Rise Again Below Zero (35 page)

She crossed to a doorway and pushed on the door, which was ajar; it croaked, so she lifted up on the knob to reduce the weight on the hinges and it swung open silently. She listened.

Someone was definitely here with her in the church, making a regular hissing sound. Sweeping, she thought, or mopping. Danny dipped low through the doorway into a second room utterly dark except for a pale square of doorway in the right-hand wall that let into the public part of the church. She crossed the room one careful, sliding step at a time, ready to stop if she met anything that could knock over in the darkness.

Now she could see into the main space of the church, the thorax or whatever it was called; she hadn’t gotten much religious training. There were big stained-glass windows all around, and the floodlights outside cast gaunt rags of color across pews and aisles. The place was full of folding chairs, as well; hardly any floor space was left bare. There was a balcony across the opposite end of the church with organ pipes at the back and the vaulted ceiling above. The main doors were beneath the balcony and presumably led directly outside.

A man in a hood was indeed sweeping his way down the center aisle with a wide push broom. Danny glanced around her end of the space: She
could see the back of an altar and a raised platform beneath it, and against the wall up above her to the left, centered on the gable end, was a gory, life-sized crucifixion, Christ’s arms outstretched, head sagging on his chest. She hadn’t been in churches very often, and couldn’t guess if this was a Catholic, Protestant, or other kind of operation. She associated such places with funerals, and they made her nervous.

This one made her more nervous.

She determined to slip back into the mudroom, grab the boots and peacoat, and make her way back to the hospital, rather than risk being discovered; this wasn’t getting her any closer to locating the Silent Kid. She’d seen from the incident outside that the downtown area was more or less impassable.

As she started to move back through the doorway, a voice barked, “Who goes there?”

It echoed around the big, hollow space. Danny crouched low to the ground, scalpel ready to strike. She expected the lights to come on, but it remained dark. The man in the hood, however, seemed to know exactly where she was. He rushed directly at her with the broom in both hands. He made no outcry, to Danny’s surprise; the only sound was the whack of his boots on the tile floor. Danny waited in the doorway taut as a snare while he closed the distance; as the man swung the broom-head like a sledgehammer, she jerked back, the broom striking the door frame, and the handle broke in half. Unfortunately the hooded man didn’t lose his grip, so he was now holding what amounted to a four-foot spear. He was about a head taller than Danny, and his reach was a foot or more longer than hers.

He thrust the jagged length of wood at Danny, grunting with the effort; she twisted past the thrust and grabbed the broom handle with the thumb and palm of her mutilated hand, pulling it past her in a single motion. The man overbalanced and tumbled into the dark room, knocking things over. It sounded like cartons of books. Danny ducked out through the doorway and danced backward into the big church space like a boxer. She didn’t want to fight in a pitch-black, confined area. A couple of seconds later, the man came surging out of the room and Danny understood why he’d been able to locate her so quickly—his hood had fallen back, revealing night vision goggles.

The man launched an all-out assault now, whipping the broom handle back and forth like a sword with one hand; he clipped her on the elbow with it and it hurt like fury, but didn’t disable her arm. Then she saw him
draw something from his belt and heard the pinging power-up sound of a Taser. If it was a pistol-style unit she was in trouble. She decided not to wait to find out.

Danny grabbed a steel folding chair and bowled it at the man. He swiped it out of the air with his forearm, which knocked the goggles on his face askew. Danny leaped into the gap between them at this moment and struck down against the wrist holding the Taser with the heel of her fingerless hand; he didn’t drop the weapon, but he forgot about the broom handle, which gave Danny an opportunity to grab it and twist it around so that his arm was extended backward. He could either let go or break his wrist. He let go, and attempted to grab Danny instead. She caught his outstretched arm and pulled him toward her. His Taser hand was flailing.

Now the hooded man had forward momentum and nowhere to send it, which gave Danny the advantage. She couldn’t do the kind of grips they taught in boot camp, not with so few fingers, but she didn’t need much. As he crashed into her, she brought her leg around his and drove his knee downward until it was bent double, hurling him to the floorboards. All of this happened in a single, fluid motion. He might be hard, he might be big, but Danny could tell this man wasn’t experienced in dealing with a motivated opponent. She caught a glimpse of his face as he crashed to the floor. He was scared out of his wits. The goggles flew up off his head.

