For all of them, she thought in one moment of deliriousness born of the elation all around her, but that wasn’t true. The future wasn’t ahead of Saul fired to ashes, those failures in the Phoenix Project. It wasn’t even ahead of Ryla still alive. There was only time for her to bide until she was taken to the flames.
But she could still rejoice for Malachi’s open doors, even as hers were shut. She turned with the cheering audience to watch the Harris family head for the president’s house. Then the celebrating began, and Ryla pushed through it to leave.
*****
Two days later, she was standing around Malachi’s hospital bed again. But this time he was dead.
The family had gone. So had the hospital staff, and Satter and Aulish as well. Aulish had angrily demanded to know why Ryla had not informed him of the boy’s depression; Ryla asked acidly if he had checked his mail because she most certainly had. One of his underlings bleated that Aulish had been given the letter. Throwing a deathly look to the hapless assistant, Aulish then blamed Ryla for sending a letter instead of presenting herself in person with her findings. If matters were so dire, she should have been more insistent in relaying her information. Content that he’d laid the blame where it belonged, he ignored her after that until he walked out.
Now it was just Ryla in the room, looking down to the body in disbelief and holding his note. She had thought she’d cried her last tear long ago, but her eyes were burning.
She wanted to not care enough to cry. To be subsumed in the fog that kept her cold and apart from all that was around her much of the time. But it didn’t come to relieve her, and in its absence, she saw too much.
His skin was blanched almost to the white of his open eyes. Even his hair seemed paler. The only color was in the bloodstains on the sheets and pillow, and in the medical waste scattered about him from the frantic attempts to save his life. The late afternoon light from the window drew a harsh definition upon him, accentuating his narrow, underfed frame, a blossoming of pimples across his naked chest, a dark clot caught in his nostril.
He was still. Of course he was still; he was dead. But she had to grip her fingers together into a fist to restrain herself from shaking his shoulder to wake him up. She needed to talk to him. To talk him out of doing what he had done.
But he didn’t need to talk to her. Not now. It was much too late for that. There would be no wakening from the hole just above his right ear, and its twin in the same place on the left side of his head. The bullet had carved a tunnel straight through his brain.
He could not be dead when she had just seen him alive.
Yet here he was.
After the celebratory luncheon, he had gone home with his family. He had gone home with no promises that it would only be for a few days or a week or two, with no reassurance that he had not wholly surrendered himself to that speech for nothing. He had just gone home, where he took out his colored contacts since they were bothering him.
The fight began. And lasted until he stole his father’s gun and pressed it into his buzzed hair to end it. His mother was sedated on another floor of the hospital; his father had yelled in Ryla’s face that she was supposed to help him before storming out of the room with the younger son in tow.
Had that happened before Aulish took out his anger on her? Or afterwards? It was all a blur in her mind. Somewhere in there, Laurie had pressed the note into Ryla’s hand. It was addressed to Ryla and from Malachi, Laurie mumbling an apology about her mother opening it. Opening it and deciding to keep it, saying in her hysteria that Malachi had addressed it wrong by mistake. Laurie had sneaked it away once the medication knocked her mother out.
The girl had been in tears as she slipped the note to Ryla. Tears of grief, tears of horror and recrimination. She had not thought the fight would end like this, since it was just another version of every fight Malachi had ever had with their parents. Mom screamed that he looked like an ugly zombie without the contacts; Dad yelled that when he said jump, Malachi had to ask how high. Malachi fought back viciously through the hours, over his eyes and hair and church attendance and countless other subjects, the only respite coming from neighbors making surprise visits. Then the argument swiftly turned off, and smiles turned on for company. And he still would not put in the contacts, enraging his parents, so the fight continued after their disturbed visitors left. The next day, Laurie had begged him just to put them in so they could have some peace.
She had betrayed him. She’d seen his thoughts in his eyeless face. His death was her fault. Ryla had told her that it wasn’t, but the devastated teenager didn’t seem to hear her words.
This note was all that Malachi had left behind, and the message was short. I’m sorry.
She took his lifeless hand in hers, still fighting the urge to shake him. Why this? Why had he not just marched out of that house and demanded to live elsewhere? Then again, Aulish would have had him frog-marched right back. So why had he not marched out and gone over the fence to be with his friends? What had been going through his head just before the bullet did?
If he went out there, he risked being brought back in. Waking up once more in the hospital. Perhaps that had been what he feared. He would not have the sense to leave the area for good as a zombie to avoid meeting such a fate. And if the zombies ever did manage to break in . . . it had been one thing for him to hunt and kill people after being changed the first time. He had had no control over what he was doing. But to choose to be a zombie on purpose, to go into it knowing that his choice might mean the death one day of those he loved, that might have been too much for his conscience to bear. He had not been an unfeeling person.
Maybe he hadn’t thought about it so deeply. That could have been a largely subconscious debate within him, the rightness and wrongness of going to the fence. His thoughts could have simply revolved around how to make the most immediate escape from pain, and that was the gun.
