Samson Niebolt lay on his side atop the bed, his back to the door, his knees drawn to his chest. He looked like a kid, and Colleen realized that he had been one, not all that long ago. So had she.
She held her breath, stared at him, certain that he was dead, but no—that was the old way of things. If he was dead, he’d be on his feet. She took one step toward him and became aware of the slow and steady expansion and contraction of his ribcage.
The door eased closed behind her, and the click of the bolt engaging caused Samson to jump. He lifted his head and groaned, tried to sit up, kicked one foot over the edge of the bed and, gasping, drew it back, as if he’d dipped his feet into hot water.
“Daddy?” he asked, and Colleen wondered if he always referred to Huff in that way, or if it were the beating and his surroundings talking. “That you?”
“No,” she said. “I’m not your daddy.”
“You hurt me, Dad,” he said, oblivious to her words. “Hurt me real bad. I can’t—” He grunted in pain once more and struggled to sit up, pawed at the blood-streaked wall before him. After a minute of trying and failing to sit up, he laid his head upon mattress and took a deep breath. “I can’t see.”
He rolled onto his back and faced her. His nose was bloated and crooked. A blood-crust encircled his nostrils. His right eye was swollen shut, the lid shiny and purple. His left eye had not yet swollen completely shut, but it would, and what little she could see of his eye was not white but darkest red, almost black. A line of blood ran like a tear from the corner of his eye.
“Can’t really see you. Who is it? Evie?” He tried to smile, and Colleen was not sure what it was supposed to mean. One of his front teeth was missing, and she could feel his hands on her body, his cock inside her. His breath in her ear.
She raised the gun, got his face in her sights. Her heart raced, and she could not feel her fingertips. In sync with her heart, a hammer slammed into the inside of her skull, right between her eyes, and there was only anger and fury and the sensation of his fingers sliding into her ass.
“I need help,” he said, blinking away blood and pawing at his battered face. He probed his lips, sucked in air, and pulled his fingers away from his face. “Thilda has drugs. This hurts so bad. My head, it feels like…”
“You bastard,” she said, tears blurring her vision. Her hand rocked, and the gun seemed so heavy now. Her finger was taught upon the trigger. It would take so little effort to finish this, to finish him, but this isn’t what she wanted. She’d wanted to look into his eyes, wanted him to see what was coming, to know who was doing it.
She crossed the short distance between herself and the bed, climbed onto it, and straddled his chest, pinning his arms beneath her knees. She placed the gun on his chest and clutched his throat with her right hand.
“Aaah,” he yelped, and she tightened her grip.
“Open your eyes, you piece of shit,” she screamed, prying open his swollen eye with the fingers of her left hand. “Look at me.”
She released his throat and he gasped, spattered her hand with blood and spit. His body rocked beneath her weight, and his eyes rolled in their sockets. She pried open both eyes now, screaming.
“Look at me.”
His right hand slipped from beneath her knee and clawed uselessly at her hands. He stopped struggling.
“Oh,” he said. “Is that you, Colleen?”
“It is.”
Seizing the gun from his chest, she drove a knee into his balls. He gasped, and she did it again, and when he screamed she thrust the barrel of the gun into his mouth, shredding his bottom lip against his teeth and pressing, pressing and twisting until his teeth crumbled and Samson wretched and heaved and vomited around the intruding steel cylinder.
She squeezed the trigger and watched Samson Niebolt’s head come apart. She squeezed it again and watched what was left of his head come apart a little more. The third squeeze brought only a faint click, and she squeezed it four more times.
click click click click
She got up, leaving her gun where it was, jutting from the crimson ruin of Samson Niebolt’s head, leaving Samson’s cowboy cannon where it was, on the rug in the hall, and drifted out of the room and out of the house. It was fully dark now and the air was cool.
She threw up between her feet and sat with her back to the van’s rear bumper. When mosquitoes landed on her arms and sank their tiny needles into her flesh, she did not swat them away.
She sat that way for some time, until the rumble of a diesel engine broke the silence and the headlights of the great truck burned through her splayed fingers. Three people got out of the truck—two men and a woman, just silhouettes against the glare of the truck’s lights.
One of the men stepped toward her.
“Are you Colleen?” He asked.
Thirty-Seven
Not long after the screaming had stopped, Misty got onto her hands and knees and reached under the bed, fished out the last of the liquor her bedroom had to offer—a quarter of a bottle of cheap Canadian whisky that tasted like piss if piss were made of fire.
She drank it all, knocked it down with Olympian speed, and slept through the night and well into the next day. She awoke to an explosion of sunlight and the sensation that there were chunks of brick embedded in her brain.
She sat up and put her feet on the floor and rubbed her eyes and waited to die. When that didn’t happen she got up and stepped into the bathroom. She sat on the toilet and did her business, and her eyeballs seemed to toy with the idea of popping within their sockets. Flushing the toilet and pulling up her pants, she rinsed her hands and then grabbed the cup that contained her toothbrush and a tightly rolled tube of toothpaste, dumped its contents into the sink, and filled with cup with cool water from the tap. She emptied the cup, filled it once more, and took the second cup a little slower, setting it down long enough to rummage through the medicine cabinet and produce two aspirin tablets.
