by Ben Tripp
“Listen up,” Danny said to the Risen Flesh. “The Architect made me a nice little deal and I can close it right here and right now. Don’t move,” she added, slipping her good hand under her sweatshirt when the acolytes all stepped toward her at once.
“She must be in possession of a firearm,” the crucified thinker said. “How clever of her. So original.”
“What have you got?” Danny barked.
“You’ve made me terribly cross,” the zombie said, and tried unsuccessfully to laugh. “Come on, that was funny. Well it was funny to me . . . Be that way.”
When Danny failed to respond, it took another long breath and said, “With that terrible fellow across the street out of the way, we reduce the bureaucratic component of this society and gain a larger role for faith. There are other, less modern churches operating within the population here, throwbacks from the old days. They aren’t the competition. The trouble is that secular man-eater in the bank, with his pretend-living nonsense. Be honest, I say. I’m honest. Look at how honest I am. The Architect is unliving a lie.”
“Here’s what I want,” Danny said. “If I take him out, the kids go free. All of them. The living take over operation of the trains, the electricity-generating operation, and the running of the town. Any of you fucking half-dead assholes”—here she addressed the acolytes—“who want to stick around, you guard the perimeter against the hunters and moaners. How you eat, I don’t know. Eat rats, like my sister. But you don’t eat here. That’s a special deal for this freak show alone.”
“That’s a fairly broad bargain, Sister dear,” the Risen Flesh said, the amusement gone from his voice. “Things might not work out that way.”
“I might not keep you from destruction, for that matter,” Danny said, and sank her hand deeper under the sweatshirt, as if she had something to advance her position in it.
“Well then, let’s say I’ll take that deal,” the Risen Flesh replied. “We can call it a miracle and the goodness of the church. And in return . . . you destroy the Architect. Within the next two days. That’s what I want.”
10
It was cold, but not the bitter cold of the night hours. Her breath formed long white scarves. Although she’d attracted some attention by puking during the ceremonies, Danny thought her civilian costume would probably help her avoid being recognized, as long as she stuck to the side streets; in any case, the most interesting action was to be found off the main drag, which was apparently the “respectable” part of Happy Town. She left the milling crowd in the town square behind. Nobody paid her any attention; there were quite a few people around, most of them clearly filling the days with nothing much. Some had errands and moved briskly. Once in a while the security vans would circulate.
She took a side street westward, a block below the Civil War statue. This took her through a neighborhood of small apartment buildings with between two and six units in each; a lot more people lived in them now. Then she turned northward again and approached the heart of town from the westward margin, so she reached the low-rent commercial area that surrounded the better buildings: residential upstairs, shop fronts below. There were a lot more people here, mostly wandering aimlessly around and shooting the breeze. She pulled the hood closer around her face. There were some Tribespeople here. None observed her, that she could tell. They were chooks, folks she hardly ever interacted with before. She found herself wondering if anyone within her immediate area was one of the semi-undead, still passing for normal. It could be almost anyone.
She passed a row of little shops—once a blacksmith, a saddlery, and a surveyor’s office, according to the mock–Olde West signs up above the porches; now they contained a bunch of individuals selling all manner of stuff off the top of milk crates and boxes. Feeling exposed on the street, she ducked inside the first of them, and that’s when she understood how crowded the town really was. There were vendors on the porches, inside the doors, in the back rooms, crammed anywhere they could seize a scrap of floor space. The customers were shoved together like subway riders, everyone haggling and coughing and knocking things over. It reminded Danny of the Asian import marts in Los Angeles’ Chinatown, in which subsistence-level shopkeepers and entrepreneurs vied for customers with their elbows almost touching. There was also a strong whiff of the junktique shops such as Forest Peak had supported, too, in which every imaginable bit of rubbish was worth attempting to sell: an early Budweiser can, a broken fishing pole, some spent shotgun shells. It looked like when business hours ended, everybody just lay down where they were, among their stock: She saw bedrolls, pots and pans, camp stoves, old grocery sacks full of laundry. And nobody took cash, of course. The favorite medium of exchange seemed to be food.
Danny watched as a couple of tins of baked beans were exchanged, after much back-and-forth, for a dozen syringes still in their wrappers. Someone else traded a sack full of belt buckles for half a package of teething bread. There wasn’t any fruit or fresh meat available in this part of town, but she didn’t expect it. If Danny had been running the place, she’d have controlled access to perishable stuff, and she assumed the Architect did the same. It just made sense. Keep the merchants from gaining power.
She pushed through the shop floor to the back rooms, which once would have been the shopkeeper’s residence; now it was more vendors crammed in all the way to the back door. People were living, it appeared, with less than a dozen square feet of floor to call their own. It reminded Danny of San Francisco before the city fell, with the refugees jammed into every building until the very streets smelled like bad breath and dirty feet. She’d seen people there who were living on a single stair step, standing on it when awake and lying on it when asleep. This was much the same. In a vast country nearly empty of living people, the living still ended up crammed together like pickles in a jar.
