“
I should have done more, Danny.”
“
Why do you say that?”
“
I saw them walking past. I saw their guns in their belts. I didn’t know them. I should have figured something was up.”
“
We
all
carry guns. That’s nothing. I never should've let Mueller settle in Princeton. Should've sent him on to Moline or something, or just left his ass in Chicago to get fried. Should've killed his sick ass when he was in Snareville. Something.”
Cindy stared out at the night.
“
There’s two bunnies out there making babies,” she remarked, then: “I guess we both got enough guilt to go around. I didn’t mean to bite that lady, but I don’t know how to use a gun.”
I'd been curious about that. “You weren’t just going Zed on us? People are kinda worried."
“
I know. I scare people. It was the only thing I could think of. I don’t know how to shoot. I didn’t have a knife. I think even if I was normal, I wouldn't know what else to do.”
“
I’ll tell folks.” I stared out into the darkness for a while. “I’m sorry for what was done to you, Cindy. I know it’s not your fault. Any of this.”
“
Some nights, I dream about when I was smart. When I was like Tess and Doctor O’Shea. I was going to school to be a baby doctor like Leary. Did you know that?”
“
You were a med student? No, I didn’t know that.”
“
It’s how Johnson found me. She was my teacher. Me and Tess. Lab assistants. Then she took us an’ shot us up with her gunk and made us sick and turned us into these… things. Some people don’t think we’re people anymore.”
I could hear the tears in her voice.
“
She took three years of my life. She took my
whole
life. Here I am… a twenty-five-year-old zombie virgin. I’ll never get married. I’ll never have babies. All because somebody in a lab wanted more money.”
She sobbed then. I slid over to her and pulled her close. She cried into my chest, and I cried into her hair. What a fucked-up world we lived in.
I don’t know how long we sat there together. George curled up on the porch behind us. The cat Ella named Chloe came along and pushed her face into my hand. Eventually, the tears stopped. We sat and listened to the night. Tree frogs croaked above us, and crickets chirped in the grass. They sang a nice duet. Bats flitted around in the starlit sky and picked off mosquitoes for us.
After a while, I stretched, and we stood. Back inside the house, I turned on the battery-powered camping lamp in the kitchen. From the living room, I retrieved my old family Bible. It was my grandpa’s. I inherited it after he passed away. Some relative or another decided I'd become the family historian. I never knew why, but what do you know? Here I am. I’m alive to keep the records. God does work in mysterious ways.
I flipped through the pages of my family. Cousins, aunts, uncles, nieces, nephews—all with question marks and
presumed dead
with a year beside their names, unless I knew for sure they were gone. Grandpa back in 2002. My sister Carly in January last year. My oldest brother, Jim, in July; Tommy spotted him in a pack of Zeds over in Davenport and put him to rest. He did the same for his daughter, Savannah, in September. Hard to believe a year had passed already.
Cindy hovered over my shoulder as I found my page. Pepper and Jenny and I had our marriage date inscribed last Christmas. Mikey's and Rachel's birthdates followed. I carefully put down Jenny’s date of death as August 2010. As an afterthought, I annotated,
Cause of death: murder
. If anyone cared enough to look later, I didn’t want anyone thinking she'd gone Zed or gotten eaten. Not my tough little Jenny One Sock. Nope. Just plain, old, normal murder got her instead.
I climbed back up the stairs as Cindy went back to the fold-out bed in the living room. I shucked my clothes and climbed into bed with my family. Pepper rolled over and put her head on my chest.
“
Couldn’t sleep?” she whispered.
“
No,” I said. Ella stirred beside us.
“
I have trouble, too. Seems like I dream of Jen at least once a night.”
“
I know. I love her, Pepper. It’s hard. You girls were my rock. We were just about getting the world back to normal.”
“
I know, Dan. I love her, too. I miss her so bad. I miss talking to her. I miss holding her. I think it’s easier to let go when someone goes Zed. At least then you can say you've put them at peace. This… this was just stupid."
