"Oh," I said. "Good."
"If it's all settled then," Sam said, his packing, apparently, concluded, "I think we've got a helicopter to catch."
And he was right.
We did.
I held Vanessa's hand for most of the ride, but I also looked out the window.
The helicopter went up and up, and Knox County spread out below us and got smaller and smaller.
I thought about how all of it was there, right beneath us. Kenton College. The tiny towns. The zombies. The black turkey. The gangsters. The murder. The dead bodies. The death.
k few minutes into the ride, the sun dropped off the horizon completely. The sky went dark, and the ground-so very far beneath us-went even darker.
In such blackness, even the smallest lights stood out starkly, like stars in the night sky.
So.
That's the way it happened, more or less. Raises more questions than it answers, if you ask me. But who knows? Maybe you eggheads will be able to make sense of it. I hope something somewhere in there was useful.
You gentlemen have been great, by the way.
These tests have been more than reasonable. A few of them have even been fun. And my accommodations are certainly adequate-if perhaps a bit confining. But then, we're all doing the best we can with what resources we have, aren't we? And I do thank you for passing all my correspondence on to Vanessa and Sam. I hope I'll be able to see them again soon ...
What do I think? Fuck, I don't know ... Random chance sounds good. Like Sam said about the one person in one hundred thousand who gets HIV but doesn't really get HIV. It could all just be some statistical fluke. I was in the wrong place at the wrong time, so now I'm that one zombie who's just a little different from all the others.
I'll be honest with you, though. Sometimes I wonder if it's because I killed myself that I don't get to die. Seriously-like there's some sort of poetic justice to it. By killing myself, I hurt all these people-Vanessa, Sam, and I'm sure there are others-but by taking a coward's way out, I wasn't gonna be around to see the consequences of my actions.
Except I was.
So I dunno. Yeah. Sometimes I think about that. God or the Universe or whatever decided to use this zombie outbreak as an opportunity to show me what an absolute fuck I'd been. To really drive it home. Maybe to punish me for it, too. I don't know.
That's not much of a "science answer," though. Judging by your lab coats and all this equipment, I'm guessing you guys aren't here to listen to me wax theological.
Well ... probably you aren't.
It's a...
Excuse me.
It's a funny thing ... I walked around Knox County for monthsday and night-and never needed to rest at all, except maybe to clear my head when I felt emotional. But all of this talking is suddenly making me tired. It's the darnedest thing. I'm really getting snoozy here.
First time I can remember feeling this way since I woke up there on the side of the road by Gant.
My head feels, like, thick, you know? It's really hard to focus.
"Talking tires out zombies." Write that down. There's your first science discovery.
Seriously though, can we have a break for just a little bit? Take five, or something?
I'd really appreciate it.
You just keep doing what you're doing, okay?
Great.
Just give me a second or two.
I'm going to lie back down.
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