And now he was gone. Gone to a place where they could not follow. Gone where they could not drag him back. Death was freedom from all of it. Forever.
I’m sorry.
Malachi, I am too.
His death would not be reported as a suicide to the reenergized populace. Nor did the government or the Phoenix Project want to place the blame on an allergic reaction to the treatments. In fact, they did not want to say that he had died at all, to poison the jubilant mood still infecting the community.
Ryla had listened to them wrangle over it. Was that before Aulish confronted her? After the note was given to her? In the room or out in the hallway? She couldn’t say. But they had decided to fly out the remaining members of the Harris family to another settlement just as soon as Settlement 3 could get an aircraft here. Then they would claim that Malachi, alive and well with his family, was now touring the Phoenix Projects across North America and Canada with several of his doctors so that this advance in medicine could be further studied and refined.
Malachi Harris was dead. But very few would ever know. In the minds of the people, he would live. Had a nurse not summoned Ryla to the hospital, she would have believed it herself. Cheered him on quietly through the years and hoped he could wrest some joy from this bottomless well of sorrow.
She put down his hand. Over contacts. Yet that had only been the straw to break the camel’s back. It was about respect, or the lack of it, and a kid who could see no more future than Ryla could for herself.
Had he been planning this at the ceremony? It gave her a chill to consider. Even then, he could have been planning to bring it all to a close, and while people were joyous for his return, his joy came from knowing he was about to leave. He had ceded the battle of the speech, but he was about to win the war.
She would never know. She needed to know, but the answers had been blown from his mind along with the rest of him. His body would rest in this room until night, and then he would be covered up and whisked down to the fires of medical waste.
You stupid boy.
He could have won if he’d
just kept fighting for himself. But he had spent his life fighting and losing and fighting and losing and he had not known that he could win. He was locked in a circular battle without the age or experience to trust it would end. He could only fight and lose and bridle, and at last explode.
Ryla leaned over the stained bars of the bed and pressed a kiss to his cooling forehead. Then she left the hospital.
On the bridge, she stopped to watch a single corpse fisher drag a body along with the current. The fisher was a grim-faced girl of twenty or so; the corpse was a swollen, gaseous blob face down in the water.
Coming to the railing without a sound, the suicide watcher rested along the bar and looked down with her. The body was pulled beneath the bridge, and then all there was to see were the rocks splitting the water.
“What do you tell them?” Ryla asked without preamble.
“The ones who come to die?” the old man replied.
“What do you tell them?”
“I tell them that someone’s going to miss them. Even if they don’t think so.”
“And if everyone they know is dead?” She nodded in the direction of the fence. “Or out there?”
“That’s why so many of them jump in the end. They don’t have anyone or anything anymore. Whole family is gone; friends are gone; pets and homes, schools and jobs are gone. It’s all gone. I tell them that I’ll miss them, even though we’re strangers. And I’ll understand if they’ve got to jump. I’ll watch them go down, so they know they aren’t alone in those last moments.”
“You don’t try harder to talk them out of it?”
“I can’t tell anyone to hang on to this wrecked world. Tomorrow isn’t going to be any brighter. Things won’t go back to normal in a few years. If they don’t want to be here, I’m not going to hold them to this bridge. One day I might go over it myself.”
“I’m not sure you should be a suicide watcher.”
They laughed, darkly.
“You thinking of going over?” he asked.
“Yes. No. I don’t know.”
“Then you go off and think about it some more. The bridge will still be here tomorrow, and so will I. We’re not going anywhere. You got any people?”
“Over the fence. You?”
“In their gullets.” His eyes lifted from the water to the trees.
“What keeps you here?” she asked.
“Nothing.”
“Nothing at all?”
“Nothing at all. Some of them hold onto hope to keep them here; some have faith. Some stay from a fear of hell. I’ve got nothing. No ties. But I got something they don’t.”
“What’s that?”
“Age. I’m eighty-eight and change. My sunset is already coming. I don’t need to check out of this hotel yet when I’m going to be checked out soon enough. Though if it takes too long, or if this just gets too hard . . .” He patted the railing fondly. “Then I’ll go. What’s kept you here all of these years?”
“Shock. But it’s wearing off.”
“Once you’re in the air, you can’t get back up here. I hate when they go down screaming no. Wanting to take it back when it’s too late to change their mind. Go on, honey, go home. You come back here when you’re feeling certain. I’ll keep you company until it’s over.”
She walked off the bridge, but did not go home. Cutting through the grass to the path that the corpse fishers took, she followed it along the river. This was the walk that Malachi should have taken, not the one to the gun. A moment of anger at him flared and died, and she thought of his mother waking up to a world without him. Ryla hurt for her. She had gotten back her son only to lose him once more. Whether her style of parenting was borne of maliciousness or just incompetence, Malachi would haunt her for the rest of her life.
