Rise Again

by Ben Tripp

  Some stations continued to play preprogrammed music. On the rest, the weird faxlike tones of the EBS screeched out, then a recorded voice said, “Stand by for an important bulletin.”

  In the police cruiser, Nick and Danny caught up with the bearded hiker—he’d fallen on the yellow lines a little way outside town, dead like the others. Cars were creeping past him on the way out, pale faces pressed to the windows. The screaming woman in her skivvies had run off behind the houses into the woods. They couldn’t hear her cries anymore, but there were others coming now, charging through the trees and hollering like banshees. A mass of traffic was quickly tangling up where the road widened at the end of town—too many vehicles trying to get around each other, clogging the street.

  The situation was devolving with the speed of a wildfire.

  “Find out where Dave is,” Danny said to Nick. “Get him out here. We need all hands, now. Tell Ted to haul ass back here. I want these people to stay right here in town until we know what’s going on.”

  Danny hopped out of the car and jogged the rest of the way into town—it was faster than driving, at this point. The Sheriff’s Station was only a few hundred yards away, but with the confusion reigning in the street, it took Danny twice the time she could afford. A lot of people were shouting at her from their vehicles, even climbing out to make demands she couldn’t possibly meet: Get us out of here, take control, do something. Danny ignored them and kept on going until she was through the station doors, where Highway Patrolman Park was trying to organize a crowd of some thirty people jammed into the front room—standing room only, the air rancid with fear and anger.

  Danny forced her way through the crowd, took a position next to Park, and banged the flat of her hand on the counter until most eyes were turned her way.

  “Listen up!” she shouted. “You all need to get to your vehicles or find a quiet place to wait until we have things calmed down, you hear me?” Danny’s voice sounded harsh and ragged to her ears. It sounded the way it did back in the foreign desert. “We do not have the personnel to deal with individual situations. Please leave in an orderly manner and I’ll get back with everyone as soon as possible.”

  This last detail was patent nonsense, but it helped. The people nearest the door, complaining loudly and bitterly, went back outside. The others filed out after them with the heavy, headshaking tread common to all thwarted taxpayers. They can write their representatives, Danny thought. I’m about ready to cap the fuckers.

  “I can’t keep you here,” Danny said to Park, as the last of the civilians slammed the door on the way out. “But you’d better get going, because traffic isn’t getting any better, even if you light up the bubblegums.”

  Park drew a long breath and let it out at the same slow rate. “I’ll…I guess I’ll stay here. I haven’t heard anything from my department in fifteen or twenty minutes. Be an hour at least before I got back there. I might as well stick around and be useful as get myself caught in rush hour on the mountain.”

  “Thanks,” Danny said, and meant it.

  Park went outside after a brief conference about Danny’s objectives, which were at this point limited to keeping injuries to a minimum and maintaining general order, until the nature of the situation was clear.

  Danny took a few moments at the radio desk to call around to other police and fire departments, but didn’t get much useful information—they were all in the same boat, trying to catch up with events.

  Wulf Gunnar was complaining from his cell, demanding to know what was going on outside, and it gave Danny a small pleasure to ignore him. Forest Peak was lucky to be on the margin. Down in the thickly settled areas, if the radio chatter was to be believed, circumstances were devolving at a pace not even a military presence could slow down. This thing was going to have to play itself out overnight, at least.

  Danny was trying to find somebody at the federal level who could tell her what the hell was going on, but the FBI was not answering any of its phones and the civilian government’s snarl of automated touch-tone phone assistants sent her around in ever-decreasing circles. She was setting the handset of the phone back on the cradle when Nick came in, dragging the dead man from the back of the cruiser. The body was wrapped in the vinyl banner from the Chevron station.

  “Somebody gotta tell me what the fuck is happening,” Wulf growled when he saw the corpse. Nick left it on the floor alongside a desk. Danny relented: Wulf did have a right to know, especially if she was going to keep him locked up. She couldn’t remember if he’d been charged yet. She turned to speak to him.

