Zombies: More Recent Dead (65 page)

The girl watched him beneath her drooping eyelids, but after a moment, her gaze fell to the ground and she nodded. “Fine. But I’m only staying for one night.”

Sometime in the slow, hobbling trip back to the tower, the fog dissipated, and the evening’s long, wet shadows stretched like steel bars across the asphalt. The girl refused Shepherd’s help as she limped along, despite the sweat pearling on her brow and the lancing wince that crossed her face every time she put too much weight on the injured foot. But despite that streak of stubbornness, she seemed to trust him, at least to a degree. She made no protest other than a hunched-shoulder glance at Bart and Mary as he lead her past them and into the tower. She didn’t ask about the floors they bypassed, moving up to the second highest, and even allowed him to carry her up the final flight of stairs and into the furnished living room.

Her arm over his shoulder felt like a broken wing—thin and fragile beneath the thick bulk of the jacket she wore. She was light, too, and for a moment he allowed his imagination to think she might be an angel sent to give him some kind of message.

He lowered her on the sofa bed he slept on, and sat down beside her. A sigh whistled through her teeth as she gingerly slid her sneaker off, revealing the heel to ankle gash glistening with dark, oozing blood.

“I was following the river,” she said as she settled back and moved her foot onto his lap for closer inspection. “There was a . . . a metal bracket or something. I don’t know. It was hidden in the tall grass.”

She twitched when he put his finger near the inflamed laceration. The pale skin was red and swollen; grains of dirt lined the tender edges. Yellow bruising spread out and up the leg.

“How long have you been walking on this?” Shepherd asked.

“Two, maybe three days, I think.” The girl’s face had gone ashen and she swallowed hard. “Do you . . . do you have some water or something? I think I’m going to throw up.”

She lay quietly, eyes closed, as Shepherd brought her a cup of water and then retrieved his first aid kit. He put on his reading glasses, the kit’s rubber gloves, and carefully lifted her foot back onto his lap.

“I’m going to have to clean this,” he said. “It may hurt.”

The girl grimaced and shrugged. “I can handle it.”

He used the antiseptic wipes to clean out the dirt and gathering puss. The girl’s teeth clicked from time to time as she clenched them, but she said nothing—not a curse, not a whine, not a whimper. But when he tossed the first wipe away, he saw that her cheeks were wet.

His heart ached, watching her fluttering, moist eyelashes, her averted gaze. His own foot tingled along the ankle, and his stomach turned. In the semi-light of the room, and with her hair brushed back, her face struck him with its similarity to Penny’s. In another life, at another time, she could have been mistaken for a daughter of his. Maybe she and Penny might even have been friends, confused for sisters—or twins—while shopping at the mall or volunteering at the hospital. The angle of her nose was like his; her eyes, slightly wide set and pale, could have been Anne’s.

Anne.
Shepherd looked down at the blood smeared on the rubber gloves, and the room suddenly spun. The last time he’d had blood that red, that fresh, on his hands . . . His throat tightened. Little trickles of blood dripped down his palms and onto his pants. The antiseptic on the second wipe was wet, and its liquid blurred the red streaks on his fingers, turning them a softer, fading pink.

He tried to be gentle as he continued, but judging from her occasional twitches and hisses of air, he knew he didn’t always succeed. When had he last been near someone who could feel anything, could wince, could ache, or sting, or whisper curses under her breath? The skin he worked on blushed deeper with the irritation. His hands trembled. The silence between them, pierced only by her involuntary reactions to his touch against the wound, crept under his skin and festered into a film of nervous energy.

“Where are you from, originally?” he asked, noting the crack in his voice when he spoke. “Around here?”

The fabric of the sofa hissed as she shook her head against it and sighed. “I can’t really talk right now,” she whispered. “I’m barely holding it in as it is.”

“Then I’ll talk,” Shepherd said. “Sorry, it’s just . . . I haven’t spoken to anyone in . . . years, I think. I mean, I talk to my flock, but it’s . . . ” He paused, closed his eyes against the sudden flicker of a headache. He wanted to pinch the bridge of his nose, or press his palms against his suddenly burning eyes, but he could feel the slime of blood on his gloves between his fingers, could smell it thick in his nostrils. He wasn’t sure when he’d started sweating, but suddenly he felt clammy and cold, and had to fight back a shiver.

