Rise Again Below Zero (6 page)

They drove through the night, reaching the truck stop as the moon was emerging cold and hard above the distant hills.

•   •   •

It was one of those vast plazas of asphalt and concrete designed to get hundreds of vehicles and their passengers refueled and back on the road all at once, day and night. There must have been fifty gas pumps under a gigantic gullwing roof mounted on posts. At the center of the plaza was a sprawling collection of ransacked fast food restaurants and souvenir shops. They were surrounded by abandoned vehicles, mostly big rigs. There wasn’t much left to forage for. But the Tribe wasn’t looking for materiel, except fuel. Someday soon, all the gasoline would go bad—phase separation, contamination, and especially water getting into the ethanol-laced stuff. Gas had been around five bucks a gallon when the end came. Now it was priceless—and free of charge, if you had a siphon pump and a lookout watching for zeroes.

Besides gasoline, if there was any, what they needed most was a good place to wait a couple of days while the scouts went the long way around to find a route to the east. These big truck stop plazas were excellent for holing up as they were generally fenced on three sides and the acres of pavement around them meant zeroes couldn’t attack from places of concealment.
Nice field of fire, head-to-toe beaten zone, and three-way enfilade potential,
as Danny had once described them. In better times it would have been lit up like the sun at night; now it was dark and full of black shadows that glittered with broken glass.

As the first vehicles in the convoy arrived, a flare went up from the foremost; men and women spilled out of the others with flashlights, dogs, and guns, reconnoitering every corner of the place beneath the wobbling red light of the flare. They looked inside the looted truck trailers, checked all the cars, team-cleared the restaurants and shops, and kicked all two hundred of the restroom stall doors open. They searched the overgrown landscaping and made a circuit of the fence. All clear. No living, and no undead. Danny had taught them the system, and it kept them alive, so they stuck to it.

A heap of mangled hunter corpses piled up among some abandoned big rigs suggested the place had been defended in the recent past—so maybe the local superpredators had been wiped out. The Tribe’s dogs, mostly Shepherds, barked furiously at the remains. They had to be pulled off. It was Tribe custom to burn the corpses of the dead and undead alike, but
most other groups weren’t that organized—or didn’t care. They would burn these ones in the morning. As an extra precaution, there were double watches posted on all sides of the perimeter.

Danny sent a team of lookouts five kilometers back down the interstate; they took the truck with the bucket lift. They’d spend the night in shifts at the top of the crane arm, watching in case the Vandal Reaper gang approached. The bucket was retrofitted with a .50 caliber machine gun, but they weren’t expected to fight. In practice, the heavy weapon made the crane oscillate so violently it was useless, anyway.

Then she walked through the tall grass beyond the fence with Kelley, making a long, slow circuit of the plaza. Set the smell of a thinker out there like a moat. They’d do it again in the wee hours to make sure no expeditious corpses got too close.

In half an hour, the plaza was occupied, secured, and the Tribe was moved in. It was their equivalent of 1700 hours: quitting time, but not yet bedtime. In fact, it was 1:20 in the morning.

•   •   •

“Can we have a quick talk?” Danny muttered to Patrick on her way back from the circuit. He was headed toward the White Whale with food for some of the kids; there was a DVD presentation of several early
Ren & Stimpy
episodes on the TV in there, to keep the little ones out from underfoot a while.

“Ten minutes,” he said.

Danny was at loose ends. Sometimes there wasn’t anything to do, despite all that needed to be done. This was one of those moments. She watched the Tribe assemble its fires and begin meal preparations. There was young Michele, and beside her as always her brother Jimmy James, who was shooting up tall all of a sudden; they attached themselves in a general way to Maria, the radio operator, who had lost her husband in Forest Peak.

Danny remembered Michele as a blue-haired girl in deep shock when they’d first met. Now she came off as a grown woman, although she probably wasn’t sixteen yet. Danny didn’t remember her true age. A similar evolution had happened with Kelley, although Danny hadn’t been around for that part of her life. She turned and squinted out into the darkness beyond the pavement where Kelly stood beside the interceptor, motionless except for the rippling of the muumuu in the light breeze. Kelley’s head was tilted back; she was smelling the air.

