by Logan Keys
Cara knows I’ll tell her when I’m ready. She’d run down the slope to find us, Joe and I. But was too late to see the creature girl.
Cara knows I need my space and has accepted that I haven’t put to bed my feelings. Whenever I see Sara’s smug face, like she’s happy Joe’s gone … If she can’t have him, then no one can.
Cara watches me set up camp, the extra-careful dimming of the lantern and so on, and it makes her wary. She’s no dummy; she’s already connected the dots—it wasn’t a wolf, like Lotte had told the crew, and she’s as nervous as I am after my having seen two of ours taken by this thing.
I’m still riding out this foggy shock. Joe being in a box doesn’t even feel real.
He was just here … just today.
“Tell me the story,” Cara says, trying to make me think of something else.
“Which one?”
She laughs. “You know which one, Dallas. My favorite.”
We’ve built up my stories from the past, I’m not even sure what’s true anymore. Used to be I told them to pass the time in an awful place. Now, once again, we need them, the ones where the good guy wins.
Cara loves the “knight in shining armor.” We don’t use names—not ever—so we call him Sir Lancelot instead.
“My pa was beating on me,” I begin.
Cara groans. She hates it when I start at the end. Tonight, though, I’m trying to keep things quiet, and I’m too weary to talk long. “He was pushing me up against the wall, doing things he never did, even drunk. My Ma had died a few months before, and he’d been getting bolder. Sir Lancelot—Lance, that is—comes to get me to go hang out. He’d never seen my dad get really bad. He had some idea, but he never guessed how deep that hole went. I hadn’t seen it, either; not like this. There was rage in my father’s face, and the alcohol on his breath burned my eyes. He was so close, and here comes Lance, knocking on the door.”
Cara rolls onto her belly, rubs at her buzzed head. Carebear is the biggest romantic junky on the planet, even if she does look like a boy. Catch her reading smut novels, and everything. Even snuck a few to see what the fuss was about. I get it—men being men, and women being … well, not like me and Cara. But that’s okay. To each his own, I guess.
“So Lance doesn’t know what he’s walking into? And your dad doesn’t know Lance is there?”
Cara knows this story better than I do, yet she asks for more details, hoping I’ll embellish them.
“He doesn’t have a clue,” I say and look off into the darkness.
That thing down by the river had reminded me of something…
“Anyway, he goes for my throat, and I dunno if he’s going to bite me or kiss me there, but—”
Cara gasps.
“Yeah.”
She shakes her head sadly.
“But Lance is swinging open the screen door, already talking.”
“Was he a talker?”
“Yeah”—I smile—“he talked all the time. Not with anyone else; just me. He knew I’d listen, and well … we’d always get into arguments about good sense.”
“I think he liked you more than you let on.”
I squint my eyes in warning, and she backs off. We don’t dissect the stories. We let them stay as they are: untouchable.
Cara picks at the dirt. “Anyway. So what happened next?”
“Well, Lance sees me there, up against the wall, and his eyes get really round. The door slams behind him, and he says—”
“You slimy son of a bitch!” Cara shouts, her face twisted as mean as she can make it, which makes me chuckle. Then she sits up and points her finger. “I guessed you was the devil, but now I’m sure of it!”
I nod, my face draining cold. “I guessed you were the devil, but now I’m sure of it.”
“Then what?”
Cara’s so excited, but my throat’s tight with the ghostly sensation of phantom hands around it, all over again. The pain in my head. Fearing for my friend’s life. “My pa says, ‘Boy, you’d better get.’” I swallow. “But Lance is already there. He’d gotten so big, so strong. My dad lets me go, and I fall to the ground. Lance grabs my pa around the neck and yells—”
“How do you like it!”
I nod at Cara’s rendition. “And he grits his teeth, you know?”
Cara nods, fists up in front of her. “How do you like it, you sorry piece of shit!”
“He’s so angry, I think he’ll change into something else, and my dad’s fighting and fighting.
