Rise Again Below Zero (32 page)

“We went off after you, Danny. When you and the Wolfman split. After
shit got ugly with the prisoner. We rode out all over the place, but there weren’t no sign of you nowhere. Where’s Wulf, anyways?”

“He’s dead.”

“Ah, hell.”

Topper did something Danny had never seen in real life before—he pulled the knit cap off his head and held it over his heart. Then he picked at loose threads sticking out of it, saying, “He was a good one. How—”

“Died in his sleep,” Danny said.

“I’ll be damned.”

“We’re losing daylight,” Danny said. “We can discuss this shit later.”

They got down on hands and knees and crawled back to Topper’s overlook position. Danny put her eye to the telescope’s optics and was amazed at the magnification. She could see people’s faces, although not well enough to distinguish individuals. Topper scratched his chin while she panned the lens around town, taking in details.

“Me and Ernie,” Topper went on, unconsciously lowering his voice as if they might be heard now that they were within line-of-sight, “we started off trying to figure out if we can come down the mountain and get to the kids from here, because this cliff kind of butts right up to the train station down there. Not as defended. But it don’t look real good, so we was thinking maybe we could spring ’em out of that summer camp thing they got going upriver. I guess with Ernie out of the picture it’s time to report back to the others. Get an expedition set up.”

“You’re sure we shouldn’t be trying to rescue Ernie?”

“Well, I didn’t see any corpses go on the pile yet today—so far, so good.”

“Corpses?”

“They got a lot of rules down there and they behead a fucker every couple days. Usually at sunup. I weren’t kidding about the bodies.”

“Shit.”

“I think they keep it a secret from the Happy Town chooks. Don’t make a ceremony out of it or nothing. You can’t see it from down there; it’s behind a wall. But there’s a yard by the station where they take care of business. They pile the bodies on a truck, cover them with garbage, and take ’em away early in the morning. No heads. We seen it twice in two days.”

“Goddamn. You thought
I
was a hard-ass.”

Danny gave Topper the binoculars and spent an hour with the telescope, studying the town. She paid special attention to the area around the train
depot—there was a lot of activity centered on a couple of the warehouses, with men in orange safety vests coming and going. There was also a shed with a locomotive engine underneath its sheet metal awning; it looked like they were overhauling the big diesels aboard it, with showers of welding sparks spraying down and men wrestling huge machine parts in and out. She saw a gang of a dozen men carrying an immense cast-iron connecting rod of some kind, like zookeepers holding a record-size python out straight for the photograph. There were several cattle cars on a siding, as well. It looked like somebody was planning a mass migration down there—either that, or they planned to start a circus.

The panel vans cruised around town. Danny could read the writing on them with the telescope:
HAPPY TOWN SAFETY PATROL
, it said. Hand-painted with a spray can. More of the men in safety vests inside the vans—the vests seemed to be the official uniform.

Church got out about an hour and a half after the bells rang, and Danny watched the outflow of citizens. She didn’t recognize anybody.

“They do services morning and afternoon,” Topper noted. “God ain’t fuckin’ dead, apparently.”

While she watched the town, Topper filled her in on further details of the past few days: The scouting team was down to eight individuals. They stayed in touch with Patrick, Amy, and some others inside the fence because there was a whole town set up outside the wire, and you could talk freely through it. Get lost in the crowds if security came poking around. Connor was in charge of the scouts’ encampment while Topper was away.

This put her in mind of her own situation. Danny was on a schedule. Vaxxine and the Kid would be waiting for her back at the house, and if they ran into any major trouble, she still wasn’t confident that the wheelchair-bound woman would be up to dealing with it—if only because she couldn’t run across the fields. Danny’s return time was tomorrow afternoon. She’d need to head out before dawn to make it there on schedule.

“So how safe is it?” she asked, while she and Topper were eating what passed for lunch. Hers was a Chicken Breast with Cavatelli MRE, essentially identical to the omelet she’d eaten last; Topper ate venison jerky and what appeared to be cat shit, which he claimed was freeze-dried bananas he’d found on the floor of a ransacked sporting goods store. They drank river water.

“From zeroes? I ain’t seen but a handful the whole time I been here, and they’re on the other side of the river. That big swarm to the west is like the end of the zeroes. Out this way it’s real peaceful. Whatever gimmick they figured out, it’s working.”

“I meant do you think these Happy Town fuckers know what they’re doing.”

Topper noisily scratched his neck. “I don’t know, be honest with you. I mean, there’s maybe a couple hundred in charge, mostly guards. Thousands of chook-ass civilians. They could overrun the joint in five minutes if people rose the fuck up. On the other hand, they got harsh discipline like I said, and people are scared to rock the boat. Those vans stay busy. Most of all I think people keep their heads down because of the little ones. The kids are like instant hostages. I’d call that a pretty good security strategy.”

There were more questions, but Danny didn’t think Topper could answer them. It occurred to her he might know something about the big picture.

“One other thing. Did you guys check out what’s keeping the zeroes back to the west?”

“You found that radiation train yourself. It’s keeping the swarm way the fuck back.”

“Only to a point. Why doesn’t the swarm come north, hook around the hot zone, and nail this place? Those fences down there aren’t shit.”

“We was wondering the same thing. So far we can’t make it out. There’s land mines on this little road leads to where the kids are at around the far side of the mountain, which is why they take the train this way instead. Weirdest thing is this: They got a perimeter of scouts scattered around all over the place, kind of in rings around here as far out as five, six miles. But they don’t do shit, they just stand around and none of the zeroes come close.”

“Could they be thinkers?”

“Not real fuckin’ likely. Why would thinkers stand around in the desert like assholes when they could be eating fresh meat back here?”

“I can’t think of any other explanation for the swarm staying put.”

