Be still. He closed his eyes and listened to the scratching and thumps, felt the trembles of the car pass through his body. They had made it almost two miles, gone parallel to Newgreen on Simmons, but the rest of it had been a pretty direct dive south. How much farther away was Newgreen? Between two to four miles from this spot? He could run that distance. He’d run 5Ks before the contagion. Colette could have run twice that distance and swum around the moat afterwards.
He concentrated on her in his mind’s eye. Her calmness. So rarely did it flag. She was cool and deliberate in every instance except when her children were in danger, and he needed that coolness and deliberation for himself. But she slipped away from him, like his children’s hands had slipped away, shaken free by the scratching and pounding upon the car.
Please, dude . . .
He swallowed and cast about his mind for anything else. What came up was a memory from the year before his father died, the one time Dad tried to explain how their family came to be. Xan’s mother had been so desperate when she couldn’t get pregnant. Dad had been okay with it. He was getting older anyway. It would have been nice if it had happened, but it just hadn’t. He’d made his peace with it.
It was death by a thousand stings for Mom. Every time she turned on her computer or opened her mail, there was another invitation to a baby shower or christening. Then it became first words, first steps, first days at preschool, first days at kindergarten. Birthday parties, younger siblings’ celebrations, all of her friends from high school and college belonged to this messy, joyous, trying club of parenting while she sat on the sidelines and yearned for an invitation to join. Then it happened. It was finally her turn. But her friends were now worrying about junior high or high school coming up fast, braces and bullying and blocks on the computers. They were well past the baby stage unless it was with their third or fourth child, and no parent with that many children had the time to get a smoothie after prenatal yoga and chat about their changing bodies for hours, capture every moment in the baby book and snap those firsts to proudly post online. Xan’s mother had joined the club at last, but everyone was circling in a much higher orbit.
The car shook from side to side. A furious blow hit the window. Xan lifted the gun and put his finger to the trigger. Point it at Selena, pull it, and then point it at himself? Or point it to the window? And which window? The car was surrounded.
She had loved Xan. Yet even with him, she was on the outside looking in. The parents of his classmates were a decade or two younger and she didn’t want to make friends out of them; she wanted Xan to get along with her long-term friends’ youngest children but all of them were girls, and kids didn’t become friends just because their mothers were friends.
Over the years, his mother had disengaged from the family little by little. What Xan remembered most about his mother was watching her go out the door to visit that group of buddies at coffeehouses or each other’s homes for book groups and girls’ nights. If they weren’t getting together, she still left for errands that lasted hours, or went to movies on her own. Xan couldn’t remember her face too clearly by the time he was seventeen, but he remembered the back of her head perfectly.
Thump. Scratch. Thump.
That had upset his father to hear Xan say. She’d loved him. She just had a crappy job sucking out her soul and a sick husband and parenthood hadn’t admitted her to the ultimate in sisterhood experiences that she had built it up in her head to be. She just couldn’t reach out to Xan in the right ways. And, his father said bluntly, neither could he, and he was sorry. He was sorry to be an old, sick man who never had the energy to play with his own son.
Why the memory of that old conversation was surfacing now was a mystery. Then it wasn’t. Xan was preparing to die, and that was what one did. Tried to make sense of life as it had been, to understand where he had come from before he left this mortal plane.
He was sorry that he hadn’t wanted Katie at first. He hoped that he had made up for that, and she had never known. He was sorry that he had kept Lucca at a distance, held him liable for his sister’s smile bursting out on his lips. Again, Lucca didn’t know that. Should Xan make it home, he would never give himself cause to be sorry with Lucca again. He would ask Colette to marry him. The unhappy verses of their parents’ marriages didn’t have to be replayed in their own.
Thump. Thump. Now a zombie was making a slide out of the hood. Some of the scratching had gone away. There was still Mr. Fun Time and a tapper over on Selena’s side. If a few people treated with the antidote could remember what they had done out in hell, then it was not unreasonable that a few zombies could put together the association of humans and a previously moving car.