“Then Lance lets him go, and my pa falls down, almost on top of me.” My eyes burn with this last, and hardest, part. “Then Lance says to me, ‘It’s not your fault, Dallas. It’s not your fault. Even Satan was an angel once.’ ... And my pa never touched me again.”
“And Lance?”
I sigh, then lie back to look at the stars. “Another night, Cara.”
Cara, too, lies back, her own sigh dreamy. “I’m in love with that Lance. You know that, right?”
“Yeah … aren’t we all.”
Chapter Thirty-One
Liza
Thomas—the real Thomas—stares at me through the monster’s eyes, and he’s looking at me like I’m the monster.
He glances down at the sword, and I let go of the handle.
Tommy groans, backing away, stumbling, shrinking with every step.
Grunting, he again meets my stare, then yanks at the metal that’s impaled him. It falls with a clang and a splatter of blood.
Now completely himself, Tommy crumples onto his back, making terrible sounds.
“Liza,” he moans, and this snaps me out of my horror.
“Oh my God! Tommy, I’m so sorry.”
I rush to his side. His wound’s leaking like a faucet, and I shove aside his useless attempts to press my own hands more firmly against the hole.
“Forgive me. Please.” I frantically search around for a piece of cloth to stem the flow of blood. Luckily for me, the sword hadn’t gone all the way through, so he’s only bleeding from one side.
Tommy grinds his teeth, letting me keep steady pressure on his stomach. Already he’s so pale, but the pool of blood seems to have stopped growing. I just stabbed my only friend in the whole wide world, and I may have killed him.
“Stay with me,” I say when his eyes flutter.
They snap open, and he stares back, face filling with questions.
“Listen, Tommy, you had me—something had me by the neck. I would never—you have to believe me. I thought—”
He gives a sharp nod, grunts, then clenches his eyes against pain that’s no doubt radiating from the hole I’d run through his center.
After a time, I finally get the bleeding to quit, but the ragged wound almost makes me pass out when I move the cloth aside slightly to look at it. The sword had moved, or something, ripping the edges unevenly. I’m sorrier than I can say, even after trying a hundred times. Tommy’s quiet, deep in thought, clutching the rag, or seeming to try not to pass out.
With each moment, he looks whiter than before.
I avoid him for as long as I can, cleaning blood off of myself outside.
When I again sit within his line of sight, he smiles at me. He seems stronger, having eaten while I was busy.
“You did the only thing that would have worked, Liza.”
I’m tired of blubbering. “Okay.”
“The only way to keep me from changing. If I’m too injured, I can’t.”
Not sure what he means, but if he’s not angry or dying, then I’m happy.
“I’m afraid you might have to leave me, though,” he says. “Maybe go to LA yourself. Get some help.”
At the thought, air hisses from my lips, and I draw nearer, placing my palm to his forehead. He’s clammy, but not hot. Then I check his wound, and even though it’s ugly, it’s not bleeding anymore. “Listen, I don’t know what happened or why, but I like you with me, Tommy. So I don’t have to feel alone.”
I hand him back the gift he gave me in t
he tent not so long ago. “You’ve saved me enough times, and now I’ve stabbed you. Let me worry about how we’ll get there.”
He sighs, then leans back and falls asleep.
With his soft snores for company, I sit there until the morning comes to meet us, counting every breath, afraid it’ll be his last and it’ll be all my fault.
But when day’s fully upon us, Tommy gets up, staggers, then rights himself. “We’re so close,” he says.
I get underneath his arm to help him walk. “Then let’s go.”
Chapter Thirty-Two
Tommy
When I wake, my head’s hot and the wound in my side is soggy. We’ve walked for three days, barely making any progress, until a mercy appeared out of the woods—a little truck, used not too long ago by the looks of it, stored under a cover for safekeeping.
A godsend, and probably has something to do with those fires we saw not far from the border, which seems like forever ago.
