Rise Again Below Zero (2 page)

Tha seem to cum up owt th grown or under evere rok or behiin ever tre an bush. An ever tiim sumbode got biten tha turn in2 a zombi themselv an
so it got wurser evere da until thar war no mor survivars xep me an 2 othir in owr gruup. We seen othir gruups 2 but we kepit to owrselv then ntil ii was aloon in th worl. Maabe it war a mistaak an we shud av gon for strenth in numbars but in liit of what ii seen aftar that maabe our gruup did th riit thin aftar al.

Bc th onle cretur worser an moor cruul an vilent an bludfirsy than the zombi is man.

“Y
ou have the right to remain silent. In fact I prefer it. Anything you say would be held against you in a court of law, except there isn’t one. You would have the right to speak to an attorney, but we don’t have those either. There ain’t shit except me. Do you understand?”

Danny Adelman had the man facedown against the pavement on the side of the road, his hands bound across his spine with a plastic zip-tie. Her attention was divided, but she’d gotten good at multitasking since things went bad. The zeroes were coming through the tall yellow grass. Slow ones. Moaners. Dozens of them, drawn out into the open by the burning wreckage, preceded by their long, sobbing cries of hunger.

“You can’t kill me,” he said. “You’re a cop.”

“I didn’t say I was going to kill you,” Danny replied. She knew where he got the idea: Her short-nosed shotgun was jammed up under his left ear. “I’m only judge and jury here. But the executioner is getting real close.”

She and the perpetrator had another minute, at most. Then Danny was going to have to get to the Mustang Special police interceptor and bug out. The black smoke rising up out of the wreckage of the man’s truck was shaped like a giant fist, with one finger pointing down at the scene of the action. The perp wasn’t going to be any more ready to talk than he was now. Time to get down to business.

“Tell me something,” Danny said.

“Fuck you,” he answered. He was burly-shouldered, stinking of sweat, his lank hair clinging to his skin in oily strokes. There was a deep, unhealed gash across his forehead.

With patience she did not feel, Danny said, “You tried to steal one of our children. Why?”

The man barked a laugh. “You don’t know? I guess not, if you’re coming from the west.” He wrenched his face into a mirthless grimace, trying to smile despite the asphalt against his teeth.

Danny thought about breaking his nose. “And you figure not telling me is gonna be satisfaction enough for dying?”

“Doesn’t matter—you’re going to kill me either way,” he said.

“Tell me what I want to know and you get your hands back,” Danny said. “Even with that busted foot, you can probably make it out of here.
Don’t
tell me, and I leave you just like you are. Maybe you can still get away, even with handcuffs on. You could last for days.”

“Fuck you,” the man repeated.

“And if you say that just one more time, we move on to option three: I break your other foot. You got fifteen seconds.”

The perp wasted ten of them weighing the alternatives. Then he said: “I was trying to survive, okay? There’s a bounty. One kid buys you passage to the safe place. Got to be under twelve. Lots of people are doing it. Parents are turning in their own.”

“And what happens to the kids?”

“They go somewhere else. An even safer place. I hear they’re happy there.”

“Then why the hell didn’t you just ask nicely?”

Danny saw there were tears running out of the man’s red eyes and dripping on the tar.

“Because somebody stole
my
son,” he said. “I was taking him there, and this biker gang showed up. Called the Vandal Reapers. And now he’s gone.”

The man sobbed. Danny heard the grief, the real agony in his chest, and she knew he was telling the truth. For a few seconds, she listened to the man’s sorrow hacking out of his chest, but the muzzle of her shotgun never wavered, and she did not relieve the weight of her knee upon his back. The nearest of the zeroes was within fifty yards by now. It moaned with renewed urgency as it came closer. A big male.

There was only death in the world now. Living death that could walk and hunt and feast, and barbaric death from outlaws and madmen. Death from the ruins of a shattered civilization. Death from disease and festering wounds. Danny could leave this man to die, or do something to help him. This man whose grief had made him crazy and convinced him to rush one of the Tribe’s caretakers. Whose panic had led him to drop the child he’d grabbed, and drive away at top speed.

Danny’s mind was racing. She was long past compassion for anyone who acted on behalf of chaos, even with the most personal of motives. But another man dead was another feeding for the zeroes. Another pair of hands that could fight back against the dead would be lost forever—or might become one of the enemy.

“Get in the fucking car,” she said.

T
he police special slewed between the undead that shuffled onto the roadway. They were ragged, dark, indistinct things, like the piers of an abandoned dock revealed by the tide. Skulls with wet rawhide stretched over them, yellow teeth in black, gaping mouths. Eyes that stared out of deep sockets. Pale, lightless eyes. Butcher-shop eyes. They moved like people in pain, stiff-limbed and lurching, twisting around to follow the vehicle. As soon as the last one went by, Danny hit the throttle. Those assholes back at the convoy weren’t answering the radio, probably because Maria, who normally operated the communications system, was the one this escapee had punched when he went for the kid. But once again, the Tribesmen had failed to follow protocol and keep communications open. Danny decided the prisoner’s fate rested on whether Maria was badly injured.

