by Ben Tripp
Danny grabbed a steel folding chair and bowled it at the man. He swiped it out of the air with his forearm, which knocked the goggles on his face askew. Danny leaped into the gap between them at this moment and struck down against the wrist holding the Taser with the heel of her fingerless hand; he didn’t drop the weapon, but he forgot about the broom handle, which gave Danny an opportunity to grab it and twist it around so that his arm was extended backward. He could either let go or break his wrist. He let go, and attempted to grab Danny instead. She caught his outstretched arm and pulled him toward her. His Taser hand was flailing.
Now the hooded man had forward momentum and nowhere to send it, which gave Danny the advantage. She couldn’t do the kind of grips they taught in boot camp, not with so few fingers, but she didn’t need much. As he crashed into her, she brought her leg around his and drove his knee downward until it was bent double, hurling him to the floorboards. All of this happened in a single, fluid motion. He might be hard, he might be big, but Danny could tell this man wasn’t experienced in dealing with a motivated opponent. She caught a glimpse of his face as he crashed to the floor. He was scared out of his wits. The goggles flew up off his head.
Until this moment, Danny hadn’t considered what kind of fight this was. But the terror in the man’s face told her. As far as he was concerned, this was a fight to the death. She wasn’t going to get away from Happy Town if this man was alive. He had seen her face. He would raise the alarm. And there was another, bigger problem: She wasn’t a hundred percent certain it was he who had shouted “Who goes there.” The voice hadn’t come from his direction, although she couldn’t be sure with all the echoes.
But Danny didn’t want to kill. She hated it. Too many had died already. For the living to slaughter the living in these times was the worst thing of all. It didn’t matter: The man made the decision for her. He was on his back and saw her hesitation; while she paused, he got the Taser up and fired it at her head.
Police training had taught Danny the best place to fire electrode-based weapons wasn’t center mass, as with a firearm, but at the belt. One electrode in the lower abdomen and another in the thigh was the perfect shot. Such a hit would buckle the leg and fold up the torso so the target was completely helpless. Her attacker had not been trained. He fired the electrodes at her like a handgun, aiming for her face; she felt the coiled wires whip past her neck, but the electrodes didn’t catch her skin or her clothing. By that time, she was already diving straight at her attacker. He tried to get his feet up to kick her away, and Danny brought the scalpel into play.
He was okay for a moment, attempting to get back on his feet while Danny shoulder-rolled across the floor to the base of the altar, and then the pain reached his skull. She’d slashed the tendons holding his left kneecap in place. He made a gurgling cry—trying to suppress the scream, for some reason—and pitched sideways into the folding chairs. The fight was out of him.
Danny wasn’t in this merely to defeat him, or she could have stopped there. But the Taser wires singing past her ear had unlocked the killer inside her. Before the man could untangle himself from the chairs, she drove forward, slashing, ripping through his fingers as he threw his hands up to defend his face. His palms split open and the tip of his thumb came off and then she got him hard in the throat. Danny kept hacking until the handle of the scalpel broke, and now the man started to scream at last, but he didn’t have time for a single unbroken cry before his voice was drowned in a fountain of foaming, foul-smelling blood.
Danny was soaked in gore. Tasted it in her mouth. It stank like vomit. She was so adrenaline-hot she felt like there ought to be smoke rising off her skin. She backed away from the twisting body of the dying man and scanned the church to see if the noise had attracted any of the guards patrolling outside.
The place was still and empty.
The man bled out, gagging, his heels sliding in his own blood, and then it was quiet. Danny panted for breath and watched the lights of a patrol vehicle wing across the windows, casting beautiful colored projections of the biblical scenes in the glass onto the walls. But it continued past and drove away. Nobody was coming from the street.
Then she heard a voice, hoarse and wheezing: “Bravo.”
Danny spun around. Someone else in there with her after all. She couldn’t see anyone.
“No need to be frightened,” the voice said, from somewhere above her. “As you can see, I’m unarmed.”