In the bedroom, she looked through the window and into the back yard, which was littered with fallen corpses. She picked up her pistol and looked at it, wondered if she had the strength. She doubted it. The previous night, she lay in bed drinking and listening to Cardo and the black guy slaughter the dead in the stairwell. By that point, she’d been certain that Crate was dead, that he’d been murdered by the cop, and though she’d lain with a loaded gun in her hand, the barrel inches from her lips, she’d hoped on some level that one of them would make it easy on her—just kick the door in and put one between her eyes.
This had not happened, and now she was alone. She searched the folds of the blanket strewn across her bed and discovered her gun beneath her pillow. She checked the cylinder. She had five shots left.
The hallway outside the bedroom was empty. Before reaching the stairwell, she stepped into the cluttered guest bedroom. Spent shell casings littered the floor and the bed. The window was still open. The air smelled like morning dew on grass and leaves. Only a trace of the scent of charred flesh reached her nose, and as she looked down at the mad scattering of dead bodies in the parking lot, she knew that the air would not smell so nice for much longer.
Two walking corpses walked strange and uneven circles before the store, their feet tracking blood from the burst remains of the dead things that had been unable to get out of the way when the big truck had rumbled out of the parking lot.
Downstairs she found the back door wide open. Two bodies lay huddled together across the threshold, and she would not be able to close the door until they were gone. She stepped into the store and realized that there’d be little point in closing the back door: the front door was shattered. Anyone or anything that wanted to get in would have no trouble doing so.
Between herself and the shattered door, there lay a twisted and flayed form, barely recognizable as human. Its clothes had been peeled away and were strewn around it in blood-blackened tatters, and its body had been pecked clean. It was little more than a skeleton caked in dried blood and gristle.
She remembered the scream, the wailing and inhuman scream.
“Oh, Crate,” she said, stepping toward her husband’s remains. A sound to her left made her jump.
A dead boy sat before the cooler farthest away from where she stood. It looked to be ten or twelve and held an unopened bottle of chocolate milk in its bloodless right hand. Its face was taut and multi-colored—the right side bone-white, the left bruised with settled blood, deepest purple washing to crimson at the edges. It looked up at her, dropped the milk bottle, and tried to stand.
She walked up to where it struggled to find its footing and shot it through the head.
“God,” she said, stepping back and jamming a finger into her ear, working it. She looked back at the front door and realized her mistake. Walking past the thing on the ground—maybe it wasn’t Crate… maybe—and through the broken glass door, she looked out into the parking lot and saw that the two corpses she’d seen from the upstairs window had given up their aimless wandering and now moved toward the building.
She turned her back to them and walked over to the thing on the floor, dropped to her knees beside it. She saw the matted tuft of hair on the floor next to the thing’s raw skull and any doubt she’d had was laid to rest.
“Crate, honey,” she said, and rolled the thing onto its back, winced at the feel of it, like something from a butcher shop. Its face was mostly skull. One of its eye sockets was empty. The other contained a blue eye that moved left and right, following her every move.
Feet crunched on broken glass and she looked up to see the first of the walking corpses stepping into the store. She got up, walked toward it, and shot it between the eyes. She waited for a moment and shot the next one as it shuffled along behind its partner.
She stepped to the door and looked out, stepped onto the porch, looked around. The only dead were the truly dead.
She went back into the store and looked down at what was left of her husband. The blue eye moved left to right, left to right in its lidless red socket.
“You dumb old shit,” she said.
Two bullets.
Thirty-Eight
On the morning following her final encounter with Samson Niebolt, Colleen went down to the place where her brother and her boyfriend had died. The black man and the cop accompanied her, and the woman had stayed behind with Mathilda and Sally and the children.
They cut down Daniel while she stood facing Guy’s tethered corpse. It looked at her, mouth silently working.
“You don’t have to do this,” Reggie said, placing a hand on her shoulder.
She pressed the barrel of her gun to the dead thing’s forehead. She said nothing, not even a hushed goodbye. Guy was not here. This was not him. This was what he’d left behind and he was no longer here.
She closed her eyes and squeezed the trigger.
Reggie and Cardo removed the bodies from the bedroom, took them far away from the courtyard and burned them. All but Huffington Niebolt’s head.
Colleen worked alone.
She found a five gallon plastic paint bucket in one of the supply sheds. It took a while to wash away the remaining paint, and when she was done Colleen dried out the inside of the bucket and dug the hole. She was sorry that Sally could not be there with her. Once Sally had healed, Colleen would bring her to this spot.
She opened the pillowcase and removed Huff’s head. It blinked its eyes and opened its toothless mouth. She’d thrown away Huff’s false teeth.
She placed the head into the bucket, and it looked up at her, blinked once, slowly. She pressed on the plastic lid, encircled it with duct tape. It was an airtight seal, and would last forever. Nothing would get in—not worms, not bugs.
