The first thing I noticed when entering was how quiet the house was. “Pen?” I called. No response. The kitchen was empty. The hall was clear. I moved to the bedroom and saw Penny standing in front of the bed, her back to me. “Pen?” I asked again. Slowly she turned her head, and the expression on her face made me shudder with chills. She looked alabaster. Stone. Dead. In her hand was a box of saran wrap. The box slipped from her weak grip, and fell to the floor. “Pen, I…”
And then I saw her. Eleanor. Her head was wrapped in plastic. Her little round face was contorted and purple. She was just lying there, on the bed, like a horrid Halloween prop. All of the air left my body. I collapsed to my knees.
My daughter was dead.
Penny moved to my side and drew my pistol from its holster.
I didn’t care.
She stepped back, and said, “First me, then you.” As she raised the gun to her mouth she told me how we would see Ella on the other side.
The gun went off.
Her body collapsed to the floor.
I just knelt there, unable to move.
Penny’s blood flowed from her convulsing body in shuddering gushes. I stared at her foot, inches from me, the ringing in my ears providing a demented sound track to the end of my life.
I couldn’t speak.
I couldn’t look at either of their faces.
Banging noises filled the house. Fists pounding on doors and hands breaking glass.
Rage came. Rage like darkness. Rage like a storm. Rage that leveled civilizations and tore down the pillars of the earth.
Rage.
How dare they interrupt my death?
How dare they soil the ground where they lay?
I grabbed my bat and headed to the living room.
What I remember comes back in short bursts, like clips form a morbid film running in my mind. The sound of the aluminum clanging against skulls. The screams of dying men. The crack of bones and the sickly-sweet smell of blood filling the home. I beat them until they were unrecognizable. Zombies? Humans? Did it matter? My life was over, and they had not even given me the chance to die in peace.
When I finally stopped long enough to look around, the scene didn’t affect me at all. The bodies. The pieces. The blood. The viscera. The stains on the furniture, floors, walls, and ceiling. None of it mattered.
I turned back to the hallway, ready to die, but found that I was unable to move.
I couldn’t go in there.
Not again.
I couldn’t see them like that.
Penny.
Eleanor.
I froze, but I didn’t feel. No tears. No quivering. No heartache. I was dead inside. The room was not to be feared, in my mind. It was to be revered. That bedroom was sacred. It was the tomb of my life. Buried there were the sum of my life’s hopes, dreams, and accomplishments. I had to preserve it. I had to protect it.
I flooded the property with fuel, and put the house to the torch.
I didn’t feel the need to run. I didn’t feel the call to action. I just left. I took my bat, and I left. I began to walk the streets, until I met the highway. Then I walked the highway. I stole food to live, and wandered without direction.
With the first zombie I encountered, I didn’t see the face of a dead man. I saw the face of my wife, of my little girl, of the people they could have been. This zombie did not kill my family. Every zombie killed my family.
So I murdered it. I attacked and killed it.
I had heard reports that getting zombie by-product on your skin could infect you. For some reason I cared and always wore long sleeves and a face shield. Maybe I wanted to choose my own time of death. Maybe I wanted to live forever. But I didn’t consider these things as I slammed the staggering thing which used to have a life. All that I saw was red.
For days, I wandered the highway, stealing, killing, and sleeping in whatever hidey-hole I could find. I attacked single zombies. Groups of zombies. It didn’t matter to me. The blackness came, I killed, and the blackness went.
One day, in eastern Washington, I encountered two men in coveralls and full-face motorcycle helmets.
“I’m Pete,” said the taller one. “An’ this is Duck. You got someplace to stay, friend?”
It hadn’t occurred to me until that moment that I hadn’t spoken since my girls died. I stared at the man, and I couldn’t see a reason to start speaking now.
“You talk, buddy?” asked the one called Duck. I just continued to stare at the two of them. The one called Pete gave me a sour look, then told me if I wanted to come with them I could, but I would have to clean up. I looked down and saw that I was covered in old, browning bloodstains.
He never asked about my past.
He never asked about the tomb.
He never asked whose blood it was.
I followed them back to a factory. He told me that they had made it their goal to find the best ways to kill zombies.
And for the first time in weeks, I smiled.
CHAPTER 7
What it cost
“If their blood gets on you kid, you’re dead.”
Peter shifts uncomfortably in his wheelchair as I snare the dead man in the cage, who moans horridly and bangs his head on the cyclone fencing. A flick of the wrist, a pull of the handle, and I have
