Rise Again

by Ben Tripp

  Danny scuttled crabwise from the interceptor to the recessed vestibule at the entrance to the store. No shots, no answering sound of running feet as hidden assailants ran for better cover. It occurred to Danny that she should have called Wulf to cover her. He was a badly damaged human being, but he was vigilant as hell and he could shoot.

  The town radiated fading heat and emptiness. There were even tumble-weeds down by the railroad tracks. Danny slid along the façade of the store and knelt by the trash barrels at the side of the gas station lot. No signs of life. Even the dead weren’t moving. She broke open the gun and checked it: It was fully loaded.

  “Come out!” Danny called. Somebody had to be around. These people didn’t die of mutual suicide. “My deputies and me are here to take you to safety.”

  No answer. Danny looked around her at the low, falling-apart buildings, the cracked pavement, the short, scrubby trees. There were a couple of old cars parked at the curb in both directions, in and out of town. Maybe the entire population was holed up in the church, or maybe they all got out of town in one school bus. Probably no more people lived in Riverton Junction than Danny had under her tender care in the convoy.

  She decided to take a risk, because otherwise she could spend the rest of the night crouched by the stinking trash, and her knees were too sore for that. She rose slowly, holding the shotgun in a relaxed position, but ready to switch up if circumstances changed. Then she did her breathing for a few seconds and walked as casually as she could toward the gas pumps. It was the same casual walk she had developed in Iraq. It was bullshit, but you couldn’t tell from a distance.

  Two of the corpses by the scooters were dressed in dusty, worn-out ordinary clothing that had been washed too seldom, and yet too often. Locals. A man in his fifties and a woman some years older. The third corpse was a smallish man with a long mustache. He was dressed to ride, in chaps, leather jacket, and red bandanna. He had some very good boots on, and Danny found part of her mind wondering if they were her size. Her own boots were ruined, the soles melted and cracked.

  All three corpses had been shot in the head. She squatted down among them, looking at the wounds. Then she heard a soft noise behind her and spun around.

  Amy was out of the interceptor and strolling across the street. Danny made throat-cutting motions, but Amy just made them back. Hopeless.

  “Troy wants to know if it’s clear,” Amy asked, in an ordinary speaking voice. Danny all but threw herself flat on the ground. This was exactly how to draw enemy fire.

  “Obviously not,” Danny hissed.

  “That’s what I told him. They say the rest of the town is empty.”

  “Awesome,” Danny said.

  “What’s the problem here?” Amy asked. “We’ve been seeing dead people all day.”

  “Look at the blood,” Danny said.

  Two of the corpses, the locals, had bled the dark slime of the zombie. The biker had bled red blood, and plenty of it.

  “Murder,” Danny said, and Amy crouched down beside her.

  Danny was trying to figure out what to do next. Whoever killed these three were well within their rights to shoot zombies, as far as Danny was concerned. But the biker was alive, red-blooded and aware when he went down. No matter how bad the situation was, murder was murder. Yet whoever had done this didn’t seem to have a motive: The bikes were gassed up and ready to go. Didn’t they want to steal them? Unless the bikes belonged to companions of the dead man. Maybe they had been attacked and were hiding somewhere. Danny absentmindedly reached over and touched the cylinder head of one of the choppers. It was hot, running hot. Now she had an idea. But at this moment, a sound was rising from the distance. She looked down Leche Street and saw the motor home rumbling toward them, the headlights like big bug eyes in the fading light. It pulled up behind the interceptor and rumbled to a stop.

  Troy jumped down out of the driver’s seat, and moments later several of the survivors came out of the side door.

  “What the fuck,” Danny said, standing up. In a target-rich environment like this there was no point in keeping low.

  Troy hitched a thumb over his shoulder. “Ask him,” he said, and knelt to examine the bodies. Ted in the Hawaiian shirt was coming up behind Troy, a look of vindication on his face. Patrick and Wulf, an unexpected pair, emerged together. Danny realized a few moments later that they were deep into an argument. Then Ted was standing at the curb, surveying the scene at the gas pumps.

