Dearly, Departed

by Lia Habel

  When they got closer, I saw that they were far too small for that.

  They were bombers.

  “No!” I screamed at them. “Stop it! Stop it!”

  “What’s going on?” Tom hollered up through the door.

  Fireballs started blooming up from the desert below. I pounded the railing and screamed incoherently.

  The zombie known as Ben was soon at my side. When he saw what was going on, he pulled me into the belly of the ship by my skirt. I struggled against him but was no match for his strength.

  “They’re killing them!” I cried. Renfield stopped working on the engine.

  “No,” my father said, sitting up. “No.”

  Ben went for a com unit. “Ben Maza, to Z Comp. Someone, please come in!”

  “No,” my father repeated, staring at the wall of the ship as if he could see through it.

  “Someone come in now!” Ben shouted into the com.

  “Mr. Maza!” Salvez answered. He was absolutely panicked.

  I ran over to Ben to look at the screen with him. Behind Salvez, I could see techs packing up. “Who’s with you?” Salvez asked.

  “Dr. Salvez, they’re bombing them! They’re firebombing them!” I punched Ben’s arm for emphasis. He didn’t seem to feel it.

  Salvez rocked on his feet but his expression didn’t shift. “The order went out at 0600,” he said. “We got in touch with General Patmore himself an hour ago, pleaded with him, but … they put out the order anyway. There were planes sent to the coordinates your father provided, to eliminate Averne’s army.”

  “But the others are still down there!”

  Salvez stared helplessly at me. “They know.”

  “What’s going on?” Tom wasn’t accepting it. “What’s going on?”

  I didn’t understand at first. I mean, I literally didn’t understand. I stood there watching the com unit screen, expectant and patient, even after Ben turned it off. I knew that if I only stood there long enough, someone would tell me differently. Ben took me by the arm and guided me away, and I went with him without protest—for surely he would tell me differently?

  But he couldn’t.

  I started to shake, deep in my bones. Ben got me to my father’s side. My father reached out for me, but I ignored him. My mind now viewed him as somehow incomplete, incorrect. This was absurd, for he’d been all I wanted, all I’d dreamt of. But now something else was missing. The picture was still not whole.

  My knees gave out.

  “Nora!” my father cried.

  “Captain Griswold … Chastity … they’re lost,” Renfield said, attempting to explain my actions. He sounded as if he didn’t believe it himself, and for an eternal second I let myself feel better. See? None of us accepted it, so it couldn’t be true.

  I felt my nose pressing to the wooden floor of the ship as I broke down.

  We hid the airship in the jungle.

  We didn’t know what else to do.

  When we got to Z Beta, the others had been waiting for us. They boarded the ship quickly, half of the base’s equipment in tow. When we took off again, Samedi went to see to my father and Beryl came over to see to me.

  I didn’t feel her arms around me. I didn’t hear a word she said. That evening, after we touched down, I barely even remembered that she’d been there beside me.

  There was a lot of arguing over the next few days. Constant arguing about where to go, how to get news without being spotted, how to get messages out that couldn’t be traced back to us.

  I didn’t care.

  I thought of him, and I thought of Pamela and her brother. I wondered if they were safe.

  I wondered if I would ever know.

  * * *

  It was three days before I finally took my father to task.

  In full view of Samedi, Isley, Chas’s mom, and the rest of the surviving undead, I screamed my case at him. He bowed his head and took it.

  “You killed my mother!” I said as I slammed his wooden crutch into the wall. “You lied to me! You didn’t tell me anything. You let me think you were dead, that you were gone, that I was an orphan. And now, because of everything you were involved in, I will spend the rest of my life hiding in the outback, mourning the death of a man who was dead when I met him!”

  “I’m sorry.” His voice sounded so small.

  I said it. “I hate you!”

  “I don’t deserve any less.” He looked to Samedi, who couldn’t meet his eyes. “I don’t. I’m sorry. I’ve done what I needed to carry on to accomplish … and now, if you want to leave me … Nora, if you want to kill me … it’s your right. It’s your right, and I wouldn’t take it away from you for the world.”

