Rise Again

by Ben Tripp

“Sheriff, these people are hungry and they don’t all eat brie and caviar, which is what’s in that bus there.”

  Patrick emerged from the motor home with a big white plastic bag full of trash. He didn’t look pleased. When he saw Danny was back, he rolled his eyes eloquently. Danny circled Shoemaker, but kept her gaze on the others ranged inside and outside the store. She raised her voice and was pleased to discover she could do so again.

  “Listen up. Hungry and thirsty, I got it. You all didn’t have the keys, though, so you broke in. That’s a felony. We’re still in America, and the law still applies. You are all guilty of breaking and entering, theft, looting, and I’m sure I can come up with more, depending on who grabbed what. We are not going to do it this way. I’m not in a position to make arrests, but if you want to roll with my group, you observe the law—”

  “Sheriff,” Shoemaker said, stepping slightly on Danny’s speech. Definitely a lawyer. “You don’t seem to understand the situation. I know you went through a lot back in that little town of yours, but we’re not there anymore. Heck, this isn’t even your jurisdiction,” he added, turning to take in the crowd around him. There were nods and murmurs. “We need to stock up for what certainly looks like a long drive. Just where are we going, by the way?”

  More murmurs. A couple of people picked their loot back up. Danny saw Michelle and her brother deep in the shadows inside the store. Troy, arms still folded, walked over to stand next to Danny. The big man with the goatee was standing by the motor home with his hand resting on the metal skin like he didn’t want to risk getting left behind: She thought he was probably on her side as well, which was a surprise. She was grateful.

  And she thought she had an answer to the question of where they were going that most of them would buy.

  “I’m taking this stage by stage. We scope out an area, we move in. It could be there’s none of those things out here at all. Life goes on as normal. In which case, what you have done here is even worse. But we don’t know anything. The fact that you broke those windows may mean nobody has else stopped here. So the area could be clean. But we don’t know. What if those things were inside? I don’t see any of the people that live here. Maybe they’re reanimated, right nearby. If they were in the store, you would have let them out. Those kids in there? How do we know there’s not a zombie in the freezer behind them?”

  Danny pointed at Michelle and Jimmy James. They involuntarily stepped forward to the window, away from the freezer with its magnetic floor-length doors. A great hiding place, in fact. Danny thought she should remember that. The kids looked scared to death, but she wasn’t in a position to be delicate. It was probably the word zombie that got everybody on her side of the issue at last.

  Now the survivors were shuffling away from the store, suddenly eager to get back to the safety of the motor home, but waiting for official permission.

  “What’s your first name?” Danny asked Shoemaker. There was authority in last names. She would keep him on a first-name basis.

  “Ted,” he replied.

  “I had a deputy by that name. He’s dead now.”

  “That sucks. Anyway, we’re just grabbing some supplies and moving on, and I think you can cut everybody some slack if we’re kind of in survival mode right about now, think so?”

  Troy looked angry now. He stepped forward, well inside Ted’s personal space, but he didn’t say anything. The muscles in his jaw were jumping.

  “How about the next people that come through?” Danny said.

  Ted smiled. “They won’t have to break a window.”

  Danny wanted to punch this glib cocksucker in the teeth. Her vision went red as she struggled not to lose her temper, the shadows filled with a blood-colored glow. Inside her head was a chaos of angry replies, shouting, fighting. Outside herself, she stood very still except for her fingers, which curled up into fists. But the line between inside and outside was hard for Danny to see. Then Amy was speaking from somewhere close behind her:

  “Just remember, everybody: We don’t have the medical facilities to deal with an infected bite wound. Nobody does. There isn’t a working hospital for a hundred miles, maybe more.”

  That did the trick. They were back on the road within five minutes.

  They motored up the 12A toward the Mojave Desert. There was no traffic, which seemed strange. Danny had expected they would run into heavy refugee populations getting away from the cities.

