Rise Again Below Zero

by Ben Tripp

Danny could see flickering images of stacking wood in the basement, welding herself combat gear in the auto shop, having an ordinary barbecue. The Kid climbing one of the trees. Sledding down the hill in winter. Picking off zeroes from the porch roof. Hell, they could find a trailer for the truck and park it next to the porch and fit it out as an escapemobile. If trouble came, everybody jumps in and they would drive away in their armored monster truck.

  Less than a minute passed while the reverie drifted through her mind. The bag was as compressed as she could make it with her one-handed grip. She bound it with bungee cords and shook off the tranquil ideas she’d entertained. She felt strange in some way that was hard to define, but that had to do with the loss of Kelley, Wulf, and the entire Tribe.

  She was alone now.

  She could choose her friends. She missed the folks she’d traveled with all the way from Forest Peak, her fellow survivors of the first wave. Amy, Patrick, Maria, Troy. A few others. But she was always the hard bitch at the top, not a real friend to anyone. So much ugliness and suffering and history between them. These people she was with now didn’t really know her—the mute boy, the cripple, the runt dog, they were safe. She had started fresh with them.

  If she had been a more articulate person, Danny might have realized she was—for a fleeting moment—content. And that she liked the feeling.

  • • •

  The ground was frozen hard and Danny’s boots chewed loudly at the hoarfrost as she crossed the last open ground before the forest that curved around Happy Town.

  She hadn’t seen woods in a couple of months, the Tribe having crisscrossed the Midwest and Great Plains, where ex-agricultural fields and grasslands dominated the landscape. She had grown up in the trees, and there was always a certain natural advantage she felt beneath their branches. She was still six kilometers from where Dr. Joe had said the town was, so she didn’t think there would be any sentries or security systems in place this far out. But she adopted a tracker’s stoop as she headed for the trees, keeping her head down. If they shot her for a zero, so be it.

  According to the scrap of map she had duct-taped to the sleeve of her jacket, Happy Town used to be called Jordan. It enjoyed natural barriers on three sides: a river hooked around it on the east, with three bridges to the far shore, and there was a cliff-edged escarpment rising above the northern margin of town that a zero could step over, but it wouldn’t be able to do much after it reached the bottom, where massive heaps of ragged boulders lay piled up. This was the border of the South Dakota badlands, Danny knew, but she no longer thought of the world in terms of states and political boundaries. Those things were gone. It must have been like this in past centuries, when there were frontiers. It was now a world of landmarks, not place names. Maybe that was why they had renamed their stronghold “Happy Town.” “Jordan” didn’t mean shit anymore.

  The western end of town was wide open to a mixture of low, ravine-scored wilderness and serrated hills. This perplexed Danny. She had a crappy pair of bird-watching binoculars with a football team’s logo on the side; these had been in a drawer in the living room of the house by the repair shop. Through them she could see the train line coming from the west, cutting straight across the flats, the same as on her map. So this was where the line went. If its people had indeed come this way, this is where the Tribe had ended its long journey. The railway entered the settlement close to the foot of the escarpment and exited on the far side across a trestle bridge that curved with the river there. Danny was approaching from the south, so she was going to have to skirt the shore to get close to town—but if she could go the long way around and get up on that escarpment, she could study the place from three hundred feet up, like it was a model train layout in a giant’s basement. She had brought enough food to keep her for three days, so she thought that was the best plan.

  The trouble, as always, was zeroes. There were a lot of them around. Even as she hustled across the field to the trees, she was taking a course equidistant between two of the things that were drifting in her direction, and there were several more almost at the edge of her sight in the distance. Of course, with a standing human population nearby, they would swarm in this direction. She expected the woods would be crawling with them.

  Vaxxine had given her a slingshot lesson—she never missed—but Danny didn’t have enough fingers to properly hold it. She was far better with a gun. They had a shotgun in the big rig, which Danny had brought but did not intend to use; she also had her pistol at her side. But the plan required stealth, so her primary weapon would be something she’d found over the fireplace of the abandoned house: a nice long-handled tomahawk, the steel inlaid with German silver. The stave was of hickory, and it had to be an antique, maybe hundreds of years old, because the wood was as hard as stone. There was a pipe bowl shaped like a hammerhead opposite the narrow cutting blade. Danny didn’t intend to smoke with it, but she thought the pipe would punch a nice divot out of any skull it came near.