Right now, I’m afraid to tell Liza the truth, afraid to leave behind the poor girl who has no memory. Every so often, I fall back into a deep sleep with her behind the wheel. She drives the stick shift like she’s in battle; she’s terrible at it. “I’ve never driven!” she cries. “I’m sure of that now!”
Last stop, I had to give her a five-minute lesson when it’d become obvious my pain was too great for me to drive. Liza’s been stalling out every twenty miles or so, or driving only five miles per hour, or worse, speeding up and hitting every bump she possibly can.
Women drivers.
Whenever I wake, seemingly days later, my brain’s on fire.
I don’t have to give her directions. This highway has markers that read “LA—80 miles.”
When I do wake, though, she tries to keep me up for as long as possible, and I tell her that’s for concussions, not being skewered. She does it anyway.
“What was it like, Tommy? The end, I mean.”
“I thought you remembered that part.”
“My memories are coming back to me like they belong to someone else. They’re a movie of my life; I don’t feel connected to them. What was it like?”
I look out the window. In the reflection, I see home. Daisy’s there—not the ghost one, but the one without the zombie features—and she’s running around barefoot, yelling at me to hurry up or we can’t fish the pond before dark. It makes me smile. But then some, lesser memories make me sad. “It wasn’t so sudden to me as some others,” I tell her. “I’d seen death already, before it was all around us. My mother had said to my dad, no woman should have to see her kids needing her to stay when she can’t.”
“Cancer?”
“No, this was before all of that. I mean there was cancer, a lot of people diagnosed. But this happened before it became an epidemic, or illegal. I was still little. So many things I think of to say to her. She was like you, you know? A girly girl. She’d walk on her tiptoes sometimes, like you do, and she always looked pretty, no matter what she wore. When she slept, she’d curl her hands under her face, and her cheeks would turn rosy, like yours do. I knew the moment she died, because there was no color anymore.”
I fall quiet, let the jeep rock me back and forth while I try to find relief in fevered dreams.
Liza clears her throat, likely embarrassed I’d compared her in such a way. “I’m sorry,” she says.
“We moved soon after. Up north, where it froze every winter, and us kids complained to my dad. We lived in Texas when we were little, but after my mom passed, Dad felt like the big state was just too big, I guess.” I shake my head, though it hurts to move it. “Anyway, we ended up on a smaller farm in Illinois. One winter, the pond was frozen, but my sister fell through and she came out pale, too, same color as my mother had been. And while I carried her to the house, hating God every step, just hating Him, because I knew she’d die … even then, I just knew I’d lose them all. It was like death had already come once, so it knew our address.”
“Did she?”
“No. Not then. She spit up the water and warmed.” Now it’s my turn to clear my throat. “My middle sister got cancer first, coughing up blood within a month. My father stopped the clock on the hour she passed. He didn’t say it, but he didn’t have to. One of us was a Job.”
“A Job?”
“Yeah, like the man from the Bible. He lost everything and everyone.” I turn my head, and Liza glances over. “I knew one of us would be alone to bury them all.”
Chapter Thirty-Three
Liza
Tommy wakes again, and he sweats more than he drinks. He’s still talking about his dead family—
“And we did. I did.”
— and has been at it all day, actually. He wakes off and on, only to continue with his sad and terrible story like he’d never paused. Sometimes he talks about himself, other times about the Bible. More often, though, about his father, the preacher man. He feels an immense regret for rebelling against this loving parent, who’d died a painful and tragic death at the hands of the zombies, it seems. Tommy hasn’t forgiven himself for never telling his father he was proud to be his son.
I don’t really have many comforting words, so I say what I feel. “They die, but they join our lives in the only way they can.”
“In our hearts?” he spits out with derision.
“No. Rogue influence that molds us.”
He looks at me crazily, then laughs.
“What?”