The tapping stopped. Feet scraped on the pavement. Tapping resumed on the back window. Thump. Thump.
Then something crashed down on the roof of the car. He clamped his hand over Selena’s mouth to stop her scream as the roof bulged inwards. Feet or hands scrabbled for purchase and the car rocked. Thump.
Scratching, and then silence fell.
“Doing okay?” he whispered when it dragged on after several minutes.
“Shit damn fuck,” Selena hissed. “Fuck fuck fuck.”
“Language, young lady.” He didn’t mean it.
She didn’t take him seriously. “Fuck. Fuckity-fuck-fuck-fuck, that scared the piss out of me.”
“Me, too.”
“Why did you stop? The car was still hauling its pathetic ass around.”
“Cars are blocking the road. No way through.”
“So now what?”
“Now we hang out for the night. A bunch of zombies are in this area and we need to give them a chance to wander away. Cross your fingers in the morning that we can get to a house on foot.”
“Are there houses nearby?”
“I don’t know.” He hadn’t seen any in the darkness, but his vision was limited to the headlights. Gardner Road pierced through the heart of those curling streets, crowded together like short wisps of hair on a baby’s head.
Selena sighed. “I don’t even know how to smoke, but I want to smoke one of my cigarettes.”
“Smoking is very bad for you, just so you’re aware.”
“Really?” she asked with sarcastic innocence. “Should I worry about getting cancer?”
He grinned into the darkness. Fear had given her some sass. When there hadn’t been any sound save crickets for half an hour or so, he helped her to lower her seat. Then he pulled the blanket over his head, turned on a flashlight, and studied his map.
Through a yawn, Selena said, “Don’t you fucking honk that fucking horn by fucking accident, Mr. Spencer.”
“Mr. Fucking Spencer?”
“No, I like you. You can keep your first name.”
She slept as he concentrated. From their position on Gardner, the next road coming up on the right side was Westmore. Beyond that was Graham on the left side. Graham wound around and curved back north into the city. Westmore also wound around, but the streets going off it led south.
A zombie scratched by and didn’t stop to examine the hybrid. Xan turned off the flashlight anyway. It was pitch black in the car. He removed the flap when the scratching could hardly be heard anymore and looked out. Stars twinkled, the only light in the sky. The world had been swallowed up by darkness. The flap put back in place, he lowered his seat and stretched the blanket out to cover both of them.
He had thought Selena was asleep, and was surprised when she spoke. “Why did he really do it? Do you ever wonder?”
She could only be referring to one person. “He was angry.”
“But he had no reason to be angry at me or my mom and dad, at Astor or you and your family. How many people could he have known? A hundred? Two hundred? Two hundred out of . . . seven billion, and that’s nothing. Less than one tenth of one percent. Why did he want to get revenge on us . . . when we never even met? Why didn’t he just go out and try to make friends elsewhere?”
“That was the crazy
side of him.”
“I watched his interview on the news. He didn’t seem crazy. He wasn’t the talking to invisible people kind of nuts. Nurse Burt . . . said that crazy comes in many different flavors. He used to work in a psych ward and saw all kinds.”
“I think Olyvyr Gravine could have met every single person on the face of this planet, shaken hands with all seven billion of us, and still not found a friend,” Xan said. “He still would have done what he did. Because what he wanted wasn’t friends. He wanted to be worshipped, to be in control of people. That’s not being a friend.”
“He was so proud of being smart. Someone should have told him about this woman I read about who had an IQ that measured over two hundred. Left him . . . in the dust. And she had friends. She got married and had kids, smart but normal. So what was his problem? How can you be that smart . . . but not know how to be a friend? Part of him was really dumb.”
