Even though Sacchetto spoke of places Benny had never seen and technology that no longer existed, the images of carnage and desperation filled Benny’s mind. When they were out in the Ruin, Tom had reminded him that there had been more than three hundred million people living in the United States on First Night. The thought of all those people, fighting and dying in just a few days … It made Benny feel sick and small.
“What about the pregnant lady?” he asked after a long silence.
“Yeah … well, that’s the real story. That’s the story you want to hear.”
“What do you mean?”
“That woman … She gave birth that night. There was a daybed that we wheeled out into the living room, and made her as comfortable as possible, but we didn’t know what we were doing. I sure as hell didn’t. The others helped. I … Well, I just couldn’t. You’d think someone who was around blood all the time—sketching crime scenes and all—you’d think I could take the blood and mess from her giving birth. But I couldn’t. I’m not proud, and I don’t even understand that about myself … but there it is. I was still cruising the Net when I heard the baby cry. It was right about then—right after the baby started crying—that the first of the dead began pounding on the door.”
“The baby … ?”
“It was a girl,” Sacchetto said, but he looked away. “We didn’t know the mother had been bitten.”
“God!” Benny’s mouth went dry, and when he tried to swallow, it felt like he had a throat full of broken glass. “The baby too? Was it a …” Benny couldn’t make his mouth shape the word.
But Sacchetto shook his head. “No. I know there have been a lot of stories about infected mothers giving birth to babies who were, um, monsters. But that’s not what happened.” He cleared his throat. “Years later, when I told this story to Doc Gurijala, he said that maybe the disease, or whatever it was, either couldn’t cross the placental wall or didn’t have time to do it. The woman must have been bitten when we were breaking through the crowds of zombies. None of us noticed.”
“What happened?”
“Well, the infection had already taken hold. We missed it because she was already sweating and moaning from the hard delivery, and we still didn’t understand what we were up against. When they started cleaning her up, she just … died. She fell back against the bed and let out this long, sputtering exhale. It was horrible to hear. It was a series of clicks in the throat as that last breath came out of her. They call that sound a death rattle, but that’s too ordinary a phrase for the sound that I heard. It sounded more like fingernails scraping on a hardwood floor, like her spirit was clawing at life, trying to stay in her body.”
Benny felt the skin of his arms rise with ripples of goose flesh.
“By that time I’d seen hundreds of people die and had seen thousands of zombies … but that death was the worst,” said the artist. “And after all these years it’s still the worst. That poor woman had fought her way out of Los Angeles, had saved her daughter and struggled to survive long enough to bring her baby into the world, and when she’d succeeded—when she was safe—death just dragged her away.”
He abruptly stood and walked over to the counter, snatched up the bottle, and stared at it. He set it down again, thumping the heavy glass against the countertop.
“That baby?” Benny asked tentatively. “Did she live? And … is she the girl on the card? Is she the Lost Girl?”
Sacchetto turned, surprised. “No. She was too young. She’d be only fourteen now.”
“Then I don’t understand. …”
“It was her sister,” said the artist. “The little girl who was on the run with her mother. Lilah.”
“Lilah,” Benny echoed. The name was a cool breeze in the middle of the heat of Sacchetto’s terrible story.
“She watched her sister being born, and she watched her mother die. Poor little kid. She was only two, so all the screaming and the blood must have hit her really hard. Before, while we were still running, while I was carrying her, she was talking. Some words, but mostly nonsense stuff. Kid stuff. After that last breath … the little girl screamed for five minutes. She screamed herself raw, and then she stopped talking.”
“For how long?”