But then she had to go and break the spell.
"Do you believe this shit?" she said, rocking a little as she held me. "I keep feeling like it's a dream. You know what I mean? Just a few days ago, I was worrying about finals and incompletes and who's going to be the new editor of The Journal of Indo-Asian Studies. Now I'm holed up at my sister's house with our kids and her terrifying neighbor, stockpiling food and guns."
"And me," I said, hoping it was a good thing. "You're stockpiling me. I'm here, too."
"And you," she said, pulling me down toward her face and giving me a kiss on the lips.
After a second, she flinched and pulled away.
"Pete, you're like ice," she said.
"Sorry," I responded.
"Let's get you inside," she said. "How are you not freezing? I'm completely freezing."
"Just warmhearted, I guess."
As I stepped inside the house, I was greeted by the inefficient glow of energy-efficient lighting. A geothermal-pull heating system provided something akin to an afterthought of warmth. I was not, of course, cold, but it was still enough to surprise me. Vanessa noticed my expression.
"Most eco-friendly house in the state," said Vanessa. "Or did you forget?"
"I am having some memory problems," I told her. "Sam wasn't lying about that. I mean, this house is familiar, but ..."
"Well then, let me give you the tour again," Vanessa said brightly.
Ahead of us, down a bamboo-floored corridor, four girls between six and ten years of age-Catie, Sarah, Elise, and Chaz-played together in a well-appointed family room. Kate, Vanessa's shorter and dowdier sister, sat playing Stratego with one of the older ones, and gave us both a wave.
"To start with, you've got your voltaic solar panels on the roof," Vanessa said, shifting in tone from harried college professor to genial contractor. "In the summer, they generate more electricity than they can use. The difference gets fed back into the grid, and Kate gets a little check from the power company. In the winter it's not nearly as good. You have to go up on the roof and knock the snow off.
"Moving to the interior, here you've got your bamboo flooring, your automatic blinds, and your low-VOC paint on the walls. Recycled plastic for all the kitchen countertops, and recycled porcelain tile in all the bathrooms. Low-flow toilets too, which is gross, so let's not get into that.
"Every room is connected to the Internet. So, theoretically, Kate can go to work-not that she works-and she can use the Internet connection at her office-not that she has an office-to turn off lights or turn down the heat. And look, out the window there, you can see all those trees they planted close to the house. In the summer they're natural shade. In the winter they provide a windbreak."
"And that really makes a difference?" I asked. "A few trees like that?"
"You'd be surprised," Vanessa said. "Little things add up. This place has been profiled in magazines and newspapers. It was in Architectural Digest when they first built it. One of the professors at Dennisburg teaches a class on this stuff, and brings his students out here once each semester."
In addition to its environmental benefits, the house was as impressively modern-looking inside as out. (I couldn't remember having read architecture magazines, but it certainly seemed like something I'd see in one. Outcroppings were daring and angular. Interior balconies seemed to overhang rooms at striking, M. C. Escher angles.) As we ended the tour and returned to the family room, Vanessa gestured to an empty metal square about the size of a television or fish tank.
"This is a portable room heater that runs on clean-burning oil," she explained. "The floors are heated too. Geothermal. There's a rain garden outside, and an organic greenhouse out back where she grows vegetables. Oh, and the water in the taps goes through cycles. Like, water from washing your hands goes to the toilet tank. Stuff like that."
"Eww," I said.
I looked over to confirm that Kate was out of earshot.
"Whose idea was ... all this?" I asked raspily. "Your sister, or-?"
"It was Kate's," Vanessa said. "He built the house for her. I mean, we were all a little cynical when they started the project, but now we're the only house left in the area with power that's not from a generator."
"Little did you know you were preparing for a zombie outbreak," I said.
"Yeah," Vanessa replied. "Us and the Amish ... We're the ones who were living off the land, or at least trying to. Growing our own food and not depending on the grid. Matilda, that neighbor, used to come and gape at this house like it was the damnedest thing she'd ever seen. She's not gaping now.,,
I smiled.
