“They’ll make me pay for it with my body,” she said. “And I’m pregnant, Dad.” She’d been crying, but that hadn’t meant it was true. He’d been so angry, or maybe so shocked, that he’d hung up.
Next time they heard from her was two years later, in Baton Rouge. His heart swelled like a leaking sponge when he found out she’d been telling the truth.
“Did you ever imagine she had a baby?” Gladys asked as they sat on the plane headed south, their IRAs cashed in for bail. “It’s a blessing, maybe,” she said with tearful eyes. “Little feet running around. Burping and pooping. God, I’ve missed that.”
Connie looked out the window at the clouds as they’d kissed the ocean. He thought about how, in purgatory, you relive your life over and over without ever finding resolution or redemption. The colors outside the plane had been blue ocean on blue sky, and, in between, the red of a sunset. “I had no idea,” he’d said.
V.
Delia and the Start of It All
The prison is an ordinary building. The cast-iron gate surrounding it is open and rusted. It’s dark out, but with the infection threading his veins, Connie can see. He can hear, too. Already, he knows that the prison is lousy with the dead. They’re looking for things they’ve lost. Children. Love. Ambitions. Their souls.
“Maybe she wasn’t immune, and they only told people that to keep hope alive,” he says in Gladys’ voice as he comes to the end of Emancipation Place. “It’s a lie, just like everything else. Maybe she wasn’t the cure; she was the cause.”
“You’re the optimist, Glady. Not me.”
“You should shoot yourself now while you still can. I hate the idea of you turning into one of them. What if there’s a heaven, and you’re not allowed, because your soul is gone?”
He stops and looks up at the vast, brick prison whose windows are all barred. “I’ve come this far, Glady. We both know she was never right, but I can’t chicken out now,” he says, then climbs the steps to the entrance.
The lobby inside is small and long, with reception stations down the entire length of the building. He wanders first the east wing, then the west, where he passes a slender child who sways to the rhythm of the vents that pump hot, wet air. Her eyes are bloody, and out of habit, he kicks her so that she lands against the tiled hall wall. Something cracks (her femur?) but she doesn’t come after him. Only lies against the cafeteria wall like a fractured doll.
“Sorry,” he mumbles, then keeps walking.
It’s okay, she answers in his mind. Have you seen my daddy? He abandoned me.
“That’s a low blow,” he mumbles back, only maybe he doesn’t say the words. Maybe now, he and the dead understand each other.
She grins.
The holding cells are in the back of the building. About thirty in all, they border the periphery of a large, two-story room. Connie walks from cell to cell. Half are empty, the other half singly occupied by emaciated, uninfected women lying mostly in their beds. None bear Delia’s face. It seems a waste to Conrad that no one thought to set them free or feed them. In cell nine, a woman clings to the bars with locked fingers. Her front teeth are worn down to the gums from where she tried to bite her way out.
There are zombies, too, of course. They walk in aimless circles, and have spread nearly equidistant—about one per every ten square feet—like air molecules in stasis, mindless and inanimate. For the most part, they don’t notice him, though he can hear their thoughts:
I’m hungry.
I’m thirsty.
I’m lonely.
It’s so dark in here, and my love is so dry.
In the basement of the west wing, he finds the makeshift laboratory where it looks like surgeries happened in the hallways. He sees the IV trees, monitors, and needles that remind him of Adam. It occurs to him that he and Gladys never asked Delia if she wanted the child. Instead they took him, then abandoned her as if she were junk. In admitting his own fault, it’s easier to admit the greater truth: she murdered the fish, and Barkley, and those high school kids, too. She was born with a bloodlust.
In the basement, he finds the rest of the prisoners chained to gurneys. They must have been injected with the virus, because their heads are cleanly sawed away.
A doctor and nurse, both infected, wander the aisles, forever trapped in their roles of sick and, well, prisoner and captive. They seem to believe they are ministering comfort as they check lifeless wrists for pulses.
“Delia!” he shouts. They look at him for a moment, then return to their work. If she is alive, and I find her, I will be happy, he thinks. Even if she has not changed, I will take comfort from finishing this journey, and be fulfilled.
“Delia!” he cries. Like his joints, his throat is beginning to lock.
Just then, a tiny, faraway voice shouts back: “Here!”
It’s been years since he’s seen her, but her voice transcends time. It is imprinted upon him and dwells in the reptile part of his brain that even the virus cannot devour. His body moves, almost of its own volition. Not even his back hurts anymore. He is entirely numb.