Danny stepped out the back door of what had been the kitchen. There was a narrow yard with a garage at the end; several tents had been pitched on the dirt where the lawn should have been. She stepped through these and followed a gravel-topped alley for another block until it terminated in the perimeter fence of Happy Town. The fence, ordinary wire cloth on metal poles, topped with barbed wire and a couple of electrified strands stood off on insulators, was about twelve feet tall. It wrapped all the way around town, at least on this exposed side, and cut straight through the neighborhood. So there were houses on the fortified side of the fence and identical houses on the outside.
The main difference was more tents. Danny could not imagine living up against the fence on the outside, waiting for that seething horde of zeroes out to the west to figure out a way through the town’s mysterious defenses. Although it was a good, long march away through radiation-poisoned country, the idea of half a million undead moaning and yearning for blood just over the horizon would have been enough to drive her crazy. Sleep in a tent? Might as well be a burrito skin. In any case, it looked to her like as much as half the population was stuck outside the fence. And there was a lot of activity against the wire.
Guards were patrolling the fence, guns across their chests, and always in pairs; there was a van down the next block with several of the orange vests standing around beside it. Danny couldn’t quite understand why they were there, until she got close enough to see how the commerce in town made its first step: Anything small enough to fit through the mesh of the fence could be exchanged right there, and people were constantly doing it. Many of the links in the mesh had been enlarged into round or square holes, but only by stretching, never by cutting the wire. People pushed things through these openings: cans of food, clothes, shoes, clocks, almost anything. Even building supplies. A 2x4 would just barely fit endwise through a fully-expanded gap in the fence.
The scavengers outside the fence were relaying things to their confederates on the inside, who were conveying them to crowded markets like the one Danny had seen. When the undead inevitably came, the people outside the wire would be no less doomed, of course. They wouldn’t be allowed ins
ide for being good trading partners. But it filled the days, and from the looks of things this might be the only way a lot of people on the inside were able to afford to stay alive—they had diligent foragers working for them in the badlands. If it was true that people were thrown out fairly frequently, it might be a big advantage having good friends on the outside willing to risk their asses to collect cans of soup for you. It might guarantee you a little scrap of floor space behind the wire when there was a cull going on.
The trouble was, as Danny could see from her first cursory glance, that the fence itself was useless, except for containing living people. It was too lightly built for its height; a swarm mass would push it over. And the single layer of wire would rip wide open if a tree fell on it or someone drove a vehicle through it. So whatever was keeping the swarm away, out there in the badlands, it wasn’t a fence like this one. And the Architect and whoever else had fortified this place must know it. Again, Danny wondered what their system was. The Architect said it was the semi-undead, standing around smelling bad to the moaners. But that would take hundreds of them, or thousands; otherwise the swarm would pass between them. Their numbers weren’t that great. If they had been, then they, too, would probably have turned on the fully living and eaten them like cattle.
• • •
She was feeling tired again. Her head fluttered a little, as if there was a headache in the area, but it hadn’t decided to settle in. She needed to drink more water. What she wanted more than that was a few good hard pulls of bourbon, but since Wulf’s demise she had kept away from the stuff and it seemed like a waste of the DTs to start into it again. Running her mind without alcohol was like running an engine without oil. But so be it. She could destroy herself some other way.
She started back toward the center of town, planning to find a spot from which she could observe the two institutions of church and government and decide what to do. She had permission from both sides to kill the opposing leader; if she played her cards just right, it might be possible to get them to do it to each other. That would be the best thing, she thought. Get rid of the Architect and make a new deal with the half-living sentries out in the wilderness to keep them in place; get rid of the false god in the church and make a new deal with the folks who wanted religion to go back to the old-fashioned wooden effigies.
Her thoughts were circling like this, the low afternoon sun sinking to the top of the fence behind her, when she heard shouting.
At first she thought there must be a zero attack, but the voices were raised in anger, not fear. She hastened toward the main street through town, where a crowd was already gathering. She saw a knot of people pushing up the street past the monument. They gathered in front of the bank; a mass of others filled in behind them, reaching as far as the church steps and the sidewalk on Danny’s side of the street, which was opposite the bank. Three or four hundred people. They stood there looking on, with more and more excitement-seekers filling the cross-streets and upper-story windows. The smaller group at the front of the protest kept chanting and shouting; some of the larger crowd took up the chants, and it seemed most folks at least shared in the mood of discontent.
After fifteen minutes, during which time the upstairs balcony of the bank and the rooftops of the nearest structures filled up with armed men in safety vests, Cad Broker emerged. He was on the balcony among the orange vests, and he looked worse than when Danny had last seen him, his makeup more obvious.
“We’re busy trying to save the world!” he shouted. “What do you folks want?”
A man at the front of the crowd, taller and broader than most, stood up on something, so he was now visible from the back of the crowd. Even Danny could catch a glimpse of him.
“I’m Darren Williams,” he said. “You brung me and my wife in here with my two daughters about two months back.”
“I hope you’ve been safe and well,” Cad said, pitching his voice for the crowd, not the individual. “Do you want for anything?”
