Rise Again Below Zero

by Ben Tripp

  Danny wanted to get through the barriers and find the children, extract the Silent Kid from among the rest, and have him at her side while she did what she could to defend him. But it wouldn’t work. In practice, you couldn’t pick one kid and abandon the rest. So instead she scaled the quaint railroad props left on the station deck, barrels and crates stacked up almost to the eaves. She hooked a leg over the wooden gutter and almost fell—the snow and ice made the shingles as slick as soap, and the heavy pack overbalanced her. But she clung to the gutter and shifted her weight by main force. She was on the roof. Already the first of the guards were coming back, laden with gear. And they had men and women with them. The laborers, Danny guessed, who were quartered behind the barriers. People with strong arms. They would have to do.

  She risked getting to her feet, her boots shuddering on the snow. They still didn’t realize she had no authority here.

  “Okay, listen up!” she shouted, and thirty or forty faces looked up. “Anybody who doesn’t have a firearm, get one. If you can’t get a firearm, find a weapon. Shovels, hammers, axes. Anything. You don’t have to take the zeroes down, do you hear me?”

  “Who the fuck are you?” one man shouted.

  “I am the person who stands between you assholes and death,” Danny said, and continued without missing another beat: “You don’t have to take them down. You only have to break their jaws. If they can’t bite, they can’t kill. Are you hearing me?”

  “What’s happening?” a woman shouted.

  Danny was glad she was on the roof, now. She had command of the situation. But more than that, she had a hell of a view down the main street.

  “The town is about to be overrun by zeroes,” Danny replied. “That’s it. That’s the situation.”

  “What happened at the church?” a man called, from the back of the group. As he spoke, another dozen workers appeared, coming through the heaviest of the fences. Danny observed they left the fortified gate open behind them.

  “Unrelated incident,” Danny said. She had every reason not to get into that subject. “We have five minutes to set up these perimeters for defense. No more. Pile up anything you can get your hands on across this gap. I want the doors and windows of this building barricaded with enough shit to keep a tyrannosaur out. Those of you with guns, get up top of something so you have a field of fire. The rest of you man the barricades and bust the head of any motherfucker that comes near.”

  “What about the noncombatants?” one of the guards said. He was among those Danny had seen when she arrived.

  “Tell them to head for the river. Anything as long as they don’t overrun this position.”

  In fact, Danny had no idea what to do about the civilians. They were going to hit the barriers faster than the undead. And now that they could hear the moaning of the undead coming up the main street, they were on their way.

  • • •

  Danny’s vantage point on the station roof gave her an axial view down the entire length of town. She could see the back of the bank, with the crooked church and the headless bronze soldier beyond it. A flood of terrified people was coming straight up the road. They might not have thought of the train as a means of escape yet; so far they were simply running away from the danger. But the moment the train turbines started up, there was going to be a riot.

  A ladder clattered against the eaves of the roof; a window opened in the charming cupola of the station. Men and women swarmed onto the roof, dragging all kinds of materiel behind them. Danny saw several rocket launchers and bristling armloads of guns. Cases of ammunition. One of the men, sixtyish with a salt-and-pepper mustache, slipped his way along the ridgeline of the roof and shook Danny’s hand.

  “I don’t know who the hell you are,” he said, “but welcome aboard.”

  His name was Mickey Orlando, he was ex-Navy, and he knew a Marine when he saw one. That was all the conversation they had time for. Then Danny was shouting orders down at the people on the ground and Mickey was organizing the defenses on the roof. Somebody slipped and fell over the edge and broke something, but otherwise they were working with the desperate calm of people with no alternative.

  Then the civilians arrived.

  Fifty people became a hundred, and a hundred became two hundred, shouting in fear and demanding to know what was being done to secure their safety and the safety of the children. Somebody handed Danny a bullhorn. She slid down to the edge of the roof, wet slush clinging to her boots, and clicked it on.

  “You need to remain calm,” she began, and nobody heard her amplified voice. She reached out to Mickey, indicating his AR-15. He handed it to her. She fired a burst of five rounds into the sky, and the crowd settled down enough so she could hear the brass jingling to the ground below.

  “I will tell you what you need to do,” Danny tried again, shouting into the horn. The people were still making a lot of noise, but they could hear her. “Head for the river. Go east to the river. You will not be opposed. Tear down the fence there if you have to, but get down to the waterline and follow the shore south. The quicker you go, the fewer casualties. Now!”

  She handed the bullhorn to Mickey. He got the idea, repeating Danny’s message as the crowd swelled to three hundred, then five hundred, the street black with people. They were beginning to flow along the edge of the fence that protected the railway tracks, moving east. There could be an army of zeroes moving up the river shores. The chooks might be running to their deaths. It was a shitty idea, Danny knew, but the only alternative was to lose control of the station, the train, and the kids.

  • • •

  She had hoped to hold the line until morning; if they could get the kids out by train, the surviving defenders might be able to get up the steeps of the mountain and escape that way once there was enough light to see by.

  As it transpired, the line held for another ten minutes.

