Rise Again Below Zero

by Ben Tripp

  The commercial center of town was a dozen blocks or so of uninteresting Old West–style structures with flat tarpaper roofs, false gables, and long, interconnected wooden porches; it reminded Danny of the studio backlot cowboy towns in Hollywood. She tried the binoculars. They lacked sufficient magnification to see anything more than antlike people moving around, but it appeared the place was bustling with activity, even at this early hour. Only a couple of vehicles were moving around—panel vans with something written on the sides in big, irregular letters—but the town was walkable in scale and plenty of folks were already on foot.

  Church bells rang out, at this distance a small but clear sound. Danny realized most of the people she’d seen in the street were heading toward a big white-framed church that stood opposite some two-story brick buildings with white porches across the biggest intersection in town, where there was a little memorial square of some kind in the center with a statue on a plinth, ornamental shrubbery, and benches. The church was plain, with a tall, shingled steeple and high Gothic windows. It didn’t look large enough to accommodate all the people heading toward it. Danny wondered at this: The end of the world had turned nonreligious folk superstitious, and religious folk into zealots, in her experience. These were probably the latter. Or it could be a requirement: You want to live in Happy Town, you go to services. The Tribe had run across a few enclaves like that.

  Danny needed to get closer. She could see there were some pens built up around the train depot, which was almost directly below her position. There were several big warehouses, as well. The pens suggested this had once been a cattle transfer station, probably moving beef to cities on the coasts. A collection of industrial buildings and sheds indicated that this was where the real business in town took place, although whether they were in use anymore was impossible to tell from her altitude.

  She scanned the steep slope below. It wouldn’t be hard to get down from ledge to ledge without exposure by making long back-and-forth descents, and the tree cover was fairly good. It surprised her there weren’t any lookout positions visible from where she was, but maybe they were exceptionally well hidden. She scanned the ledges below for evidence of a human presence. And found some.

  Somebody had set up a hunting blind partway down the mountain. It was nicely camouflaged with branches and debris, but wasn’t intended to conceal the occupant from eyes above, only below. It looked like a two-man shelter, probably about waist-high at its peak; she could see the rectangle of a camouflage-printed tarpaulin against the ledge rock, and there was a screen of rubble and sticks set up in front of it to break up the silhouette.

  Even as she watched, a man emerged from the shelter on his hands and knees, looked carefully around but not up, and crouch-walked his way to the nearest stand of trees, probably to relieve himself. He emerged a few minutes later, looked at his watch, and then lay down in front of the shelter in much the same posture Danny was in. She thought she could see a telescope on a tripod, but it could have been a rifle. Again, she needed to get closer. She had all day for the recon, intending to return the following day to Vaxxine and the Silent Kid, and this looked like a place to start. Somehow she didn’t think the man below here was on official Happy Town business. Otherwise, why was he concealed from there, and not her position?

  She spread her wet clothing out on the ground; even the cold sun would still dry them eventually. If anyone found them, they could go ahead and wonder what it meant. Then she repacked the rucksack and rolled the sleeping bag tight. Tomahawk in hand, she began to make her painstaking way along the ridge, which sloped downhill to the west; in the trees there she could make a switchback and reach the ledge on which the watcher below was perched. The question uppermost in her mind was whether she could take him down with the tomahawk if it came to that. She hoped it wouldn’t. But gunfire up there would be heard by every pair of ears in town.

  Two hours of cautious going brought her obliquely down to the broad ledge on which the unknown man was watching.

  It was a bright day with light overcast, but there were signs of bad weather coming. Danny hoped it wouldn’t be another tornado. She had enough troubles without acts of God. She had seen no tripwires or cameras mounted in trees, no patrols had come her way, and in general she found Happy Town’s security operations to be mostly show and very little substance. There must be some natural advantage there that kept the zeroes away. There were mine tunnels in the area; maybe there was uranium in the ground or something like that. It sure as hell wasn’t the crackerjack armed response teams.

  She reached a position from which she could see the man hunched over his telescope. There was a rifle, but it was on the ground at his side. He was dressed for invisibility like herself, but his outfit was quality hunting gear, insulated woodland camouflage. Dirty but new-looking. Danny considered throwing a rock at his head—sportsmanship was of no interest to her in a world with so many perils—but she was sure he was unaffiliated with the town, and in that case he might know something she didn’t. So she stole from cover to cover, getting around behind him by degrees, moving not much faster than the shadows.

  At last she was directly behind his shelter.

  “Don’t touch the rifle,” Danny said, in a low but commanding voice.

  “Fuck,” the man muttered. He didn’t move, but his entire body radiated tension.

  Danny thought he seemed familiar. “Topper?” she said.

  At this, he turned fully around. There he was, with leaves in his beard and a big stupid grin on his face. “I’ll be fucked in the ass,” he said. “You are a sore for sighted eyes, Sheriff. Stay where you are.”

  He scooted back from his position at the margin of the ledge, only standing up when he was next to Danny, far enough back so they weren’t visible from below. Danny had lowered the shotgun right away, but it was the tomahawk that caught his eye.

