Rise Again Below Zero (20 page)

“Right,” Wulf said.

“We got to go after them.”

“They’re gone, Adelman. Hey! They’re
gone
. What the fuck kind of heroic bullshit you think you’re gonna achieve, I don’t know. You always think you can just ride out and save the day, and for the fuckin’ life of me I cannot figger out why. It’s retarded.”

“You can’t just give up,” Danny said. She felt like a prisoner in the back of the vehicle. She couldn’t get out.

“I gave up years ago. And I’m still here.” He spoke almost gently, with perfect knowledge, as if this was the essence of his entire philosophy. Which it may have been.

Danny forced herself to calm down. “I found Kelley, didn’t I? We can still find those kids.”

Wulf glanced over his shoulder at Danny to see if she was kidding. “
That’s
your argument?”

“Fuck you.”

“You wish. Okay: Listen up, Sheriff, because this is my party now. Them scouts we just left behind are perfectly capable of going after these here kidnappers. If any of them chooks want to join in, they can go, too. Hell, where are the parents? Why didn’t they drive off after these shitheads themselves? Because they’re scared pussies. They’re more afraid of zeroes
than they love their own fuckin’ kids. So that leaves you, because you ain’t scared of zeroes. So you want to go off and save those kids.
Bra
-fuckin’-
vo
. But here’s the thing. Ain’t gonna happen. They already got away, and them poor little ones gonna get ate alive, screaming for their mommies and daddies while some walking skeleton spoons out their guts. That’s the way it is. The sooner you figure that shit out, the sooner you can give up. It’ll be a lot easier after that.”

Wulf drove in silence for a long time. Danny sat with Kelley’s spider-light corpse in her lap, the broken head lolling against Danny’s chest. The smell of decay was amplifying, a sick, gassy stink; whatever principle kept the animated corpse from putrefying as fast as simple dead matter, it had failed. Wulf rolled down his window, but still said nothing more. Danny did not weep. She sat in silence with the dead kindling limbs gathered close to her, and brooded about giving up.

•   •   •

She hadn’t known Wulf could drive. It had never occurred to her. But of course he could. He had been an ordinary person once, too, with a job, car, wife, kids. Living indoors. He’d been a vagrant since before Danny was born. His filthy, tangled hair batted like half-deflated balloons in the wind that whistled through the bullet holes in the glass, and the stench of his armpits cut through the bilious reek of Kelley’s remains. Danny only knew him as a big, stinking drunk who stumbled through the woods. Discovering he could drive was like seeing a bear picking up a guitar to play “Smoke on the Water.”

They drove nowhere and nowhere again until the sun went down, and in the twilight Danny saw small fields from some family farm, a rare thing in the industrial-scaled crop monoculture of that region, deep in the unbeating heartland. Although the place was clearly abandoned and the coming winter had put the fields to sleep, they were matted with past growth. The headlights revealed a half-collapsed farm stand beside the road with a sign that read
ORGANIC PRODUCE
. So these were old-style plants that grew from healthy seed, while millions of acres of corn and wheat all around the little farm were sterile and could never reproduce, but only rot.

“Stop here,” Danny said, and Wulf pulled over. It was the first time either of them had spoken in two hours. The old clapboard farmhouse was far distant, flanked by a couple of trees. He got out and opened the back door for Danny, then cleared his throat, and said:

“Bob G. Ingersoll said something about six score years ago,” he began, and paused to gather the words. “The dead don’t suffer.” He didn’t add anything
else, so Danny nodded and began gathering up the limbs of her sister. That was his idea of an epitaph.

The moon rose bleary above the horizon as she carried the limp weight of her sister out into the fields. Wulf stayed with the interceptor. This wasn’t his grief.

Danny waited beside Kelley all night in a field down the long farm road. It was cold, and she shivered and flexed her remaining fingers and suffered and hated. All the pent-up fury at the Tribe—and herself—was filling her mind, and she couldn’t stop it.

She sat still and kept her vigil, kneeling beside the body, not knowing what she was supposed to do. The stars turned overhead, winking in a sky of darkest ultramarine blue. The Milky Way was a trail of frozen breath across it, the moon a bowl of snow. Danny looked into the night and blinked back tears, unable to let the sorrow loose. She hoped that Wulf would drive away and leave her. He did not. In fact, he was no longer in the interceptor. He had melted away into the night at some point, as he often did.

At some deep, silent hour, three moaners shuffled through the straw, attracted by Danny’s scent. She reflexively drew her pistol, but did not shoot as they came nearer. By the moonlight she could see them: a naked girl, thirteen or fourteen years old, halfway through puberty forever, mottled and pale, missing a big scoop of flesh from one thigh. The crater was layered like a ragged onion inside. There was an older man who might have been the farmer, now missing his scalp and ears. The third was a bent old woman trailing ropes of rotten intestines.

They came within fifteen yards of Danny and stopped. They scented the air, making their soughing moans as they tested the stink of flesh. But they came no nearer. It had to be Kelley. Even inanimate, the thinkers must have possessed that warning smell moaners feared. For a time, the trio of zeroes stood and swayed and swallowed the cold air. Then they shuffled away, all in the same direction, like a family of ghosts.

Danny wondered if they knew each other in life. If they were relations. Or if the undead had simply found their way here coincidentally, all drawn by the same faint smell of humanity. She struggled with something, a thought she’d been suppressing all this time. The undead had lived once. They had been family. She remembered some survivors who had made the argument that the dead deserved respect, even kindness, despite their savage hunger. After all, there were people with repellent diseases who were loved. Danny might include herself among the unlovable living,
scarred and mean and bitter as she was, and yet there were some who cared for her.