  “Did you kill them?” he asked. Danny’s vision grew red again and she thought she was going to go over there and skull-fuck the son of a bitch with the shotgun. She counted to ten, breathed, and waited.

  Then she said, “We have a murder on our hands here. And the murderer is probably still in town.”

  “Murder. As opposed to a mass epidemic of cannibal corpses.”

  Danny could see Ted was showing off for the bunch of survivors that were standing off to the side, listening. He must have been rehearsing his arguments during the long afternoon drive in the back of the motor home. She walked over to Ted and spoke quietly.

  “What’s your damage? You want to go off on your own? Go. There’s nothing stopping you.”

  “Yeah, right,” he said. “Off on my own, great idea. I have another idea: How about we all agree where we’re going to go, together, in a group? Because you seem pretty determined to take us all to the middle of ass-nowhere.”

  “That’s about right.”

  “And now we have to fart around here while you investigate a murder. What are you going to do, catch the guy and put him in jail?”

  By this time, Wulf had disengaged himself from Patrick and was crossing the street, rifle tucked loosely under his arm. “Dude, cut the shit,” he said.

  “Seriously,” Ted continued. Now he was facing the others, not Danny. “You gonna find the killer and put ’em in front of a judge? You know any judges that are still around? Or are you gonna pop ’em in the head like you do the zombies?”

  Everybody was listening now. Troy and Amy and Wulf on Danny’s side of the line. The rest in the street with the shadows gathering around them. Maria shoved her way to the front of the onlookers and pointed indignantly at Ted. “Why do you have to make so much trouble? The whole way, you make all this trouble!”

  Danny turned to Troy: “How about you and Wulf go around the station and see if the lights work?”

  “You want us to stick around?”

  “I got this handled.” She turned back to Ted as the other men walked off toward the garage office and repair shop. “There are laws. This is a country of laws. No matter what happens,” she said.

  Ted put his hands on his hips and laughed at the ground, bent over at the waist. A pose that reminded Danny of professional baseball players. The smile fell from his face. “Country? What country! We were trying the radio all the way down that mountain, Sheriff. You know what we found? Nothing. There’s nobody out there. Got a nice satellite TV in that bus, too. Nothing. I think the country may be gone. And I think the laws are gone, too. We need new laws, even if they’re temporary, like you don’t get to run the show. We all do.”

  The floodlights under the tin canopy over the pumps popped and sizzled and lit up, and now the shadows were ten times darker in the town, but the gas station was lit up with a lurid greenish light that made the corpses look especially dead.

  Danny didn’t know what to say. Her arguments had run out. But she could change the subject. She picked up the shotgun, and the triumph in Ted’s face went out like a shaken match. There was fear in his eyes. Then Danny shouted, unexpectedly loud in the quiet of early evening despite her cracking voice: “Okay, listen up! I know you can hear me. I got a twelve-gauge pump here. This is the sound of me shooting the Shovel Head cruiser.”

  Danny squeezed the trigger and a spurt of flame jumped halfway to the vintage bike. The roar of the gunshot was loud enough to make Ted throw himself to the ground, Danny was pleased to observe. The bike’s instrument cluster blew apa
rt and several holes speckled the immaculate paint of the gas tank. The bike toppled like a wounded buffalo and crashed to the tar. After about twenty seconds, the gunshot came echoing back off the mountains.

  Danny could hear people running behind her, survivors deciding to get out of range of the crazy sheriff, presumably. Scrupulously not looking to see how Ted was reacting to her actions, she walked over to the nearest chopper and shouted again: “You hear that? Next I got what looks like an early seventies one-thousand Sportster Chopper with an eagle on the tank. I’m going to count to three, because I’m guessing you can’t count any higher than that. One.”

  She could hear more people running away, and someone was crying. It sounded like Maria’s voice.

  “Two.”

  Danny cocked the shotgun. It made such a muscular sound. As she trained the barrel on the chopper, she wondered if this was a deliberate design feature. Now it was just what was needed.

  “Don’t shoot! For the love of God, don’t shoot!” The voice came from beyond a shed out in the darkness.