  “You were gonna scalp me,” he said, and threw his arms around Danny and kissed her full on the mouth. She threw her arms around him, too, and kissed him back. She didn’t care how he smelled or how hairy his face was; she had seldom been so glad to see another human being as she was to see him.

  Once the initial delight had passed, it got awkward pretty fast. They drew apart at arm’s length, still hanging on to each other’s shoulders. They were both laughing, although Danny’s laugh sounded more like a saw going through bone.

  “So what the fuck brings you here?” Topper asked, when they were done grinning.

  “Same as you, I figure,” Danny said. “Recon. Do you know if the Tribe is down there?”

  “Most of ’em. Some run off. Sheriff—Danny—there’s somethin’ you need to know. After you left—”

  “I know already.”

  “Oh. Well then you understand why some folk lit out. Me and the scouts, we did, too. There was a big old fight, bunch of raised voices. Then some took off in the direction of the station, me and the scouts took off for the interstate, and others just plain took off. I figure sixty-seventy ended up going this way. Assumin’ they all made it.”

  “It’s really over.”

  “The Tribe? Yeah.”

  “Now what?” The news made Danny nostalgic. She remembered the campfires and the common kitchen, the gifts of prize liquor people sometimes brought. Bartering for a hundred pounds of jerky with some intrepid settlers. She remembered sitting with Amy one night in lawn chairs outside the White Whale. Inside, Patrick had organized a movie night and a bunch of people were watching a DVD of My Fair Lady. Amy had been talking about the first human baby she’d ever seen into the world, about three months before.

  It was a squalling baby now, the fattest person in the Tribe. Everyone saw the little girl as a token of future prosperity, as if she was a new apple tree growing from the stump of an old one long gone. Danny had complained about the smell of babies and told a story about her time in Iraq when she’d been in a yard with her squad, firing back at some rebel yahoos across the street, and a goat had given birth to its kid ri
ght in the middle of the firefight. Mother and child both made it through the fight just fine, because the enemy had been mostly fourteen-year-old boys who couldn’t have shot a camel if they were sewn up inside it. Danny thought this was a hilarious story, and Amy didn’t.

  “Maybe I shouldn’t bring it up, but I’m sorry as fuck about what happened with your sister,” Topper said, and at that moment Danny tuned back in. He’d been talking and she had been remembering the quiet times with the Tribe. Topper’s words cut through her reverie. Fury instantly took over. She stepped back two paces and her knuckles went white—one fist and one finger, all squeezing the anger back.

  Topper let his hands drop to his sides, speaking without rancor: “Take it easy. You want to know what happened?”

  “I know what happened, you asshole. They shot her.”

  “I mean do you want to know why.”

  “No, I fucking don’t want to know why,” Danny snapped.

  They were silent for a while, tasting the cold air and hearing the occasional sound from down in Happy Town, distant as a radio through an open window.

  Then Danny spoke, all her anger having dissipated into the cold air. “So why are you here?”

  “Recon, like you,” Topper bluffed.

  “Are you working with the Tribe again? I don’t care, I just want to know.”

  “Nah. Just us scouts, parked about fifteen miles east of here far side of the river,” he said. “But we couldn’t just ride away like it weren’t nothing. It’s the kids, you know? We don’t give a rat’s cunt about the adults; as far as I’m concerned the Tribe did its bit and it don’t exist anymore. But all the little ones got stowed away in some kind of holding facility they got down there. And apparently once a week they send all the kids they collected around the backside of the mountain on that train of theirs. Ernie went off to check it out. He’s been up here with me.”

  “He went last night?” Danny had a terrible foreboding.

  “Yeah. Must have been on his way down when you was on your way up,” Topper acknowledged.

  “They caught him,” Danny said. “Chaser patrol took him on the riverbank. Dammit, if I’d known it was him, I’d have—”

  Topper cursed and punched the air. “You fuckin’ shithead, Ernie. Goddamn.”

  “I should have—”

  “—Don’t start blaming yourself again,” Topper cut in. “You ain’t the boss of Ernie. You’re a free agent. He took his chances, that four-eyed dumbass.” Then he added, without any conviction, “Anyhows, he’s probably all warm and well-fed right now.”

  “You don’t believe that.”

  “No, I don’t.”

  “Do we go after him?”

  “Us scouts agreed there weren’t gonna be any of that bullshit. Not enough of us. He’s on his own.” It clearly pained him to say this, but he was right, of course. Danny thought he might cry, so she changed the subject.

  “Do you think the kids are in danger?”

  “Not right away,” Topper said. “Least we ain’t seen any little kid bodies yet.”

  “We talked to a guy from Happy Town couple days ago. He said they’re even taking in the kidnapped ones. So that explains all those assholes chasing the Tribe around.”

  Topper’s eyebrows crawled up. “Who’s ‘we’? You got a new team already?”

  “Me and the Silent Kid and this lone survivalist,” Danny said. She didn’t want to elaborate, not least because she didn’t want to admit Vaxxine had saved her from certain death. But Topper’s thoughts had gone a different way.

  “We went off after you, Danny. When you and the Wolfman split. After shit got ugly with the prisoner. We rode out all over the place, but there weren’t no sign of you nowhere. Where’s Wulf, anyways?”

