by Ben Tripp
“That’s great,” Danny said, so without feeling she might as well have been undead herself.
“You must be curious about that,” the Architect said. “Everyone is. We send the children five miles upstream to a defended island position. It’s a resort, in fact, once a luxury spa retreat for wealthy Victorians taking the train to the West Coast. The place is in the middle of a deep reservoir, connected to the land only by a bridge, and it’s entirely secure. There is also a hydroelectric station at the dam. That’s where we get our electricity from.”
“Excellent,” Danny said. She tried to look like this was all news to her.
“Now you may think I’m joking about the resort, but I am not. The children are fed, bathed, even given a little education. There’s a heated swimming pool. How about that? Children playing in a heated swimming pool, in this day and age!”
He’d taken a further two cigar-breaths by this time; watching the amount of smoke he consumed made Danny’s guts squirm. Even if he couldn’t feel it, Danny could. His lungs must have been as dry as stale bread. She didn’t know why he was spinning a tale for her. Did he want her to believe what he was saying? Or was he compelled to talk to his victims before he killed them, like the villain in a spy movie?
The Architect went on: “Things were going quite well until recently. Our authority was respected and the system honored, if not loved, because it was best for the little ones. But then the Preacher moved into the church across the street. He brought with him an object extraordinarily disgusting to behold. Cad? Nancy? Would you step outside for a minute? The guard, too,” he added, when the guard showed no sign of leaving.
“Do you think that’s wise?” Nancy asked, from the doorway.
“Ms. Adelman is very weak with a serious brain injury. And she wouldn’t harm me. I’m the only individual here who can make a bargain he can keep.”
So it was going to be a bargaining session. There was something he wanted her to do.
The door closed behind Danny and she did for a moment consider springing across the room and hacking the Architect to pieces with the big scissors she’d seen on the console table by the door. She didn’t move, however.
First, hear the offer.
“Ah, that’s better,” the Architect said. “Would you like a drink? I heard you enjoy a taste now and again. I have some excellent whiskey, although I can’t touch the stuff myself. Bad for my health.”
“I quit,” Danny said. In fact, she wanted a drink right now with every cell of her being. “Anyway, how do you know what I like?”
“You’re the Sister of the Dead. Practically famous in some circles.”
“Don’t call me that,” Danny replied.
“Why not? You should embrace it,” the Architect said. “It’s your ticket to the future.”
At last, a cloud of smoke spilled out of his mouth.
“Now listen,” he continued. “No games. You know what I am. I know what you are. Your sister wasn’t quite as isolated from our kind as you may have thought. Those long walks she used to take. The feeding expeditions. Hard not to bump into one of us now and then.”
Danny remembered the figure that she’d glimpsed during Kelley’s last feeding trip. What else had Kelley not thought fit to tell her about?
“The attack with the hunters. Truck plaza. Was that yours?”
“It was not, and I am deeply sorry it occurred. I feel responsible because the perpetrator was seeking to collect children for entrance to Happy Town.”
For the first time, the Architect rose to his feet. He began to pace, very slowly, across his end of the room.
“This is a world in which mother may devour her child, brother may slaughter sister—we don’t care how the children get here. We don’t want to know. We just want to get them out of that godforsaken wasteland and into the safe, clean environment we have created. Where they can get medical treatment, nutrition, education, and untroubled sleep. It was a terrible compromise we had to make, taking in children whom we knew to have been taken by stealth or force. But it worked, and now we have threefold the number of admissions. We may open a second facility soon, as our first is near capacity.”
Having delivered this statement, which sounded rehearsed, he lowered himself into his chair again. Then he did something almost human: He drew a handkerchief from his pocket, as if to dab the sweat from his brow. But he must have remembered he would never sweat again, because instead he refolded the linen and put it back inside his jacket.
“So what’s your pitch?” Danny asked. Nothing he’d said mattered to her so far.
“Let me tell you a little more about our situation. Otherwise you’ll never understand why we do what we do.”
“It’s your fucking town. Talk all you want.”
He nodded, taking no offense. “You must be wondering how we secure our perimeter. It’s a wonderful secret in a way, but humanity isn’t quite ready for it yet. Have you encountered anyone who seemed to be half-alive and half-dead?”
“Like Kelley?”
“This will interest you. Mr. Broker, whom you have met, is a very special, new kind of person. The acolytes at that damned church across the street are the same sort, although terribly misguided. You see, the condition—I hesitate to call it a disease—that first created my kind is mutating, refining itself. In fact my kind is the result of such a mutation; had I turned a few months earlier, I’d have been one of those brainless things that wander the land.”
“Lucky you.”
“There’s a new infection going around. The lucky victim becomes one of us very slowly, a sort of metamorphosis. Those infected retain their human character and personality for the most part, but lose the absurdly inefficient metabolism. And they become immortal, of course, like me. As I’m sure you guessed.”
“Is that why Broker’s wearing the makeup?”
