Rise Again Below Zero (21 page)

A zero that hadn’t been more than three or four years old when it died followed him right up to the window. Its small, shrunken face was a caricature of human features, with cavernous eye sockets and tiny yellow teeth. A thin, rat-eaten hand scraped at the glass, finger-bones scratching clean tracks through the dried-on blood.

“Let’s get the fuck out of here. I ain’t any good with kids,” Wulf said.

•   •   •

After that, the plan wrote itself. They had a 360 horsepower hemi-equipped vehicle, several gallons of hard liquor, five hundred rounds of mixed ammunition, and a couple of family-size bags of stale Funyuns. Danny drove until near midday, when they found a suitable location: a water tower atop a small hill, overlooking the entire landscape for miles in every direction. There wasn’t much cover there should anything want to attack; there was a tall fence around the tower, which Danny locked behind them with one of the padlock-and-chain combinations she kept at hand in the trunk. If anything wanted to come up the ladder on the leg of the tower, it was going to make a lot of noise and present a perfect head exposure to do so.

The two of them climbed the tower: the old, bearlike man, stinking and weather-beaten, and the young woman with the scars and the ancient green eyes. Then they hauled their supplies up behind them on a rope.

Shortly thereafter, the drinking commenced.

N
either of them had directly said what they had in mind when they started their bender. It wasn’t the sort of thing that bore speaking about.

Danny hadn’t expected Wulf to break ranks with the Tribe, especially in support of anything to do with Kelley. Wulf hated the zeroes on a level that transcended the fact of them. They offended his sense of how the universe should operate. Danny regarded them as dangerous predators, for the most part; the exception was the thinkers, which she considered to be more like human beings than zeroes—meaning they were also more dangerous. No
matter what, though, the real enemy in the world was still bad-hearted living humans.

But when the moment came, Wulf was the one who stepped forward and got Danny out of there, although he hated what Kelley was the most of all. He had left the Tribe, and in so doing probably forfeited his place in it. They had been natural enemies once, the vagrant and the cop; now they were two broke-down veterans of war, punching their way through an ugly world.

•   •   •

They drank the good stuff first: searing, smoke-flavored single malt washed down with an occasional swig of water. They each had their own bottles, and kept working until they drained them. Wulf could drink more than Danny, but she was the best competition he’d ever met.

Danny started to feel the booze after she’d drunk the first bottle down to the top of the label. It was the place she spent a lot of time—nursing a low-level buzz that took the edge off everything but didn’t interfere with what she had to do. She tried to maintain that level of buzz as often as possible; it made her seem more agreeable to others, which was a benefit, but the chief effect was to make others seem more agreeable to her.

Wulf was a third of the way through his bottle. While Danny took small sips at short intervals, he favored massive chugs every ten minutes or so. Danny observed his technique with admiration. She watched the golden bubbles roiling up like jellyfish through the cruel, beautiful liquid, amber and hot to the eye. Six deep swallows and two fingers of the bottle emptied.

She tried that approach, and it damn near killed her. Which was fine. The end game, although neither of them had bothered to articulate it, could include death, if it came to that. Glorious drunken death. She took four massive pulls, filling her throat with whiskey, and it felt like molten lava. It hit her belly like a hammer, but that was secondary; the raw alcohol stripped the skin out of her gullet and set it on fire. The fumes punched the air out of her lungs. She retched and coughed until her eyes sparkled with purple and green fireworks and she was lying on her side. Her eyes streamed and there was snot hanging out of her nose.

Wulf observed this impassively. “You’re doin’ it wrong,” he said, and proceeded to drink another two inches of whiskey out of his bottle with swallows that sounded like marching boots. Then he belched, and Danny thought she could see his whiskers turning to ash in the shock wave. Her head was starting to hurt.

“You in this all the way, Sheriff?” Wulf inquired, fixing her with a ham-colored eyeball. His nose had lit up like a stoplight.

“Cheers,” Danny said, and set to drinking again. It was getting very chilly. Their breath made ostrich plumes around their heads. They shrugged sleeping bags over their shoulders, camo models from the trunk of the interceptor. She used them both for bedding; Kelley hadn’t needed to sleep.

•   •   •

An hour into the binge, Danny was no longer altogether in command of herself. Gravity had ceased to operate on her nervous system; things weighed the same and moved the same, but they didn’t
feel
the same. That was the tricky place where legions of high-school-aged kids got into trouble, back before the end of the world when drunk driving was a matter of concern. Danny’s limbs were filled with what felt like a mixture of helium and elastic; it took skill and experience to move normally, to speak clearly.

The real, hardcore drunk—and Danny felt she could compete in that league—was aware of all the subtle ways that intoxication gave itself away. It was a point of pride not to reveal the effects of alcohol until they were absolutely impossible to ignore: Keep the motions steady, the hands moving accurately, the speech clear and articulate. But any quality drunk knew that
over
articulated speech was a sign of the influence. It had to look natural. You couldn’t allow your movements to become too precise or careful, like a kid trying to operate a coin-operated claw over a heap of stuffed toys to impress his girlfriend.

“You know what the trick is?” Danny said.

“What is it?” Wulf asked, peering at her over the neck of his bottle.

“They jam those fucking stuffed toys in so tight that the claw can’t pull ’em free. It’s a bullshit trick.”

“What in the name of blue-nutted monkey fuck are you speaking of, Sheriff?”

“You know,” Danny said.

“I probably do,” he said, philosophically, and drained his bottle almost to the bottom.