Danny looked up, her mind short-circuiting. It couldn’t be.
The voice was coming from Jesus on the cross, now looking down at her with pale, wet eyes.
“Did—did you just make a joke?” Danny said, when she found her voice.
“Why, was it funny?”
“No.”
The thing on the crucifix was a zero.
A thinker, its hands and feet securely nailed to the cross, a dim sketch in the shadows. Danny saw the outlines of an emaciated male body, almost naked and much abused. It spoke with a southern accent, and right now it was out of air.
It filled its lungs and said, “On to business, then. I saw what you did there. If I was one of your kind, I’d say it was impressive.”
“Your kind doesn’t use a knife,” Danny said, and realized she was still holding the broken handle of the scalpel in her hand. She looked around for the blade and didn’t see it.
“You don’t like me,” the thing on the cross said. When it spoke, its sparse beard wagged.
“No, I don’t.”
“Plain-spoken. I’d like that, if I gave a damn about anything.”
“Why are you here?” Danny asked, grasping at her sanity as her lizard brain shouted for her to run, to get the fuck out of there. She was trying to think of what to do instead: The thing was up too high to destroy it easily, but it was a witness to the fight. It knew she had killed the hooded man. No matter the bizarre situation, it had to be silenced. Her heart was racing and she saw green blossoms behind her eyes, the coils of panic grabbing at her mind. She needed a ladder, or a fifteen-foot pole with a point on the end. Get at the monster’s head.
“I have the best gig in town,” the zero was saying. “I rest up here safe and sound, and my followers feed me pieces of their own living flesh.”
“And children?” Danny said, a ghastly suspicion revealing itself in her mind. “Do they feed you kids? Is that what’s going on?”
“I wish I was as lucky as that,” the thing said, and again Danny thought she detected amusement in its voice. “I see you are missing some fingers yourself,” it added.
“I didn’t feed them to one of you fuckers,” Danny said, and started looking around her for something she could use to get up there and bash the creature’s skull in.
“Wait just a minute, Sugar. You’re that sheriff everybody talks about,” the zero said. “I recognize you now. Sister of the Dead.” Danny stopped moving. The thick burn scars on her back tried to shiver; tendrils of ice trickled along the courses of her nerves. Sister of the Dead.
“Got your attention?” the zero went on, drawing another breath. “Thought it would. You’re known to us here, you see. Others from your so-called ‘Tribe’ came here a few days ago, bearing strange tales. My acolytes tell me all kinds of things. You just killed one of them, in fact. I suppose I ought to be very . . . cross. Was that funny?”
“I don’t have much of a sense of humor these days,” Danny said, wanting to keep the thing talking now. “So you heard who I traveled with? My sister?”
“Yes,” the zero said, and took a long, wheezing breath. “And we thinkers, as you hot-bloods call us, we have heard of you from our own kind, as well. Your exploits. We’ve been trying to get you on your own for some time now, kill you . . . isolate you. It appears we have succeeded in that, at least.”
That fuck in the Chevelle, she thought. Trying to get her away from the Tribe. Score one for the undead.
“Okay. You’ve got me isolated. Now what?” Danny said. She’d been gone from the hos
pital for at least an hour. They were probably already looking for her. When the alarm went up she’d be discovered here, covered in blood, with a mutilated corpse at her feet.
“Do you know how Happy Town works?” the zero asked. “Of course not, or you wouldn’t be here. I’m what you would call the ‘spiritual leader,’ for lack of a better phrase. I am the way and the truth and the light, you understand? Thousands follow me and worship me and feed me of themselves, because I am the Risen Flesh incarnate. Beats working. I play stupid, of course. First got here about six months ago—I’ll tell you that story another time. But here’s the important thing, Sister of the Dead: I’m not the only of the Risen here in town.”
He drew another breath. She was desperate to escape this place—she needed to get the hell out of town entirely, right now, and see about rescuing the Silent Kid from outside, somehow. Otherwise they’d hang her for sure. But this creature was telling her things that might be useful. She ignored the staccato bursts of panic that kept fluttering through her hair like bats at twilight. Keep talking, she thought. But talk faster.
