“How have you been feeling, Conrad?”
Conrad, who had never once felt a thing in his life, said he was feeling fine.
“Have you been applying the lotion regularly?”
He said he had.
“Has there been any improvement?”
He hesitated.
The doctor set the clipboard aside. He rolled a stool out from under the table and sat on it. Taking out a penlight, he held it up to Conrad’s mouth. “Open wide.”
Conrad came out of the room ten minutes later. He could see the hopeful, expectant look in Denise’s eyes. He tried to force a smile but couldn’t.
“How bad?” she asked after they’d gotten into the elevator and the doors had slid shut.
“Not bad at all.”
“You’re lying. I can always tell when you’re lying to me.”
They went to the grocery store next, slowly walked the brightly lit aisles.
In the produce section they passed a young woman pushing a baby stroller. Denise gasped as she bent over the stroller. Conrad stayed where he was behind the cart, looking away in embarrassment.
“Oh what a cute little thing,” Denise said to the baby, its black eyes squinted up at her, its little decayed hands opening and closing. “What’s her name?”
“Abby,” the woman answered.
“Hello there, Abby. How are you?”
The dead baby cooed.
Denise smiled at Conrad, then at the woman. “What a precious baby you have.”
“Thank you.”
Turning back to the baby, Denise said, “Aren’t you just the most precious thing? Yes you are. Yes you are, Abby.”
After checking out, after loading the car, Denise turned to Conrad and embraced him. She held him for a long time. Her head to his chest, she told him that it was okay, that they were going to fight this.
Their next stop was the pet store—Pluto’s Pets Unlimited, the very same store to which Conrad had brought Kyle the other day.
“Are you sure you want to do this?” Conrad asked.
“Don’t you think he’s mature enough to take care of a dog?”
“I guess …” Remembering Eugene Moss’s kitchen again, watching as Philip shot the gray retriever in the head.
“Okay then.” Denise opened her door. “Let’s go.”
They arrived home and unloaded the car just in time for the phone call. It was a nurse from Kyle’s school.
“There’s been an accident,” she said.
“Ouch, ouch, ouch!”
“Kyle, relax. It’ll be okay.”
“But it hurts.”
They were in the emergency room, almost every chair filled. Phones were ringing, a robotic voice was paging somebody every thirty seconds, and in the seat between Conrad and Denise their son was doing his best not to cry.
A good portion of the skin on Kyle’s left leg had been torn off, enough so that the dead muscles and bones beneath could easily be seen. Kyle’s face was screwed up. His eyes were squeezed shut. His teeth were gritted. He kept rocking in his seat, mumbling how much his leg hurt, how much it hurt.
Denise was the one talking him through the pain. Conrad, despite how much he wanted to, couldn’t force himself to say anything. He knew his son was feeling no true pain. And because of this, he couldn’t show the appropriate reaction to what had happened to his son—an accident, just like the nurse had said, Kyle playing a little too rough with his classmates at recess, and when he’d gotten knocked down his knee scraped the macadam and tore off all that dead skin.
It could have been worse, Conrad knew. It could have been a whole lot worse. A broken bone, mostly, because it was very difficult to find replacements, especially for a child Kyle’s age. That was one thing Conrad had found most interesting about the living: when they got hurt their bodies began healing themselves, even their bones could heal, unlike the dead, whose bodies did nothing more than continue to decay.
“Mommy,” Kyle said, reverting himself back to a much younger age as he lowered his head on her shoulder. “It hurts so bad.”
“I know, sweetie. I know.” She looked over Kyle’s head at Conrad, stared at him a moment, and stood up. “I’ll be right back.”
She returned a minute later, and after another minute one of the nurses came with a wheelchair to take them back to one of the rooms.
“Hey, that ain’t fair,” said a woman sitting next to her husband. The husband had a white bandage around his head. “We been waiting here an hour now. An hour!”
Others started up the protests but the nurse just ignored them. Conrad stared at his wife in amazement, but she ignored him too, walking beside Kyle as he was pushed in the wheelchair.
Once they were taken to a room—much like one Conrad had been in earlier that day—the nurse said, “I’ll make sure a doctor sees you immediately.”
“Thank you,” Denise said.
The nurse smiled and was gone.
Conrad said, “You didn’t do what I think you did.”
“I didn’t have a choice. Kyle needs immediate attention.”
“But it goes against the Code—”
She shot him a glare. “Enough with the Code. Don’t you think our son is more important?”
Not one doctor came to see them, but three. They each wore long white coats, two of them held clipboards, and after taking a look at Kyle’s leg all three doctors stepped to the side, conferred for a minute, and came back.
“Your son will be okay,” said the doctor without a clipboard. “We’re going to perform an immediate skin transplant.”
It should have been left at that, it really should have, but before the doctors left to prep for the surgery, each and every one of them turned to Conrad. They extended their hands. They told him how much of an honor it was to meet him. They told him he was a hero.