Her voice lowered and sped up. “I saw him die. I watched with the sound way down. He didn’t look like a genius, or someone who ended the world. He was just . . . a slob. Beer gut and messy hair, wearing dirty clothes, a slob. Everyone had their mouths open in the stands . . . as he was torn apart. They were screaming . . . for all those people he killed or changed, and changed pretty much means killed. I wanted to scream for my mom and dad. I wish I could have been there . . . for real. And he was so scared when the zombies were released. I was glad . . . that he was scared. I was scared in that restroom with the waitress. I’ve been scared for two years. He was only scared . . . for a few minutes, but I was happy to see him scared. Terrified. It hurt . . . when he died. Hah-hah.” Her voice was thick with mockery and hatred. “Did you see him die?”
“Yeah, I saw. I’ve seen it a few times.”
“Why did you watch it more than once?”
It was easier to talk about these things in the darkness. “I just did. I wanted it to make me feel happy. Like we were getting some vengeance. He made us hurt, so we made him hurt. But hurting him didn’t give back our old lives, and that’s what we want. It doesn’t return your mom or my daughter, or let us leave the settlements. We still live in his destruction and we always will. He contracted our world to the size of a dime. I won’t ever get to fly to Hawaii for a vacation. I don’t know if I’ll ever teach again. The United States will never, ever be the same. If . . . if my son lives, he’ll be picking tomatoes instead of picking colleges. He’ll know that stores can run out of food . . . that the closest he’s ever going to get to seeing the pyramids or a waterfall or an elephant is in his books . . . and God forbid when he’s a teenager, he decides to see a zombie or two for himself with his friends. Swim over the moat to pump up his adrenaline by running around in hell.”
“He wouldn’t be so stupid.”
“But this won’t be real to him like it is to us. Not as visceral. We know the before and after. He will only know the after. And when you’re young, sometimes you don’t use the best judgment.”
“Can’t say Olyvyr did either.”
Olyvyr Gravine was young to Xan and old to Selena. “Anyway, my son’s life won’t be anything like mine. There are things I want to do with him. Teach him how to ride a bike. Take him to parties. Drive a car. He won’t do any of those things. Olyvyr took them away. Everything I know how to teach my son to do, he doesn’t need. He needs things that I’m still learning how to do myself. It’s overwhelming.”
He had never even voiced these fears so completely to Colette. “I guess that’s how I feel every time I watch Olyvyr die. Overwhelmed. It’s good that he died. He deserved it. But it’s hollow.” What Xan hated was that Lucca was going to grow up thinking that this world was normal. He would never fully grasp what he had lost. He wouldn’t be angry. Yet why did Xan want him to grow up to be angry? Raging about the loss of things he had never had? This was going to be Lucca’s normal. For his mother and father, it never would be.
“I miss real TV,” Selena said when they had been quiet for a minute or two. “Watching a show and talking about it with Astor over text, and then the next day at school. That’s such a stupid little thing that he took away . . . but I still miss it. He was going to shoot girls, you know. Pretty girls to live with him in his zombie paradise.”
“Yeah, I heard.”
“He thought they would have to like him since he was the only guy in the world. But I bet that most of them still wouldn’t have liked him. I wouldn’t have. He thought he could kill their families, their friends and . . . boyfriends, their kids if they had them, but they would forgive him or not be too mad since he was the only guy left standing? Live happily ever after? That breaks my brain. That’s just . . . fantasy thinking. Delusional. That’s as delusional as unicorns. I believed in those . . . when I was five. But not now.”
“You matured, and he didn’t. He breaks all of our brains.” Humanity was going to be asking why for hundreds of years to come, and no answer was ever going to be satisfactory.
“The nurses don’t like for me to talk about it,” Selena said. “Only Nurse Burt will a little. And I have to talk about it. I can’t pretend . . . it never happened like they do.”
“I don’t think that they’re pretending. I think that they’re in too much pain. But you can talk about it with me.”
“You can talk to me about dying.”
Another zombie, or the same one from earlier, was scratching by. It bumped into the car but didn’t stop. Xan said, “Are you afraid to die?”
