“Delia!”
In reply is that same hesitation from years ago, when she called late at night while Gladys slept. He’s run that moment over in his mind every day since, and recognizes now that her hesitation was shame. It was always shame.
“…Dad?”
He’s racing on stiff, rigor mortis legs, while his favorite memories, long forgotten, surface: the night she stayed home from a party to play chess with him; the poster of dogs playing poker in her bedroom that he never took down, even after Adam moved in; the color red, that he has forever associated with Delia, his perfect child, who was born with a taste for blood. These memories surface like exploding stars, and then just as quickly, disappear. He tries to catch them, but they are mist. By the time he reaches the lower level of the basement, he is aware only of their loss, and not what they contained.
“Delia!” He cries, and now he can’t remember—is he chasing her ghost, or the actual girl?
“Dad, I’m here. In the bomb shelter!” she answers.
He shambles, standing tall now, past the walking dead National Guard and orderlies and reporters, through the second examination room, where the rest of the headless prisoners lay, and toward the back stairs that lead farther down. His muscles tear and creak as he descends. He unlocks another door to another wide room, where there are no zombies. Just a single cell in the center of the room. Several bodies lay half inside the bars, their legs and chests chewed down to the bones. He looks up, and there is Delia, red-cheeked and glowing, peering out from her cage.
“Dad,” she says.
He doesn’t remember her name, and her young, vigorous face doesn’t look familiar, but he knows her, and he loves her like red dawn. He walks stiff-legged to the bars. She’s crying. The sound is both terrible and beauteous.
There are voices, many voices, whispering words of nonsense.
I’m hungry.
I’m lonely.
It’s so dark.
Nine hundred ninety-nine times out of a thousand, my master will lie.
And then, through all that, so softly he can barely hear it: Connie, promise me. She’s all we’ve got.
The woman is small and sharp-featured with a round belly. Though he has no evidence or memory, he knows she is his daughter. “You’re immune?” he asks.
“Sort of,” she says. She can’t look him in the eyes.
“Why didn’t they make a vaccine?”
She shakes her head. He waits for more. She doesn’t ask about the boy, Adam. He doesn’t remember the name or what the word represents. He only knows he’s disappointed, like always. And she’s ashamed, like always. And the chasm between their two distinct natures is red.
“I got bit,” he tells her. “Where are the keys? I better get you out so you can run away.”
She nods her head at the key ring about twenty feet away and he retrieves it. There is only one key, and it occurs to him that to put her here, they must have thought she was very dangerous.
“Don’t worry about me,” she says. “I can’t get what you have.”
Something clicks inside him. The part that knew this all along. The part that came all this way because it knew, and needed to finish what it had started.
He comes closer. In one hand, he’s got the shotgun. In the other, the key. He feels himself nodding off. He thinks about the ocean and the sky, and the time they went fishing at dawn, and how she told him she loved him, too.
And then there is Gladys, looking down on them both with the baby in her arms like the Virgin Mary.
“Why are you immune?” he asks.
She points to the back of her cell. He notices that the structures he’d first imagined as furniture are bones. She has fashioned a chair, a bed. The rest are piled and polished like shiny rocks. He realizes why this room is free of zombies. Little is left, save their bones. “I feed on their blood. Any blood. It keeps me young. But you knew that.”
He nods, but doesn’t answer, because he has lost the words. He is losing himself, one brain cell at a time.
She licks her lips, and he sees that she’s less happy to see him than hungry. But this is the nature of parents and children. The former give, the latter take. “The key, Dad?” she asks.
It feels sharp in his hand. He remembers those missing high school kids, and after that, the junkies’ bodies he read about in the paper that had been drained of blood. No wonder she developed a taste for heroin.
“The virus came from me,” she says. “I bit someone and they lived. It mutated inside them and spread.”
“I’m dying,” he says.
Her orange jumpsuit is slack in the hips and waist. It’s probably been a while since she fed. If he opens the door for her, she’ll make a meal of him. But what are fathers for, if not sustenance? “Fuck you, Dad. You never understood it was a gift. You made me ashamed.”