by Ben Tripp
Danny looked over the side at the water and saw a great column of steam coming up, the surface churning where the grenade had exploded. She had one more task and then she could lie back and enjoy the acid warmth of the radiation. There were auras glowing around everything, blue-green eels.
Danny crawled on hands and knees toward the electrical plant, dragging the backpack alongside her. She was within a few yards of the structure, close enough to see where the sheds dropped down into the water on the reservoir side and met two big humped shapes of dark, pitted iron, presumably the covers for the turbines below. She tried to get the pin free from a grenade, and it worked. She was so surprised she almost dropped the weapon, but managed to fumble it over the side, where it exploded at the waterline, punching a hole in the iron. Danny felt needles of ice lance her face. Water was gurgling into the hole she’d made, flowing into some hollow booming space. It might work.
She sat on her haunches and bowled another grenade; it bounced off the side of the structure and exploded in midair, doing little damage. So she shuffled forward another few feet and was able to toss the next one down between the pair of turbines. It went off with a good, metallic clang and there was a deep, vibrating thump from somewhere inside the dam that sounded like major damage. The dam itself was vibrating now, some great mechanical assembly grinding itself to pieces inside. She chucked two more grenades down into the gap and the noises grew. Her arm was nice and limber now. She felt like she could pitch a Little League game.
But she hadn’t been paying attention to the zeroes.
They were close, dozens of them. They rushed at her, silently, faces bent into snarls; the first few reached the dark, wet slick where the first grenade had wetted the deck, and they collapsed among the others. The remaining zeroes skidded to a halt. One of them knelt to examine the wetness, and it also fell lifeless, face downward, and slipped over the side of the dam into the roiling water. The rest fell back a few paces, and one of them passed a rifle to the foremost.
They were all piss-poor shots, of course. Zeroes couldn’t read, appreciate music, or shoot accurately. But Danny had no illusions about gunfire. Even bullets aimed at nothing eventually hit something. And with the pain in her head and the frostbite and the burning skin she didn’t think her system could take another outrage. Not even if they just winged her.
She had two more grenades, so she rolled one of them along the parapet toward the zeroes. It exploded with a yellow flash and blew chunks out of them, twisting a section of the railing so that it hung over the side of the dam. Something hit Danny, as well. She didn’t know if it was a piece of concrete, a bullet, or simply the shock of the blast. But her vision went red on one side, and then her left eye stopped working. The world went flat, like a television picture.
Danny turned her attention to the turbines again, twisting her head to see. There was a hell of a lot of grinding and banging noise down there, and above it all the rush of a very large quantity of water. She crawled to the far side of the dam and looked down: A black gout of water was spewing out of the sluiceway, bursting over the narrow banks of the river, washing away the snow as it flooded out into the valley. But it wasn’t enough. She had to drain the whole bathtub, and do it fast.
The train was coming into view down the valley, bigger than Danny imagined it would be, a post of black smoke leaping up out of the exhaust stack and scouring against the cliff wall beside it. It was accelerating, just as she had thought. The Architect wasn’t going to stop here.
The zeroes hadn’t noticed this. They were picking their way across the blasted part of the parapet now. Danny had inadvertently removed the radioactive barrier when she detonated the grenade. They were more hideous than ever now, some missing arms or faces, all of them chewed up by the explosion, but none of them stopped. The one with the rifle was completely mobile, if pocked with craters. He would seek retribution for the wounds that did not heal, of course. Then two of the zeroes were flung to the ground—Danny saw black holes appear in their bodies. Was someone shooting at them? She began to crawl.
The fuel tanks for the backup generators were on the reservoir side of the building. Danny identified them, two thousand-gallon tanks of propane mounted on iron frames against the hull of the dam, near the high-water line so if there were a fire they would burn nothing but water and concrete. That meant they would also blow the living shit out of the dam, if they chanced to explode. Danny dragged herself toward them. Something punched her in the body, knocked her sideways. It didn’t hurt, but she was having trouble breathing.
In the growing light she saw that there was blood pouring out of her chest. That explained the breathing problem. She’d been shot. Even as she marveled at this, her left ankle flew up in the air of its own accord and she saw she’d been shot again. There was a ragged hole in her boot with a pale pink mass inside that turned red as she watched.
Danny got her back up against the nearest of the elephant-sized gas tanks. Shoot this, assholes. Go ahead. Time was running out. It seemed to her there ought to be something important, some revelation or insight that would put it all in perspective. But there wasn’t. She was half-blind and her head hurt and she was shot up and she didn’t want it anymore. Might as well wind up her affairs. There were other people running in her direction now. They looked familiar. Not zeroes. She must be hallucinating. No time left to wonder.
She rummaged in the backpack and found the one remaining object she would need, the thing she had been lugging since long before she got the deadly core of heavy metal. It had been with her since she knelt in the field beside the alcohol-soaked corpse of her sister. The thing she retrieved before she set fire to Kelley’s rags and watched the familiar, tragic body burst into yellow and blue flames. She could see the flames in her mind and feel the heat. Then she felt herself stepping off the cliff, falling into that terrible sorrow, falling so that her belly touched her backbone. But this time it was different. She wasn’t falling, she was flying. Flying away from the cliff. The flames had become daybreak, and she could fly.
