Rise Again

by Ben Tripp

  Amy got creaking to her feet and hobbled across the parking lot. She could hear Murdo down low, arguing with the men huddled inside the ASV as she limped past. She could hear agitated voices inside the White Whale. She skirted around Boudreau’s corpse to the gates, and swung them shut, one at a time. She closed the padlock. One thing she wasn’t concerned with was getting shot by whoever was out there in the night—she had a feeling it was somebody she knew.

  She could see the zeros coming, now: some as rough outlines crossing in front of the firelight, some moving into the glow of the headlights on the vehicles. They were slow and shuffling and slack-jawed, that sound like the wind in winter trees coming out of their throats. The undead were finally here. And it seemed to Amy there were an awful lot of them.

  Dawn took its time coming. The Hawkstone men were no longer in control. They used the civilians as a human shield to extricate themselves from their vehicles; that was Molini’s idea. He suspected whoever shot Boudreau must be one of the men they’d ejected from the airfield, days before. Gun in hand, he formed up a weeping ring of survivors and sent them scuffling across the parking lot with himself in the middle. They pulled up next to each of the military vehicles, until all his comrades had been able to climb out and crouch behind the circle of human cover. They didn’t know from what direction the gunshots came, although it seemed likely to be along the road. Not worth taking chances. They forced the huddle of civilians back into the terminal, and then made them close all the roller blinds on the windows, while the mercenaries remained firmly on the floor, shoving their guns around. Becky with the fake boobs had the baby in her arms again. She pulled down a roller blind in the men’s dormitory. Flamingo was pressed against the wall with his gun aimed at her head. Patrick lay still between them.

  “Goddamn coward,” she said.

  “Fuck you, whore,” Flamingo said.

  “This baby’s mother had more balls than you.” She strode past him, ignoring the gun.

  2

  The sky grew light that morning in a silvery overcast, the bank of clouds that had been on the horizon the previous day having moved in over the desert. It was hot and still. The overcast did nothing to cut the heat of the sun. All it did was dim the colors of the world, making the undead, with their leathery-gray skin and ragged, dingy clothes, look even more monochromatic. The trip through the desert had dried them out. Lips were pulled away from long teeth, eyes shrunken, bone structure telegraphing through the thin flesh. The fat ones in life had become as dry-skinned as all the rest, but the fat formed liquefying sacks around their waists, their thighs, and the upper parts of their arms. These dangled and swung like the infected udders of cows, leaking serum. The weight of this putrefying flesh dragged the loose skin in folds from their necks, their heads, giving them something of the look of droop-eyed hounds, their mouths pulled down in a caricature of a frown. The ones that had been slender in life were now angular stick insects, skeletons bound in hide, moving with difficulty as their tendons shrank and stiffened.

  Around six-thirty, once the light was full, a bulky figure in the Hawkstone camouflage stepped out of the terminal. He looked around, his body poised for flight. Then he walked toward the corpse of Boudreau, unwilling, his steps as halting as if he were crossing a minefield. He made it to the body. The moaning of the undead went up loud and urgent. They could smell him. They wanted him. The chain link of the fence and gates bellied outward with the mass of the things. They wrung the wire with their fingers, clawing to get in.

  The man took hold of the corpse’s sleeve and started pulling it across the parking lot. The corpse was heavy, heavier than the man dragging it toward the terminal building. He stopped halfway across to wipe the sweat off his face with his sleeve, taking the opportunity to scan his surroundings. Then he turned back to the task. He got the body another yard toward the terminal before a spray of blood leaped out of his chest and he fell across the corpse, his boots clawing at the pavement until he bled to death and went limp. The report of the rifle followed the impact by almost a second.