  An enormous biker came out of the shadows and stepped into the edge of the light. He had a huge gut, hands like catcher’s mitts, and a black chin beard five inches long. His leathers were old and well-broken. Not a city biker like the dead man. This was all outlaw, as big as Wulf must have been in his prime. But he looked scared, his fingerless gloves raised to collar height. Danny turned to face him squarely, the shotgun pointed easy at the ground.

  “Didn’t hear us roll into town, Easy Rider?”

  “Jesus, Billie Jean.”

  “Who’s Billie Jean?”

  “You blew her up.”

  The big man wanted to go over and look at the bike, but Danny put herself between him and the machines. Could be a weapon in one of the saddlebags. The biker slumped and rubbed his face in both hands. Pressed a finger alongside his sunburned nose and cleared a nostril with a violent snort.

  “Hell, I guess it don’t matter anymore.”

  “Down on your knees, hands behind your head,” Danny said, advancing on the big man. She reached her handcuffs off the back of her belt, shotgun braced against her hip with its bore trained at the biker’s waist. He dropped to his knees, hands up, but he was angry now.

  “What the hell gives you the right—”

  “Murder.”

  Danny circled around behind him and plucked a nickel-plated revolver from the back of his wide, studded belt. Skidded it away from her, toward Wulf and Troy.

  “Has it been fired?” she asked, clapping the cuffs around the biker’s thick wrists.

  Wulf scooped up the gun and sniffed the barrel.

  “Sure enough.”

  “You think I killed Mike?” the biker suddenly roared. Danny backed up a couple of feet, to see where this was going. “You think I done that to him?” He was enraged, his face the color of raw steak. He twisted around to look at Danny, his small eyes bright with hatred. There was spittle on his lips. “Ernie! Ernie, you jumped-up catfucker! Get over here!”

  Danny turned sideways to take in both the biker and the shadows toward which he was directing his voice, out in back of the gas station where the wrecked cars were kept. Moments later a bizarre figure emerged from the darkness. It was a skeletally thin man with a long, curving body, like a weasel. He wore a beat-up beaver top hat with feathers stuck in the band, a leather cowboy-style vest, and no shirt. His thin arms were cabled with veins, he had the face of a much older man than the rest of him suggested, and he wore thick-lensed glasses that made his eyes look like twin goldfish. He held his hands up just high enough to indicate they were empty.

  “Topper’s all right,” Ernie said, in a high, whistling voice. “You can take my word on it.”

  Wulf stood behind Ernie, taking him into custody simply by proximity.

  “Up,” Danny said. The big man called Topper heaved himself upright and walked over to the corpse of Mike without consulting her. He was muttering under his breath. He knelt beside his dead comrade and brought his cuffed hands down in front of his head, then reverently pulled back the sleeve of the corpse and slid a rag down the wrist, exposing a deep wound in which Danny could see tendons and bone. Danny had assumed it was a red handkerchief protruding from the sleeve, but the fabric had originally been white. Topper let the limb fall back and rose to his full height, towering up past Danny like an oak tree. Ernie spoke first: “See?”

  Topper sighed, and the anger seemed to seep out of him. He wasn’t done grieving, same as everybody else.

  “He got bit back in Palmdale, where we came from,” Topper said. “We rode this far but he couldn’t go on, he lost too much blood. He said it was taking hold of him.”

  Amy knelt by the body now, shining a flashlight on the dead man’s face.

  “Did he show any symptoms? This would be a good thing to know.”

  “Not now, Amy,” Danny said.

  But Topper hadn’t heard. He went on, lost in his thoughts: “He wouldn’t have got bit at all except he went to his ex-wife’s place to see if she was all right, and she wasn’t. I don’t know why he took care of her, she never did shit for him. But I guess you could say she took care of him after all, in a way.”

  “She sure did,” Ernie said, shivering all over like a dog.

  “So old Mike,” Topper continued, “he had that piece on him, and he told us to get some beer from somewhere as a good-bye present. We turn our backs, he shot himself in the head. Sure, we shot the other two. They was already dead and lookin’ for munchies. But Mike, he went and shot himself.”

