And Nancy screamed. She screamed out her pain and misery, her anger and frustration. She screamed for lost love, a lost brother. She screamed for the end of the world and the senseless death and destruction. She screamed until her chest ached and her throat went raw, until her breath was gone and her lungs refused to continue. When she couldn’t scream anymore she took a deep breath that rattled her chest and made her body shiver, and then she began to search for the baby.
Though she didn’t think she could feel anything anymore, panic soon filled her chest again. The baby wasn’t here! She wasn’t anywhere around Greg or the desk, she wasn’t amongst the scattered supplies that had been dropped on the floor, or amongst the contents of the desk that Greg had scattered in his search for pen and paper. She wasn’t in the bathroom or in the kitchenette. She wasn’t in the tiny bedroom. She was nowhere to be found. Nancy was just about to scream again, her heart ready to burst from the strain that had been put on it, when she heard footsteps above deck and realized that she had company. She took the stairs two at a time, burst through the door, and saw him.
At first she was too taken aback to react. Then she really looked at the man standing near the boat’s stern and she bit her tongue hard. He may have been a handsome man at one time, his lean body showing through a plain white shirt and jeans, his short blond hair ruffling in the wind. Handsome, perhaps, if not for the death-like pallor of his skin and the red liquid that seemed to swim behind the surface of his eyes.
Nancy hadn’t even completed the thought process that told her to run back below deck and grab the gun when the man turned his head sideways at her and a voice filled her head: “I wouldn’t do that.” Before she could react he shifted his body and she saw, with horror, that he was holding a bundle of blankets through which a small head was poking.
“Sarah,” Nancy whispered, voice hoarse. Her mind and body warred with each other. Should she run to the baby? Would this man - this creature - hurt either of them if she came closer? Should she run for the gun despite his warning? All she could think to do was to ask, “Is she alive?”
The man nodded. He did not move his lips, but his voice filled Nancy’s head, an intruder in her brain. “For now.”
She realized that he was poised and ready to drop the child over the railing if he so desired. The thought filled Nancy with rage. “Who the hell are you?” she cried. Her voice was saturated with hatred.
The voice that came back to her was impassive. “We are the watchers, the emissaries. We do the work that must be done. We complete the tasks given us by the Above.”
“The A-” Despite herself, Nancy found she was at a loss for words. Her mouth hung open, dumbfounded. After everything she’d seen and experienced she now desperately wanted to spit sarcasm and disbelief. What she eventually managed to say was, “Are you trying to tell me that you’re an angel sent from God?”
The man looked at her sideways again, moving his head slowly as though to examine her. “You may call us what you wish,” said the telepathic voice. “Whatever makes it easier for you to comprehend.”
“To comprehend what?” Nancy demanded. “If you want me to understand what you are, just tell me what you are!”
The man shook his head, just a tiny movement, almost imperceptible. “It does not matter to us that you comprehend what we are, merely that you comprehend what we have done.”
For a moment Nancy meant to demand that he drop the cryptic speak, but then his words poured over her and her heart beat like mad with rage. “You...” she hissed, her eyes narrowed, her blood boiling. “You things, whatever you are, you did this, didn’t you?” With an accusing finger that was shaking from the well of emotion beating in her chest, she pointed toward the shore where dozens of zombies were wandering around mindlessly, searching for their next victim.
The man did not answer, but the look he gave her was enough.
Nancy couldn’t hold the emotions in. She wanted to rush the man, to knock him on the floor, climb on top of him, and bash his face in until there was nothing left but a bloody pulp. She wanted to have her hands around his throat, to feel her fingers squeezing into his windpipe. The only thing that held her back was the fear of putting Sarah at risk, so instead she dropped to her knees and put her fists to the floor. She punched the deck of the boat again and again until her knuckles were raw and bleeding and one or two of her fingers felt like they might be broken. She bit her lip and tasted blood on her tongue. She squeezed her eyes shut until she saw spots and had to force herself to open them again.
When she finally looked back up at the man, who showed no emotion at the display he’d just witnessed, she could only force out one word: “Why?”
His response was immediate, as though he’d been waiting for the question and prepared the answer in advance. He said it simply and in a matter-of-fact tone: “Humanity had grown too corrupt. A purging was the only way to save your species.”
Nancy was shocked into silence. She stared at him, waiting for more information, waiting for some kind of punchline that never came. “Corrupt?” she finally repeated. She couldn’t keep the skepticism out of her voice. “You brought the apocalypse down on us because you think we’re corrupt?”
The man’s eyes widened, a strangely frightening sight. “Can you honestly disagree?” asked his mental voice.
Nancy didn’t get a chance to spit back a reply before her mind came under a sudden and vicious attack. In front of her eyes flew images. Hundreds of them, thousands of them, flashing in and out like brainwashing propaganda. She began to hyperventilate from the shock of it, but slowly the images began to come into focus, become clear enough for her to really see them. What she saw made her shoulders slump and her chest constrict.