  “He’s dead.”

  “Ah, hell.”

  Topper did something Danny had never seen in real life before—he pulled the knit cap off his head and held it over his heart. Then he picked at loose threads sticking out of it, saying, “He was a good one. How—”

  “Died in his sleep,” Danny said.

  “I’ll be damned.”

  “We’re losing daylight,” Danny said. “We can discuss this shit later.”

  They got down on hands and knees and crawled back to Topper’s overlook position. Danny put her eye to the telescope’s optics and was amazed at the magnification. She could see people’s faces, although not well enough to distinguish individuals. Topper scratched his chin while she panned the lens around town, taking in details.

  “Me and Ernie,” Topper went on, unconsciously lowering his voice as if they might be heard now that they were within line-of-sight, “we started off trying to figure out if we can come down the mountain and get to the kids from here, because this cliff kind of butts right up to the train station down there. Not as defended. But it don’t look real good, so we was thinking maybe we could spring ’em out of that summer camp thing they got going upriver. I guess with Ernie out of the picture it’s time to report back to the others. Get an expedition set up.”

  “You’re sure we shouldn’t be trying to rescue Ernie?”

  “Well, I didn’t see any corpses go on the pile yet today—so far, so good.”

  “Corpses?”

  “They got a lot of rules down there and they behead a fucker every couple days. Usually at sunup. I weren’t kidding about the bodies.”

  “Shit.”

  “I think they keep it a secret from the Happy Town chooks. Don’t make a ceremony out of it or nothing. You can’t see it from down there; it’s behind a wall. But there’s a yard by the station where they take care of business. They pile the bodies on a truck, cover them with garbage, and take ’em away early in the morning. No heads. We seen it twice in two days.”

  “Goddamn. You thought I was a hard-ass.”

  Danny gave Topper the binoculars and spent an hour with the telescope, studying the town. She paid special attention to the area around the train depot—there was a lot of activity centered on a couple of the warehouses, with men in orange safety vests coming and going. There was also a shed with a locomotive engine underneath its sheet metal awning; it looked like they were overhauling the big diesels aboard it, with showers of welding sparks spraying down and men wrestling huge machine parts in and out. She saw a gang of a dozen men carrying an immense cast-iron connecting rod of some kind, like zookeepers holding a record-size python out straight for the photograph. There were several cattle cars on a siding, as well. It looked like somebody was planning a mass migration down there—either that, or they planned to start a circus.

  The panel vans cruised around town. Danny could read the writing on them with the telescope: HAPPY TOWN SAFETY PATROL, it said. Hand-painted with a spray can. More of the men in safety vests inside the vans—the vests seemed to be the official uniform.

  Church got out about an hour and a half after the bells rang, and Danny watched the outflow of citizens. She didn’t recognize anybody.

  “They do services morning and afternoon,” Topper noted. “God ain’t fuckin’ dead, apparently.”

  While she watched the town, Topper filled her in on further details of the past few days: The scouting team was down to eight individuals. They stayed in touch with Patrick, Amy, and some others inside the fence because there was a whole town set up outside the wire, and you could talk freely through it. Get lost in the crowds if security came poking around. Connor was in charge of the scouts’ encampment while Topper was away.

  This put her in mind of her own situation. Danny was on a schedule. Vaxxine and the Kid would be waiting for her back at the house, and if they ran into any major trouble, she still wasn’t confident that the wheelchair-bound woman would be up to dealing with it—if only because she couldn’t run across the fields. Danny’s return time was tomorrow afternoon. She’d need to head out before dawn to make it there on schedule.

  “So how safe is it?” she asked, while she and Topper were eating what passed for lunch. Hers was a Chicke
n Breast with Cavatelli MRE, essentially identical to the omelet she’d eaten last; Topper ate venison jerky and what appeared to be cat shit, which he claimed was freeze-dried bananas he’d found on the floor of a ransacked sporting goods store. They drank river water.

  “From zeroes? I ain’t seen but a handful the whole time I been here, and they’re on the other side of the river. That big swarm to the west is like the end of the zeroes. Out this way it’s real peaceful. Whatever gimmick they figured out, it’s working.”

  “I meant do you think these Happy Town fuckers know what they’re doing.”

  Topper noisily scratched his neck. “I don’t know, be honest with you. I mean, there’s maybe a couple hundred in charge, mostly guards. Thousands of chook-ass civilians. They could overrun the joint in five minutes if people rose the fuck up. On the other hand, they got harsh discipline like I said, and people are scared to rock the boat. Those vans stay busy. Most of all I think people keep their heads down because of the little ones. The kids are like instant hostages. I’d call that a pretty good security strategy.”

  There were more questions, but Danny didn’t think Topper could answer them. It occurred to her he might know something about the big picture.

  “One other thing. Did you guys check out what’s keeping the zeroes back to the west?”

  “You found that radiation train yourself. It’s keeping the swarm way the fuck back.”

  “Only to a point. Why doesn’t the swarm come north, hook around the hot zone, and nail this place? Those fences down there aren’t shit.”