  •

  Inside the terminal, Murdo cursed and punched the wall, leaving a row of dimples where his knuckles hit the plasterboard. For a while it looked like Juan, the fat Mexican, was going to make it. They had dressed him up in Jones’s uniform, which didn’t fit him very well but looked convincing enough from the kind of distance a sniper would be dealing with. Then they forced the blubbering, shiny-faced man out the door at gunpoint: He could go out there where it was a fifty-fifty chance he’d get shot, or he could stay in here where the chance was one hundred percent. All the way to Boudreau’s body, Juan looked like he was still deciding which option suited him best. Then he seemed to gather courage. He was still alive, after all. Murdo thought the solid mass of zombies might be spoiling the shot for whoever was out there. It might have been true. But the sniper found a better angle, apparently, because he blew Juan’s heart clean out of his body.

  Now the zeros were going crazy, their hunger driving them against the fence, as if they could push themselves clear through it if they tried hard enough. Murdo’s main concern was that they probably could. There were hundreds of them, with more on the way, and the fence rocked slightly as they thrust themselves upon it.

  Meanwhile, inside the terminal, the civilian hostages wept and cursed.

  3

  Wulf got another one with a trick shot. He’d spent the morning of the third day after he rescued the sheriff getting himself into the high ground overlooking the airfield, and he was working his way along the ridge. These Hawkstone dipshits couldn’t simultaneously search for his position and hide on the floor, so they had no idea where to find him, and they obviously didn’t put on their thinking caps, either. Because right now there were very few safe places he could shoot from without getting eaten alive.

  One of them was the stony ridge that ran parallel with the runway. He had a good six hundred feet of altitude at a fairly steep angle. From that height he could see down into the rooms of the terminal building, if the windows were clear. They had the place buttoned up pretty well now; all the blinds were drawn. But the blinds stood off the interior window frames a couple of inches. He noticed, in one of the upstairs sleeping rooms the men used, every now and then somebody would move the edge of the roller shade a little and have a quick look around. And when they did, Wulf could clearly see the silhouette of legs, a glimpse of them, between window frame and blind. Invisible from below. Obvious from above.

  Now, Wulf didn’t want to kill any noncombatants. He wasn’t sure about the fat guy he’d shot, for example. He wasn’t built like a fighter, and his uniform looked borrowed. So that might mean they were dressing up civilians and sending them out to die. Far from troubling Wulf, this merely added to the interest of the assignment. The possibility of an unforgivable error made the stakes higher. Sweetened the pot. Still, he had to make damn sure it wasn’t a harmless woman, especially the one with the ten-gallon hats in her shirt. He thought he might have a chance with her, if he cleaned up a little.

  He elevated the barrel of the rifle, adjusted for windage and gravity. The legs were there behind the window blind, and then the weight shifted and the curtain fell back into its usual position. They were about to move on.

  Wulf fired, brought the target back into the scope, and waited.

  There was no sign of whether he’d gotten a clean hit or not. There was a tiny black dot where the bullet had gone through the blind, half an inch from the window frame. A little haze around it. That would be the broken glass. Nothing else.

  Wulf crawled backward on his belly until he was out of view. He didn’t want to risk their locating him: That grenade launcher could turn the ridgeline into Mount Rushmore. He scrambled along a deep ledge until he found the notch that took him right over the other side of the ridge.

  It was getting harder and harder to travel, what with all the zombies down there. Looked like a wildebeest herd, but it was all walking corpses. Some of them were
struggling along trails that a mountain goat would have trouble with. Wulf had seen a couple fall, tumbling down the mountainside to land broken in the rocks. One of them even kept on crawling. They weren’t afraid of anything, that was clear. Wulf was only afraid of them, nothing else (except maybe that Sheriff Adelman), so he figured that was about as good as it was going to get. All he had to do was stay up high and not fall off anything and break his back. The irony alone would kill him. And then he might get up dead and start looking for fresh meat.

  Nothing else happened that day. Wulf was a man of infinite patience.

  He waited.

  Dawn came. Morning turned to day. Then the front door of the terminal building opened, and Wulf sighted on the figure below through the scope of his rifle. The man was wearing the Hawkstone camouflage.

  The hunt was back on.

  4

  Danny opened her eyes.