“I used to be afraid. Then I became afraid of living. I don’t want to have a life in the hospital, getting poked with needles and taking medications . . . that make me sick. What kind of life is that? Doctor Hansen said . . . that I’m just going to get more and more tired, sleep longer and longer until I go. That isn’t so scary. Dying by zombies is, though. I just want . . . to fall asleep and have a nice dream and die without knowing what’s happening. Most people want to die like that. Are you afraid?”
He was very afraid of dying, of Colette wondering forever what had gone wrong, of Lucca growing up without a father. Xan’s father had been a shadow to Xan; Xan would be a cipher to Lucca. “Yes. I’m not finished here. My family needs me. I need them. I’m not ready to let go.”
“I’m ready. If there’s a next life, I want to come back in a better body. This one sucks.”
“What would you do?”
“Don’t laugh.”
“I won’t laugh.”
“I want to be an actress. Not in movies, in plays.” She said the last part hastily, like movies weren’t respectable to her. “There was a playhouse in the city where I grew up and we went there all the time since I was little. In sixth grade, I got a part in a kids’ play there. It wasn’t the biggest part . . . but it wasn’t the smallest one. That was so much fun. I loved all of it. My dad sent me roses on opening night. I wanted to take drama in high school. It wasn’t offered . . . at my junior high. So that’s what I want to do. We had a little dance in the play . . . and it was the one and only time I liked physical activity.”
She was too tired to keep talking. A companionable silence stretched out until she was asleep. He turned over, concerned that he was going to sleep so deeply that a zombie broke in with him blithely unaware. He’d have to trust the hedgehog squeaking in his ear did the job.
Scratch. Scratch. Thump. Scratch.
He drifted away to that disturbing lullaby, and the next he knew was dim light coming in through the construction paper. The flap had come off, startling him when he realized he was looking out into the world. His hand went out automatically to shove it up. Then his brain woke up entirely. There was no reason to hide when no one was out there.
No, someone was. A zombie was staggering off the road and into the foliage. But he saw houses, two of them on the street that had to be Graham. They were two stories tall and showed in bits and pieces through the trees.
Four cars were creating the snarl that had stopped the hybrid. Two had collided, their hoods coming together in a crum
pled V-shape. Two more were behind them and parked bumper to bumper over the lanes. It was an odd configuration, like the drivers of the two farthest ones had driven up, seen the problem, and tried but failed to execute a U-turn simultaneously. One couldn’t get past the hill, which was too steep to drive up, and the other couldn’t get past a guardrail.
Xan climbed into the back and peeled off a little of the construction paper over the back window. They had still been rounding the hill when they were forced to stop, and little of the road behind them was visible. No one was there, but someone could be only fifteen feet away around the rock and grass by the shoulder and he wouldn’t see.
He had to pee, and had brought diapers along for that reason. He relieved himself into one as Selena slept, and then wrapped it up in a plastic bag and knotted the handles. The rustling woke her up. She stared dully at the roof of the car and Xan felt it: the bit of lost ground from the day before. A precursor to death was in that hollow stare. Piece by piece, she was moving away from this world.
He put the bag under the seat. Her head turned and she stared at him. Recognition filled her eyes and her lips worked silently. Fatigue was a heavy aura all around her. He shifted her seat upward, so that she was still reclined but no longer almost flat on her back, and held a bottle of water to her lips. He squeezed the middle and clear fluid spurted into her mouth. Some of it leaked out before she swallowed. Wiping her up, he gave her more water. Then he held candy to her lips, and she shook her head. In a raspy voice, she whispered, “Something . . . soft?”
Pudding, applesauce, those would go down with less effort. He peeled off the foil lid of another chocolate pudding and fed it to her spoonful by spoonful. She had about three-quarters of the container and he had the rest. Then he looked outside. One zombie was blocking them from those homes. Just one. But they couldn’t exit the car just yet. He had to charm Selena back from the border, return her to this world.
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