Rise Again Below Zero (5 page)

But Kelley
was
lost. She had returned with her memories, the record of her life, intact inside her mind. Just as her body was decaying, those things that had been hers were fading by degrees. Sometimes Danny thought she should have pulled the trigger. But she hadn’t, and Kelley was now her constant responsibility. It was the price she paid for being a crappy sister,
and for putting the Tribe at risk to go find her. Someday Kelley might attack Danny, or kill someone else in the Tribe. It was possible. They talked about it. But Danny didn’t think so. Kelley had made some grim calculation and decided not to eat the flesh of men. She had never wavered, at least so far.

The Tribe didn’t like it at all. Most of the small children didn’t know the truth; the name “Leper” had stuck because it was the only way to explain the concealing bandages. It took new people a few days to realize what Kelley was, and most of the folks who hitched a ride for a couple of days never knew how close they came to a specimen of their worst nightmares. The thinkers they’d encountered were deadly. They could use weapons, lay traps, and make complex plans. They sometimes worked with hunters, the undead who had animal-like intelligence, using them almost like dog packs; the moaners, the stupid ones, were useless to them. But the moaners also seemed to fear the thinkers, and that’s why Kelley was allowed to exist alongside the Tribe.

Moaners wouldn’t come anywhere near her. They had superb senses of smell: Even the most rotten walking corpse would have fresh-looking tissue in its sinuses. Not pink, but marbled and purple. But it was vital flesh, sometimes so enlarged it bulged out of the nostrils or the hole where the nose used to be. The ones that came shambling toward the Tribe’s halting places, though, would smell Kelley and immediately back off. Their incessant moaning would stop. They would slouch away and disappear into the landscape. The hunters were a little more persistent, and might circle a campsite all night, but they’d never come close. It was almost worth the price of having a thinker around. Almost.

This aversion to the scent of thinkers was why Danny escorted Kelley through a few tours of the perimeter wherever the Tribe had halted—the residual smell usually kept the stupider types away, as long as it wasn’t windy. It was the same reason she guided her sister
away
from safety when it was time to change her diapers and clean up the spongy, half-rotten skin around her genitals. Danny always buried the baby wipes and diapers in the place she thought most likely to facilitate an attack. They worked better than land mines on the zeroes.

But Danny knew that her people were only waiting for the other shoe to drop. As if Kelley had some diabolical plan to kill them all and eat their guts. Every day, Danny spent a lot of her leadership capital ensuring her sister was safe from destruction by the living. That was one reason she took
big risks: it was a show of fearlessness to remind them all who had their back. It kept the balance sheet firmly in her favor. If Danny wanted Kelley around, there must be a good reason: that was the message she wanted them to get. On an average day, she guessed they about half-believed it. Kelley wasn’t dangerous—she craved human flesh all the time, but had never actually tasted it.

Danny had lost her sister once. She didn’t intend to lose her again. Ever.

•   •   •

She drove aimlessly through the twilight. As long as Danny stayed in the vehicle, she didn’t have much to fear from the undead; it reeked of her sister. But another thinker wouldn’t hesitate to attack. They didn’t fear each other. The Tribe had even found evidence of thinker teams destroying each other. She turned on the headlights and saw a kind of View-Master slide presentation of the apocalypse in exaggerated 3-D. Wrecked cars, burned-out structures, white femurs and rib cages winking out from beneath cars or strewn across the pavement. Sometimes a gallows figure crawling away, clothed in rags and filth. She drove until she came to a low hill, bare of trees or bushes; the entire hilltop had been flattened and paved a long time back, for what purpose Danny couldn’t imagine.

She parked at the margin of the paved area in a position that gave her a good view of the landscape below: a town, completely dark and silent, the last of the daylight spread as thin as watercolor on the rooftops. Kelley was hunting on the opposite side of the hill where the uglier businesses had been built, away from the quaint charm of downtown. Danny thought to look at the map and find out what this place used to be called, but it didn’t make any difference. Call it Deadville.

