Rise Again Below Zero (17 page)

“We gotta stop these shitheads,” Topper said.

“They don’t know where the place is,” Conn pointed out.

Ernie chimed in: “Where is this place?”

“Not twenty miles from here,” Topper said. “It’s just about the only way to go. They’d find it by mistake. Sheriff, what do we do?”

Danny had been asking herself the same question. Kelley stood beside the interceptor a few meters away; as usual, people gave her a wide berth
but otherwise ignored her. She wasn’t a part of this situation any more than a vicious dog would be. But now she raised her skeletal arm and extended a finger northward, and the scouts all turned to look at her.

“Stop them,” she said.

•   •   •

In ten minutes, the entire Tribe was on the secondary road leading toward the train depot. Thirty-five kilometers of wreckage and bad pavement. The first time in a while that the complete convoy had attempted to take a narrow route anywhere. It was a lesson often learned: never get into a tight place with a wide load. But these people had been driving to nowhere for almost two years. They had seen no specific progress except the ritualistic racking-up of mileage and a slow, aimless review of what was left of the great open spaces of the American West. If they had forgotten why keeping to the open spaces was a tactical decision, not everyone would blame them.

Danny did, however.

She, Kelley, and the scouts didn’t race for the front this time. After flagging down individual vehicles proved futile, they stood back and watched the Tribe go by. Danny was seriously wondering if the time had come to give up on the entire project. She made only one further attempt to intervene: As it rolled past, she tried to flag down the White Whale, biggest of the vehicles, to keep it from joining the general rush. Patrick was at the wheel. He called to her out of the driver’s window:

“We can’t stay behind anymore, Danny. Divided we fall. I’m really sorry.”

“It’s a trap, you dumb bastard,” Danny said.

“It’s a cookbook!” Patrick shouted, and Danny had no idea what he was talking about. Then, as he was rolling past, he added over his shoulder, “We have to stick together. I’m not leaving the kids sitting out here without the whole Tribe around us. And to be honest, I’m tired of you always leaving us.”

Maybe he is right,
Danny thought. After all, the Vandals would attack half the Tribe standing still just as fast as they’d attack the other half moving. It was her instincts against everything else.

“Fuck it. We’ll take up the rear for once,” Danny said, and the scouts climbed aboard their bikes. “Stay off the radios!” she added, yelling above the thunder of engines. “Let’s not clue anybody in if they’re listening.” By the time she and Kelley were in the interceptor, most of the traffic had already passed by.

“No matter what goes down, stay in the car,” Danny said.

“We’re past the point of you trusting me.”

“We’re past the point of me covering your ass, Kelley. Stay in the car.”

•   •   •

They rumbled along in the stop-start fashion the convoy always did on smaller roads; somebody would hit the brakes and the entire enfilade would shudder to a crawl, then a bit of distance would open up and others would rush into the gap—only to repeat the process. The exhaust fumes at the back of the convoy were choking. This was the first time Danny had ever been in the rear guard, and she didn’t like it.

There was a halt when someone ran over a plank with nails in it. The tire change took ten years, in Danny’s estimation. She considered walking up the line and trying to talk individual drivers out of pursuing their quest, but by this time she was so angry about the situation she was almost reconciled to finding out what happened when she wasn’t in charge. Maybe nothing. Maybe everything would be fine. Maybe she was only paranoid. But she had a feeling they’d fuck it all up.

They passed through an area she remembered—up ahead was a big modernistic church opposite a slaughterhouse, with two liquor stores in a row right next door to the church. Huge parking lots followed by endless fields of weeds. The convoy slowed to a crawl and Topper pulled up next to Danny’s window.

“You sure you don’t want us up ahead? I don’t like this,” he said.

“What difference will it make?”

“None, I guess. But we should of stopped these fuckheads. We’re fifteen minutes from the place where that dead chick on the road is. Maybe that will slow ’em down.”

Topper rode on anyway, weaving in and out of the traffic for a while, then falling back behind the interceptor. Danny hoped the murder scene would make some of these idiots think—if not of their own safety, then of what the scouts saw every day. She glanced over at Kelley, who sat motionless, her head turned to look out the passenger window. Or, more likely, to exclude Danny from her field of view.