“Yes, exactly. He’s a little too far along in the transformation to pass for living without a little added color. Soon, he will have to join the sentinels at the perimeter and allow the last of the life to seep out of him. It’s the sentinels that keep the town safe, you see. They’re unliving, but thinkers like me, completely intact in the mind. The stupid ones can’t abide the scent of us. They stay back. After a few months on the perimeter, the fully transformed unliving joins a lottery to determine if he or she will travel up the line, where we maintain the secure facility for children between the ages of two and twelve.”
Danny had heard enough. The acolyte she’d killed was half-zombie. These fuckers were collecting the kids to eat, she was almost certain. The only thing she didn’t understand was why this evil creature was telling her all about it, knowing that she must do something to stop him.
“I see aggression in your face,” the Architect observed. “Don’t attempt anything, please. Hear me out. We’re not eating the children, you understand? Heavens, no. We are raising them as if they were our own, so that there will be unliving and living in a new, tolerant world, side by side, putting away their differences to forge a new future of unity and understanding.”
“Bullshit,” Danny said.
“I’d send you over there for a look tomorrow, if I could. You’d see how well we keep them. But it isn’t practical. The town is about to come apart, and all because that monstrous cretin with the nails in him thinks he can snack his way through eternity.”
“So recap for me,” Danny said. “What you’re telling me is you have how many—a hundred, two hundred, three hundred smart zeroes—”
“I’ll have you know I consider that an offensive, racist term.”
“—Zombies, like that better? You’ve got less than a company’s strength of your buddies out there keeping the moaners off the living. That’s right neighborly. But what are you eating? Kelley lived on rats. You fuckers don’t look like you eat rats to me.”
“We subsist on criminals, outlaws, and scavengers, primarily. Consumed methodically, a single body can provide a dozen of us with enough sustenance to last
a week.”
“So you admit you’re eating people.”
“If I told you otherwise, you wouldn’t believe it. Our relationship must rest upon complete honesty.”
“So how did you find out who I was?” She already knew something based on what the Risen Flesh had told her, but she was pretending that conversation never happened. The Architect might not treat her so well if he knew she was taking offers from both sides.
“From time to time, your sister would make contact. Oh, nothing bad,” he said, off Danny’s scowl. “Very discreet. She was one of the deadpan, as we affectionately call them. No emotions, really. An earlier form of the condition, of which one might immodestly say I’m the flower. But of all of us, she is the only one ever to have retained a personal human connection. She spoke of you with admiration, you know. Even without emotions, she knew you were a giant among the living, a fighting queen.”
“Don’t blow smoke up my ass,” Danny said. Thinking of smoke, she observed that the cigar had gone out, the Architect forgetting it in his zeal to suck his lungs full of air so he could make long, impassioned speeches. “I left her to be destroyed.”
“We never could get through to her. In the dozen or so times one of our kind made contact with her, she was always defiant. There’s more, she would say. There’s more than we know. I think she was talking about existence, or the difference between living and unliving. We would have treated her so well if she’d escaped your primitive followers. It’s terrible.”
Here the Architect hung his head and pantomimed a tear rolling down his cheek with his finger. The interview so far had lasted half an hour. Danny decided she’d probably learned everything he had to tell her; it was time to get to business.
“There’s a boy under my protection here. I want him back. He was never supposed to be processed here.”
“The quiet one. Well that’s the thing, isn’t it,” the Architect said, relighting the stub of the cigar with a match. Danny noticed he held the match by the very end, as far from the flame as possible. Unfeeling, unhealing flesh. He had to be careful. After another scorching drag, he continued: “The boy is scheduled for the next train to the resort. That’s four days from now.”
He leaned forward until Danny could see the cloudy eyes behind the dark lenses. “I’ll be frank with you, Sheriff. From what I’ve heard about you, there’s only one person in this town ruthless and violent enough to have killed an acolyte in his own church.”
Danny opened her mouth to speak, to make noises of denial.
The Architect raised a hand to cut her off, palm outward. “Don’t bother. I don’t want to know. The point is, if I could find the person who was able to accomplish that task, I would want that person to finish the job for me. I would want that person to kill the blasphemous effigy hanging in the church and expose it as an abomination to all, before that damnable preacher delivers another of his rabble-rousing sermons and this whole place comes apart.”
“And if that person delivered, you’d hand over the Kid.”
“For starters. I might also be able to arrange safe passage all around the countryside for such a person. Almost as far south as the Alabama border and east to Albany, New York.”
“You don’t have that kind of reach,” Danny said, not trying to hide the contempt in her voice. “There are assholes like you stalking all the roads, grabbing kids and eating them, collecting them like fucking frogs in a bucket. You can’t arrange safe shit.”
The Architect tried to laugh, but only made a sound like a broom on a concrete floor. “I was told you were quite intelligent. Do you imagine we don’t recruit from our side of the life-death divide?”
One for you, twenty for me.
Suddenly it all came together in Danny’s head.
The entry fee for the living was one child. For the undead, it was twenty.
The Chevelle driver had been collecting the toll. The mutilated things hanging in the ranch house had been older, maybe thirteen or fourteen years old. The driver must have been eating the ones that were too old while he gathered enough younger children for entry into the secret, undead side of Happy Town.