What he was showing her was a compilation of the worst moments of mankind. She saw the ravages of war, armies cutting down women and children, mercilessly and without concern. She saw bombs destroying cities and razing entire civilizations to the ground. She saw men raping young girls before slitting their throats, and women drowning their children in bathtubs. She saw people ruining lives for financial gain. She saw psychopaths taking lives just for the thrill of it. And amongst the images of atrocities that had happened all over the planet, she saw reminders of things she herself had witnessed throughout her journey. She saw William dispatching his undead brother before taking his own life. She saw Aria ordering her cronies to murder Sarah’s birth mother in cold blood. She saw Jake attempting to rape her in the middle of the night. She saw the farmhouse family, screaming and struggling as the father shot them all one by one. The last image she saw was one of her parents, so happy and in love, being struck by a drunk driver in a transfer truck. She watched, chest tight, as her parents bled out, trapped in their crushed car, while the truck driver simply drove away.
“Enough!” she cried. It was more a plea than a demand. Tears were pouring down her face and she had to wrap her arms around her body to keep the heaving sobs to a minimum. “Please, enough!” She dropped her head to the ground and wept into the deck until the images began to fade away.
“Can you honestly disagree?” the voice asked again.
“No,” Nancy admitted without raising her head, and she was telling the truth. She could not truly argue. Humans, on the whole, had proved themselves time and again to be a truly despicable species. “But,” she added through her tears, “a lot of good people have died so that you could...purge the corruption.”
“Sacrifices must be made,” the voice said simply.
She had no fight left in her with the images of death, destruction, and a hundred kinds of evil still fresh in her mind. But she raised her head to look the man in the eye. “The sacrifices you took were too many,” she insisted. She saw in her mind’s eye her neighbors, who had been good people for the most part. There was Terri-Lynn, whose only sin had been giving up too easily, and Marshall who had tried so hard to keep her and Greg moving forward. There were the people who had gone to Aria’s hospital simply looking
for shelter. And of course, there was Greg, sweet Greg, and Ken, who she had fallen in love with and who had taken a part of her to the grave with him. “You took too many.”
She had expected some kind of response, some kind of argument, but none came.
Eventually she let her gaze wander away from the Angel of Death and toward Sarah, unmoving in her bundle of blankets. “So you’ve been collecting the babies?” she guessed, remembering the words of the red-eyed girl from back at the farmhouse. “You’re going to, what? Start humanity over?”
The man made a movement, not quite a nod, but a motion that indicated that she had the general idea of it.
“And you’ll teach them differently? Try to make them less...corrupt?” Nancy didn’t like the taste of the word on her tongue, but it fell out of her mouth unbidden.
The man shook his head once, slowly. “No. We must soon leave this place.”
Nancy’s eyes widened. “But,” she sputtered, “but you can’t just leave them! If you’re killing off all the adults with your apocalypse and then you’re leaving, who will take care of the babies? They’re helpless! You realize that, don’t you? They’ll all die!” She felt her heart begin to race. She had come to a place where she could accept her own inevitable end, accept that she might be able to join Ken wherever he had gone. But she couldn’t handle the idea of Sarah being left to starve to death, alone and terrified.
“I never said that the children would be left alone.”
Nancy blinked away a few traitorous tears and looked into the man’s bloody eyes. His mental voice had sounded almost amused. “What do you mean?” she begged.
His eyes swirled maddeningly for a long time before he spoke. “We seek out not only the progeny of your species, but also suitable caretakers to ensure that they survive to create a better humanity. Do you not comprehend the reason why I am here, speaking to you?”
Finally, Nancy was struck dumb. This piece of information, for whatever reason, refused to compute. Her mind kept throwing out this ridiculous image of her as a post-apocalyptic babysitter, surrounded by orphaned children being dropped off by bloody-eyed angels. She had a sudden psychotic urge to laugh out loud.
For the first time since their conversation had begun, the man shifted his entire body so that Sarah was safely positioned over the deck of the ship. “I will leave this little one to you,” the telepathic voice said.
She should have been grateful, happy even, but all Nancy could do was gesture toward the zombies shambling around on the shore. “I will take her,” she said slowly, “and believe me when I say that I will love her and take care of her, but tell me, what kind of life can I possibly give her when we’re constantly fleeing for our lives, hiding out, never sure when we might be able to eat next?”
The man began to move toward her and Nancy sensed an imminent end to the conversation approaching.
“The plague will not last much longer,” the voice told her. “The reanimated cannot exist for extended periods of time. Before the moon waxes and wanes twice more they shall fall and rot and return to the Earth. You need only survive until then and the planet will be open to you once more.”
He stopped within a foot of Nancy. Suddenly, strangely, she felt small and ashamed. For the life of her she couldn’t have explained why. She pulled herself to her feet and stared straight forward at Sarah. From this close she could see that the baby was sleeping gently, the movement of her chest almost imperceptible beneath the blankets. Nancy bit her lip. She longed to reach out and grab the child, but she found that she was frightened, afraid that if she made the move the baby might vanish without warning. With a great deal of willpower she forced herself to look up into the eyes of the man, her Angel of Death. His face was expressionless, unemotional, but the red of his eyes swirled and stirred. Nancy thought it was both lovely and horrifying at the same time.
