Lilly gets off the horse now.
“Jack? You’re kinda freaking me out here, man,” she says.
“Where is it?” I’m mumbling, my head completely and totally someplace else.
“Where’s what?”
Tears are on the verge. I can feel them. I don’t want to cry in front of this woman, this stranger, but I can’t help myself. Besides the memories, that picture is all I have left of Darlene and Junior—and my memories are not solid like the picture is; they’re fading, fading, fading…
“Is it this?” Lilly says, but I’m almost too lost in this current nightmare to hear her. By some desperation, I look up and see her in the grass off of the side of the road. She holds something small between her thumb and index finger. It glimmers, catches the early sunshine.
Relief floods me.
I spring up, still forgetting that Bilbo’s reins are tied to me. Naturally, the horse is heavy and though I’m stronger than I was fifteen years ago, I’m nothing compared to the beast whose hooves are planted firmly on the asphalt. I fall backward, landing on a minefield of batteries, bullets, and every sharp thing in the world.
Should hurt, but the adrenaline is pumping and I hardly feel it. I will later.
Scrambling up, trying to break free of the sliced reins—and I’m so anxious to get the one piece of my old life back I consider ripping my arm off and shambling at this strange woman like a mutilated zombie.
“Don’t open—” I shout.
It’s too late. Lilly puts her long nail into the crack and the locket glides smoothly open.
I finally get free of Bilbo’s reins and I’m running at Lilly faster than I’d run from a horde of the dead. I snatch the locket out of her hands. In my palm, the pendant feels so right. I look at that perfect moment, the picture, and the tears that were on the verge spill over. They ride the lines in my face only to get lost in my beard. I turn away so Lilly doesn’t see me cry, but the noises betray me. I’m sniffling, trying to swallow down hitching sobs.
She says nothing. All is still in the countryside except for me. Even Bilbo watches me curiously for a moment before he realizes his leash has been unhooked and he’s free to graze on the crabgrass nearby. Which he does greedily.
I want to jump through the photo back to that moment. I want to hug my wife and son one more time before they’re gone forever. I have so many regrets. I would’ve never yelled at Junior. I would’ve let him watch all the scary movies he wanted to watch despite him being much too young for those types of gory and frightening films. I would’ve let him stay at his friends and ditch the schooling Laura Harkinson taught the youngsters Monday through Friday. I would never have argued with Darlene. I would take her into my arms and never let her go. I would’ve told her how beautiful she was every chance I got. I would’ve read those trashy romance novels she liked so much just so I could talk to her about them into the wee hours of the night. I would’ve done all of this and more.
But it’s too late.
They’re gone. Gone for good.
And it’s my fault, and all I have left of them is this little rectangular picture, so small I can hardly see the color of Darlene’s eyes or my son’s gap-toothed smile. What if I forget those things? What if I forget that Darlene’s favorite shampoo was strawberry scented, that Junior’s last baby tooth was his front one and he didn’t lose it until he was accidentally elbowed by his friend Joey while shooting hoops.
I can’t take this. I can’t take it any longer.
“Jack?” Lilly’s voice drifts through the heavy sadness clouding my thoughts. “Jack, are you okay?”
I’m not okay. I’m anything but okay.
“Yeah, I’m fine. Just thought I lost it,” I lie.
“Jack, it’s okay. I understand,” she says. She stands over me now, her hand out and resting on my shoulder. “Here, let me help you.” She bends down and begins picking up all the little knick-knacks that were in my cloak.
“Thank you,” I say.
After everything is picked up, Lilly reaches back behind her neck and takes her own necklace off. It has a small crucifix on it. She slides the pendant off, her eyes narrowed in concentration as her fingers work. Once the pendant is free, she hands me the chain. It’s thin, sterling silver. “Here,” she says. “So you don’t lose it again.”
The chain hangs over her fingers like a strand of a spider’s web.
“I think it’ll fit,” she says.
“No—I can’t.”
“Jack. Just take it.”
“But it’s your necklace,” I say. “You need it.”