  At first she thought there was another wave of civilians rushing up out of the suburbs behind those who already crowded the street in front of the station. But they were zeroes. The things formed a solid, lurching mass as far as she could see, like a tide of cockroaches. The panicked civilians began to pour over the barriers at the station, and soon the defenders down there were overwhelmed.

  When the first zeroes reached their perimeter, many of the living were fighting each other.

  There was a different kind of scream that came with the teeth. The bite of a zero made the cries shrill, almost too high to believe they came from a human throat. Suddenly the swirling snow was crowded with such awful sounds, and beneath the cries there was the coronach of the undead, the ceaseless, bitter lament of hunger that rose up when prey was close.

  Someone threw a grenade and rotten meat spewed into the air. Now people on the ground were fighting with their bare hands. The rooftop defenders opened fire, mostly hitting the solid mass of the undead as they surged over the first barrier.

  The thunder of small arms was punctuated by the rush and bang of antitank rockets. Shovels, iron bars, axes, and wrenches rose and fell, black with the blood of monsters. Red blood illuminated by spotlights and fire jetted into the air and the snowy ground became a foul soup of guts and corpses.

  Danny lost any sense of time. She fired the gun until the barrel was red hot and it jammed, then threw it into the melee and picked up another and emptied every clip she could get her remaining fingers on.

  The defenders on the roof were a brave bunch, and doomed. Danny saw a woman slip over the side and two men tried to pull her back up; claws from below hooked into her legs, but the men would not let go. They hung on even after the woman’s leg was peeled down to the bones. Then one of the men pitched off the roof along with the woman, and they disappeared headfirst into the swarm. A man who had been swinging a sledgehammer hesitated, dumbstruck by horror when confronted by a zero completely covered in bulging veins that rose out of its flesh like tree roots; in the moment he hesitated, three others attacked him and he went down.

  Fire broke
out as someone threw a torch into the undead and it found rotten fabric. The blazing zeroes looked like skeletal puppets, wreathed in flame. Buboes exploded and the frothy whitebeard filaments curled up like roasting hair. Yet still the undead attacked the living, tearing out throats with their burning jaws. The fire spread, turning the dark chaos into a tableau out of hell.

  “Diesel fuel!” Danny shouted. “You have shitloads of diesel here, right?”

  “Yes we do,” Mickey said, scrambling to her position.

  They both paused to shoot a burst into the undead. Then Danny said, “Get some drums up here. Fuckers can’t eat if they’re cooked.”

  “What about the civilians?”

  “What civilians,” Danny said. Anybody left alive below them was already done for. Workers were scrambling through the cupola onto the roof now. The zeroes filled the narrow yards between the fences, ripping at anything with blood in it. Danny spared a few seconds to examine the most massive of the fences, the one between the station building and the concrete warehouse inside which the children were housed. She didn’t think it would collapse, but the zeroes had built up to such great numbers they might yet find a breach in some adjacent structure and get through. Even the station itself, although built of heavy timber, could not stand forever. They would get through the downstairs walls.

  “Mickey,” Danny said. “You know the score. Get back down there behind the final barrier and make sure all the kids are loaded on that train. I don’t know who the fuck is in charge of that, but if the engineer is still alive, get him in there, too. Get the train running. We got one shot at this. Get those kids out of here.”

  Mickey grabbed her arm by way of response. His eyes were wet. He nodded, then skidded his way across the roof and dropped down through the cupola.

  “We’re done here!” Danny shouted over the gunfire of the other defenders on the roof. “Fall back! We can’t take them all down. We need to fortify the station and keep the tracks clear!” The snow was blinding them by now; it fell so thickly that the civilians fleeing eastward seemed to disappear, the zeroes coming after them like wolves. There wasn’t much else to be done. Soon the remaining defenders would have to fight hand-to-hand. If they were lucky they would choke the entrance into the children’s building with so many corpses the zeroes couldn’t dig their way through. She felt a cold inside her, a dread. She knew her future, what was left of it.

  The pain in her head had come back, too, and it was getting worse. She had a feeling her time was running out, one way or another.

  Then the swarm of the undead parted from the back, as if some cosmic zipper was being pulled through them. As if they were the Red Sea and Moses was cleaving the waves. Danny couldn’t put it into words, but she had never seen anything like it. She squinted through the snow but couldn’t see what was causing the phenomenon. There was someone in the middle of it, scattering the undead like a bull shark moving through a school of vile dark ragged fish.

  The Architect.

  He was at the head of a small wedge of followers; they must have been the half-dead infected. They passed through the swarm and it split apart, leaving a red carpet of steaming blood and flesh for the Architect to tread. A weird calm seemed to radiate out from the Architect’s position: The moaners and hunters stopped attacking where he came, and instead took on the shrinking, craven look of whipped dogs. Those nearest would have fled, but there was nowhere to go. The zeroes were packed in so densely they couldn’t get away from the only thing such creatures feared. The screams and fighting continued unabated out in the dimness of the storm, but where the Architect went, a dreadful quiet fell.

  Guns went up: Danny’s fellow-defenders saw only the threat of the uncanny.

  “Don’t shoot!” Danny barked. “It’s your Architect. If he goes down, we all go down.”