“There’s another of my kind,” the zero said, when its lungs were filled again. “And he’s oh-so terribly wicked you would not believe. He hides what he is. Only one or two of you hot-bloods know his secret. Unlike me, he plays at being a living human. So far, he has gotten away with it. You mortals know him only as ‘the Architect.’ I don’t know if he’s really an architect, of course.” The Risen Flesh breathed again, but Danny thought he was pausing more for effect than for air. She was right.
“The Architect and I don’t see eye to eye, and not just because I’m up here. That’s another joke. Was it funny?”
“No.”
“It doesn’t matter. His headquarters are in the bank across the street. The brick building with a white porch. Even now, at the end of the world, the real governing is still done inside banks. But you’re impatient, I can tell. So here’s why I’m so glad to have this chat with you. A large number of people in town are extremely unhappy to see their children sent away . . . their fragrant, juicy children. It is only a matter of time before there’s a revolution. There is another shipment of recently-arrived children supposed to travel up to the resort in five days. Something has to be done before then, or there will be riots. This place will burn. When that happens, the unbelievers won’t spare this church, or me, unless someone carries me away in time. But I don’t want it to come to that. I have the perfect strategy for survival right here, if only the Architect didn’t overplay his hand.”
It stared at Danny with its cloudy eyes and she thought it was smiling through its lank beard. It inhaled and said, “That’s where you come in. It pains me to say that I need your help. My acolytes are useless, as you just demonstrated. But I can’t confide in any of the other locals. I need someone to take the Architect down, before he takes me down, in the most literal sense.”
Danny was past the point of bewilderment, unsure how to react. She said nothing, and the Risen Flesh took this as an indication that she was waiting to hear his proposition.
“I want you to get through to the Architect. And then I want you to kill him, Sister of the Dead.”
The adrenaline from the fight had worn off; Danny felt sick and cold and afraid. She wanted to escape. But they needed to close the deal.
“What’s in it for me?” she asked.
“Anonymity. You were never here. I’ll tell my acolytes someone else did this killing, someone from the Architect’s side of town. I can lie, you know. I’m practically human.”
“So I kill the big bad dead dude, the kids stay here, and you and me never met, is that right?”
“You have my word.”
“I guess we can’t shake hands,” Danny said, and slipped out the back of the church.
4
Danny fled back through the darkness, stinking of blood and sweat. The rasping voice of the Risen Flesh was in her ears, and her mind whirled with the things he had told her.
There was little time.
She’d been gone from the hospital an hour and a half at least, but so far there were no search parties rushing around, no whistles. Now that she had survived the lethal combat in the church, she sure as hell didn’t want to get caught and beheaded by a bunch of volunteer cops.
She shed the blood-stinking sneakers, sweatshirt, and jacket, and stuffed them deep in the Dumpster she’d found on the way out of the hospital grounds. Then she entered the same way she’d left, through the basement locker room window. Still no guards. In the locker room there were sinks and showers; she didn’t dare run a shower at full strength, lest it be overheard, but she let the hot water trickle down on her, lathered herself with grainy industrial soap, and by the dim light of the exit sign she eventually determined the water was running clear. She was clean enough. She dried herself off with coarse paper towels, stuffed the bloodstained pants and shirt up inside a plumbing access hatch, and ventured naked into the basement hallway. No one. Dead quiet.
Six minutes later, she let herself into the room she had awakened in and hurried toward the bed. If the zero on the cross was lying to her, she was about to climb into her deathbed. Literal-minded as the zero thinkers were, it didn’t seem possible the thing could lie—but then again, they weren’t supposed to tell jokes, either. So their weird bargain might well have been a set-up to get her out of the church without destroying the monster inside. In that case, she had been outsmarted by a corpse.
