by Chuck Wendig
“Ain’t loaded.”
“You don’t know that. Besides, that’s still no reason to go waving a cup of piss under somebody’s chin.”
“Pssh, Daddy, you are the same old stick-in-the-mud that you always were, and I love you for it.” She set the mug down and kissed her father on the bridge of his crooked nose. He was a tough old guy—not big, and actually kind of short, but even still. Serious gray eyes, salt-and-pepper at his temple and in his beard, and a stripe of silver up top. Skin like saddle leather.
He just grunted at her affection, then pulled her close and tilted her chin with his thumb. It was a gentle adjustment; he had never been rough with her.
“Looks like someone strung you up in a tree, left you there overnight.” From the back of his throat, a low growl. Then he turned his eyes away from her—a flash of shame crossing his face. “I should’ve been able to take that sonofabitch out before he hurt you. Damnit, Kayla, you should’ve stayed back at the Winnebago.”
Before she should respond, Leelee was behind her. The woman dried her hands on an old shammy. “Here,” she said, turning Kayla toward her, “let me see, girl. Come on, now, let’s have a look.”
Kayla rolled her eyes and did as asked. Didn’t stop her from adding, “I am fine. Doesn’t even hurt.” A lie, given that with every beat of her heart her neck throbbed with waves of echoing pain, almost as if he were still choking her. “I am, as you have noted in the past, one tough little bee-yotch.”
“I think I said tough little cookie,” Leelee mumbled. “The bruising’s bad. But it’s just that. Bruising.”
“I bruise easily. You know that.”
“Mm.” Her nurse wasn’t convinced. “Let’s see the cup.” She peered into the coffee mug, and Kayla saw the woman’s face fall. She knew it wasn’t good; Leelee’s forehead scrunched up into a little consternating ‘V’ whenever she was genuinely concerned. “That’s a lot of blood.”
Kayla felt Gil’s eyes following all of this. He wouldn’t say anything. Not now, anyway. With him, it always simmered low and slow: the man’s heart was like a tough cut of brisket. Took a while to break it down.
“Pshh. I’m fine. I feel good.”
“It’s getting worse.”
“I am as healthy as a bear. A big bear. A big happy healthy bear. Come on, Lee, you know me. I should’ve been dead six months before the world went and turned to spoiled meat. But I keep on keeping on and it’s because somebody—God or Buddha or John Travolta—wants me to keep going.” The other two stared at her, each worried in their own way. Her father’s dark pinprick eyes were the tell, with him. With Leelee, the ‘V’ in her forehead just grew deeper and deeper until it looked like you could shove a dime in there and lose it forever. “It’s just a thing, a temporary my pee looks like cranberry juice thing,” Kayla said, fetching her last cigarette from her pocket.
She popped the Virginia Slim between her lips like a lollipop. Her father quickly grabbed at it—she was too slow to lean back, and he snagged it. Then he flicked it into the lake where fish promptly began to nibble at it; it twitched and hopped like a bobber.
“Dad,” she said. “That was my last smoke.”
“Last smoke is right. You’re done with that shit. You’re not healthy, and sick little girls should not smoke cigarettes.” Before she could protest, he continued—more firmly this time, thrusting his finger up into her face. “You’re also done with this delusion about what’s going to happen tonight. We’re not waiting around for that mean crazy sonofabitch to come back.”
Kayla sneered. “I’m not a little girl. I’m fifteen years old. And he is a vampire. Mean and crazy, maybe. But he’s a vampire. You can say that word.”
“What I can say is that he was some nut-ball cannibal cranked to the gills on methamphetamines or horse tranquilizers or some-such. We can only hope that he didn’t have some kind of other disease before he decided to bite into Ebbie like he was a tube of summer sausage. Last thing we need is Ebbie getting Hep-A or something. We don’t have the means to deal with that.” Just six months ago or so, Ebbie got an infection from a cut on his calf—the skin turned red and dark tendrils spread out underneath the skin looking like earthworms under dirt. Leelee said it was blood poisoning, and that they were lucky to find some antibiotics in the medicine cabinet of an abandoned house or Ebbie would’ve been a goner. Didn’t help that Leelee discovered the big guy had diabetes (though Ebbie strongly disagreed with that diagnosis and made no effort to confirm it). “Ebbie’s already laid low today, thanks to that monster.”
