We drove in silence, Deacon tucked between me and Nova, and Crazy Pants—sorry—
Joan
in the back of the truck. Apparently she liked the fresh air. With each rev of the engine as we neared our destination, Deacon’s body grew more rigid and taut with anxiety until his anxiety was almost something palpable. Something you could reach out and touch with the palm of your hand. I wanted to offer him some support, to tell him that it would be okay, but I couldn’t. That would have been a lie. Because things would never be okay again. Things hadn’t been okay for a long time now, and with each breaking dawn, when I thought I had seen the worst, a new horror seemed to arise from the ashes.
That’s something I would never be able to get over. Something I would never become immune to. Because each day I was only shocked more than the last.
“Next left,” Deacon said, his voice thick as he struggled to contain his emotions. His shoulder was pressed against mine in the small cab of the truck and I could feel him trembling, but chose not to comment or acknowledge it in any way.
Nova turned left, down a dirt track and past some trees that had grown wild in the years that had passed. We finally came to a stop in front of a small two-story farmhouse, and all the air seemed to leave Deacon’s lungs in one quick gasp. The horror was clearly too much for him, the fresh agony of being here hitting him like a punch to the stomach. It couldn’t be good, whatever awaited us, to garner such a reaction from him when he had seen whatever lay within already…
I looked away from his face, taking in our surroundings. The yard was overgrown, and what was once a small wooden fence surrounding the expanse of the house was now mostly broken down and rotten. The place had once been well-loved, with a vegetable garden and flower bed, the wooden exterior once a bright white, the roof a pretty red. However, now it was nothing more than a drab, broken home filled with unknown horrors.
I looked across at Nova as she turned the engine off and the cab of the truck fell into a thick silence. She was staring out of the windshield, her pale face a blank canvas, and in that moment all I could think to do was tell her to keep driving—to take us back to base camp and forget this crazy shit. We knew what was in there. We didn’t need to see it.
Nova chose that moment to blow a giant bubble, letting it pop and making both Deacon and I jump.
“Let’s do this shit.” Nova looked across at us all, her stare cold, but her words even colder.
She reached for the handle on the door and pulled on it, letting the door swing wide before jumping out, her boots landing in the muddy earth with a resounding
splat
. I took a heavy breath and did the same, holding the door open for Deacon while he climbed out. I ordered Joan to stay in the truck—which, surprisingly, she did with no argument—and then we walked toward the door of the farmhouse. I looked around us as we walked, checking for deaders and traps and anything else that might be out of place.
I couldn’t quite fathom why Deacon was just doing as we told him. I mean, sure, we had guns and knives, but he was no boy. He was a man with layer upon layer of muscle, broad shoulders, and strong hands that could easily snap my neck if he wanted to. Sure, Nova was badass, and yeah, I had a big-ass knife and a gun to boot, but it still didn’t make any sense.
As we climbed the steps to the front porch, the wood creaking underfoot, I watched him carefully, waiting to see what trick he would pull on us. But then I saw it. The sag to his shoulders, the defeated look on his face. This man was broken, exhausted, and dead on the inside. He wasn’t fighting us because he had given up already. He had nothing left to live for and didn’t care what happened to him. He had given up already, and was now merely an empty shell for his soul to reside in.
Nova stopped in front of the door and turned back to look at him. “Should I knock?” she snarked with a grin. “Will the little lady come open up for us?”
Right in that moment I wanted to smack her around the face and tell her to stop being such a heartless bitch. I knew she was hurting, but weren’t we all? Hadn’t we all done things that were wrong, that were evil and cruel, and that we were ashamed of? Things that kept us awake at night, guilt eating away at our consciences? Or maybe that was just me.
Regardless, we had done what we had to do because we were trying to survive, just trying to make it through the day as best we could. I couldn’t—wouldn’t ever—say it was okay for him to kill all those people, because it wasn’t okay, and it never would be. He would pay for that crime, of that I had no doubt, but right there in that moment was what mattered. And right then, I knew that we were walking into his worst nightmare, and possibly our own.