  This time, Danny was in the driver’s seat of the interceptor. She needed to project at least the illusion of control, or people were going to wander off and get killed. The radio was silent most of the time, except for the occasional lonely query from a unit somewhere out in the great, flat spaces. Danny wasn’t the only cop alive. But all the living cops were alone.

  “I lost five men,” the first of these lonely voices told her. “One came back, and I let him in. He bit my arm. God help me, I blew his brains out. Now all I want to do is go to sleep.”

  Everyone she spoke to over the radio was the last of their force, having survived the initial onslaught essentially by luck. They were on an isolated call, or sick in bed, or in one case stuck on the road with a dead battery. Danny thought the cop who related this story, from the Martell division, was probably lying. Cop cars didn’t get dead batteries. She tried not to blame him, but she did.

  It looked like she was going to get away with her diversion into the desert. It did make sense, from a tactical standpoint, to get well clear of the population centers. She wasn’t acting entirely selfishly. It was just that, given two equal alternatives, she had chosen the one that would most likely lead her to her sister. Perfectly honorable thing to do, not like sitting out the crisis in a police car on a remote side road somewhere. Not nearly as bad as that.

  Danny was hating herself. She couldn’t talk herself around to the idea that searching for Kelley with a bunch of fairly helpless people in tow was an okay decision. She knew damn well she was valuing one life above the rest—a life she’d failed to value enough before.

  As she pulled out onto the deserted 12A, Danny looked back and saw one of the vehicles peel off from the convoy. It was a pickup truck with a camper shell on the back. The truck took the right-hand turn and headed south, the opposite direction. That meant there were now six vehicles, including the interceptor and the motor home, under her charge. If the entire Riverside contingent was in the truck, her little tribe of survivors was now six members smaller, as well.

  They’re dead, Danny thought, and felt a chilly curl of vindication in her belly. Fuck it. Let them die. The rest of her didn’t feel that way, but there was a small and vocal minority voice inside her head that hadn’t cared for people much, anyway, since she got back from the war. That voice was getting more airtime lately. She would have to watch that. It made the anger worse. She was starting to wonder if there was any difference at all between these people and the people she had confronted in the desert of Mesopotamia.

  They had been on the 12A for twenty minutes when they saw the first zombie.

  It was at least half a mile away across an expanse of dirt that had once been a cattle stockyard, back when there was water. Danny wasn’t sure why she knew it was a zombie, but there could be no mistake. The figure was a short charcoal stroke on the bright, brown landscape, moving alongside a wire fence. Something about the way it moved.

  Danny wondered what it was doing here. Hell, how did it get this far? She considered stopping to check the thing out, maybe neutralize it. But by that time, her charges would have had time to think again. They would have realized if there were zombies here, they could go another way where there might not be zombies at all. So Danny kept on going, hoping nobody in the motor home had seen it. The radio squawked, and Troy was speaking:

  “Come in, Sheriff, you see? Over.”

  “Hundred-and-four, out.”

  She didn’t want to discuss it.

  A few miles later, there was a possible answer to the question of where the thing came fr
om. The convoy passed a long pair of wheel ruts that eased over the embankment of the highway and abruptly curved down into the deep drainage ditch below. A medium-duty white stakebed truck was overturned at the bottom.

  Danny hefted the shotgun out of its cradle inside the interceptor and knelt at the edge of the ditch. Three zombies down there, scrabbling uselessly at the steep dirt walls of the ditch, unable to get out. Danny stood up, then fired the weapon from her hip. The gun bucked in her hands, and one after another the monsters collapsed.

  She walked back to the interceptor. Troy and Patrick were standing beside it, now, alongside Amy. Nobody had spoken a word. They stood and scuffed the ground and looked out across the huge landscape, with its arid, treeless mountains looming up above the highway on one side and the ever-expanding desert flats on the other, its far margin indicated in the distance by more mountains, a pale violet saw-blade along the horizon.

  “What are we going to do?” said Troy.

  “Keep moving,” Danny said.

  “Where?” Patrick asked.

  “Away from these things,” Danny replied.

