Zombies: More Recent Dead (64 page)

Cal chews his cereal and sees me deep in thought. “What is it?”

“Nothing.”

Felix has procured extra gas rations for faculty, so I get to drive the car to work. It’s sunny and I put on my sunglasses—I have contact lenses now, also thanks to Felix. When I turn on the radio they are finishing a replay of the President’s State of the Union speech: “To persevere is to live—to live together as one country, one nation—together in health, hope, and liberty. Forgiveness is not forgetfulness, but rather an acknowledgement of the innate need for security, survival, and the necessity of recovery. We shall
all
be reawakened to see a new vision of our nation . . . ” After she finishes there is applause and then a John Lennon song starts playing. I listen to the chorus: “
And we all shine on
 . . . ”

I drive slowly around the commuters on bicycles and on horseback; people wave to each other and smile. I pass by the tank on Main Street and there is a tiny tree sprouting up from the turret. A cardinal warbles and sings on the strongest branch, as red as a drop of blood.

Someday maybe the world will “make it,” as the writer of the Campus Eight had hoped. I don’t know if it will involve remembering or forgetting. I don’t know what languages our silences might speak. But maybe it will be okay. Maybe someday I will tell Cal that I dreamed of him crouched over the body of our daughter, taking bite after loving bite.

Maggie Slater

The low-lying fog across the tarmac made it difficult to be certain, but the figure moving toward the tower limped like a roamer. James Shepherd lifted his binoculars—it was a girl, a young girl, wearing a jacket so large its cuffs hung over her hands and the waist almost down to her knees. She favored her left leg, or perhaps her ankle. No doubt she’d been walking on it unconsciously for weeks, maybe even months.

I can fix that,
Shepherd thought, and it made him smile. It had been a while since a roamer wandered onto his ground space. He’d have to give her a good name. A sweet name. Perhaps Esther.
Little Esther,
he thought, and tapped in the command for Peter to intercept and incapacitate.

Luke was also in the area, not a hundred meters off by Hanger B.

Adding Esther would make his group an even dozen, and that too made Shepherd smile. He pulled off a piece of masking tape and pressed it beneath the others on the control panel. With a marker, he wrote her name.

Twelve was a good number. A holy number, if the Good Book was right. Peter, Matthew, David, John, Paul, Mary, Luke, Bartholomew, Joseph, Martha, Mark, and now Esther. Yes, twelve was right.

As he watched Peter tromp toward the newcomer, Shepherd heard a strange noise over the radio. At first, he thought it might be a breeze caught in Peter’s microphone, but it grew steadily stronger. The moan reached him across the speakers in the air traffic control tower just as the little red button next to Peter’s name began blinking ferociously.

Not a moment after that, Luke’s light started flashing, too.

Shepherd stared at the lights, hardly remembering what they were meant to indicate. It had been so long since one had flashed.

He snatched up his binoculars and looked out at the three figures, now visible and moving toward one another. As he watched, the girl lifted what he’d mistaken for a long stick at her side and pointed it at Peter’s head.

The girl was alive.

Shepherd’s hands leapt for the microphone button. “No, wait!”

The blast of a shotgun echoed through his tower speakers.

Panicked, Shepherd twisted the knob for Luke’s frequency and slammed the speaker button again. “Wait! Don’t shoot.” He stabbed his fingers onto the keyboard to command Luke to stand still. “Hold your fire. They won’t hurt you. I’m in control.”

The speakers buzzed. “Who’s talking? Where are you?”

Shepherd froze at the sound of the voice and lifted his face toward the window again. “Penny?” His voice cracked when he said her name.

“Hold on,” Shepherd said, ducking under the control panel to plug in the video line for Hanger B’s security camera. A flood of gray light filled the dusking room behind him as he scrambled back into his seat.

The girl stood some twenty yards away from the hanger, and Luke was less than half that distance from her, his back and the glint of his bolted metal spine visible on the video feed. The girl’s shotgun was leveled at his chest. The video was too grainy to see much else in detail.

Shepherd leaned in until the static from the screen crackled at the tip of his nose. “What’s your name?” He couldn’t even be sure of her face shape, let alone her features.

“I’m not telling you shit until you tell me where you are.”

“Sorry—I just need to fix . . . something.” Shepherd squinted and leaned back from the screen, as though blurring the image more would somehow make it sharper.