  Ted pushed to the front of the onlookers. He spoke too loudly, probably trying to get his stolen thunder back. He’d been forgotten in all the excitement, and this was supposed to be his scene. “He did the right thing, man,” he said.

  Danny held out her hand to Topper, who was still glaring down at her. Topper extended his own cuffed hands, and Danny opened the bracelets with her key. She now knew what she wanted to say, how to respond to Ted’s argument that the laws were gone.

  “Ted here asked an important question. Until we get our country back, how can we have laws? No judge, no jury. And I’m not the executioner, whatever you people think. Lemme make this simple. Few days ago, this was a country with laws. Until we get that back, all we have is rules. My rules. You don’t like my rules, it’s a long way to run from here. Am I clear?”

  Nobody spoke. Topper folded his thick, tattooed arms. Danny could see the globe and fouled anchor drawn on there among the other, mostly lewd designs. She stuck her hand out at him.

  “Lance Corporal Danny Adelman. Three tours in Iraq.”

  Topper’s surprise was almost comical. From the corner of her eye, Danny could see Ernie’s glasses reflecting the lights as he looked back and forth between them, the enormous man looming over the small woman with the scorched hair. There was a long silence, broken only by the buzzing of insects around the lights.

  “Semper fi,” Topper said, and shook Danny’s hand. Her hand hurt like hell, but she felt as much relief in that moment as she had driving out of Forest Peak. Wulf stepped up.

  “Where did you do your time?” he asked Topper.

  “Gulf War.”

  “Nam, ’65 through ’69. Spent the Summer of Love killing zipperheads, God love ’em.” Wulf shook Topper’s hand as well.

  Then a petulant voice came out of the darkness in the street. It was Patrick, unimpressed: “Okay, ooh-rah everybody, we have the first in and the last out, can we get on with our lives, now?”

  They slept on the rooftop of the grocery store. An old aluminum ladder provided access, and one of the survivors had dragged a charcoal barbecue up so they had light from the burning twigs heaped on the grill. The survivors had sorted themselves into vague groups, people having formed fragile alliances of one kind and another during the stressful but boring drive up the desert roads.

  Danny sat up, her back against a vent pipe that jutted up through the roof. Amy was sleeping next to her, mumbling occasi
onally. She had her filthy doctor’s coat wrapped around her like a blanket. Patrick was next to Amy, lying on cushions from one of the RV’s deck chairs. The girl was sleeping under a pile of curtains with her little brother in her arms, with Maria snoring on the other side of him. The girl’s name was Michelle, Danny had finally learned. She was talking a little before they dozed off, which had to be a good sign. Danny remembered seeing their mother as one of the undead: empty-eyed, mouth open, before the hunger set in. She had a perm, as Danny recalled, and her dress was soiled. Unless she was one of the things caught in the fire, she would remain like that until she rotted away. Danny hoped neither of the kids was thinking that far ahead.

  That prick Ted was sprawled across the roof nearest where they had pulled the ladder up, probably so he could book out of there at the first sign of trouble. Various people were lying in between, under all manner of blankets, tarpaulins, and tablecloths. There was a young mother, a pretty woman with a small baby that never cried; Danny hoped the baby was all right. She should have Amy check it out in the morning. An undead infant wasn’t something Danny wanted around.

  There were a couple of college-age kids, too, boy and girl, who looked like they had been very well-cared for before all this happened. His name was Matt or Mark or something like that. Danny hadn’t heard what she was called. They were not so much younger than Danny, but they were kids to her, untried by life, untempered in the hot forge of violence. There weren’t many intact couples, Danny observed. Most people lost the person right next to them, somehow, and now they were all alone together. She was lucky to have Amy. What a stupid thing to do, coming back for Danny the way Amy had.

  Danny silently toasted Amy’s dumb courage, then took another pull on the hip flask she’d appropriated from behind the counter of the store. She chased the whiskey with a swig of beer from a warm can. Why wasn’t she asleep? She’d been struggling not to fall asleep at the wheel all afternoon, going in and out of a trance that had her eyeballs spinning and her eyelids dragging down as if weighted. Now she was alert, though exhausted.