Rise Again Below Zero

by Ben Tripp

  Nancy didn’t look too pleased to be allowing Danny to see any of this, but she had her orders. Behind the special engine stood three old-fashioned passenger cars, these also armored, the windows barred and shuttered, roofs laden with supplies. Once coupled to the engine, they would allow about two hundred passengers to get somewhere the easy way. Danny didn’t think these would include the men outfitting them.

  The third and final barrier was formidable. This one wasn’t for show. A fence made of tall sheets of iron, topped with accordion wire and welded-on spikes of bent rebar. There was a deep hum of electricity. A crudely painted lightning bolt flashed on the sheet metal, which Danny now saw was crisscrossed with cattle wire stood off on insulators. She wondered what the voltage was. It must be lethal, of course. There were no guards in front of this gate, but two men atop the wall, which crossed the western end of the tracks and appeared to stay shut. End of the line. The trains that came from the west must stop outside town, going back and forth like a shuttle. This wall kept men in and trains out.

  The wall extended across the tracks, over the sulfur-stinking clinker rubble on either side, and up to a natural rock formation on the north side (the lowest foot of the mountain) and a concrete block warehouse on the south. This building Danny remembered from her survey up on the mountain—it was the largest structure behind the barriers. A door in it opened, and four men in combat fatigues issued from within.

  “Stay here,” Nancy said to Danny.

  Danny stood looking around her, ignoring the guard who remained at her side and the hard stares from the men who’d emerged from the warehouse. “No guards,” she’d stipulated. So far, so bad.

  Nancy crossed to the warehouse men and discussed her mission at some length. One of them eventually went inside, returning several minutes later, by which time Danny was starting to feel the cold. She pressed her gloved hands over her mouth, breathing through them to warm her fingers. She could feel the pocket knife and cigarette lighter she’d concealed inside two of the empty fingers of the left-hand glove. She had liberated both items from the jacket she’d stolen. They might not be a great deal of use, but she wasn’t entirely unarmed. If nothing else, a punch from that hand was going to hurt.

  Eventually three of the armed men advanced on Danny and fanned out around her, marching her into the warehouse. Danny could feel warm air coming at her through the open doorway. It smelled familiar, a sort of yeasty, sweet-salt smell like fresh bread dough and dirty laundry all at once.

  It was the smell of a lot of children.

  The guards were fools, in Danny’s estimation, for all their scowling and bravado. They formed a delta around her, one in front and two behind; the doorway was a standard opening just wide enough for one. So she could hypothetically knock the man in front of her down, slam the door on the others, and raise hell before they could do much to stop her. She passed through the door with a tingle of adrenaline, but made no move, did nothing but take in the interior with quick, darting eyes.

  High roof with bow truss frame, insulated with fiberglass batting. Walls of concrete painted in sanitary green. Space partitioned up to an eight-foot height with enclosed cubicles and offices at this end, with the far end walled off but open to the rafters. Plumbing recently added over the surface of the walls. The thing that most caught her attention was the noise of children, of small high voices and squeaking rubber-soled shoes and many bodies moving around. There wasn’t any laughter or sounds of play; it was a zoo sound, animals pent up and restless. So far Danny couldn’t see any of them, but the warmth and stink and noise brought out some instinct in her that could almost be described as maternal. It was sympathy, at least.

  She had found the children.

  “I need you to understand only the best behavior will do in here,” Nancy said.

  They were signed in at a desk by an intensely bored-looking man with a side holster. Then he rose, pistol in hand, and they walked behind him across the concrete floor to a padlocked door. The man unlocked it and they entered a hallway, the three guards trailing along behind. The man relocked the door behind them. Nancy continued her spiel.

  “This is the transfer hotel, as we call it. As you can see, we take every possible precaution to keep the children safe and secure after the long nightmare of uncertainty they have endured out there in the unforgiving world. Once you have seen how we handle things, there’s something additional my employer would like you to do, besides the work you discussed with him the other day, whatever that was.”