  “I don’t want to kill you!” I sat down, my knees up, my arms around my head. “You’re all I have left!”

  “I love you, Nora,” he said, voice cracking. “I love you. I didn’t want you to be touched by this horror. Why else do you think we kept mum … all of us? Why else do you think it became the enormous secret it did? Why should anyone be touched by this horror?”

  I’d been physically touched by it. The bite Bram’d given me ached every time I thought of him.

  “I love you, too,” I sobbed into my skirt. “I can’t lose anyone else. I can’t lose anyone else.”

  My father stayed with me almost every second of the day after that. He stroked my hair, kissed me, pledged the world to me. It didn’t affect me. It didn’t register. I didn’t care about the reappearance of his love—not fully.

  I’d missed him so much, and here I’d had him given back to me, only to be ignored—a toy a child had begged for, only to abandon in the corner of her closet.

  “We need to get some news,” Samedi decided on the fifth day. “We need to know what’s going on, or we’re all going to go mad.”

  “Let’s just pirate a signal,” Beryl said. “Let’s just do it. If they trace the signal all the way out here, they care entirely too much about us. If they find us, maybe they deserve to kill us.”

  And so we finally learned that all was not lost.

  Aloysius Ayles had been impeached from the position of Prime Minister. It seemed that after it became apparent that our soldiers were exterminating all the undead they could find, he was caught attempting to smuggle his decrepit father out of the city. They escaped, and both men were still missing. The Deputy Prime Minister was dead.

  According to law, the man who had to take over was the Lord Speaker of the Houses of Parliament. The Lord Speaker was an elegant, silver-haired man named Esteban Alba. When we saw him appear on the news in order to address the public, it was with his dead wife seated next to him. She was a beautiful woman with high cheekbones and no visible wounds. The wrinkles on her face were deep and dry, though.

  “While we are still working out the details,” I watched him say, “and while it’s clear there was a massive cover-up involved, some facts have emerged that are very encouraging. One of them is seated right here. Some of the dead are still … alive.”

  He wasn’t an eloquent speaker. It was clear he hadn’t memorized anything to say. He waved his hands as he tried to come up with words that would adequately convey his meaning. “They’re still … themselves. They have new challenges ahead of them, certainly, but … all people do. Why should we punish the infected if they have shown no signs of violence? And so, I am asking Parliament to decree that all zombies who can be shown to be sane and capable people be permitted to continue to exist. I know for a fact that many are in hiding. Until this moment my wife was in hiding, and my son still is.” He stroked his wife’s yellowed hand. “And I would kill an entire living army for one more moment with her. I admit this plainly. If this means that the people wish to impeach me as well, so be it.”

  I wasn’t alone.

  Samedi was seated beside me. He patted my shoulder.

  “We can get in touch with him,” Dad said. “Even if he’s impeached, he’s an ally.”

  “Yes,” said Chas’s mother, Silvi
a, a petite, plump, nutmeg-colored lady. Death had lent her dark eyes a forbidding hunger, but she seemed good-natured enough. She used a wheelchair, rarely spoke, and seemed mostly content to keep company with her own thoughts.

  Later that day I watched the bodies of the zombies that had already been killed in New London burning in massive pyres that seemed to blot out the sun with their smoke. There would be no funerals for them. No wakes.

  “I want to go to Z Base,” I said, without taking my eyes from the screen. “Just for a moment. I want to see it again.”

  “I’ll take her,” Beryl volunteered.

  This time no one argued.

  We went the next day. We took a small motorized cart that the techs had used to haul equipment to the transport yard before. Both of us were armed.

  The base was quiet. It didn’t appear to have been sacked or searched, and it certainly wasn’t bombed. We left the cart by the gate and strolled slowly, almost reverently, through the med halls, the cafeteria, and the armory.

  But Beryl and I both knew where I wanted to go.

  “I’m going to get some things from my room,” she said, finally breaking the silence. “I’ll meet you at the cart in a few minutes, all right?”

