Rise Again Below Zero (50 page)

He saw with poorly-focused eyes that his remains were lying on the floor of the concrete room, the X-shaped frame above him, straps hanging down empty, glistening with blood. His head was tipped on its side so that he could see a mass of bloody driftwoodlike sticks festooned with glistening white and red tissue. Those must be the bones of his limbs, and the shapeless, empty barrel his body, all sloshing in a pool of clotted blood.

He felt no remorse, no horror. Only hunger.

There were others standing around him.

He rolled sluggish eyes up to look. It was the creatures that had eaten him, their clothes and faces stained with blood, rags of meat hanging from their teeth. One of them reached down and lifted him into a plastic bucket. He was staring up at the ceiling. A shape moved into view.

“Welcome to forever,” the Architect said.

D
anny forced herself to wait. She was sitting inside a tiny toolshed tacked on to the side of a house a couple of blocks west of downtown; the house itself had been extensively burned, so nobody lived inside it, and few windows overlooked the lot. It was cold in the shed, but not intolerable; there was so little space her body heat warmed it up.

She spent the time organizing the backpack and examining its contents; in combination, she had enough materiel in there to start a war or finish a small city. It scared her a little. She had got hold of something that was well above her pay grade. Letting other people handle the pack had taken a lot out of her, but there had been no alternative. At least nobody had tampered with the lock or tried to get into the bag; there were no signs of it, at least. The scouts were reliable people. Danny thought she ought to be nicer to them in the future. She often thought that.

She should have added a blaze orange vest to her demands. As it was, when she started moving around in the dark, she was going to have to rely on stealth, or if she was spotted by a patrol, she’d have to hope the Architect had sent word down to the troops not to apprehend or kill her. If they saw what she had in the pack she didn’t think they would bother to ask for advice. It was a moot point, anyway: She couldn’t ask the Architect for special dispensations, because then people would know he was complicit when things went down. He’d deny it.

When she couldn’t stand to wait any longer, she forced herself to hold out for another half-hour. Then she stole out of the shed, oozing from shadow to shadow, still refusing to act upon the urgency that was trying to burst out of her. Everybody in town was on alert. This was going to take absolute caution.

After crossing through several yards and traversing the main street between searchlight sweeps, Danny reached the shadow of one of the buildings behind the church. She had decided, during the long wait in the shed, to attack the Risen Flesh first. The Architect commanded too many guns; she’d never make it out of the bank alive. So the church had to be first.

The door through which she had first entered the building was ten meters away. She thought it was probably locked, these days. But the Victorian hardware wouldn’t
stand up to much abuse. The Preacher and acolytes lived elsewhere, maybe in the very house she was hiding behind right now. Once she was inside, there would probably be at least two acolytes on guard, however. Maybe the entire contingent. She’d made her present task harder when she destroyed the first of them.

But her mission didn’t require finesse. She had a dozen baseball-style hand grenades, some NATO and some U.S. Army. She thought two of them would take care of business. One to take down whichever guards were in there, and the second more or less shoved up the Risen Flesh’s asshole. That was phase one of her plan. Phase two involved the bank across the street.

She took several deep breaths to get oxygen into her tissues and stuffed four grenades into her jacket pockets. Then she shrugged into the backpack—it was heavy and cumbersome, but she couldn’t afford to end up parted from it again. She even latched the chest straps around herself. If a stray bullet hit the pack or it caught fire or any of myriad other mishaps, she would be feeling no pain. Then she slipped the gloves from her hands. Absolute dexterity was required, and she was already at a disadvantage there. In ten seconds she was going to kick the door down.

“One,” she whispered. “Two.”

On three, the church exploded.

D
anny was thrown off her feet.

The stained-glass windows all lit up at once, then turned into a million glittering butterflies, and then they were gone in a blast of smoke and debris. The entire structure of the church seemed to leap into the air. Its walls bowed outward and clapboards burst apart and flew whickering over Danny’s head. With a great and mournful note, the bell in the church tower broke free of its moorings and sang its way through the air, then smote the Civil War statue, shearing the head off the bronze soldier and clanging to the ground. Thick mats of smoke belched out of the gaping windows and turned the now-crooked tower into a chimney.

Danny’s
ears were ringing and the backpack stuck jagged fingers into the coarse flesh of her back. She was covered with debris and bright fragments of colored glass. There were voices now, distant shouts and cries. A siren wound up to full voice and the spotlights wheeled around, glowing through the smoke. For the better part of a minute, she couldn’t get up. Danny’s head was blazing with pain again. She’d been told to avoid this kind of thing. Then self-preservation took over and she scrambled back away from the church, along the side of the house that had mostly sheltered her from the explosion. A storm door was flung open just in front of her; it led out onto a raised porch with three steps. Danny dived under the porch, jamming herself into the cobwebs and dead leaves underneath it as heavy footfalls banged on the boards overhead.