“It’s not the same,” he said, the words pushing themselves off his tongue and out of his lips before he had time to even think about what he was saying. “And it’s just nice to know someone hears you—I mean, really
hears
you—instead of just . . . you know. I don’t even know if they can understand me, and sometimes . . . sometimes you just . . . just . . . ”

“Hey.” He glanced at the girl. She was looking right at him, no hint of smirk or scowl on her face. “I get it,” she said, so softly he almost couldn’t hear it. “Talk if you need to. It’s better than bottling this shit up.”

Shepherd sat back and leaned his head against the wall behind him. He closed his eyes and tried to breath slowly, deeply, imagining all the little particles that made up his body, his cells, his molecules, his atoms, his electrons, and the energy that—for the moment—gave him existence. That same energy that gave everything he could see or touch or smell or taste or hear substance, all of life; the same energy that made dirt, made trees, made animals, made Penny, made roamers, and likewise made planets, stars, galaxies—everything. He was awash in a sea of existence, and it was good.

When he opened his eyes, the shivers had passed and he felt calmer.
Though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death,
he thought,
I shall fear no evil, for Thou art with me. Thy rod and thy staff, they comfort me.

He sighed and shook his head, once more leaning forward to apply the antiseptic wipe to the cut. “I’m sorry,” he said, pleased to hear that his voice was steady. “I’m not normally so easily shaken. It’s just that at first glance, I really thought you might be my daughter. It got under my skin. That’s all.”

The girl frowned, eyes closed. “Where is she?”

“I don’t know.”

“Alive?”

“Don’t know.” He shook his head and tilted the foot toward him. The girl winced. “I’m sorry. I’m almost done.”

Shepherd taped the wound closed with a series of adhesives and pressed a clean square of gauze over the spot, which he bound in place with an ace bandage. The girl sighed as he wrapped up the foot, and rested her head back against the sofa arm. She sniffed and rubbed her jacket sleeve across her face.

“Thanks,” she said. “I don’t think I could have done that myself.”

Shepherd lowered her foot onto the sofa as he stood. “You really should stay off it for a few days. And I’m not just saying that so you’ll hang around.” He smiled, hoping she could sense his sincerity. “The cut needs to close up a little. The bandages won’t hold under too much movement.”

The girl smirked. “Lucky you. What’ll it cost me?”

Shepherd peeled off the gloves and tossed them into the trash. “Is that what it’s like out there now? No one’s willing to help each other without a motive?”

“It’s the way of the world, Pops. You don’t get something for nothing, you know?”

Does Penny think like that, too?
He shook his head and sighed, trying not to let his mind carry the thought any further. “Well, I don’t believe in that,” he said.

“What do you believe in, then?” the girl asked, shifting herself up onto her elbows. “I can’t trust you if I don’t know what you want.”

Shepherd smiled and moved toward the door. “What I want?”

What did he want, really?
Penny,
he thought, but it made him frown. That door had closed a long time ago, and the girl’s presence only made that more clear to him. The Penny who lived now—if she lived at all—wouldn’t be his Penny, wouldn’t be his little girl. She’d be world-hardened, angry, and defensive. He wasn’t even sure she loved him anymore, wherever she was, though he thought about her every day, and prayed for her safety, and ached to comfort her, to explain to her, to show her that he’d taken what she said to heart.

“Meaning.” Shepherd looked down at his hands. “I want meaning. And that’s not something you can give me. That’s for the Lord to reveal.”

“So you’re waiting for a sign? Is that why you take care of those things? Because of some twisted sense of responsibility?”

The gruffness in her tone made him smile despite himself. She sounded like a normal teenager, annoyed by a teasing comment, being grounded, or asked a personal question. He could see now that she wasn’t Penny, wasn’t anything like her. The lines of her face were all wrong; her eyes were set too deep and framed by shadows.

“No,” he said. “Because of a promise. I think you’d have to be a parent to understand.”

The girl shrugged and reclined again. “Whatever. You’ll tell me what you want eventually.”

“Are you hungry?”

Again, she shrugged. “Sure. Rack up the bill.”