“Ebbie’s going to be fine,” she said. “Besides, he could stand to lose some water weight.”
Again with the finger in her face. She felt a stab of guilt in her heart because she knew what was coming: “Abner could’ve been killed last night. And there you were cozying up to the one that almost put him in the grave. If we had it your way, he’d be stuck on a spit somewhere. We might all be. Hell, your buddy from last night damn near collapsed my throat.” He craned his neck, showed her his own bruises—mottled shadows from where the rifle pressed. “You should be ashamed of yourself, little girl.”
Leelee offered a steadying hand and gently eased Gil’s finger and hand back toward the rifle. “It’ll all be okay.”
Kayla tightened her lips. She wanted to say she was sorry, wanted to tell her father and Leelee that it would all be okay, that she dreamt about how it would be all okay in the end—but she felt angry inside, a storm of broken feelings like a tower of teacups pushed over so they shatter.
“You shouldn’t talk to me that way,” was what she said instead, her words betraying her feelings—or was it the other way around? “Tonight, he’s coming back here no matter what you say. That’s just the way it’s going to be. We’re going to give him what he wants so he helps us get out to California. You don’t like it? Too damn bad, Daddy. Because if you really believe I’m so special like you keep staying, then you don’t want me doing something rash, do you? Running off by my lonesome? Maybe taking a big old fistful of Tylenol and Advil and swallowing it down with a gulp of Cecelia’s vodka? You think I’m so special, then it’s time to start doing things my way.”
The anger came out of her like fluid from a lanced blister. Her father, rarely a man to wear his emotions on his sleeve, looked taken aback. He tried to say something, but she just shook her head and marched off.
Leelee called after her, but she dared not look back.
Inside the RV, Ebbie—short for Abner—slept on his side on the pull-out couch. The couch had long developed a cruel lean, and it looked like it would soon spill him out onto the floor.
Kayla crept in and placed the flowers she had picked—just a handful of early spring tulips coming up out there amongst the trees—on an overturned bucket next to Ebbie’s head.
“The hell are you doing?”
Kayla spun around, her heart jackknifing inside her chest as Cecelia appeared—skinny, eyes ringed with shadows (both real and painted on), long dark hair draped over a ratty old robe. She looked like she had just awakened, even though it was already coming up on the middle of the day. Dad didn’t let anybody sleep past seven (or six if he was in a mood)—anybody except Cecelia, who did whatever she wanted, whenever she wanted it.
“Shh,” Kayla said, pressing a finger to her lips.
Cecelia waved her off. “Whatever. That blubbery dipshit wouldn’t wake up if you stuck a firecracker in his ear and let it explode.”
As it to confirm this, Ebbie grunted, groaned, then pulled the sheet up around his chin. When he moved, Kayla could more easily see the square patch of gauze covering the wound on his neck. Her father’s voice echoed in her head: You should be ashamed of yourself, little girl.
Kayla tried not to think about it.
“You should be nicer to him,” she said, instead. “He likes you.”
“He also likes Snickers bars. In fact, I think he likes those a lot more than he likes me,” Cecelia said, poking around the vehicle’s in
terior—kitchenette countertop, seat cushions, console dashboard. “Gimme one of your cigarettes.”
“I’m out.” She paused, decided to tell her the truth: “Dad threw my last one in the lake. Food for the catfish.”
Cecelia eyed her up, obviously suspicious. That wasn’t unusual: Cecelia was suspicious of everything and everyone. Years back, her father told her that people like that—people who can’t trust, who always think the worst of everybody—act that way because they themselves can’t be trusted. Most people, he said, figured they were as good as or better than all the other folks around them. So, bad people couldn’t ever see the good in folks because they were the only example. Funny, then, how her father couldn’t see the same in Cecelia. Funny too how he’d become like that—suspicious all the time—ever since the world went to Hell.