  To underline her words, she placed her hand over the hot muzzle of the nearest rifle and pressed it downward until it pointed at the roof.

  “The Architect?” the gunman whispered.

  “That’s him,” Danny said. “And he’s not what you thought.”

  She felt the pressure on the gun barrel as the guard struggled to raise it again.

  “You shoot him, there’s nothing to stop the swarm,” Danny barked. She pushed the weapon down and wondered how many other trigger fingers were a foot-pound of pressure away from blowing the Architect’s head off.

  “Look who it is,” the Architect said. He was within earshot now, standing where the first of the barrier fences had once stood. It was flattened now, mashed into the gory snow. Danny realized he was speaking to her. She didn’t reply. Nancy and Cad were with him, among others.

  “You let me down,” he said. “I had to take the initiative, and look what happened. Those zealots blamed me. You know, this all could have been avoided.”

  “I was on my way,” Danny said. The others were looking at her now. They were soaked in adrenaline and sweat and fear, their own master turned out to be some kind of enemy they hadn’t seen before, and Danny had a relationship with him. She could well be the next one to die, unless things went precisely right.

  “Are you suggesting the unliving lack patience?”

  “I’m telling you that fucking church blew up in my face. You brought this place down.”

  “We had a deal,” the Architect said to the others on the roof. “She was going to rid us of that meddlesome priest. She didn’t. Now I’ll have to start all over again. Are the children safe?”

  “So far,” one of the other defenders said. “You’re not going to find out.”

  “Yes, he is,” Danny said.

  “She’s no fool,” the Architect added. “Either we take the train out of here, or nobody does. If you surrender, I’ll allow every one of you to leave town. If you do not, we set fire to that old wooden building of yours.”

  The stupid, burned, broken zeroes all around him were beginning to straighten up, to cease their groveling; it was as if they had found some quietus in total submission. Danny noticed all the moaners that still had faces were turning to look up at the survivors. Danny felt the world tipping away from her. It was that cliff, the endless fall into oblivion that seemed to wait for her in her worst moments. Nothing felt real. Then she recognized a weight against her belly: hand grenades. And a weight on her shoulders. She had the pack on her back and the grenades in her pockets.

  “So we let you take the kids, we walk out of here.”

  “That’s right,” the Architect said.

  Danny looked across the roof at the defenders. They were all spent, shaking, covered in snow and soot. If the battle continued, they could hold the zeroes off another ten minutes. Then the kids would die, or the Architect would take them away. If they took the Architect down, the kids would only die.

  “He can’t eat them all,” Danny said, her voice low so only those on the roof would hear. “Let them go and we’ll regroup. The tracks only go one way.”

  “It’s a fucking trap,” the man next to her said.

  “We’re already in the trap,” Danny said. She saw a couple of blaze orange vests among the undead below—bloody guards who had already reanimated, although half-eaten. “Which way do we go? It’s your call, people.”

  “Whose side are you really on?”

  It was Mickey. He was standing by the cupola, and his face had taken on a new hardness.

  “I’m on the side of the kids,” Danny said, and knew it wasn’t enough.

  “You said you made a deal with that cocksucker. What were you supposed to do? Take out the zombie Jesus?”

  “That’s right.”

  “And what did you get in return?”

  “They have a kid of mine.”

  “What about the rest of them?”

  Danny didn’t know what to say. She reached for the right answer and it wasn’t there. She looked helplessly down at the Architect, and his bland face with the dark glasses seemed perfectly neutral. It infuriated her: He looked reasonable. A geyser of rage t
hat had been building inside Danny’s chest rose into her throat. She felt daggers of pain in her skull and it was nothing to the hot fury that threatened to blow her head clean off her shoulders.

  She looked over at Mickey and the faces of the other defenders. They didn’t know what to think, but there was something like disappointment there. Something like the death of hope. She felt it, too.

  “That’s enough talk,” the Architect said. “Are you dead or alive?”

  “I don’t know,” Danny said. “How about you?”

  And with that, she tossed a grenade at the Architect’s feet.

  20

  The blast threw the Architect backward over the heads of his companions. Danny distinctly saw Nancy’s legs disappear below the knees; she pitched to the ground screaming. A dozen of the moaners came apart in the explosion, and whatever spell the Architect had cast over the rest was broken.

  The sunken, clotted eyes that had been bent on the survivors seemed to kindle with renewed energy, and then the swarm attacked.

  Things happened fast, in stuttering bursts of frenetic motion. The gunfire opened up again. Rockets leaped into the swarm. A drum of fuel came up through the cupola and tumbled down into the writhing attackers; in a fusillade of gunfire it ignited. Now there were flames devouring the station walls. The heat consumed the snow as it came down and black smoke unfurled around the defenders. They fell back, spilling down through the cupola into the station, where a rough wooden ladder gave access to the main floor.

  Heaps of sheet metal and supplies had been shoved up against the windows and doors on the exposed side of the station, but there were rat-eaten fingers thrusting through the very walls. Smoke and flame spurted out of every crack and fissure in the facade. As Danny reached the floor, a hand fell heavily on her shoulder; she reflexively brought up her fist, but braked it in midair. It was Mickey.