  I nodded, and proceeded to float through the hallways toward Bram’s room.

  At first I didn’t want to touch anything, as if his room were a crime scene, or a tomb filled with offerings. After a few minutes I had to or I was going to go insane. I curled up in his closet, as I had in my dollhouse, inhaling the scent of him. I trailed my palms over his books, the cool leather so much like his skin. I packed up his diary and his watch, to take with me.

  He’d changed in a hurry for his last mission, and his dress uniform was on the bed. I found one of his cuff links on the floor. The insignia—the Z with the two interlinked rings on top—was turned sideways, something like NB. I stared at it for a good two minutes before deciding to pick it up.

  Later that evening, back at the airship, I cut a hole in a ribbon Beryl had given me and attached the cuff link, before tying it around my neck.

  Symbols are powerful.

  When he saw this, my father finally decided to ask after the extent of my loss. “I feel,” he said, glancing across the rain-speckled deck of the ship, “like I have lost a son.” His hand was trembling, as it always had whenever he admitted to great emotion. “I take it that you’d grown fond of him as well? He was such a noble young man.”

  “Something like that,” I confessed brokenly.

  Papa was at my side in an instant, drawing my head to his shoulder. He didn’t judge me. He didn’t question it. He let me cry.

  He’d had to confirm it, but the others didn’t. They gave me space. Even Samedi managed to hold his tongue. He busied himself with his latest assignments—designing Tom a leg brace and my father a whole new leg. Occasionally I would go and sit outside the ship with him as he worked, neither of us saying a word. I tried to hypnotize myself by watching the machinery slip back and forth, the sparks that erupted from his spot welder. Anything to make a few minutes go by.

  Renfield and Tom mourned as well—though their lack of real action told me that they both thought the worst. Still, they talked a good game. “If there’s any chance at all,” Tom pledged, “I will go out there and find them myself. Bram’s a friend.” His voice grew loud. “Chas is my girl. I don’t care if I have to pull myself across the ground to get to them, if I need to.”

  “Not without me,” Renfield said. He reached out and laid his thin hand atop mine. “Don’t give up.”

  I remembered the disk my father had recorded for me and nodded. “They’re not gone.” These two three-word phrases became our password, our mantra. Even if none of us probably believed it. We’d seen the fires. We’d seen the explosions.

  Don’t give up. They’re not gone.

  A few days later I finally guessed the password to Bram’s digital diary. “Adelaide-Emily.”

  I stayed up reading by its own light, tears flowing ceaselessly down my cheeks. He’d begun keeping it when he joined the army, and I learned how he had to mature and adapt—for he quickly had to learn how to fight, how to strategize, how to be a soldier instead of a boy trying to support his family. I learned how much he missed his mother, how much attention he paid to how brightly the sun shone and how healthy the trees around him were and how fragrant the soil. How much he’d grown to care for and respect my father. How sometimes he still thought of giving up and going beyond the gate and putting a bullet in his head, but knew he couldn’t do it—that he had to hang on.

  On the last page he’d written simply, She’s so beautiful.

  I shut the diary and kissed it. I took to carrying it about, like a blanket. I slept with it beneath my cheek every night, pretending it was the inside of his arm.

  After three weeks in exile we learned that we could go home.

  Any talk of impeaching Alba was shouted down by friends and family of the functioning dead, and the army was charged with safely escorting the undead to the Christine and the Erika for quarantine and treatment. A few went mad there and were put down. One was euthanized as a television personality stood in front of a cloth screen, reporting on conditions in the ship; she jumped when she heard the popping of gunfire and nearly fainted. I watched the same scene blandly, unfeelingly.

  When we were sure it was safe, I called Pamela. I sobbed like a child when I heard her voice. She was okay. I only cried harder when I heard Coalhouse and Isambard shouting my name from somewhere else in the room she was in.