Pepper's tears splashed on my chest. Men can take a hell of a beating, but tears hurt us so much more. I held her tight until we both fell asleep. When the rooster crowed, he found us still curled together, Ella snuggled against us. Morning came earlier every day.
For breakfast, we made eggs and ham. We'd shot the hog out behind our fields to the south, where there used to be several pig farms before the outbreak. This was about third generation to go feral, and they were showing it. Their hair had grown coarse. Thinner hogs, less meat, more hair, bigger tusks. One didn’t want to wander around out in the south woods without a gun that could handle a pack of them. Damn things were about as dangerous as the Zeds.
The rest of the house turned out when the smell of ham cooking drifted through the other rooms. Then Cindy came in from outside, face bloody.
“
What happened to you?” I asked as she took a wet paper towel to her mouth.
“
Nothing,” she mumbled, standing near the sink. “I needed some liver. A hunter brought in a deer this morning.”
“
Oh,” I said. I thought about that for a moment, then walked over beside her. “Deer liver helps?”
“
Helps. Not as good as the real thing, but it helps.”
“
Sorry.” I didn’t know what else to say.
“
It’s okay. Better than it was. Thanks for last night.”
“
Least I could do. We both needed to talk about it.”
“
About what?” Pepper asked from behind us. She took the paper towel from the blonde girl and wiped at the corner of her bottom lip. “You missed a spot. Blood low?”
“
Yeah. Danny and I talked last night when we couldn’t sleep.”
“
She’s feelin’ guilty for not stopping things," I muttered. "And I’m missing Jenny.”
“
Don’t feel guilty. It happened so fast, none of us were prepared. You did what you could. We all did. And we all miss her.” She gave Cindy a brief hug and a little smile. The rest of us got our breakfast.
During the meal, it was decided I needed to get back to the Farm. My troops needed me there. It had been two weeks since we lost Jenny, and I needed to take command again. It was time for me to relieve Bill, so he could come home for a week.
My Humvee was fueled, loaded, and ready in no time flat. I packed my bags. Arguments fell on deaf ears. Pepper wanted me out doing what I do best. It sounded like a comic book cliché, but I was better in the field than I was in the garden. Pepper and Ella could take care of the babies. Sandy and Heather were there to help. The area was secure. Trade had begun to flow between the little towns. The investigation into Rick’s little coup had turned up another half-dozen people, who now idled away their hours in the county slam on the south end of Princeton. Everything was in order.
“
Something else, Danny,” Pepper said as we picked a few late green beans.
“
What’s that?”
“
You’re going to be a daddy again. I want you out there helping to find a cure for this virus before this next child comes around.”
I looked up at her, mouth wide open.
“
Don’t look so surprised. It’s not like we haven’t been trying.” Tears streamed from her eyes.
I wrapped her up in my arms. I don’t remember much else about the morning, but after lunch, Cindy and I were packed for the trip west.
“
A baby?” Cindy marveled from the seat beside me. “Congrats! You need to change your name from Danny Death.”
“
So I’ve been told,” I said.
We were just past Atkinson, rolling down State Route Six. I wanted to check the trade routes and stay off I-80. At an empty farm near the outskirts of Geneseo, I stopped the truck.
“
You’re getting a shooting lesson today.”
Cindy gaped as I pulled Jenny’s rifle from the back seat. We stepped out of the rig. I showed her how to hold the rifle, how to sight it, where to hold. We picked out a board on the side of a barn. A piece of window trim painted white stood in stark contrast to the red walls. Cindy's first three shots missed. The next one clipped the edge of the board. Her next centered. The rest of her magazine shattered the wood.
I slid another magazine into the well, but I didn’t charge the gun. We rolled into town.