“Drink some water,” Danny said.

“No,” her companion in the front seat said. It was a woman’s voice, or nearly so.

“You need to drink water or you’ll shrivel up,” Danny said and pressed the plastic bottle into the gloved hands beside her.

They were barreling along Interstate 70 through Kansas. Not too many shrubs grew through the pavement and there were relatively few wrecks on this route; she could use some of the speed the police special was designed for. The wind whistled through the barbed-wire zero catcher bolted to the front fender and ruffled Danny’s choppy red hair beneath her Smokey hat.

“I made a mistake and I’m sorry. Can’t you just let me go? Drop me off here, I don’t mind,” the prisoner said. “Please.” He sounded afraid. More than he’d been before.

Danny glanced in the rearview mirror: The man in the backseat couldn’t take his eyes off the apparition riding shotgun next to her. His fear was justified. They made a peculiar pair, she knew. Danny could pass for good-looking from a few feet away, but there were too many scars on her face for up-close work. Most people, however, found themselves staring at her left hand. It ended in a mess of cauliflower tissue where three fingers should have been. According to some crazy story that was going around, Danny had once chewed them off with her own teeth to get free of a wrecked car surrounded by zeroes. Mutilations were not an uncommon sight in this time, however. Almost everyone had a couple of badly healed injuries or an untreated illness. It was a world of decaying teeth, greasy hair, and crooked scars.

Even so, Danny’s companion was the eye-catching one.

It was understood among their fellow travelers that nobody was to ask about her, although Danny knew they talked about her when she wasn’t around. Underneath a stained, shapeless muumuu with big flowers on it, the woman was bound from head to foot in dirty bandages, like a cartoon mummy. She was known simply as “the Leper,” and she was untouchable in every sense of the word. Her presence was part of the price of being a member of the Tribe.

“Water,” Danny repeated, not much interested in the man’s feelings.

“I don’t want it,” the Leper said.

“You need it. Your condition’s getting worse.”

“So is yours.”

Danny glanced at the mirror again. The prisoner was looking at her now. If he hadn’t figured out what the Leper’s condition was, he soon would. But he seemed like a bright guy. And scared to death.

As if thinking the same thing, the Leper turned her head to face him.
The bones in her neck creaked audibly. Mike could see himself reflected in her sunglasses. She took a breath, speaking through the exhalation.

“We all make mistakes,” she said. “It’s only human.”

T
he radio opened up, grainy with static. It was a call from the White Whale, the immense motor home that formed the center of the Tribe’s convoy. The voice on the radio was not Maria, but Patrick, another of Danny’s original fellow-survivors from the desperate hours after the undead first rose up in another life.

“The kid’s all right,” Patrick said. “Nobody’s hurt. Maria’s got a shiner, that’s it. Where have you been?”

“Got the perp. Over.”

“We were calling you for the last half hour. Just so you don’t feel like you need to lecture us about communication when you get back,”
Patrick said.

“It did cross my mind,” Danny said. “Remember to say ‘over’ when you’re done speaking. Over.”

“Can’t we pretend this is just a phone call? I really miss phone calls.”

So the child was okay. The failed kidnapper had that in his favor. Danny hated to admit it—she hated to admit anything—but she didn’t have a clear answer as to what should be done with this guy. She would have to put it to a Tribe vote or something. For now, she was silent with her thoughts.

They drove on through a broken country.

It was a year and a half since the onslaught of the undead plague: Lawns had become fields, pavement was buckling and sprouting with grass and sapling trees, and everywhere there were vast swaths of scorched earth and burned-out towns where fires had raged unopposed. Cities were unapproachable, swarming with animated corpses.

In contrast to the ruined places, the Tribe would sometimes pass through deserted neighborhoods that appeared not to have suffered at all—overlook the untrimmed yards, and the houses were just as firm as the day they were built. The windows cast back reflections of the clouds, the roofs
shed the weather, and the walls stood straight and clean. But here and there a front door hung open in a litter of leaves, or there was a rotten shape in the grass with one skeletal arm outflung.

The Tribe had been traversing the western states, mostly, looking for supplies and safety. Neither one lasted very long. But they had seen a great deal of the changed America along the way. Of all the ruined things they saw, it was the cars that bothered Danny the most. She’d spent a long time fighting wars overseas, and had seen ruins and fire and death. But in those foreign places, everybody took the bus or drove shabby little cars and dust-colored pickup trucks. Here, though? This was
America
. The cars were supposed to be bright and clean and shiny, neatly parked along streets and in driveways. To Danny, who had once owned and loved a flawless vintage cherry red Mustang, cars were a projection of who Americans were.