Free Rise Again Below Zero by Ben Tripp Page B

amplified in the cool, clear air. She passed through a broken-down gate, a continuation of the sheep fence they’d come up against. It wasn’t even locked; there was a gap she could step through.
    And as she did so, the floodlights came on.
    Danny tossed herself back through the gate and crouched low against one of the crooked posts. Her eyes throbbed with the sudden brightness. There were lights mounted on the roof of the main building, about a fifty-second sprint from her location. They revealed a ranch yard: barns, sheds, a main house, vacant animal pens. Fences running every which way inside a taller fence that marked the borders of the ranch compound itself. No gunshots rang through the night, no shrilling alarms or shouting. Just the lights, staring across the dry grass like sunlight on the moon, colorless and severe with long inky shadows.
    They must be automatic, Danny thought. If the occupants were truly looking, they couldn’t have failed to see her. But they weren’t doing anything about it. Maybe waiting for a better shot . Still, Danny’s role here was to draw fire.
    She hitched up her gun belt, took a few deep drags of air, and then sprinted through the gap in the gate, running zigzag for the nearest cover—a pickup truck on blocks near a cattle pen.
    She got behind the truck without incident.
    Now she stole along the margin of the pen, then broke cover and ran for a long, low shed. She got her back up against that and dipped around the corner.
    No sign of life from the main house.
    She drew her Beretta out of its holster and thumbed the safety up. She would use the pistol for cover fire to make her enemies duck, save the shotgun for when she got to the building and needed to clear a room.
    She swiftly reached the house. Still nothing.
    Okay, now things are getting weird .
    It appeared nobody was home. Where was the Chevelle? She could still smell dust in the air; it had come this way. But it was not in the yard as far as she could see, and none of the outbuildings would provide sufficient cover. She decided to join Topper around the back, in case it was there.
    She kept below the windows and skirted the house; at the rear corner, she risked a hissed signal and waved to Topper, who was hiding behind a stack of rusting natural gas cylinders. Always a good place to seek cover—peoplewere afraid to shoot at fuel tanks, as a rule, and they were made of heavy steel. No sign of the Chevelle, but there was an open gate at the back of the property and the long straight road continued into the darkness behind it.
    They met in the middle of the back wall of the house and took up positions on either side of the back door, which led into a mudroom with the kitchen beyond.
    “You see anybody inside?” Danny whispered.
    “No, nobody,” said Topper.
    “Huh.”
    “Yeah, I know. Weird.”
    The lights in the house were blazing, the only sound was the hum of a generator running in one of the barns. They both raised their weapons. Danny pumped her fist three times, because she didn’t have enough fingers on that hand to count to three, and then they stormed through the screen door, Danny first.
    The only thing that came at them was the stench of rotten meat.
    The original occupants of the ranch were long gone. Human beings hadn’t taken their place.
    It could only be zeroes that had squatted there recently—thinkers. Hunters wouldn’t know to fire up the generator.
    The air was dripping with a miasma of decay, heavy clouds of flies motoring through it. The mudroom was undisturbed. There were rubber boots, jackets, rakes in there. The kitchen was mostly untouched as well, mundane clutter under the bright fluorescent lights, dirty dishes, a coffee cup with a black crust in the bottom. Zeroes don’t cook. Bloody footprints all over the floor, however, told of worse to come.
    Sure enough, the next room—the dining room, it must once have been—was a scene from hell.
    The fly-studded chandelier cast yellow light on a