Then, disaster.
"I know it's not that warm in here, but do take your coat and hat of" Vanessa said casually. Then whispered: "You're liable to hurt Kate's feelings."
"Sure," I said, without moving to do either. Or moving at all.
"Oh," Vanessa said, as if she had forgotten something. "We're putting coats in the laundry room over there. There should be some empty hooks on the wall. I'm going to go make you some hot tea. You look like you could use it."
Vanessa departed for the kitchen, with its low-energy appliances, solar grill, and countertop composter. I slunk off in the direction she had indicated. In a nook by a side door, I found a washer and dryer almost completely covered in clothes. I put my hand to my coat, and stopped. I was all despair.
What had I been thinking, exactly? That somehow I would be able to hide the top of my head from these people indefinitely? (Of course I couldn't do that. It made no sense.) Maybe I needed to leave. Maybe I should just leave now.
I sighed. It was a depressing thought.
Vanessa was nice-very nice, actually. And I seemed to have something much more than a general memory of her ... But could I expect her to, in any sense, "be understanding" when I told her I was one of these things? That I was a "moving cadaver"?
I looked, in my despair, through the small circular window in the nearby door. (Like many conventional homes, this eco-house had a side door in the laundry room that opened directly to the outside.) The snow fell quietly among the trees, unaware and uncaring. I seriously contemplated an escape on foot.
Then I saw it. Something small and round and blue and red. Twenty-five feet from the house, looking forgotten and lost at the base of a tree.
It was a baseball cap, and it was calling to me.
Even as a member of the walking dead, I was not yet forsaken.
I quietly unlocked the side door and stalked outside to retrieve the hat. It was faded and sweat-stained. CEDAR RAPIDS KERNELS was stitched across the bill in silver thread. The front of the hat bore an emblem of a baseball emerging from a cornstalk. It was perfect.
I picked the dirty, cold hat off the ground and quietly shuffled back inside. I paused and listened for a moment, but it seemed no one had heard me. The shrill voices of the children echoed in another part of the house. I took off my coat with some trepidation (forsaking the hook and throwing it on the pile with the others), then in a single, swift, Indiana-Jonesian motion, I removed my black knit cap and replaced it with the baseball hat.
There was no mirror handy, but I consulted my reflection in the window's glass, and thought perhaps I'd pulled it off. Moments later, Vanessa surprised me with a cup of tea.
Three of us, Kate, Vanessa, and me, sat in the kitchen, sipping our drinks. My ruse appeared to have worked, but I was not entirely off the hook. (Perhaps, I feared, I had merely delayed the inevitable.)
"The groundskeeper's hat?" Vanessa asked cautiously.
"He's not like a regular groundskeeper," Kate asserted firmly, between bites of whole-grain carob brownie. "Not like most people have. He makes his own loam and brings fertilizer and other things we need from the local farms. He has a degree in organic landscaping from the University of Minnesota."
"It's not like he's using it," I pointed out. "The hat, I mean-not the degree."
"Yes, but he said he lost it," Kate insisted. "He's been looking for it."
"It looks filthy, Peter," Vanessa said. "At least let me get you one of the clean caps from the closet." She leaned in to touch it, but I flinched away.
"Look, I like it," I said, trying to sound playful (as opposed to she-would- "Seriously, I'm gonna leave it on. This is doctor's orders. You want terrified-that-she-would-see-that-my-brain-was-showing). me to get better, right?"
"Then you're washing your hair before you come to bed," Vanessa said. "And that's not up for debate."
"But Vanessa, all the water-just for that?" Kate objected.
"Where's Matilda, by the way?" I asked, to change the subject.
"Up in her room, I have a feeling," Kate said. "The guest room at the very top."
"Quite a personality on that one," I offered.
No takers.
Both women looked again at my filthy hat, I think only halfbelieving I was actually wearing the thing.