  Despite the cold, Danny was sweating when she made the shadows under the trees. No sign of watchmen or scouts. There was a zero drifting directly ahead of her. It probed the gloom when it heard her coming, slack-faced, its lower lip torn away to reveal long yellow teeth in a shrunken black net of gums. She went straight at it and struck it in the temple next to its left eye before the thing could rally to attack. It collapsed in a spew of dark liquid. The tomahawk blade was designed to slip out of an entry wound without getting caught, Danny discovered. Those old-timers knew a few things about hand-to-hand combat.

  She kept moving through the forest, bearing eastward until she reached the shore of the river. It was a carved-out sidewinder surrounded by rust-colored rock steeps, the brown water slightly wider and faster than she could swim and a lot colder than she could endure. She was going to have to pass under the bridges at night, or get on the other side of the river and circle around, then cross back again to get to the escarpment. She decided to risk a night crossing, and elected to go no farther that day, but settled herself between three massive boulders with a narrow space beneath the uppermost that would make a fair foxhole if she found herself under attack by zeroes—or humans. Even as she slid her legs into the cavity, a swollen corpse drifted past on the river, its stiff arms clawing at the sky.

  Night took a long time to fall; the twilight lasted the better part of two hours. Then Danny felt it was safe to move around. Nothing had disturbed her hiding place, and although she couldn’t bring herself to risk sleeping for a couple of hours, it had been good to rest after the long hike. She relaced her boots, settled the rucksack firmly on her shoulders, and took up the tomahawk and shotgun. Then she began stealing alongside the river until the first bridge came into view.

  Danny had borrowed a dark balaclava of Vaxxine’s. She pulled it down over her face now, and the itchy warmth felt good. It was needle-cold that night. Her hands were concealed in bulky black ski gloves she’d found at the house.

  It was time. She’d already checked and rechecked her equipment and if she intended to get past the bridges, she would need every minute of darkness she could get. She moved forward into view of the bridge.

  The first one was a high-span concrete structure with streetlights set along it; they were lit up, which seemed bizarre to Danny after so many months of living in a world that simply went dark when night fell. It seemed obscenely extravagant. As she crept closer, she saw there were men patrolling the bridge. Three or four of them, which wasn’t enough to fight off a swarm, so there must be a garrison somewhere close by. She was moving through a band of eroded rock that followed the course of the river, overhanging slightly; keeping up against it she was able to avoid the loose piles of rock thrown up by the river and keep her silhouette from breaking with the general darkness around her. But it was slow going. After twenty minutes, the deck of the bridge was too high above her to see anymore, and she was out of view unless someone leaned over the side. This proved to be good luck.

  She was almost to the foremo
st of the bridge piers that held up the span when a searchlight blazed on. Its beam was whiter and harsher than the sun. A figure was picked out of the darkness on the far shore, pure contrast of light and dark like the old movies of astronauts on the moon. Men were shouting up on the bridge. The small figure was at about the same elevation as Danny on the embankment opposite her, still a distance from the bridge. She tucked herself behind the poured concrete footing and debated whether to see what happened or use the diversion to try to make some time getting past the bridge.

  A loudspeaker barked out an amplified voice:

  “Okay, that’s far enough. Raise your hands. Stand still. Are you alone?”

  Danny couldn’t hear what the man in the spotlight said, but she saw him raise his hands. A skinny little guy, a human, she could see that much. She decided to move on while attention was aimed elsewhere.

  Another twenty minutes of sliding along with her back to the rock and she was around the next bend and the bridge was just a glare of reflected light on the water. The man back there hadn’t been blacked up the way Danny was; they might have had night vision capability up there, but to see something it had to stand out, and Danny’s drab clothing and concealed skin made her look more like a tree stump or a rock than anything else. The trick was to move with infinite patience.

