Ken supposed he could have been declaring his lack of hope, lowercase “h,” but he thought the big man was asking the little girl to stop what she was doing. To let the mangled cadavers rising around them lay down and resume their long sleep.
Aaron was pulling Christopher along. A moment later The Redhead joined them, grabbing Christopher’s other arm and throwing it over her shoulder. She had one of her machetes in her free hand, and swung it at a zombie as she helped Christopher lean on her.
A hand fell to the ground. Pussing over with the yellow ooze. It lay twitching like an upended turtle. Not dead – or not any deader than the rest of the zombie. The creature whose hand she had lopped off barely paused before grabbing at The Redhead with his remaining hand.
She didn’t pause either. Reversed grip on her machete. Plunged it into his open mouth. The dead zombie made no sound – the dead ones looked like they were screaming, but they never vocalized, not ever – but the viscous pink sludge that apparently kept shelter in their skulls erupted from the wound. The zombie went crazy. It held up its hands to the sky as though praying to a god only it could see. Its feet danced a quick rat-ta-tap on the pavement, then it fell to earth and started beating its face against the blacktop.
More of the pink goo splashed. Even more. The crunch-crack-thock of meat and bone shearing away made Ken’s stomach twist. Maggie gagged, a hrrrrk sound that didn’t help his own intestinal distress much. He tasted acid at the back of his throat.
Another zombie shuffled on two legs that ended unevenly above the ankles. It moved past the one that was beating its own head to a nub on the blacktop. The headless one reached out and attacked its fellow. The two fell into a melee as violent as any Ken had yet seen.
He looked away.
The other undead creatures were closing.
Five or so behind.
Another half dozen ahead.
Six more turning a corner nearby.
They were all too fast.
“What now?” said Aaron. Ken didn’t know why the cowboy – or anyone else – kept asking him that question.
He suddenly wanted to lay down and die. It wasn’t the sound of the zombies, either. He simply couldn’t stand the thought of going on like this forever.
He’d lost his son, and it looked like he was losing his daughters as well.
Just sit down and let it happen, man.
The ten-plus zombies ahead were not going to be easy to get by.
“What now?” Aaron repeated.
Sally growled, as though adding his own two cents to the moment. Adding encouragement, but also requiring answers.
Ken didn’t know what to say.
Just sit down.
Just let it happen.
The thoughts were not, sadly, the product of the psychic attack that had been coming faster and harder since the Change. They were his. He recognized his own inner voice, though the words were new. He had never thought of himself as a quitter, and was dismayed to find how comfortable the thoughts were now. They fit as tightly and comfortably as old shoes, friends long-buried in the detritus of his mind but made familiar and all-too-friendly by the present circumstances.
And the reason for his despair was obvious. It wasn’t the imminent doom of yet another horde. Nor was it the fact that even the dead were apparently a threat as long as his daughters were present.
No, it was his daughters themselves. It was the fact that he had lost Derek; had invested the rest of his hopes for the future in the little girls that hung limp beside him. And more and more he was realizing – was being forced to realize – that he might be hoping for something impossible.
What good to hope for your children if they have been taken, whether their bodies remain or not?
Then a flash of memory came. Not long memory, not a memory of before the Change, a time that was already receding into ghostly unreality. This was a time only a few short hours before.
He remembered Hope saying, “We’ve been here for seven poops!”
He remembered Liz curled up and asleep against the snow leopard. Her chubby fist bound up in the thick fur of the cat, like any baby with the world’s largest plush toy.
The moment saved him. The memories threw up a shield of truth that warded off the despair that had invaded his mind. Maybe only for a day or even a moment. But he picked up the pace again.
So maybe the girls were a part of this.
But this – whatever it was – wasn’t all they were.
They were still his daughters. His little girls. He had to believe that. To believe otherwise would be to give up give in die die die.
Ken refused.
He forced himself to stand a bit taller. To bear more of his own weight instead of leaning on others. The rest of the survivors looked to him. He didn’t know why – Aaron would have been a more logical choice to lead, and even Buck seemed to have become a strong person bent on saving the girls.
But the others looked to him.
He wouldn’t be the first to fall.
35