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“Mama!” shrieked Gutsy as gray fingers grabbed one shoulder and a handful of her hair, and a gaping, snarling mouth lunged forward for a bite.
To.
Bite.
Her.
“No, Mama!”
Gutsy slammed her palms against her mother’s shoulders so hard it knocked Mama’s head forward even faster. Those teeth clacked shut an inch from Gutsy’s windpipe. Cold spit flecked her cheeks. For a moment they were locked together that way, Gutsy’s hands stiff and braced; Mama pulling her by hair and shoulder, and those teeth snapping, snapping, snapping.
In another part of the house Gutsy could hear Sombra going wild, barking, howling, knocking things in the kitchen over to clatter and smash.
Here in her bedroom, Mama suddenly twisted her head to one side and tried to bite one of Gutsy’s forearms. With a yelp, Gutsy let go with that arm and flailed at her mother, knocking the biting mouth away. That shifted the weight that was pressing down on her, and Mama lost her balance. She slipped halfway off the bed, and Gutsy turned her hips and kicked her own body the other way. It broke the contact, though she felt a flash of hot pain on her head and realized she’d lost some hair. She kept kicking until she reached the far side of the narrow bed, and then suddenly she was falling. The floor hit her like a punch between the shoulder blades and the air whooshed from her lungs as pain exploded in her shoulders and spine. She lay there for a moment, lost in pain, dazed, desperately trying to gasp in a spoonful of air.
The slap of bare feet on the floorboards snapped her out of it, and Gutsy looked through the fireworks of pain to see her mother lumbering around the end of the bed. She did not move fast, but it was a small bedroom and there was nowhere left to run.
If Gutsy had thought her town and her life were hell before, now she was sure of it. Everything about this moment burned her, including the certain knowledge that some devil had dug her mother up twice, had brought her here twice. Maybe hell was all about reliving the worst possible experience over and over and over again throughout eternity.
In her mind an ugly little voice whispered, Don’t fight. Let go.
The voice tried so hard to make sense. And Gutsy’s mind tried to fool her into thinking that there was a light flickering in the eyes of this monster, and that it was the spark of Mama’s soul. Her need not to be abandoned, her buffer against grief, fueled her need to believe that somehow, impossible as it was, Mama was still there. Still here with her. Not gone.
Not forever gone.
Let it happen. It’ll be okay afterward. You’ll be with Mama. Don’t fight.
For a burning moment she almost stopped fighting. For one razor-sharp edge of a moment, Gutsy simply wanted to give in. To accept a bite if it was what paid her way to where Mama was.
That flicker of light was there. It really was. Wasn’t it?
Before Gutsy even knew she was doing it, she reached up and over and grabbed the handle of the night-table drawer, yanked it hard enough to pull the drawer all the way out, and flung it at the monster pretending to be her mother. Pens and notebooks and jewelry and a book of poems went flying as the drawer struck Mama’s reaching arms. Then Gutsy scrambled to her feet, snatched the pillow off the bed, and thrust it forward, pressing it into the gray hands, smashing it against the biting mouth, blocking those teeth, using it as a cushion as she drove her weight forward. Mama snarled and tried to spit the pillow out, but Gutsy shoved and ran forward until the thrashing body struck the thin wall between her bedroom and the narrow hallway that ran from living room to kitchen. The impact shook the house and pictures fell from the wall, their pine frames splitting apart as they landed.
There were other thuds as Sombra threw himself against the far wall, his bark rising into panic.
“Please,” Gutsy begged as those cold fingers tried to grab her again. “Mama, please don’t.”
The body was her mother’s, and even though Father Esteban said that the souls of the dead were still in the body, and would be until judgment day when they all rose to heaven, there was no response other than a monster’s need. This was not Mama. This was one of los muertos vivientes. Beyond thought, empty of life, filled only with hunger, offering nothing but heartbreak and death.
Gutsy struggled with the living corpse, twisting her body so that her back was to the door. Then, with a huge cry of fear and effort, she thrust her mother back, whirled, and ran for the door. Her foot caught on a tendril of blanket that had fallen to the floor during the struggle. She went flying and landed badly halfway into the hall. She turned to see Mama coming for her, mouth snapping, eyes dead, hands clawing at the air.
“No!”
Gutsy kicked free of the blanket, scuttled backward, got to her feet, and made a fast grab for the doorknob. She gave it a desperate pull and the door slammed shut as Mama lunged forward. The loose-jointed sound of hands and knees and maybe a head striking the door from the other side was horrible. She looked down at the doorknob and saw it rattle. It took a few long, long moments to realize that it was moving with the vibrations of Mama pounding on the door, but not because it was being turned.
Some of the dead were smarter. Some remembered how to do things like turn a door handle.
Not Mama, though.
Gutsy tried to feel some comfort in that. There was none. There was nothing but pain and loss on both sides of the door.
20
GUTSY STAGGERED DOWN THE HALLWAY, falling against the walls, gasping, crying. She jerked open the kitchen door and Sombra bounded out, snarling, eyes wild, teeth bared.
Not at her, though.
The coydog raced past her, but he didn’t stop to bark at the trembling door. Instead the animal ran into the living room and out into the night through the open front door.
