Rise Again Below Zero (44 page)

Dr. Joe nearly got himself killed by climbing out of the truck with a rifle in his hands, but he placed the weapon on the roof of the truck, stepped away from it, and hollered, “Anybody here?”

“The hell are you?” a gravelly voice called from an upstairs window.

“I’m from Happy Town,” he said. “Sheriff Adelman asked me to show up here and ask for something.”

The scouts emerged from their various hiding places, and Dr. Joe went pale; Danny hadn’t mentioned how rough-looking they were. But he explained to the tall one (who introduced himself as Topper) what he was looking for, and where it could be found; this cemented his credentials and it was insisted that he have a drink with them. The scouts wanted to hear how the sheriff was doing. The last time Topper had seen her she was incapacitated.

“Her brain is damaged,” Dr. Joe explained, holding a coffee mug full of tequila in his hands, seated in the living room on a shabby floral couch. “She’s totally fine, I mean she can do anything, but if there’s another shock to her head I don’t know if she’ll survive it.”

“Are you a good doctor or a shitty one?” Topper inquired.

“I’m pretty good, I think,” Dr. Joe replied. He wasn’t offended by the question; he knew what Topper meant. How qualified was he? “I’m not a brain specialist, but it’s unmistakable. Subarachnoid lesions and stuff. What’s amazing is how well she’s doing
despite
it. I guess I can tell you guys she’s been in at least one fight since her episode, and it didn’t seem to have any negative effect on her.”

“That’s the sheriff,” Ricardo said. He was a little guy with a huge mustache. “How long has she got?”

“I don’t know,” Dr. Joe admitted. “But she has a deathwish, that’s for sure. What’s in this backpack she wants so bad?”

“Nobody knows,” Topper said. “Weapons, anyway. Any time she needs a little extra firepower, it’s usually in there. Maybe grenades, maybe a flamethrower.”

“Maybe we should look in it,” Conn said.

“I’ll tell her it was your idea,” Topper said.

“Maybe not,” Conn reflected. “Anyway, whatever she got in mind it’s her fuckin’ business.”

“You Oriental cats can keep secrets, right?” Topper said, addressing Dr. Joe. He was taken aback, but nodded as if agreeing. “Okay, I’m gonna take this pack back myself. Ain’t leaving it to you, nothin’ personal. But I don’t know you from a fuckin’ serial killer. Thing is, though, if the sheriff wants out of there, she’s gonna need inside help. I want you to be that help.”

“I’m prepared for that, as long as it’s nonviolent,” Dr. Joe said. “Showing up here is a hanging offense, I have a feeling. Might as well go all-in.”

“We might not need nothing from you, but an inside man is always a good thing.”

They didn’t have any specific role they’d need him for; Topper’s real goal was simply to get Dr. Joe feeling like he was in too deep to cause them any trouble. Like if he snitched, he would be implicated. This wasn’t the kind of work any of them were good at. It was like spycraft. Most of all, he knew he was going to drop the backpack off in a specific location; that meant he would be right where an informant said he’d be, and holding a backpack that could be full of sarin gas, for all he knew. The sheriff liked the dangerous toys. It occurred to him Conn might be right: Maybe he should see what was in there. But he was still going to drop the pack off, because Danny wanted it. No point looking at its contents, even if it meant getting caught by the Happy Town police and thrown into the clink like Ernie. Fuck it.

•   •   •

Nancy was chatting with manic brightness as she, Danny, and their escort of guards walked the five blocks from the town center. Danny didn’t say a word, but cut her eyes back and forth, taking in every window, every doorway, every means of escape or attack the length of the street. They were surrounded by orange vests, and beyond that the civilians lurked in every
corner, down every alley, watching. Nancy had been talking the entire walk, but it was only when they got closer to the train station that Danny tuned in.

Nancy was saying, “. . . best possible care, of course. We have the MRI machine, superb surgical facilities, a burn care ward, a dialysis center, and we even have a cancer center in another building with complete chemotherapy and radiation treatments available.”

“Radiation?” Danny muttered, half-aware she said it. By now they were at the gate; the bored-looking man waved them through, Nancy being well-known to him.

