Xan would light them for her if she wanted. But she wasn’t all that curious about smoking. She just enjoyed having something forbidden, something so adult, in her possession. It wasn’t what it was; it was what it represented.
It would be best for them both if he found another hybrid for this last part of their journey. However, the terrain below the hill gave him pause. If the car ran out of juice at anything less than the moat, and zombies were present, the options for hiding were extremely limited. Very few structures stood between Delanto and Newgreen. Except for the land once used to graze cows and sheep, most of the rest of it hadn’t been used for anything at all. They would be out in the open. Trapped in the car until the zombies went away; trapped in the car if the zombies wouldn’t go away. Xan would have to shoot his way out and run for the moat, but he could not shoot and run all the while carrying Selena in his arms.
One or two zombies could be handled. The tsunami would be disastrous. And he had no idea what condition Rockwin was in. There could be a tree or accident just a quarter-mile down that road, which would strand them even farther from the moat.
Even if there was a hybrid in the garage, they couldn’t leave tomorrow. He needed to creep around this property and its adjoining ones with the binoculars and get a better idea of the conditions below.
Then he slept, running and jumping and shooting in his dreams, and when he came to the moat, the bridge was down. He ran across it to find everyone in Newgreen roaming and vacant. Lucca was walking, his hand in Colette’s, and their filthy fingernails dragged on the ground. The blood of squashed tomatoes left a trail of red footprints behind them. Xan screamed and a legion of hungry eyes settled on him.
He woke up early in the morning to another rally of Selena’s, but this rally was not as good as the ones on previous days. She smiled at him, asked for a bottle of water to be placed on her side of the bed, commented about the view out the window. He opened their last container of soft food, which was applesauce, and fed it to her. She only had a few bites.
Eager for him to get through the diary, she shifted comfortably in the pillows as he turned to January first. College applications. Nearly every day had an entry, although most weren’t longer than a paragraph or two. It was still a bit gray outside for his planned roving, full of shadows that could hide what he most needed to see.
By the time he reached March, the sky was blue. As he paused to drink water, Selena said dreamily, “What does he look like? Your son?”
“Why do you ask?”
“I never got to babysit. I always wanted . . . to do that and I like little kids. If he died from his surgery, I’ll take care of him in heaven. You don’t . . . have to worry. But you have to tell me whom to look for. Does he . . . look like you?”
Tears stung in Xan’s eyes. “He’s a real little guy, small for his age. He’s got a full head of light brown hair. Long toes from me; slim hands from his mother. There’s a tiny mark in his lip, a notch.” He pointed to his upper lip to show where. “He has . . . he has a very funny little laugh.”
“Does he like toys?”
“Yes. When he has the energy to play.”
“He’ll have . . . energy. He and I won’t be sick where we’re going. I’ll look after him for you until you get there. He can be . . . my little brother. I never had any brothers or sisters. Mr. Spencer . . . what is that box in the plastic bag in the corner? I’ve been looking at it . . . for ages now.”
He got out of the bed, blinking hard and needing the distraction, and pulled the box from the bag. “This is a hat box.” A receipt fluttered away. He picked it up for a look. “Purchased the day before the contagion, one hundred and eighty-nine dollars from a store in Valley Oak called Fascinating.”
Selena took the lid off the box and said, “A horse races hat! I’ve only ever seen women wearing these on television.” That was true for Xan as well. She pulled out the pillbox hat, which had a giant white flower and golden pheasant feathers stuck to it.
“Derby hats, those were called,” Xan said.
“Are there any more in the closet?”
There turned out to be several, each one a grand concoction of silk and lace, netting and velvet flowers. One had a massive brim and white wires flying up into the air with feathery flowers at the tips. He laid them out around her. She stroked them, tired but interested. “These are beautiful. Did she wear them . . . to real horse races, or were they just for parties?”