"How was it, on the hill at Kenton?" Vanessa asked. Finally, something I could answer. I told her about the empty campus with the group keeping watch over the graveyard. I described the dark, empty houses. The roving dogs. And I told them about killing the zombie.
"Dreadful," Vanessa pronounced, shaking her head.
Another awkward pause.
"It was nice seeing Sam again," Vanessa said. "He used to come around a lot more often."
"Did he?" I said, forgetting myself. "He made it sound like he'd only been here once."
Vanessa looked at me curiously.
"I mean, he sure did," I quickly amended.
"You really hit your head, didn't you?" Kate offered.
"No use pretending I didn't," I said with a nervous laugh.
Kate finished her brownie and let out an immodest belch. Vanessa wrinkled her nose reflexively.
"What?" Kate said defensively. "It's natural."
"She's got us there," I said with a grin.
Vanessa smiled back at me, and something triggered in my memory. That smile! I had once loved it like nothing else. I had felt about that smile the way a zombie feels about brains. I wanted it like cats want mice, or like drunks want a drink. Yes ... that had been my all-consuming goal. Once, I had been willing do whatever it took to see that smile.
I had craved it for the same reason addicts crave a fix-because it made everything okay. (But unlike drugs, there was no downside to it. No hangover. No sense that I really shouldn't be doing this. No danger of dying. It was all good. A non-zero-sum game, where I could just feel better and better and better.)
I liked seeing Vanessa's smile because it signaled that I had made her happy, and that was the goal.
Even as a zombie, apparently, I could still do it.
At least a little.
So we were talking just like that ... about burps and hats and how Sam was going to fare on the hill back at Kenton-when the din of little-girl ruckus from the living room increased considerably. Jarring screams echoed off the bamboo and recycled fiberglass. It sounded like a serious fight.
"Girls!" Kate called down the hallway. Her tone said that they had already been warned against becoming over-boisterous. The shrieks did not cease. Vanessa cocked an eyebrow.
Then we heard a door slam.
"Catie? Sarah? What's going on?" Vanessa called.
We heard a six-year-old's barefoot plod approaching. A towheaded girl in a purple sweater presented herself. She was wearing a frown.
"Elsie left," the girl announced flatly. "She ran outside."
"What?" Kate said, springing up. "Outside? What did we tell you girls about going outside?" Kate took the girl by the hand and I followed the alarmed mothers into the living room. There, two other girls (Catie and Sarah, Vanessa's children) quickly indicated the door.
"Where's Elsie?" Kate asked Vanessa's daughters.
"She went to get Missy Madlangbayan," said the older girl, referring-I later learned-to an American Girl doll of Pan-Asian ancestry. "We told her no. We said not to go outside. She did it anyway.
The women cast their alarmed looks against the door, its foggy energy-efficient window, and the creeping emptiness beyond. Vanessa hurried across the room and threw the door wide open. Beyond it, we saw only the quiet snowfall, an organic garden shuttered for the winter, and the quiet forest. There was no little girl to be seen.
Vanessa stepped through the doorway, attempting to survey the scene beyond. She looked left and right desperately, but it was clear she saw nothing. "Elsie!" Vanessa shouted.
No response.
"Elsie," she tried again. "Come here right now! This isn't funny."
"Are there footprints in the snow?" I asked.
"I don't see anything," Vanessa replied. "It's all just mud."
"You girls stay here, understand?" said Kate, who had already retrieved a green Eveready flashlight from the kitchen. "Stay here!"
The mothers bolted out the door, one turning left toward the greenhouse, the other turning right and heading into the fallow winter garden. I shuffled after the lither, quicker woman, and was almost out the door when I felt an insistent tug on my pant leg. It was Sarah, Vanessa's youngest daughter. She looked up at me with deadly serious eyes.
"Elsie went up to the road," Sarah said matter-of-factly. "She threw Missy out the window when we were in the car before. She was afraid to tell Mom."
"Up the driveway toward the road?" I asked. "Where cars go?"
"Yes, stupid," the little girl said. "Where cars go."
