They nodded, and she kissed them on the forehead and hugged them one last time.
The tall soldier held out his hand to Hope, and she grabbed it. D.J. reached out for the white soldier's hand, and he grabbed it as well. Then Mercy ushered them to the door. She took one last fill of the sight of her children, and then they disappeared into the howling wind and snow. She closed the door behind them, her eyes streaming tears.
She stumbled down into the basement of her townhome, the home that she and Duane had worked so hard to create for the children. She dug a few photo albums out of a dusty cardboard box, and she sat down to look at the pictures. She looked at photos of her wedding. She studied her children's baby pictures. There were her parents, lost at the onset of the world's rotting condition, holding her children. She was glad that they had gotten to know their grandchildren. They had been fantastic grandparents, kind and gentle, the way she had hoped to be someday.
When she was done, and her heart couldn't be filled with another memory, she put the photo albums back. She closed the box, interlocking the flaps to offer them some sort of protection on the odd chance that the children would be able to come back someday and find them. It was a small hope. She laughed to herself. Just like her daughter—a small Hope.
She put her shotgun underneath her chin, squeezed her eyes shut, and pulled the trigger. Brains and blood splattered the cardboard box. She would have been happy to know that she had been right to close the lid. D.J. and Hope wouldn't want a photo album with her blood on it.
Chapter 13: Matching Haircuts
Hope wanted to scream. She didn't know why Mommy had stayed back or where Daddy was, but she knew that Mommy was sad. She didn't want to think about what that meant, so she didn't. She focused on not screaming instead.
She hadn't been outside in a long time. Mommy and Daddy and old Uncle Chris had said it was too dangerous to go outside… that she would be eaten. Now she understood why she had been told to stay inside. She wanted to talk and ask questions of the man that carried her, his breath echoing in her ear.
The tall man, with skin like milk chocolate, ran through the snow, his head swinging from side to side. She bounced in his arms. She couldn't run through the snow. It would come up to her belly if they put her down in it, which they had a couple of times when they crossed over a fence. She had stood there, holding D.J.'s hand, wondering when one of those things would come out and bite them. She expected one to pop up out of the snow at any moment.
She was cold, but she was too scared to notice. Periodically, she craned her head to see if D.J. was there. She could only sense his shape in the darkness. She couldn't make out his eyes or smile at him the way she knew she should. If she was afraid, D.J. was probably terrified.
"We're going to set you down now," the tall man said.
They put her and D.J. down in the snow, and the three men ran away from them. She saw the movements in the dark, but she couldn't make out what they were doing. But she knew the men carried axes. The hungry ones fell in the dirt, and the soldiers came back and scooped them up.
"Are they dead now?" she whispered.
"Yeah," the man gasped. "They're not getting up again."
She didn't know where she was or how far away from home she had come. Time was different out here. In the house, every day seemed to take forever, the nights especially, when they turned off all of the lights and sat together in the basement, huddled under blankets together to keep warm. Out here, there was so much to see, even in the dark. She spied great shapes, big and looming in the distance. She heard the wind and occasionally the groans of the hungry ones. She saw the stars above, brighter than she had ever seen them before. They were beautiful. She wished Mommy was there to talk about the stars. She knew about the stars, knew all the shapes they made. But Hope knew nothing about them.
"How much farther?" the tall man asked.
"'Bout a half-mile to the fence, and then we're home free," the white man said.
"You need to switch?" another man asked. His skin was dark, so it was hard to see his face, but for the reflection of the starlight off the snow in the man's eyes.
"Yeah, you carry her for a while."
They handed her off, and Hope felt hurt for a second. She liked the tall man, felt like she'd gotten to know him in the time that they had spent together. It was the only person she had been around since Mommy and Daddy in a long time. She felt betrayed by the tall man. Maybe he didn't like her.
No, dumb-dumb, he's just tired. The thought came out of nowhere, in the voice of Mommy, although Mommy would never call her dumb-dumb. It made her feel better, at least. He was just tired. Adults got tired when they did things. D.J. could run around the basement all day, running in circles, making airplane noises, though neither of them had seen an airplane in months. Was that the right amount of