  They all heard glass breaking on Main Street, and screams—not the screams of those crazy people running through the woods, but screams of fear, anger.

  Danny rushed out the front doors of the station onto the sidewalk, heard an engine racing, and an instant later got clipped by the wing mirror of a BMW with a “Trojans” frame on the license plate. She stumbled back into the wall and gritted her teeth, feeling the big muscles of her thigh contract with pain. Nick came rushing out and thumped into a woman holding a small dog. The dog leaped to the ground and ran off beneath the idling cars. The woman spat at Nick: “Asshole!” and threaded her way between the cars after the dog, shouting “Puff! Puff, stay!”

  The BMW, meanwhile, was tearing down the broad sidewalk space between the old-fashioned wooden telephone poles and the doorsteps of the businesses on Main, leaving behind it a strew of upended trash barrels, the town’s lone post box, a cardboard display of Whiffleballs and bats, and a couple of knocked-over crafts booths—and there were several other cars coming after it. Almost at the end of Main Street, the Beemer hit an abandoned chili cart and slewed to a halt, the windshield covered in beans. The driver jumped out and started scraping the chili off the glass with his bare hands. An irrelevant voice flickered through Danny’s mind: I hope that’s not Rosarita’s. Danny considered for a split second making an example of the driver, hauling him out and handcuffing him, but the real crisis wasn’t this one driver.

  The entire town appeared to have gone insane.

  From end to end, Main Street was jammed with vehicles, all heading south toward the flatlands. Before, it had been a mess, like getting out of the parking lot after a football game. Now it was impassable, and people were flipping out—there was a shouting match across the street that looked like it might escalate into a brawl. The crawling vehicles spanned both lanes of the road, incoming and outgoing, with more nosing out of lanes, daring to attempt the shortcut down what passed for a sidewalk in Forest Peak. Horns and engines and voices rose in an unholy din. Dogs were barking through back windows.

  The same as she did in the Marines, Danny gathered what she knew and assembled a quick working hypothesis, subject to constant revision. Some kind of disaster had happened, as far as she could tell; what it was, nobody knew, but it seemed to be spreading fast. People were fleeing the major urban centers (or trying to return), and there were others running and dying, like the ones they’d seen here in Forest Peak, but in huge numbers. All over the place. Out there in the wide world where Kelley is, said the voice in her head.

  It had been less than fifteen seconds since the mirror hit Danny’s thigh, and she could almost move the leg again. As she had learned when she threw away the cane after the town elections, you don’t heal an injury by treating it like a friend.

  “You hurt, Sheriff?” Nick said.

  Danny didn’t have anything useful to say—this was not the time to bark at the minions—so she drew her sidearm and gestured with the weapon: Follow me. Nick did so. Danny fed orders into her radio mic, summoning the remainder of her tiny peacekeeping force: Highway Patrolman Park would do what he could in town; Danny wanted Dave, Nick, and Ted to assemble down on Route 114. What they needed was a roadblock, something she knew a great deal about.

  Patrick thought traffic was light enough so they could start moving. Weaver switched on the video screen that showed the view to the rear, as seen by an all-weather camera mounted
on the roof. There was an overturned baby stroller behind them but the cars were cleared out, room enough to back up. Weaver switched the screen off again.

  “All those cars are going to be stuck on Main Street for another hour,” Weaver said. “We’ll only be stuck behind them.”

  “But Weaver!”

  “Panic is panic. You think it’s gonna help?”

  “When do I not panic?” Patrick said.

  “Patrick?”

  “Okay. I know. I’m shutting up.”

  They waited as a few stray cars that had been parked up the hill on Sawyer Road drove past to join the fray, then they were almost alone except for the few locals who stood at the end of the parking lot to watch the pandemonium on Main Street. The locals weren’t freaking out because they were already where they belonged. Patrick knew dislocation was a powerful feeling and it drove as much mindless fear as did the threat of bodily harm. He watched through the tall windshield of the motor home, but Weaver was examining his Geological Survey map, one of those outdoorsy charts that were more geared to topographical details than useful features like restaurants and outlet malls. To Patrick, the map was a mass of meaningless wavy lines, like an Op-Art painting.