“You think this really is a trap?” Danny asked, not expecting much of a response.

“Yes,” Kelley said.

Kelley drew in a lungful of the exhaust-poisoned air, which meant nothing to her except as a medium to allow her to speak.

“What,” Danny said, when Kelley failed to say anything for the better part of a minute.

“There is one thing I didn’t tell you,” Kelley said, speaking with care, as if the words were made of thin glass. “It’s a secret. You keep grilling me about talking to one of my kind? He told me a secret on pain of destruction,” she continued.

“Tell me now.”

“And you won’t tell anybody?”

“Who the
fuck
am I going to tell?”

Kelley took a hesitant breath and sounded, for that moment, almost alive.

“One for you, twenty for me,” she said.

“What?” Danny didn’t understand, but the goose bumps suddenly breaking out all over her arms gave away her deep unease. “Is that a riddle?”

“One for you, twenty for me.”

“You need to tell me what the fuck that means,” Danny said, her head throbbing. “I don’t understand.”

“You’re in trouble,” Kelley said, and pointed ahead.

“Incoming!”
a voice shouted on the radio.

The Vandal Reapers were upon them.

•   •   •

Immediately there was gunfire and smoke. The bikes came booming out from behind the church and the slaughterhouse, which were dead center of the convoy; this placed the White Whale and the children at the heart of the attack. The vast apron of tar around the buildings made for a broad maneuvering zone joined seamlessly with the road. It was a perfect setup.

Danny couldn’t see the action at first. She heard the bikes roar as they started up, bleating and crackling; then there were voices on the radio and confusion and gunshots. She wanted desperately to move up the file, but at the back of the convoy the road was still narrow, with guardrails on one side and cow pens on the other. So she shoved her entire upper body out of the window and waved the scouts forward.

“Do what you can!” she shouted, and then turned the wheel over and scraped along the guardrail, squeezing past the vehicles ahead, ignoring the shocked faces pressed to their windows.

“Hand me the shotgun,” she said to Kelley.

Now she could see the fight. Most of the gang’s bikes had riders in tandem, the passenger firing into the line while the one at the handlebars
maneuvered in close. In the initial panic, Tribe drivers were slamming on the brakes or trying to speed up, depending on what confronted them. Plastic and metal crunched; broken trim began to fly. Vehicles piled up and gaps in the line split open. The riders moved in, cutting the convoy into sections. They’d done this before.

The Vandal Reapers, Danny saw, had covered themselves in animal remains—bones, hides, gristle. These weren’t some
Road Warrior
disco renegades; they looked more like raiders from a prehistoric war. There wasn’t any exposed skin. Some of them had rotten deer legs slung over their backs like foul guitars; all of them carried an axe or a machete in addition to firearms. She glimpsed poxy skulls wired all over the triple trees and hung like party lanterns along the flanks of the bikes. Her impression was brief, but enough to know these weren’t some desperate outsiders trying to stay alive. These bikers had figured out how to make the end of the world into their finest hour.

•   •   •

Danny’s bad hand was on the window side, so she hooked her finger over the steering wheel and rested the shotgun in the crook of that arm. Almost the moment she got onto the wide part of the road, she had a clean shot; she blew the nearest bike over with a load of old-fashioned buckshot and saw the passenger’s face connect with the pavement. She’d hit the driver in the thigh, so he was out of action. Then the windshield frosted over on Kelley’s side—they’d taken a bullet through the glass, but it didn’t appear Kelley was hit. Danny rammed one of the motorcycles and the cable overrider cut deep into the gunman’s waist as he was crushed between the vehicles.

Her course took her alongside the White Whale. She could only defend one flank of it, but she was on the side with the most doors. The gang wouldn’t know the children were inside, but it still made a great target. If they figured out what the payload was, the fight was going to get extremely hot.

The vehicles were no longer moving. It was time to take the fight on foot.

The arsenal bag was locked in the trunk. Danny didn’t think she could get to it without taking a bullet—the interceptor was drawing a lot of attention. The roof lights were coming to pieces as gunfire shattered the plastic.