Chapter 22
The next morning it was as if Kyle had never even had his accident. His leg was all stitched up with skin that had been donated by those families of men and women who had recently expired. His high spirits had returned. He got up early to play his video game, have breakfast with his parents, and then headed out for the bus. Conrad stood on the porch, watching his son walk down the block, and once again noticed the black sedan parked farther down the street. This time he nodded, once, and when he turned and stepped back into the house, he found Denise waiting for him just like before.
“I should have told you yesterday, but so much happened I forgot. We’re going out to dinner tonight. On a double date.”
“With who?”
Denise gave him a very forced smile. Through her crooked, rotted teeth, she said, “My sister.”
Conrad sighed. “Come on, you know that isn’t a good idea.”
She was still giving him the forced smile. “That’s not all.”
“It gets worse?”
The smile faded as she slowly nodded her head.
“How?” he asked. “How could it possibly get any worse?”
Everyone in Olympus knew who Anthony Bruno was. Every time there was a zombie attack and a Hunter kill mentioned in the news, Anthony’s name quickly followed. He had only been a lawyer for a few years and was already starting to build his reputation. Many people saw him as a troublemaker, a rebel rouser, while others saw him as a kind of working class hero. The mission statement of his law firm—which right now was just Anthony and two legal aides—was that he would do everything to help protect the rights of the family members of those whose children had turned into zombies.
And, apparently, for the last three months he had been dating Conrad’s sister-in-law.
They went out that evening to a restaurant in the city, nowhere close to The Restaurant’s posh standards but a place that nonetheless required its male guests to wear a tie and jacket. It was the four of them—Conrad, Denise, Jessica, Anthony Bruno—and when the two couples first met in the foyer, hands were shook and hellos were said and each of them did a good job of putting on smiles. Denise had
pleaded with Conrad to go through with this, explaining how Jessica thought she was in love, and it meant a lot not only to Denise but to Jessica that Conrad show his support and do his best to act civil.
Anthony was relatively young for a lawyer, still in his early thirties, but he had a boyish smile and a way of making everyone his friend that Conrad couldn’t help but take to immediately. If he didn’t know what Anthony Bruno did for work, he might have actually liked the man, but as it was he felt it best to stay on his guard and only answer questions when they were directed at him.
The hostess took them to a corner booth lit by a large candle in the middle of the table. They ordered drinks, appetizers, and after they had ordered the main course, Denise asked Anthony how he and her sister had met.
“You mean Jess never told you?”
“She did. But I want to hear your version.”
Smiling broadly, Anthony said, “There isn’t really much to tell. Jess here delivered some documents to my firm one day and happened to leave her wallet. She came back a few hours later, completely hysterical. She said her entire existence was in her wallet and that if she lost it … well, I don’t know why, exactly, but I asked her out for some coffee afterward. She accepted, and … here we are.”
Conrad took a sip of wine. The urge to roll his eyes, to get up and leave, to scream out his frustration, was almost too much. Denise had already told him Jessica’s side of the story. How his sister-in-law, who never dated a guy for more than a month, who had always flirted with Denise’s boyfriends in high school, had had her eye on Anthony Bruno for a while. This had of course seemed odd to Conrad, because while Anthony was good-looking, he wasn’t very rich or powerful … at least not yet, and that was where Conrad figured his sister-in-law saw the attraction. Get in on the ground level, stay with him through the tough times, and when he hit it big—because despite what Conrad thought, he knew eventually Anthony was going to make it big—she would be sitting pretty for the rest of her existence.
But she needed a way to meet him, a way that wouldn’t be too obvious. And one day documents needed delivered to Anthony Bruno from her firm and she jumped at the chance, already with her plan in mind. She left her wallet at Bruno’s law firm and walked out, went back to work, sat at her desk for a few hours before she began looking for her wallet. It wasn’t there. It wasn’t anywhere. She freaked out, really playing the part, and one of the firm partners suggested she call Anthony Bruno’s firm to see if it was there. She picked up the phone, dialed only six numbers, and acted like she was talking to the legal aide who answered and who told her yes, they did have her wallet. When she hung up, she asked the partner if she could hurry over there right this moment, right this instant, and the man, seeing the desperation in her black eyes, said sure, why not.
One thing about Jessica, Conrad knew, the girl was a great actress. She really was in the wrong line of work, but it didn’t matter, because she went back to Anthony Bruno’s firm, she played her part perfectly, and later that evening they went out for coffee and she was charming and gave him her number and—surprise, surprise—he called her the next day.
And so now here they were, three months later, sitting in a corner booth in some fancy restaurant a few blocks away from the Herculean, a candle flickering light in the middle of their table.
Anthony Bruno placed his arm around Jessica. Jessica rested her head on his shoulder. She smiled and closed her eyes, held them shut a moment, and when she opened them again she stared straight at Conrad.
And Conrad, despite his best efforts, coughed out a laugh.
“What’s so funny?” Anthony asked.
“Nothing.”
“No, please, tell me.”
“It’s just this joke I heard earlier today. You wouldn’t be interested.”
Anthony stared at him hard for a moment, then took his arm away from Jessica.
“I didn’t want it to come to this,” he said, offering Denise an uncomfortable smile.
Conrad said, “You didn’t want what to come to what?”