When Ryla approached the fence, she slipped behind foliage to wait for the guard to stroll by. Then she crept to the tarps and lifted the edge of one to look out.
Past a lengthy stretch of tall grass were trees, the trunks and foliage so thick that nothing could be seen beyond the first few uneven rows. Here and there she made out a little movement, though zombie or beast she could not discern at the distance. She guessed zombie.
Malachi had given her a peek into such a strange, silent existence, ruled by light and shadow, hunger and scent, a life without knowledge of past or future, and barely a concept of a present. They did not even know they were rotting, or grasp the significance of those in their packs.
Appalling. All of it. Yet she envied them for the burdens they did not and could not carry.
The next guard would come by soon, and she did not want to be discovered here. Not that the consequences concerned her, but the effort it would take to explain her presence in this off-limits zone was more than she could stand.
Just as she was about to turn away, to go home to a place that would never be home, a splash of red came through the outermost trees.
Five years of wearing it, and it was still red. Stained badly along the hem and bodice, torn at the sleeves, yet some of that original red remained along the front of the skirt. Ryla’s heart clamored as her elder daughter shambled into view. The white of her eyes was not trained upon where Ryla hid behind the fence. She had parted the tarps just enough to see out but not expose herself.
Once in the grass, Kelsey paused. She stood there, lost in some internal reverie as Ryla took in every detail. A little taller. Much thinner. Blonde hair matted hopelessly and hanging down to her upper thighs. Necrotic spots stained her arms and neck and God, if the one on her throat ate in too deeply Kelsey was going to die when her windpipe rotted away . . .
At least she wasn’t in pain. At least she didn’t know.
Only Ryla would, and she couldn’t carry that, too.
Then Cadence appeared in a rush of noisy birdsong, her jeans and shirt in tatters, and she lurched to the grass. She and Kelsey did not seem aware of one another’s presence. But that was not true. Scent was keeping them close after all of this time, and Ryla’s scent had lured them from the trees. Ryla’s scent was why they returned here to Settlement 3 where food was so scarce.
Maybe you should go to them.
Malachi’s words echoed in her mind. No, she replied.
Why?
Of course he would ask why.
And she did not have an answer for him.
Why was she staying in Stalemate 3? There was nothing here for her. There was nothing for her in any of the settlements. What was left of her world was out there in the grass, her ravaged daughters.
Her living daughters.
It was wrong on so many levels for Ryla to go out there. Just wrong.
Why?
She could continue living in the settlement, waiting another forty to fifty years to die. She could throw herself off that bridge and end it now.
Or she could go out there and let them change her. She would lose . . . everything. All that she was would be eradicated down to her name. Her mind would become a blank slate; her flesh rot from her bones as hunger drove her to eat any kind of meat she could get her hands on. People would scream in terror and run from her, Ryla chasing after them with white eyes and teeth ready to bite.
She didn’t care.
God help her, she didn’t care.
Her fingers sank into the tarp over the diamonds of the fence, pushing the fabric through. She shoved her feet into the diamonds lower down. Then she was climbing fast, the tarp making soft rustles of warning and the fence clacking in a muffled metallic protest to be mounted.
The afternoon was growing long, wasting away. It would be better to wait until the next day, the sun high and guaranteeing that she would only be changed. But she kept climbing, afraid that her daughters would not come back for her tomorrow. Sweat broke out on her forehead, and her muscles ached in surprise at this unusual activity.
They would take it from her, one way or another. They would take all of this weight and give her peace in a fog that could not be broken.
Hearing
a distant shout, she climbed with even more speed and determination. No guard was going to stop her, force her to remain inside this graveyard of dreams. She came to the top, her chest heaving, and swung her leg over to the other side. There were her girls about forty feet away, both of them entranced upon something that Ryla couldn’t see.
She skidded down the fence to the grass and landed in a stagger, so frightened that her throat was closing and her breath came in gasps.
Kelsey and Cadence turned to her when the birdsong ceased. Then a naked little boy with blond hair and black rot on his upper thighs stepped out from the trees, his blind gaze fastened upon Ryla.
JoJo?
It could only be.
She should have waited until morning, but she had not. Hopefully there was still enough light left. Kelsey and Cadence began to shamble for her, but the white-eyed boy outstripped them both. Shooting like a star through the grass, he sprinted between the girls as he came with singular purpose to Ryla.
There was another figure standing far back in the trees. A man’s figure. Perhaps it was Matt. Perhaps it was not. Whether she was changed or consumed in the next minutes, she would not know.
Her son was almost to her.
Weeping, she dropped to her knees and held out her arms.
THE END
More Zombie Titles by Macaulay C. Hunter
The Zombies: Volume One
The Zombies: Volume Two
The Zombies: Volume Three
The Zombies: Volume Four
The Zombies: Volume Five
The Zombies Volume Six
Zombie Tales Box Set [Books 1-5] Page 68