He told her what his plans were for the day. Those didn’t catch her interest the way that the hats had. When he started to put them away, she shook her head about the first one. “Leave it on the bed, would you? I really like that one.”
She had her water and the rest of the applesauce on the bedside table, the hat and the diary to amuse her. He went downstairs with his binoculars and stopped in the kitchen. The refrigerator was the usual mess. There was some food in the pantry, and bottles of sparkling water in a cluster on the floor. He drank one and opened the plastic over little yellow cakes filled with vanilla and chocolate frosting. Two years later, they were still in perfect condition.
They were soft. He’d take some up to Selena later.
He went outside and jimmied open the garage door. The expensive cars within were not hybrids. The only other mode of transportation was a two-person kayak balanced on beams above. They could float down the river to the moat around Newgreen, which would make them untouchable and required nothing from Selena, but getting to the river would mean going west, and how exactly was he supposed to lug the kayak there?
Clang.
Someone was at the gate, which the garage didn’t face. Xan held up his hands. He hadn’t cut himself on anything, and he hadn’t shaven at any of their stops for fear that he would nick his skin. The zombie had roamed here randomly. Stealing back to the house, Xan locked the door and went upstairs to the exercise room. That was the only room with a view of the gate. He edged aside the curtain.
Just one. No, two. Just two zombies were there, one hitting the gate and one milling around. It wasn’t the tsunami, unless the rest of it was undulating up and down Wicker Place and hidden by the trees. This could be the outermost edge of it, for all he knew.
His mind idly picked over the challenge of getting to the river. If they had a working vehicle . . . well, if they had a working vehicle, they would just take the freeway. No need to drive to the river and kayak to the moat.
It was very quiet from the master bedroom. Selena must have fallen asleep. He poked his head in to check on her, planning to ask if she wanted a little cake if she was awake, and his heart stopped.
White powder on her chin. A pill bottle on the duvet. An empty water bottle on the floor.
Her eyes opened as he flew into the room, the water bottle crackling as he punted it under the bed. “Don’t . . . be mad, Mr. Spencer.” The hedgehog was on her chest, and her hands were clasped over it.
“Wait. Wait,” he said. “You can’t . . . Did you-”
“I’m . . . I’m not going. I’m . . . done.”
He snatched up the pill bottle. Nothing was inside. She had taken it from the bathroom, the heaviest narcotics, and when had she been alone in there?
Yesterday. She had told him that she’d gone to the sink to wash her hands. She had lied. He hadn’t noticed the missing bottle, just closed up the cabinet and gotten her to bed. It hadn’t been candy ticking in some fold of her too-large clothing overnight. It had been a bottle of pills and it had never crossed his mind that she could do this . . . Why had it not crossed his mind?
“It’s better,” Selena whispered. However much she had taken, it was hitting her already. She could barely keep her eyes open.
“How long? How long ago did you take these?” Xan demanded. He hadn’t been gone all that long, about thirty minutes, no more than that. Just the time it had taken to eat the cakes, pry open the garage, and conclude the cars weren’t hybrids. And also the minute or two in the exercise room to watch the zombies.
She was floating away. He sat down beside her and grasped her shoulders. Using his teacher’s sternest, most implacable voice, he said, “We need to make you throw up.”
“No.”
“Yes.”
“No. I can’t. I chewed them up, too.”
She could still throw it up. But the effects were making her soft and pliant in the face of his severity, unconcerned about it. Wistfully, serenely, she said, “I don’t want to leave. I don’t want . . . to die out there, or in the hospital. I’ll go here, in my own palace. But . . .”
“What?”
“Will you stay? Just long enough . . . to make sure I’m gone? I . . . I don’t want to wake up alone. Or with . . . them . . . around me.”
He was going to drag her to the bathroom and stick his finger down her throat. Tie her to his back and flee for Newgreen where the doctors could pump her stomach and give her charcoal to absorb the rest and . . .
And then she would die anyway.
