“Hey, guys!” M bellows with a friendly wave.
The horde goes still. A few snap their teeth at us once or twice, then resume their shambling. But most remain motionless, regarding us with inscrutable expressions. Their faces are worn and weary, their bodies slumped; their strange, leaden eyes stare at us with sorrowful longing, like beggars resigned to starvation. I feel a surge of emotion for these lost creatures, pity laced with love. I was one of them. I’m still one of them. Yet somehow I escaped this place, and they remain trapped.
There was a moment, sitting on a hill with Julie, when I thought freeing them would be a simple thing. Not easy, but simple. We would come here, we’d share what we’d learned and spread what we’d created, and they would see the light and be healed. Our effect on the Boneys had been immediate and dramatic. Those empty husks had sensed a shift in the atmosphere, an inconceivable alteration to the rigid rails of their reality, and they had fled, perhaps in search of more stable land, some new flat surface on which to rebuild their universe. But my fellow Fleshies? The Dead who had yet to cut that final thread? Our effect on them was subtler. Something has changed; the bullet-scarred giant by my side is proof of that, as is B and every patient in Nora’s Morgue. But our attempt to go forth and evangelize was disastrously naive.
They are not impressed. They are not convinced. They are waiting for something more.
M strides ahead and begins to mingle, shaking hands and slapping backs. The Dead stare at him with furrowed brows, like they don’t understand what he is. He still has some distance to go before all traces of his rot are rubbed out, but I have retained enough of my Dead senses to know he registers clearly as Living. So their uncertainty is not the age-old question of to eat or not to eat. It’s something more complex.
I follow M into the swaying, stinking crowd.
“Hey, R?”
I look back and see Julie and Nora lingering at the end of the hallway like kids on a dock, scared to jump in the lake.
“Are you sure about this?” Julie says.
“Maybe find some blood to smear on us?” Nora says with a cringe. “Like you did with Julie?”
I shake my head. “Wasn’t just the blood. It was me going with you. Won’t work anymore.”
“Why not?”
I shrug. “Because I’m not Dead anymore.”
I plunge into the crowd.
“You’re insane,” Abram shouts from his chosen position far back in the hallway. “Where are you even going?”
I point toward the distant end of the hall, over the heads of a thousand zombies. “Somewhere safe.”
I press further in. The Dead don’t respond to nudges or other polite requests, but M’s sheer mass allows him to part the crowd like jungle grass, and I follow in his wake. Julie and Nora stick close to my back, and while Julie is fighting hard to embrace her convictions and not be afraid of these creatures—these people—Nora is a little more transparent.
“Hello . . . ,” she greets them through gritted teeth. “How are you . . . please don’t eat me . . .”
“Let’s go, Daddy,” Sprout says. She tugs on his hand, but he remains rooted to the floor.
“Come on!” Julie calls back to him.
“I’m not dragging my daughter through a zombie horde.”
“Use your eyes, man. It’s okay.”
“You don’t know what they’re going to do.”
She throws up her hands. “You don’t know what anyone’s going to do! Any person in any crowd could be a murderer, a rapist, a suicide bomber. You dive in and hope for the best.”
Like her, I’m putting on a brave face, but I can’t pretend I’m not scared. Fighting off the plague didn’t make me immune to it. This was one of the first big questions among the Nearly Living—what happens if we’re bitten again?—but we didn’t have to wait long to find out. A suicidal runaway showed us the dismal answer: what happens now is what happened then. We rejoin the Dead. We lose it all. We start over.
Despite my long struggle, despite the Gleam and all the other mysteries of the cure, I am just as vulnerable as Julie. And just as dependent on the whim of the mob.