The cattle trucks full of Zeds had to have gone somewhere. My bet was Geneseo, chasing scavengers. We rolled past the farm store, then past the grocery store. Both had been looted months ago. An empty bank full of scattered papers came up next. We turned right at a dead stoplight and rolled into the older section of town. Beautiful Victorian homes lined the streets. Maple trees showed tinges of yellow and red in their leaves. I crept along, looking through the firing port for any sign of Zeds.
It didn’t take long. Cindy glanced down a side street on her side of the truck and grabbed my arm. Without a word, she pointed. I followed her finger. Around a church two blocks down, a large pack of deaders milled. I backed the rig up a couple feet, turned, and eased down the street. With the diesel in low idle, the Zeds ignored us. They concentrated on getting through the door. At a hundred yards, I parked diagonal in the street. I could feel a wicked grin pull at my face.
“
Drop the window and shoot from inside. We don’t want to get out yet.”
Cindy looked at me. “What’re you gonna do?”
“
I got that Pig mounted up top for a reason.”
“
Oh.” She shifted in her seat, rifle pointed out the window toward the mob.
One thing I did do to modify my Humvee was to strip a stereo system out of an abandoned Porsche and mount it in my rig.
“
How about a little mood music?”
I slid a disc into the slot, cranked the volume, and climbed behind the M-60. In a carnal bellow, Kid Rock’s voice swept out and crashed down on the silent neighborhood. That got some attention.
A few of the Zeds at the back of the pack turned, just in time for the tracers from my gun to catch them in the face. With a shout, I held down the trigger. Three bursts ripped into the crowd. I could hear Cindy’s single shots punctuating mine. Bodies flew to pieces. Heads exploded. A skull cap tore loose and ricocheted off the white wall of the church. A jaw disintegrated. Figures spun in drunken pirouettes. It was a beautiful ballet of bullets and gore.
Some of the dumber Zeds turned and came our way. They must have been
really
hungry to walk into that lead storm. I laid off the trigger of the Pig for a second to drop into the rig. In the back seat, I had an M-79 grenade launcher stashed. Yeah, Tom had a lot of cool toys loitering in mothballs up at the Arsenal. The single-shot beast ate the same fodder as Jinks’ M-203—just a useful round altogether.
With a crazy-assed grin, I climbed back through the spider hole and dumped a shot into the group of deaders. The explosion ripped two in half and sent more spinning across the lawn. I sent three more rounds downrange. Black mist sprayed the walls and door of the church. Zeds disintegrated. The pack turned and shuffled away. We sent a few more rounds after them to let them know they weren’t welcome back. One last grenade from the blooper tube blew the doors off the church.
“
If they were smart, they weren't standing right behind that door,” I mentioned as I climbed behind the wheel.
I pointed the Humvee down the street, and we plowed over corpses while Kid Rock demanded to know who was going to give him some sugar. The tires eased through black slush. I stopped in front of the splintered church door.
“
Come with me,” I said as I stepped out. I could still feel that wild grin on my face.
Cindy snapped her head around at me. She wore the same feral smile. We both climbed the steps. I wrapped an arm around her waist and pulled her close, grabbing the back of her head. She blinked at me for a moment, not understanding until I pulled her to me and kissed her. Hard.
She squirmed for a second, then opened her mouth and returned my tongue. Little muffled whimpers came from the back of her throat as we devoured one another.
She yanked back suddenly. “No, Danny no! I’m contagious, and—”
“
I’m immune,” I said. “Inoculated in the spring.”
Cindy stared at me, starry-eyed, then we stepped inside the building.
I fired a pistol shot into the ceiling. The shell casing bounced off an oak pew to rattle along the floor. Plaster fell on us in a light shower.
“
Hello?” I shouted into the gloom. “God’s not home right now, but if you leave a message, He’ll ignore you later!”
No reply. But Zeds didn’t try to claw in through a wooden door for no reason. There had to be fresh meat in here somewhere.
“
They’re back there, Danny. Big ones and little ones. Up by the alter.”