That was how this ended. That was the only way this ended, with her dying. There was no way around it. So she could meet her end in the hospital where she didn’t want to be, in trying to get there and falling brutally to zombies, or peacefully here in this bed.
Newgreen was not immediately accessible. No longer could he call 911. The powder had already gone down Selena’s throat and her eyes were hardly open.
Leave it alone. It went against every fiber of his being in striving to live. But that was what he wanted, and now . . . he had to accept what she wanted. There was nothing he could do. It was done. His turmoil evanesced, and he entered a calm, almost blank space.
All he could do was grant her request to not be alone. Put himself and his hatred of this unfairness aside, and allow her the death she had chosen. He could give her the respect that cancer and Olyvyr Gravine and the hospital and fate had not. Grasping her hands, he squeezed them to rouse her a little. “I’ll stay, Selena. I promise. I’ll stay right here until I’m one hundred percent sure you’ve gone.”
“Thank . . . you. Then you . . . go home.”
He wiped at his face, which was wet. Then he picked up the diary.
The clanging had stopped. The sound of singing birds came through the windows, and as it grew louder, Selena grew quieter. He stopped between passages to listen for the sound of her breathing. And there it was, soft and slowed, becoming softer and slower. He sat up once when her lips parted, relieved and convinced that she was going to speak-
-comment on the entry that he had just read-
-tell him it was a joke and she hadn’t swallowed anything-
-read his mind and ask for cake-
-but it was only the muscles in her face relaxing. She twitched and he thought seizure. The twitches stopped quickly and then she was even more still than before. In a coma, maybe, but she wasn’t dead. He pressed his fingers to her wrist and felt a faint throb.
He read through April. He read through May. It was the middle of the day now, and then it was later. He got to June, a page decorated in ink pictures of balloons, and said about the very long entry there, “She’s about to graduate, Selena. Do you want to hear?”
She was beyond that. He read it anyway, his voice choked. “‘What can I say? It was perfect. Everything was perfect. Gran-gran didn’t say a word about my tassel being blue instead of gold. I forgot bobby pins to keep my cap on and Mom whipped two out of her hair and put them in mine. She never wears those, but she had them today. Jake and I couldn’t sit together and no one was allowed to have cell phones, but I saw this note being passed along in the rows ahead. Even teachers were passing it on. It came to my row and it was for me. From him, saying I was beautiful, and he was so proud of me.’”
Xan read through the whole of the graduation with his hand over Selena’s wrist. By the time he came to the end, he dug his fingers in harder, searching for that throb. Then he put his ear close to her face, listening for a hiss of air, feeling for a puff of breath.
There was nothing. Selena had graduated, too.
Chapter Nine
He cried and straightened her out in the bed, cried and fixed her hands to keep them over the hedgehog. He hadn’t cried so much since he had come to the settlement and learned that Katie was gone. He wiped a tear of his off her cold cheek, jostled her shoulder, and checked for her pulse in her wrist. He checked for it again at her neck, lifted her eyelid, and shined the flashlight into her eye. Every weird article about people waking up in the morgue or at their own funeral was passing through his head. He’d wait in this house until he knew that she had purchased a one-way ticket to the next world.
He didn’t know it yet. He was in that space between, when she was neither alive nor dead but taking a detour through his own mental limbo.
He took a brush from the bathroom and ran it through her thin, oily hair. Colette was present in this room, guiding him on to what the girl would have wanted. Tidy hair, if not clean. The powder from the pills wiped off her face. And it would give him time to be sure, very, very sure, that she was dead.
Would she want the derby hat? It’s sort of silly looking.
Did she like it, Xan?
Yes.
Put it on. It wasn’t silly to her.
He put it on and stopped thinking it was silly. Cleaned up the applesauce, threw out the empty bottles of pills and water. He placed the diary beside her, leaning up against the pillow he had slept upon last night. That didn’t look right, so he moved it to the bedside table and left it open to the first page of the graduation story, the one with balloons whose tails weaved through the margins.