She chuckles, holds the small cross up to her eyes. Unlike the chain, I don’t believe the pendant is real. It looks cheaply made. Of course, I know that doesn’t matter if it’s important to her. Importance is all about perspective, not how much something’s worth.
“I’m not even religious,” she says. “This cross—I only wear it because I thought it was cool.”
“That’s reason enough to keep it,” I say, but I can see plainly on her face that she doesn’t believe me.
“Like I said,” she continues, ignoring me, “I’m not religious. Not anymore, anyway.” She spins around, sweeping her hands out to the landscape. “Once I believed in God and Jesus Christ and the Bible and all that stuff, but—” She points to a nearby house up the road. There, a dilapidated fence and overgrown grass and dead crops stare back at us. “But what kind of God would let this happen to the world?”
I say nothing, only look at her with a mixture of contempt and admiration. She is growing on me, and I don’t like that. I’m a lone warrior. No more partners, no more people who’ll just die—
“Really, I’m not,” Lilly says, knocking me off my line of thought. “Plus, there’s more crucifixes than there are zombies. That’s a guess. Not a fact.” She smiles and takes the cross into her closed fist, cocks her arm back, and launches the pendant as far as she can throw it. My jaw drops as I follow its trajectory. For a long moment, it hangs in the air. A shard of silver against the orange sky. Then I lose sight of it. It lands somewhere among the weeds, lost forever.
I turn to face Lilly. She holds the chain out to me again.
“Believe me now?” she asks.
Still, I’m hesitant to take it.
She rolls her eyes and tosses it at me. My natural reaction is to catch it. I do.
Not outwardly happy, I thread the chain through the pendant. The length of the chain is longer than the one it was on before, but I don’t care. When I clasp the necklace, I look down and see the pendant is closer to my heart than it was before.
And that just feels right, but I remind myself not to get attached to this woman, not to let her become a friend.
We are back to walking again. Neither of us are on Bilbo. Lilly suggested that the horse needed a break, too, and I agreed with her. I still don’t know how I feel having her on this journey with me. We’ve only been traveling for about half a day, largely in silence.
And I don’t like the silence because all I can do is think about Darlene and Junior. So I break it.
“A car,” I say.
“Yep,” Lilly says.
“I haven’t seen a car in two years,” I say.
“Not many around here. Where were you two years ago?” she asks, honest curiosity in her voice.
I know if I take too long to answer her question, she’ll know I’m coming up with a lie. I’m not the best at lying.
So I answer Lilly honestly.
“Haven,” I say.
Lilly stops walking, and Bilbo does with her.
Before I look at Lilly I already know what her face will look like. Her eyes as wide and round as the noon sun is above our heads. Her fingers touching either her chest, unconsciously clutching the cotton over her heart, or the same fingers resting on her parted lips.
Sure enough, as I turn, I’m wrong.
Instead of a look of surprise, I’d say she looks to be filled with contempt, as if I’ve somehow ins
ulted her by mentioning Haven. Her arms are crossed over her breasts and she rolls her eyes as she says, “Haven? Okay, Jack. Funny.”
“What?” I say.
“You expect me to believe that you were all the way up in San Francisco at one of the best—if not the best—communities left in America and you somehow traveled by foot across all these states without a scratch to show for it?”
My heart breaks a little more. She’s right. Haven was the best. I made damn sure of it. Along with the help of so many wonderful people, people willing to sacrifice so many amenities for the greater good of the community, we made Haven great. Others came from all over the world to seek out that stretch of land, to have a chance at being helped or even saved. And Lilly is also right in thinking this task of travel is impossible. I do, however, have a little more than a few scratches to show for it.
I nod. “Yes, I expect you to believe that because it’s the truth.”
“There’s no way,” she says.
I shrug and turn away from her, fingering the locket beneath my cloak. By the grace of the God I may or may not believe in, Bilbo follows me. This way, I don’t look like a total ass-hat.
“Is that your wife and son?” Lilly’s voice calls after me. “The people in that picture.”
I turn around and look at her.