The bucket fit nicely into the hole. She tossed in the first shovelful of dirt.
“Live forever,” she said.
They found the door-covered shack and the bodies within. They buried Kimberly alongside Daniel and Guy. They burned the rest.
No one wanted to deal with Lissa and Jack. The doorknob rattled and rattled, and though Reggie volunteered to take care of it, in the end, Mathilda went into the nursery and did what needed to be done.
Sally named her daughter Lolita.
“You sure you want to do that?” Colleen asked, laughing.
“I wanted a boy,” Sally said, touching her daughter’s cheek. “I mean, before this I wanted a girl. I’ve always wanted a girl, but over the past few months I’ve wanted a boy.”
She stared at Colleen, tears in her eyes, and Colleen closed her mouth. She could tell that Sally was not finished.
“I wanted a boy,” Sally said, weeping now. A tear dropped onto the face of her sleeping daughter, and she wiped it away. “I wanted a boy because I thought maybe a boy would look like my son or my husband, either of them. I just wanted to see their faces again.”
“I don’t know what to call him,” Mathilda said, holding the unnamed boy to her heavy breast.
“It’ll come to you,” Colleen said
“What was your brother’s name?”
“No.”
“Why not? A name is just a name.”
“My brother was an asshole.”
“That’s okay,” Mathilda said, easing the child from her breast and placing him on her shoulder, patting his small back. “He doesn’t have to be.”
Reggie and Cardo retrieved the guns from the house. Huff had been planning for the end of the world, and they were the beneficiaries of his sickness. There were enough rifles, pistols, shotguns, and ammunition to hold off an army.
Colleen woke up screaming a lot. She wanted to get drunk and she wanted to get high. Sometimes she did, there was booze and there was grass—the Niebolt boys had known how to have a good time—but mostly she didn’t, and her mother’s words hung like a fog in her head: that stuff just makes you stupid. You need to stay sharp in this world if you want to make it.
She thought about them a lot, all of them. Guy was dead, and so was her brother. Her friends were dead. Her mother was dead, too, but maybe not the old kind of dead. Daniel and his heroes Nietzsche and Lennon and Bowie had probably been right. There was nothing after life—dead was dead, but not anymore.
Huffington Niebolt deserved to spend eternity gaping into the darkness. Her mother didn’t. Colleen wondered if she could get down to Fresno one day with a shovel and a gun.
Stacy was a natural with the kids. They called her Mama Starshine. She and Cardo weren’t exactly falling in love but they spent time together. A lot.
Reggie and Cardo drove down into Harlow and cleaned out Misty’s. There was no sign of the old woman. Her bedroom door was still closed, still locked, and the old man’s remains were gone.
Reggie refilled his truck from Misty’s diesel pump.
They encountered only three walking corpses.
They brought Richard’s body back to the compound and buried it beside the others.
There was a new TV in one of the three small apartments at the top of the hill. They brought it back to their dwelling and plugged it in, gathered round.
The CBS eye was gone.
On the following evening, the lights went out.
Thirty-Nine
Reggie was with them for three weeks, and though he was helpful and kind and resourceful, he was rarely actually there. Even when they gathered together for dinner or to play with the children, he had the air of a man whose heart was elsewhere. He was silent and often seemed to be lost in thought. Colleen knew why—they’d shared their stories—but she was still surprised when he told her that he was leaving.
They were alone. Everyone had gone to bed, everyone but Colleen, who didn’t get all that much sleep these days. He’d crept out of the room that still contained Evie’s sewing machine and seen her sitting on the couch, trying to work her way through Sally’s copy of Lolita.
“Are you sure?” She asked.
“I am,” he said.
“Damn.”
“Look—I’m not stupid, okay? I know I probably
won’t get there, and if I do get there, I know what I’m gonna find. It’s just something… something I have to do.”
“Wish you didn’t,” she said. “Soon?”
“As soon as the sun comes up.”
“Damn.”
The sun rose and he loaded up his truck, taking only his own guns and several boxes of compatible ammunition from Huff’s enormous stash. They all hugged and waved. They asked him to stay and he told them he wanted to, he couldn’t, and he would be back, if at all possible.
Unable to turn around, he backed the big truck down the hill. He blew his horn and was gone.
“God,” Sally said, on the third morning after Reggie’s departure. The night before, the sky had flickered orange in the south, and they’d feared a raging, lightning-born forest fire. Now, staring into the leaden sky, their fears were greater.
Colleen walked over to the park bench and ran a finger through the fine layer of ash that coated its surface.
“Is that radioactive?” Sally asked, wrapping her arms around herself. “Do you think?”
“I don’t know,” Colleen said. She smiled, shrugged. “Guess we’ll find out.”
“We should probably get inside.”
Colleen followed Sally into the house. She stepped into the living room, closing the door behind her, and looking around, feeling lost.
David walked out of the nursery. He looked up at her, a smile erupting across his face.
“Mama Colleen,” he said, rushing toward her and throwing himself into her arms. “Wanna play with me?”
She held him close, pressed her face to his curly yellow locks. “Sure.”
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