“I’m so sorry.” Maggie’s voice was low. Ken knew she was reliving her own loss. Was seeing her own son fall, and die, and then come back. The return of a dead child, which was every bereft parent’s dream, had been twisted into a nightmare by the Change.
Just like everything else.
Christopher shrugged. Trying to muscle through, to build up the walls of his dam, making the reservoir deep enough that it could hold the grief, could contain the guilt. Could let him drown until he was as dead as his baby. Only she wasn’t dead, was she? She was horribly alive.
“The hospital fell down,” he said. “One of those planes hit it and it fell down. It was St. Luke’s, over on Jefferson.”
He looked at them with a haunted gaze. “It fell down.”
Ken knew what the young man was saying. What he was asking for.
He also knew he was the only one who could give it.
He moved slowly to Christopher. He felt like he was approaching a wounded beast. In a way he was.
He took Christopher in his arms. His missing fingers throbbed, pounding a drumbeat from chest to arm to phantom fingers. Pain speared down his left leg, worse than the thrumming of burns and bruised muscles, worse even than his missing fingers. He took the pain and held it tight. Pain was life. The dead didn’t feel.
“You didn’t let her die,” he said. Ken could tell that to Christopher, and he was the only one who could. Because he knew what it was like to be a father and watch your child die, to be the protector and let your child fall from your arms and be helpless to stop it. “You didn’t let her die, and you couldn’t stop her from changing.”
Christopher collapsed against Ken. He sobbed again, and tears hot as blood fell against Ken’s neck.
Ken held him.
He heard a growl.
(… give up…
… give in…)
Far away. But coming closer.
Ken didn’t move. Not yet.
What was the point of surviving if the survivors were not permitted to live? To grieve for the dead and so demonstrate that they were still alive?
Aaron spoke, and any comfort that Ken might have felt in that moment bled out of him.
“This isn’t an accident,” said the cowboy. Everyone swiveled to stare at him. The older man took a breath, and wiped his face with his one good hand. The other, a starfish with twisted legs that he had tucked into the waist of his pants, twitched with nervous energy.
He looked at Ken. “Your boy came for us.”
Then at Christopher. “Your girl.”
He muttered something. Ken thought it was “Dorcas,” but couldn’t be sure.
Then Aaron looked at them all. “These aren’t random coincidences. They’re targeted attacks. Psychological warfare.” The cowboy looked shaken, weary and worn at the idea of what he was saying. “These things aren’t just trying to kill us or turn us, they want to break us first.”
32
“What do you mean?” said Buck. Ken thought the big man sounded much smaller than he was. Almost like a child, lost in an unfamiliar place without care of a parent.
Buck had lost his mother only a few days before.
What if she shows up, too?
Ken thrust the thought away. Tried to. It wouldn’t go far.
What if she’s in the horde coming now?
No, she’s dead. Aaron killed her to stop her from being Changed.
So? The dead are rising.
(the children are raising them)
No. She won’t come. She can’t. We can’t take it.
“I mean these things are smart,” said Aaron. “And they know us.”
Aaron looked like he was going to say more, but at that moment The Redhead broke in. “We can’t chat about this right now.”
She pointed at Maggie. At Liz. The little girls’ fingers were twitching. And at the same moment, Ken realized that the sounds of the horde – the far-off but still-too-close-for-comfort horde – had died.
“What –?”
Movement stole his voice. He looked down.
There were several bodies on the road. Several people who had been peeled apart and half-devoured, like appetizers when the main course suddenly rolls out earlier than expected.
He had barely noticed them – they were just part of the landscape, as normal now as a gray Toyota might have been a week ago.
Ken could smell death on the corpses, the stink of putrefaction seeping out of pores and oozing out of shattered stumps; leaking out of open mouths that allowed gas to escape from methane-bloated stomach cavities. A few of the bodies looked as though they had actually burst, ripped apart from neck to crotch.
All were dead.
All were well into decomposition.
And all were moving.
33