The woman came up on her, stood in front of her, looking down. Her breath smelled like mouthwash—did her father sneak her some? Or did she have a stash of it somewhere in the Winnebago? Kayla felt privy to too many secrets already. She knew that Ebbie had a cache of candy and junk food in the back of one of the RV’s luggage compartments. She knew that sometimes Leelee went off by herself to just cry—not just cry a little but great big heaping gulps, the kind of sobs that wrack your body and hollow you out. Given how the woman was normally a rock, normally so level-headed, that was not comforting news.
Cecelia, ironically, bent down and tried to smell Kayla’s breath. It wasn’t subtle. Nothing about Cecelia was.
“Guess you’re telling the truth,” she said to Kayla, apparently satisfied that she wasn’t catching any whiff of recent cancer intake. “Your Daddy’s too much of a goody-goody.” The corners of her mouth turned to a salacious smile. “Though not when he’s with me.”
Outside, as if on cue: two gunshots—reports from the rifle. Kayla felt her heart kick, and she turned to pull back the curtains on the little porthole window, but Cecelia grabbed her hand.
“He’s just out hunting,” she said. “Calm down, little girl.”
Little girl.
“You don’t call me that,” Kayla said. “Hell, you’re not but five years older than me. You don’t get to talk down to me.”
Cecelia ignored her. “Your Daddy’s a good shot with that rifle.”
“Yeah. I know.”
“He always hits his target.” The smile on her face broadened: she was no longer just talking about the rifle, and she wanted Kayla to know it.
“Gross.”
“Your friend from last night rolls up in here, he’s going to kill him. Figures he probably won’t show because by now the PCP or whatever he was jacked up on will have worn off—he won’t survive those other bullet wounds. But if he does show?” She made her finger into a gun and held it against Kayla’s temple: the nail, cut and painted, dug into the teen’s skin. “Pop, pop, pop. Three to the head.”
“You’re disgusting.”
Cecelia licked her lips and winked.
“Coburn’s going to come back. I dreamed about it.”
“You’re too old for that kind of fantasy. Bet you also believe a unicorn’s going to come out of those woods and whisk you away on its back.” Her laugh was as much a growl as anything; it was almost enough to put Kayla off smoking. Then, Cecelia changed gears suddenly. “He and I are gonna get married, your Daddy and I. Soon as we find the perfect spot away from the rotters. Out West somewhere. During the sunrise. We’ve talked about it. Maybe one day you’ll call me Mom.”
Kayla couldn’t take it. She shoved past Cecelia and exited the RV. Just to be sure that Cecelia got the message, she slammed the door.
Hard.
Hard enough, in fact, to break it.
The door didn’t stay closed when she slammed it; that was the first sign of a problem. The latch didn’t catch. The door just bounced off it and drifted open.
Kayla felt panicked. That wasn’t good. The door needed to close. The zombies, they were creatures of opportunity, not intelligence—ironically, even though shooting them in the brains put them down for good, they didn’t have a whole lot going on in those brains, either. Something as simple as a door presented a problem for them: best they could do was swarm up against it until they broke it down by sheer weight and volume.
She hurried back over, gently closed the door. Heard a click. Let out a sigh of relief, then stepped back down to the ground.
And the door drifted open again.
“Oh, no,” Kayla said. “Shoot shoot shoot.”
Cecelia appeared in the open doorway.
“You gotta be shitting me, Kayla!” she said—Kayla couldn’t tell if the anger and outrage was real, or just Cecelia trying to pour gas on a fire. “You broke the damn door? For real? I swear, you are nothing but a problem. First you invite some kind of cannibal back to our camp, and now you break the ’Bago door? You are something. Now somebody’s going to have to fix it before the damn rotters show up. Nice one. It’s like you want us to get killed.”
Kayla didn’t even hear this last part—because, by then, she was weeping and running for the woods.
It wasn’t fair.
You’re special, they told her. Again and again. You’re different. You’re not like everybody else. You should be dead. We have to take you somewhere.
We have to take you Out West.
Then, of course, times like these came along and she didn’t feel special at all. Matter of fact, she felt the opposite: she felt lower than a snake’s belly in a wheel rut. Her father treated her like a child. Leelee treated her like a fragile little thing, a snowflake that might melt with even the gentlest touch. Cecelia treated her like a bag of garbage. And Ebbie…
Well, Ebbie was the only one who was nice to her at all.