  The sun was shining. The sky was blue.

  In the dream, she had been swimming. The water was warm and full of bright flashing fish. She dove down among the rocks and coral. There was no question of drowning. She could hold her breath forever. She swam down through a gap in the rocks, where the light was green and dim. Then she swam through a dark tunnel, ribbed and barreled like the inside of a cartoon whale. She swam upward toward the light, broke the surface, and found herself in a bathtub. It was in an all-white bathroom with a bedroom beyond. A fire burned in the fireplace.

  Then she woke up.

  “You look like Patrick,” she murmured.

  “I am Patrick,” the man replied. This surprised Danny. The Patrick she remembered was on the pretty side of handsome. This man was not. His face was a symphony of yellows and browns, with notes of deep blue like the USDA ink stains on a side of beef. His nose was very different from Patrick’s as well, all dented in, and one of his eyes was a raw, red slit between thick lids.

  Only his hair looked the same.

  “Hi,” Danny said, and laughed a little. Laughing was physically painful, but it felt good anyway. It sounded like rocks grinding together. Of events at Boscombe Field, Danny had no recollection at all. She dimly remembered driving down the road, but nothing more.

  “Take it easy,” Patrick said. “We got you stuffed with all kinds of painkillers. Might make you kind of light-headed.”

  “Who’s we?” Danny asked. She was floating in a haze, unable to connect even the most rudimentary pieces of information with each other.

  The sun was behind Patrick’s head, turning his blond hair into a golden halo. He was wearing a white T-shirt. It occurred to Danny that she might be dead, and this was heaven. Then she was disappointed to remember what she had been avoiding the memory of since she awoke: The world was overrun by walking dead that ate human flesh. So probably this wasn’t heaven. She was glad she hadn’t mentioned it to Patrick.

  Patrick counted off on his fingers: “Topper and Ernie. Martin, Simon, Don. Troy’s here. Even Wulf comes by every once in a while for food and water. He’s not such a bad guy. He stayed right beside you the whole first night you were here. Went away before the sun came up.”

  As much as she enjoyed lying on her back being stoned, Danny felt like there was a great deal of data she was missing and her hypothesis was woefully out of date. She tried to push herself up into a sitting position but Patrick gently guided her back.

  “Let me get you a pillow,” he said, and hoisted himself up. Patrick was walking with the help of a stick, Danny observed. He was obviously in pain, but didn’t make much of it. That was different. He used to complain about damn near everything; now he had something real to bitch about, he was bearing it with grace.

  Danny drifted out of consciousness without knowing it.

  When she awoke again, Topper was kneeling beside her. He had a fading black eye himself, though not quite as bad as Patrick’s.

  Patrick returned. He arranged a balled-up overcoat under Danny’s head. She was lying on, or very close to, the ground, inside something like a big turtle shell. That much detective work she could handle. Topper knelt beside her and she smelled armpits and whiskey and motor oil. The motor oil smell disturbed her for a reason Danny could not summon before her mind. “How you feelin’, Sheriff?”

  “Feelin’ no pain,” Danny said, and smiled back.

  “There’s so much dope in your bloodstream we could probably sell your piss for fifty bucks a shot,” Topper said.

  Danny wanted to laugh again, but it seemed like a lot of effort, so she passed out instead.

  They cleared the farmhouse room by room. Two men inside, both dead. They were not locals. Danny thought they were from the city, not the middle of nowhere where they had been patrolling flat sand to keep the date palms safe.

  The woman in black was dead, someone said. Danny went outside again. She hadn’t spared a thought for the woman since she’d run for the side of the farmhouse to get herself out of range of the windows.

  Now Danny went out into the broiling hot yard and crossed the dirt to the place where the woman lay, dead, her eyes half-open and staring at a point somewhere beyond the center of the sky. Her lips were parted. Danny saw hard white teeth with dark patina between them.