Shepherd shook his head, but kept smiling. He brought her some of the prepackaged foods he’d collected from raiding the airport’s vending machines and the local convenience store, and a smoked piece of the salmon he’d caught earlier in the summer. They spoke only a little while eating and that mostly about the choice of the airport as a safe house compared to the others she had seen on her travels, but by the time they finished the salmon and the snacks, the girl seemed more relaxed and even smiled as she scraped the last few smudges of pudding out of the plastic cup.

Shepherd stood and gathered up the trash, moved toward the door. “I’ve got some work to do,” he said. “Will you be all right on your own?”

The girl chuckled at him and lifted her shotgun from the floor. “I’ve been all right so far. I think I can manage.”

Shepherd nodded but then paused in the hall. “What’s your name? You never told me.”

The girl half smiled as she sucked the chocolate pudding off her finger. “What was your daughter’s name?”

“Penny.”

“Then call me Penny.”

“Is your name Penny?”

The girl shrugged. “Does it matter?”

Shadows are everywhere. There are large ones, cast by abandoned buildings on a sunny afternoon; and there are small ones, like the love fading out of a child’s eyes. On the dimmest days, there are shadows so dark they’re like a puddle of night left behind from the previous evening. On the brightest days, there are sharp, unyielding shadows like brick walls.

But the worst shadows cling to you, hang over you, and haunt you in your sleep. They don’t have to be dark; some of the worst are bright and filled with familiar faces that laugh and speak to you like they’ll always be with you, even when they’re not.

Shepherd stood at the door on the third floor of the tower, the key in his hand hovering an inch from the first of three padlocks on the doorframe.

One for Anne. One for Chris. One for Penny.

The metal lock was cold in his palm, and heavy like the grip of the handgun he used to keep in his bedside table. With a sigh, Shepherd slipped the key into the first lock.

Compared to the bright hallway he stood in, the room itself was shrouded by shadow. Even when he flicked the light switch, only one of the fluorescent bulbs turned on. Its pale white light seemed to touch only what was necessary and no more, a weak brushstroke of illumination across the central table, the workbench, the shelves of plastic cartons filled with wires, bolts, metal piping, and tools. Car batteries he’d harvested from the long-term parking lot were piled in a plastic tub in the corner. Stains of red, brown, and black blossomed on the grungy tile floor around the table, spreading outward like grasping fingers.

The odor that swept over him as he stepped inside made the gall rise in Shepherd’s throat, as it always did, and he pulled the paper mask up over his nose and mouth.

Luke waited in the hallway, sputtering behind his speaker. His hands twitched against the bolts in his wrists as he held what was left of Peter. Shepherd now took the remains himself, cradled the dead weight of the full-grown man as best he could, and carried him to the workroom table. He laid the body down gently, and pushed the cord restraints off to the side, unnecessary for this operation.

In all the confusion of meeting another conscious person, he had neglected Peter. Good Peter. The first. The rock. The trusty follower. Shepherd pulled his stool up to the table and gingerly brushed back the matted, sticky hair on the good side of Peter’s head. Death had been kind to Peter, even if its means had been abrupt and gruesome. Despite the bruising, the un-healing lacerations, the crusted blood at the corners of his cracked lips, Peter looked like a man again. Peaceful in death despite his trials in life. Shepherd closed his eyes and tried to block out what he could remember of Peter prior to this moment, tried to erase the sound of his moan, the snap of his teeth, the feral glow in his eyes. When he looked back down at the corpse, he thought he could see what Peter had looked like before, when he was a son, a father, a co-worker, a neighbor to someone. He couldn’t be more than just a few years older than Shepherd himself, perhaps looking forward to a first grandchild, or a twentieth anniversary on a cruise ship in the tropics.

Or perhaps he was divorced, living in a one-room apartment alone, drinking at the corner pub morning, noon, and night, feeling the missing presence of his children like phantom limbs he swore were still there.

Shepherd shook his head at the sinking of his stomach. This was not the time to think about things like that. Instead, he took Peter’s cold, rough hand in both of his. Shepherd always thought Peter’s hands looked like a carpenter’s. Little crisscross scars danced up the sides and across the knuckles where a whittling knife might have pushed too hard against a knot of wood, slipped, and cut.