  “I get the feeling there’s no ‘away,’” Amy said. She was holding her elbows in her hands, rubbing them as if it was cold. In fact it was hot and they were starting to sweat in the sun.

  Danny could feel the heat etching into her blistered scalp. She needed a hat. “If we keep on going, we will reach a point where the people that did this—” Here Danny pointed toward the overturned truck with her chin—“couldn’t get to, before the change happened. I’m guessing what went down here is these things came to life and the driver wasn’t expecting it. He lost control and crashed. Say there are others that didn’t crash. How far did they get before the zombies started attacking? How long was it for us, five or six hours? Longer?”

  Patrick looked like he was going to cry, but his voice was even and cool. “So what you’re saying is this perimeter thingy of yours just got pushed out, am I right?”

  Danny nodded, nudging a pebble around the edge of her shadow with her toe.

  “Yeah. I gave it a hundred-kilometers radius. Sixty-odd miles from downtown. We’re a hundred miles from downtown right now.”

  “As the crow flies?” Amy asked.

  “By road,” Danny said. But Amy wasn’t really speaking to her; she was looking at some crows circling above their heads.

  “I like crows. They’re the most intelligent bird, did you know that?” Amy continued.

  Irritated, Danny opened her mouth to speak, and as suddenly as she became angry, it was gone, erased by realization. There was method in Amy’s madness. The crows, she thought. Like that Hitchcock movie.

  “We should keep our eyes out for crows,” Amy said. “They like to keep an eye out for dead things.”

  With that, Amy shoved the first-aid kit back into the trunk of the interceptor and went to sit in the shade of the open passenger-side door, leaving Danny to reel in her thoughts.

  Patrick and Troy were squinting up into the bright sky, watching how the crows circled overhead with their sleek black heads cocked down at the scene. It was time to make a decision, Danny knew. Another decision. Always another. She could hear the hot wind keening through the desert scrub, the cry of a crow, and the idling engine of the motor home.

  The whole world seemed to be waiting.

  “Let’s push the radius of our safe zone out another fifty miles,” Danny said, calculating in her head, picturing the big map. “Joshua Tree or Twenty-nine Palms east, uh…Barstow north. Forget west and south. Lancaster and Palm Springs. Too many people.”

  “Palm Springs was full of zombies to begin with,” Patrick muttered.

  They were on the road again. Troy radioed to Danny a few minutes after they were rolling. “Come in, Sheriff, this is RV, over.”

  “Go ahead.”

  “There’s been a lot of discussion while I was away. Thought you should know, out.”

  Danny’s stomach knotted. Shit. Those stupid bastards were second-guessing her every move, of course. That slimeball Ted Shoemaker was probably the ringleader. There might need to be another come-to-Jesus moment pretty soon.

  “Ten-four, out,” Danny said, and hung up the handset.

  Amy had her forehead against the window, almost as if asleep, but she said, “Too many control freaks, not enough Indians.”

  Danny didn’t want to discuss it. “That was a damn good idea with the crows. Could save some lives,” she said instead.

  They drove in silence for a while, the mile markers flashing past on the side of the road. Signs for little desert towns that would probably be gone in ten years, zombies or no zombies. There simply wasn’t anything worth staying for. The price of gas was so high, the weather that much drier.

  People in remote reaches of America had started to drift back in, closer to the big places. It had happened in Forest Peak. Some families couldn’t afford the commute down to the flatlands, so they moved. Turns out not to matter, Danny mused. Price of gas, length of commute, global warming. All wiped off the list of pressing concerns for an indefinite period of time—maybe forever. Her thoughts were churning, following no pattern. There wasn’t enough information to start tinkering with a new working hypothesis yet. They would just have to see how far things went.

  Instead, she tried to organize her memories of the last couple of days, to make some sense of the death and chaos. But all that came into her mind were snippets of irrelevant nonsense, like those envelopes of photo prints that accumulated at the back of a drawer when all the good ones were tucked away in an album: pictures of people’s thumbs, accidental shots of shoes or the corner of a building or somebody blinking when they were supposed to say “cheese.”