“We want our kids back is what we want, Broker,” Darren said. “We didn’t fill out adoption papers. We handed our children over to you on the condition that you’d keep them safe.”
“And they are,” Broker said.
“You said we’d be safe, too,” Darren interrupted. “But this whole place is a cult.”
“Sir, there is a strict separation of church and state here,” Cad said. “If you have a problem with the true believers, that’s none of my business.”
“I mean this whole damn thing is a cult. We want our kids back.”
A dozen people took up this cry. The spokesman Broker waved them to silence.
“That wasn’t the deal.”
“If this is the safe zone for us, I can only imagine what the hell you’re doing with the kids. You got them in pens? Jail cells? I don’t think it’s any damn country club. Not if this is your idea of a town. Damn head-busting thugs everywhere. Curfew. Never enough food.”
A general shout went up at this. Danny wondered why they didn’t allow visiting hours or something. It seemed obvious. Maybe they’d tried it and it didn’t work. But even prisons had visiting hours. Even West Point. The Architect was making a mistake here. Unless it was all part of the plan. That seemed more likely.
“Sir, the children are cared for as our most precious resource,” Cad said. “The line here is effectively one-way. That’s how it works. That’s how we keep the children from further trauma, from accidental exposure to disease. We have a crisis on our hands. We can’t undo what we’ve done or we lose the war on the undead.”
“That’s bullshit. That’s just words. This isn’t a crisis, it’s the new normal. We live in a zero-infested world, end of story. You don’t call alligators a crisis.”
“It’s the new normal in the sense that the crisis is ongoing and there’s no end in sight. So we’re agreed on that. And the last thing—the last thing—that anybody needs is to introduce the children back into this chaos before we’ve got a handle on it. You’re right. Things here in town are kind of wild. We’re working on it. That’s what the so-called ‘thugs’ are doing. Do you really think this is a fit place for children?”
“Wait a minute. You take both sides of every damn argument and somehow the answer always comes out the same. I’m not falling for that.” More shouts of agreement from the crowd.
“I don’t care what you think, sir,” Cad said, dabbing his face with a handkerchief. Danny wondered if it was a theatrical gesture—he might already be so far gone in his condition that he didn’t perspire anymore.
He continued: “Here’s why I don’t care: because you’re not thinking, you’re just reacting. The kids are safe beyond the mountain, and we’re here. It’s working for the kids. Not one of them has died. If you decide to be selfish and insist on having your way when the whole system is set up to go the other way, you’re just creating a nightmare for everybody. The kids most of all.”
“Everybody?” A man not far from Danny shouted. “Everybody wants their kids back.”
“I see about thirty to fifty people here,” the spokesman replied. “That’s not everybody.”
“I see five hundred people here. And there’s a lot more where we came from.”
“We’ll have to agree to disagree on the math. The point is we can’t have mob rule. We can’t allow a momentary failure of courage on your part to turn into an endless nightmare for everybody else.”
“You said this nightmare was already endless.”
There was a lot more shouting. Danny saw something arc through the air—a shoe or a piece of wood or something. It clattered off the facade of the bank. She decided she didn’t want to be there if crowd control became an issue. She didn’t need a riot, she needed a ninja. So she turned her back on the scene just as one of the guards started shouting through a megaphone and the vans pushed into the throng. She was a block away when the gunfire started—into the air, by the sound of it, but a moment later she heard the stampeding feet and screams of a panicked m
ob.
• • •
She had a good lead on them, so she trotted easily, heading in the general direction of the hospital. The exercise warmed her up. She entered the school grounds without difficulty; her interview with the Architect had apparently squared her with all the guards. She was one of them, now. Then she strode around for a while up and down the halls until she ran into Dr. Joe, who was emerging from what appeared to be a ward for flu cases, once a science classroom. Danny heard a lot of wheezing and coughing in there.
“Ah, Sheriff,” he said, when he saw her. He stank of alcohol. Danny wondered if he was a secret drinker until she realized he was rubbing sanitary gel all over his hands. “How’s the head?”
“Good,” Danny said. “I’m fine. Listen, can we talk?”
“We can talk here,” he said, seeing nobody in the hall but them. Danny got up close.
“I need a favor,” she said.
“I’m all done with favors,” he said. “I’ll be lucky if they don’t take me down right along with you, at this point. I don’t know what the Architect and you have in mind, but I am only here to take care of people.”
Danny ignored the protest. She didn’t have a choice, so as far as she was concerned, neither did he. “I’m going to give you directions to a farmhouse not too far from here. There will be some buddies of mine there. Tell them I need my backpack. Black one with a lock, weighs about fifty pounds. I’ll let you know where it’s hidden, and that’s how they’ll know you’re legit.”
Dr. Joe shook his head.
“I can’t do this for you,” he began, but Danny held up her fingerless hand to silence him.
“The Architect wants me to do something. Lives are at stake. I need that backpack. Sixteen hundred hours tomorrow, no later.”
Joe opened and closed his mouth, but nothing came out. At last he turned around and went down the hall.
