by Logan Keys
So I make sure he doesn’t have to.
I raise the barrel of my shotgun and, hands shaking, I pull the trigger.
But just like my nightmare, Joseph’s gone.
Cara rushes in, running to the crib, screaming so loud that at first I can’t even hear myself. But I’m screaming, too.
We grip one another, horror settling deep into our bones, shaking and rattling them. I don’t tell her Joseph had done this; the words refuse to crawl from my throat.
Our cries are echoed throughout the town as the monsters begin their night of terror.
Chapter Thirty-Five
Liza
We have to leave the truck. Wouldn’t we know it—more water. It wasn’t far, Tommy said, and the signs indicated this exit would take us to LA. But all of it has been swallowed whole.
“Ocean’s close,” Tommy slurs, swaying dangerously on his feet.
It’s gotten colder and colder, and every way we turn is flooded, with no boats in sight. We move more slowly by the hour. By this point, Tommy’s stopped talking. When the real cold finally hits, it hits hard.
I find a way that seems unhindered. Water lies in the ditches to either side, but the road itself is in perfect condition, as if repaved recently. We, without proper shelter and tired beyond all ability, huddle together by the side of it to sleep on and off again, until I awake alone and frozen, curled up into a ball against the wind biting at my exposed skin.
“Tommy!” I yell, but the weather eats the words from my lips.
The moon’s low and gigantic in the bright night.
I start to search for him, fear more than the cold stiffening me. He’s nowhere near, not that I can see, and he’s not back the way we came. So I begin onward toward our destination, alone.
We’d been so close.
Defeated, I whisper, “Where are you?”
As pale as death and quiet as the grave, he was slumped over in repose alongside the black road. I found him frozen, cold, color gone from his cheeks. Just like he’d said.
Here, time seems revolving, and the moon hangs against the edge of the glittering roadway like a giant spoon end. A perfect setting for sadness and regret as I sit on my knees to mourn my friend.
If any heart was too big for this world, it’d belonged to Thomas.
If a wound was too grave to bear, so much so that it bled from the inside out, it’d been the one put there by himself for things he felt he’d failed at, people he’d let down, a world he couldn’t save.
I have no such scruples.
If I had them, though, I’d hope someone—anyone—might sit by the road and miss me as much as I miss him already. Cry as hard as my sobs racked my body.
And just when my hiccups have subsided and my nightmare bleeds from frightening to numb acceptance, thinking he’s expired…Thick fingers slip around my wrist, making me jump.
His eyes snap open, eyelashes caked in ice, and I see my stricken face, hazy inside dark orbs. The endless black pools same as before—his monster, here to carry him the rest of the way. He'd die otherwise.
Is it you, Tommy? It’s a question I'll forever be asking around this man: Who is he today? Instead, I silently help him to his feet.
Together, we amble awkwardly, and finding a rhythm is impossible.
The monster even walks differently.
And it has no voice.
He’s not as big as before; only certain things have changed, as if his injuries stifle the completion.
We go onward then, slowly, like this—an unequal pair of large and small, down an unending road of cracked, black tar, and I think: What treaty have I made to save a life?
I've let the monster come so I'd have someone with me in this place; we work together so I can selfishly have my friend.
Does this make me a monster, too?
Chapter Thirty-Six
Liza
Everything’s like a dream. How I don’t give under the weight of the weather is a mystery. The ice ends, and the road with it, and the monster and I stare into an abyss.
A boat sits at the edge of this abyss, as if waiting for us. Water—a lake, or a very still ocean, maybe—as far as the eye can see. Waveless. Infinite. In this dead of night, we might as well be at the end of the Earth.
The abrupt break from industry into undisturbed nothingness is so sudden, and the road goes straight into the inky depths as if by design. No cities in the distance, nothing on the other side but that mocking moon twinned on the water, as if this boat offers us a ride between life and death.
Tommy’s monster lumbers in, making the decision for us, and it lies back with a loud thud, the last of his energy spent.
My spinning mind makes me see mirages in the water.
Once I’m aboard, I lean over the edge and, avoiding my reflection, push off, grabbing the paddles.
I don’t want to see what’s in the water.
I don’t want the water to see what’s inside of me.
Rowing keeps me warm, though I know this leads nowhere. The place we’d pushed off from is now gone, and we silently glide, maybe going in circles, maybe already frozen, dead by the roadside and this is my penance, my Hell, one last spark of my brain trying to make some sense of life.
Soft words from glossy depths whisper to me, “A world away,” and I realize the voice had come from my passenger.
“Thomas?”
When he stirs, I throw the paddles aside and lunge across the boat. “Tommy?”
He looks at me, his chest making a rattling sound before it stills.
I shove my hand under his nose and feel no warmth—nothing. Not even a small puff of breath. “No! No. No. Tommy!” Tears blur my vision like invaders trying to undo me. “You breathe, you hear me?”
Already his face is waxen. I shake like a leaf, pounding on his chest. What should I do? I have no memory of these things! He’ll die because of me.
“Wake up! Tommy, you have to wake up!”
In the stillness that follows, I cry in earnest, certain that death sits with us in this boat tonight.
