Brady grew somber as if she opened the wound of their death all over again. Brady moved towards her and tried to embrace her again. But she would not let him.
“No!” she said pushing back his attempted embrace. “Where are our children?”
Connor and Val looked at each other and both thought the same thing. Connor turned off the stove and the two went outside.
“We’ve had months to absorb all this stuff,” Connor started to say, “but for her it’s immediate. The world changed so much and she didn’t get to change with it.
“So I know I’m messed up,” Val began, “but isn’t there a part of you that wonders if- you know…”
“Val, I really don’t. What are you talking about?” Connor asked as they sat outside on the porch swing.
“If she ate them.” Val said finishing her sentence with raised shoulders.
“Her kids?”
“I know it’s probably because I was a zombie so I think about this stuff, but isn’t there a part of you that’s curious?”
“Val! You are seriously messed up.”
“What? You’re telling me that thought never crossed your mind?”
“Not even a little bit.”
“Well, if it helps, I was thinking we could go rescue them too. But not if they’re eaten.”
“Stop talking.”
“I’m sorry ok! After everything I’ve been through, that’s how I think. You’re the one who wants to marry me. I mean, what’s more messed up? The one who’s a crack head up or the one who wants to be with her forever? You said you wanted to get to know me. There you go. It’s a lot of thoughts like that. You still want in?”
“Oh I’m still game. I just need to teach you some social etiquette or you’ll kill all the parties I regularly attend. Literally kill them.”
“Eh, those parties are lame anyway. They could use an ex-crack heads to liven them up.”
“Yes. Nothing like that threat of being eaten to keep you on your toes at a party.”
Just then the screen door opened and Brady and Sara came out. Both had obviously been crying.
“I’m sorry,” Sara started off by saying.
“Don’t be,” Connor replied. “The whole world has changed and you didn’t get time to adapt. It’s a lot to take in all at once.”
“Rachel?”
It had been a long time since Connor heard his wife’s name used. “They’re all dead,” Connor answered. “I buried them.”
“I’m so sorry,” Sara said taking Connor’s hand.
“I haven’t suffered more than anyone else. Everyone’s lost someone.”
Brady and Sara sat on the chairs on the far side of the door to the porch swing.
“Were you flying the helicopter?” Sara asked Val.
“That’s right,” Val answered nodding. “Connor and I swooped in to the rescue.”
“You had our exit planned out?”
“We had everything planned out,” Brady said. “To the last detail.”
She took Brady’s hand. “Tell me everything.”
“Connor and I have been together since the virus hit. I found him at his house after he buried his family. By then I’d found our car and knew you were infected, Sara. From then on, I had a plan to look for a cure. Connor and I gathered a bunch of food and supplies and established ourselves here. Connor and I managed to locate you once and put a tracking device in you. Eventually it fell out, but we watched your movements enough to know you would stay in Colorado Springs. So the plan was to leave Connor here to manage everything while I went out and looked for a cure or clues to unravel the infection.”
“It’s weird that you guys split up,” Sara interrupted.
“I guess it is,” Connor answered her. “But we didn’t just want to be nomads wondering around. We needed a base of operations. It gave me time to get things going here and keep the livestock alive. And I was able to setup a lab so I could work on any leads that Brady brought me.”
“In Kansas City, Val and her team picked me up. We travelled back to Colorado Springs and checked out Peterson. Then we went into the mountain complex to follow some leads about the virus. We were ambushed in there and only Val and I made it out.
“I brought Val back here and gave Connor the samples of the virus I’d collected. Unable to resist her bubbly personality, Val immediately became one of us.”
Val did a little bow. This managed to produce a smile on Sara’s face.
“At my request, Connor created a modified virus to infect me. We hadn’t seen you, Sara, in quite some time. With the tracking device lost, I knew the only way to get to you would be to infect myself and search for you.”
Sara seemed intrigued at this. “You infected yourself? And, Connor, you let him do this?”
“Seemed like a good idea at the time,” Connor replied.
“Connor gave me a virus that would hopefully let me maintain pieces of my sanity so I could remember I was searching for you. Once I found you, I’d lure you outside the zombie city and cure both of us. And then they’d pick us up. So when Connor had modified the virus and found a working cure, we infected me. When we travelled down to Colorado Springs, Connor gave me the cure. I dug into my chest and placed it safely behind my sternum. There it would remain until I could remember to use it.”
“But what Brady didn’t know,” Val interrupted, “was that I was a zombie.”
At this Sara seemed rather unnerved.
Val continued, “I’d betrayed his entire plan of saving you and discovering a cure to the Zombie King in Colorado Springs.”
“The zombies have kings?” Sara asked.
“You knew him as a shining, overwhelming brilliance.”
Sara thought deeply for a moment. “Yes,” she said distantly, “I remember. He whispered to me.”
“He was my father,” Val announced. “He practically made me. I was a hybrid. Both human and zombie but neither one fully. Some horrible combination of the two. I’d infiltrated the group Brady joined in Kansas City. I was trying to find out what the rest of humanity was up to and if they were collecting anywhere. I think the Zombie King was thinking humanity would gather together into a city and I could infiltrate it.”