Was it possible that she was wrong? Did all the undead deserve something more than destruction, not just her sister? Was there some small observation that ought to be made when they were dispatched, the way cavemen had honored their kills in the ancient past? Danny didn’t know; she didn’t have that kind of philosophical mind. But she had to acknowledge that what made Kelley different from all the rest of her kind wasn’t just the peculiar remembrance of self with which she had been endowed. It was Danny’s own love. She had
chosen
to love Kelley, regardless of her condition. In that instant of reanimation it had somehow made the difference.

It seemed the thing that had kept Kelley from killing the living was the love of one living person. Danny had seen moaners slaughter their loved ones without hesitation. Maybe thinkers were closer to being alive. Maybe they were only sick. Danny had heard that drug addicts should be treated as people with a medical condition. Until she’d found herself relying on the bottle to get to sleep, she sneered at that idea. It could be that the thinkers were more like that, somehow.

With Kelley destroyed, she would probably never know.

She was numb, close to freezing. But Danny maintained her watch until dawn, shivering violently, hoping against hope that Kelley would come back one more time.

When the sky began to glow and Kelley’s remains were rimed with frost, Danny knew it was over.

She wanted to bury her sister, but she didn’t have a shovel and the ground was as hard as an iron pan. So she stirred her own aching limbs and arranged the corpse with legs and arms tidily straight, unwound the bandages around Kelley’s face and neck, and then went to the trunk of the interceptor and collected every bottle she’d been keeping there. She bathed her sister in vodka and whiskey and Everclear, tequila and sochu and rum. The fumes made her eyes water and that was as close to tears as she would allow herself.

It took all the will she had to drag out the lighter. It seemed like some kind of prayer was in order, but if there had ever been a God, He had left this world behind. She stared at the wavering flame of the lighter, and couldn’t touch it to the alcohol-soaked rags. To do this thing was to acknowledge it was truly the end. Even in her hungry, reanimated state, devoid of emotions or attachments, Kelley had been there, somehow.
Danny had kept that tiny essence going, her greatest failure remaining incomplete.

She stared at the flame, saw the way it glistened on the alcohol-wet corpse, and could not start the blaze.

“Forgive me,” Danny whispered at last, and took out her hunting knife and rose up on her knees as if to pray beside the corpse.

W
ulf returned ten minutes after sunrise, reeking of spirits; he emerged from a field of dried corn like a pagan mud effigy come to life. Danny was sitting in the driver’s seat of the interceptor, so Wulf went around to the passenger side. Danny’s weapons backpack was on the seat; he was going to drop it on the floor, but Danny snatched it away and put it in her lap instead.

Wulf settled himself into the vehicle, sighed a great gust of alcohol at the windshield, and said, “I’m outta liquor.”

“Me, too,” Danny said.

They drove onward toward nowhere in particular, looking for a place to refill. In the rearview mirrors, a column of smoke rose up to mark the place they had just left behind.

“That bonfire for her?” Wulf asked, after a while.

“I didn’t want the crows to eat her,” Danny said.

“They’ll eat us all,” Wulf said. He looked like a crow himself, a grizzled elder bird.

•   •   •

They found a town with one church, two streets, and three liquor stores. There was an overturned school bus on the main drag, and even as they rolled up near town, Danny and Wulf were counting the zeroes out loud.

“I got sixteen,” Wulf said.

“They look like kids,” Danny said.

“Zeroes all the same. Must have died in the bus wreck,” he added, as if that made it okay somehow. “How do we want to handle this?”

“If we go down the main street, we’re going to be at close quarters with
a lot of wreckage,” Danny observed. “I’d go in the back way. But we can’t see what’s there.”

“We can take those things. They ain’t much,” Wulf said. Danny thought his judgment might be a little clouded by his thirst. But they probably could. Small zeroes were weaker and couldn’t go for the head and neck as effectively. Besides, the presence of moaners meant there weren’t any thinkers or hunters around.

Eventually they settled on a plan. It revolved around the unexpected fact that Wulf was a capable driver. There was a tow truck outside the town with a car rusting away on the hooks, its front end still suspended. They crouch-walked up to it, using abandoned vehicles for cover and a favorable breeze to keep their smell from reaching town. The tow driver was sprawled next to the cab; exposure and vermin had destroyed what was left of him, but the name
MARTIN
embroidered on his polyester shirt remained legible.

The elderly truck had a primitive ignition, which Danny quickly defeated with a screwdriver; she had a portable jumper battery of sufficient amperage to get the truck started, but worried the gas in the tanks might not be good anymore.

However, the truck started, belching smoke the color of five-o’clock shadow. Danny lowered the boom and disengaged the car from the hooks while Wulf laid down suppressing fire with his beloved rifle, popping the small zombies in the head as they emerged from town to see what the noise was about. Then Danny ran back to the interceptor and Wulf shoved himself up into the cab. The tow truck disappeared in twin plumes of choking blue smoke, then emerged at ramming speed, headed for the liquor store at the near end of town.

He drove the truck around the back of the store, across the few parking spaces, and crashed straight into the loading doors, exploding several cases of foul beer that had been weathering outside since the fall of mankind.

Danny, meanwhile, pulled the interceptor up at the rear corner of the building so she had a view down the back and side, and for five minutes she practiced shooting with a pistol. Any time a gray, leathery head emerged from cover, she punched a hole in it. Wulf had shot four earlier; Danny took down three of her own before Wulf emerged with his first armload of bottles, dumping them into a noisy-wheeled shopping cart.

He made three trips inside before there were too many zeroes to shoot; as soon as Danny shouted “Incoming!” he knew she couldn’t take them all down, and he shoved the laden cart into motion. He made it to the trunk of
the interceptor with half a minute to spare and transferred the bottles inside like there was a prize involved. Then he dashed around to the passenger door.