A mewling sound breaks through my lips as his body grows cold, and then a foreign voice eels out of my mouth, “You listen to me, you stupid, stupid boy. And that’s what you are: a boy. What we are: barely grown—not even grown. You can’t leave me here! I’ll be lost, and you don’t want that, do you, Tommy? Thomas Hatter. You. Your monster. One of you had better wake up!”
A wail cuts through my insane rambling, and I punch his chest again. “I’ll disintegrate! Do you understand?”
My words wobble, like the boat. No—this can’t be happening! It’s beyond comprehension.
“Don’t you dare leave me! I don’t even know where I am! What will I do? Tell me what to do. Please, just one word—one silly comment. Stay with me—stay. I can’t do this alone.”
My cheeks can’t catch my tears fast enough, and when I lean in closer, they drip across him, soaking his pale face. Anger wells up, and I strike his cheek with my open palm, slap my tears right off his face. “Wake up! Wake up! Damn you. Damn you to Hell for leaving me here all alone.”
I slap him again, hard enough to snap his head back, and his mouth moves. He sucks in a breath—
Only to still again.
I gape, and then I’m momentarily blinded by a bright light.
I throw my hands up as the beam finds me like a ray of hope, and I let my fear and pain come out in a scream. An actual scream. I don’t care if they think I’m crazed. I am. I’m a maniac who can’t stand another second of helplessness. Another person has to be on the other side of that light … God, an Angel—something.
“Somebody help us!”
The light dims.
“No!”
I lunge for the paddles and begin to row.
“Don’t go!”
The light fades out.
I cry out in frustration as if I’d imagined the whole thing and chuck my paddles into the water in a surge of lost anguish.
Then I sob, and I
sob, until I finally close my eyes in a release of sorrow, and lie down next to Tommy to join him in the cold, still end.
Chapter Thirty-Seven
Dallas
The fiends have ascended, so many of them I’ve lost count. They leap from the roofs, and there’s screaming. Lotte’s place has caught fire, which helps, because these things fear it. They don’t fear guns.
Lotte and Jansen prefer to be out in the open, so they’re in the middle of the square, surrounded by monsters.
“Torches,” I yell, trying to get Lotte’s attention.
I rush over to grab some wood, but Cara’s way ahead of me, dousing a ripped-up T-shirt with alcohol. She wraps the ends of our sticks, and we light them just in time to stave off Cutter who’s come for us, grave dirt still powdered on his face.
“Lotte,” I shout, driving Cutter back with my ball of fire.
He flees so fast; I blink, and he’s gone.
Lotte turns toward me, and I throw her my torch, helping her to narrowly escape what would have been certain death from two of the things crouched before her and Jansen.
One of them latches on to Jansen’s arm. He screams as blood sprays from the bite. Then the thing lets go, rushes on, its dress flowing behind like she’d been ready for a party.
Cara’s holding them off, but we need something more than simple fire.
I swing my gun down from my shoulder and put two bullets into the chest of the nearest, this one in army fatigues.
Army?
Had the military returned to America?
But the bullets barely check him, and he runs off—or flies, or disappears. I can’t trust my eyes, they move so fast. Having been shot hadn’t killed him, that much is certain.
Lotte’s wild-eyed.
“We just have to hold them off until dawn!” I yell, and she nods.
I sense she knew I lied about how Joseph died, but she let me be. Allowing me to stay after his death was probably her way of an apology. I took it with both hands.
I look over at Cara, hoping, praying, she’s got a better idea.
“We. Need. Bigger. Weapons,” she says, words staccato between fighting the things lurching toward us from the dark.
We cut off from the group and head for the armory. While scouting, we’d lifted some firepower, and Cara loads us up—grenades, a heavy machine gun that’s the weight of a car axle. She hefts this for a moment, then shakes her head.
“Aha!” She grabs something big and shiny in the corner. “You think this’ll work?”
“I don’t see why not.”
We run back toward the center of town, where I see the gate’s open with no one guarding it.
“Go on ahead. We don’t need to add zombies to the mix!”
Cara reluctantly leaves me, and I grab onto the iron gate, pushing it closed.
It’s almost shut, when I spot a pale figure waiting out on the trail. The lone girl stands perfectly still, even in the wind.
I have a sniper rifle strapped over one shoulder, but I pull a knife instead and sprint toward her, blood boiling with anger, Joseph’s last moments flashing before me.
She doesn’t move.
She stands there like an apparition, face both grim and sad.
Her black hair is long, a stark contrast against her nightgown of pristine white, the eerie color of her alabaster skin luminescent, finishing the effect—a specter in the night. The hair on my arms stand when I get closer, and I stop.
Black eyes track me, a pleading look in their depths.
“I’m sorry about your friend,” she says in a voice so young, brimming with angst.
“What about them? Are you sorry about all of the monsters in there?”
“She didn’t make them,” a deep voice replies.
I spin around. Behind me, on the pathway, stands the soldier. His clothes have holes in the chest with blood around the ragged ends, plus the fresh ones I’d made, without blood. His nametag reads: Pike.
He grins, his needle teeth pointed and deadly. “I did,” he says.
