The Resurrected Compendium

by Megan Hart

  Kelsey slammed open the cafeteria door and ran for her life.

  69

  Maggie swiped the hair from her face. She stunk of sweat and gasoline and mud. She had spent the last few days in the basement of the grocery store where once upon a time she’d bought birthday cakes and eggs and diet cola. She’d been taken there with twenty others; only she was left.

  Numbed, drained, incapable of doing more than putting one foot in front of the other, she pulled herself through a fallen wall of concrete rubble. There’d been an explosion. More than one, actually. Fire and smoke. The sprinkler system had not yet been disabled, and the water had turned everything into a sea of filthy, thick mud.

  Someone had drowned, face down in the mud, crushed. The others had gotten out the best they could, fighting for access to the stairs and the barricades that had been meant to keep them in. Maggie had made it out, pushed ahead of the crowd, unable to stop herself from stepping on the hands and backs and faces of anyone who fell in front of her as mass of panicking people behind her refused to stop pushing. The crunch of bones would be loud in her head for the rest of her life, though not as loud as the sound Bill’s voice saying her name over and over the way he had just before he’d died.

  So many had died.

  Maggie was alive. She thought she was. There was pain, all throughout her arms and legs, her lower back. Her jaw ached. So much pain had to mean she was still alive, didn’t it? Surely whatever greater force there was in the universe would not suffuse the afterlife with agony. She stumbled over another pile of fallen concrete and twisted her body to get past a freezer case that had been pushed onto its side. Scattered glass glinted in the light from the big plate glass windows at the front of the store, all of which had also been broken. Only empty frames stood between the store and the parking lot. One large, jagged piece that remained was the final resting place of some poor asshole who’d tried to get in or out and ended up falling, instead.

  She didn’t want to pass that body.

  Didn’t want to try to sidle past it, to wait and see if it would shiver and grunt and come to life. Maggie had always been the first to go into those October haunted houses made from old barns. Fearless in the dark, knowing that whatever was going to jump out and startle her, it wouldn’t really hurt her. But that body might not be dead, it might indeed writhe to sick and vicious life. It could hurt her, very much. It could kill her.

  Death might be a blessing, actually. The world shimmered and blurred in front of her. Tears or imminent unconsciousness, she couldn’t be sure. She reached and found the support of a candy rack. It had been emptied of its contents long ago, but at least it was upright and hadn’t been knocked over. Maggie’s fingers gripped the metal tight enough to turn her knuckles white. She could not let herself fall. She might not get up. And still she went to her knees, trying to breathe through lungs that feel coated in mud. The floor was cool on her cheek.

  There was darkness.

  Maggie closes her eyes and holds her knees close to her chest. She is in the shed, tucked behind a wall of stacked lawn chairs and cushions that reek of mold and rodent. Stuffing falls from a chewed hole in one of them, and something rustles inside. She doesn’t care anymore about the mice living in her expensive lawn furniture, but she will scream if one runs across her face again, the way it did last night while she slept. She will scream. And scream. And scream.

  It had been Bill’s idea to build this shelter in the shed. He’d meant it for camouflage, building up the inside space behind a bunch of junk that wouldn’t attract anyone. Not when the house was full of good stuff. Better to be alive with less, than dead with more. It had been a good idea. Impressive. Maggie had been proud of him, thinking so clearly and quickly. For the first time in years she’d remembered how it felt to love him.

  Maggie can’t keep herself from drifting, though she’s desperate to stay awake. She needs to be on her guard. There is nobody else to protect her. Bill is gone. Jake, too. The men who killed her husband might’ve done the same to Jake; at any rate, both of them are gone, but the men come back at regular intervals. They sweep the neighborhood, looting and raiding and looking for whatever they can take, and not just food or supplies.

  They’re taking people, too.

  She can’t keep herself from sleeping. And sleeping, she dreams of Jake and startles herself awake with her heart pounding. Stomach sick. The roil of arousal low in her belly is shameful. Painful. She presses her fingertips to her eyelids to keep the tears from sliding down her cheeks.