  “Check it out,” Weaver said. “Everybody’s heading downhill, right? That’s here.” Weaver indicated the road with his finger. Then he tapped the other end of town, where they were now parked.

  “But if you go the other way—”

  Here he followed a line that twisted up deeper into the mountains—“You get up to Big Bear, and from there you can go down the other side to Scobie Tree and hook up with Route 66 again. It’s a bitch of a drive and it’s probably three hours extra, but I guess it will put us back in civilization before any of them even make it past the Forest Peak Chevron station.”

  Patrick nodded. Weaver was right. Then something else occurred to him.

  “What if there’s trouble down there, too?”

  Weaver gave him that slow cowboy smile.

  “Light dawns on Marble Head. We got caviar, crackers, and beer. We got a queen-size bed and a flush toilet. While everybody is losing their minds, I suggest we wait things out right here in Forest Peak.”

  Officer Park, responding to Danny’s urgent inquiry, thought he could hold things together on Main Street, although the sheriff told him not to hesitate to call down some of Greer’s firemen if things got out of hand—anybody in a uniform would help, especially if they happened to be carrying fire axes.

  Danny tried to put her priorities in order. What mattered the most: public order? Keeping the town safe? Getting everybody out? Preparing for whatever was coming from down below? There ought to be a huddle with Mayor Crocker, and anybody else in a position of authority, too. It seemed like she had to make all of it happen at once.

  Danny had Dave take the Crown Victoria along the disused logging road down the hill, the one that came up on Route 144 about a half-mile outside Forest Peak, behind the Chevron station. He wouldn’t get there any faster than Danny and Nick could do on foot, because the road was dirt, and mostly washed out. Not ideal terrain for a sedan. It was the way the locals took to dump their trash in the woods below town, down where the first corpse had been discovered by those boys.

  “There’s no hurry,” Ted said over the radio. He was at the gas station. “Things have gotten pretty hectic here. People going feral for a chance at the gas pumps, and there’s more of those screamers in the woods, too.”

  Danny turned to the deputy at her side. “Nick, I think I want you here on Main Street,” Danny said. She had a feeling things were going to get worse before they got better, and if that happened, Danny was going to have to fall back—and town was the only place they could fall back to.

  Dave at last reached the station in the Crown Vic and radioed back to Danny with a slightly better description of the situation than Ted could provide. Nobody was going anywhere, according to Dave: The road was jammed in both directions. The two lanes of southbound travelers were head-to-head with two lanes of northbound traffic coming up from the flatlands.

  There was a fistfight winding down at the Chevron pumps, two angry fathers duking it out while their kids shrieked inside the cars. And there were people on foot coming up the mountain, exhausted by the steep grade, leaning forward as if into a high wind to ease their aching legs. A few SUVs were trying their luck along the steep verge above the road, pushing the limits of what gravity would allow. One of them had already overturned, cutting off the breakdown lane on the uphill side.

  Ted almost wept with relief when Dave showed up. He got into the police car and Dave switched on the lights and the siren and used the nose of the vehicle to push a space through the traffic. Even in this extremity, people still responded to the presence of the law. Ted jumped out in midroad and set up the collapsible sawhorses they kept in the trunk. Between them, the deputies were able to block the road completely, although people were shouting death threats before they were finished.

  The line between law and anarchy was stretching thinner and thinner by the moment.

  Danny went back into the station, ignoring the ongoing complaints from Wulf’s cell, and liberated some hardware from the gun cabinet. The dead man was a lumpy shape beneath the banner. Danny went out through the front room and locked the door behind her. Then she pressed her way up Main Street, making a presence out of her guns, uniform, and hard stare. She turned off between two buildings, reached the alley behind them, and found Amy’s white cube van with Cutter Veterinary Ranch on the side, parked at the back of the Junque Shoppe.

