Rise Again (51 page)

Patrick counted off on his fingers: “Topper and Ernie. Martin, Simon, Don. Troy’s here. Even Wulf comes by every once in a while for food and water. He’s not such a bad guy. He stayed right beside you the whole first night you were here. Went away before the sun came up.”

As much as she enjoyed lying on her back being stoned, Danny felt like there was a great deal of data she was missing and her hypothesis was woefully out of date. She tried to push herself up into a sitting position but Patrick gently guided her back.

“Let me get you a pillow,” he said, and hoisted himself up. Patrick was walking with the help of a stick, Danny observed. He was obviously in pain, but didn’t make much of it.
That
was different. He used to complain about damn near everything; now he had something real to bitch about, he was bearing it with grace.

Danny drifted out of consciousness without knowing it.

When she awoke again, Topper was kneeling beside her. He had a fading black eye himself, though not quite as bad as Patrick’s.

Patrick returned. He arranged a balled-up overcoat under Danny’s head. She was lying on, or very close to, the ground, inside something like a big turtle shell. That much detective work she could handle. Topper knelt beside her and she smelled armpits and whiskey and motor oil. The motor oil smell disturbed her for a reason Danny could not summon before her mind. “How you feelin’, Sheriff?”

“Feelin’ no pain,” Danny said, and smiled back.

“There’s so much dope in your bloodstream we could probably sell your piss for fifty bucks a shot,” Topper said.

Danny wanted to laugh again, but it seemed like a lot of effort, so she passed out instead.

They cleared the farmhouse room by room. Two men inside, both dead. They were not locals. Danny thought they were from the city, not the middle of nowhere where they had been patrolling flat sand to keep the date palms safe
.

The woman in black was dead, someone said. Danny went outside again. She hadn’t spared a thought for the woman since she’d run for the side of the farmhouse to get herself out of range of the windows
.

Now Danny went out into the broiling hot yard and crossed the dirt to the place where the woman lay, dead, her eyes half-open and staring at a point somewhere beyond the center of the sky. Her lips were parted. Danny saw hard white teeth with dark patina between them
.

The satchel mine the woman had been holding was kicked several meters away from the body. Danny would secure it in a few seconds. First, she leaned close to the dead woman, wanting to ask her: What were you doing? Why did he kill you? Who did you imagine I was? But the woman’s eyes opened, and they were not eyes at all—they were mouths full of crooked teeth—

Danny returned to awareness at intervals throughout the remainder of the day and night. Unconsciousness, within which there was nothing, eventually gave way to sleep, where there were picture-plays of the waking world. At last Danny was able to remain awake for as much as an hour at a time.

Along with returning clarity of mind came the return of pain, to which she responded by demanding the others stop feeding her with tranquilizers. Her body needed a complete overhaul. And at some point the many things she had decided not to think about emerged, and demanded to be known. To distract herself, she studied her surroundings.

She was lying on an old mattress inside the stripped frame of an ancient automobile. There was no floor. It was only the hull. The roof formed a sunshade; there was no glass to keep in the heat of the day, and without the doors she could see a section of the scenery on either side. Piles of crushed and broken automobiles towered all around, flattened as if by their combined weight. There were heaps of chrome parts, old fenders and grilles. Iron racks bore windshields and door glass, arranged by make and model. Dumpsters full of alternators, engine blocks, motors, transmissions, and all the rest of the guts of cars stood in ranks below the walls of mashed vehicles. The place had been paved with concrete once, but the concrete had split and broken and now it was pavement, dirt, and lank brown grass in equal measures.

Topper explained to Danny during one of her brief lucid periods that they
were
in heaven. It was a wrecking yard, not three miles from Boscombe Field. He and Ernie had seen it on the day they arrived at the airfield.
They made straight for the place when they were banished by the mercenaries. Danny asked about that, and Topper told her it was a long story for when she was fully awake.

They had a big old Chinese-made diesel generator, welding gear, a machine shop, and all the raw materials a man could ever ask for, if he was man enough to ask for raw materials. They even had a fridge full of beer. They were surrounded by a fortress of crushed cars and a tall sheet-metal fence. They had some projects going.

