by Ben Tripp
“There’s more,” he continued. “When you die, you will come back. The virus is in you. And you will probably mutate, as so many of the new ones do. And you will still be shunned by the unliving. You will have eternal unlife, alone. Purgatory. Beyond hell.”
Danny stared at her terrifically mutilated enemy and wondered: Would it be worse to go through eternity with a wrecked corpse or to be alone forever? That determined which of them won. And then she thought how strange it was to be trying to decide who won on points—or who won at all. If the Architect yet lived, Danny had lost forever. Her own death was of no consequence because it was already inevitable. Only the Architect had something to lose.
Danny turned around and walked away without saying a word. If she had seen what was left of the Architect’s face, the smile crumpling to twisted fury that leaked black serum, she would have known that in that moment, after all, she had won.
But he had one more thing to say.
“I ate your friend Topper. Chewed real slow.”
Danny turned back. A sheet of fury swept through her like the wing of some great ghost-bird. But then it was gone, wheeling through space. She did not question that the Architect had done what he said. It wasn’t enough to stick a grenade down his pants now. She needed to make his brief reign in the world an absolute failure.
She hobbled across the parking lot, ankle deep in blood-speckled snow, looking into vehicle windows until she found a Chevy truck with the keys in the ignition. It took a while to start; the battery wasn’t much use. But eventually it caught and choked and spluttered and ran. Danny looked back through the cloud of blue exhaust smoke, expecting to see the undead rushing at her. But they continued to stand at the edge of town, silent and waiting.
She drove away out of the accursed place, and saw a number of human corpses—the honest dead, red-blooded and still—those who had fled Happy Town during the attack, only to die within sight of the gates. Over many of them crouched gorging corpses, their throats stuffed with meat.
24
Danny drove directly away from Happy Town until she was out of sight of any watching eyes. There were scenes of horror still unfolding in the badlands to her left and right, visible in the faint light of dawn, like gray velvet; she didn’t take her eyes off the road. There were wounded people crawling across the hard ground with the undead tearing the flesh from their limbs, some juggling their own steaming entrails as they tried to get away from their rotting pursuers, broken and sightless people stumbling to destruction. The undead moved with energy, but they were in no better condition, many of them stripped of skin, burned, shattered like dolls, yet still pursuing, still hungry. The uncanny discipline of the creatures within the city ended at the gates.
Out in the beyond, it was chaos of a kind Danny had not witnessed since the day mankind fell. Those who had survived the destruction of their haven but made it no farther than this were doomed. She couldn’t help them. Her business was elsewhere.
She found the road that ran along parallel to the now-shattered defensive line of buckets and sentinels and turned north, the truck’s wheels skidding in the snow, headlights bouncing. She was three or four kilometers from town. No sentinel would see her change course, if anyone was looking. She suspected they were otherwise engaged. She was counting on it.
Twelve minutes after she’d driven through the crumpled gates, Danny was within sight of the western reach of the train tracks. She turned again and took the maintenance road alongside the rails, heading back toward the town. She kept going until the road that led to the resort island crossed the tracks—well above the section of that route she knew to be sown with land mines. The security there was entirely for show, to keep the chooks from exploring. They didn’t have the personnel or hardware to mine the entire thing. Or so she hoped.
She heard a shrill cry, and initially thought it was an air raid siren; then she realized it was the scream of the train whistle around the corner of the mountain. Her time was getting very low. She drove recklessly in the slick snow, expecting the sudden blast of a mine and the upside-down world and the pain at any instant. But her hunch was correct. In six minutes, she was deep in the forest that caped the lower part of the northern side of the mountain, and suddenly she could see the reservoir through the trees.
She twisted the wheel over and drove unceremoniously off the road into the ditch. Climbed out and dragged the precious backpack after her. She guessed the train needed fifteen minutes to get from the town to the dam across the reservoir; if it stopped there to pick up the rest of the children as the Architect had said he would, she had as much as an hour while they loaded up the boxcars. But she didn’t think they planned to stop at all. The Architect was close to human. He could lie. He would know she’d try to follow the train. He had to fool her into thinking she had more time. Then they could get away.
Besides, there were so few undead on the train, they had enough kids aboard to feed them for a good long while. So she had fifteen minutes, tops.
This vigorous test of logic made the pain in her head form two red-hot horns that tapered from the back of her skull into her eye sockets. Her muscles ached, and the bite on her leg was leaking blood and hurt like a rotten tooth. The pain in her head scared her. It was the bad kind, the kind that Dr. Joe had warned her about. It couldn’t be helped. She had to stay conscious, or wake up undead.
There were zeroes in the woods around her, but she saw no living survivors this way. The things saw her or smelled her, they stalked her, but they didn’t attack. It seemed the Architect was right. Somehow, they all knew. She forced her unhappy limbs to pump and push her across the landscape and didn’t dare think how close she was to collapse.
When she reached the edge of the trees, she fell to her knees and sobbed for lack of oxygen, blue phantoms writhing at the edges of her vision. A moaner walked past her, quite close, one of the mutated ones with the whitebeard, its head a mass of worms. It ignored her, just as the Architect had said they would. She picked up a big rock with both hands and threw it at the moaner’s face. The thing’s head came apart in handfuls like an overripe melon. The disease had turned its skull into mush.