“So Brady and Connor didn’t know?” Sara asked.
“Well that’s where things get interesting,” Val said. “You knew, Brady. You told me my wound was fatal. And you set things up for me to be cured even before you were infected. How did you know?”
Brady seemed almost distressed at being put on the spot. “I guessed,” he answered. “When I brought you up from the mountain, I had to change your clothes.”
At this Val brought her legs up to her chest.
Brady looked at Val. “I saw you and guessed.”
“And you didn’t think of letting me in on this?” Connor asked the question that had burned in him since a few days ago. “You left me alone with a zombie and you knew it!”
“I knew you’d be ok,” Brady replied.
“How did you know?”
“I just knew it.”
“Bullshit! You painted exactly what would happen with you and Val. How did you know? And why didn’t you tell me?”
“I can’t answer that.”
“Brady, you could have killed me leaving me with her.”
Brady looked straight in Connor’s eyes. “No, I couldn’t have. I knew she wouldn’t kill you – or even attack you.”
“What is that supposed to mean? You’re a fortune teller now? Do you have dreams of the future? What are you trying to say?” Connor yelled.
“I’m trying to say: trust me,” Brady replied in a now calm voice.
Connor turned to Val, “See, this is what I was talking about. His deranged actions make sense to him and they do work out in the end. But he’ll be damned before he shares the tiniest bit of helpful information with you that would make any sense out of all of this!
“Brady, it’s not just you! I’ve been putting up with your secretive behavior since the infection.
And I’m tired of it. You know things. Over and over I’ve seen it. You’ve got to share those things with us or how can we truly be a team?”
“It’s not that I don’t want to,” Brady answered, “it’s that I can’t. Connor-”
“Fine!” Connor interrupted. “Keep your secrets. I wonder if you’ll choose them over us some day.”
“It’s the only way that would have worked. I know you’re a thinker and a calculator. Val needed to go back and have her connection to the Zombie King severed. It’s the only way she could be free of him! If you knew she was a zombie, would you have let her go? You would have kept her in a cage and wasted your cure prematurely.
“If I had told you I stole some of your precious cure, you would have used it for some other means. I had to keep it a secret from you. Your heart is good, Connor. You would have used it for good. But I didn’t need good. I needed perfection. And so I brought you to it at the exact moment and told you how to use it. That’s why we’re all here. That’s why Val isn’t dead.
“If I told you how slim of a chance there was that my cure would actually go off, would you have let me go? If I informed you that my actual plan to save Sara would be to let her eat the cure out of me, would you have allowed any of it? I had to bring you one step at a time.”
“You used us,” Connor said disgustedly.
“Yes,” Brady answered, “I did. And you can hate me if you want to. Just know that without me, none of us would be here. I came and sought you out, Connor, right after the infection. You were scared just sitting in your house. I came back for you, Val, when all logic told me to let you die. And do I even need to mention Sara?”
Connor stood and decided to make one last comment. “We’re not your slaves, Brady. We have a right to know.” With that, he stormed out.
Val stood to follow him out to the woods.
“Leave him be,” Brady told Val.
“You should have told him, Brady,” she snapped and ran off towards Connor.
“She’s a bit of a firecracker that one,” Sara commented.
Brady sighed as if in agreement.
“Well,” Sara began, “I guess that answers the question of whether or not Connor knew about Val’s infection.”
“I really would have told them if I could have,” Brady answered. “You understand, don’t you?”
“I don’t know, Brady. I’ve never had to make that choice. Do you really see the future?”
“I have a way of seeing what’s going to work.”
“You keeping secrets from me now? Tell me. I’m your wife after all.”
“You don’t even know what you’re asking.”
Sara thought it best to drop the subject before she worked herself up. “So you infected yourself and hid the cure inside your chest. Then what?”
“Then there was madness. Eating and killing and dying.”
“You ate humans?”
“I was willing to do whatever it took to save you. You may or may not understand that. I don’t know.”
“Hey,” she said forcing him to meet her gaze, “I’m not them. I’m not the enemy. Please don’t be defensive with me. Let me in.”
Brady put his hands on her shoulders. “Sara, I’m sorry. Connor’s got me in a mood.”
“Brady, I’m not judging your methods at all. I’m just trying to understand. Please let me understand you.”
Brady sighed again. “I’m sorry. Yes, I ate. I took lives to save you. It was a terrible choice but I would make it again. I evolved until I became a low level king under our father’s guidance. You also were being groomed for that purpose. But your evolution was taking much longer. Keen desperation drove a fiery passion in me.
“At the perfect moment, an enemy hit me with a blunt object in the chest releasing the cure. I started to turn slowly back into human. But I made the best use of my time during transition. I used the new clarity of my mind to remember my purpose of finding you. I used my zombie attributes to shoot through the network of minds to find you and call you to myself. And I used what remained of my kingly authority to force a rebellion among the zombie ranks to allow us to escape.
“I knew calling you to me would have only one outcome. You would see me as a foe and eat me. In this way, I gave you the cure coursing through my body. The speed at which you transformed was far greater than my own because you were only second level and the cure was already in my system. It acted in you immediately.
