The artist looked away again.
“I don’t know. The rest of that night is kind of a blur. The dead surrounded the place. I think they were drawn to the cottage because of the screams. And after … by the smell of blood.”
“What happened to the mother?”
Sacchetto still didn’t meet his eyes. “She woke up, of course. She woke up, and for an insane moment we thought that she was still alive, you know? That she hadn’t died, that we were wrong about it.” He laughed a short, ugly laugh. “She bit one of the men. He was bent forward, trying to talk to her, trying to reach her … and she craned her neck forward and bit him. Then we knew.”
“What did you do?”
“What we had to do.” He came slowly back to the table and sat down. “We still had our weapons. The sticks, the rocks, the empty guns. We …”
He could not say it, and Benny did not need it said. They sat together for a while, listening to the wind-up clock on the wall chip seconds off the day.
“Near dawn,” the artist said at length, “one of the others said that he was going to try and make a break for it. He said that the creatures outside were slow and stupid. He was a big guy, he’d played football in high school and was in really good shape. He said that he was going to break through their lines and find some help. Everyone tried to talk him out of it, but not as hard as we could have. It was the only plan anyone had. In the end, we all went to the living room and banged on the doors and walls, yelling real loud. The zombies came shuffling from all sides of the house. I don’t know how many. Fifty? A hundred? When the back was mostly clear, the young guy went out through the back door at a dead run. He was fast, too. I closed the door and looked through the crack and watched him in the light of the false dawn as he knocked the zombies away and rushed into the darkness.”
“What happened to him?”
“What do you think?” Sacchetto snapped, then softened his tone. “There was nowhere to run to. We never saw him again.”
“Oh.”
“It was almost a full day later when another one of us tried it. A small guy who used to manage a Starbucks in Burbank. He made a torch out of a table leg and some sheets that he’d soaked in alcohol. He didn’t run fast enough, though. And that myth about the zombies being afraid of fire? That’s stupid. They can’t think or feel. They’re not afraid of anything. They surrounded him. Before he fell, the little guy must have set fire to a dozen of them. But the others got him.”
Benny looked down at the card that lay on the table before him. “You said that seven of you made it to the cottage.”
“Six adults, plus the little girl. And the baby made eight. The mother … died. So did the guy she bit. And you know what’s really sad? I never learned either of their names. The little girl only knew her mother as ‘Mama.’ We couldn’t even respect their deaths with their names. Maybe that doesn’t seem important, but it mattered to us. To me.”
“No,” said Benny, remembering Tom reading the note to Harold Simmons. “I get it. It matters.”
Sacchetto nodded. “So that left two of us. Me and last guy—a shoe salesman named George—played rock-paper-scissors to see who’d try next. Imagine that: two grown men playing a kids’ game during the apocalypse to decide which one was probably going to live and which one was almost certainly going to die. It’s comedy.”
“But it’s not funny,” said Benny.
“No,” said the artist. “No, it sure as hell isn’t. Mostly because neither of us really thought we were going to live. We just didn’t want to be the next to die.”