Now Danny was moving again. She was hobbling like a spent jogger, trying to run, but progressing at the speed of a walk. The pain in her head was opening up like a stainless-steel claw. She felt warm wetness on her upper lip, and then her entire chin, as her nose bled freely. The blood was cold by the time it reached her neck. The pain in her skull had become burning cold, first torturing and then killing the nerves pressed against it. It became tolerable once she understood it was killing her. The problem would self-correct. Whatever else his flaws, the good Dr. Joe Higashiyama knew what he was talking about when it came to brain damage.
So Danny bled, and her skull creaked with the pain inside it, and there was nothing else to do but continue onward. She moved along behind the skirt of the woods until she came to a ridge of stone, the foot of the mountain. The dam was before her now, a long, flat line dividing the dark land from the dim sky, fringed with black trees at each end where it met the cliffs that defined the canyon. The electricity-generating plant was at the far end. That’s where she needed to go. The snow on this side was deep enough that she had difficulty lifting her feet sufficiently to clear it with each step, but her shins ached with the endless grating of crusty ice against them, so she tried to lift her boots out of it rather than shove forward like an icebreaker in a frozen sea. She kept pushing along with the rock wall to her right and damn few trees sheltering her to the left from the resort.
It didn’t seem like much, now that she was there. An island of three or four acres with some large, rustic-style structures, lots of windows lit up warm and yellow, the grounds gentle and manicured with clumps of ornamental trees all blanketed by snow, the island a civilized little eminence in the cold metallic water with a neat row of docks and boat slips on the far side and a narrow iron bridge on the near side. There were a couple of hundred kids in there, som
e ready to eat, others requiring more time to mature. When the Architect didn’t stop to pick them up, the thinkers here would fall upon the children like wild animals.
Then she found herself crawling through the snow, almost swimming. She didn’t remember falling to her knees. The ice packing into the wrists of her jacket sleeves revived her somewhat, and she stood up. Not long until dawn. There was a rind of pale light up behind the dam, the morning close to breaking. The blood on her face had frozen in places, and that was fine. It was easier. It stopped wetting her collar and making her cold.
The cold and the pain in her head had joined up. They had become one thing. Danny didn’t think about it as she sometimes did, trying to compartmentalize the pain, break it down, blunt its edge by knowing it. This was different. She was filled with the pain. It was the thing that animated her, the way the hunger had animated her sister. The one thing that proved life, or a property like life. If the pain kept her moving, it was worth enduring. Somehow this triggered a brief memory of standing in a brown snowsuit as a girl of nine or ten, looking up at the walls of a snowplowed driveway during an especially snowy season. She remembered the good kind ache of a long day playing outdoors in the wintertime. Then the memory was gone and the vise on her skull tightened another turn.
The road that led across the dam was near. She heard voices. She would have to act quickly, once she broke cover. But as she prepared to step onto the roadway, the snow beneath her collapsed, and she was tumbling downward. The drifts had obscured a culvert that drained into the river below. She was helpless, only clinging to the backpack as she fell. Her head struck a stone and for a long moment her vision was gone, but the pain didn’t increase. It couldn’t. She lay on her back and looked up. Now she was below the dam, sprawled beside the river.
It was a concrete slab, battered a few degrees so the face of it was not vertical, but fell back toward the top. There were no trees at its base; Danny was out in the open. But she didn’t think anyone knew she was there, or would think to look for her. Whoever was there, they would be looking for the train. She could hear it in the distance, the noise of the engine competing with the noise in her skull.
Suddenly she was pouring tea for Kelley, who was a very small girl. Danny was older, the tea set miniature in her hands. Kelley laughed at something Danny said, and Danny saw the admiration in Kelley’s face, her little pearl baby teeth flashing.
Danny swiped the blood ice off her nostrils and peered around with unfocused eyes and discovered an iron catwalk that crossed the river at the base of the dam. She tugged on the straps of the backpack and felt its weight pressing against her spine. She lurched over to the catwalk, grasped the railing in both hands, and inched her way across it.
The black water below her looked fifty fathoms deep, boiling because the outlet of the electrical plant came out of culverts there. The remaining overflow spilled from a channel cut just below the top of the dam, pouring down past her. There were voices directly above, now. No cries of alarm. Then she was across the catwalk, and there was a stairway ascending the face of the dam. It seemed almost like victory, but this wasn’t a marathon with cheering onlookers at the end handing out towels and Gatorade. Danny would be alone at the finish.
25
The sky glowed pink and gray, the sun almost up, rising through the twist in the canyon beyond the reservoir. Danny reached the top of the dam by the eastern slope of the valley. The road cut through the base of the cliff on that side and met the dam. She was among a stand of heavy trees clad in snow, but the top of the dam was clear and dry, salted and plowed. On the other side was the reservoir. Millions of tons of water. Plenty of water. And the electricity-generating plant was not far away on the summit of the dam. She could feel the vibration of the turbines in her skin. There were lights burning in unblocked windows in the plant. It was directly ahead of her, a carbuncle of corrugated sheds and fuel tanks and pipes rising up like castle battlements over the deck of the dam. It rumbled and hummed and the biggest structure had yellow lighted windows as warm and inviting as fresh dinner rolls.