But there was something more to be done. Something back in the world.
Danny blinked and regained consciousness. The sun broke above the reservoir, the same barbaric golden eye that had looked indifferently down on the world since the dawn of mankind and the dawn of the solar system and the birth of God, for all she knew. The backpack was open between her knees. Soon she could fly all she wanted. Danny thrust her quaking hands into the bag and lifted out the precious burden. She stripped off the plastic bags that wrapped it tight and then pressed it to the bleeding crater in her chest, held it and rocked it and with the one remaining finger of her club hand she pulled the pin from her last grenade.
“I said forever,” she whispered to Kelley’s mummified head, and closed her eyes.
26
They heard the detonation all the way back in Happy Town. Heads turned. Thousands of zeroes twisted around toward the noise. The living who continued to flee through the badlands paused at the mighty sound, but kept on moving. There wasn’t anything else; just the single explosion and then the new day was bright upon the valley, shining through a gap in the clouds, and it was time for the unliving to continue the slow progress toward immortality. They had forever, after all, the zeroes did. With fresh meat and enough padding to protect unhealing flesh, they could live, after their fashion, for eternity.
Then there was another sound, a deep roar, growing until it sounded like the ocean in a storm.
• • •
Aboard the train, the Architect, Cad Broker, and a few others in various stages of undeath were in the engineer’s compartment, watching the canyon walls move past, almost to the reservoir. They had no intention of stopping, although that’s what the thinkers there were expecting; this was no time to stop just because promises had been made. All of the living servants they’d brought were back with the children, keeping order inside the boxcars. They would be eaten first. The sun rose above the horizon, and they saw tiny
silhouetted figures running along the top of the dam ahead. Then there was a flash of light and a greasy orange ball of fire briefly outshone the sun.
The detonation was so loud it sounded like a blow to the train itself. The Architect turned on the engineer, the one living man allowed at the front of the train.
“Stop for nothing. Stop for nothing or I will eat your eyes.”
But massive chunks of stone were spilling down the sides of the canyon now, some crashing to the tracks, some pulverizing the roadway or hitting the reservoir, sending up gouts of water. The brakes of the engine shrieked and everyone was thrown forward; they could hear screams from the boxcars. Then the face of the dam seemed to liquefy, slumping into the river, and a white spray leaped through it, followed by a shimmering black mass. A wall of water, beating the rocks with a vibration like the hooves of a great herd. The river burst its banks and the tide swept past the train, no more than a dozen feet below the rails at its greatest height.
“You foolish bitch,” he said to himself. “We don’t drown.”
The words had barely left his broken lips when the radiation exerted its influence and he fell lifeless to the floor of the engine compartment. The Architect’s brief eternity was over.
The partially unliving around him cried out, for they could still feel pain, and the radioactive water was fighting with the infection for the privilege of taking their lives. They screamed and clawed at their own flesh, and then collapsed like the others. Then the flood surge was past, the river three times its natural height but well below the tracks. It roared away down the canyon, sweeping over the banks of the river and battering the cliffs.
• • •
It took twelve minutes for the flood to reach the outlet in the canyon near where Happy Town had been built. Then the surge rose over the high-class neighborhood against the hill, spilling down the streets and sluicing through backyards, turning the white snow black. Thousands of zeroes turned to face the wall of foaming destruction that sped toward them, uncomprehending. Then Happy Town was underwater, crushed by the deluge and the trees and rocks and debris caught up in the tide. The ruined church steeple was the last thing visible above the foam. Then it twisted, bent, and drowned.
27
The survivors came back. They wandered through the forest, the badlands, up the canyon in which the river was now a gurgling stream among massive wet rocks and broken trees. The reservoir had drained down to the lowest point of damage in the dam, and now the flow had little passion. People picked their ways along until someone found the train up above on the shelf of rock that bore the tracks. The children were there, walking single file, making slow progress toward Happy Town, unaware there was no longer such a place in the world.
There was a brief and violent interlude as the living humans who had been tending the children were slaughtered by the mob that found them. Their pleas for mercy were ignored; they might be innocent, but they were associated with the Architect. The train engineer was thrown into the river with broken arms. The children looked on. One group was spared—scouts from the Tribe, recognized by some other Tribespeople before they, too, could be torn apart.
“We saw somebody on the dam,” Conn told the posse that had found them. “Bunch of fuckers comin’ after her.”
“Her?”
“Or him. Couldn’t see. Anyhows, we shot them up and then the one they were after blew up the fuel tanks. Then we went after the train.”
For some reason, Conn decided not to identify who he thought had done it.
Then a large party of newly emboldened citizens crossed the sludge on the exposed bottom of the reservoir to the resort island and liberated the children there. The staff who remained at the resort met the same fate as those on the train. None of the infected or undead remained animated.