Deacon stared at Nova with a deep-seated hatred, his eyes burning vicious holes into her, but she didn’t care, and I couldn’t help the disgust I felt for her in that moment. More so, I couldn’t help but wonder if this was how people looked at me. I was heartless and selfish, I knew that, but to see yourself—your actions—reflected in another person was an entirely different thing. It was making me reevaluate my behavior. Because who I was seeing Nova be at the moment was not someone I wanted to be any longer.
She turned and twisted the handle on the door and swung it open. A smell wafted out to us—a musky, rotten smell that made my heart skip a heavy beat because I knew this smell, and I hated it. I held my katana against my chest, ready to use it if need be. I could feel the tension coming from Deacon as we stepped inside what I guess was his makeshift home, our footsteps sounding hollow and empty on the wooden flooring.
I looked around, noting that the house was relatively clean and tidy—a home against all odds—but something was off. Other than the smell, of course. I looked over at Deacon, who gestured with his head upstairs. His mouth was closed, his lips pulled thin, a grimace against his handsome and rugged face. We slowly climbed the stairs, each creak and knock of the aging wood making me cringe, my nerves tingling with the anticipation of what awaited us.
As we reached the landing I looked to Deacon again, but I didn’t need to. A muffled sound at the end of the hallway caught all of our attention, and Nova moved out of position and toward the sound without waiting for me. Her steps were quick, her gait strong and filled with angry, nervous energy.
Deacon followed after her, his heavy steps loud as he rushed to catch up to her. She laid her hand on the door handle as she looked back at us and slowly opened it up, and then she turned her face away from me, looking inside the room and at the horrors I was envisioning it holding.
I stood at the foot of the stairs, somehow unable to make my legs move toward her or Deacon, who stood between the two of us as if unsure who he would need to react to first. His large frame blocked the hallway, and his arms hung limply by his sides in a sign of submission, yet his fists were curled up into solid forms, telling me a different story.
Nova’s breath caught in her throat like the wind had been punched from her, and I looked up to her, watching as her shoulders sagged and she shook her head ever so slightly while she raised her gun.
“No!” Deacon roared, his body coming to life. He charged Nova, his footsteps echoing around the small space.
“Shit!” I yelled, running after him.
He hit her body sideways with his own, just as she was swinging her gun back around to shoot him. His shoulder slammed into hers, sending her sideways, and the two of them crashed into a heap together and began to fight. A shot went wide, and wood splintered next to my head, shards of what was once the banister sticking into my clothes, but thankfully none making it through the material and embedding themselves into my skin. I jumped, squealed, and maybe even peed in my pants a little. I had been shot before. It was not nice, at all. It felt like a hot blade slicing into your body, and I did not wish to go through that again.
I didn’t have time to cuss up a storm, though, as Nova and Deacon, still on the floor, continued to fight over the gun in her hand. He hit her wrist repeatedly in the hopes of knocking the weapon free from her hand, but she kept it gripped in her palm despite his attempts.
I should have been more worried for their safety—one of them was going to shoot and kill the other after all—but at that moment, I had just reached the doorway after jumping over their writhing bodies on the floor, and as I looked in at the horror that the room held, the only thing I could think about was not throwing up on my boots.
My heart cracked, a thin splinter of it breaking away from the bloody pulp that beat within my chest, and I knew that it would never go back. I knew that I could never be healed from the atrocities that I was witnessing. I gagged on tears and bile, on heartbreak and fear.
I didn’t notice that Nova and Deacon had stopped fighting, or that Nova was crying loudly.
I didn’t notice that I was bent over, struggling to breathe through my own silent tears that burned hot paths down my cheeks.
I didn’t notice anything but the blood and the bodies, and the groaning and the grunting, and the horror that was Hilary and her tiny writhing bloody baby still dangling between her thighs.