Until this moment, Danny hadn’t considered what kind of fight this was. But the terror in the man’s face told her. As far as he was concerned, this was a fight to the death. She wasn’t going to get away from Happy Town if this man was alive. He had seen
her
face. He would raise the alarm. And there was another, bigger problem: She wasn’t a hundred percent certain it was he who had shouted “Who goes there.” The voice hadn’t come from his direction, although she couldn’t be sure with all the echoes.

But Danny didn’t want to kill. She hated it. Too many had died already. For the living to slaughter the living in these times was the worst thing of all. It didn’t matter: The man made the decision for her. He was on his back and saw her hesitation; while she paused, he got the Taser up and fired it at her head.

Police training had taught Danny the best place to fire electrode-based weapons wasn’t center mass, as with a firearm, but at the belt. One electrode in the lower abdomen and another in the thigh was the perfect shot. Such a hit would buckle the leg and fold up the torso so the target was completely helpless. Her attacker had not been trained. He fired the electrodes
at her like a handgun, aiming for her face; she felt the coiled wires whip past her neck, but the electrodes didn’t catch her skin or her clothing. By that time, she was already diving straight at her attacker. He tried to get his feet up to kick her away, and Danny brought the scalpel into play.

He was okay for a moment, attempting to get back on his feet while Danny shoulder-rolled across the floor to the base of the altar, and then the pain reached his skull. She’d slashed the tendons holding his left kneecap in place. He made a gurgling cry—trying to suppress the scream, for some reason—and pitched sideways into the folding chairs. The fight was out of him.

Danny wasn’t in this merely to defeat him, or she could have stopped there. But the Taser wires singing past her ear had unlocked the killer inside her. Before the man could untangle himself from the chairs, she drove forward, slashing, ripping through his fingers as he threw his hands up to defend his face. His palms split open and the tip of his thumb came off and then she got him hard in the throat. Danny kept hacking until the handle of the scalpel broke, and now the man started to scream at last, but he didn’t have time for a single unbroken cry before his voice was drowned in a fountain of foaming, foul-smelling blood.

Danny was soaked in gore. Tasted it in her mouth. It stank like vomit. She was so adrenaline-hot she felt like there ought to be smoke rising off her skin. She backed away from the twisting body of the dying man and scanned the church to see if the noise had attracted any of the guards patrolling outside.

The place was still and empty.

The man bled out, gagging, his heels sliding in his own blood, and then it was quiet. Danny panted for breath and watched the lights of a patrol vehicle wing across the windows, casting beautiful colored projections of the biblical scenes in the glass onto the walls. But it continued past and drove away. Nobody was coming from the street.

Then she heard a voice, hoarse and wheezing: “Bravo.”

Danny spun around. Someone else in there with her after all. She couldn’t see anyone.

“No need to be frightened,” the voice said, from somewhere above her. “As you can see, I’m unarmed.”

Danny looked up, her mind short-circuiting.
It couldn’t be.

The voice was coming from Jesus on the cross, now looking down at her with pale, wet eyes.

“Did—did you just make a
joke
?” Danny said, when she found her voice.

“Why, was it funny?”

“No.”

The thing on the crucifix was a zero.

A thinker, its hands and feet securely nailed to the cross, a dim sketch in the shadows. Danny saw the outlines of an emaciated male body, almost naked and much abused. It spoke with a southern accent, and right now it was out of air.

It filled its lungs and said, “On to business, then. I saw what you did there. If I was one of your kind, I’d say it was impressive.”

“Your kind doesn’t use a knife,” Danny said, and realized she was still holding the broken handle of the scalpel in her hand. She looked around for the blade and didn’t see it.

“You don’t like me,” the thing on the cross said. When it spoke, its sparse beard wagged.

“No, I don’t.”

“Plain-spoken. I’d like that, if I gave a damn about anything.”