“Only one obstacle remained: the king. Having no more use for him or his curiosity, I gathered all my zombie strength that remained. There we clashed and I overcame him. He had grown weak from lack of hunting. In his quest for knowledge, he had become reliant on being fed.
“In the meantime, Val told Connor she was an infected. He thought of killing her but couldn’t bring himself to do it. He brought her here to lock her up until he could make more cure. But when he arrived here, he remembered my painting. I had been working on my last painting that I kept hidden from him. At this point he thought I was lost to the zombie ranks forever and saw no harm in looking behind the curtain. What he found there was hope.
“I needed him to hope again. To wake up and rescue us. Now that he loved Val and knew of her infection, the moment was right for him to be given the cure. He used it on her and the two returned to Colorado Springs to get a helicopter prepared for our escape.
“They met us at the roof of the hospital. Val as the pilot and Connor the gunner. With their help, we narrowly escaped through a horde of zombies. And afterwards, came directly here.”
Sara sat silently for a moment soaking all this in.
“It’s unbelievable,” Sara began. “All of it happened so perfectly. I mean, what are the chances of you being hit in the chest just so to release the cure? What if you were never cured? You risked so much to save me. Thank you.”
Brady squeezed her hand. “I love you. I would do anything for you. No matter what – remember that.”
“I love you too. You are such an amazing man.” She put her head on his shoulder as best she could. After a moment she whispered, “I want to see your paintings.”
Slowly, the two rose and made their way over to the bunker. Beyond the mossy steps leading downward, Sara found Brady’s artwork. She discovered her story written anew in flames of color. The walls throbbed. For to her, these paintings were his very heart somehow magically removed, splattered upon these walls, and gently replaced in his chest. The air smelled of him with a deep, penetrating aura. The spirit of the place moved over the warm, moist air and encircled her like a blanket.
Her eyes, gently led by the progression of the paintings, moved forward to the final painting now revealed. The curtain still upon the floor just as Connor left it. Tilting her head upwards, she gazed on it fully.
A hideous form of Brady, unlike Sara had ever known, rose as if out of the paint. In full zombie majesty, he towered over another as a great tree might overshadow a sapling. The fiery passion in Brady’s eyes roared audibly like a furnace. Not unlike a great burning tree Brady toppled onto the other. Sara turned to examine the other more closely and found the tiniest hint of a crown. It lingered behind his head when he moved. Vaporous. Like a trail of smoke. Sara mistook it at first as part of the background.
Both figures summoned their strength and collided there in the paint. As if they tore through the very medium of the artwork, the paint bled its colors like a wound.
Sara found herself in the painting. Changing from zombie to human. Her feeble body being tortured as it writhed in the transformation, convulsing between Brady’s feet. Like pillars his legs protected her from the peering curiosity of lesser minions. The boldest of which stretched out their rotting hands towards her as if only to see if she might already taste pleasantly. But, as the two titans move back and forth under each other’s weight, Brady’s scrambling feet kept the lesser prying hands away.
With no conclusion to the battle above, Sara’s eyes moved downwards onto the lower part of the paintin
g. There she found a breathtaking woman clothed only in wings. From her naked shoulders, white feathers grew into wings that covered the whole front part of her body. Sara gasped at how magnificently the face of the woman grabbed Sara’s focus. Nestled behind strands of the woman’s long black hair, Sara found a pair of familiar eyes on the winged creature’s face. Though only a painting, Val stared directly into Sara’s soul. In desperate, longing beauty Val’s eyes looked out at Sara in a heart wrenching plea. An aura like the silvery white light of the stars crowned her. Deep in her face the painting of Val bore a zombie resemblance. In traces behind her eyes, she held a sinister hunger.
Reaching out of the wings, Val’s arms parted white feathers. And by some magic, her hands came out of the very painting in a beautiful, gentle gesture. In soft hands Val held out vacancy to Sara. The plea in Val’s eyes tugged at Sara’s heartstrings. And for the first time, she looked on an almost complete stranger and loved her.
“What was she holding?” Sara whispered.
“Her cure,” Brady answered.
Having taken in the last painting, Sara looked over the room again and commented, “It’s all so beautiful.” She took his hand. “I forget how deeply things hit you.”
“A blessing and a curse.”
“How will we ever start over after all this?”
“I’m not convinced that we can.”
“Some sort of society has to keep going. Humanity will survive.”
“I don’t know, Sara. I just wanted to save you.”
“And you have in your own wondrous way.” She looked into his face and saw a far-off look. “Are you not happy?”
He immediately gathered himself and looked into her eyes. “Yes, I am. There’s just – something else.”
“Something other than me?”
He smiled casually and realized his error. “You’re right. I should just let things go and cherish having you back.” He embraced her. “It is so good to have you back, Sara.”
∙ ∙ ∙ ∙ • ∙
That evening, Val went to talk to Brady alone. She found him at his rock pile meditating. She tried to make a noise so he would hear her approach, but she startled him anyway. He turned her way and before he could try to disguise them she saw his weeping, bloodshot eyes.
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