She had her elbow out of the open window, relishing the ice-cold air; if anything wanted to attack, she’d hear its feet on the broken pavement. So it was that she felt the sound before she heard it. The door panel was vibrating under her arm. She pressed her one finger against it and felt the rumbling in the sheet metal. Then the sound reached her ears: engines. A lot of engines, very far away. Was it the Tribe? Could they have come after her, for some reason? But no; they’d be on the other side of the hill. This sound was coming from outside the town. She permitted herself another minute of listening, until she was certain: motorcycles. A lot of them. It sounded like early morning on Bike Day back in Forest Peak, when the Harleys started coming in big groups up the mountain roads, audible ten minutes before they came into view.

Is it the Vandal Reapers?
Danny wondered.
Maybe not worth finding out.

Then there were gunshots—some single, some rapid-fire, punctuating the rise of the engine sounds. She dropped the interceptor into neutral and rolled backward away from the rim of the hill, lights out. Then she turned around and drove down the road she’d come up, maintaining darkness until she was among buildings at the bottom of the hill. She had to be sure she wouldn’t light up the sky. Artificial illumination caught the eye in these times.

It took her half an hour to backtrack to the place she’d left Kelley to feed. She wasn’t there.

Danny honked the horn a couple of times, then zipped up her jacket and retrieved the snub-barreled shotgun from the passenger foot well. Best not to remain in the vehicle in case it attracted unwanted attention. She checked the immediate area outside the warehouse for signs of other zeroes, then ran across the truck lot to a security booth. There wasn’t any glass in the windows, but it would protect her from a rush, at least. She waited. After a couple of minutes that felt like days, Danny saw something move on the far side of the rubbish piled up outside the warehouse. It might have been Kelley. She waited, holding her breath. The light was poor. But she saw it again: a distinct human figure, hunched over, moving between the buildings. Then it was out of view.

She didn’t think it was Kelley she’d seen; maybe a hunter. But any hunter would have fled at Kelley’s scent. So if it was one of the wolf-smart zeroes, that meant Kelley was nowhere nearby.

Then Danny saw the pale ripple of the muumuu coming out of the warehouse itself. Kelley had been in there. Who—or what—had been nearby?

She tabled that aspect of the problem; her sister had reached the interceptor and was looking around. Or, to be precise, scenting the air. It disturbed Danny to think the thing that had been her sibling now operated more by smell than sight.

“Kelley!”
Danny whispered, as loudly as she dared. The thin neck swiveled around. Danny saw Kelley’s bandages were smeared with blood. She would have to change them before they returned to the Tribe. Kelley walked toward the interceptor and looked inside, then again scented the air with her nose tipped up. Danny emerged from the security booth, but kept most of her mass behind it, opposite where she’d seen the unknown figure move out of sight.

“Over here,” she said. Kelley came swaying toward her, and Danny
felt the same thrill of horror she experienced every time: All her instincts cried out that the enemy was coming. That she needed to destroy this thing.

“Whenever I come near, you hold your breath,” Kelley said, when she was close to Danny.

“Because you stink,” Danny lied. “There was another zero. I saw it.”

“Yes,” Kelley said. She never bothered to lie anymore. That was a thing the living did. If she didn’t want to admit something, she simply remained silent.

“A thinker?”

“Yes.”

“Did you talk to it?”

Kelley chose silence.

“Goddamn it, Kelley, I need to know.”

No response.

Danny found her hand on the butt of her sidearm. Kelley’s silences had become deeper, lately. It was hard to explain. Somehow she seemed to be retreating inside herself. Without her personality to hang on to, Kelley was just another sentient corpse; the thing Danny feared the most was an ambush by her own sister, if that glimmer of her old self ever went away completely. The factor that kept Kelley in touch with her past humanity might be Danny’s determination to keep her that way. If Danny broke that compact, there would be consequences.

Danny let her hand fall into her pocket and retrieved the keys to the interceptor.

“The subject is not closed. But we need to get out of here. There’s a shitload of motorcycles coming.”

Danny drove back by a more direct route than the one they’d taken out. Kelley had removed the bandages that bound up her head—once there was blood on them, she was in danger of getting moldy underneath. Danny would rewrap her before they came into view of the Tribe’s encampment.