  Nancy’s implied question caught Danny’s ear: Did she genuinely not know what had been agreed upon? Was the Architect that opaque with his people? Minions, Danny thought. That’s what you fuckers are: minions.

  “What did you say?” Nancy asked, one eyebrow cocked at Danny.

  “I said ‘What’s your opinion?’ ” Danny didn’t have any idea what she meant by that; it simply sounded like “minion,” which she must have muttered aloud.

  “My opinion of what?”

  “This setup for the kids,” Danny said, still covering. But it turned out to be a good question.

  “Oh,” said Nancy, suddenly enthusiastic. “I think it’s brilliant. Not one single child has died after arriving here. You can almost feel them relaxing. Gentlemen, we’re all set here. I’ll meet you outside in ten minutes.”

  This last statement was directed at the guards, who seemed to be slow to comprehend. Nancy waited, straining her smile at them, and at length they turned around and went back down the hallway. Before Danny and Nancy was a door with a window in it, but someone had painted a rainbow on the reverse side of the glass, so they couldn’t see through. There were child-height shadows moving behind it. Danny willed herself to be patient and calm and not to betray the burning urgency she felt.

  Nancy waited while the guards were allowed back through the previous door by the desk man. Then she turned to Danny and pitched her voice to a whisper, which made her sound like a child herself, a saccharine peep.

  “I can see that you avoid coming near me,” she said. “You’ve clearly been told that I am managing an infection right now, as are a goodly number of folks in town; it’s not something we like to discuss, of course, because there is such stigma associated with it.”

  “Did you volunteer for it?”

  “I got scratched before I came here and it didn’t take me away like what you usually see. I thought I might be immune, at first.”

  Nancy was warming to the subject, which surprised Danny. But she must feel incredibly isolated, unable to speak to anyone who could possibly be sympathetic. Kind of like at the VA when they encouraged vets with PTSD to talk about their experiences with others. Except not.

  “Not everyone understands,” Nancy continued, almost babbling. “But we are slowly changing in our bodies and becoming more like those individuals who have suffered and died and returned intact. Not all the way, of course. I still have my soul, heaven forbid I should lose that! But still. I feel judged when you look at me that way.”

  “Your poor feelings,” Danny said. She thought it might be useful to express some kindness, but she didn’t remember how.

  “I guess I wasn’t expecting sympathy,” Nancy said.

  “Show me the kid,” Danny said, becoming irritated. “I’m not here for the scenery. I don’t give a shit about you, your diseased ass, or any of this bullshit. You want sympathy? Go loot a Hallmark store.”

  Nancy’s mouth opened and closed like a fish in the bottom of a boat. Whatever she wanted to say, it never happened. Because a few seconds after Danny spoke, the door opened.

  There was a glimpse of many children in a small place, swarming like zeroes. They didn’t look happy, but they didn’t look emaciated or abused, either. Then a woman with gray hair and a badly-ripped mauve pullover emerged with the Silent Kid’s shoulders in her hands. She propelled him to the doorway. When he saw Danny, he didn’t need any urging: He sprang toward her and threw his arms around her waist.

  �
�It’s good to see you, too,” Danny said, her voice hoarse with unexpected emotion.

  The child squeezed her around the hips, hanging on the same way Danny had clung to the rock in the icy river. Then, as if an urgent message had just come through, he leaped back a pace and made a puppet mouth-snapping motion with his hand, then pointed at the ground, then made goggles out of his fingers and stuck them around his eyes.

  “Your dog’s safe outside town,” Danny said. “Friends of mine have him. They’re tough, don’t worry.”

  The Kid was more worried about his runt dog than himself. Danny thought that was a good sign. “He’s gained a little weight,” Danny said.

  Nancy had regained her composure. “Oh, we take great care of them. Plump children, can you imagine?”

  “I bet they’re delicious,” Danny said.

