Rise Again Below Zero (24 page)

Danny’s repentant frame of mind was gone. Here was murder in cold blood. They had left their own dead behind to turn into monsters and hanged the prisoner while they were at it. Why? Because Danny wasn’t around? What had Amy been doing? Patrick? Troy? Had they stood by or had they argued?

There was no coming back after this.

Danny wondered if anyone had left a note, besides the scrawl on the White Whale’s windshield and the painted message on the sign over Mike’s corpse. It didn’t matter. She had gone back to apologize, only to discover the Tribe had murdered her prisoner. Whether it was retaliation for what she herself had done, or the assertion of new leadership, or merely an old-fashioned lynching, they were now even.

She’d be damned if she would ever apologize to them. In fact, she was a hell of a lot more likely to kill the bastards if she ever saw them again.

The headache that had been stalking her began to open up, to bloom like a time-lapse film of a rose blossom opening. But the petals were jagged, bloody claws, and the red flower was the tissue of her brain splitting apart. Her limbs stopped responding to commands. She was accelerating past Mike’s gibbet when her nerveless foot slipped off the accelerator. The interceptor swung around of its own accord. Danny found the brake with a boot that seemed to weigh as much as her body. She came to a stop facing the front of the convoy, blinking back fireworks of white-hot light that rocketed through her eyeballs. Sizzling electric auras. Was she having a stroke?

Something was running out of her nose. She swiped at it: blood. There was a noise like machinery in her head. Danny’s vision was turning red the way it did when she was very, very angry. But her heartbreak was bigger. And more than that, she was in agony. The redness before her eyes was laced with veins that flashed to the beating of her heart. She needed to get out of here before she passed out—there must have been thirty or forty zeroes coming up the road after her.

She saw a small zero, a hunter by the way it moved, running onto the pavement from a drainage culvert set alongside the edge of the church property. A child hunter. Where were the others? They worked in numbers.
Danny’s thoughts were sliced apart by the pain, as if she had to think through a rank of slashing knives.

The thing ran straight at her. She groped around for her sidearm with useless fingers.

It was the Silent Kid, with his bat-eared little dog tucked under his arm like a football, running in her direction for dear life.

The mass of undead were now homing in on the child. Danny needed to get him out of there, if the boy made it as far as the interceptor. He wouldn’t make it back to his drainpipe.

Half-blind, Danny fumbled for the door handle, hoping to get out and shoot the nearest zeroes. Popped the latch, but instead of standing up she fell helplessly to the pavement, facedown, her head churning with pain, filled with blood lightning that set her skull on fire. Her boots were still inside the vehicle. She couldn’t use her legs, her arms.

The Silent Kid reached the interceptor half a minute ahead of the closest zeroes. Danny tried to speak to him, to tell him to get in, dump her feet out of the car, lock the doors. She was done for. She’d rather be torn apart than endure the pain in her head another instant. Instead of words, bile came out of her mouth. With an effort almost beyond her strength, Danny got to her knees, reached back into the interceptor, dragged the munitions backpack off the floor of the passenger side, and pulled it to her chest, struggling with the zippers.

The Kid was waving with his free hand now, leaping and gesturing at something behind Danny. She tried to struggle upright, but gravity had gone off-axis. She fell over backward and sprawled on the asphalt. She saw a wheelchair.
The medics are here at last,
she thought. But there was already somebody in it. She heard a strange
thwack
. And another, and another. Something whistling through the air. A meaty crunch.

“Get up,” a female voice said, and Danny felt a handcuff snap onto her outstretched arm, heard the jingle of the chain. Then she was sliding across the pavement, and there were wheels arching up above her, someone between them, at the top of a cliff trying to pull her up. She blinked and the redness in the world turned green; she blinked again and a slab of red-stained darkness like a collapsing bridge came crashing down and the whole world snuffed out.

“I
f you die, I have to shoot you,” a voice called from the end of a very long tunnel.

Danny blinked and saw what looked like the edges of a film strip, sprocket holes in the sky. She squinted. Not sprocket holes, but windows.

She was lying on her back inside a vehicle. Her head still hurt, but it was nothing. The savage torture that had visited her back at the abandoned convoy was gone, replaced by an ordinary headache. The dull throb of it was almost comforting, like having a doctor’s note to stay home from school despite being only a little bit ill.

The woman who had spoken was the color of bittersweet chocolate, black-eyed, with a fleck of pigment in the white of her left eye. The hair on her head was carelessly buzzed short, all the way down to the scalp in some places. She had strong, lean arms. Her teeth looked luminous in her dark face.

“Where’s the Kid?” Danny mumbled.

“Asleep underneath your bed,” the woman said.

A shot of panic hit Danny’s kidneys and burned through her bloodstream before she found the backpack she’d been lugging around was right by her side. The zipper lock was intact.

“You wouldn’t let go of that thing,” the woman said. “Coffee?” she added, opening a thermos.

Danny’s mouth abruptly filled with water at the thought. The cab was filled with a long-forgotten aroma: good coffee, nutty, sharp, and strong, with a velvety depth like exotic wood smoke. Back at the Tribe they had all drunk freeze-dried instant dissolved in lukewarm water.

“Yes,” Danny said. There was more to the exchange. She tried to think of the word. “Please,” she added, as if saying “hello” in a language she hadn’t used since high school.

“There’s something wrong with your head,” the woman said. She had an accent of some kind. Danny would have said Jamaican, and she was pretty sure she’d be wrong.