  What the hell were the monsters that had stood up and started killing people? How could they be dead, and yet want to eat? Were they dead? Had the definition of death changed, and Danny was only slow to catch on?

  That they could move, that their eyes could see, did not make them living things. They were no more alive than the closed-circuit cameras that clustered under the eaves of public buildings, craning their motorized necks to watch the passers-by. And yet, what made a man alive?

  Danny struggled across this alien philosophical terrain, not knowing where to begin. What was life? Was it the intelligence within? The beat of a heart? The suck of lungs? Her comatose war buddy, Harlan, had been alive. Danny felt sure of it, even though she had sat at his bedside for a week and he’d manifested less life in a practical sense than these infected things. She had held his hand that felt nothing, looked into his eyes that saw nothing, and spoken to a mind that could not form thoughts, but it was still Harlan there on the bed with all the tubes and wires. Even though he would never come back. He was, in some way that Danny yearned to define, alive.

  And these walking corpses were not.

  Danny’s thoughts were in shorthand, as ever. She thought all of these things, but in the minimum of words: They’re like security cameras. How come they’re still dead even if they can move? And: Harlan’s alive, even if he’s not in there. So why aren’t they?

  Then Danny found herself staring at Kelley’s note fluttering on the dashboard. She tucked it back into her pocket, this time vowing silently to read it before the sun went down.

  3

  Sunset in the desert. The sky was a deep bronze bowl, molten red where the sun burned down toward its lip. Danny and her entire contingent of survivors rolled into the town of Riverton Junction.

  Their progress was agonizingly slow: In the Mustang, on an ordinary afternoon, Danny could have made it here from Forest Peak in less than three hours. It had taken the convoy an entire day. Danny still hadn’t looked at the note.

  Another tiny place, Riverton Junction even owed its name to somewhere else: A train line passed through, running east-west with a spur line to Riverton, thirty miles north, where there was a profitable bauxite mine. This was nothing but the junction of the two lines. There were a dozen low frame houses and
some trailers, spread out over a junkyard landscape that could otherwise have been on Mars. A church with a tin steeple. Some metal cow sheds from back when beef came this way by rail, headed for the several military installations in the area. And miles of barbed-wire fence. Riverton had one paved street that intersected with a road running alongside the railroad tracks. The rest of the streets were scratched into the dirt across it like the spurs on an old-fashioned television antenna.

  What mattered was that Riverton had a gas station and a grocery store, although Danny wasn’t holding out hope that either one would provide much selection. She had discussed their approach into town at a brief halt a few miles outside the settled area. The smaller vehicles at the back of the convoy would cruise the side streets, looking for signs of life, or zombies. Danny would ride point to the town center. The motor home would wait for the all-clear outside town.

  Danny and Amy were alone as the last wafer of the brilliant orange sun slipped below the mountains to the west. The interceptor rolled to a stop in the middle of Leche Avenue, Riverton’s main street. Danny took the place in at a glance. On one side there were a couple of commercial buildings—a feed and hardware store and a surveyor’s office. On the other side was the general store, which wasn’t any bigger than the Quik-Stop, and looked much poorer. Next to the store was the gas station with its three pumps. There was a big sheet-metal roof over the pumps, and even with the fading light the heat rippling off the roof was visible against the sky. It was ticking and groaning as it cooled. Hand-cut plywood letters on the roof spelled TEXICO, suggesting the gasoline available might be generic. What caught Danny’s eye, however, was the tableau beside the pumps.

  Three motorcycles were parked there, two choppers and a restored vintage Hog. There were three corpses, as well.

  Danny warned Amy to stay where she was and sit low, then eased out of the interceptor, availing herself of the shotgun that came with it. She had no idea if the weapon was loaded, but regulations stipulated it should be. Her mind slipped back in time to another desert not long ago, and she was filled with the kind of fear that borders on elation. Hide-and-go-seek with killers. She had always won the game, so far, and she thought she might be better at it than most people.