“You,” he says. “You never say what I expect.” With a painful grunt, Tommy turns to face forward again. “It’s nice,” he sighs, then: “Watch out!”
I slam on the brakes, then gas, and stall before a pothole. Frustrated, I start the stupid truck again.
When I stare out ahead of us while weaving around the carnage of our planet, I feel like I’m turning as feverish as my driving instructor. Our destroyed world is proof of the prior people’s weaknesses, their dissatisfaction, and I’ll go mad with Tommy to see every bit of what’s left.
Those generations—they were desirous, greedy, jealous of every little better thing. Instead of stealing from their neighbors, they’d stolen our future. Instead of gifting us their wisdom, they’d robbed us of our faith in humanity, and for Tommy … faith in a God he must have loved once upon a time, and a father who must have loved him, too.
When I get the chance, I should read Job. It might help me understand Tommy a little better. And this thought gives me hope. I’m planning a future, like we’ll make it somehow.
I press on the accelerator and, glancing at Tommy, I whisper, “Just hold on a little longer, okay?”
Chapter Thirty-Four
Dallas
I’m not tired, so I go instead to where I want to be: the lookout. The creature might be out here. This half-zombie, or whatever it was.
“What is it?” Cara’s on the alert, knife out already. She spits off to the side.
But my eyes never leave the black hole punched in the darkness. It’s there; I can feel it.
Joseph, barely cold in the grave, and the thing’s already back. Could it be hungry again so soon?
With each moment the woods picks up again with the sounds of birds and critters, and my sense of peace increases. They tell me she—it—is gone.
“Listen Cara, I know you’re going to think I’m crazy, but it wasn’t a zombie that killed Joseph.”
“No shit. It looked like a lion got him. But Sara was wailing so loud in her pretend mourning, I didn’t think it smart to point out something like that.”
“It was hungry like a zombie, but fast and smart.”
“You think it got smarter? Over time?”
“No. I think it’s something else. It can’t stand sunlight, acted like it was getting burned.”
“No way, man.” Cara curses under her breath. “Don’t tell me these a-holes who made us zombies, shilled on us some vampires, too. If it wasn’t you saying it, Dallas, I’d think you were crazy.”
“I think I’m crazy.”
They didn’t show on the first night. “They,” because there’s more than one. After we’d just breathed a sigh of relief and felt maybe they’d never appear, they came on the third night.
I sit on the rocking chair out on the porch of the house Sara shares with her sister, keeping watch. Even with everything that’s between us, it’s still Joseph’s son in there.
Sara’s finally sleeping inside, when something overcomes me like I’ve been drugged.
I sleep soundly, until a nightmare wakes me with a jolt. The world spins; just a dark swirl, with the moon as its shining pinwheel. And the air seems stagnant, too still, the natural noises empty, like someone’s turned up the quiet.
To rise takes some serious effort—my boot heels scrape the wood, and my gun’s loose in my grip no matter how I try to hold it. I turn the doorknob, knowing instantly something’s wrong.
When the door opens, the smell of blood billows out of the hot room.
Sara’s lying on the couch, staring at the ceiling, arm dangling and wrist exposed to show bite marks. She’s dead, drained, with nothing but puncture wounds across her arms and neck.
My knees quake, and I stifle a cry of alarm, then I try to make my way through the house and down the short hallways to the back.
I find him in the baby’s room.
Joseph turns to face me, red eyes gleaming.
“Dallas,” he hisses, every bit of him that matters, gone.
Without looking at the crib, I know he’s killed his babe; Kent’s quiet, and the smell of fresh blood is stronger in this part of the house.
Seeing this is like being kicked in the gut, and I dry heave in reply to the monster whose fangs needle out of his mouth, skin sheened like marble, body swaying in a strange weave, like a reed in a canal.
The Joseph I knew would never hurt his family. No, this was something else, something akin to the zombies out there eating without regret over who they kill. My sweet friend who’d always been there and who’d protected us at Ironwood has done something he could never live with.