“Yes,” Nancy said, and looked suspiciously at Danny. “Is that so odd? The rate of cancers has skyrocketed in the last few decades, and these days of course it’s going untreated. Why, going forward, it could kill more people than those nasty moaners out there.”

The first security perimeter was a chain-link fence about five feet high, not too heavy, no barbed wire; just a kennel fence for keeping people organized. There was a gate in the fence with a man in winter clothes sitting on a stool, opening and closing his hands to keep them warm. He had a clipboard tucked into the throat of his jacket.

There was a blaze-vested guard standing nearby, but he was making a show of boredom, and if he carried a firearm, it was concealed. Even the casual distance between him and the gate seemed calculated to project how relaxed they were, how mild the security was. The guard’s studied nonchalance was particularly ridiculous in light of the fact that fifty or more people had followed Danny and Nancy up the street and were now standing in an angry knot in the middle of the pavement, complaining loudly and trying to provoke the guard. From a safe distance.

“I’m just surprised you’d bring radioactive material into town. Radiation kills zer—the undead,” Danny said, correcting herself, remembering that “zero” was apparently a pejorative with this bunch. She didn’t want to antagonize the woman; she wanted to destroy her. Be polite until then.

“There are no undead here,” Nancy said, lamely. “I mean except that nasty thing in the church, God forgive me.” She was just repeating what she’d been told to say to the ordinary, ignorant people she met. Her slowly dying mind wasn’t equipped with a response for an outsider who
knew
.

“Right,” Danny said. “Anyway I bet you keep real close tabs on those radium pellets or whatever they are. Are you at the point where it would kill you instantly, or are you still human that way?”

“You disgust me,” Nancy said, when she had thought it over for a few paces.

They had arrived at the next security perimeter. This one was considerably more serious: Three men in combat gear stood there, no vests, lots of guns. The gate stood in a twelve-foot fence with razor wire along the top, but only a short section of the fence was visible from beyond the station; it crossed an access road over the tracks between the station house and the next building, a luggage storage shed. Danny saw a forklift go past, its arms laden with crates of canned food; she caught a glimpse inside the building and saw stacks of crates up to the rafters.

There were men working in this secure inner sanctum who had a frontier look to them, the kind of men who would drop their tools and pick up a rifle at the first sign of trouble. It reminded Danny of forward posts she’d been to in the deserts of the Middle East. She wondered if the workers could all be infected semi-living people like Nancy and Cad, and decided it was impossible: Zeroes, even part-zeroes, wouldn’t be able to heal or build muscle the way the living could. They needed living hands for the hard work. So these men (it was all men) must have some kind of special status here, some privilege others didn’t.

Nancy explained their business to one of the guards, who looked frankly skeptical and picked up an all-weather telephone to call someone. He listened for a while, nodded, then hung up and indicated his colleagues should pat Danny down. Danny spread her arms out and allowed the inspection to occur. They groped her thoroughly; as had happened before, she felt the probing fingers hesitate when they encountered the geography of her back through her shirt. But they moved on. Of course, none of the men had thought to feel the fingers in her gloves, or there might have been a delay at the gate.

They passed through, and now one of the guards accompanied them as they turned left and moved down the tracks westward, the station behind them and the warehouses and train-repair sheds ahead. Danny estimated there were fifty or sixty men working here. In combination with the various security men around town, the Architect probably commanded a private army 250 strong. Not enough to stop a rebellion but sufficient to fight a decent rearguard action. These were definitely fully human, not the half-dead or unliving. She wondered what they had been promised in return for their service.

Although she rejected the idea with every impulse in her being, she understood what Nancy, Cad, and the acolytes were in it for: immortality, of a kind. Stockholm Syndrome taken to the next level. They were like Dracula’s
groupies. But what was in it for these other men with their unsmiling faces and heads-down labor? Did they get free whores? Better food? Maybe they got the nice bungalow houses in the suburbs, like the one from which Danny had stolen the jacket on her first night in town. Or it could be that they’d simply been given a little authority. That went far with some people. A little stamp of approval from the VIPs:
You’ll make the grade. You’re better than the chooks. We need these pallets moved by noon.