“Could be more radiation, too. I guess you should know this: We killed one of them. Practically drove over him on our way to scout this place out a few days back. He told us to ‘halt’ like some German asshole from
The Dirty Dozen
. Conn got off his hog, they didn’t agree on much, and next thing you know the guy’s dead with a broke neck. He wasn’t no thinker. He was one
of us. But he looked real ill, and we thought maybe he had radiation poisoning or like that. Or cancer. Pale as fuck, and he smelled weird. Anyways a search party must of come around after that but we were long-gone. The body weren’t there next day, so they probably picked him up. We got his radio, but they don’t say much.”

“The whole thing stinks,” Danny said. “But I can’t figure out where the smell is coming from.”

T
here was another tolling of church bells and gathering of the faithful in the early evening, but not much else happened that day in Happy Town.

It grew colder as the shadows lengthened. A mean-spirited wind swept over the ridge and poured down on them as the sun went down. Danny and Topper retreated into the shelter, which was stale as a clothes hamper, but kept the chill out; when the light failed, they were in darkness. It was too risky to use even the dim red key-chain light Danny kept on her tool belt.

“You’re all right,” she said to Topper, after they had sat in silence for a while.

“I wish we had something to fuckin’ drink,” Topper said. “Take the edge off.”

“I quit the stuff,” Danny said, surprising herself. And it occurred to her this might actually be true, especially after the epic bender with Wulf. She’d been tormented by thirst lately, but since that blinding headache, she hadn’t touched the booze. Her body didn’t care what the real diagnosis was: It thought that crisis was a hangover, and it revolted at the thought of alcohol.

“No shit,” Topper said. “For real?”

“Yeah. At least for the time being,” Danny said. She was starting to feel defensive, like quitting the alcohol was something shameful. Maybe an admission that she had a problem before. Which it probably was. They were lying inside the dark shelter staring up at the tarpaulin overhead, seeing nothing. The wind made the shelter expand and contract, rustling.

“Let’s check out the lights,” Topper said. “It’s something to see.”

They crawled out and stood on the rim of the ledge looking down at Happy Town. No need to conceal themselves now. Even night vision goggles couldn’t penetrate this far into the darkness. The entire town was lit up: rooftop searchlights, streetlights, windows with lamps in them, even shop signs and some Christmas lights strung up here and there. It looked so out of place in the dark world, and yet this would once have been an unremarkable sight. There was so much light flooding the town that Danny could see Topper in the reflected glow.

“Looks like old times,” Topper observed.

“Where the fuck is the power coming from?”

“Near as we can tell,” Topper said, “they’re sending it down the power lines alongside the railroad. From upriver. Might be a generator up there.”

Danny couldn’t stop staring at all the lights. “I don’t know what they’re up to, but you gotta hand it to them. This is one major operation with its shit stowed secure.”

“There’s even a whorehouse,” Topper said, apropos of nothing.

“Not a surprise. The church doesn’t mind?”

“Hail Mary and lie down with Jezebel, as my old man used to say.”

“Who’s Jezebel?”

“Some chick from the Bible.”

“That’s why I went into law enforcement instead of prostitution,” Danny said, watching the glittering lights of the town below. “After my combat barbecue, I couldn’t get laid with a million-dollar bill up my twat.”

“Aw, hell,” Topper said, laughing quietly. “At this point I’d fuck a saguaro cactus if it agreed to throw in a handjob.”

They both laughed at that.

“Let’s go,” he said, and to Danny’s surprise, kissed her. It was the right move.

Unexpectedly, her mouth flooded with desire. She found she was grabbing his neck with all seven of her fingers, and there wasn’t enough air in the world. She groped in the shadows and found the hot weight of his balls inside his jeans. Danny was suddenly, almost painfully turned on like she hadn’t been in years. There was a hot pink wire running straight through the middle of her, and she wanted this man to pluck it till it broke.

Halfway through their lovemaking, all the lights of town went out
except for the sweep lights on the roofs; it was midnight, at which time they shut off the grid every night.

•   •   •

Afterward, neither of them knew what to say, so they didn’t. Danny picked a hair out of her mouth and they sat in the darkness with the tarpaulin against their heads, panting for breath. Then they slept for a while. Danny awoke around 0400 hours and shook Topper awake. He was snoring, which for some reason filled her with affection.

“Get your clothes on. I’ve got a new plan,” she said, lacing on her boots. An idea had come to her while she slept.

“Honeymoon’s over,” Topper grunted.

“I’ll tell you where to find the Silent Kid and the woman I told you about. Name’s Vaxxine, like the shots. She’s in a wheelchair, but she’s hard as nails. You’ll like her. Anyway, soon as you can, rendezvous with them. Make sure you tell her I sent you, or she’ll kill you with a slingshot. I’ll give you their coordinates.”

“You’re not going back?”

“I’m going to follow that railway line to its source and see just what the fuck these assholes are up to. Find out where they’re taking these kids. I think it’s a concentration camp or something. If I’m not back in three days, figure me dead, you got that?”

“You’re gonna end up like Ernie, for chrissakes.”

“Come on, man. The fuck else are we supposed to do? There’s nothing to learn from up here. And there’s no other way into town, unless we do some Rambo commando shit and sneak around. That’s stupid.”

“Your whole idea is stupid,” Topper said. He took a risk and switched on a button flashlight, cupping it in his hands. He wanted to make eye contact. “You go off and get killed, that’s step one. We hook up with a cripple and a kid who don’t talk, step two. That’s it. That’s the plan.”

“You got a better idea?”

“Yeah. Let’s round up everybody we got left and get out of fuckin’ Dodge. Keep on looking for a safe place somewhere else. Or maybe we could take a chance down there. I don’t know. At least there ain’t no zeroes in the area. I’d rather deal with a human enemy than a undead one, personally.”