“No,” I murmured to myself—to Deacon, to Nova. Hell, maybe even to Satan himself. Because this was too much. It was too much to see, to live, to breathe in. I would never be able to unsee this and forget it.
I couldn’t do this anymore.
I staggered backwards, almost tripping over my own feet. Nova and Deacon stepped out of my way, making a path for me between their bodies. I continued walking backwards, my katana hanging loosely in my grip. I reached the stairs, looking back at Nova and Deacon, listening to the growling coming from within, the smell of the room having followed me, and then I turned and ran down the stairs, taking them two at a time, almost falling as I hit the last step and stumbled outside, sucking in great lungfuls of air.
I collapsed to my knees, my body trembling as I tried to get rid of the image of Hilary and the bloody stain where her womb had once been. Of her tiny, perfectly formed baby and its tiny gray face with cold, dead eyes, gurgling from the back of its throat as it dangled upside down.
If this would have been a normal pregnancy—a normal birth—this baby wouldn’t have lived, it was too young, and far too small to have survived. But this wasn’t a normal birth, and this wasn’t a normal baby. This was an abomination, a horror like no other.
It
had survived.
It
had lived, in a sense, though it was dead in every other sense of the word.
It
shouldn’t have been living.
It
shouldn’t have been moving around.
It
shouldn’t have been there…
“This shouldn’t have happened!” I screamed, the words exploding from my mouth before I could stop them. “This is wrong!”
A gunshot sounded out from the house, and I stumbled up to my feet and staggered back inside. Not wanting to go back
there.
Not wanting to see
that
.
But I had to. For Nova.
I could barely hear anything beyond my own heartbeat as I reached the top of the stairs. I looked down the hallway and saw Nova fall backwards out of the doorway, her hands held up in front of her in defense. But I couldn’t hear anything. Just my breath. It went in and it went out, the sound so crystal clear inside my own head. I could see Nova screaming, and I could see Deacon standing over her, angry tears covering his face and a shotgun pointed at her.
I was sure I was yelling at him, almost certain that I was begging at him to stop, but I couldn’t hear myself speaking or shouting. All I could hear was the sound of the air inside of me.
And then it was like a balloon had popped and I was expelled back down onto the earth again.
POP!
Just like that. And I could hear, and see, and smell again.
“NO! Please, Deacon, please, no!” I ran toward him, my feet moving until I was standing over Nova, and the gun was pointed at me. I held my hands up in front of me in surrender like Nova had and pleaded for her life. “Please, Deacon, don’t.”
I couldn’t see around him or over his shoulder—his body was blocking the doorway, filling the small space up entirely—but I had heard the gunshot, and I could see the grief written over his face. His body was shaking in anger, his face filled with rage, but it was in his eyes that I found his sorrow.
“Please, no,” I begged again, reaching out carefully to touch the end of the shotgun and gently push it away from me.
Surprisingly, Deacon let me in, his breathing coming in ragged, choking gasps. Turning away from me, he leaned against the doorframe, allowing his body to slide down the length of it. Slumped on the floor, he let his shotgun clatter free from his hands, and as his face fell, he began to cry.
I glanced back at Nova, who still hadn’t moved. She was looking at me like I was some sort of crazy person, and maybe I was. After all, I did just stand between her and a shotgun. Yeah, I was clearly fucking crazy. I shuddered as the realization hit me, and I stepped away from her and finally let my eyes look around the room again. I didn’t want to. Not really. I wanted to leave this house—leave Deacon and his twisted, bloody little family and head back to the base. I had my answers now. I knew what needed to be done now for the sake of Jessica and her rapidly swelling belly. But I didn’t leave. I turned to face the room, not finding Hilary or the baby.