  The second bridge was the railway span, and there were men up there, too; one on each end of the bridge, looking bored even at a distance. Zeroes couldn’t have made it across the span, as it didn’t have a deck. The wooden trestles had nothing but empty space between them and there did not appear to be a catwalk alongside the tracks. Danny slipped beneath it without any difficulty. They clearly did not expect any trouble from that angle.

  Danny’s luck ended when a search party on foot swept along the bank above her head. She heard them coming—with dogs. She decided not to risk them catching her scent; a dog only needed a molecule or two to decide it smelled something. Not unlike the undead. She scooted away from the rock wall and got down on her belly as the noisy team came through the light woods about two hundred meters from her position, not far from the railroad bridge.

  She slithered backward toward the river’s edge, twisting herself like a lizard between the dark bulk of the boulders that strewed the shoreline. The dogs were baying and she could hear the men behind them shouting to be heard, but couldn’t make out what they were saying. It was probable that this was just due diligence after they’d captured the man on the far bank, but if they’d detected her presence somehow, Danny wasn’t going to let herself be caught. The noise of the river was close, drowning out dogs and men. And then her boots splashed in the water. She couldn’t go any farther. The dogs were close—still up on the top of the bank, but nearly to the place she had been when she first heard them. She might have another couple of minutes while they found a way down to the shore, or she might not.

  Danny was always working the problem in the back of her mind, formulating plans. Observe, orient, decide, and act. The results got passed up to her conscious mind while she was still trying to decide whether to stand up and call out to them as if she was simply lost, shoot the sons of bitches, or play dead; the frigid water was sucking the heat out of her feet but she didn’t dare move them. A splash out of place and there would probably be another searchlight.

  Then she saw what to do.

  It was going to hurt, but it would get her out of trouble in seconds, if need be. She rearranged her burdens as quietly as she could. Then she sucked a deep breath through her teeth and slid backward into the black, icy water.

  • • •

  The search party stopped for about a minute near where Danny had last touched the bank, twenty meters from the water’s edge and five or six above it. The dogs smelled something and they directed their attention in precisely Danny’s direction. The men were discussing what to do. Several flashlight beams played around the shore, groping between boulders and cross-lighting deep shadows, but they found nothing out of place. Somebody lit a cigarette. Then they moved on upriver in the direction of the third bridge, hollering at the dogs and crashing through the undergrowth.

  Danny waited through a count of twenty, then dragged herself back out of the water. She hadn’t been completely immersed or she would not have had the strength to heave herself up; as it was she’d gotten soaked up to her nipples and halfway up her back. The rucksack was still dry, and she’d had the presence of mind to loop her gun belt around her shoulders, so the vital gear pouches were also dry. But it felt as if her skin had been peeled off—a sensation she had experienced in the burn ward—and there was no strength in her limbs. She’d been clinging to the back of a boulder that stood a little way out in the river, and if the men had not moved on, she was twenty seconds from losing her grip and being carried away in the vigorous current.

  She got herself up against a tall chunk of concealing rock and immediately began to strip down despite the murderously cold air. Her teeth were jackhammering together and her hands were useless, pawing at the clinging, wet fabric. A headache was flaring up in her brain stem, pulsing until blue lights flickered in her vision. But she got her boots off, her pants off, shrugged out of the rucksack and dumped the belt beside it. It was a still night. If there had been a breeze, she didn’t think she could have made it. But with all the vitality left in her, she took shelter behind a fallen tree, then yanked the rucksack open, pulled out the sleeping bag, dragged the bungees off it, and crawled inside headfirst. She was shivering so violently it made her bones hurt.

  She pulled the rucksack in after her. She had earlier transferred some of the contents of her weapons backpack into it (and then relocked and hid the latter so no temptation would fall in the way of Vaxxine or the Silent Kid), so to get to the change of clothes in the bottom she had to dig through grenades, spare clips of ammunition, medical supplies, and Meals, Ready to Eat in their Mylar pouches.