  The satchel mine the woman had been holding was kicked several meters away from the body. Danny would secure it in a few seconds. First, she leaned close to the dead woman, wanting to ask her: What were you doing? Why did he kill you? Who did you imagine I was? But the woman’s eyes opened, and they were not eyes at all—they were mouths full of crooked teeth—

  Danny returned to awareness at intervals throughout the remainder of the day and night. Unconsciousness, within which there was nothing, eventually gave way to sleep, where there were picture-plays of the waking world. At last Danny was able to remain awake for as much as an hour at a time.

  Along with returning clarity of mind came the return of pain, to which she responded by demanding the others stop feeding her with tranquilizers. Her body needed a complete overhaul. And at some point the many things she had decided not to think about emerged, and demanded to be known. To distract herself, she studied her surroundings.

  She was lying on an old mattress inside the stripped frame of an ancient automobile. There was no floor. It was only the hull. The roof formed a sunshade; there was no glass to keep in the heat of the day, and without the doors she could see a section of the scenery on either side. Piles of crushed and broken automobiles towered all around, flattened as if by their combined weight. There were heaps of chrome parts, old fenders and grilles. Iron racks bore windshields and door glass, arranged by make and model. Dumpsters full of alternators, engine blocks, motors, transmissions, and all the rest of the guts of cars stood in ranks below the walls of mashed vehicles. The place had been paved with concrete once, but the concrete had split and broken and now it was pavement, dirt, and lank brown grass in equal measures.

  Topper explained to Danny during one of her brief lucid periods that they were in heaven. It was a wrecking yard, not three miles from Boscombe Field. He and Ernie had seen it on the day they arrived at the airfield. They made straight for the place when they were banished by the mercenaries. Danny asked about that, and Topper told her it was a long story for when she was fully awake.

  They had a big old Chinese-made diesel generator, welding gear, a machine shop, and all the raw materials a man could ever ask for, if he was man enough to ask for raw materials. They even had a fridge full of beer. They were surrounded by a fortress of crushed cars and a tall sheet-metal fence. They had some projects going.

  “We’re going to put some gear together and retake that motherfucking airfield, for one thing,” Topper said. “We’re going to make ourselves some battle wagons!” He was excited now, his voice raised almost to a shout. Patrick came back and shooed him away.

  Danny awoke in the night. There was a lump of moon in the sky, and bunches of stars. She could see a couple of the planets, although as always she had no idea which ones they were. Patrick was sleepi
ng beside her inside the shell of the old car. They were lying under a heap of secondhand clothing. It was cool but not cold.

  Danny’s left hand itched like fury. It was driving her mad. Woke her up. It felt as if ants were inside the bones, making tunnels. She couldn’t get her fingers to move.

  So Danny extracted her hand from beneath the pile of clothes, and discovered it was bound inside a large wad of cotton gauze. She unhooked the butterfly clips that held the gauze in place, unwinding the long strips of bandage until her hand was exposed. It was too dark to see—even the pale gauze was little more than a blue-gray smudge in the shadows. Her hand was an astringent-smelling darkness in the greater darkness of the night.

  So she felt her way up from the wrist with her other hand. The wrist was badly sprained, swollen and tender. Her palm was rough with abrasions. There was a crust, presumably blood, in all the creases of her hand. Then her fingers slipped up past her knuckles and there was nothing. She closed her good hand over the injured one.

  Before she could understand what she was feeling, a massive fireball of pain leaped up her arm and blew her straight back into oblivion.

  “You chewed off your fingers,” Patrick explained. “That’s what Wulf thinks. He found something in your mouth, apparently.” Patrick shivered involuntarily.

  Danny was trying to remember, squinting up into a pale gray sky, pink at the margins. Dawn was an hour away. She had bled a lot in the night; Patrick had awakened in the wee hours to find both of them sticky with blood. Despite his protestations, Danny had a close look at the damage by flashlight, before the fresh gauze went on. She had a thumb and a pinky finger, then three swollen knuckles with the skin sutured at the ends like sausage casing. The fingers were gone and there was blackening, ragged skin around the cinched-up wounds.