I looked down at Deacon with a nervous frown, and I stepped over his legs. He didn’t stop me, he just continued to cry into his hands as if the burden of this nightmare was finally over. Because now he was sharing it with us—other people that were alive. I stepped around the large bed that filled the majority of the room and saw Hilary’s body sprawled on the floor, her ankle tied to the bed by some rope. Her head was a messy pulp of black blood and shattered skull bone, her body thin, almost skeletal. And beside her was the baby—if you could call it that.
I released the air that had been trapped in my lungs since I’d stepped inside the room. The dots in front of my eyes vanished as I pulled oxygen into my lungs, but with each breath I got a mouthful of the foul odor of the room. I took a small step forward, not wanting to get any closer to the bodies of the mother and child but needing to open a window, to let some of the deathly smell out of the room. The window was jammed, and I pushed on it once with the palm of my hand, and then again with both to get it to open, and I tripped as it finally opened. My foot slipped in the gore on the floor and I stumbled and nearly stood on the baby, my foot nudging the fragile body.
I looked down at its tiny face, seeing its pale eyes staring back up at me, and hearing the small, strangled growl coming from its tiny grey mouth. I gasped and staggered backwards, one hand going for my katana and the other covering my mouth to hold in the vomit that automatically rose up my throat.
Deacon came to life behind me, jumping up and pushing me out of the way as he charged past, reached down and sliced through the rotten umbilical cord, and then lifted the writhing bundle of death up in his arms. He pulled the tiny form against his body, his sobs deepening with every retched breath.
I wondered why he had left the baby attached all this time, why he hadn’t cut that cord a long time ago. But then I guess the bigger question should actually be—why hadn’t he put them both out of their misery, instead letting them both live—if you could call it that? I moved back out of the room, my brain wanting to shut down. I clutched the doorway as I exited, looking at a pale and forlorn Nova leaning against the balcony, smoking with shaking hands.
“I shot her,” she said bluntly. “I couldn’t let her live like that. Not that she was alive, but…” Her words trailed off. “What?” she said, frowning as she finally took in my expression. She lit another cigarette off the butt of the previous one and then crushed the old one underfoot. “Fuckin’ hell, Nina, what is it?”
“The baby,” I mumbled quietly.
“Baby?” Nova said just as quietly. Her face was a picture of confusion.
And I wondered how in the hell had she missed it when it had been all that I saw—a dead baby swinging from its cord, still attached to its mother. Her eyes drifted over my shoulder and I turned and flinched at the sight of Deacon coming out of the room carrying the baby.
“Oh my God, I didn’t realize there was a baby!” She rushed past me to console Deacon. “I’m so sorry, no wonder you…” She reached out for the baby, pulling the thin wool blanket that Deacon had wrapped around it away from its face, and then she yelped and pulled her hand back like she had been burned.
She turned to me accusingly, as if I somehow had somehow this. But I couldn’t speak, so I shook my head and swallowed, and tried not to cry. I closed my eyes to the pain and torment on Deacon’s face and I thought about what he had said to us before we had left the town.
You’ll understand why this place needs to burn if you see.
He’s right: I do understand now. The place does need to burn. That place was a manufactured hell, and had no right being left standing. No one should ever live there again, because that place is pure evil.
Deacon passed us, both of us too numb to stop him. It took several minutes before I could think straight, before the stench coming from the room became too much and Nova finally turned back to me.
“Did I do that? Did I kill that baby?” She looked horrified, and I quickly consoled her that she wasn’t the one who had done it.
“No, that…baby was dead already.” I hadn’t realized that she hadn’t seen it. Her eyes must have been so drawn to Hilary coming toward her, not realizing that the woman was tied by her ankle and couldn’t get to either of us. She must have shot Hilary, who fell backwards over the bed and dragged the baby with her.
“Are you sure?” She didn’t sound or look like she believed me, and I knew the guilt would only last seconds if she believed that she’d killed that baby. Without a doubt, she’d turn her gun on herself—because that was too much for anyone to have on their conscience.
“Yes,” I said, placing my hands on either of her shoulders. “Yes, it was already dead. You didn’t do that.”
