Rise Again Below Zero by Ben Tripp Read Free Book Online

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, butmost 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