Rise Again Below Zero (55 page)

“Fuck you,” Danny suggested, her voice cracked and hoarse.

“You know that you cannot survive,”
the bullhorn said, in that flat, disinterested way of the undead.
“You will be eaten alive or you will die of thirst. Come out.”

“Clear your zombies out and I’ll do that,” Danny replied. She doubted the thing could hear her, her voice was so ruined. But the silence was so complete it must have carried, because the zero replied:

“
They will not attack you. Bring the child. The law is one child, one life.”

“Like hell I will.”

“One child, one life. Or we burn the church down.”

T
he walk out of the church taught Danny there was no limit to terror, no maximum fear. It could always get worse.

She went down first, pulling a rafter free in order to make her way hand-over-hand down to the ground level. The zeroes stood there, packed together like sides of rotten beef in a deep freeze. They didn’t part to let Danny through. She held a grenade in her teeth. If anything happened, she would grab the Kid and pull the pin. This wasn’t a fight that could be won. And while the Kid still lived, there was still a chance she could prevail.

But the zeroes honored the truce. She saw peeling black tongues rolling around in cancerous mouths, heard them snuffling the air to smell her scent. But they didn’t attack. Their fear of the thinkers was too great, or their loyalty. Whatever it was, the influence held.

Danny had never been this close to the undead without violence, except for Kelley, who somehow wasn’t the same. These were the stupid, nobody kind, the sharks. Even in the twilight of undeath, Kelley had been
someone
.

She pushed the grenade up the sleeve of her jacket. “It’s your choice,” Danny said to the Kid, when she was still alive after thirty seconds on the ground floor.

The Silent Kid came down. He was weeping, shaking like there was an earthquake only he could feel. But he came down. Danny put her arm around him, drew him in as tight as she could. They started walking.

Now the zeroes parted before them, a bubble of space following their progress through the crowd. Danny was limping; she had to transfer some of her weight onto the Kid. She felt insanity—real madness—clawing at her mind. It was too much to bear. Every face was more hideous than the last, every body more misshapen, the human frame twisted by devils into every imaginable distortion. The stench of burned and rotten flesh was overwhelming, and yet there were notes of decaying hair, of shit and urine, foul teeth, ruptured bellies. A thing with a translucent membrane for a head, filled with what looked like worms, touched the Silent Kid’s hair in an almost tender gesture. Everywhere there was exposed bone, seething with insects despite the cold, and entrails hung in blackened swags. Danny abruptly vomited thin bile on skeletal feet held together only by scraps of rawhide skin. The Silent Kid threw up as well, but into his hands, as if he was trying not to discomfit anybody near him. She spat on one of the zombies to clear her mouth; it moaned faintly with desire.

“Listen, Kid? You heard what the zero said. One child, one life. I know what you must be thinking: I’m handing you over to save my own ass. But I’m not. I got something in this backpack he doesn’t know about. I got one more move that might get your skinny ass out of trouble.”

The Kid didn’t respond. But he was gripping Danny’s mutilated hand in his own vomit-slick fingers, and she understood he was so frightened he would cling to her even if she attacked him herself.

“So here’s the deal. That zero up ahead, I was going to kill his enemy for him and then when he came around to congratulate me, I was going to kill him, too. And like always, I was too goddamned late. So he collected all the kids in that train. The last one is you. Then he’ll stop up at the resort and get the rest. After that he’s going to choo-choo the fuck out of here and eat you all one at a time. Right? That’s what this means. I hope I’m not upsetting you.”

The Architect was working from Adolf Hitler’s playbook, except he wasn’t using his prisoners as free labor.

This was a buffet.

Danny and the Kid were halfway through the stinking undead to the pickup truck. She could see the thinker with the bullhorn up ahead on top of the vehicle. They’d be within earshot soon. One of the things with no face stumbled across their path; the Kid made a noise of horror and pressed himself behind Danny. She let the thing stumble by. It had nothing atop its neck except an egg-cup of skull supporting what must have been the hind brain, the medulla and cerebellum. One ear still clung to a spar of bone that jutted up above the ruined flesh. It was effectively headless.

Danny felt the madness coming again, the desire to stop and be done and die. But the part of her that planned and schemed was putting things together. She thought, if this somehow wasn’t a trap, if they weren’t torn to pieces in the next couple of minutes, that she might yet save the Kid. But it would be a long shot, and there were more variables than even the worst plan ought to have.

“Listen good, okay?” she whispered. “You’ll be safe on the train, okay? For a while. I think that’s true. Maybe a couple of days or more. Not too near here. And here’s what’s going to happen. If I get out of here alive, I’m going to score some wheels and follow the train. I’m going to head it off at the pass and fuck things up.”

They were close. She could see the thinker watching them, his shattered face a bloodless mess of anatomical detail, the socket where his arm should have been catching the firelight. She dropped her voice even lower, speaking directly into the Silent Kid’s ear.

“I promise, if I am alive, I will come for you.”

Rough claws fell upon them, and there were hunters pushing through the crowd of moaners, making way, taking charge like palace guards. They were salivating freely over their leathery chins, long teeth wet.

“Do you understand?” Danny said, as the monsters pulled her away from the Kid.

“Yes,” the Silent Kid replied.

And then he was dragged out of view into the swarm.