“It just happened,” Danny said, and tried to sit up. A great chunk of pain collapsed into her skull and she had to lie down again, gasping involuntarily. She closed her eyes.

“And you think you can ignore it, am I right? Tough it out. You’re tough, I see that,” the woman said. “Bad-ass. I am also bad-ass, and I have bad legs as well. You can’t ignore physical problems. I think you have a brain injury, unless you have a history of epilepsy or something.”

“No. Just hung over, I guess,” Danny mumbled, waiting for the lance in her head to withdraw. “Went on a massive bender the last few days. I don’t even know what day it is.” She opened her eyes to find the cup-lid of the thermos held just in front of them. She took it and propped herself up enough to sip it. It burned. Hot, acrid, and rich, black as ink.

“Fuck, that’s good,” she said.

“Creature comforts, Mama,” her companion said. “I’m Vaxxine. That’s with two exes, which is funny cos I have two exes in real life. It’s Wednesday.”

Danny’s eyes were in focus now. She assessed her situation. They were inside the cab of a long-haul tractor-trailer truck. Danny lay on a bed in the little apartment behind the front seats. It was outfitted with ergonomic precision like the first-class cabin of a jumbo jet. There were pockets and compartments everywhere, a coffee machine and miniature microwave near her head, a tiny bathroom at her feet. It could have been the captain’s berth of a submarine, shipshape and efficient.

Danny turned her attention to her host. Vaxxine was seated in the driver’s position, twisted sideways so she could talk to Danny. Her jeans-clad legs were bone-thin, the knees knobby; they didn’t match her strong, corded arms. Her pants were unzipped and a diaper poked out of the waistband.
But then Danny remembered the wheelchair she’d seen before she lost consciousness. A paraplegic truck driver?

“So you know who I am, and I see you’ve sorted out my legs are just for show. Who are you in your raggedy police uniform with a gun and a corkscrew? You don’t have any identifying papers or marks I could find, unless you count a relief map of Colorado on your back.”

Danny involuntarily tried to sit up again, and again the hammer came down on her brain. She sloshed coffee over her hand.

“Sensitive about that? I won’t mention it again,” Vaxxine said.
“Me no maco,”
she added, turning her accent all the way up.

Danny
was
sensitive about her wildly scarred back, but at least she wasn’t sitting in a diaper without the use of her legs. There was that. She had spent three months in a wheelchair after she’d been medevaced out of a combat zone with crushed legs and third-degree burns, and had nothing but sympathy for anyone stuck in one of the damnable things forever. So Danny swallowed her irritation and drank more coffee to chase it down.

“My name is Danny Adelman. I used to be a sheriff in Southern California.” She didn’t think much else was worth mentioning.

•   •   •

Danny had a view amidships forward to the driving compartment and the windshield, beyond which was an empty parking lot. Up above the cab, there was a deep space that was probably intended as further sleeping accommodation, but Vaxxine had used it for storage: Danny saw boxes of toilet paper, duct tape, ammunition, canned goods, adult diapers, and various other things it was good not to run out of. A helping-hand gripper on a pole hung on the bulkhead; her host could reach up from her chair.

“Anyway, we need to get your head examined, Danny. Nothing personal,” Vaxxine said, and drank directly from the thermos.

“It’s a headache, that’s all,” Danny said. She decided to expand her biography a little, in case Vaxxine knew anything about the Tribe’s fate. “I was with a large group traveling around until recently. Just came back for a visit and they were all gone. Do you know what—”

“I only arrived a little before you showed up,” Vaxxine said. “I was trying to figure out why all the vehicles were sitting there empty like that, when they’d obviously seen recent use. Then you came along and that boy and his dog came racing out to meet you, so I figured you were involved somehow. We barely got you out of there. The boy had to help me get you into the rig, with the zombies coming and all.”

“I appreciate it,” Danny said. “If you don’t mind me resting up a couple hours, I’ll take the Silent Kid and be out of your hair, unless you need help with anything.”

“The Silent Kid,” Vaxxine said. “That explains why he’s so quiet. I thought he just didn’t like me.” She laughed at this, so apparently it was funny. Danny didn’t bother to respond.

•   •   •

She must have fallen asleep again, because when she next opened her eyes, the sky outside the windows was purple with twilight and they were driving somewhere. The Kid was sitting in the passenger seat in front, with his snouted dog looking out the windshield with its front paws up on the dashboard and his tongue curling out like a pink wood shaving. Vaxxine was driving. Good enough. Danny threw an arm over the weapons backpack that rocked gently at her side and passed out again.

T
he hospital looked like a mirage. There wasn’t anything around it except dead cornfields. It rose out of a dry ocean of leaves like the city of Oz, a modern building of green-tinted glass and bright steel. From a distance, it appeared that nothing was wrong with it, as if the disaster had passed it by. But as they drove closer, details revealed that the hospital had not escaped unscathed.

Danny was sitting in the passenger seat by now, having recovered sufficiently from the pain in her head, and she had been getting carsick lying in the back. The Silent Kid was on the bed now, playing tug of war with the Boston Terrier. Vaxxine drove the bobtail rig ably with customized hand controls that were bolted onto the foot pedals and rose up the steering column; Danny had seen similar units during her time at VA hospitals, but never on a machine this size. Vaxxine appeared completely comfortable with the ten-speed gearbox, and floated the gears as ably as any professional driver, using the clutch only to start and stop. It must have been doubly complicated when it all had to be done with hands alone.