Rise Again Below Zero (47 page)

Danny and Lashawna watched from the doorway of the shed as a pair of sentinels climbed out of the pickup; another emerged from the cab of the wood-chipping truck, which was of the commercial type, like a big orange-painted garbage truck. The three of them off-loaded the corpses; then the
one from the cab returned and started the chipping mechanism, which roared and coughed smoke. Then the three of them unceremoniously tossed the corpses into the chipper. The steady rattle of the motor went shrill and staccato as the bodies were torn to pulp. Once the unit was powered down, the sentinels rolled the Dumpster to the back of the truck; then the operator tipped the entire cargo bed back on its hydraulics and a slurry of black muck slurped into the Dumpster.

“That’s the system,” Lashawna said. “It’s obviously pretty nasty, but it works.”

“And this would work anywhere? To keep the moaners out?”

“Oh, sure, I guess,” Lashawna said, sounding entirely unsure.

“Amazing,” Danny said. There was nothing more to learn here. She’d politely (or impolitely) watched the show put on for the visiting dignitary; none of them suspected, as far as she could tell, that she’d discovered how they
really
kept the perimeter zero-proofed. Everything was going according to the Architect’s plan. And Danny had gotten what she needed to know: On her walk from town she’d seen the barricaded turn-off road that led around the mountain to the resort. She’d seen how big the safe zone around town was. She’d seen how close to the perimeter the moaners came, and that there were a lot of them out there waiting for a breach in the line.

Happy Town was one small fuck-up from disaster, and there were fifty fuck-ups waiting to happen.

Maybe the Risen Flesh didn’t know it, but the Architect certainly did, or he wouldn’t be rushing to get the escape train ready: This little safe place was almost out of borrowed time.

•   •   •

It was getting dark, later than she’d intended, when Danny got into a truck with Lashawna, with one of the sentinels riding in back; the sentinel got down a kilometer outside Happy Town, and Lashawna stopped a couple of hundred meters from the front gates.

“I can’t come any closer, because of . . . you know,” she said.

“Yeah, I sure do,” Danny said, cruelly. Her mean streak was getting worse, she thought. But she could not hide her contempt for these creatures who had given up their humanity so cheaply, who had allied themselves with their mortal enemies. Lashawna was a vulnerable, very sick, terribly deformed woman whose future was even bleaker than that of the living who were doomed to be devoured alive. But she was also a collaborator,
a traitor not just to her species, but to everything with a pulse in its veins. If Danny had found an opportunity, she would have destroyed her companion without hesitation.

“I gotta piss,” she said, by way of farewell, and left Lashawna to her unhappy fate. Then she limped toward the nearby burial cairn and out of sight of the town gate. The truck drove away into the badlands.

Danny glanced back to make sure she wasn’t observed, then crouched down and circled the pile of stones, her heart accelerating into her throat. If the pack wasn’t there—but it was. She saw it propped among the stones at the base of the pile, the black nylon camouflaged with a few handfuls of dirt. She opened the combination lock and checked the contents. All there. She almost missed the note tucked into the handle, as it had slipped to the ground, but paper litter was rare in those days. It caught her eye. She read the note twice.

Then she headed back up the wash, backpack slung over her shoulder as if she’d had it with her the entire time. The feigned limp was gone, no longer required. She passed through the gates as they were laboriously shoved open by the guards. Nobody spared the pack a glance.

Her course of action was perfectly clear, now. Her resolve was set. She might have remained undecided, except for the contents of the last bucket she’d looked into during the unauthorized part of her reconnaissance. It was just another severed head with its bare teeth and rolling eyeballs, except Danny knew the face, because it was fresh and the features were unmarked by decay. It had once belonged to one of her finest scouts. Ernie—who was also Topper’s best friend. Even then, she might have found some way to reconcile herself to the savage frontier justice of these people.

Except there was no question in her mind that Ernie’s still-animated eyes had looked up into her face—and recognized her.

•   •   •

The twilight was rearing up under the snow-pregnant sky, darkening the world. Danny was planning her next move, watching the light die. A couple of guards regarded her from their shed next to the gate; a light came on inside and Danny got a glimpse of a cook stove and a couple of cots before one of the men closed the door. Then headlights winked through the gloaming up near the center of town and a security van came tearing down the street toward her. It scraped to a halt and Cad Broker jumped out, scooping his arms at her:

“We have a situation. Get in the van. Now.”

Danny heard a distant roil of voices that she had previously thought were crows. There was gunfire that echoed and clattered against the mountain. She sprinted forward and jumped into the van after Cad.

“T
here’s a fight,” Cad said. He was out of breath, and his wheezing for air sounded like the Architect or the Risen Flesh. Danny clung to the grab handle in the ceiling as the van rocked around corners. There were three guards with them, and they weren’t there to keep an eye on Danny. They were looking through the windows, fingers hooked around the triggers of their weapons. Amateurs. One good speed bump and they’d shoot up the van.

A couple of blocks into Main Street they stopped and the guards piled out.

“Somebody give me a sidearm,” Danny said, and nobody did. So she opened the van driver’s door and held out her good hand. The driver looked at Cad, who nodded, and then he slapped an automatic into her palm.

There was smoke rising up from the area around the Civil War statue. Searchlights roamed over the gathered heads, but didn’t know what target they sought. It had the look of a rock concert. A mob of people blocked the view down the street; fists and sticks and bottles raised overhead reminded Danny of all the riots she’d seen in the war zones before the fall of civilization. She dropped the clip and counted the rounds. Nine. The ammo was mismatched, from three different manufacturers. There was a muffled
bang
and a puff of black smoke rose over the crowd. People screamed.