She’d been right: One acolyte came down the porch steps and ran for the church. They must be quartered in the house. She waited, although the cramped space was suffocating her. Where were the others? Had they come out the front door? After another half-minute she was rewarded by more cautious steps coming out onto the porch. She saw the Preacher’s cowboy boots on the stairs, then watched as he walked down the side of the house. He stood a long while surveying the destruction of the church—the smoke was already clearing, and it appeared the place wasn’t on fire. He stood there immobile, a crow-black shape framed by the ruination of his little empire. Then he spat on the ground next to his left toe and walked rapidly back the way he had come. He didn’t go back inside the house. He just kept on walking. Somehow, Danny didn’t think anybody would ever see him again.

She emerged from her hiding place and brushed herself off as best she could, then circled around the house so she could emerge at a distance from the action. The central square of town was pandemonium. Hundreds of people were spilling out of houses and businesses all up and down the streets, rushing to see what had happened. Some were wailing with terror, others whooping with excitement. Most were simply shouting, confused and alarmed. The guns on the rooftops were silent. They couldn’t shoot this situation down.

“What happened?” Danny asked a woman running past in nightgown and ski parka.

“Oh, my God,” she said, and kept on going.

So Danny joined the throng, and nobody seemed to take note that she was fully dressed, filthy, and wearing a heavy military-style pack on her back.
The church was still standing, but it was an empty shell now. The doors had been blown off and the interior, while dark, was revealed in glimpses by the spotlights that roamed over the window holes. A great wreckage of pews and folding chairs was scattered across the floor. Lengths of broken timber spilled out of the window frames. Where the Risen Flesh had once hung, now there was only the upright post; she thought she saw a single foot, upside-down, still hanging from one of the holy nails.

Danny turned her attention to the bank, which the crowd was entirely ignoring in all the excitement across the street. The Architect was outside on his balcony, Cad on his right, Nancy on his left, with a dozen fully armed guards on the downstairs porch beneath their feet. But all of the interior lights were off. They didn’t want anyone to notice them. None of the unliving saw her, as far as Danny could tell. But she now understood the game.

The Architect had set her up. He didn’t know exactly when Danny would strike, or even if she would do so at all. But he knew she would be somewhere she wasn’t supposed to be, and his minions could kill or capture her and that would be that. She was the scapegoat. Capture the terrorist, probably execute her, and he would win the sympathies not only of his own followers, but of the churchgoers who had lost their rotting god.

She’d seen it coming, of course. But she hadn’t expected anything quite this spectacular.

She needed to get the hell out of there.

•   •   •

As Danny retreated through the backyard shadows of the suburbs, aiming vaguely for the school-hospital that was her temporary home, she saw gangs of men running down the streets, waving flashlights and guns around. She saw bewildered civilians beaten to the ground, mostly women. She had a feeling the setup theory was correct. A group of people were herded out of their house and forced to lie on the icy pavement in their underwear, guns pressed against their necks. Danny remembered there had been something like this in Nazi Germany, the Night of the Broken Glass. A witch hunt. If they found her, she wasn’t going to make it as far as the show trial.

The hospital looked like a beehive stirred with a stick. There were guards patrolling the grounds and the streets around it. She wasn’t going back there. Danny caught a glimpse of the medical staff being marched down the front steps; Dr. Joe Higashiyama had his hands laced together behind his head like the others. She wondered if they would kill him just
for being her doctor. She wondered how many patients they would lose because the staff wasn’t able to attend to them. Then she kept on moving. She needed to get through the perimeter fence.

•   •   •

The gates that controlled access to and from Happy Town stood open. There was a guard on the ground, facedown, and in the little guard shack where Danny had seen the stove and cots there was another guard lying faceup, his throat cut. She looked up the long axis of the main street and in the distance there were searchlights and smoke and noise, but here it was eerily silent. It could be a trap, but she decided to find out the easy way. Danny crawled out of the bushes of the last house beside the fence and walked up to the road. She paused. No voices rang out to challenge her. She approached the gates, which stood slightly ajar. Still there came no warning, no shots, no sudden glare of searchlights.

She stood in the opening, irresolute. Should she flee into the badlands and rejoin her companions at the abandoned house? Should she pay the Architect a personal visit by some devious route through town? Her ability to develop a plan seemed to have deserted her. Now her head was throbbing with pain, as well. If she had another of her blackouts, she wasn’t going to find out how this thing ended.

She looked back into town and saw it was snowing again. Starting to come down hard, in fact. There was some gunfire and tiny screams reached her ears. The moaning of the wind was a sad commentary on the state of humanity. She watched the fat snowflakes spiral down, already dusting the road from black to gray.

Then Danny realized there was something impossible about the scene. She analyzed the feeling, because it was important somehow. She took each factor one at a time: the attack on the church, clearly coordinated by the Architect. The search for women. That much she understood. Then there were the open gates and slain guards. Something was wrong. She listened to the faraway noise of the mob, the howling wind, and watched the snow falling.

Then she understood.

The snow was falling straight down. But the wind was moaning, getting louder.

There was no wind.

Danny turned back to face the badlands, and saw the swarm approaching.