“May you rest in peace, my friend,” he said softly, squeezing Peter’s hand. “Please forgive me for not serving you better and for what I must do now.”
It was messy work, pulling out the motors and the bolts, prying back the cage that had kept Peter safe—safe for Shepherd, and safe for himself—and it took time. Each bolt broke the bones as they came out, spraying his masked and goggled face with moldy blood. The skin slipped and peeled back from the coagulated divots in the muscle. Twice, Shepherd had to get up and stand outside, leaning his forehead against the wall as he took deep, uninhibited breaths to clear the stench out of his nostrils and to settle his stomach.
Shepherd buried Peter in the grassy field beyond the runway. Ringing the grave, Martha, Paul, Matthew, and Luke stood quietly, wheezing and gurgling. Peter’s towel-shrouded body lay beside the grave. In the distance, Shepherd could hear one or two roamers, their moans and shrieks amplified by the stillness of the river and the flat of the runway.
His companions heard them too. Luke pushed his head forward, straining his neck and back against the metal restraints bolted into his flesh and bones. Martha’s eyes rolled from side to side, and her wheezing intensified; she stiffened at a distant howl, and her throat rumbled with a muffled cry in return.
“Stop it,” Shepherd whispered. “Stop it. You’re better than them. You don’t have to give in to the sickness.”
Paul gurgled at this, and a sludge of blood and bile oozed down his throat and dripped from his chin to the ground.
Shepherd hoisted himself up from the hole and laid the shovel aside. Peter’s body was light, what was left of it, and Shepherd carefully placed it in the bottom of the grave. There was a part of him that wished he could give Peter a proper burial, with a coffin and flowers and a minister’s ordained prayers, but the close-hugging blanket of dirt would have to do. At least it would keep Peter’s remains undisturbed by the gnawing teeth of free roamers.
No, not free,
Shepherd reminded himself.
They’re controlled as much as my flock are. More, because they have nothing to live for, nothing to hope for beyond the torments of this world.
Luke’s gasping, grunting moans grew louder as Shepherd shoveled dirt over Peter’s corpse. Luke wheezed, and the metal restraints groaned as he pushed against them. Back in the control tower, Shepherd knew the warning lights must be blinking, but he did not fear. He had given up on fear a long time ago.
He withdrew the weathered, life-beaten New Testament from his back pocket and turned to a page marked with a bloodstained fingerprint. Seeing it made him pause, catch his breath, remembering all too well the crack of nine-millimeter bullets entering the skulls of two very familiar heads, heads that had born faces twisted beyond recognition by the virus’s grasp on the minds within.
Once upon a time, Shepherd thought, and his trigger finger ached.
He should have realized then what he knew now: that the roamers could be controlled, could be guided and helped, at least for a while.
Luke quieted, as he always did when Shepherd read scripture to him. It warmed Shepherd’s heart to imagine that Luke was a God-fearing man, like himself, or had been before the virus trapped him in his body. Luke’s desire to listen, or appearance of it, was the one shining example of hope—a quiet, patient sign—that perhaps he wasn’t completely insane for thinking they could still be helped.
He was lying on the sofa, dry-eyed but shaking as he staring at the ceiling. Out of the corner of his eye, he could see the dark red streaks smeared down the wall and the lumps of the bodies where they’d fallen to the floor. His lips and the tips of his fingers were stiff and numb. He could feel his chest rising and falling, but he didn’t know if he was breathing.
The front door slammed, shaking the whole house, his eyes in their sockets, his heart in his chest, his brain in his skull. It shocked him back to life, and he sat up. The sofa springs creaked. His breath came in short gasps at first, short bursts he used to whisper her name. But his throat held back the cry. If she stopped, if she turned and came back, what else could he tell her that he hadn’t already tried? What could he say that would work? Would make her stay, make her forgive him?
She had called him, begged him to come home, to help her. Her trembling voice echoed in his ears: “Something’s wrong with Mom. I-I don’t think she’s breathing.”
He could still feel Anne’s fingers clawing at his arms, at his face, see the flashing white of her teeth and the blood oozing from the corners of her eyes. He could still hear Chris’s howling moan as he lurched out of his bedroom, his white T-shirt turned maroon and brown.
