Rise Again Below Zero (54 page)

She toppled and fell full-length among the undead.

Three of them collapsed when she hit. A splinter of wood penetrated the flesh of her upper arm. Danny kicked and pushed, knocking the things away, and in a matter of seconds was on her feet, but one of the things had bitten her, down low on her right leg. She didn’t know how badly.

The Silent Kid had disappeared from Danny’s field of view and she hoped he was on his way to the roof or wherever was farthest from the sheriff’s last stand.

But then a long yellow piece of pine came down, a rafter or something like it. It was studded with joist hangers, bent metal clips to hold connecting members of wood. They looked a hell of a lot like the footholds on a telephone pole. Danny didn’t look back. She hauled herself up the rafter, bony fingers scratching and clawing and pulling her back down. She remembered the woman with her leg torn apart while she hung from the roof, and kicked out. She reached the landing, and tried to pull the improvised ladder up after her. But the zeroes were grabbing it like it meant
something to them, maybe hoping to follow. So Danny kicked it away instead, and it fell among them. She watched to make sure none of them were smart enough to stand the timber back up, then scrambled away from the edge of the landing and pressed her weight against the wall.

The Silent Kid was beside her, panting. The landing had about half the roof framing spilled down onto it, with some plywood and tar paper still clinging to the structure. Snow spilled down from above like handfuls of feather down. Danny wasn’t sure how long the landing would remain attached to the wall, but there wasn’t much of anyplace else to go. Above them was another flight of stairs, intact except for the railing, but above that was only the blown-out steeple, two adjoining walls and the spire, the rest fallen down.

“Stay against the wall,” she said, when she had her breath back. The undead were moaning and gasping down below, sucking in the scent of living flesh. They were climbing over each other, trying to scale the walls. The building shook with the fury of their attack.

The Silent Kid was checking himself over, now. Danny was glad to see that. He still planned to survive. Or cared what kind of condition he was in, at least. While he was checking himself over, Danny took the opportunity to steal a look at her leg.

The bite was just above her Achilles tendon. Reached the muscle. A piece of skin had been bitten away. She’d felt that during the struggle, the intense but blurry pain of compression between the jaws suddenly sharpening into razor-edged agony as flesh tore. The Silent Kid was also looking at the wound, his eyes wide and round. Whatever went on in his young mind, it had no outlet, no words.

“It’s just a zombie bite,” Danny said, and remembered she’d never been much good at reassuring children. Kelley could have attested to that, if things had gone differently. She tore a strip of duct tape off one of the rips in her jacket and pasted it over the injury. “Are you okay?”

The Kid nodded. His pale face was grave. The danger hadn’t passed. This was just a brief interlude. They couldn’t stay on their precarious little perch for very long, and below them were dozens of zeroes. More than dozens. The moaning was so numerous it sounded almost like ocean surf. Danny decided to have a look at their predicament and start making the new plan. There was a one-in-a-million chance they could get out of this. She’d faced worse odds.

There was a window on the landing just above their heads. The glass
was broken out of it, a piece of lumber jammed clean through, and the arch at the top gave the opening a look of surprise. Danny pushed herself up the wall, and felt the throbbing injury to her leg start bleeding afresh as hydraulic pressure took over. Nothing to be done about it. She hooked an arm over the windowsill to steady herself and looked out across the dark town.

The view was ghostly in the deep falling snow. The buildings that hadn’t been damaged in the fighting and fleeing seemed normal enough, but every third or fourth structure was either smoking or shot half to pieces. Not much glass in the windows. The phone and power lines were draped limply over the rooftops and snaked around the pavement. But not much of the ground was visible, because the zeroes didn’t just sound like the ocean. They looked like it.

Danny didn’t bother to count. However many of the undead it took to fill an entire small town from one end to the other, wall to wall, shoulder to shoulder, that was the number of them. Thousands. Some were pale as cave creatures, most filth-darkened, discolored by exposure, stained or charred. Some of the things could almost be living people, except for the blood and the chunks missing. Most of them were ragged and skeletal, often naked, but there were the incongruous heavy ones, pendulous with rotten bags of fat, and some still wore garments of bright colors that resisted the filth and corruption and wrapped their decayed hosts in cheerful patterns. The miracle of polyester. The deforming disease was everywhere in all its varieties.

Danny didn’t mark any individuals or note their positions. There was nothing to note. Every damn square foot of the entire town was covered in the undead.

There was nothing to see, nothing to do until daylight came. Danny and the Silent Kid hugged their knees in the darkness and shivered, listening to the restless dead below and the ticking and creaking of the crippled structure around them. Their jackets were inadequate and wet. It was briefly warm when a nearby building caught fire and the wind shifted in their direction; Danny honestly thought they were going to die of suffocation. The smoke filled the air like stinking cotton wool and scoured their eyeballs raw. They became dizzy, coughed continuously, and the Kid puked. But at least it was warm.

Eventually the wind shifted. The reek of smoke clung to them and filled their mouths, but the air was cold and clean, scoured with snow. Once again the dominant stink was the queasy smell of decayed human flesh from below. Danny eventually thought to hold the Kid, keep him warm that
way; he was fairly well-dressed but his neck and wrists were exposed. He fell asleep against her chest.

She wanted to look out the window again at the crowd of the undead. She wanted to deploy what she had left in the backpack. She wanted to climb up onto the roof and scream at the night sky. But instead she sat and waited.

