Rise Again Below Zero by Tripp Ben

Rise Again Below Zero by Tripp Ben

Author:Tripp, Ben [Tripp, Ben]
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Publisher: Gallery Books
Published: 2013-12-16T16:00:00+00:00


6

Dawn found Danny asleep on the topmost ridge overlooking Happy Town.

She could go for long periods without sleeping, as a rule. But the brush with freezing to death, the leg-burning hike, and the tension of near-capture had worn her out completely. She awoke at sunrise, closely wrapped in the sleeping bag with the rucksack under her head. The ridgeline was studded with tough cedars; she had bivouacked beneath one of these, sheltered by its low, contorted branches, which swept the stony ground. Her head had stopped throbbing, and she could feel all seventeen of her digits again.

Behind her position was a long, tapering slope of stone and debris, naked of vegetation, that led down to the rock drop-off and shoreline she’d traversed in the night. It had been a long, slow climb with her near-useless hands. The ridge was narrow and fairly flat, with the remnants of a forest along its summit; then the far side descended sharply in a series of cliffs and ledges scattered with rockfall and avalanche tailings, held more or less in place by further scrub brush and cedar woods.

Danny drank some of the mineral-tasting water she’d filled her bottle with at the river, ate an MRE that claimed without much justification to contain a cheese omelet with vegetables, and then crawled to the edge of the ridge for a look at Happy Town.

The place was located in a sort of natural harbor, the river cradling it like a bent arm around to the east and south, the escarpment rising up as a backstop against northerly winds; to the west the landscape was wide open, hills and badlands rolling away as far as the eye could reach. How the hell they kept that border secure, Danny could not guess.

Happy Town stood on level ground at the foot of the uplands and spread out to south and west—she estimated the town was built for seven thousand inhabitants or so, maybe more with the suburbs. It looked like the present population was higher than that. There seemed to be a fortified wall or fence of some kind extending around the entire settled area. The sunrise illuminated its top, which glittered like wire.

Within the fence and huddled against it on the outer perimeter was a city of tents and campers of every description, resembling a colorful mural of broken tile from Danny’s elevated position. The town itself was mostly laid to a grid, with a broad central street forming the spine with the train depot at the skull end, and the ribs extending out to the fringes of town, where the streets became irregular, curving around to conform to the rocky landscape. There were big houses under the trees in the low parts of the slope, probably rich folks’ houses. They always got the best views. Out in the flat areas were suburban developments with little square brown lawns and one tree per house.

The commercial center of town was a dozen blocks or so of uninteresting Old West–style structures



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