The asphalt and the sky were the same color. It was dark now. Felt like snow. These thoughts flitted through Danny’s head as they always did when there was a battle ahead. Occupy the mind, distract it with trivia, keep it away from the fear and anger that would come when the fight was on. As the seconds ticked past she expected the fight to break up. But it appeared to be escalating.

Glass broke. There was another
bang
.

“I’m going to see what’s happening,” Danny said. “This entire fucking town is on the edge of collapse. You know that, right?”

Cad nodded. He was scared shitless, Danny saw. He must know how short his remaining days would be if the Architect fell out of power. People must have known there was something alien about him. Some must know about the infection. Word would travel. He’d find himself in one of those stinking buckets out there in the badlands.

She thought of all the people crammed into their little shops and apartments cowering in the dark, and the kids in the warehouse hearing all the noise, probably descending into terror. It was time. The Architect was right: She needed to act immediately. But after what she’d seen out in the badlands, he wasn’t going to like what she’d decided to do. He was going first.

Danny strode toward the back of the crowd, then when she was among the most timid of the rear guard, she got up on a wrought-iron bench and looked over the heads in front of her. There on the ground by the statue was an acolyte, dark blood flowing out of his head. He was dead for real, not only half-dead. A couple of the blaze-vested guards were carrying one of their fellows to the back through the crowd on that side of the street. He didn’t show any outward injuries, but his face was fish-belly white. He didn’t look good. Then a brick sailed through the air and clipped one of the men carrying him. He tumbled to the ground and the stunned guard fell across the wounded man.

A syncopated refrain of gunfire crackled out, and now people were running. The shots had been fired into the air, Danny thought, but she still jumped down off her perch. People were stampeding. Then a second wave of gunfire broke out, and now several panes of glass in the Architect’s upstairs office shattered. There were gunmen inside the church, shooting across the square. Several young men with rags tied around their lower faces rushed out of a building on the third side of the square—the same building Danny had seen the refugees running from on her first fateful night in Happy Town. They were carrying Molotov cocktails, several each. The one in front used a lighter to set fire to an old flannel shirt, dropping it on the pavement, and the others dipped their improvised missiles into the red flames. Now the crowd was panicking two ways—gunfire and fire itself sent them in all directions. The silhouettes of the people in the crowd
looked like shadow puppets. A path was opening up in the direction of the bank building.

The military training that ran Danny’s waking life kicked in and she found herself drawing a bead on the young man who had set the shirt on fire. She could knock him down with a single easy shot. She hesitated. Take him out for the safety of the people around him, sure. And then she would have publicly chosen sides. She’d be in the fight, and whatever happened after that she could not shape events to achieve her goals. The Silent Kid wasn’t going to jump into her arms again just because she shot some asshole with a Fanta bottle full of gasoline. She lowered the weapon and waited as he threw the blazing vessel in a high arc at the bank. It didn’t even come close. One of the guards had to beat the flames out of his pants leg; otherwise all that was accomplished was a sooty fire in the middle of the road.

Danny moved. She got low and hustled toward the bank in a zigzag that would take her to the side farthest from the main street, where the vestigial ATM machine was. Her course of action was simple: use her VIP status to claim she was joining the defense of the bank, get upstairs, destroy the Architect. She’d have to wing that part, because they couldn’t know it was her who did it—not until she’d used the ensuing excitement as cover to get to the Risen Flesh. This whole thing could be over inside half an hour.

As Danny hustled toward the bank, another guard shot the bomb-thrower. He went down heavily, strings cut. A hail of flaming bottles followed a second later from his companions, and then they were scattering into the crowd with the rest, covered by the blooming garden of flames leaping up in the town square. A couple of bystanders didn’t move fast enough and were engulfed in flames. Danny got to the porch of the bank and immediately found two automatic rifles pressed into her face. She tucked her pistol in her waistband and showed them her hands, identified herself. The guards were so wound up she felt the real possibility of getting her head blown off. She hadn’t expected it, but these men were not as panicked by the action in the street as typical civilians would be. They could be ex-military, or mercenaries from an outfit like Blackstone or Xie. She calculated the odds of killing the Architect were still pretty good; she could argue her way up to him, at least.

But there was no chance she’d get away alive once the job was done.
And that was an important part of the plan. It was no good destroying one of these things if the other one was still around.

•   •   •

The crowd dispersed once the guards built up a solid cordon around the town center. A van pulled up and the wounded cocktail-thrower was dragged aboard. Half a dozen civilians had been injured badly enough so they had to be carried, but no others were picked up by the guards; the rest were borne away by their allies, leaving pools of blood to jelly up on the cold ground. The burn victims left under their own power, although Danny knew it was only shock. Once the blackened flesh started to crack off and reveal the white fat beneath, they wouldn’t be moving around. Not for a few months. The gasoline fires in the street went out on their own once the fuel ran out, leaving carbon scars and bubbling asphalt and darkness behind.

By then, Danny had herself dispersed; Cad had told the guards she was on their side, the guns had been lowered, and Danny had taken the opportunity to do her best “pissed-off superior officer” face at them. But her thoughts were on something else: the scouts. They would probably meet heavy armed resistance to their feint at the Happy Town gates. It wasn’t going to be as straightforward as it would have been only a few hours earlier. But that kind of diversion was ideal for Danny’s purpose. Draw the firepower away from the church and the bank. Get security’s backs turned, then use her apparent insider status to slip inside and do the dirty work.