  She left her soaking-wet underwear on, but pulled thick socks onto her unfeeling feet, hauled on the Dickies work pants she’d found in the house, and pulled a fleece warm-up jacket over her head. She didn’t need a shirt; she needed heat. These were all the clothes she had. The wet stuff she shoved into the trash bag she’d used as a liner inside the rucksack. There wasn’t time to warm herself anymore—she was in a terrible position, and if the men came back the same way with their dogs, they could hardly miss the woman using her sleeping bag as a tent halfway up the shore of the river. If the bag had been camo, maybe she’d have stood a chance, but it was navy blue. Fine in the dark. Obvious under a spotlight.

  She stowed the rest of her gear in the rucksack, transferring one grenade to the hand pocket of the fleece jacket, strapped on her stiff, half-frozen boots, then the rucksack and belt on her shoulders; finally she wrapped herself in the sleeping bag and started hiking back up the river, not too fast because she didn’t want to catch up to the search party—and also because she could barely move. Her body simply would not warm up. It took fifteen minutes of stumbling along the riverbank before she had command of her extremities again; her solitary pinky finger on the left hand was so numb she wondered if she’d killed it, but she wrapped what fist she could make in a knot of sleeping bag and kept on going.

  With her pounding head, she almost missed the third bridge—she was directly beneath it when she discovered chunks of shattered timbers lying all over the shore and looked up. No guards on that span, because the bridge wasn’t there. It had been dynamited. She couldn’t see the far side in the moon-dim overcast, but it must look much as the near side did: jagged stumps projecting out of the rockface.

  “Nice try, idiots,” Danny muttered.

  For although the bridge was destroyed, there was a neat ascent made of undamaged iron rungs hammered into the rock that rose up alongside where the bridge had been, and at the top was the escarpment she intended to make camp on.

  6

  Dawn found Danny asleep on the topmost ridge overlooking Happy Town.

  She could go
for long periods without sleeping, as a rule. But the brush with freezing to death, the leg-burning hike, and the tension of near-capture had worn her out completely. She awoke at sunrise, closely wrapped in the sleeping bag with the rucksack under her head. The ridgeline was studded with tough cedars; she had bivouacked beneath one of these, sheltered by its low, contorted branches, which swept the stony ground. Her head had stopped throbbing, and she could feel all seventeen of her digits again.

  Behind her position was a long, tapering slope of stone and debris, naked of vegetation, that led down to the rock drop-off and shoreline she’d traversed in the night. It had been a long, slow climb with her near-useless hands. The ridge was narrow and fairly flat, with the remnants of a forest along its summit; then the far side descended sharply in a series of cliffs and ledges scattered with rockfall and avalanche tailings, held more or less in place by further scrub brush and cedar woods.

  Danny drank some of the mineral-tasting water she’d filled her bottle with at the river, ate an MRE that claimed without much justification to contain a cheese omelet with vegetables, and then crawled to the edge of the ridge for a look at Happy Town.

  The place was located in a sort of natural harbor, the river cradling it like a bent arm around to the east and south, the escarpment rising up as a backstop against northerly winds; to the west the landscape was wide open, hills and badlands rolling away as far as the eye could reach. How the hell they kept that border secure, Danny could not guess.

  Happy Town stood on level ground at the foot of the uplands and spread out to south and west—she estimated the town was built for seven thousand inhabitants or so, maybe more with the suburbs. It looked like the present population was higher than that. There seemed to be a fortified wall or fence of some kind extending around the entire settled area. The sunrise illuminated its top, which glittered like wire.

  Within the fence and huddled against it on the outer perimeter was a city of tents and campers of every description, resembling a colorful mural of broken tile from Danny’s elevated position. The town itself was mostly laid to a grid, with a broad central street forming the spine with the train depot at the skull end, and the ribs extending out to the fringes of town, where the streets became irregular, curving around to conform to the rocky landscape. There were big houses under the trees in the low parts of the slope, probably rich folks’ houses. They always got the best views. Out in the flat areas were suburban developments with little square brown lawns and one tree per house.