“Get down!” she said to Kelley. When Kelley didn’t move, Danny grabbed the bandages around her head and pulled her sister down. Then she kicked her door open. Pump shotgun and her sidearm and a knife if it got intimate. Time to go.

She dropped to the pavement and fired a load of shot underneath the interceptor, kicking the wheel out from under a bike on its way past. Then she came up on one knee and methodically fired into the densest part of the attack from behind her door. Fragments of window glass were raining down on her—not from the interceptor, but from the White Whale.

She saw Charity the scout race straight at a couple of the enemy bikes on her own hog, blasting away with a long-barreled .357; they collided, and once the bodies stopped rolling it was hand-to-hand. Conn ditched his own machine beside her and waded in, a Russian automatic in one hand and a crowbar in the other.
Time to move,
Danny thought.
Time to get bloody
.

Danny sprang into the open and a fresh round of gunfire heated the air around her, but the guns were rapidly turning useless because there were chooks, scouts, and bikers all over the place. It was a pitched battle, and the Tribe had a numbers advantage if every cowardly bastard among them manned up. Danny emptied the last shotgun shell into the crotch of a huge biker with an iron cross tattooed on his forehead, clubbed another over the head until the stock broke, and then she was beside Conn and Charity, still swinging hard.

Then a crowd of huge, wild-eyed men charged into them like football linebackers; Danny got sacked and hit the ground and was winded so badly she could only suck air, but the man who hit her had rolled off, so she forced her legs back under herself. She drew and shot him before he could bring the pickaxe in his hands to bear. He grabbed at his throat and vomited blood.

She didn’t know where anybody else was. Conn, the White Whale, they were gone, replaced by shaggy monster-men draped in rotten skins. She was disoriented, in that dangerous place when confusion kills. Then she saw the interceptor through the fray. The passenger door stood open. Kelley was not inside.

Danny needed to get her back against something, so she made for the vehicle again. A tall, long-armed man with a chromed steel Nazi helmet collided with Danny, slamming her into the rear quarter of the interceptor. The wind barked out of her lungs, and she saw stars. One more hit like that and she was done.

She heard but did not see the man’s boots scraping as he stepped back from her, and she sensed there was a blow coming in, even before her vision cleared. She threw herself toward the driver’s side door, hoping it would deflect something; an instant later the whack of chain on the roof told her
she’d saved her own ass for the millionth time. But the next blow whipped around her stump-hand and stung like fire. He was swinging a greasy drive chain at Danny, his lean face contorted with the desire to see her bleed.

Danny reached into the vehicle. There was a sawn-down shotgun concealed under the dash if she could get it. But hard fingers grabbed her hair and yanked her head back into the A pillar. There was a second biker, hauling her into the wedge of space between the door frame and the car. She was fully exposed for the next blow of the chain, her throat arched. She kicked, but the tall biker had gotten in close, his knee shoved into Danny’s crotch so she couldn’t twist away. Her eyes found the second biker, a big Samoan-looking dude with a greasy pyramid of hair pouring down his neck. She saw him upside down. Clawed for his face but couldn’t reach. She felt her hair tearing out of her scalp.

Then the Samoan screamed, and there was a spidery shape wrapped around his throat—Kelley’s arm. She was behind him, the bandages around her face unraveling as she opened her jaws and jammed her teeth deep into his flesh. He tried to pull her off and his hand met a fountain of blood. Danny’s head fell free of his other fist. She dropped low and got one boot up and pushed the tall man away, taking the chain across her leg. His attention was off her completely; the screams of the second man were hideous to hear. Danny tore the concealed weapon out of its duct-tape moorings and fired it straight up at the man with the chain. The chromed helmet opened up like a flower and tumbled away with his head inside it.

Danny dragged herself back up, mastering the searing pain where she’d been slashed by the chain. If she could still move, she wasn’t entitled to suffer yet. She saw Kelley clinging to the Samoan, who staggered backward past the wreckage, blood shooting out of his carotid artery. Kelley was glued to his back, her legs hooked around his waist. As Danny watched, her sister’s head jerked back, and a huge chunk of meat pulled out of the Samoan, full of blood vessels and glands and yellow fat. Danny found Kelley’s eyes, and saw a fire in them she’d never seen before, in life or death.