Is it?
He couldn’t be sure. He counted off how old Penny would be now, if she was still safe. She’d been fourteen when she left, so she’d be nineteen now.

Over the speakers, Luke’s wheezing grew stronger. The muzzle of the girl’s shotgun, which had dipped toward the ground as she surveyed the area, snapped back to attention. Shepherd glanced at the light next to Luke’s name, but it no longer blinked.

“How are you doing this?” The girl’s voice had a husky growl in it, too low for Penny. But the longer he looked at the video, the more the girls seemed alike. “How are you controlling that thing?”

“I’m coming down. Wait there.”

“You try to pull any tricks and I’ll blow this motherfucker’s head off just like the last one.”

“No tricks. I’m in the control tower. You’ll see me coming.”

The girl grunted as Shepherd released the microphone button and headed for the stairs. Bart and Mary stood barring the door out to the tarmac where he’d placed them. Their lips and blood-crusted teeth chewed at him around the edges of the speakers he’d installed in their throats. They gave him a cursory glance as he slipped past them with a light touch to their shoulders and a quiet, “Excuse me.”

He’d grown so used to them that he’d forgotten how frightening they must look to a someone who didn’t realize the suits prevented them from acting on their feral instincts. Still, his chest tightened as he turned the corner of the tower and saw the three figures in the foggy distance: two standing and one crumpled on the ground.

“Lord, have mercy upon them,” Shepherd whispered.

He wanted to run to them, but he fought the urge for fear of making the girl nervous. With each step, he tried to make out the details of her hair, her face, her height—anything to determine with certainty that she was familiar. But as he drew near, and the girl turned toward him, he knew she wasn’t Penny. Just a youth alone in a bitter world clutching to her firepower like a security blanket.

He lifted his hands.

“I’m not going to hurt you,” he said. “It was me you heard. Please, put the gun down.”

“Not on your life,” the girl said, glaring at Luke. His exosuit was locked at the joints, but he didn’t struggle against the sudden stillness of his limbs. Instead, he twisted his head as a trickle of bloody spittle dribbled down his chin from the side of his mouth.

But then, Luke had always been the quietest of the bunch. Shepherd felt a pang of guilt that he was glad that Peter had taken the shot, and not Luke.

What kind of a father thinks like that?
His gaze dropped to the form on the ground collapsed in a pile of awkward angles. A marionette with cut strings and stiff metal joints.

The girl aimed her gun toward him as Shepherd knelt beside what was left of Peter. The left side of Peter’s head was gone; pulped gray matter coated the asphalt. The dislodged speaker hung out the open side of his skull. The battery pack strapped to his twisted back hummed.

With a sigh, Shepherd pressed Peter’s remaining eyelid shut and flipped the switch on the pack to shut it down. Then he bowed his head and whispered the Lord’s Prayer. He wished he knew what pastors used to say over gravesites, but all he could remember—which he added to the end of the prayer he knew—was, “Ashes to ashes. Dust to dust.”

The girl shifted her weight on her stronger leg, and the gravel crunched. He could see now that the heel of her favored foot was pushed up and out of the dirty sneaker. There was crusted blood speckled up the ankle.

“You’re hurt,” he said.

The girl scowled at him. “Who the fuck are you? And what . . . what the
fuck
is that?” Her finger stabbed in Luke’s direction.

“That’s Luke. And this was Peter. You don’t have to be afraid. No one here will hurt you.” He began to rise to his feet, but the girl pushed the muzzle of her shotgun into his chest.

“Don’t move.”

She was younger than he’d first thought, certainly younger than his Penny would be now, but Shepherd knew better than to underestimate the anger of youth, so he sank back down to his heels and lifted his hands again.

“I have a first aid kit in the tower,” he said. “And food, if you want it. I’d be happy to share it with you.”

“Yeah, right.” The girl scoffed, her attention flickering between him and Luke. “You’re just going to be a good neighbor and give me medicine, food, and a big damn feather bed for nothing?” She shook her head, and her sneer twisted into something a little like a smile. “You think I don’t know how this works?”

The girl took a shuffling, unsteady step back, putting a little more space between them. For a moment, a wince cracked her face. “Are there more of those things around here?”

“Yes. There are nine others.”