“We’re going to put some gear together and retake that motherfucking airfield, for one thing,” Topper said. “We’re going to make ourselves some battle wagons!” He was excited now, his voice raised almost to a shout. Patrick came back and shooed him away.

Danny awoke in the night. There was a lump of moon in the sky, and bunches of stars. She could see a couple of the planets, although as always she had no idea which ones they were. Patrick was sleeping beside her inside the shell of the old car. They were lying under a heap of secondhand clothing. It was cool but not cold.

Danny’s left hand itched like fury. It was driving her mad. Woke her up. It felt as if ants were inside the bones, making tunnels. She couldn’t get her fingers to move.

So Danny extracted her hand from beneath the pile of clothes, and discovered it was bound inside a large wad of cotton gauze. She unhooked the butterfly clips that held the gauze in place, unwinding the long strips of bandage until her hand was exposed. It was too dark to see—even the pale gauze was little more than a blue-gray smudge in the shadows. Her hand was an astringent-smelling darkness in the greater darkness of the night.

So she felt her way up from the wrist with her other hand. The wrist was badly sprained, swollen and tender. Her palm was rough with abrasions. There was a crust, presumably blood, in all the creases of her hand. Then her fingers slipped up past her knuckles and there was nothing. She closed her good hand over the injured one.

Before she could understand what she was feeling, a massive fireball of pain leaped up her arm and blew her straight back into oblivion.

“You chewed off your fingers,” Patrick explained. “That’s what Wulf thinks. He found something in your mouth, apparently.” Patrick shivered involuntarily.

Danny was trying to remember, squinting up into a pale gray sky, pink at the margins. Dawn was an hour away. She had bled a lot in the night; Patrick had awakened in the wee hours to find both of them sticky with blood. Despite his protestations, Danny had a close look at the damage by flashlight, before the fresh gauze went on. She had a thumb and a pinky finger, then three swollen knuckles with the skin sutured at the ends like sausage casing. The fingers were gone and there was blackening, ragged skin around the cinched-up wounds.

“Do you remember what happened?” he continued. “If one of those undead things did this, you could have some kind of infection…” he trailed off, leaving it unspoken. They could both guess what would happen.

“I don’t remember anything after seeing the airfield down the road. There was somebody there. That’s it. How long ago was that?”

“Two days,” Patrick said, as if admitting something shameful.

“Two fuckin’ days?” Danny wanted to sit up again. Patrick held her down with both hands. She lacked the strength to resist, and fell asleep again.

When Danny awoke, the sun was close to rising. She kept her eyes shut and started thinking about her new situation.

She felt she was at some kind of crossroads. She knew guys, people in rehab, soldiers and Marines dealing all the time with the Veterans’ Administration, who were missing a hand, or both hands, or a foot or a couple of legs. Eyes, faces, what have you, missing. They spent so much of their time trying to increase the amount they were considered legally disabled. This was the “percentage.” Twenty percent got you a certain stipend every month. Thirty, fifty, eighty percent disabled: They were all worth increasing sums. At a hundred percent you could practically live on the money the government allowed you, except of course you spent it all on the iron lung and diapers. Danny couldn’t get a thin dime once she could walk again, because she had been deemed fully recovered. The VA didn’t give a shit if you were ugly and deformed, as long as you could theoretically go out and get a job cleaning bedpans.

But now she was properly disabled. She was sporting half the stock number of hands. She had phantom limb syndrome, and everything—her nonexistent fingers continued to itch. She could probably get a handicap tag for the Mustang.

A tremor of doubt rattled through her mind.
The Mustang
. There was some question about the car, but she couldn’t remember what it was.

The reverie fell apart. Danny wasn’t fooling herself. She knew that even
if there still was a Veterans’ Administration (she thought of Harlan again, presumably rotting away in a bed, untended), even if parking was ever an issue again, she wasn’t somebody who could call herself handicapped. She was going to have to put this thing behind her. She was going to have to figure out a system for living the same way she was before, only one-handed.
Which shouldn’t be difficult
, the voice said. It never slept.
You weren’t living very well before
. She had lost a part of herself, and come out alive. She was stronger than ever, because she had even less to lose.