“Why are you here?” Danny asked, grasping at her sanity as her lizard brain shouted for her to run, to get the fuck out of there. She was trying to think of what to do instead: The thing was up too high to destroy it easily, but it was a witness to the fight. It knew she had killed the hooded man. No matter the bizarre situation, it had to be silenced. Her heart was racing and she saw green blossoms behind her eyes, the coils of panic grabbing at her mind. She needed a ladder, or a fifteen-foot pole with a point on the end. Get at the monster’s head.

“I have the best gig in town,” the zero was saying. “I rest up here safe and sound, and my followers feed me pieces of their own living flesh.”

“And children?” Danny said, a ghastly suspicion revealing itself in her mind. “Do they feed you kids? Is that what’s going on?”

“I wish I was as lucky as that,” the thing said, and again Danny thought she detected amusement in its voice. “I see you are missing some fingers yourself,” it added.

“I didn’t feed them to one of you fuckers,” Danny said, and started looking around her for something she could use to get up there and bash the creature’s skull in.

“Wait just a minute, Sugar. You’re that sheriff everybody talks about,” the zero said. “I recognize you now. Sister of the Dead.” Danny stopped
moving. The thick burn scars on her back tried to shiver; tendrils of ice trickled along the courses of her nerves.
Sister of the Dead.

“Got your attention?” the zero went on, drawing another breath. “Thought it would. You’re known to us here, you see. Others from your so-called ‘Tribe’ came here a few days ago, bearing strange tales. My acolytes tell me all kinds of things. You just killed one of them, in fact. I suppose I ought to be very . . . cross. Was that funny?”

“I don’t have much of a sense of humor these days,” Danny said, wanting to keep the thing talking now. “So you heard who I traveled with? My sister?”

“Yes,” the zero said, and took a long, wheezing breath. “And we
thinkers,
as you hot-bloods call us, we have heard of you from our
own
kind, as well. Your
exploits
. We’ve been trying to get you on your own for some time now, kill you . . . isolate you. It appears we have succeeded in that, at least.”

That fuck in the Chevelle,
she thought. Trying to get her away from the Tribe. Score one for the undead.

“Okay. You’ve got me isolated. Now what?” Danny said. She’d been gone from the hospital for at least an hour. They were probably already looking for her. When the alarm went up she’d be discovered here, covered in blood, with a mutilated corpse at her feet.

“Do you know how Happy Town works?” the zero asked. “Of course not, or you wouldn’t be here. I’m what you would call the ‘spiritual leader,’ for lack of a better phrase. I am the way and the truth and the light, you understand? Thousands follow me and worship me and feed me of themselves, because I am the Risen Flesh incarnate. Beats working. I play stupid, of course. First got here about six months ago—I’ll tell you that story another time. But here’s the important thing, Sister of the Dead: I’m not the only of the Risen here in town.”

He drew another breath. She was desperate to escape this place—she needed to get the hell out of town entirely, right now, and see about rescuing the Silent Kid from outside, somehow. Otherwise they’d hang her for sure. But this creature was telling her things that might be useful. She ignored the staccato bursts of panic that kept fluttering through her hair like bats at twilight.
Keep talking,
she thought.
But talk faster
.

“There’s another of my kind,” the zero said, when its lungs were filled again. “And he’s oh-so terribly wicked you would not believe. He hides what
he is. Only one or two of you hot-bloods know his secret. Unlike me, he plays at being a living human. So far, he has gotten away with it. You mortals know him only as ‘the Architect.’ I don’t know if he’s really an architect, of course.” The Risen Flesh breathed again, but Danny thought he was pausing more for effect than for air. She was right.

“The Architect and I don’t see eye to eye, and not just because I’m up here. That’s another joke. Was it funny?”

“No.”

“It doesn’t matter. His headquarters are in the bank across the street. The brick building with a white porch. Even now, at the end of the world, the real governing is still done inside banks. But you’re impatient, I can tell. So here’s why I’m so glad to have this chat with you. A large number of people in town are extremely unhappy to see their children sent away . . . their fragrant, juicy children. It is only a matter of time before there’s a revolution. There is another shipment of recently-arrived children supposed to travel up to the resort in five days. Something has to be done before then, or there will be riots. This place will
burn.
When that happens, the unbelievers won’t spare this church, or me, unless someone carries me away in time. But I don’t want it to come to that. I have the perfect strategy for survival right here, if only the Architect didn’t overplay his hand.”