They walked past the train engine project, on which a crew was working at speed. There were showers of sparks and clouds of smoke and steam, all to the beat and clang of hammers and steel. The engine was mechanically finished, it appeared; there were men bolting cover plates on over the massive power plant, and all the drive wheels were in place. But they were adding a huge, hand-built plow of steel at the front, and armored baffles along the entire fuselage. It was becoming a war-wagon.

Nancy didn’t look too pleased to be allowing Danny to see any of this, but she had her orders. Behind the special engine stood three old-fashioned passenger cars, these also armored, the windows barred and shuttered, roofs laden with supplies. Once coupled to the engine, they would allow about two hundred passengers to get somewhere the easy way. Danny didn’t think these would include the men outfitting them.

The third and final barrier was formidable. This one wasn’t for show. A fence made of tall sheets of iron, topped with accordion wire and welded-on spikes of bent rebar. There was a deep hum of electricity. A crudely painted lightning bolt flashed on the sheet metal, which Danny now saw was crisscrossed with cattle wire stood off on insulators. She wondered what the voltage was. It must be lethal, of course. There were no guards in front of this gate, but two men atop the wall, which crossed the western end of the tracks and appeared to stay shut. End of the line. The trains that came from the west must stop outside town, going back and forth like a shuttle. This wall kept men in and trains out.

The wall extended across the tracks, over the sulfur-stinking clinker rubble on either side, and up to a natural rock formation on the north side (the lowest foot of the mountain) and a concrete block warehouse on the south. This building Danny remembered from her survey up on the mountain—it was the largest structure behind the barriers. A door in it opened, and four men in combat fatigues issued from within.

“Stay here,” Nancy said to Danny.

Danny stood looking around her, ignoring the guard who remained at
her side and the hard stares from the men who’d emerged from the warehouse. “No guards,” she’d stipulated. So far, so bad.

Nancy crossed to the warehouse men and discussed her mission at some length. One of them eventually went inside, returning several minutes later, by which time Danny was starting to feel the cold. She pressed her gloved hands over her mouth, breathing through them to warm her fingers. She could feel the pocket knife and cigarette lighter she’d concealed inside two of the empty fingers of the left-hand glove. She had liberated both items from the jacket she’d stolen. They might not be a great deal of use, but she wasn’t entirely unarmed. If nothing else, a punch from that hand was going to hurt.

Eventually three of the armed men advanced on Danny and fanned out around her, marching her into the warehouse. Danny could feel warm air coming at her through the open doorway. It smelled familiar, a sort of yeasty, sweet-salt smell like fresh bread dough and dirty laundry all at once.

It was the smell of a lot of children.

The guards were fools, in Danny’s estimation, for all their scowling and bravado. They formed a delta around her, one in front and two behind; the doorway was a standard opening just wide enough for one. So she could hypothetically knock the man in front of her down, slam the door on the others, and raise hell before they could do much to stop her. She passed through the door with a tingle of adrenaline, but made no move, did nothing but take in the interior with quick, darting eyes.

High roof with bow truss frame, insulated with fiberglass batting. Walls of concrete painted in sanitary green. Space partitioned up to an eight-foot height with enclosed cubicles and offices at this end, with the far end walled off but open to the rafters. Plumbing recently added over the surface of the walls. The thing that most caught her attention was the noise of children, of small high voices and squeaking rubber-soled shoes and many bodies moving around. There wasn’t any laughter or sounds of play; it was a zoo sound, animals pent up and restless. So far Danny couldn’t see any of them, but the warmth and stink and noise brought out some instinct in her that could almost be described as maternal. It was sympathy, at least.

She had found the children.

“I need you to understand only the best behavior will do in here,” Nancy said.

They were signed in at a desk by an intensely bored-looking man with a side holster. Then he rose, pistol in hand, and they walked behind him across the concrete floor to a padlocked door. The man unlocked it and they
entered a hallway, the three guards trailing along behind. The man relocked the door behind them. Nancy continued her spiel.