•   •   •

“You killed many. You destroyed the town,” the Architect said. Danny limped beside him, every step a penance for her sins. None of this could be happening. She was among the zeroes and there was order, security, and discipline. She didn’t know it was possible. But the moaners parted well ahead of them, almost cringing, clearing the way; the hunters were like dogs, patrolling along the edges of the mob. They hissed and snarled
the moaners into compliance. Danny wondered if there was some instinct for fear being awakened in the things, which otherwise seemed to fear nothing.

“They fucked up and killed themselves,” Danny said. “If you had waited another ten minutes, I would have blown up that asshole on the cross.”

“You’re not reliable, Sheriff. I eventually realized you would try to kill me, too.”

“That’s true . . . so why am I still alive?” Danny couldn’t see why the Architect hadn’t attacked her yet.

“That’s the right question. You are still alive because you have ruined my body. I want you to know what eternity feels like. From now on to the end of your little life, you are marked. No unliving creature will harm you, not the stupidest nor the most cunning.”

“Bullshit. These things will take me down the minute I’m out of sight of you.”

“You’ll see. You have upon you the mark of Cain. That’s why they didn’t kill you at the train, when everyone else was destroyed. You shall live on and on while all around you die.”

“Then why did they attack me in the church?”

“I hadn’t reached them yet.”

Danny rejected the idea. It was too elegant. Too damn clever for this gristly creature to pull off. But still, she wasn’t dead yet. It might even be true.

“Why are we talking? I don’t talk to you fuckers. If that Kid dies, if you harm him—”

“He will be safe. He will reach the destination.”

“And then?”

“And then you will spend the rest of your life wondering. I hope that you live forever.”

They hobbled down the street in silence. Danny’s head was flaring with pain now, a series of crescendos that threatened to expand into another blackout at any moment, but she forced her legs to move, limping heavily. There was still a single, slender chance for the Kid—and by extension, the rest of the children, too.

They reached the margin of town and the zero swarm was much thinner here. She might be able to run for it soon, although the hunters would come after her fast as wolves. But she couldn’t run at all, if she was honest about it.

“Good-bye, Sister of the Dead,” the Architect said.

“My sister was different,” Danny said, and hatred bubbled up inside her like hot coal tar. “She came back and she still had something inside her. She wasn’t just a shell like you.”

•   •   •

The Architect stood at the edge of a parking lot in front of what had once been the local supermarket, the last structure inside the fence. Behind it was an army of the undead, hunters first, forming a hunched, eager rank, then the mass of the swarm behind them, pressing forward, the control of the more capable zeroes barely enough to stop them rushing at the retreating prey.

Danny stood a few yards into the parking lot, blood trickling into her boot. “Find a working vehicle and leave? That’s it?”

“That is all,” the zero said. “Enjoy what’s left of your life. Everybody you know will either join us or die, but you”—here he ran out of breath and had to reinflate his lungs—“
you
alone,
will never be eaten by our kind. You are tainted meat. All shall die or serve us, and you shall look on in despair, shunned by every kind, even your own.”

“Is that all you got?”

“No,” the Architect said, and for the first time, smiled. It looked like real pleasure, at least on the side of his mouth that wasn’t a ruptured mass of tissue. His one eye even sparkled. At that moment Danny realized he was almost more human than she was—she couldn’t feel happiness. He could.

“There’s more,” he continued. “When you die, you will come back. The virus is in you. And you will probably mutate, as so many of the new ones do. And you will still be shunned by the unliving. You will have eternal unlife, alone. Purgatory. Beyond hell.”

Danny stared at her terrifically mutilated enemy and wondered: Would it be worse to go through eternity with a wrecked corpse or to be alone forever? That determined which of them won. And then she thought how strange it was to be trying to decide who won on points—or who won at all. If the Architect yet lived, Danny had lost forever. Her own death was of no consequence because it was already inevitable. Only the Architect had something to lose.

Danny turned around and walked away without saying a word. If she had seen what was left of the Architect’s face, the smile crumpling to twisted fury that leaked black serum, she would have known that in that moment, after all, she had won.

But he had one more thing to say.

“I ate your friend Topper. Chewed real slow.”

Danny turned back. A sheet of fury swept through her like the wing of some great ghost-bird. But then it was gone, wheeling through space. She did not question that the Architect had done what he said. It wasn’t enough to stick a grenade down his pants now. She needed to make his brief reign in the world an absolute failure.

She hobbled across the parking lot, ankle deep in blood-speckled snow, looking into vehicle windows until she found a Chevy truck with the keys in the ignition. It took a while to start; the battery wasn’t much use. But eventually it caught and choked and spluttered and ran. Danny looked back through the cloud of blue exhaust smoke, expecting to see the undead rushing at her. But they continued to stand at the edge of town, silent and waiting.

She drove away out of the accursed place, and saw a number of human corpses—the honest dead, red-blooded and still—those who had fled Happy Town during the attack, only to die within sight of the gates. Over many of them crouched gorging corpses, their throats stuffed with meat.

D
anny drove directly away from Happy Town until she was out of sight of any watching eyes. There were scenes of horror still unfolding in the badlands to her left and right, visible in the faint light of dawn, like gray velvet; she didn’t take her eyes off the road. There were wounded people crawling across the hard ground with the undead tearing the flesh from their limbs, some juggling their own steaming entrails as they tried to get away from their rotting pursuers, broken and sightless people stumbling to destruction. The undead moved with energy, but they were in no better condition, many of them stripped of skin, burned, shattered like dolls, yet still pursuing, still hungry. The uncanny discipline of the creatures within the city ended at the gates.