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Maria didn’t speak, but her sobs shook her body as she cried for her mom, and Eden, and for herself. For everything she’d lost, the life she’d had before. A life with cellphones and friends and crushes and school. For the lost innocence of a teen forced to grow up before her time.
This was their world now, Rachael realized. They all had to grow up too fast. But, she would do everything she could to change this world, to make it a place where children could be children. Where heroes could exist and bring hope.
— 6 —
“What next?” Brett asked quietly. They sat on the edge of the low roof of one of the hospital buildings, under the late summer full moon. Rachael leaned her head against his shoulder, her fingers entwined with his, watching her fighters, her warriors, her army, practicing in the moonlight. “We took back our home . . . so, seriously, Rachael, what’s next?”
She was silent for a moment, considering, weighing her options.
“Next? We take back our world.”
PART FOUR
STILL OF NIGHT
JONATHAN MABERRY AND RACHAEL LAVIN
SIX MONTHS AFTER THE OUTBREAK
— 1 —
THE SOLDIER AND THE DOG
The dead rose. We fell. That’s the short version of current events.
Well . . . not so current. We’re still falling. It’s a long damn way down to nowhere.
I’ve spent months going from one side of the country to the other. Me and my dog, Baskerville. There are no planes, no trains, no automobiles. At least none that work. Some geniuses in the military decided that nukes were the only proportional response to the armies of the dead. They dropped a lot of them. Huge sections of North America are gone, buried under ash that glows in the dark. The radiation is probably going to kill more people than the zombies will. And the electromagnetic pulses fried all of the electronics. Which means any chance there was of driving somewhere safe is gone. The power is out, taking with it the controls for water, sewage, and every other damn useful thing.
Oh, yeah, and don’t get me started on radioactive walking corpses. If I ever find anyone alive who was party to the decision to try nukes, I’m going to fucking kill them and when they wake up as zoms, I’m going to kill them again.
If I could fly or drive I might have gotten home in time. If the phones worked I could have called.
Instead it took weeks to go from California to Maryland. A lot of weeks, because I had to fight my way through some places, and circle way the hell out of my way to avoid others. When I got to my uncle’s farm in Robinwood, Maryland, I found nothing but ashes and bones. I don’t know if a
ny of those bones belonged to my wife. The fact that I didn’t find the charred bones of an infant gives me hope. A slender needle of hope that is buried all the way into the center of my broken heart. That’s not poetry. It’s a fucking tragedy.
I think I went a little crazy.
I mean, I guess I had to.
Days are gone. Maybe weeks. Time stopped having any meaning for me. There are days when all I have left are fragments. Shivering in a rainy ditch near the farm, covered in vomit and rainwater. Kneeling in the ashes, screaming, punching the ground, punching my own face. Wandering down roads I no longer recognized.
One day I woke up naked and covered in scratches, in a creek miles and miles away from anywhere. I had a dog leash clutched in one hand and when I could focus my eyes I read the name on the heavy steel tag: Baskerville. I knew that dog. He belonged to a neighbor and was one of the many descendants of my old combat dog, Ghost, and an Irish wolfhound named Banshee. I think he was Ghost’s grandson, out of a litter of seven. We’d gifted the dog to the teenage girl, Sandra, daughter of a neighbor, a lovely girl with Down syndrome.
I made my stumbling way to the farm where Sandra and her folks lived, but there was only heartbreak waiting for me. All the sweet gentleness that was Sandra was gone from the thing I had to fight in the living room of the old house. I buried her and five other members of her family, stole her uncle’s clothes, and began drifting along the Maryland back roads. Finding no one alive.
Not. One. Person. There are some blank spots in my memory there, too. There is absolutely nothing in my brain to fill in those blanks. Even now, months later. My voice was gone, though. Raw. I spat blood onto my hands. Screaming can do that, if you do it long enough and put your heart into it.
The leash stayed with me, wrapped around my waist. Don’t ask me why. I was wearing it when I became aware of who I was again. Days blurred by. I had the sense that I was being hunted, and gradually my old skills came back to me. Not on a conscious level at first, but instinctually. The lizard brain working toward its goal of survival while the monkey brain still went mad at times.
It was maybe a week before I even organized my brain enough to wonder how Top and Bunny were doing. After the cluster fuck that was our so-called “mission to rescue the president” and the subsequent helicopter crash, we split up. Bunny had a lot of family in Orange County; Top had people in Georgia. We each wanted to be there for the others, but we couldn’t. We parted ways with an agreement to meet at an off-the-books base we all knew of in Nevada. It was fortified and had a hardened facility with a full laboratory, hospital, and room for hundreds of refugees. We’d each try to bring our families there. Parting was tough, though. It was a bitch, and we held each other and wept because none of us had much hope left. Not much at all. The thing driving us was fear. And need. But not hope.
Robinwood nearly destroyed me. Sandra’s farm pushed me all the way to the edge and the only thing in the world that looked like it would offer a shred of comfort was the big fall into the welcoming black.
I wandered like a ghost, haunting a dead landscape, waiting until I dropped my body and drifted on as a spirit. Then, maybe, dissolve like mist and become nothing. If that meant there were no more memories, then I wanted it. Craved it. Needed it to be true.
Then something changed one day, and maybe changed me. Like a slap when you’re on the edge of hysteria.