He knew what to do, knew what was best, the only option. Even when Penny screamed at the gunshots, caught his arm, tried to pull him away, he hadn’t hesitated. He hadn’t thought about it, and he should have. He should have stopped. Should have controlled himself, or tried harder, anything . . . It was easy to shoot them. What did that say about him?
Clutching his head with his sticky hands, he felt a moan resonating in his chest. It seeped out from between his lips from some dark place within him, and cracked the silence left in the wake of the squeal of tires on asphalt as the last living person he cared about raced away from him into the night.
He awoke in the shadows to the blinking of a warning light. Its red, pulsing bloom beat against his eyelids like a dying heartbeat. Darkness fell away to the sanguine glow, and then descended again, leaving him disoriented.
From somewhere below, he heard a crash. Shepherd’s heart jumped, and he threw back the blankets to scramble from his makeshift bed to the control panel. The warning light was Luke’s.
A gargled moan crept up the hollow cavern of the stairwell. Another crash, and this time, a scream—a girl’s scream—and the blast of a shotgun. It jump-started Shepherd’s feet, and he dove for the door, barreled down the stairs. Another shotgun discharge filled the stairwell with resounding, discordant noise.
The handle of the stairwell door was sticky with blood, and the loosened hinges groaned as he pushed the door partway open before it hit something on the floor and stopped.
It was silent inside. Shepherd slipped through the crack into the darkness and whispered, “Penny?”
A croak came from the far corner where his adjusting eyes located a hunched figure. The croak broke suddenly and became a sob. “Fuck.”
A body lay across the floor, its foot keeping the door from opening all the way. Shepherd tripped over a twisted metal bar connected to a contorted ankle as he stepped over it.
“Fuck,” the girl whispered again, her voice shaking. “Sonofabitch.”
“Are you okay?”
Shepherd climbed over the body and kicked a speaker he hadn’t seen. It bounced off his foot and struck the wall with a hollow thud.
The girl sat pressed into the corner, curled up so tight she almost seemed like a part of the wall. When he knelt in front of her, he saw tears shining on her cheeks.
“Penny—”
“He got me,” she said, and pushed something toward him. It was long, cold—her shotgun. Her eyes were so wide, he could see his shadow in them.
“Where?”
Her lips trembled as she fought back a sudden surge of tremors, and thrust out her injured leg. The ace bandage was torn ragged and soaked with sticky blackness. In the dark, he could only see the deep emptiness beneath the torn fibers where there should have been skin.
Shepherd set the gun on the floor next to what was left of Luke’s skull, his hands cold and shaking as he turned the foot to examine it. “It’s not so bad,” he said. “We’ll bandage it up and see. There’s no saying it’ll be infected. You may be fine.”
“Stop it,” the girl said from somewhere deep in her chest, growling up her throat. “Fuck, Shepherd, I know about survival, okay? I know what this means. So . . . stop it.” With a shaking sigh, she rubbed her face. “You’ve got to shoot me. Do it now before I turn.”
Shepherd shook his head, unable to let go of the slender ankle, even as the blood from her wound dripped into the palm of his hand, trickled down his wrist. Penny jerked her leg back, pulling her knees up to her chest. She choked, and her eyes widened, the whites reflecting the light from the stairwell. There was a thin rim of red around them, red that melted away and ran down her cheeks with her tears.
“Please,” she whispered. “Please, Shepherd. You have to do this for me. I’m begging you!”
Shepherd shivered, and his hand fell upon the muzzle of the shotgun. “I-I don’t . . . ”
Penny spasmed, her head cracking back against the wall. The impact and the sob that escaped her throat tightened his grip on the gun. “Please. Please, Shepherd . . . ”
Her voice caught in her throat, choking her again. This time, it took her a moment to swallow. She gagged, clutched at her throat. When the bubble burst, she gasped for air between clenched teeth. Her eyes rolled.
Shepherd stood, the shotgun weighing down his arm. “I don’t kill them,” he whispered. “I don’t. I just . . . I can’t.”
