Rise Again Below Zero by Ben Tripp Read Free Book Online Page B

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 onhim. 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