Finally, after what seemed like an eternity, he extended his arms and offered the baby. Tentative, her mind filled with a thousand fearful outcomes, Nancy reached out and accepted the little bundle of blankets. Sarah stirred, ever so slightly, opened her small mouth in a large yawn, and snuggled happily against Nancy’s chest. Nancy couldn’t resist; she leaned forward and placed a wet kiss on the child’s forehead.
“Survive, Nancy King,” the man’s voice told her, not unkindly. “Survive and raise your children well.”
“Children?” she asked with a frown. She glanced at Sarah. “There’s just the one. Are you bringing me more?”
It may have been a trick of the light, or perhaps entirely her imagination, but for just half a second Nancy thought that she saw the ghost of a smile twitch across the man’s face. “No, Nancy King,” he replied. “I am not bringing more. You already have two.” He didn’t move, but his liquid red eyes seemed to shift so that he was looking down, past the baby in Nancy’s arms, and down to her abdomen.
Nancy’s lips parted and her heart seemed to stop dead in her chest. One hand dropped to her stomach and she stared down at it in awe and disbelief. When she finally looked back up, a million more questions suddenly swimming through her head, the man was gone.
She never saw her Angel of Death or any of his brethren again.
Epilogue
Nancy stretched and let out a long sigh. The sun was hot this morning. It felt good on her face, but it was starting to make her sleepy so she decided to get up. She reeled in her fishing line and found it empty. Oh well. She poked at the small cooler that she’d filled with the past couple of days’ catch. She’d painstakingly cleaned the fish of bones and covered them in salt that she’d found in the boat’s kitchen cupboards. She wasn’t exactly sure if that was how salting fish worked, but she figured the smell would warn her if her supplies began to turn.
Sarah stirred in her makeshift playpen, constructed from the rowboat that Nancy had taken from the shore. She rubbed her eyes sleepily and spotted Nancy. Her chubby little arms went up and her face expanded into a playful grin. “Mama!” she gurgled.
Nancy smiled back and thought about how big the baby girl was getting. She was getting heavier too, which made her harder to carry, but it was really a good thing. It meant she was healthy. Nancy happily pulled the girl out of the row boat and into a warm hug. “Mama’s right here, sweet thing,” she cooed.
While Nancy packed her salt fish and a few other supplies into a pack, Sarah crawled around on deck and played with a small stuffed bear that Nancy had concocted. She’d wanted the child to have something in memory of Greg, who had died getting her to safety, so before she’d given the boy a burial at sea she’d taken his shirt. She cut away the parts that were stained with blood and dismembered a couple of pillows for thread and stuffing. Now the baby had something special from the ‘big brother’ she’d never know.
Nancy only wished she could have made something similar for Ken’s son.
She lay down her pack and placed both her hands on her belly, which had only just begun to protrude a bit. She didn’t know how she knew it was a boy, but she just knew. She could already picture him with a sweet, shy smile and hair that was black like his father’s. He was going to be beautiful.
With a sigh she slid on her homemade baby carrier, fabricated from another backpack, and slid Sarah into it so that the baby was nuzzled up against her chest. The pack of supplies went on her back, and her fishing knife went into her belt. Now was the hard part. Sarah watched with interest from her carrier as Nancy struggled, panting and puffing, to heave the row boat back over to the pulleys she’d used to retrieve it from the water in the first place. It took longer than she would have liked, but it wasn’t as though she was in a rush.
When the row boat had been lowered back into the calm, blue waters, Nancy leaned against the railing of her fishing vessel to catch her breath and look out onto the shore. There were bodies scattered everywhere, but none of them moved. She’d counted the days and kept a diligent watch. The time that the Angel (she found she couldn’t think of him as anything else) had foretold ha
d come and gone. She’d been fishing off deck when they began to fall, quite suddenly. She had waited five full days after that just to be sure. Not a single body had so much as twitched in those days, so now, finally, it was time.
Crawling down the ladder on the side of the boat was more difficult than it had been when she’d climbed up. She was rested and fed this time, but she was also carrying a lot of extra weight. Sarah giggled at the sight of the water when they dropped into the row boat.
It didn’t take long to make it to the shore. Before she knew it Nancy was standing on the wharf again, looking out into the silent town. She could smell the death from the rotting bodies, but she had nothing to fear from the dead now. Only in her nightmares could they bother her any longer.
“Mama?”
The baby had reached up and grabbed Nancy’s chin and she realized that she’d been staring straight forward, unimpeded, but unsure. Now she smiled and offered a finger to the curious little girl. Her other hand she again lay on her stomach, as though to reassure the child within as well.
“Okay, children,” she said with a deep breath. A world of possibilities laid before them. “Where would you like to go first?”
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