  As Pam told it, Charles Evola had been one of the meds on the Christine that night, and he took care of Issy. When the order to kill the zombies went out, he’d hidden Pam, her brother, and Coalhouse in the newly empty coal bunker and smuggled them off the ship after nightfall. They’d been hiding out in the bakery cellar for the last few weeks. Pam’s family had come through all right, and they were back home. There was no more talk of sending her to stay with relatives.

  “I think they still don’t know what to make of me yet,” she said. “But then again, they’re fixated on Isambard. Mom keeps trying to cook for him. Oh! Those people I mentioned, the Delgados? They’re fine. Mr. Delgado came over to tell us they were going to the ships, and asked us to keep an eye on their house. Isambard keeps talking about babysitting for Jenny when they come back. He never would have thought about doing something like that before.”

  I had to laugh a tad. “He’s got some perspective?”

  “Yes! That’s it exactly. As he puts it, he was reborn in a coal chute, so he can’t look down on anyone now.”

  I slid my hand along the edge of Bram’s digidiary, watching it. “I think the people who reanimate and then really make good on it? I mean, don’t just survive, but do well at it?” I felt my eyes burning again. “I think they are the strongest people on the face of the planet. I think they’re far stronger than us. Far better than us, really.”

  Pamela was quiet for a minute before saying softly, “I agree.”

  “I’m trying to be as strong as that. I am. I’m going to ask Dad to send me up there soon. We’ll probably all be up there soon.” I sighed and said, “I should go.”

  “Are you sure? I just don’t want you to think you’re alone, Nora. I’m always here. I’ll always love you, and I’ll always be here. No matter what.”

  I smiled mistily. “I know, Pam.”

  I heard the hold door slamming above me. Samedi’s head appeared. “Nora? Nora, come with me!”

  I looked up at him. “What is it?”

  “Is it that doctor guy again?” Pam asked on the other end of the line.

  Samedi jumped down into the hold and took the com unit from my hand. “Nora needs to be somewhere right now. She’ll call you back in a bit.” He hung it up, and I stood angrily. I was just about to open my mouth and give him what-for when he grabbed my hand and started pulling me along.

  “What’s the meaning of this?” I asked.

  “You
need to see something.” His voice was all urgency, its usual undertone of anticipatory sarcasm gone.

  He yanked me onto the deck of the ship, and I blinked in the midday sun. “Right, like I can see anything—”

  “Nora, shut up and look.” He took me by the shoulders and turned me around. I squinted.

  There was a line of people walking through the forest toward us. From the slowness and difficulty with which they moved, I could tell they were zombies.

  “Zombie survivors?” I asked excitedly. “From around here?”

  Samedi didn’t say anything but held onto my shoulders. I held up a hand to block out the sunlight. There were about twenty zombies, faces I’d never seen before, save for …

  Samedi’s fingers dug into me, to keep me steady.

  At the front of the line was Bram. Behind him was Chas. She had a half-starved Doberman with her, on a chain.

  I broke away from Samedi and sprinted down the gangplank, screaming out Bram’s name. His head turned, and he started limping toward me.

  I tilted so far forward that I thought I was going to fall onto the hard-packed earth; my fingertips brushed it at one point. I fought my way past nests of tangled young tree trunks, hoping I wouldn’t hit my head before I could get to him.

  “Nora!” I heard someone yell.

  Bram met me halfway. He scooped me up with one arm and pulled my head toward his. I didn’t fight it in the least. He kissed me harshly, and I returned it, leaping up on my toes, seeking out his chapped, broken lips with my own, inexpertly, needfully. And then he just held me as I cried, soaking his dirty T-shirt with my tears, his cheek on my head.

  “I thought you were gone,” I managed to get out. “I thought you were really gone …”

  “I thought I was, too,” he said, laughing weakly. “But I’d never leave you, if I had the choice. I was going to get back to you, or grind to dust trying.”

  There was shouting all around us. Someone’d found Tom, and he was barreling across the jungle floor, his newly installed leg brace squeaking. Chas tackled him when he got close enough, clinging to him. The dog, meanwhile, had spotted my father and gone for him with a joyous bark.