A
t last there was a hint of light in the dark sky. Dawn might be a couple of hours away. Maybe less. Danny didn’t know. Her teeth chattered and she could see her breath in dim gray plumes. She tested her bitten leg and found the blood was no longer flowing. It was stiff but she could use it, at least until she got gangrene. The Kid was still alive, huddled to her chest, one of his thin arms hooked around her waist. He’d had a long night.

The zeroes below seemed to have settled down. That wasn’t unusual. They stopped moving to conserve their strength when there wasn’t any active prey nearby. There was a gusty breeze and the rumble of fires continuing to burn out of control in the town, but no other sounds. It was time to decide what to do, before they died of exposure or the landing collapsed or some hunters showed up and figured out how to scale the ruined tower. She gently slid herself out from under the Silent Kid. He seemed to be heavily asleep. Maybe, Danny thought, he was in a smoke-induced coma and he would never wake up. Lucky him.

She turned around, kneeling, her knees screaming with stiffness, and looked through the empty window frame, keeping herself as low as possible. She didn’t want to get the zeroes worked up again. Their quiet state might mean a chance of escape.

But what Danny saw struck a sheet of frozen steel right through her body, chilling her guts, her bones, her soul.

The zeroes were still down there, thousands of them. They were standing still. But they were all looking directly at
her
.

Every one of those scarred and misshapen skulls was turned precisely toward the window. Those with eyes were staring. Those without eyes had
their heads tilted back to scent the air, the firelight glistening on their pulpy remains.

She saw there were a few so badly mutilated they continued to shuffle among the others, aimless, like decapitated chickens that didn’t know it was over yet. Exposed brains, faceless, featureless things, stumbling among the rest. But if the zero had any motor control left, it was turned toward the only prey in town.

Danny found she was shaking violently. More than cold, a species of shock had overtaken her. She’d seen this weird behavior in the zeroes once before, long ago when she fled San Francisco and the city was about to fall. It had been a suburb—San Mateo or somewhere like that, on the peninsula to the south of the city. She’d seen thousands of zeroes, all facing in the same direction like soldiers on a battlefield awaiting an order. The difference then was they’d been snapping their jaws. All of them, snapping and chomping until the noise of it sounded like marching feet.

Danny could hear the sound in her mind, that cracking of a million yellow teeth. It was a memory so vivid . . . but it
wasn’t
a memory. She watched the creatures below her. Some of their heads were rocking, snapping. They were doing it again. That awful clack of teeth.

The Silent Kid woke up.

“You know that old saying, ‘from bad to worse’?” Danny whispered. The Kid nodded. “This is what they were talking about.” Part of her mind was contemplating suicide in a matter-of-fact way—a grenade would take care of the two of them and there would be no more suffering.

But the train was still there at the end of town, the engine idling. The Architect hadn’t left yet; he must have known he’d won. That meant the rest of the children were still in play. This thought alone was Danny’s defense against the hideous noise coming from the swarm.

By now the things were all snapping their jaws. The ones so diseased that their heads were just masses of knobs struggled to make their teeth heard beneath the cancerous masses. Those whose faces had been blown off shook their heads up and down, the same instinct motivating them. What the hell was this? Some reptile memory from a billion years ago? Some little Easter egg hidden in the virus by a disease engineer? Was it God’s idea of a joke? Danny had seen documentaries in which the Nazis were gathered in Nuremberg or somewhere like that, a vast plaza, and half a million steel-helmeted men stood at attention while their Führer ranted from his podium, then bellowed their
sieg heils
. This looked like that, with
the champing of teeth instead of the stiff-armed salutes. Ashes from the fires mingled with the snow and drifted down on the upturned faces. The snow didn’t melt, because the undead flesh was cold.

“I want you to know something,” Danny said to the Kid, because it was better to talk than to listen to the jaws snapping all around them. “I’m scared shitless. A lot of people think I don’t ever get scared. Probably you thought that, right?”

The Kid nodded, his big eyes wet.

“Well, I get scared like everybody else. But a lot of people can’t multitask. They get scared and that’s all they can think about is being scared. But what you gotta do is be scared with one hand and get shit done with the other one. Anyway, I’m kind of low on ideas right now, but what we need is a good idea. Then we can be scared and work on the plan at the same time. And if it’s a good plan and it works out, you get less scared because you got something to concentrate on. That’s my secret. I recommend it. But I got no ideas at the present time, so if you do, maybe now would be a good time to start talking again. We need to get those kids on that train out of here.”

The Kid shook his head. Whether he couldn’t talk or didn’t have an idea, he didn’t say.

Danny looked above them. They could see up inside the framing of the steeple, some of which had collapsed. There were two small cupola-style louvered windows up there, one of which was on the side of the main part of the church.

“Okay then,” Danny said, when the clacking started to get to her again. “I’m finding it hard to think with all that noise. What say we see about getting up on the roof? It might be easier to think up there.”

The zeroes continued their endless jaw-snapping. Sometimes the noise would happen to synchronize, the way clapping crowds at a concert would fall into unison; then it was one gigantic pair of jaws, biting the whole world. But it wouldn’t last, and then it became the undifferentiated blanket of crunching noise again.

She was about to lift the Kid up into the framing when the Architect’s voice came up through the empty window.

“Come out,”
he said, and the moment he spoke, the champing teeth stopped.

A quiet deep as the winter followed. Danny’s ears were ringing with the silence.

She squinted out into the predawn darkness and the whirling snow. She
sought the source of the voice in the crowd. Maybe it would still be possible to destroy that undead bastard completely.

“Come out,”
the Architect said again. But amplified. The damn thing had a megaphone. Danny searched the far reaches of the square and thought she saw him: a lone zero perched atop the remains of a pickup truck. Yes, he was holding an electric bullhorn.