Rise Again Below Zero Read Online Free PDF Page B

find her. Someday Kelley might attack Danny, or kill someone else in the Tribe. It was possible. They talked about it. But Danny didn’t think so. Kelley had made some grim calculation and decided not to eat the flesh of men. She had never wavered, at least so far.
    The Tribe didn’t like it at all. Most of the small children didn’t know the truth; the name “Leper” had stuck because it was the only way to explain the concealing bandages. It took new people a few days to realize what Kelley was, and most of the folks who hitched a ride for a couple of days never knew how close they came to a specimen of their worst nightmares. The thinkers they’d encountered were deadly. They could use weapons, lay traps, and make complex plans. They sometimes worked with hunters, the undead who had animal-like intelligence, using them almost like dog packs; the moaners, the stupid ones, were useless to them. But the moaners also seemed to fear the thinkers, and that’s why Kelley was allowed to exist alongside the Tribe.
    Moaners wouldn’t come anywhere near her. They had superb senses of smell: Even the most rotten walking corpse would have fresh-looking tissue in its sinuses. Not pink, but marbled and purple. But it was vital flesh, sometimes so enlarged it bulged out of the nostrils or the hole where the nose used to be. The ones that came shambling toward the Tribe’s halting places, though, would smell Kelley and immediately back off. Their incessant moaning would stop. They would slouch away and disappear into the landscape. The hunters were a little more persistent, and might circle a campsite all night, but they’d never come close. It was almost worth the price of having a thinker around. Almost.
    This aversion to the scent of thinkers was why Danny escorted Kelley through a few tours of the perimeter wherever the Tribe had halted—the residual smell usually kept the stupider types away, as long as it wasn’t windy. It was the same reason she guided her sister away from safety when it was time to change her diapers and clean up the spongy, half-rotten skin around her genitals. Danny always buried the baby wipes and diapers in the place she thought most likely to facilitate an attack. They worked better than land mines on the zeroes.
    But Danny knew that her people were only waiting for the other shoe to drop. As if Kelley had some diabolical plan to kill them all and eat their guts. Every day, Danny spent a lot of her leadership capital ensuring her sister was safe from destruction by the living. That was one reason she tookbig risks: it was a show of fearlessness to remind them all who had their back. It kept the balance sheet firmly in her favor. If Danny wanted Kelley around, there must be a good reason: that was the message she wanted them to get. On an average day, she guessed they about half-believed it. Kelley wasn’t dangerous—she craved human flesh all the time, but had never actually tasted it.
    Danny had lost her sister once. She didn’t intend to lose her again. Ever.
    •   •   •
    She drove aimlessly through the twilight. As long as Danny stayed in the vehicle, she didn’t have much to fear from the undead; it reeked of her sister. But another thinker wouldn’t hesitate to attack. They didn’t fear each other. The Tribe had even found evidence of thinker teams destroying each other. She turned on the headlights and saw a kind of View-Master slide presentation of the apocalypse in exaggerated 3-D. Wrecked cars, burned-out structures, white femurs and rib cages winking out from beneath cars or strewn across the pavement. Sometimes a gallows figure crawling away, clothed in rags and filth. She drove until she came to a low hill, bare of trees or bushes; the entire hilltop had been flattened and paved a long time back, for what purpose Danny couldn’t imagine.
    She parked at the margin of the paved area in a position that gave her a good view of the landscape below: a town, completely dark