Danny dreamed of warmth inside the generating station, a couple of small, hot rooms with clanking radiators and a stove with a shrilling kettle, mugs of instant coffee, maybe a flask of bourbon. Warm blankets and dry clothes.
But it wasn’t the kettle she heard—it was a siren.
The heat and light were gone and Danny was back in the tomb of winter with the sun threatening to come up and the darkness taking on more detail, even a little color, telling her the night was over and she didn’t have any more time. It would have to be now. She was done with comfort and warmth and bourbon. She swiped one of her ice-stiff gloves across her mouth and felt the blood begin to flow again. That meant her heart was still pumping. Good enough. She was on her knees once more, and there were dark strokes against the pale concrete coming in her direction. Zeroes. They had been in the middle of the span so they could see both ends of the dam at once; it did not appear anyone was inside the generator building at her end. Nobody emerged, at least.
My lucky day, she thought.
The weakest point in the dam must be the generators, she reckoned. She found herself thinking this over as if it was some great revelation. The mere act of thinking was a triumph, when the pain in her head demanded she not think, but shut down and die.
Too soon, she soothed it, and did not shut down. She reckoned it again: The solid mass of the dam was interrupted here, at the generators, because the turbines would have to be mounted inside the dam itself, where the water went through.
Danny found the slow working of ideas in her head helped drive back the agony, so she kept on reasoning. She had brought two things with her to deploy, and then she was done. The first thing was easy. She might as well do it. Danny struggled out of her backpack. The terrible weight of it was lifted and she felt a renewal inside herself. Her shoulders were no longer bent into hooks. She rocked them once, felt the relief, and then took the knife from her belt and held it in her fist and slashed the backpack open. There was no way in hell she could operate a zipper. The zeroes were halfway across the distance.
She shook the backpack, and the lead cylinder she had collected from the wrecked military train clunked free and rolled across the parapet of the dam. Danny threw herself on it. It might roll under the iron railing, through one of the curb drains, and fall into the snow below; that would be an end to everything. She scooped the thing up between her numb hands, wishing she had more fingers to capture it with. She could feel nothing at all, not even the weight. It was as if she was watching a movie of her arms. The soft lead cap on the end was finely threaded, an old-fashioned but effective way to seal such a container tight, considering the contents would eat through any kind of elastomeric gasket. Danny would not be able to unscrew it in her condition.
But that was why she had brought the hand grenades.
The contents of the pack were padded with old clothes. Danny pulled a tube sock out of the pack and stuffed the lead cylinder down inside it; it barely fit into the maximum diameter of the sock, but that was fine. She wanted it snug. She jammed one of the grenades in after it.
The zeroes approaching her were running now, or running as well as they could, with a crouching, bent-double gait that made the intelligent ones look no better than the hunters they considered so primitive. They weren’t shouting at her or each other; they were more efficient than that. They didn’t get excited, except when there was fresh meat. She had another twenty seconds before they reached her.
Apparently, the Architect had changed his mind about her. She was fair game, after all.
Danny discovered she couldn’t work her fingers, couldn’t pull the pin on the grenade. She tried to do it with her teeth, but they chattered and skated over the steel ring and would not hold it. She could make fists, though. So she took up the knife in her good hand again and stabbed the tip through the ring on the pin of the grenade, and pulled it free that way. There was more to do, but she could
n’t think what it was.
The zeroes were close now, and she saw their faces. The nearest one was missing its nose and its skin was blue-black, probably from exposure to cold. It was a grim silhouette against the rapidly paling sky. Some part of Danny observed it wasn’t snowing anymore.
The grenade. Throw it over the side with the precious lead cylinder. Danny dumped the sock full of metal off the side of the dam into the reservoir, as there was no question of throwing it in her condition. She heard the loud, flat bang of the explosion come very shortly after that—she had almost waited too long. The force of the blast felt like a slap in the face. Then a noisy shower of water sprayed up the side of the dam. The zeroes were so close they caught the spray full in the face; the reservoir was full, the waterline less than ten feet below the top of the dam.
The entire party of zeroes collapsed instantly, robbed of animation. They were steaming corpses now.
Suck it, Danny tried to say, and didn’t care if her idea of a clever retort was unwitty. Her skin was burning now, as well. The blown-up lead cylinder contained a pellet of radioactive metal, of course. Danny had just given herself an extra-concentrated dose of poison.
The water felt hot; she didn’t know if it was real heat or some property of the radiation that only felt like heat, but she welcomed it. It broke through the numbness. She could bend what fingers she had.
The siren was screaming still, and now there were figures swarming down the road at both ends of the dam. She would soon be overrun or shot dead, regardless of the radiation. Especially if there were living men among them. She didn’t know if the zeroes would entrust mortals with something as vital as guarding the dam, but they might need someone to read the maintenance manuals for them.