  “Don’t be disgusting,” Nancy said, recoiling.

  “Don’t act like some kind of innocent here,” Danny said, carefully pulling her gloves off. She didn’t want to drop anything on the floor. She stuffed them in her jacket pockets and ran her fingers, such as they were, through the Kid’s hair. “If you didn’t have some kind of crazy bullshit planned, you’d leave the kids here, not run them around the other side of the mountain.”

  “You’ve seen what those survivors out there do. You’ve seen it. They discriminate against people of color, handicappeds, you name it. How do you think they’ll respond to a whole new kind of person such as myself and the many others living with infection? We need to get these kids isolated and educated from that kind of ignorance and cruelty or the future belongs to none of us.”

  “You said there was something else you needed from me,” Danny said, cutting through the insanity. “A part of the deal.”

  “We should discuss that in private.”

  “The Kid doesn’t talk.”

  “If you give satisfactory results in the matter you’ve already been asked to undertake, we might like you to take over security operations.”

  “I’ll think about it. But I’m not doing a single fucking thing for anybody unless this boy walks out of here today, right now, with me.”

  • • •

  “I got an idea,” Topper said, and took a swallow of the doctor’s untasted tequila. They were watching Dr. Joe’s truck roll away into the distance, having first enriched the young doctor with a couple of bottles of vodka for his personal medical use. The backpack was at Topper’s feet. It was a lot heavier than he expected; maybe Danny had a tactical nuke in there, or something.

  “Check it. Me and the sheriff were up top of that mountain behind the town. We was there a while and got a good sense of the . . . lay of the land, so to speak. Down the bottom of the hill there’s the town, and it’s open on the west end like a funnel. If fuckin’ zeroes break through the defensive line in the badlands, ain’t nowhere to go but straight at the town, all the way to the river. They could bust in by the river, too—there’s even a town beach. Now, speaking of the river, that leads up a few miles to the fuckin’ resort place where they keep the kids. You can just about see it from the mountain. Water all around, train goes by, damn good defensible position. Zero can’t swim.

  “But ’cause of that they ain’t guarding it for shit. So if we could cause some kind of a situation at the island where the kids are at, my guess is those fuckholes would fire up the train and send all their best boys up to deal with it. Then we could maybe hit town and spring everybody who wants to get out.”

  “So we just go around the land way and set up a diversion at the island? Hell, let’s get started,” said Ginny, one of the female scouts. But Topper shook his head.

  “You can’t get to the island real easy because first you gotta get by the town, if you’re going upriver. They blocked the fuck out of the access road that goes the long away round the mountain, and for all we know there’s mines in the woods up there, too.”

  “You could hike the long way through the badlands in a couple hours,” Conn rumbled. “Fuck the road.”

  “Yeah,” Topper said. “That’s what I was thinking. But when you get there, there’s only this bridge to the island from the shore. You make it that far, sure, and then they strafe the shoreline with a .50 cal and that’s that. They blow the bridge up like they did the other one across the river. I mean it ain’t rocket science. Only other thing is to get some boats and raid it at night from the far end of the reservoir. But I don’t want to put all them fuckin’ kids at risk, neither.”

  He was sweating by now, his mind working with unaccustomed vigor and the tequila working as it always did.

  “But the basic idea is good,” Ginny said. “Make a diversion involvin’ where the kids are, somehow, then crash the main gates of town. If we got word to the people inside, they could be waiting for us there. Right now there’s only eight of us but there must be a few hundred on the inside who would join us in a heartbeat. Get Ernie back, too.”

  11

  Ultimately, Danny walked out alone, without the Silent Kid.

  It took two hours of negotiation, first in the hallway and then, when raised voices were disturbing the children, at the desk. The Architect himself eventually showed up. Had he been capable of much emotion, he would have been furious; as it was, he was as irritated as Danny imagined one of the so-called unliving could become.

  A timetable was established. Danny had to make her move tonight or it was all over; the Kid was collateral to ensure she performed.