She knew it was the painkillers, but Danny was exhilarated by this weird new situation. She had to share the moment with somebody. She didn’t feel loss, as she expected to do. She didn’t resent having to chew off her own fingers. Rather she felt impossibly alive. She felt irreducible. What she was had been reduced to its absolute essence, then reduced again, and then she was supposed to die. She didn’t die. So everything ahead of her was extra time.

Danny rolled over on her good elbow and shook Patrick.

“Hey,” she said, in an urgent whisper.

“What is it,” Patrick whispered back.

“I’m invincible.”

She passed out again. By midday, she had a raging fever.

Patrick kept asking for cool cloths to wipe Danny down, and the others kept bringing him filthy shop rags. Danny’s face was getting progressively dirtier as the fever expanded, but if Patrick left her alone for ten minutes, her sweat flushed most of the grime off. He’d given her some oral antibiotics they’d found, but of course knowing nothing about antibiotics, Patrick might be treating her for malaria, for all he knew. Whatever the stuff was, it didn’t seem to be helping.

Am I in love with this weather-beaten woman? Patrick wondered, as he tried again to rouse Danny enough to drink something. Stranger things had happened. Were happening, all over the world. No, he decided. He
loved
her, which wasn’t the same. But it was still a big deal.

Danny was talking again. The fever brought up whatever was stewing in her subconscious, like dragging the bottom of a swamp with an oar. She murmured a great deal of gibberish, and sometimes spoke of her sister Kelley. Never
to
her. She spoke directly to Patrick when she recognized him, to the Amy in her mind’s eye at other times; she spoke to someone named Zero Killer, and even once to Weaver, begging him to get down. But
Kelley was in the past now. Patrick kept her cool as he could, and frequently changed the looted thrift-store shirts tucked beneath her to serve as diapers. It remained a miracle to Patrick how often women could pee. Danny was starting to stink, Patrick realized. Not like body odor or the sickbed, but a rotten smell, like death.

Danny’s stump of hand had swelled to three times its original diameter. There was no question: That was where the stink was coming from. The wounds, which Patrick had sewn shut himself as he’d seen Amy do, were weeping and purple where the stitches dug in, but turning gray at the edges. He was losing her. After all that Danny had been through, after all the enemies she had faced, it was the microscopic army that was going to beat her.

“Hey, Topper, heat me up a sharp piece of wire,” Patrick said. “Like redhot.”

Topper took one look at Danny’s hand, said, “Oh Jesus fuck,” and walked away, shaking his head.

“It don’t half fuckin’ stink,” Ernie said, handing the sterilized wire to Patrick at arm’s length.

Patrick examined the bulb of Danny’s hand, swollen now to the size of her folded knee, purple and hot to the touch. He was wasting time. Go for it. There was a moon-shaped hubcap in his lap, upturned like a salad bowl. He held Danny’s limp arm over the basin formed by the hubcap, then—with a sharp inhalation—he thrust the sharpened wire into the palm of Danny’s hand.

It popped.

An incredible quantity of stinking, bloody pus spurted out, marbled with whorls of amber and greenish cream. It spattered his secondhand jeans, then the stream lost pressure and steadied. The stench made him want very much to throw up. He swallowed and kept swallowing, but he couldn’t help crying out. He said “oh, God, oh, my God,” over and over. The liquid continued to run out, until it was dribbling. Much as he would rather have been stabbed to death with chopsticks, Patrick changed his grip on the purulent wound and started milking the puffy flesh. Gobs of congealed pus belched out of the puncture. Things that looked like chewed fat. Finally the wound ran blood. Patrick let it bleed for a minute, then doused the whole red mess in alcohol and wrapped it back up with fresh white bandage.

The hubcap in his lap was almost full. The hot liquid sloshed over his thumb as Patrick carried it away and poured it down a storm drain in the
pavement. Then he vomited down the drain, and stayed like that with his head dangling and his hands on his knees for several minutes. Topper came by and slapped him on the back.

“You done a hell of a thing,” Topper said. “Fuckin’ Florence Fuckin’ Nightingale, man.”