I looked out across the yard into the darkened mouth of the wooded driveway. I saw nothing beyond-no movement except skeletal trees creaking and cracking in the winter wind.
I shuffled outside, feeling stiffness in my joints.
"Kate ... Vanessa!" I called, seeing no sign of either woman. "I think Elsie went up the driveway! Guys? I'm going up to the road!" Then I saw the flicker of Kate's frantic flashlight beam in the depths of the greenhouse. Perhaps she could not hear me. Perhaps neither woman could.
"Fuck," I croaked to myself, and hurried toward the drive. The wind picked up, and the woods chattered excitedly as I approached. The tunnel of trees loomed before me like an enchanted funhouse ride, anxious for me to wander inside once more, eager to come alive and scare me. The solid darkness of it grew closer and closer. I wished for a flashlight of my own.
I entered the dark tunnel. The driveway began crunching softly under my feet-an easy-listening version of the sound it had made under the Scion's tires. I slowed down to a kind of sprained-ankle shuffle. It was black and very hard to see. I started running into things. Branches whipped against my face in the wind. I had to pull my hat down hard to keep it on my head.
C'mon, I thought to myself, don't zombies have special night vision or something? Apparently, we did not. Before I had ventured twenty paces down the dark driveway, I slipped in the snow and (painlessly) fell on my face. I spat out snow and re-secured my Kernels hat. Then, as I righted myself via an awkward push-up, I saw it.
Faint in the muddy snow, and just inches from my face ... a child's footprint. I inspected it closely. Even in the near-total blackness, I was soon sure. This was no animal mark or random indentation. This was a child's footprint-and, from the way it had ground the new snow into the mud, it was a recent one.
I crept forward a few inches and found another.
I wondered what to do. Going back to tell the women would take time, but they also moved quickly and had flashlights. Then again, the little girl might be mere paces ahead of me. In that case, it would make no sense to go back and risk her wandering farther away. Surely, I thought, even a zombie can move quickly enough to gain on a little girl in the woods.
I began advancing forward once more, extending my arms to feel for errant branches and shuffling carefully on the icy gravel. I listen
ed closely for any sound of the little girl. Every minute or so, I called her name ("Elsie ... !") into the nothingness. Shouting made my voice sound especially hoarse and-if I had to be honest-a little frightening, even for me to hear. I looked hard at every variation in the darkness, but never did I see a little girl.
Then, just as I was beginning to regret my decision not to go back to get Vanessa and Kate, I saw a light in the distance ahead. And movement.
"Elsie," I called, unaware of what I was seeing. (It was not quite headlights ...) "Elsie, it's ... it's Uncle Peter."
Then I heard a scream. High-pitched. A child's.
I began scrambling toward it.
The sound was soon followed by a forceful, "Eeeeek! No!" by the same voice. Then a sound of distant movement-clothing rustling, gravel splashing underfoot.
Then another scream.
Then: "Mommy! Mom-" The second Mommy was hideously cut off by the sound of a blow. Slipping and sliding, I broke into a lumbering run, making straight for the light and voices. My breath did not quicken with my pace, so my hearing remained sharp. As I drew closer, I could more distinctly detect violent, urgent noises. Pulling. Pushing. A struggle.
The light ahead of me came from the lamp left hanging at the mouth of the drive, but also from something else. There were two lights, and one of them was pointed like a searchlight into the forest. The scene soon came into view.
A young girl in a winter coat was being pinned against an ATV (with a single, blinding headlight) by a large man with an unkempt beard and a giant gut. He gripped a hunting knife and held the struggling girl against him. When she flinched away, he hit her hard with the fist that clenched the knife. There was a horrible noise. The girl fell back against the ATV, stunned and sick-looking.
"Hey!" I managed, still several yards away. "Hey you!!"
My voice startled the man. He released his grip on the child, and she began to squirm free. He looked around for me, but was blinded by the lights so near him. Then, he drew a handgun from his coat.
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