• • •
Twenty-four hours after the flood, several hundred survivors gathered in the badlands in an area where the undead had fallen to the run-out of the flood. It was easy to see where such areas were; the white carpet of new snow had been turned to dark slush in long, broad fingers that extended away from town and drained into the erosion washes of the badlands. Someone eventually realized radiation might have played a role in the destruction, and after a Geiger counter confirmed the theory, they pulled the encampment back; but away from the taint of radioactivity, the remaining zeroes began to circle.
In the end, they had to gather up any vehicle that would still start and drive away. Several thousand of the living were never seen again. Of some six hundred children collected from the living, four hundred were found, and almost half of these were reunited with some living relative.
28
“It was her,” Amy said.
“It might not have been,” Patrick suggested.
He was tired and miserable from a long day of listening to unhappy kids wailing at the top of their lungs. He wanted a martini. They had water, so he drank that.
Two hundred and fifteen children left over once all family and friends had taken in those they knew. They would need more volunteers to take on parenting, the toughest assignment in the ruined world. Otherwise the search for a safe place would have to continue.
But nobody believed there really was a safe place any longer.
They were staying overnight in the abandoned house where the scouts had set up camp. He, Amy, Maria, and a couple of other old-timers had left town less than four hours before the swarm descended upon Happy Town; now they just wanted to travel forever, as long as it was away from this place.
Gunshots punctuated the silence of the night; there were still scores of moaners in the area who hadn’t been caught in the flood or ventured too close to the hot zone, and a pack of feral hunters was on the move through the wilderness to the north. Huge bonfires lit the night every hundred yards. Most of the unclaimed children were sleeping in vehicles or in tents, patrolled by vigilant survivors, but the Silent Kid was asleep on Amy’s lap, with the little goblin-dog asleep in his, snoring.
“I can’t feel her pain anymore.”
“Oh, come on,” Patrick said. “That’s telepathy.”
“Whatever. She’s not there anymore. I can’t feel her.”
• • •
The scouts had told very few people what they’d really seen at the reservoir. They weren’t sure if it would put members of the Tribe in danger or not—a lot of lives had been lost along with the lives saved.
“When Topper didn’t come back, we decided to go fuck the dam up ourselves,” Conn explained. “We was hiding in the rocks waiting for first light. Then we saw this chick come crawling up out of the woods. The zeroes fucked her up but she kept on coming. She fought ’em off. Then—boom.”
That was the entire story, in as much detail as they would ever get. Patrick was certain it must have been Danny. But he resisted Amy’s certainty. He wanted her to enjoy the comfort of uncertainty. A little ember of hope.
That same day, several ex-Tribespeople had ventured out to the defensive line of Happy Town to see if there was some useful secret there; if they could replicate Happy Town’s security, but not its society, they might yet create a real haven. But when they had found the buckets and their foul contents, mostly dumped into ditches by the acolytes to allow the zero swarm through, it was understood that they would not be using that approach.
That was how they found Topper’s still-animated head.
• • •
As more and more of the survivors of Happy Town had arrived over the course of the day, fleeing south, they had been quizzed to determine if they worked for the Architect or not; those who passed muster were put into scouting teams or used as lookouts. The entire sequence of events had been so dense and chaotic it felt like years since yesterday, centuries since the fall of Happy Town.
“Danny’s probably alive and well, up in the hills scalping the last of the child snatchers,” Patrick said.
He took his eyes from the red light of the fireplace and looked Amy in the face. Tear
s were spilling down her cheeks. He wound an arm around her neck and pulled her close, but said nothing. He’d run out of words of comfort a year back.
Patrick listened to the keening grief that escaped her, a cry of anguish from somewhere so deep inside it didn’t reach her vocal cords. She kept as quiet as she could, sobbing and sobbing until she got hiccups. The Silent Kid stirred and muttered something in his sleep. Amy stayed where she was, soaking Patrick’s sweater with her tears, until she could breathe again.
Amy’s grief wasn’t just for loved ones lost. It was also for the end of things, the loneliness of life without afterlife. Neither of them believed in anything after death anymore, except the resurrection of the hungry dead.
Amy heaved a mournful sigh, placed a gentle hand on the Silent Kid’s cheek, and said, “Let’s name him Danny.”
EPILOGUE
So thats the store of sherif dany an her braav esploids to defeet th zeros wich ii hav root doun so al mankin wil reemembar hir 4ever. Ii los 2 fingars of mii lef hand same as sherif dany but from frosbiit not from eetin of my oon fingars as dany did wif hir oon fingars. Thats also wen ii got mii naam dany. Aftar that ii wen south wif the triib, an we had manee aventirs agaans the zeros be4 thaa dzeez wipit owt mosly. Ii got a sekand dog a big dog naamit boons wich doktar amy saas is spelt BONES but she spels th ol waa not th nu waa.
My oon chilrin heer th store of sherif dany everbode chilrin heer that store now it is famist th worl arown, but ii nu dany personal so it is difrin wif mee. Al th chilrin bleev sherif dany is stil aliiv 20 yeers arter shi was las seen gooin into th col and iis with her bakpak an wepins. Thay bleev shi stil keeps us saaf from zeros an striids the hils an valees an cant eevin dy shees so badas. But not zeero ii meen shi is imortel.
An ii ges as long as we bleev, it miit jes be tru.