The girl cursed and reached into a backpack she wore slung over one shoulder. Tucked under her arm and obscured by the bulky jacket, Shepherd hadn’t even noticed it until then. She squinted at him as she pulled out a box of shotgun shells and pried it open with one hand while the other remained on the trigger. She glanced at the box—once, twice—mouthing the numbers she counted without seeming to realize it.

“You won’t need your weapon here,” Shepherd said. “They can’t hurt you. Even if they wanted to, I’ve modified them so that they can’t move without my command.”

“Oh, yeah?” She stuffed the box of ammo back into her bag. “Prove it.”

“How?”

As he stood, she smiled, keeping the shotgun pointed at his chest. “Go up and stick your arm near those nice chompers of his.”

Shepherd nodded and walked to Luke’s side. He put his hand on the roamer’s shoulder, squeezing it. Luke seemed calmer in the eyes today. Perhaps—if he wasn’t reading too much into it—even a little sad when his unfocused gaze rolled down to Shepherd. Perhaps he understood what had happened to Peter.

Perhaps.

“It’s okay, Luke,” he said softly. “It’s all right.”

“What kind of a sicko are you?” The girl watched him with narrow, red-rimmed eyes. “I mean, hey, don’t get me wrong, everyone’s got the right to go ape shit these days, and I’m thrilled to pieces to meet you, Mr. Talks-to-Zombies, but . . .
shit
 . . . ” She shook her head from side to side slowly. “You’re fucking insane, you know that?”

It was the rush of blood to his face that made him suddenly realize that he was angry. It had been so long since he’d let himself feel like that, or screamed, or cursed, or broke things, or released all that pent-up energy inside of him. It was a thought that made him close his eyes and will the flames back into submission. Flames unchecked—like tempers, like pride—rose and consumed, driven only by selfish destruction. Tamed fire was much more productive.

Patience,
he reminded himself. It wasn’t a virtue he’d had to practice lately. His flock of injured souls didn’t know what they were doing, and it was easy to forgive them. Years had passed since he’d spoken to someone who could talk back to him, could curse at him, could shout at him. When he opened his eyes, he could see the girl for what she was: alone and scared, just like Penny had been.

“Not insane,” he said quietly. “Just . . . ” If he listened too closely, he could almost hear Penny’s screams still ringing in the dark coils of his inner ear, could almost feel the sting of her fingernails against his arms, his face, and the warmth of her spit in his eye. It made him shiver before he could stop himself.

He looked up into Luke’s bruised and bloodied face, the one empty eye socket that oozed milky puss, the broken teeth in his blackened gums, the spidery blue veins webbing his sagging jaw. “How can I not pity them? They’re misery incarnate.”

The muzzle of the shotgun clicked as it dipped down to the pavement. The girl squinted behind her, at the fringe of trees and the orange haze of the sunset tinting the fog around them. She wobbled on her good leg, and the toes of her injured foot pushed against the ground to stabilize her. She gritted her teeth and sucked a sharp breath through them. She glanced back at him with a softened frown and cleared her throat.

“Look, this is how this is going to work,” she said. “I need that first aid kit. And a place to stay for the night. I’ve got my own food, if you don’t want to share. I get that, so don’t worry about it. I’ve got a little ammo I could give you in exchange, or . . . ” The frown shifted to a hard, motionless expression that seemed to draw her eyes further back into her skull. “Or maybe we can work out something else.”

“I don’t want anything from you,” Shepherd said. “I don’t need anything.”

The girl hoisted the shotgun up so that its muzzle pointed toward the darkening sky, resting against her shoulder. “Sure, you don’t. Just name it. I’m not a prude, so you don’t have to be embarrassed.”

Shepherd looked at the scrawny girl and felt a pang in his chest. She’d been alone for a long time. Alone and very conscious of it. Was Penny like this now? Hardened? Ruthless? Did she know how to pull herself back like that, to disconnect, to escape when there was no one to protect her?

“I don’t want anything from you,” Shepherd said. “Your company is enough. I haven’t spoken to anyone in years. It’s just nice to hear a voice that isn’t my own, and . . . ” He wasn’t sure if he should say anything, but the girl’s doubts shaded her face, and the pang in his chest made him bold. “You remind me of my daughter. That’s all. You can keep your gun and your belongings. I won’t hurt you or trick you. I can swear that in the Lord’s name, if you want. I take my oaths seriously.”