It was, in part, why she liked that vampire. It wasn’t that he treated her well—he insulted her, threatened her, choked her so hard the bruises made her look like one of the walking dead. But what she liked was that he shot straight: he told her what he was thinking, what he was feeling, and then he acted on it. He didn’t say one thing and do another.
For a monster, something about him felt utterly honest.
Refreshing, in a kind of horrible way.
Kayla leaned up against a tree, wiping her eyes. She’d been walking now for… how long was it? She didn’t even know. From time to time she’d hear her father calling, or Leelee (but never Cecelia), and when she heard their voices she either hunkered down and hid or traveled in what she could best surmise was the opposite direction. A part of her knew this was wrong—a bonafide bad idea—but even still, she wanted to punish them a little bit.
And another part of her just felt ashamed. Like her father said she should be. For getting him hurt. And Ebbie. For arguing with Cecelia—why couldn’t she just shut up and try to keep the peace?—and for breaking the door.
Didn’t help that she was just making it worse by being away. If her father was out here looking for her, who was back there fixing the door? Ebbie? Ebbie was an IT manager before the zombie guts hit the fan: the world no longer had much use for computers, and so Ebbie’s place in the food chain had been supplanted. Survivors knew how to identify edible plants and siphon gas from cars, not quarantine computer viruses and search for porn on the Internet. (Hell, the Internet wasn’t even a thing anymore. It had long gone away, as insubstantial as a distant wind.)
Shame dogged her. So did anger. And righteousness. And a whole other squirming bag of emotions—Kayla had crossed the puberty threshold and her body was a cauldron of warring hormones. It was like someone had overturned a bag of snakes inside her heart and mind and let them tangle all up together in one big crazy breeding ball.
It didn’t help that all this walking had made her sore—her back ached, her legs throbbed, her very bones seemed to radiate waves of pain. It sucked the energy right out of her. She could practically hear Leelee’s voice: You’re sick, Kayla. You shouldn’t have strayed so far.
With a follow-up bonus question: How are you going to g
et home?
She put her back against a tree and slid down to a sitting position, her elbows resting on her knees.
Here, the forest was quiet. The occasional rustle of leaves as a squirrel darted from tree to tree. A wind came along and shook the evergreens. Above, the oaks and maples were already starting to bud and uncurl the year’s new leaves.
She closed her eyes. For just a moment.
And when she opened them again, the sky was dimming. The horizon brightening, like a distant fire on the far side of the forest.
How long had she sat here, sleeping? How many hours, lost?
Sundown. That wasn’t good. The living dead were bad news any time of the day or night, but they seemed to become more active at night, more directed. During the day they might not even notice as you passed by, provided you weren’t within fifty feet or so and didn’t make much noise. One time, middle of the day, she saw one rotter just blankly orbiting a lamppost. Slack-jawed and murmuring.
At night, though, they stirred up more. Kayla didn’t know why and wasn’t sure it really mattered much; her father said he figured the sun either charged them up like batteries or instead maybe sucked the energy from them. Whatever it was, night-time wasn’t a good time to be out amongst them.
She had to get back to the camper.
She stood, her bones aching. Her blood rushed to her head—‘orthostatic hypotension,’ Leelee told her, also known as the common head rush. Took a moment to orient herself. From which way had she come?
Had to be that way, she thought. Past the fallen log.
She hurried in that direction, her muscles sore, her back throbbing from sitting in one position for so long. Everything about this disease tried to sap her strength, nibbling away at her. Sometimes she found herself wishing the cancer would kill her, like it was supposed to have over three years ago.
Kayla pushed through the forest, stepping over thorny tangles and big boulders that looked like turtle humps, the shadows of the trees stretching longer and longer until they began to disappear with the coming of evening. Kayla called out her father’s name, feeling panic and uncertainty: had she come this way before? Everything here looked like everything else. That tree looked like that other tree. This rock looked like that rock. She stepped over a muddy gully that she was sure she didn’t step over on the way here.
