Rise Again Below Zero (36 page)

It stared at Danny with its cloudy eyes and she thought it was smiling through its lank beard. It inhaled and said, “That’s where you come in. It pains me to say that I need your help. My acolytes are useless, as you just demonstrated. But I can’t confide in any of the other locals. I need someone to take the Architect down, before he takes
me
down, in the most literal sense.”

Danny was past the point of bewilderment, unsure how to react. She said nothing, and the Risen Flesh took this as an indication that she was waiting to hear his proposition.

“I want you to get through to the Architect. And then I want you to kill him, Sister of the Dead.”

The adrenaline from the fight had worn off; Danny felt sick and cold and afraid. She wanted to escape. But they needed to close the deal.

“What’s in it for me?” she asked.

“Anonymity. You were never here. I’ll tell my acolytes someone else did this killing, someone from the Architect’s side of town. I can lie, you know. I’m practically human.”

“So I kill the big bad dead dude, the kids stay here, and you and me never met, is that right?”

“You have my word.”

“I guess we can’t shake hands,” Danny said, and slipped out the back of the church.

D
anny fled back through the darkness, stinking of blood and sweat. The rasping voice of the Risen Flesh was in her ears, and her mind whirled with the things he had told her.

There was little time.

She’d been gone from the hospital an hour and a half at least, but so far there were no search parties rushing around, no whistles. Now that she had survived the lethal combat in the church, she sure as hell didn’t want to get caught and beheaded by a bunch of volunteer cops.

She shed the blood-stinking sneakers, sweatshirt, and jacket, and stuffed them deep in the Dumpster she’d found on the way out of the hospital grounds. Then she entered the same way she’d left, through the basement locker room window. Still no guards. In the locker room there were sinks and showers; she didn’t dare run a shower at full strength, lest it be overheard, but she let the hot water trickle down on her, lathered herself with grainy industrial soap, and by the dim light of the exit sign she eventually determined the water was running clear. She was clean enough. She dried herself off with coarse paper towels, stuffed the bloodstained pants and shirt up inside a plumbing access hatch, and ventured naked into the basement hallway. No one. Dead quiet.

Six minutes later, she let herself into the room she had awakened in and hurried toward the bed. If the zero on the cross was lying to her, she was about to climb into her deathbed. Literal-minded as the zero thinkers were, it didn’t seem possible the thing could lie—but then again, they weren’t supposed to tell jokes, either. So their weird bargain might well have been a set-up to get her out of the church without destroying the monster inside. In that case, she had been outsmarted by a corpse.

“Welcome back,” a voice said, and Danny involuntarily jumped as if the Taser had hit her at last. She spun around and saw a shape in the shadows: Dr. Joe Higashiyama was sitting in a chair by the door, his left ankle propped on his right knee.

“I went to take a shower,” Danny said, and felt it was possibly the worst excuse any human being had ever invented.

Joe stood up, nodding. “I see that. Did you soil yourself?”

“Yes,” Danny said. “I threw away my clothes.”

“There’s more under your bed,” Joe said. “You helped me get them, in fact. Back when we met at that hospital down south. But listen, the next time you want to take a shower, keep it under an hour. Otherwise you’ll catch cold and have to stay in bed all day. And then I can’t give permission to move you out of here, and they can’t throw you out of Happy Town or arrest you or anything. Do you understand?”

Danny couldn’t believe her luck. “Yes, I do,” she said. “Thank you.”

Joe stood at the door, leaning on the handle. “In the morning, I’ll let your friend Vaxxine know you’re not feeling well. Apparently somebody on the outside told her you had an episode and got taken in here. She came rushing right to town along with that quiet boy. She must think you’re pretty cool to take a risk like that.”

He closed the door behind him. Danny’s mind was reeling. She found another loose shirt and drawstring pants under her bed and dragged them on with trembling fingers. Then she crawled into the bed, the mattress fooshing air through its plastic cover, and pulled the blankets up to her chin. The comatose kid in the other bed lay unmoving, eyes half-open, mouth agape. That monster in the church knew Danny would never give away its secret intelligence—she had more to lose than it did. But it might very well intend to have a proxy accuse her of the killing.

She intended to lie awake until she heard the inevitable outcry go up when the corpse in the church was discovered, or when Joe betrayed her and they came to sever her head, but the silence of the predawn hours was absolute, and in two minutes, despite her best efforts, she was asleep.

V
axxine was staring at her, head tilted, mouth slightly pursed. She was so lost in thought that it took her a moment to realize Danny had opened her eyes. She blinked and smiled.

“Danny. You look terrible,” she said, affectionately.

“You sound like my friend Amy,” Danny replied. Her voice was hoarse, but she didn’t feel ill. It was the freezing air of last night, that was all. Amy. Where the hell was she now?

Danny tried to sit up; Vaxxine touched a button on the side of the bed and it motored into a lounge chair position. It was daylight now, with a bleachy overcast that made it impossible to tell the time without a clock.

“They gave me a new wheelchair,” Vaxxine said. “I didn’t need it, but I took it anyway. Joe says you’re not well enough to leave town.”

“Yes. Are we alone?”

“Except for him,” Vaxxine said, tipping her chin at the boy in the other bed. “Why so paranoid? You’re always paranoid, Danny.”

“You would be, too, if you knew what I knew.”

“Well you don’t know what I know, do you?”