  Bill died protecting her, and still she dreams of another man.

  Maggie weeps, shoulders shaking. Remembering. The first few weeks after the storms, when the people started getting sick, they were all okay there in their house. Fortified doors and windows. Stocks of food. Weapons. Before the power went out for good, the stories on the TV had seemed such fantastic science-fiction, unbelievable. Infection spreading from spores, the undead rising and attacking the living. And yet, they’d relaxed into their safety — the resurrected weren’t smart enough to come after them, hidden away inside their castle.

  It wasn’t the resurrected they had to worry about.

  They sit around the table by candlelight. Dinner was macaroni and cheese and tuna sandwiches. There’s no way to keep leftovers, but they were all so hungry there’s nothing left but scraps anyway. They play cards now, the three of them. Jake could easily win but has let Maggie pull ahead. Even Bill is laughing.

  The knock at the door stops them all. It comes again, soft but insistent. Bill and Jake, guns in hands, go to the door and check it, and while Maggie is still stunned and horrifying amused at the Wild West attitude both her menfolk have taken on, she’s also relieved.

  Outside the door is a young boy, maybe twelve. He doesn’t look familiar. Not a kid from the neighborhood.

  “I lost my mom and dad,” the kid says.

  “Don’t let him in.” That’s Jake’s advice, but Maggie can’t turn away a child. Jake is not a parent. He can’t understand.

  They feed the kid and give him a place to sleep, but sometime in the night he lets himself out the front door. Maggie worries. Jake tells her not to bother.

  “He’ll be back,” he says. “He’ll be bringing others. He was a scout, Maggie.”

  She doesn’t ask him how he knows this. While once upon a time she could have told you the number of eyelashes in each of his eyes, the exact number of breaths he took between each blink, the number of times his heart beat a minute…there are many details of his life she’s never known.

  “What do you mean, a scout?” This comes from Bill.

  He doesn’t like Jake, but he’s never said so. Never acted on it. Whatever he might think he knows about the relationship between his wife and this other man — and he could never know it all, never guess it, not the fullness of it anyway. But whatever he thinks he knows about it, he’s never said a word. He might not like Jake. He might even hate him, if Bill is capable of such a thing, and Meira’s not sure he is, since hate requires some depth of feeling her husband seems always to have lacked. But he respects Jake, at least so far as stuff like this is concerned.

  “They sent him ahead to see what sort of supplies we have, and weapons, and how easily we trust.” Jake doesn’t look at Maggie when he says this, but she knows he means her. He’s not scolding her, but this is her fault. She’s the one who insisted on letting the kid in. “They will be back, with more of them, and they will try to take what we have.”

  “What do we do?” She asks, thinking of her own children. If something had ever happened to her, she would have wanted and expected that someone else would take them in. How was what she did wrong?

  “We fight,” Jake says. “We have guns. We have fortification. That was the point of all of this.”

  “We fight,” Bill says with a nod, like that is the answer he was waiting for.

  But they don’t.

  It doesn’t happen right away, there’s a week that passes between
the time the kid leaves and the first truck pulls up in front of the house. Maggie is outside, trying to get some sun. Too many days in the dark have left her shaking and craving the kiss of a breeze. Winter will be hell, she thinks. All of them together in the dark. Being so close to him and not being able to touch him, not ever. If this is penance for what she did years ago, it seems unfair. The world is ending. There are more important things to worry about other than the path of her heart.

  At first, the low rumble and sputter of the engine is far enough away that she takes it for thunder. When the truck pulls to a stop at the bottom of her driveway, Maggie stops, head up, freezing in place like the deer she used to surprise in her front yard when she came out to get the mail. The stink of exhaust reaches her a minute later, making her sneeze. It hasn’t been that long since she smelled it, but now it’s foreign and noxious.