“Welcome back,” a voice said, and Danny involuntarily jumped as if the Taser had hit her at last. She spun around and saw a shape in the shadows: Dr. Joe Higashiyama was sitting in a chair by the door, his left ankle propped on his right knee.
“I went to take a shower,” Danny said, and felt it was possibly the worst excuse any human being had ever invented.
Joe stood up, nodding. “I see that. Did you soil yourself?”
“Yes,” Danny said. “I threw away my clothes.”
“There’s more under your bed,” Joe said. “You helped me get them, in fact. Back when we met at that hospital down south. But listen, the next time you want to take a shower, keep it under an hour. Otherwise you’ll catch cold and have to stay in bed all day. And then I can’t give permission to move you out of here, and they can’t throw you out of Happy Town or arrest you or anything. Do you understand?”
Danny couldn’t believe her luck. “Yes, I do,” she said. “Thank you.”
Joe stood at the door, leaning on the handle. “In the morning, I’ll let your friend Vaxxine know you’re not feeling well. Apparently somebody on the outside told her you had an episode and got taken in here. She came rushing right to town along with that quiet boy. She must think you’re pretty cool to take a risk like that.”
He closed the door behind him. Danny’s mind was reeling. She found another loose shirt and drawstring pants under her bed and dragged them on with trembling fingers. Then she crawled into the bed, the mattress fooshing air through its plastic cover, and pulled the blankets up to her chin. The comatose kid in the other bed lay unmoving, eyes half-open, mouth agape. That monster in the church knew Danny would never give away its secret intelligence—she had more to lose than it did. But it might very well intend to have a proxy accuse her of the killing.
She intended to lie awake until she heard the inevitable outcry go up when the corpse in the church was discovered, or when Joe betrayed her and they came to sever her head, but the silence of the predawn hours was absolute, and in two minutes, despite her best efforts, she was asleep.
5
Vaxxine was staring at her, head tilted, mouth slightly pursed. She was so lost in thought that it took her a moment to realize Danny had opened her eyes. She blinked and smiled.
“Danny. You look terrible,” she said, affectionately.
“You sound like my friend Amy,” Danny replied. Her voice was hoarse, but she didn’t feel ill. It was the freezing air of last night, that was all. Amy. Where the hell was she now?
“They gave me a new wheelchair,” Vaxxine said. “I didn’t need it, but I took it anyway. Joe says you’re not well enough to leave town.”
“Yes. Are we alone?”
“Except for him,” Vaxxine said, tipping her chin at the boy in the other bed. “Why so paranoid? You’re always paranoid, Danny.”
“You would be, too, if you knew what I knew.”
“Well you don’t know what I know, do you?”
“Jesus, it tastes like a rat had babies in my mouth. What is it? You go first,” Danny said. She wasn’t sure whether she should tell anyone about her encounter of the previous night, even in an edited form. But if Danny decided to act on what she knew, Vaxxine would surely end up in jeopardy. Danny would have to warn her before things went down. Whatever that was going to be. Danny had no idea how to handle this.
Vaxxine reached around into the big canvas bag hung on the back of her chair and fished out a grubby can of Tab. “All I could find,” she said, and handed it to Danny. Danny drank the entire can in a series of greedy chugs.
Vaxxine continued with her voice pitched down to a husky whisper: “So Danny, while you were in here with the headache, I was all around town today. Hard to believe but it’s a proper town with shops and everything, but you can’t buy anything unless you have what they want to barter, and it’s a different thing for every shop. So the butcher man has fresh meat, and my mouth is watering like a rain cloud because I haven’t seen fresh meat in a year and a half. But he’s only taking gasoline today, not gold, canned food, or ammunition like a regular person. So those who have gasoline get the fresh meat.
“So I go to the laundry, because my clothes smell like an extinct volcano, and what do they say: ‘We’re only taking nails, screws, and lumber today.’ They don’t take anything else in trade. So what do I do? I go to the clothes shop. All the latest fashions since before the zeroes. And I ask the lady, ‘What do you take in trade?’ And she says, it doesn’t matter, we only serve Americans here.’