Penny’s gaze rolled up at him, and her breathing rasped, her nostrils flared. With a shudder, she fell back against the wall, eyelids fluttering, blood trickling from the corners of her mouth. Then she went still. Relaxed, calm, she looked just like Penny. Maybe it was Penny. Maybe it had just been too long, and he couldn’t recognize her anymore.
Shepherd bent down beside her, touched her cheek with his rough fingertips. Every second he spent looking at her face, her eyes, her nose, her lips, her chin—everything about her could have belonged to Penny.
“Sweetheart,” he whispered, and she opened her blood-rimmed eyes.
As Shepherd stepped into the bathroom and locked the door behind him, he caught a glimpse of himself in the mirror: a masked and bloody creature, tiptoeing into the darkness. It made him shiver, made the sticky spots on his hands and cheeks burn. Shaking, he tore off his dirty clothes, his mask, his goggles, and crouched on the tiled floor, his head in his hands. Every inch of him burned like he was lying naked on a bed of coals. There was blood on his hands, blood in his hair, blood on the floor, on his clothes, in his ears, in his nose. He could taste it, smell it, breathe it, feel it everywhere, like a thin film of filth that covered everything and everyone, no matter how many times you scrubbed, no matter how much you cleaned.
He shivered and heard his voice crack in the darkness, a pitiful whimper. His eyes stung and he hung his head, letting the few tears that escaped patter onto the blood-slicked floor. Deep breaths drew up through his nose and escaped through his lips. Once. Twice. The shivering stopped and he could breathe again, and stand.
His hand found the light switch in the dark. The shadows fled, and he stood in the unsteady light, a man naked and vulnerable before an unmerciful mirror. There were no secrets here, no personal barriers, nothing hidden. The Lord could see him here, in his moment of greatest weakness. In this tiny room, with the mirror catching his every move, every blink, every glance, his scars were exposed. They ran up his arms, little lancing crescents of pale and pink tissue, to his shoulders and stopped, though there were a few on his chest and a notch of missing flesh at his hip.
Through the floor he could hear the roamer tied to his workshop table moaning and gnashing her teeth. Even after bolting the motors and metal bars to her, she fought against them, tried to spit out the speaker he’d put in her throat.
Shepherd pressed the palms of his hands to his sweating brow. He could walk away. He could leave. It would be so easy. No one would notice, much less care. His roamers would die eventually. So would he.
The temptation was strong, but it awoke something within him. His hands fell to his sides and he looked into his own eyes in the mirror.
The valley of the shadow of death,
he thought.
I will fear no evil, for Thou art with me, and I am with them. There’s meaning in that.
With a sigh, Shepherd took up the lavender gift shop soap and scrubbed himself from head to toe, rinsing with the tub of water he’d carried over from the river. He dug his fingernails into the purple and pink-swirled bar, rubbed his skin raw with it, massaged it against his scalp and hair until his head ached. Refreshed, cleansed, and forgiven, he dressed and returned to the control room.
Neil Gaiman
That Day, the saucers landed. Hundreds of them, golden,
Silent, coming down from the sky like great snowflakes,
And the people of Earth stood and
stared as they descended,
Waiting, dry-mouthed, to find out what waited inside for us
And none of us knowing if we would be here tomorrow
But you didn’t notice because
That day, the day the saucers came, by some coincidence,
Was the day that the graves gave up their dead
And the zombies pushed up through soft earth
or erupted, shambling and dull-eyed, unstoppable,
Came towards us, the living, and we screamed and ran,
But you did not notice this because
On the saucer day, which was zombie day, it was
Ragnarok also, and the television screens showed us
A ship built of dead-men’s nails, a serpent, a wolf,
All bigger than the mind could hold,
and the cameraman could
Not get far enough away, and then the Gods came out
But you did not see them coming because
On the saucer-zombie-battling-gods
day the floodgates broke
And each of us was engulfed by genies and sprites
Offering us wishes and wonders and eternities
And charm and cleverness and true
brave hearts and pots of gold
While giants feefofummed across
the land and killer bees,
But you had no idea of any of this because
That day, the saucer day, the zombie day
The Ragnarok and fairies day, the
day the great winds came
And snows and the cities turned to crystal, the day