  “We give you the boy now, you won’t follow through,” the Architect said. “We’re done negotiating.”

  “And if I put that church out of operation and kill the thing on the cross, you’ll make me head of security.”

  “Yes. I’ll also guarantee you a seat on the escape train if things go amiss.”

  The escape train. Danny had been right about that.

  “All these people working for you, did you make them that promise? Is Nancy here expecting a seat on the train? Seems like it doesn’t have that many seats.”

  “It’s a moot point, is it not? With us keeping the so-called moaners out, and you keeping the locals under control, we won’t require it.”

  “Twenty-four hours, starting now,” Danny said. “And the first thing I do is take a walk in the countryside.”

  “What?”

  “You just offered me a permanent job. I want to review the perimeter and see how good the security really is around here before I commit.”

  • • •

  In the end, they had a plan. Topper shaped it and everyone else contributed; after a certain point there weren’t any devil’s advocates telling the others it was a crazy idea. Consensus was that they had to do something. Even if Danny had a scheme of her own, it couldn’t hurt. The essentials were to create a situation at the island that would draw security resources away from town, toward the reservoir. Then they would hit the main gates of town, maybe drive an expendable vehicle through them. It wouldn’t compromise safety much, because the gates were not there to keep zeroes out. That was handled at the outer perimeter in the badlands.

  This plan required that someone get word to Danny—which they hadn’t dared use Dr. Joe for, as convenient as it would have been. Ginny contributed the excellent idea of tucking a note in the grab handle of the backpack explaining what they planned to do.

  “I hate like a motherfucker to say this, but I think it’s me needs to do the mission alone,” Topper said. “I’m the only one been up there. I can get up the river to that reservoir there and make enough noise.”

  “You know what’s wrong with this plan?” Conn asked.

  “It’s a piece of shit,” Topper said.

  “It relies on a bunch of chook assholes on the inside doing something on their own.”

  “Nah. The place is tense. On the fuckin’ edge. They’re beheading people. First taste of freedom, they’ll join us. We form up a fuckin’ army and we parlay with those cocksuckers running the place. That makes sense.”

  “It’s bett
er than sitting on our asses,” Conn said.

  “I’m heading out solo to drop this pack off,” Topper said, when the silence had gotten old. “Then I wait. I’ll make my move after dark. You fuckers stand by. The action will be early morning, if this shit goes right. If not, fuck it. I’m probably dead. In that case get good and fucking drunk. And forget all about it.”

  It looked like snow outside. Any minute now.

  • • •

  Danny walked through the badlands and saw nothing but wildlife. It was empty and cold and lonely, but she liked it. Stray snowflakes fell from the gallows sky, but didn’t add up to anything. There were no zeroes. It was a strange feeling, as if the world had been reset to a long-ago time. Animals everywhere, unafraid of her. They had a new enemy; the living posed no special danger to them. She strode among deer, saw coyote and foxes slipping low and straight-backed through the scrub and bracken. Long-footed jackrabbits flashed from cover as she passed, then stopped and eyed her over their shoulders. Birds cried from every tree, and the crows settled thickly on telephone wires that were already sagging without men to keep them firm.

  For an hour, she was left alone. The temptation to check the spot she’d selected for the backpack delivery was almost overwhelming; it was a cairn of rocks with a rude cross stuck in the top, the funeral mound of somebody with the good fortune to be buried, about fifty meters from the road. Danny had chosen it because there was a deep erosion wash nearby and a lot of dense bushes all around it; easy to approach, and the floor of the wash was hard-packed silt, and therefore easy for a person with wheels to negotiate. The road dipped down to it, which protected that particular spot from view of the town.

  She wanted to look right away, but it wasn’t directly on her route, and it might yet be too early. She hoped Dr. Joe had delivered the message. She hoped the scouts were still with her. If the black backpack wasn’t there, she’d need to improvise on a level that didn’t promise much success.