I lift my gun, and his smile widens, his red eyes like a nightmare. In a flash, he changes from a demon to a shadow, his outline blocking out anything beyond.
My mouth drops open.
Then the dark mist is on me, a shadow-hand at my throat. My gun’s useless, and my knife’s slicing through thin air.
Just as I’m sure death will claim me, and just as I realize I truly don’t want to die like Joseph had, where I’ll come back to hurt someone like Cara, talons of cold steel grip me from behind, bruising my skin, and rip me away from the shadow. While the demon soldier at my front fights with the demon girl at my back, I’m just about to split into two, when dozens of voices shout both inside my skull and out.
“Let her go, Pike,” she says.
And he does.
I collapse, sweaty, weak, and exhausted, with nausea and pain coming over me. And fear. Mostly fear. Pike had fed on this, stricken me with terror, leaving me a mess of bones and skin, my eyes burning with tears.
But the girl, the one who killed Joseph, she ministered to me like an angel. Placing cool hands to my forehead, she whispered that I was so very brave, that I had courage, that I was good.
I fell into a stupor and could not seem to wake up again.
Somehow I knew she watched over me all night. Others tried to steal me away, or to feast on my flesh, but she fought them each until she herself was bloody, wounded, and weak.
And this was the last thing I knew before dawn broke over me as I still lay in the dirt just outside of Ironwood’s gates, unharmed all through the night. I knew it was because of the girl; she’d stood watch until daybreak, and somehow I know that in her cave, she directed away the undead—vampires, too—and she’d kept vigil, even tired and threadbare.
I slowly rose, entered what was left of our town, and closed the gate. Then, once again, still unsure of how I knew, the girl finally, exhaustedly, went to sleep.
Chapter Thirty-Eight
Liza
Light pervades the place where my eyelids touch—it hurts.
And this pain tells me I’m alive.
“Do you remember anything? Can you give us your name?”
I know this one, so I peek through my lashes and croak out, “Liza.”
“Do you know where you are?”
Shaking my head hurts every muscle.
“Nolan’s Army Medical Center.”
My vision slowly clears to a doctor standing over me with a penlight. He’s wearing a tag that reads: Dr. Chalberg.
He backs away, tucks his penlight into his pocket, before scrutinizing me some more.
Chalberg feels my legs, my arms, checks my lungs. I finally find the courage to ask. “Tommy? Is he … I was with someone.”
“Right here.”
A uniformed man steps into my line of sight, then motions to a bed in the corner holding a familiar lump under the sheets.
I lunge toward it—
“Tommy!”
—but my legs don’t work, and I tumble forward onto the cold linoleum. Chalberg shoves his hands under my armpits, while the soldier moves to help. Together they lift me back into bed. I can’t seem to get any part of my body to work for me.
“Better stay off your feet. You were dehydrated when we found you. Thomas is going to be just fine.”
Tommy doesn’t look fine, though; he looks wilted and small—for a giant, that is—and I want him closer.
“Where are we?”
“Los Angeles. It’s now Fort Candon.”
“So we found you, then,” I say. “You’re the Underground?”
The two share a look before the soldier pivots on his heels and leaves in quick fashion.
“Where did you both come from?” the doctor asks, distractedly. He’s shooting worried glances over his shoulder toward the soldier who just left.
“Um … an island.”
Without Tommy, that’s all I’m willing to say.
The doctor nods, c
hews on his lip, then says he’ll return after I’ve rested some more. He motions to the bandage around my arm. “Leave that on.”
I frown in confusion. The markings “EVE” … he’d covered them. But why?
Before I can ask, though, he leaves with a furtive glance in both directions.
After he’s gone, the idea that Tommy’s okay soaks in. He’s not dead, and I’m not stranded in an ocean of black ink. Had it been real? The water, and his monster helping me? Or was it all an elaborate dream from when we’d collapsed by the roadside?
By mid-afternoon, my legs work again. Tommy still sleeps. Soon, a nurse arrives with food, and she gives me clothes instead of the robe to wear.
“We found you in the moat,” she says as she helps me over to the window.
When I pull back the curtains, I gasp. We’re several stories up. Instead of the undead, the roads swarm with people, mostly in military uniforms. New plaster shows the patching that had been done on the buildings, spotting them with different colors. But there’s electricity. The nurse says the moat wraps around one side to meet the ocean in a horseshoe shape.
The sparkling water and the noise of real civilization is a stunning revelation. I wish Tommy would wake up to see it.
I’m starving, but since I’m allowed to shower and change, I do that first instead; I’m sticking to the sheets from grime, and my hair’s tangles have tangles. I hate to leave Tommy, but I can smell myself. After my shower, I don a neat pair of flowing pants in navy blue with a same color, billowy shirt to match. A strange fashion, but I’ve been out of it for a while. Perhaps this is their way to identify civilians.
Already I sense a utilitarian society—no bells and whistles. Buildings are patched, but in need of painting. The hospital’s clean not renovated, and water damage remains from some previous flooding.
My hair rinsed clean after five tries. For the first time the blonde turns from gold to almost white. Curls tickle my forehead and cheeks.