She reads my expression and quickly apologizes. “I know it’s not my place,” she says. “But I figured if we are going to have a successful partnership, we should probably get to know each other a little better.”
I shake my head. “Not necessary.”
“Jack, I know you’re afraid.”
“I’m not afraid,” I reply.
“Yes, you are. Everyone left is afraid. If they’re not then they’re crazy,” she says. “I’m afraid, you’re afraid… Even Bilbo here is afraid. It’s not a big deal.”
I don’t answer. I just stare, mentally regretting my decision to let her come around. I’m sure I would come across a working car eventually.
“I had a kid. A baby,” Lilly says. Her mouth turns downward.
“I’m sorry,” I say.
“Don’t be. It happened. It happens. Her name was going to be Jean, after my grandmother. The poor old woman practically raised me. My mom worked a lot. Dumped me off at Nana’s house.” A lone tear streaks down Lilly’s face. She absentmindedly wipes it away.
“What happened to Jean?” I find myself asking, though I can guess. Again, after the words have left my lips, I wish I could take them back. Can’t get attached.
“Well, Jean was born but not normal…”
I raise my hand to tell her to stop, but she doesn’t. I don’t want to hear this. There’s already enough sadness in this world.
“Jean was infected. The doctor where I was staying was eighty-percent sure that it wouldn’t happen. We liked our chances. But I guess the odds weren't in my favor. Doctor Jinkton was actually a veterinarian, so you know, can’t blame him. Besides, if I knew she would’ve been born the way she was born, what would I have done? It’s not like we had the tools or knowledge for abortion and it’s not like I even believe in that.” Another tears streaks down her cheek. She doesn’t wipe this one away. “Alas, Jean was born and just as soon as she took a breath…she died and turned.”
It’s like a lightning bolt strikes me right then and there. Anger and sadness burn through the very core of my being. How can life be so unfair? I think back to Junior’s own birth, the feeling of dread I had in the pit of my stomach when the doctor and the two nurses held him in their arms. We were in one of the public restrooms Eve had converted into an infirmary. Knocked down the walls separating the men’s from the women’s, cleaned the hell out of the place, put in hospital beds, and it really did remind me of an honest-to-God infirmary when it was all said and done.
I remember the doctor and the nurse laughing. The clapping. Then them handing me my son for the first time. A beautiful and healthy baby boy. I almost fainted.
“I guess I always knew that what happened could happen. God knows they reminded me about it every chance they got. ‘Don’t get your hopes up, Lilly.’ ‘Whatever happens, happens for a reason.’ Bullshit,” Lilly says.
“I’m sorry,” I say again, and I do mean it.
She waves my sorry away. “It was a long time ago. I’m okay. Sure, I carried Jean around for nine months, but I should’ve it, you know? At some point I felt something…off inside of my womb—and I should’ve known then. But, like a fool, I held out hope. I was more mad than anything.”
I nod. I understand. When I found Junior’s body lying next to Darlene’s, the pool of blood around them, so much that the ground was stained red and the grass was soggy with it, and the initial shock wore off, I was angry. So mad that I was prepared to run to the ends of the earth to find the man who did it. It was only after I buried them that I think I realized that they were gone, gone forever.
Lilly looks out over the horizon, at that dilapidated fence and the equally shabby farmhouse beyond it, which we are directly in front of. I follow her eyes, and for the first time, I realize there is a silo jutting over the house’s caved in roof. There might be some sort of grain or feed there we can give to Bilbo. It’s a long shot, but looking at the farm and judging by the height of the grass and the land, whoever owned that farm did not die fifteen years ago. It’s only recently been vacated, if at all.
I look back to Lilly, see the sadness in her eyes. But I see something else, too. I see understanding. She turns and those knowing eyes meet mine. I hesitate.
I have my own stories of loss to tell. In my head, I know them all too intimately. I’ve never spoken them out loud, and I think I’ve never done that because doing so would make them real—somehow realer than they already are.
Right now, after Lilly has told me her own tragic tale, I think it would be unfair of me to withhold mine.