Then he wandered through the house. There were things he had to do outside, but he kept finding himself roaming the hallways to look at the pictures, sitting on a chair to read the mystery novel on the coffee table, standing in the pantry to have another cake. Every hour or so, he went back to the master bedroom.
Still gone.
He thought of her parents, who would never know that their daughter had just died. He thought of a pink-cheeked Astor in a black dress at a funeral, struggling to comprehend that her friend was no longer here, that youth was no insulation against tragedy. He thought of Katie appearing by magic in the Newgreen hospital, strapped down and wild and absent.
He would ask the doctors to relieve her of the burden of life. Respect that Katie as Katie was gone, and to keep her alive as a zombie was unfair to everyone.
Selena was dead.
It wasn’t a sleep so deep as to mimic death; it was death. By the time he was sure, it was too late in the day to do anything. He sat in the den and held the television remote. There was no power. He just wanted the familiarity of the pose, the nubs of buttons under his fingers as he faced the screen. He was about to turn on the game . . . a sitcom . . . flip around for something new . . .
He slept there, a deep, dreamless sleep, the remote a comfort to him on the cushion by his head. Light was coming through the curtains when he opened his eyes. Bathroom, breakfast, pack, and he went up the stairs one last time. She hadn’t moved. She wasn’t going to move. Her skin color had changed to unmistakable. He leaned down and kissed her cheek, whispering, “Goodbye, baby.”
Goodbye, babies.
He couldn’t stay in this house and call it home base as he searched for a car on the properties upon Wicker Place. The smell would grow; the bugs would come. He had to move on, and leave her behind forever.
The sun was burning coldly overhead when he went out the back door. It was the only one he could lock without keys, and he didn’t want Selena’s body to get eaten. For wasted hands to fumble at the blankets, knock off the derby hat, for nails to dig in when she was defenseless. For teeth to sink into her flesh. He was still thinking about her like she was alive, like it would hurt when nothing would hurt her ever again.
He would stay off the road. Going east through the property, he passed the garage and went down steps to a garden. It ended in a fence, which he struggled over, and then he was at the next property. It
stood utterly empty. At the time of the contagion, no one had been living here. It was up for sale. The shell of the house had little but dust inside, and the garage was the same.
What if she was waking up right now in that bed? Alone. Scared. Crying.
No.
The empty property ended in a wall, and there was a wild place of trees on a sharp slope beyond it. He crossed over the slope and scaled a fence into the next home on the block. It was an old murder scene of broken windows and scattered bones. People had been in the house; people had been trying to escape in a car. It had crashed into a brick post beside the driveway. Even if it had been a hybrid, he couldn’t have driven it out of here. Every window was smashed, and one door had been pulled off entirely. It lay there in the grass like an amputated limb.
Behind the house, he scaled a wall and stood upon it with his binoculars. There were potholes in the freeway. As the roads fell apart, the convoys were going to have a harder time going between the thirteen settlements. Power Rangers performed very basic road repair when there was no other route to take, but stopgap measures wouldn’t last forever. It was anyone’s guess what would give out first: the roads or the zombies.
He saw them down there. Roaming through the fields, one staggering onto the freeway. The guy walked over the lanes and bumped into the center divider, which changed his trajectory like he had no more will of his own than a rubber ball. He doubled back over the lanes and bumped into the guardrail, which bounced him back to the center divider. He did this until the guardrail gave off, and then he staggered down a ditch until he walked into a fence marking a pasture.
There were enough of them below Xan to be worrying. There weren’t enough of them to give up. Two were only crawlers. A field down there had once held a huge pumpkin patch and corn maze. A billboard was still standing beside the freeway to welcome people in. Now weeds were growing in that field, and a crawler was going through them. The second got onto the freeway heading for Delanto and crawled out of sight.
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