  Jake is beside her before she realizes it, his hand on her elbow the way it used to be when they crossed a street, making sure she was safe. There’d been times in those days when she knew without a doubt that if a car had come hurtling toward them, out of control, Jake would have put himself in front of it for her. Maybe that had been wishful thinking. But now, here, he takes her by the arm and leads her toward the house with an urgency she at first fights, confused.

  “They’re coming,” he says. “You need to hide.”

  “But —” She doesn’t mean to protest, to be one of those useless pieces of fluff who, in the movies, don’t know enough to get the fuck out of Dodge when things go down. Her protest is not of the immediacy of getting inside, of hiding and protecting herself. Her question is, what will Jake do?

  “Go,” he says again.

  She goes.

  Inside, she goes upstairs, where she can watch from a window unblocked by plywood. From outside, she hears Jake’s voice. He sounds calm, but the gun in his hand is a warning the men coming up the driveway can’t miss. Through the trees, she sees what Jake can’t. The men have a truck, idling at the bottom of the driveway and followed by another just across the street, where other men are knocking on the front doors. They also have a ladder. A long one.

  This is when the reality of this new world hits her. These men are prepared to take what they want, however they can. They come in trucks with ladders to reach second floors that are not boarded up. They have guns. She hides behind the curtain, her stomach sick, watching Jake meet them halfway down the driveway. He raises a casual hand, maybe to show them that though he has a gun tucked into the back of his belt, he doesn’t intend to use it.

  “Hey,” he says. At this distance, she shouldn’t be able to hear him, but his voice carries. “How’s it going?”

  The men are armed, but also carry their guns as though they mean no threat. That makes their intent all the clearer. They’ll shoot him dead if he so much as sneezes wrong. They grin and grin, their faces rough and scraggly, their clothes dirty but not filthy. They’re not living too rough, and they are together. They are a team. They’ve done this before.

  “This place is gutted,” he says. “Any luck with the other places around here?”

  He’s trying to steer them away from the house, she realizes. He’s trying to protect them. Where is Bill? He should be out there with Jake, making a show of force. They’re supposed to be fighting, aren’t they? There is a gun in this room, one that Maggie knows how to aim and shoot, how to dismantle and clean and reload. There have been lessons at the kitchen table and target practice in the back yard. Jake behind her, his breath hot on her neck as he helps her steady the gun and aim.

  She never hit the target when he was touching her; her hands always shook too much.

  Her hands shake now, too, as she goes briefly into the hall to look over the railing, trying to find Bill. She doesn’t want to yell, wary that the strangers might hear her. Her husband’s name hisses out of her on a raspy sigh. Ineffective.He doesn’t answer.

  Back in the room overlooking the driveway, she watches Jake in his negotiations. The men have inched closer the house. They aren’t arguing, there’s no anger in their faces. Amusement. They are laughing at him. They find his attempts at keeping them out of the house funny.

  One man draws his gun without warning, leveling at Jake’s head. In seconds, Maggie busts out the window glass and fires. The man’s head explodes and the rest of him crumples to the ground. The second man is also drawing, but she shoots him, too. Her aim is slightly off. The bullet clips the edge of Jake’s sleeve, and he stumbles forward, but the other man goes down with his hands clutching his gut. She shoots him again, taking away his jaw.

  Jake turns to look up at the window, his eyes wide. Blood stains his shirt, but only a little. Surely he’ll forgive her, she thinks calmly. Everything has gone slow and steady and surreal. He forgave her for walking away from him, surely shooting him a little will be okay, too.

  Then there are more men running up the driveway, two of them, and she shoots but misses. Shoots again. She will need to reload in a minute, and there was her mistake, because she doesn’t have more ammo here. It’s in the other room. She shoots again, catching one of the men in the leg but not in a place that will put him down. They grab Jake, knock him on the head. He sags. Blood pours from his head.

  They take him away.

  They take him away from her.