Wulf had now consumed enough alcohol to kill a nondrinker. Danny was about three-fifths of the way through her own bottle, and she knew her time was running out—the alcohol wasn’t all metabolized yet, but when it hit, she would pass out. She needed a leaner mixture, like giving a carburetor more air so the engine didn’t drown in gas. She drank a good measure of water, although her stomach recoiled in horror at the influx of cold liquid.
Wulf breached a bag of Funyuns and dumped them on the metal deck of the water tower; they ate them in greasy handfuls. Then Danny sat back and watched the horizon sway from side to side. The tower seemed to be three hundred kilometers tall. She had to cling to the railing. But it felt good. If she didn’t puke, she was right in the sweet spot.

“Sheriff, you and me known each other a while. I used to think you were a cunt, but I changed my mind a long time back. You got the right stuff.”

“That’s right decent of you, Wolfman,” Danny said, struggling to form the words. “I always thought you were a walking pile of ass. I was right.”

They both laughed about this until Danny threw up in her mouth. She ate some more Funyuns and drank more water. “Got to pace myself,” she remarked.

“Anyways,” Wulf said, “I brung something special because I ain’t going back to that pack of helpless assholes. So I brung it with me, and I want to raise a fuckin’ toast to your sister, God rest her soul, if any. Viola,” he concluded, and pulled a very special bottle out of his filthy jacket. It smelled like polecats, but the label said it was French.

“Wine?” Danny said. She didn’t know a thing about wine. She drank for effect. Wine had too much water in it. Inefficient for her purposes.

“This ain’t fuckin’
wine,
Sheriff. Found this particular artifact a couple months ago when we went through Utah. It’s Château Lafite fuckin’ Rothschild. This right here”—now he peered at the label, as if to verify it hadn’t been swapped with an inferior bottle—“is a 1959 Pauillac, at the peak of its fuckin’ powers. You will never set your heathen lips to anything as good as this. It ain’t the ’89, but this stuff tastes like a cherry orchard in a mountain forest on a warm summer day. Got a finish on it sixty feet long. I ain’t a hunnerd percent sure you’re worthy of this thing, but it’s now or never. You suffered a grievous loss yesterday. I only wish we didn’t have to drink it out of the goddamn bottle.”

Wulf insisted they rinse their mouths out. They swished and spat water at the ground far below, in long glittering streams; Danny vomited and had to wash her mouth out again. The fanfare Wulf lavished on this bottle made her feel like she was on a first date. He examined the label gravely, speaking with reverence, like a lover, like a priest. He had to enunciate very slowly in order to be understood; his tongue was thick with the whiskey.

“This here bottle used to retail for about fifteen hundred bucks. You can pay more for wine, but it ain’t easy to get more out of a bottle. It’s about 90 percent cab-sauv with a little merlot, if I recall arightly. Them’s the grape varietals. It don’t fuckin’ matter. Hell. You got a corkscrew?”

Danny did, as a matter of fact, have a corkscrew, on her utility belt. The cork was dry as leather at the top and crumbled like red velvet cake at the bottom, but Wulf took a whiff and declared the wine had survived the decades in perfect condition. He handed the bottle to her.

“First pull is yours, Sheriff.”

Danny took the bottle, smelled the liquid inside. It had an intense aroma like evergreens, flowers, and fruit. There was something almost like a cigar to it. She regretted they hadn’t started with this stuff, but what the hell. The old man probably hadn’t intended to share it at all.

“Wolfman, how come you know about wine?”

“Used to have a life.”

“I didn’t even know you could drive.”

“There’s all kinds of shit you don’t know about me, Sheriff. And I guess there’s all kinds of shit I don’t know about you. I know one thing, though. You finally lost that sister of yours for good.”

Danny’s fingers tightened around the neck of the bottle. This was the subject she was hoping to avoid.

“What do you think about that?” she said, after the silence had gotten too long.

“I think you lost her the one time and you kind of half got her back, and you tried to make that work on account of you were a shitty sister and a half-assed guardian when she was alive and you wasn’t there when she needed you. That’s why she run off. And now she’s gone for good and you must have a hole in your heart about the size of a fuckin’ elephant. Take a swig.”

The wine tasted to Danny like sour milk and raisins, but she liked the velvety feeling of it on her tongue. They drank the entire bottle in short order, and spoke little.

After that, they drank whatever came to hand—vodka, tequila, rum. Danny lost touch with the world; the sun was starting to go down when consciousness fell away and she entered the universe of the profoundly drunk. She walked carefully around the perimeter of the water tower on legs made out of marshmallow, clinging to the railing as if there was a storm at sea and her on a small ship on the bosom of the water. She vomited again, more than once, spilling alcoholic bile over the side. Wulf was singing songs from his youth, the kind of stuff Danny considered oldies. His voice sounded like a hacksaw cutting through an anchor rope.

She remembered how she used to drink when she was in the service,
hard like this, on leave with her buddies Harlan and the others in San Diego, drinking for nights on end, cheap tequila and beer, drinking dirty-sweet tamarindo when it wasn’t time for beer, say, before 9:00 a.m. . . . she and the crew were so drunk for so long that at least twice on leave she never made it up to Forest Peak to see Kelley, who was living with people who were relative strangers to Danny. But now with the water tower at her back and the ruined world far below, she was so drunk that instead of feeling the sorrow of the memory, she saluted it on the way by, acknowledging the pain like a veteran at a parade, no longer a part of the machine, no longer invested, but intimate with it from indelible experience.

She and Wulf entered the holy state of drunkenness in which wisdom and nonsense become one, up and down ran forever sideways, and the motion of the planets and sun and universe could be detected merely by standing still. There was a roaring in Danny’s ears like the ocean or a thousand-tongued laughing god, or the wind of cosmic wings; she felt no pain, no grief, nothing but drunk. The tortured self, whoever that was, she could see from above and below and knew it for what it was, a selfish illusion, the purpose of which was to keep her from savoring life. Life, which tasted like scotch and beer and wine, all the wet fire and dim light of it, burning, the fire that splashed and leaped, the liquid flame.