“Terrible.”
“Bingo.”
“I’m sure the police will understand. I don’t think you’ll go to jail or anything.”
“Dan, I don’t want to talk about it.”
“Sure, I understand.”
More silence.
“Bye,” Selina says.
“Bye,” Dan says.
Selina puts the phone back in her pocket. She slowly gets to her feet. Makes sure not to look at Jonas as she passes by him. But as she stops by the door, she can’t help but look back one last time.
Now she can see his face. His eyes are closed. The bag is full of moisture, and the droplets are clinging to his face like tears. His mouth is open.
Selina squeezes her lips together. She can’t leave him like this, she just can’t. Tied down and like an animal. She goes back and is just about to untie the laces, but then hesitates.
No. This is always how it happens in the movies. That final, stupid mistake.
She doesn’t believe Jonas will reawaken. She’s sure he really is dead. But she still can’t bring herself to untie him. Her instincts tell her not to.
At least the bag, then. Just so he doesn’t get found like this.
Selina carefully grips one corner of the bag with two fingers and lifts it up. It sticks a little to his head, so for a brief second his face is hidden from view. When the bag comes off and she can once again see his eyes, they are open.
Selina freezes in the middle of the movement. She’s too shocked to react; she just stares dumbly into Jonas’s irises, which are no longer blue, but milky white, as her exhausted brain struggles to understand what she sees.
She has no time to pull back when Jonas opens his mouth with a primal grunt, lunges forward and bites down over her fingers.
At first, Selina’s scream is pure surprise. But as Jonas bites down even harder and she hears the bones in her fingers splinter, the scream changes to one of pain.
EIGHTEEN
Dan puts down his phone and lies back down onto his bed.
It’s over. It’s finally over. This time, it’s for real.
He sighs deeply. It’s just past nine o’clock, and he has now officially been awake for thirty-seven hours. That’s a whole workweek. And it feels like it, too. His eyes are stinging, his muscles aching with exhaustion.
He has been through more these past two days than most soldiers go through on an entire tour to Iraq. That’s what the psychologist told him, anyway.
But now it’s over.
But then why can’t he believe that?
Something bothers him. A small thing he overlooked. He’s been over the events again and again in his mind. Played the film back and forth. He just can’t see what detail escapes him.
Perhaps there’s nothing there. Perhaps his brain is still just running in overdrive. He’d probably better get some sleep. There’s nothing more he can do now anyway.
He turns over and shuts his eyes.
From the living room he can hear the television. The sound can’t quite drown out his mother’s crying or his dad trying to console her. Dad has been in here every fifteen minutes or so since they got home. As though to make sure Dan doesn’t suddenly disappear. Their only remaining child.
Dan feels a lump forming in his throat at the thought of Jennie. She was the hardest part telling their parents about. Seeing their faces crumble as they received the news just made everything worse—more real, somehow. The possibility of all this being a dream fell away when Dan saw his parents burst into tears. Nightmares don’t affect other people.
He still can’t grasp it. He can’t imagine a world without Jennie. How could he? He has never seen a world without her. She’s been here since before Dan was born. And now she’s lying on a table somewhere.
He pushes that image out of his mind. It doesn’t exactly help him to fall asleep.
Wonder what the doctors will say once they examine the many corpses? What will they even find? If the zombies were animated by some voodoo magic, will there even be a virus in the bodies? On the other hand, if there’s no virus, then how were they able to contaminate others?
The answers will surely come within the next days. Once everything returns back to normal. Smart people will get on television and explain it all. How it could have happened, what went down and how it was all stopped in the last second.
Will people ever know how close the world came to ending? Will Dan be recognized as one of the people responsible for stopping it? Will some people even come to see him as a hero?
He sure doesn’t feel like one. A hero would probably have saved the world and his sister.
His eyes tear up once again, but Dan is too tired to cry; he simply doesn’t have the strength, and finally, his thoughts begin to drift further away as sleep comes sweeping like a freeing darkness, pulling him down deeper and deeper.
Dan sleeps as the evening grows dimmer outside his window. He doesn’t notice how the door to his room is opened a few times, as his dad’s face, eyes all red and puffy, peeks in and then disappears again.
Dan doesn’t dream. His sleep is too deep for that.
But an image nonetheless makes its way into his consciousness. Now, as his brain finally relaxes, the memories are loosened up and that thing that kept bugging him gradually floats to the surface and materializes.
It’s a cat. A black cat.
“Whiskers,” Dan breathes, not waking up, but turning his head jerkily from side to side. “It was the cat …”
A part of Dan’s subconscious recognizes the message, and it tries waking up Dan, but his body is simply too exhausted to obey. Instead, he slips further down, his muscles relaxing, and his sleep turns calm again.
NINETEEN
Paul is jerked awake abruptly. He blinks and looks around in the darkness. It takes him a few seconds to remember where he is and what woke
