Mort thought for a second. Maybe he didn't want to hear it. He tried to think of all the reasons someone might tie another person to a bed for months at a time, but he couldn't think of one, so in the end, his curiosity got the better of him. "Sure," he said.
Dez told him of her relationship with Chad, how at first, he had been a true gentleman, wooing her with flowers and furtive glances as he worked on her father's farm. Her father hadn't been blind. He had told her in no uncertain terms to stay away from the man, that there was something not quite right with him. He also mentioned that his brother was a no-good junkie, and that meant that weakness ran in his veins. He had been right, but Dez was young and stupid and vain. She liked the attention. That her father didn't want her to have anything to do with Chad only made him more attractive to her.
They had carried on in secret for months. Chad would always tell her he loved her, but she could never quite say the words. Instead, she would say, "I know you do." This drove Chad wild, and he only seemed to want her more.
She often wondered what would happen if she ever said the words back. Part of her thought that he would just disappear once he got what he wanted. Oh, she still gave him some of the things he wanted, but only because she wanted them too. But she had never seen any future with him. He was just a plaything for her.
Then came the day that Chad and his fucked-up brother had shown up at their farm, back when the dead had started rising. Her father had been watching the news, scoffing at the reports. Dez had felt safe with her father and mother on the farm. They hadn't seen any of the dead, and her father kept talking about how it was probably some sort of War of the Worlds situation, a hoax. When she said she didn't know what that meant, he explained how back in the day people had actually believed aliens were coming to attack the earth because they had heard a reading of War of the Worlds on the radio.
She had wanted to believe her father when he muttered the words "fake news," but she noticed that he had cleaned his shotgun and set it right by the front door. "Better safe than sorry," he had said when she asked him about it.
In the end, he hadn't been safe enough. Dez knew that Chad Mauer would come for her. She just didn't know how he would do it. That morning, the day the world broke, he had appeared over the rise at the far end of the field, walking through the red clover.
She watched him approach from her upstairs room, biting her fingernails. She didn't want to go with him, and she cursed herself for leading him on. Her father called to her mother. He had seen Chad approaching as well. Dez knew that her father would not allow her to go with Chad, and she felt comfortable he would protect her.
All of that changed when she heard the gunshot.
She had scrambled downstairs, and then there was another gunshot, and then she was standing at the door crying. Chad had killed her parents, and there was nothing that she could do about it. She was barely conscious of Chad wrapping her in his arms, his smell wafting over her. He always had a strong smell, a smell she associated with the smell of hard work, but at that moment, the smell sickened her.
Then her parents had risen, and Chad and her brother killed them again. She was frightened. She didn't know what to say or do, and she wished that Chad and Reed would just go away. They took her silence for shock, but the truth was she was afraid to cross Chad. He had always been kept in check by her father's presence, and now her father was dead. She was at his mercy, and she could either go along with him or risk the alternative. If they could kill her parents, who knew what they would do to her? So, she had gone along with the two brothers, trudging back to the trailer park.
"I didn't even get a chance to bury the bodies," Dez said.
"What happened after that?" Mort asked.
"We went to the trailer park. We were there for maybe a day or two. Reed got high, Chad got drunk, and I just sat in their trailer, toying with the idea of snatching Chad's rifle and killing them both. But I wasn't a killer. I was just a scared girl stuck in a shitty situation with nowhere to go."
They climbed over a fallen tree trunk, its diameter too wide to simply step over. "I tried calling my cousin. He lived the next town over, but I couldn't get through. Reed must have told on me, because Chad kicked down the bathroom door, snatched my phone, and broke it into pieces."
"He must have felt bad because he held me and cried afterward. It made me sick to see him sobbing like that. When he said, 'I love you,' this time I said it back. I knew it was a mistake as soon as I said it."
"I was sitting outside, chain-smoking cigarettes with Tammy when Reed announced his plan. We were going to move everyone up to the ranger station. I didn't want to go. I figured maybe there was a chance one of my cousins or my uncle or aunt would stop by the farm and see my parents lying dead out front. Maybe they would come looking for me. But if we moved to the ranger station, that would never happen.