“Jesus, it tastes like a rat had babies in my mouth. What is it? You go first,” Danny said. She wasn’t sure whether she should tell anyone about her encounter of the previous night, even in an edited form. But if Danny decided to act on what she knew, Vaxxine would surely end up in jeopardy. Danny would have to warn her before things went down. Whatever that was going to be. Danny had no idea how to handle this.

Vaxxine reached around into the big canvas bag hung on the back of her chair and fished out a grubby can of Tab. “All I could find,” she said, and handed it to Danny. Danny drank the entire can in a series of greedy chugs.

Vaxxine continued with her voice pitched down to a husky whisper: “So Danny, while you were in here with the headache, I was all around town today. Hard to believe but it’s a proper town with shops and everything, but you can’t buy anything unless you have what they want to barter, and it’s a different thing for every shop. So the butcher man has fresh meat, and my mouth is watering like a rain cloud because I haven’t seen fresh meat in a year and a half. But he’s only taking gasoline today, not gold, canned food,
or ammunition like a regular person. So those who have gasoline get the fresh meat.

“So I go to the laundry, because my clothes smell like an extinct volcano, and what do they say: ‘We’re only taking nails, screws, and lumber today.’ They don’t take anything else in trade. So what do I do? I go to the clothes shop. All the latest fashions since before the zeroes. And I ask the lady, ‘What do you take in trade?’ And she says, it doesn’t matter, we only serve Americans here.’

“Anyway I obviously didn’t like
that
much. It reminded me that you didn’t like the sound of the place. I thought, ‘Maybe’s she’s right. The crazy sheriff,’ so I went down by the train station to see what’s doing. That was interesting. There’s an engine on the siding, almost done with the overhaul, with one passenger car behind it. Men working on it like they have a tight schedule. And there’s barbed wire and fences all around the place, fit to keep out a lion.

“You were right about something, by the way: The main track is as shiny as water going east, so it gets plenty of use, but more rusty going west. Apparently they rarely travel that direction. I could be a detective, you know. And there’s notices with all these names on them, pages and pages up on the boards there at the station, all the names of the children who have gone to their safe place. Hundreds of them. Name, age, and the names of their parents or guardians. And a departure date for each group of children. There’s always some parents hanging around looking at it or arguing with the guards.”

“Does the list say who’s going next?” Danny asked.

“Only the ones who went before. I saw some other odd things, too, like there’s a bank building in the middle of town that’s guarded like it’s got the crown jewels inside. But anyway the whole day was like that, finding out Happy Town isn’t all that happy. There’s a place down one street like a brothel, I didn’t even go near. And there’s a part of town nobody can go into out past the station, like with warehouses in it—could be that’s where they keep the food, or could be the children. I didn’t see a single child all day. There isn’t a one in the whole place.”

Danny didn’t want another conflict right now, but it had to be asked:

“The Silent Kid is back there?”

“I didn’t know what else to do, Danny. I couldn’t care for him on my own, and those scouts of yours—nothing personal but I didn’t like the look
of them. They showed up in the morning on their great big motorbikes and told me all about you from outside while I covered them with a bang-bang from inside. It took me a while to believe them. Some of them are still at the house with the cute little dog. Big fellows, the ones got beat with the ugly stick, they took off on their motorbikes. Said they had some scouting to do.”

“Bless your fucking heart, Topper,” Danny said to the ceiling. Then she turned her attention back to Vaxxine. “I knew this place sucked,” she went on. “I knew it the first time I even heard about it. There
is
no safe place. You know why? Because as soon as a single live human being shows up somewhere, that place isn’t safe anymore. We’re worse than the fucking zeroes.”

“You are a very bitter woman, Sheriff. Me, I have the racists tell me I can’t shop and there’s no law to say I can anymore. Half the places I can’t go at all, because wheelchair access doesn’t exist, so there’s no ramps or lifts, and plenty of stairs. I could go on and on. But I don’t. People are bad doings, you’re right. But they’re also the best angels in the world. Who keeps looking out for you? Me. And I’m as human as they come. Even you”—here she lowered her voice until it was almost inaudible—“risking your ass for kids you don’t even know. You’re an angel, too. So just you remember that. The only safe place is with a friend, and that means there’s a live human.”

Danny wanted to change the subject. “Did you . . . hear anything weird happened last night?”

Vaxxine’s face went serious again; she even looked behind her at the door and past Danny at the boy in the coma, making sure they weren’t overheard, before she whispered:

“Funny you should ask that. Early this morning, I left the disgusting flophouse they stuck me in to come check up on you, and halfway here I rolled past this big old church downtown, and there was crazy business in there, I can tell you. There must have been a hundred people arguing and shoving each other, and other ones wailing like babies, and then they carried out a dead man in a hoodie. He was cut to pieces and covered all in blood. People were afraid in the street. I got away from there myself just as fast as my wheels would take me, because all the deputies or whatever they are down that way were pointing their guns at anybody who dared walk by. You’d think they were looking for a confession.

“And they found a bloody coat and shoes right outside in the hospital trash, can you believe it? Looks like a big man did the killing. That’s what they’re saying.”

Danny didn’t respond to this, but examined Vaxxine’s face. She was so dark, her skin so lustrous, that she appeared to be made of some polished wood or stone. There were fine lines like cat whiskers around her eyes, but otherwise her face was smooth. They were close in age, maybe five years apart, and yet Danny knew her own face was weathered like barnboard.