Then Patrick was back, cleaning between his fingers with a dish towel.

“What’s up?”

“You and that guy Beowulf . . .” she began, but realized she didn’t know what the question was.

“So you want to talk about my old boyfriends.”

“I got something on my mind,” Danny said. “I can’t—”

“Are you feeling inarticulate?”

“Yes.”

“What’s it about? I mean name names, and we can put it together.”

“Kelley.”

“Inevitably,” Patrick said, as if he’d seen this one coming a long time.

“It’s not like you think,” Danny hurried to add, although she didn’t know what he thought. “It’s just—well. I took her out for a feed tonight. She . . . I need you to keep this a secret.”

“I have never betrayed a confidence,” Patrick said, stiffening his back. “Otherwise I wouldn’t have scored as much as I did in my twenties.”

“I’m not talking about sex. I’m talking life and death maybe. See, I saw her with somebody. You know we go off on feeding trips. I’m not there the whole time. I leave her alone. Tonight I ran across that biker gang and came back early to pick her up . . . And I saw somebody. Something.”

“A person?”

“A thinker.
Another
thinker. They . . . they talked.”

Danny felt as if she’d jumped off a cliff. Patrick had every right to run up and down through the plaza shouting this news, if he wanted to. But he wouldn’t. Only Patrick. Even Amy might blab. This man had the instinct for discretion.

“Holy fucking shit,” Patrick said. “I mean, holy fucking leaping shit.” His hands went to his mouth, covered it like an injury.

“That’s what I said. You can’t tell
anybody
. Not yet. Maybe never. I have to find out what it means first.”

“What it means is they’re hanging out,” Patrick said. “It means—I don’t know what it means. Were they like passing a joint back and forth or anything? Dancing? I mean what do thinkers do when they meet?”

“I just saw it for a second. She doesn’t deny it. She doesn’t even seem to think it’s a big deal.”

“Maybe it isn’t.”

“Maybe. There’s stuff she didn’t tell me.”

“As long as nothing happens, it’s all good. But Danny? Why did you tell me about this?”

She looked around them, as if the whole Tribe was listening in. In fact, they could not have been more perfectly ignored. There was food and heat and bedding to think about. Nobody cared what the sheriff and her old buddy were whispering about in the shadows.

“First off, because you talk plenty, but you don’t tell. And I needed to tell somebody.”

“Yeah, but you mentioned Beowulf. Why?”

“That’s the thing,” Danny said. She was struggling so much with words. Her mind wasn’t geared for this kind of abstract thinking. “I . . . I thought after you lost that guy Weaver in the early days, you’d never find anybody else. You were real busted up over it. But then you found Beowulf. And you guys were like really tight. I mean I guess in love, right?”

“Yes.”

“And then a few months ago, you kind of stopped talking to each other.”

“Yes.”

“Were you
really
in love? Like, I want to spend the rest of my life with you?”

“Believe it or not, Danny, even homosexuals can experience the full gamut of human emotions,” Patrick said, a little stung. “God, you’re so un-reformed in so many ways.”

“I didn’t mean it like that. You guys were supertight and then you broke up. And he left the Tribe.”

“Yep,” Patrick said, tight-lipped. Danny realized his eyes were getting wet. It still hurt to think about. That erased any doubts she had about the extent of his feelings. “What does my failed relationship have to do with Kelley?”

Suddenly, Danny found the words.

“I’m wondering if me and Kelley are meant to be together anymore. I did right by her. I did my best. I
found
her. Now the two of us sit together all day like one of those old married couples and there ain’t shit between us.”

“Ah.”

“And I’ll tell you what. You know how it felt when I saw that other one there? That other thinker? It felt like I caught her cheating.”

“Danny,” Patrick said, and took her two-fingered hand in both of his. “Listen to me. Even after the end of the world, with humankind in ruins and zombies everywhere, people can still find love. I think that’s awesome. But if we didn’t fall
out
of love, too, we wouldn’t really be people anymore.
I don’t know what Kelley’s up to, but you’re just doing the hard work of being a fucked-up human being.”