  And this, the second time she loses him, is worse than the first. Maggie screams, the sound going up and up like a siren until her voice breaks. She won’t be able to talk above a whisper for a week, and the taste of blood lingers for so long she fears she will never not have it on her tongue. Her screams bring Bill, finally, and when she tells him what happened, he doesn’t pull her into his arms. He does not hold her. Maggie stands in front of him with the gun in her now-steady hand, telling him she killed two men, that others took Jake away, and her husband only stares at her without speaking.

  Later, he makes the false wall in the basement, behind which most of their food and supplies are stored. He works fast, without the normal skill that gave him his reputation as one of the best builders in the area. Still, when he’s done you’d never know there’s a whole room behind the wall unless you know the layout of the house. He makes no door, nothing to reveal it, which is why they can’t be locked in there with the food. In case someone does figure it out, he says. He makes a similar place to hide in the shed. They carry as much as they can to it, enough to use for a few days, a week, just enough to keep them safe until the men come back and strip the house bare of everything Bill is smart enough to leave them so they think they don’t need to come back.

  “What if they burn it,” she whispers.

  “Then they burn it.”

  “Bill.” She wants to lean into him, but doesn’t.

  “They’ll come. They’ll take what is left. They’ll leave. Then we’ll go back.” Bill sounds like he’s trying to convince himself more than her. “We won’t have to fight them. We can’t fight them.”

  She knows he’s right, that his plan is smart and resourceful, but part of her wishes her husband had been the one who’d gone to meet those men with his gun at the ready. She would’ve shot them to save him, too. That’s what she tells herself over and over again as they try to find a way to sleep in the cramped space of the shed, wondering how long it will be before the men return to ransack the house. She would’ve killed to save her husband.

  Two days later, when they wake to the noise of the trucks, this time in the driveway and not just at the bottom, she thinks she might have the chance to prove her loyalty. But she doesn’t. The men in the trucks raid the house, yes. They come into the shed, yes. And Bill is not there, because when they showed up, he was stupid and left his wife behind while he crept out to get a better look, and the men with guns found him before he found them.

  “Shh, shh,” Maggie muttered. “They’ll hear you.”

  She’d drooled, her spit making a puddle under her cheek. That roused her. She pushed herself upright, waiting for a blow to the back of he
r head or maybe just pain, but there was nobody there to knock her down. She got first to her knees, waiting for the world to stop wobbling. Then again to her feet, hanging onto the candy rack.

  The men who’d raided her house and killed her husband had found her. They’d thrown her in the back of a truck. Took her to a tent camp that had once been the parking lot of the local chain hardware store. Ringed with fencing and guards, it was safe from the resurrected, who rattled the metal chain link but couldn’t manage to get inside. It wasn’t safe from much else.

  They made her a whore, and Maggie didn’t care because she was very good at it. And if this, too, was her penance — that she should suffer the attentions of men who liked to put their dicks in her mouth or up her ass in exchange for food and warmth and safety — if this was her penance for once willingly and with love performing these same acts with a man who was not her husband…well. This did seem fair.

  When the raid came from the opposing camp, she was taken as a prize. The other camp was not as well-run or prosperous or disciplined as the first, even if they had been better at the art of the underhanded attack. Her life was harder in that camp, but as the rest of the world had continued to destroy itself, it hadn’t mattered so much. By the time she’d been chosen for the slaughter pens, held with twenty others in grocery store basement and waiting to be taken upstairs to the meat department’s butchering equipment, Maggie no longer cared about anything. Kept in the dark and stink of other people waiting to die, she had not thought of her children. That pain was too much to bear; she had to believe they were all right, somewhere out there in the world. She didn’t think of her husband, who had been a good man, just not the right man.

  In the dark, waiting to die, she thought of Jake. Always of Jake. And when they came at last and slit her throat to let her bleed out, to use her corpse as food or bait or whatever they chose…when that happened, Maggie had thought, she would offer up her neck to them gratefully.