“Yeah, this is my wife and son. Darlene and Herbert Jr.,” I say, holding the locket up.
Lilly nods. A smile replaces the frown on her face.
“They were in Haven with me. We helped build it up to what it was. Then the District came and they murdered everyone. Well, mostly everyone. Darlene and Junior were among those. I saw them die. I saw Darlene’s throat slit and my own son shot in the back of the head. They left me alive. I’m not sure why. Maybe they thought I was dead. I had blacked out. I don’t remember why, could’ve been from shock or from a blow to the head. When I woke up, I witnessed the aftermath of all the destruction and death firsthand. I held my son’s bloody corpse to my chest then I held my wife’s, then I held them together. Darlene’s head lolled. They had cut her so deep that I could see her vertebrae.” I’m not crying. I’m too numb to cry.
Lilly nods, walks over to me, and wraps me up in a hug.
“I’m sorry,” she says.
We part.
“This explains a lot,” she says now, wiping her tears away. Despite all the sadness, all the heaviness, she smiles.
Confused, I ask, “What do you mean?”
“Why you’re such a badass,” she says.
“I’m not.”
“Don’t sell yourself short, Jack. I know I said it earlier…but I’ve never seen anyone stand up to the District like you did.”
“Oh, that’s just the beginning. I know where the man who murdered my family is. I won’t stop until he’s dead,” I say and I mean this. I will stop at nothing until I succeed. Even if it takes coming back as a zombie and ripping his other eye out.
“That where you’re heading?” she asks.
I nod.
“Then that’s where I’m heading, too,” she says.
I don’t want this. I don’t want to put her in danger, but I keep silent, thinking that I’ll cross that bridge when I get to it.
Despite the overwhelming bad feeling I get when I hop over the fence and onto the field, I don’t stop and come back. Emptying my cloak has been eye-opening. I’m down on my last leg of supplies. Now that I have a means of transp
ortation in Bilbo, I can carry more essentials and not be weighted down.
The only problem here is that Bilbo is another life to take care of besides my own. As much as I don’t know about horses, I’m not stupid enough to not know that they eat, drink, and sleep just like us humans.
So hopping the fence is for me as much as it’s for the horse. Not because I’m getting attached to him. I can’t let that happen. It’s because if he’s going to help me achieve my goal he’ll need to be at full strength.
Once in the tall grass and weeds, I crouch low and pull out a pair of binoculars. Scanning the back of the farmhouse, I see nothing, no movement. The back door is cracked open. A couple windows are busted out. Any sane person would not leave these matters unattended. My guess: zombies somehow got in and had a feast and then moved on like the buzzards they are.
I look back to Lilly and the horse. They are hidden in the shadow of a tall tree, a few feet away from the fence. My goal is to scan the area for danger before I give her the go-ahead.
And yes, I thought about her hopping on to Bilbo’s back and making off with my horse, leaving me in the middle of nowhere. But I truly don’t think she’d do that, and if she did, it’s not a big deal. Two less mouths to feed.
I crouch-walk to the silo. It’s by no means a big silo, not like the type I’ve seen in Ohio, the silos that tower over the horizon like mountain peaks, that can be seen a few towns over, filled to the very top with feed and grain.
Inside, I shine a flashlight. The batteries need changed; it takes those fat C or D batteries, and I can’t seem to find those anywhere these days. Just as the light burns out, I see two fifty pound bags marked Feed. Horse feed? Maybe, maybe not, but we’ll find out if Bilbo’s hungry enough to eat it. One of the bags is opened and rolled down. There are barrels of grain behind this and some shovels and other tools propped up on the walls near them. But the feed. How lucky can we get? Finally, something seems to go right for me. I walk over to the full bag and try to lift it. It’s heavy, heavier than fifty pounds, I think. No way I’ll be able to drag both out by myself. Well, I probably can, but I’ll admit that the darkness inside, combined with the old smell of dirt and wood, is starting to get to me. So I go out into the light and wave Lilly and Bilbo inside.
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