I turn back to the display. Well, the prelits are useless. That leaves either the six, eight, or ten foot. The tens are too tall for the ceiling. Either the six or eight, then. A six would be easier to transport, but it looks like crap. The Texas heat has done a number on it. Needles bent and soft, big bare spots in some places where they fell off. The eights don’t look much better, but they’re not quite as scrawny. But eight damn feet! Maybe their storeroom has new ones in boxes.
I’m still debating with myself when I hear an all-too-familiar, all-too-sickening sound: a bullet racking into the chamber of a pistol.
“Don’t move!” Sam shouts. “Lemme see your hands! Hands!”
I draw my own weapon and race down the aisle as fast as my bum leg will allow, slipping on the carpet of rat droppings and hopping over fallen shelving and ripped-open boxes, until I reach the toy section and the kid who’s got a downed man at gunpoint.
My age. Wearing fatigues. A 5th Wave eyepiece hangs around his scrawny neck. He’s leaning against the back wall beneath the board games, one arm pressing against his gut, the other on top of his head. My heart slows a little. I didn’t think it was a Silencer—Marika killed the one assigned to Marble Falls months ago—but you can never be sure.
“Other arm!” Sam shouts at him.
“I’m unarmed . . . ,” the guy gasps in a deep Texas drawl.
Sam says to me, “Search him, Zombie.”
“Where’s your squad?” I ask. I have a vision of being ambushed.
“No squad. Just me.”
“You’re hurt,” I say. I can see the blood, mostly dried but some fresh, on his shirtfront. “What happened?”
He shakes his head and coughs. A rattle in his chest. Pneumonia, maybe. “Sniper,” he manages after catching his breath.
“Where? Here in Marble Falls or . . . ?”
The arm pressing against his gut moves. I feel Sam tense beside me and I reach out and put my hand over the barrel of his Beretta. “Wait,” I murmur.
“I’m not telling you anything, you infested piece of shit.”
“Okay. Then I’ll tell you: We aren’t infested. Nobody is.” I’m wasting my breath. I might as well tell him that he’s actually a geranium having a very weird dream. “Hang on a second.”
I tug Sam to the opposite end of the aisle and whisper, “This is a problem.”
He shakes his head vehemently. “No, it isn’t. We have to kill him.”
“Nobody’s killing anybody, Sam. That’s done.”
“We can’t leave him here, Zombie. What if he’s lying about his squad? What if he’s faking being hurt? We have to kill him before he kills us.”
His face turned up to me, his eyes shining in the dying light, shining with hate and fear. Kill him before he kills us. Sometimes, not often, but sometimes, I wonder what Cassie died for. The tiger’s loosed from its cage and there’s no capturing it. How do we rebuild what’s been lost? In an abandoned convenience store, a terrified girl mows down an innocent man because her trust has been shattered. There’s no other way to be sure, no other option to be safe.
You’re safe here. Perfectly safe. That phrase still haunts me. Haunts me because it’s always been a lie. It was a lie before they came and it’s still a lie. You’re never perfectly safe. No human being on Earth ever is or ever was. To live is to risk your life, your heart, everything. Otherwise, you’re just a walking corpse. You’re a zombie.
“He’s no different from us, Sam,” I tell him. “None of this will end until somebody decides to put down the guns.”
I don’t reach for the weapon, though. It should be his decision.
“Zombie . . .”
“What did I tell you about that? My name is Ben.”
Sam lowers the gun.
In the same moment, at the other end of the aisle, another silent battle is lost. The soldier lied; he was armed, and he used the time he had left to put the gun to his head and pull the trigger.
MARIKA
FIRST I TOLD HIM it was a dumb idea. Then, when he insisted, I told him to wait till tomorrow. It was late afternoon and the store was over three miles away. They didn’t have time to get back before dark. He went anyway.
“Tomorrow’s Christmas,” Ben reminded me. “We missed last Christmas and that’s the last Christmas I’m going to miss.”
“What’s the big deal about Christmas?” I asked him.
“Everything.” And he smiled, like that had any power over me.
“Don’t take Sam.”
“Sam’s the reason I’m going.” He looked over my shoulder at Megan playing by the fireplace. “And her.” Then he added, “And Cassie. Most of all.”
He promised they’d be back soon. I watched them from the porch that overlooked the river as they headed for the bridge, Sam pulling the empty wagon, Ben favoring his bad leg, and the sun cast down their shadows, one long and one short, like the hands of a clock.
The crying came with the dark. It always did. I sat in the rocker, holding her in my lap. She had just fed, so I knew she wasn’t hungry. I cupped her cheek and gently curled into her, discerning her need. Ben. She wanted Ben. “Don’t worry,” I told her. “He’s coming back. He promised.”