Denise grabbed his leg below the table, gave it a tight squeeze.
The smile was now directed at Conrad. It was no longer uncomfortable but rather tight-lipped and menacing, Anthony’s white-capped teeth almost glistening in the candlelight.
“I don’t know if you knew this, Conrad, but Hunters killed my brother.”
The candlelight flickered, playing shadows off those teeth.
“He was ten and he turned and Hunters came to kill him. And from that moment, the moment they chopped off his head, my family began to suffer. Our neighbors wouldn’t talk to us anymore. The kids at school, they avoided me, and when they didn’t, they were making fun of me behind my back. My mother lost all of her friends. My father lost his job.”
“I’m sorry to hear that.”
“No you’re not. You’re just a Hunter, and killing zombies is what you do. You don’t care about the families involved. You don’t care about the fact they had no say in what happened. You just come in with your broadsword, swing it, and that’s that. Or”—and here the tight-lipped smile became a sneer—“you torture a living child until his father can’t bear it anymore.”
Silverware clinking on dinner plates, music drifting about the room from hidden speakers, people joining in hushed conversations: Conrad wasn’t aware of any of it. He was hardly even aware of Denise’s hand on his leg, still holding tight.
“In case you haven’t figured it out yet, I’ve spoken to Eugene Moss. He told me everything that happened inside his home. Unlike what the news told everyone in the world, he told me the truth.”
Denise’s hand on his leg squeezed tighter.
“Yes, yes,” Anthony Bruno said, waving a dismissive hand, “he was the one who placed that bomb at your headquarters. There’s no arguing that. For that he is indeed guilty, and for that his public execution is inevitable. But correct me if I’m wrong. Isn’t the Hunter Code meant to keep Hunters in line? Isn’t it meant to make them responsible for their own actions? Isn’t it true that they are not in fact above the law, but below it just like everyone else?”
The hand squeezed even tighter, trying to hold him in place.
“You Hunters look at me as the bad guy. But I’m not the bad guy. I hate the living just like everyone else. They all deserve to die. But at the same time, don’t those dead who are affected because of the living deserve rights too? Why should they be punished for something they have no control over?” He paused. “Or should they?”
Both of Conrad’s hands had been folded on the table. Now he unfolded them, reached down to take Denise’s hand off his leg. At first she refused, keeping her hand there, squeezing his leg even more, and it was only when he gripped her wrist tightly—so tightly some of the skin gave away under his grasp and he could feel the bone—did she let go.
He started to slide out from the booth, intending to just leave, when Anthony spoke again.
“Jessica tells me you and Denise have a son. She says he’s almost ten. Now what if something were to happen to him, Conrad? What if he were to turn? Should you be punished for that? Should you be held accountable?”
He’d stood up, started walking away, but now stopped.
“I might as well give you fair warning,” Anthony said as he too slid out of the booth and stood up. “You and the three other Hunters inside that house are going down. I still don’t know how I’m going to do it, but I’m going to personally see to it myself. It’s not my usual type of case, and I wish I didn’t have to, but there’s a reason why we have the law, and the law needs to be followed.”
His back still to the lawyer, Conrad’s hands slowly clenched into fists at his sides.
“But don’t worry about your family. I’ll make sure nothing happens to your wife and son.”
Anthony Bruno walked forward until he was standing right behind Conrad. He placed a hand on Conrad’s shoulder, squeezed it gently.
“I figure I’m doing the right thing here,�
� he whispered. “I don’t have to give you fair warning, but I’m doing it anyway. Because I love your sister-in-law, Conrad, and hopefully I’ll marry her someday. Which means I’ll become family to your wife and son. And I don’t want to see them hurt.”
“Anthony?”
“Yes?”
“Since you’re giving me fair warning, I guess I should do the same for you.”
The hand left Conrad’s shoulder. “Regarding what?”
“This,” Conrad said, and turning quickly, he raised his fist and punched Anthony Bruno square in the face.
Norman’s call woke him early the next morning.
“Get up and get dressed,” the captain said. He named an airport just outside of Olympus. “Meet me there as soon as you can.”
Conrad sat up in bed. Denise’s side was empty. He asked what was going on.
“It doesn’t matter what you wear. Uniforms will be provided. Just make sure to bring your broadsword.”
His eyes quickly cleared of sleep. “Sir? What’s going on?”
“It’s Heaven, Conrad. We’ve found it.”
Chapter 23
She could hear him moving around upstairs, his footsteps frantic, going from one end of the bedroom to the next.
“Mom? What’s wrong?”
They sat at the kitchen table, Kyle with a bowl of cereal in front of him, Denise a glass of gray juice.
“Just finish your breakfast,” she said. “You don’t want to be late for your bus.”
Above them a door opened, closed. More frantic footsteps. They moved out of the bedroom, into the hallway, and she took this as her cue to get up.
“Mom?”
Ignoring Kyle, she went to the sink. She stood there and stared out the window at the bird feeder on the deck. No birds converged around the feeder this morning—there weren’t even any squirrels—but a butterfly caught her eye, a gray flitting shape flapping its way across the lawn.
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