Her chin quivered and she looked down to her feet. “God, why did he keep them like this?” she whispered.
“He couldn’t let go, I guess.” I shook my head. “We need to go find him and…” I looked away from her, not sure of what word to use. “We need to finish this for him if he can’t.”
“I don’t think he’ll let us,” she replied.
“Then we’ll make him. It needs to be put to rest.”
Nova nodded in agreement and headed to find Deacon, both feeling shaky and unnerved. Outside we found him sat on the porch steps with the baby still in his arms. He heard us as we went approached—I knew this because he had been murmuring to it before we walked through the doorway. His deep voice had traveled into the house and up the stairs—soft, soothing whispers that a father gave to his child. He fell silent when he heard us behind him.
We walked down the steps, coming to stand directly in front of him.
“You’re not hurting my baby,” he said bluntly, his eyes locking with mine and filled with the familiar rage I had seen back at the walled city. “You’re not hurting my child.”
I kept my composure, even though inside I was screaming at him that this whole situation was wrong, that he was sick in the head for keeping his wife and baby alive, and that
thing
needed to die, to be put out of its misery. But I didn’t say any of those things. Instead I nodded and held his gaze.
“Will you help me?” he asked, his words dripping with pity and sadness.
“Burn down the walled city?” I asked. “Destroy the place that did this to your family?”
“Yes,” he choked out.
The bundle moved, the blanket stirring until I caught a glimpse of the dead baby in his arms. I gritted my teeth, breathing through flared nostrils. Both anger and hatred flared in me, disgust that this was what we resorted to as humans—killing our own. Wasn’t there already enough to fear in this world?
“Hell yeah, I will,” I said with strained words.
Deacon seemed satisfied by my answer, by the force of my words and my obvious conviction “Thank you,” he mumbled, and looked away.
“That thing ain’t riding in my truck,” Nova fumed next to me.
“Yes, it is. He needs help,” I said, not quite recognizing the woman that I was becoming.
“I ain’t no damn shrink.” Her nostrils flared.
“Good, because what we need is fire. Help me give him his vengeance,” I pleaded. Because he deserved that much, at least.
Nova continued to stare at me. Eventually she slid her gaze across to Deacon. “You have to pay for what you did. But I’ll help you get your vengeance, because she’s right: you deserve that. Everyone deserves that—including the people you murdered.”
I couldn’t agree with her, and I guess neither could he, since he nodded and looked away. We all climbed into the truck, and after checking, I found Joan sleeping in the back, completely unaware of everything that had occurred in the last half hour, and by God I envied her ignorance to it all. Because I would do anything to go back half an hour and forget everything that I had just seen. I had thought it was bad when I thought Hilary had died, but for her to become a deader—for her own undead baby to have somehow eaten or clawed its way out of her, killing her and turning her into this monster—that was something else entirely.
As we trundled back down the muddied path, I watched the house fade away in the distance and I wondered if we should have also burnt it down. It was a house of horrors now, filled to the brim with only nightmares. Its walls were crawling with revulsions and pain. Deacon stared out the window silently, his arms still wrapped tightly around the moving baby as if he were protecting any normal newborn. The thought made me feel sick. Nova drove, her window open and a cigarette hanging from her lips, her face pale and deathly.
This was the most horrifying day I had ever experienced—possibly worse than when the outbreak had first begun, when I had no idea what was happening and it had seemed as if every nightmare was becoming a reality.
This day was worse than that. This had to be the lowest point, because I couldn’t imagine anything worse than this, than what Deacon was going through at the moment, than what he carried in his arms. I promised myself silently that I would try and bring him some kind of peace.
He had killed so many people, and for that he would have to pay, because I finally agreed with Nova that he had to die. It was seeing his family, torn up and bloody, and knowing that he had truly lost it—that there was no coming back from this for him—that had convinced me. But first he deserved some sort of retribution for his own pain, and I would help him get that.