“Did one of your kind show up a few days back with kids he got off the Tribe? Maybe bragging about his trained pack of hunters? The truck stop attack. You probably heard.”
“Why yes. You’d come after him so relentlessly he was practically frightened. Brought lots of children to us in terrible condition. We were appalled. He has been disciplined. The children are recuperating; they will be making the trip to the safe place with the others.”
“Disciplined?”
“We treat our own just as harshly as the living, ma’am. We are scrupulously fair.”
With that, the Architect leaned back, reaching out to a mini-fridge behind his desk. He opened the door and light flooded out. Inside there was a plastic deli container; inside the container was a human jaw—the bony mandible, with teeth, chin, and lips. Danny saw fillings in several of the teeth. Bloodless meat, resembling pork, hung in gobs from the severed parts of the jaw.
“He left this with us. We let him go back into the wilderness, of course. He’ll starve. Before we removed that from him, he confessed you almost caught him on two separate occasions. That’s the spirit I’d like to see applied to my own enemy across the way.”
Danny swallowed the bile that gurgled up out of her belly.
“So I wipe out the wall hanger and you let me leave town with the child, the woman in the wheelchair, a little guy named Ernie that your people captured up a couple days back, and anybody else I choose?”
“I didn’t say that,” the Architect said, sucking in air through his teeth.
“No, I just said it. Those are my conditions. Anybody I used to travel with who wants out of here can go. And you allow a tour of inspection of that so-called resort of yours. If you got nothing to hide, you got no reason to keep these people out of contact with their fucking kids.”
“It’s not so simple. You clearly don’t understand human nature the way we do. Because we’re objective. You living, your whole worldview is tainted because you came from women, from mothers. We transcend that. You see, we come from death. Your world ends when you die, and ours is merely beginning. We see you for what you are, Sheriff. If we allow your kind to do whatever you want, you’ll poison the minds of the children against us, make more and more irrational demands, and ruin our mutual chances of survival in an uncertain world. The living can’t go on without us, don’t you see that? And we need the living.”
“Then I guess it’s a hearty ‘fuck you,’ ” Danny said, and stood up. She kept one hand on the arm of her chair. She could kill this son of a bitch dead with it before his people could even get the door open.
“Not so hasty,” the Architect replied, hastily. “I’ll grant you everything except the last condition. If you alone wish to go down the line, you are welcome. Be an emissary to the undead, report back, make people understand. But nobody else. And this task I’ve set for you is a secret. As for the rest, you can have the child and your friends, although you’re cursing them to a terrible world. There’s no coming back. If you remain with us, we could make you a very influential and important person. But if you leave, you return only as an enemy. Are we understanding each other?”
“It’s pretty fucking clear. But listen, I’m not fit for a couple days, maybe a week. There’s some shit wrong with my head. And before I do anything, I’ll need some things,” Danny said. “And no more guards.”
“Agreed, agreed, and agreed. And one more thing,” the Architect added. Danny waited. She could almost hear the sound of his skull caving in under the blow from the chair. She wanted to do it.
“You must have made a deal with the thing in the church, am I right? Otherwise you would have destroyed him. Whatever it was, that deal is now null and void. Are we clear?”
6
Ten minutes later, Danny was on her way back to the school-hospital. It had begun to snow. Nancy and Cad Br
oker flanked her in the backseat, with the guards up front. Danny found herself shrinking away from Cad, something she hadn’t done with Kelley. But the idea of a half-man, half-zero was somehow even more repulsive to Danny than an animated corpse. Like it might be contagious to the touch. And she knew nothing about the man, except he was probably insane, to willingly relinquish his life like that. He could still bite.
It was still relatively early in the day, the streets not as busy as usual, people staying in because of the precipitation. There wasn’t a rush hour here. People didn’t have jobs in the old-fashioned sense. Let it snow. Danny noticed there was a pair of hooded acolytes standing on the church steps, watching them leave; she wondered how differently the fight would have gone if she’d known the thing she was fighting was only half-human. It explained the foul stench of the acolyte’s blood. Somehow it was changing, and whatever death was occurring there, it made his blood stink like puke. Her mind returned to Cad sitting beside her, a sour sack of vomit blood, half-dead, half-living, and she felt her own gorge rising.
• • •
Back at the hospital, Danny found herself left unguarded.
Nancy had let her keep the clothes she’d been given. Apparently, Danny was no longer considered a security risk. It made sense—she’d been authorized to kill. Let her have the room to operate. She felt sick in her guts and spent a long time with her head hanging over a toilet in the girls’ room. When she didn’t throw up after twenty minutes, she returned to her bed, weary and ill, her thoughts worn out.
Right now she didn’t have a plan. She’d need one very soon, however. But there was a lot to process: “There are more of us than you think, and we’re everywhere,” the Architect had said, as Danny was leaving his smoke-stale office. She, of all people, was having long conversations with living corpses who ate human flesh to maintain themselves. It was wolves talking to an unusually violent sheep. But she was still on the menu, and they’d eventually kill her, if not eat her. There was no way these things would risk having a proven zero-killer like Danny around.