  Danny had a Remington 1100 tactical shotgun in her hands and an old Ruger rifle slung over her shoulder. Amy was busy cramming the last of the pygmy goats into the back of the van. Her white veterinary coat was smeared with animal dung. Danny put her hand on Amy’s shoulder.

  “I got a situation. You remember how to use the police radio?”

  Amy nodded. Danny knew Amy had a similar unit in her veterinary barn; her work often involved angry bears, wounded deer, and rabid coyotes, animals that required the intervention of the law. A rabbit saw she was distracted, leaped out of the van, and zigzagged away down the alley. Amy started after it, but Danny grabbed her arm.

  “Amy, this is more important. I know you prefer animals, but it’s people time. My deputies are all out there trying to keep the peace. I need somebody with a working brain to stick with the radio and figure out what the fuck is going on. Are you with me?”

  “I can’t leave all these little guys stuck in the van—they’ll roast.”

  Danny did a slow burn. This was Amy’s thing. When it got too crazy in human world, she retreated into sacred animal world where nothing could get between her and her fuzzy little charges. Danny, who used to enjoy hunting deer before she went overseas to hunt men, found this self-indulgence unspeakably irritating.

  “Then open the van,” Danny clipped.

  Amy shook her head no like a child.

  Danny tried one more time: “They’ll get hungry later and come back.”

  Amy stared at Danny. This was too much to ask. But someone on the Main Street side of the Junque Shoppe chose this exact moment to smash into another vehicle: Plastic crumpled and horns blared, then hysterical voices rose up over the rooftops.

  “Amy,” Danny said, “something is happening. Something big. I don’t know what it is, but I can’t handle it alone.”

  Danny didn’t normally admit any obstacle was too big for her to handle. Amy started to protest, but there wasn’t any meaning in it. She opened and closed her mouth. A chorus of horns blared over the rooftops. I can’t handle it.

  “You owe me,” Amy said.

  She opened the rear doors of the van, and all the animals inside stood where they were, watching her. So far, so good. Danny told Amy which radio frequencies to call in on, and how to identify the Forest Peak transmitter so other police units would know she was the real thing. She wondered how much she should tell Amy, how much would be overwhelming,
or would sound plain crazy. What about this Eisenmann Plan? Was that why there were so many people coming up the hill? Or was this mass hysteria, animals scrambling to high ground before a flood?

  Danny’s thoughts were tumbling too fast for her to catch them and put them in order. She found she was concluding her instructions to Amy, but couldn’t remember the last ten things she’d said.

  “So listen,” Danny continued, winding down, “keep out of Main Street. Stay inside the station until I come back. Door locked. I wish I could tell you more—”

  Amy held up her hand.

  “Nobody knows anything. I heard something from some woman who thought I was a doctor. She told me her sister called and people were dying. Dying, okay? Then a bunch of people were asking me what to do. Which is why I’m back here with the goats, because I have no idea. I told them I was a podiatrist. What about the Mountain Rescue or something?”

  Danny realized she was squeezing Amy’s arm. She relaxed her grip and patted the arm instead, in the least reassuring way possible. But she tried.

  “They don’t exist anymore, remember? Budget cuts. See if you can raise the highway patrol or Fire and Rescue to send us a chopper. We might need an airlift. There was an ambulance on its way at least an hour ago, but there’s no way it can get here. And…and keep your head down. That’s all I can tell you.”

  “And you?”

  “I’ll be okay,” Danny said, and felt like more was required. “I got a fancy police hat.”

  With that, Danny started back down the alley. She considered covering the distance to the roadblock on foot, but her thigh was stiffening up. So she slung herself up into the Explorer behind the Sheriff’s Station and turned it down the alley toward Pine Street, from which the logging road extended. Thank God it wasn’t on the tourist maps or that would be clogged with cars, too.