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Zombie and Dumbo walking down the empty road awash in starlight, fading.
Sam pulls the silver chain from his pocket and holds it tightly in his hand.
Promise?
Have I broken one yet?
And the dark closing around Zombie like a monster’s mouth until there is no Zombie, only the monster, only the dark.
He presses his other hand against the cold glass. On the day the bus took him to Camp Haven, he watched Cassie on the brown road, holding Bear, shrinking away to nothing, swallowed by the dust like Zombie was swallowed by the dark.
Behind him, Cassie says to Evan Walker in her angry voice, “Why didn’t you stop him?”
“I tried,” Evan Walker answers.
“Not very hard.”
“Short of breaking his legs, I don’t know what I could have done.”
When Sam takes his hand away, the glass holds the memory of it like the bus window once did, a misty imprint of where his hand had been.
“After you lost Sam, could anyone have stopped you from finding him?” Evan Walker asks. Then he goes outside.
Sam can see his sister’s face reflected in the glass. Like everything else since they came, Cassie’s changed. She’s not the same Cassie shrinking on the dusty road. Her nose is kind of crooked, like the nose of someone pressing her face against a windowpane.
“Sam,” she says. “It’s late. What do you say—wanna sleep in my room tonight?”
He shakes his head. “I have to watch Megan. Zombie’s orders.”
She starts to say something. Then she stops. Then she says, “Okay. I’ll be there in a minute to say your prayers with you.”
“I’m not going to pray.”
“Sam, you have to pray.”
“I prayed for Mommy and she died. I prayed for Daddy and he died, too. When you pray for people, they die.”
“That isn’t why they died, Sam.”
She reaches for him. He pulls away. “I’m not going to pray for anybody anymore,” he tells her.
In the bedroom, Megan sits on the bed, holding Bear.
“Zombie left,” Sam tells her.
“Where’d he go?” she whispers. A whisper is as loud as her voice goes. Cassie and Evan Walker hurt something in her throat when they pulled out the pill-bomb.
“He’s going on recon to find Ringer and Teacup.”
Megan shakes her head. She doesn’t know who Ringer and Teacup are. Her hand squeezes Bear’s head and Bear’s mouth puckers like he wants a kiss.
“Be careful,” Sam says. “Don’t hurt his head.”
The window in this bedroom is boarded up. You can’t see outside. At night, after you turn off the lamp, the dark is so heavy, you can feel it pressing against your skin all over. Dangling from the ceiling are loose wires and a couple of balls that Zombie said were supposed to be Jupiter and Neptune. This is the room where Evan Walker tried to kill the evil Grace lady with wire from the mobile. There’re bloodstains on the carpet and splatters of blood on the walls. It’s like his mother’s bedroom after she got the Red Death and her nose wouldn’t stop bleeding. She bled from her nose and her mouth, and near the end, blood came out of her eyes and even her ears. Sam remembers her blood; he can’t remember her face.
“I thought we were all staying here until Evan blew up the ship,” Megan whispers, squeezing Bear.
Sam opens the closet door. Besides clothes and shoes that smell faintly of the plague, there are board games and action figures and a big Hot Wheels collection. One day Cassie came into the room and saw him on the floor playing with the dead kids’ stuff. She watched him sitting on the big bloodstain in the middle of the floor. He’d made a camp, and there was his old squad, Squad 53, and they had a Jeep and a plane and they were on a mission to infiltrate an infested stronghold. Only, the infesteds saw them coming and their drones dropped bombs and everybody was hurt except Sam, and Zombie told him, It’s up to you now, Private. You’re the only one who can save us. His sister watched him play for a few minutes and then she started to cry for no reason, and that made him mad. He didn’t know she was watching. He didn’t understand why she was crying. He felt embarrassed. He was a soldier now, not a baby who played with toys. He stopped playing after that.