She glanced over at her sister after a period of prolonged silence—the kind of silence that made Danny feel alone. The features of Kelley’s face were recognizable, but discolored, sagging. The skin had tightened across the high bones—brow and cheeks—and lost its shape around mouth and neck. Kelley looked almost as if she had aged fifty years. Or, if Danny was honest, as if she’d died and begun to rot.

“So who was it?”

“One of my kind,” Kelley replied. “But they’re boring. They don’t have any feelings.”

“You understand that I consider that consorting with the enemy, right? Did you talk about the Tribe? Our defenses? Our route?”

“He wanted me to join his group. They’ve been hunting along the roads to the north.”

“Did you talk about the Tribe?”

“No, Danny. We didn’t. He already knew.”

Kelley took a long breath that would have signified emphasis for a living person. But she was merely out of air for speaking. Danny found herself gnawing at the knotted skin over her fingerless knuckles. The instant she realized she was doing it, she took her hand away from her face—no good setting an example that way.
He already knew?
What the hell did that mean?
How
did he know? She wanted to ask but knew Kelley wouldn’t respond to such questions. She didn’t when she was alive.

“Okay,” Danny began, speaking carefully, “he already knew about the Tribe. Probably rumors and stuff. So he just wanted you to join his group and kill the living for food.”

“He also wanted to know how many kids we had,” Kelley said. “Like, if we had too many.”

“How many is ‘too many’ children?”

“I don’t know. I said no.”

“Okay,” Danny said, as if she understood. “What else?”

“What else did we talk about?”

“Yeah.”

“None of your business.”

•   •   •

When Danny returned to the Tribe, Kelley’s bandages refreshed, she moved into action without delay. She reported on the motorcycle gang and ordered everyone to saddle up immediately.

The Reapers, if that’s who they were, hadn’t followed her, as far as Danny could tell; at least, she hadn’t heard any engine sounds when she stopped on the road to wrap up Kelley.

There were no surprises as far as the truck stop the scouts had found, but twenty kilometers after that, the landscape was writhing with the undead. Beyond the infested area, it was supposed to be completely zero-free for a day’s drive or more. That was good enough for the Tribe. They
weren’t going to a specific destination. It didn’t work that way. But the project of going eastward, the logistics of it, kept everybody occupied and gave them a common purpose. So rather than give up, they all focused on the problem of finding a route around the swarm—as if it was part of a long-term plan, and not merely another meaningless obstacle.

And for many, it did fit in with a plan of sorts. The rumors of a safe place came from that direction like the smell of a summer day comes off the horizon before the sun has even risen. It was something to hope for, a direction to go. Eastward, somewhere. They’d heard about this possible Shan-gri-la from hitchhikers and fellow-roamers. How far east, though, nobody could say.

Danny was out front in the interceptor with Kelley at her side as always; then came the scouts on their motorcycles, half a dozen of them. They rode herd, sometimes falling back, sometimes stringing out ahead, keeping an eye on the shadows. The main file of vehicles traveled in no particular order, except that the motor home was always in the middle, and the ambulance always at the back; the convoy was mostly heavy-duty pickups, SUVs, and panel vans. What people wanted was a heavy vehicle with a durable suspension and enough room to lie down inside. There was also a roach coach, which served meals for the entire Tribe, if there was food enough, and a lineman’s repair truck with elevating basket that made an excellent sentry platform. One of the vans contained enough tools to perform almost any vehicle repair. Spare parts could be found wherever there was an abandoned car.

They had a dedicated vehicle for tagalong strangers to the Tribe, as well: the Courtesy Bus, a parking shuttle painted with black-and-yellow zebra stripes to make it easy to find at the airport. The driver sat inside an improvised angle iron and chicken wire booth, and the big windows made it easy to see what the passengers were up to from outside. Mike Patterson was handcuffed to one of the grab bars in the back of the shuttle, which very much interested the other outsiders aboard that night. The Tribe’s policy was to pick up hitchhikers regardless of their appearance, as long as there were fewer than six in any one group. But they had to ride in the shuttle. The driver, Sue Baxter of Tulsa, Oklahoma, was prepared to drive the shuttle into a telephone pole if her charges tried to commandeer the vehicle. They’d never had any trouble like that, but after all that had happened so far, there was a tendency to prepare for the worst-case scenario.