•   •   •

Mike Patterson sat on the Courtesy Bus and waited to find out what was going to happen to him. He’d been shackled to a pole since his capture, largely ignored except when people paused outside the shuttle to give him dirty looks. The three other survivors who had ridden with the convoy for several days had decided to take their chances on foot again, staying behind after a quick pit stop to replace a tire on one of the trucks. They had been unnerved by the hatred coming in through the shuttle windows, even if it wasn’t aimed exactly at them.

So now Mike was alone.

He’d been able to listen to the driver singing tolerably well in her chicken wire booth, but now that the convoy had stopped, she was somewhere else, probably eating. He felt like a goldfish in a tank: The interior fluorescent fixtures remained on, so he was flooded with baleful green light while the rest of the world was in darkness. He had to pee something wicked. He was hungry. And he stank. Everybody stank, of course, but the sheer terror of having that wild redheaded woman come after him, driving like a demon, charging him, and then him believing she was going to kill him on the spot—he’d gone into perspiration overdrive. His armpits smelled like an electrical fire in an onion factory.

Most of all, Mike wished he could explain himself, or better yet, excuse himself and get the hell out of there. His first impressions of the Tribe were not positive. A lot of hard, unforgiving faces. These people took their cues from the top, and consequently they all displayed a little of the sheriff’s badass swagger. After his capture he’d listened to them demanding he be executed to make an example for others who came along that road, and he’d tried to think of what to say that might cause them to spare his life. He’d tried to explain how there was a safe place only a few days to the east, a safe place where they could live themselves, and send the children somewhere even safer. They’d called him ugly names. Then the sheriff had reasserted command of the situation, marked him as hers to decide on, as surely as a panther marks its prey. Since then there had only been the mean stares.

The folding doors bumped open. Mike flinched. He’d been lost in thought; it was like waking up suddenly. For a long moment nobody came up the steps of the bus, and he wondered if someone was playing a trick on
him. Then a small head peeked around the kick panel between the seats at the bus entry. It was that kid the bikers had brought back earlier in the day. Despite his nerves, Mike could relish the irony. If he’d kept on driving a while instead of making a run on the convoy, he might have seen this kid himself. And he could have taken him away, penalty-free. Nobody would ever doubt he was doing something good-hearted, in fact, even if it did happen to get Mike himself to safety as well. Instead he’d tried to grab one of the Tribe’s kids and now he was on two hundred shit lists.

The dark humor of the thing evaporated when Mike realized what must be happening. The kid aboard the shuttle was a decoy. They were going to set him up and kill him, using the boy as an excuse. Mike turned his eyes firmly away—there wasn’t anything else he could do, chained up as he was. He kept his eyes fixed on his own reflection in the back window, a steely outline filled in by darkness.

The boy didn’t say anything. Mike had heard him referred to by some of the others as the Silent Kid, so this wasn’t a surprise. But he could see the child advancing down the aisle behind him in the reflection. And
through
the reflection he could see the light of the shuttle falling on faces outside, watching at a distance. Angry, flat eyes and thin-set mouths. They were watching to see what happened. Maybe they considered this kid to be expendable. What did they think, that he was one of those child-cannibals or something?

The kid stopped two rows of seats away and stared at Mike. His small dog came along behind him but stayed well away from the stranger, preferring to shiver and flex his ears up and down in an anxious manner. Mike stared at the reflection, which the kid didn’t seem to notice. They stayed like that for a long time, until Mike felt a serpent of icy sweat running down his neck.

Then a singsong voice cried out, “There you are!”

A moment later the Tribe’s Dr. Amy came bustling aboard, followed by the blond man, Patrick, whose face looked like it had been pretty badly smashed at some point. The thick features didn’t match his willowy build. He was missing some teeth. The Silent Kid turned to look at them, but Mike kept his eyes averted. This could all be part of their sting operation.

“Hey, kidnapper guy. Did anybody feed you yet?” Amy continued. Mike had met her when she’d splinted his foot shortly after his capture; it hurt abominably but she’d done a good job of immobilizing it, so the pain was more of a dull roar than a series of sharp crescendos.