DeadBorn

by C. M. Stunich

  “Come talk to me, Holly Olly. There's so much I need to tell you.”

  “Let my friends go, promise me that they'll be safe. Prove it by showing yourself.” The unborn sighs and black sludge coats its lips. It stands there for a long moment and then it drops dead. Just collapses to the grass like a broken doll. The children behind it start to cry. The noise is deafening. Holly turns back to us and her face is scared. She's worried now. This is the first time that I've really seen it hammered into her like that.

  “Do you think she's really coming?” Dawson asks, voice barely audible over the sobs of the dead children. Nobody answers him. There's no way to know. Again, we're relegated back to waiting. Waiting while the lopers rip the nails from their fingers in their frenzy to get inside the building, while they crush each other beneath their collective feet.

  We wait while the dead consume the earth around us.

  ***

  Sixty-Six Hours And Twenty-Eight Minutes After …

  A legion of the dead surround us now.

  They came from the city, the hills, the forest. They came from graveyards and hospitals and out of nightmares. There's thousands of them now, teeming with hunger and desperation. And even though we knew they were coming, it seems as if they appeared out of nowhere, breaking through the shadows of the night and into the harsh white glow from the parking lot. They swarmed the building like a flood, crashed into one another and started climbing. Now they're on all sides, clinging to the roof and screeching, spewing blood and gunk and leaking fluids.

  We take turns walking around the roof and doing what Holly did, cutting off their fingers. The appendages still move, but for the most part we ignore them. Sometimes Dawson kicks them off into the crowd. They join a whole host of other body parts that are flying, torn off from rotten torsos in the wild frenzy. These then join the hunt, climbing up the backs of the other zombies and waving in the air like macabre flags.

  The sound and the smell have given us all headaches. There isn't one of us, not even Holly, who hasn't thrown up in the last few hours. Dawson goes inside awhile later and hides beneath a desk, fingers in his ears and a pillow clenched between his teeth. He just can't seem to stop screaming. I don't blame him. There's moaning from the lopers, shrieking from the water hags, and clacking from the bone bags that chatter their teeth incessantly. The unborn children are still crying, sitting in this little perfect group like they're posing for a class picture. The other DeadBorn avoid them for the most part, only acknowledging them when the fire faces or the ooze spitters get close. Then the legion surges and throws themselves at the demons until either they run away or are crushed into a harmless pulp. One of the ooze spitters is missing and I suspect that the green-gray lump near the children is what it's become.

  “Holy shit,” Valerie whispers and I only know what she's saying because I watch her lips move. “Look at that!”

  The water hags, who have thus far been spared by the legion, are now fighting for their lives. Or their deaths. Or whatever. A group of bone bags that has been systematically taking out the mummies has now turned its attention to the pale women by the lake. They march forward in a jarring jog, bones clinking and mow their way straight through the screaming, flailing horde until they hit the water hags' territory. The women explode into action, trailing torn, dirty dresses behind them, and smash into the skeletons with such force that those in the front shatter into white. Bones go spinning across the refuge, raining down on the heads of the lopers, a wash of pale, grisly rain.

  Holly takes my hand and squeezes it, but neither of us say a thing. It isn't worth it to shout over the clamor. There's just nothing worth saying that we haven't already said.

  Dawson comes out in the middle of the melee and just stares while the water hags are pushed back to the edge of the lake. The shimmer on the water is pink now from the wash of blood that's draining into it. Although they're strong and wildly fierce, they can't stand up to the numbers. They can't stand up the legion.

  As far as the light will allow, we can see them. There's hardly a patch of unoccupied ground anywhere. There's just corpses: moving, writhing, screaming corpses. I close my eyes and try to find a quiet place inside of myself, but there just isn't anywhere to go. I'm all turmoil, knotted with anxiety; my nerves are stretched to the limits, strung taught like bowstrings waiting to be plucked, so I can play my last discordant note.

  Holly sees this and passes the shotgun to Valerie, so she can put her arms around me and whisper sweet nothings into my ear. I don't even think she's forming words, just soothing sounds. I stroke her hair back as Dawson and Valerie do another walk around of the roof. We're still waiting for the rotten angels. When we saw them before, they were a horde in and of themselves. It's hard for any of us to believe that we're only going to see one.

  Scuffling sounds come from the opposite side of the building and it only takes Holly and I a second to rise to our feet and take off over the shingles with pounding steps.

  Dawson has an ax buried in the thinning hair of a rotten angel. When he pulls it back, hunks of skull and bits of gray skin come flying with it. The creature screeches and drops to the roof, clawed feet shredding our last defense against the undead away as it moves towards Valerie with a bobbing step that reminds me of a bird. She levels the shotgun at its face, but stops when Holly steps up beside her with a baseball bat. They make a brief exchange that I can't hear from where I'm standing and then Holly rushes forward, weapon raised by her side. Dawson comes from behind and soon I find myself running, too. I can't let Holly fight this thing alone.

  We wail on the monster with frenzied swings that douse the entire roof in smelly guck and drop the monster to its knees. It's hard work and horrible, too. Even though it's a demon, I can't stand the thought that I'm beating something to death. This memory will turn into a wound that will haunt me for a long, long time if I let it. I bring up images of Holly smiling, sunlight streaming through her hair and try to block everything around me out.

  “Galen. Galen!” A hand is on my arm and I'm spinning. I almost hit Holly with the baseball bat and end up dropping it to the roof. It rolls down the incline and plummets into the crowd. I look up at her, face stricken, but she isn't looking at me. She's looking at the sky. I follow her gaze and against the round, paleness of the moon, I see them.

  The rotten angels that we've been waiting so long for have finally shown up, diving and spinning like a flock of birds as they come wheeling towards us.

  “Hey!” Dawson screams, catching our attention. He's got Valerie by the hand and is already moving away from the quivering gray mass. The wings are still flexing, boney joints flapping with holey gray flesh. We all ignore it, more concerned with what we're going to do now. Dawson lays it out for us pretty clearly. “Get your asses inside!”

  Holly and I turn as one and head for the false safety of the building.

  CHAPTER 20

  Mothers

  Sixty-Seven Hours And Fifty-Two Minutes After …

  Patricia is sitting in a chair near the window with a group of zombies situated around her like bodyguards. Holly sees her first and nearly falls to her knees, catching herself at the last moment on the edge of the desk. Dawson, Valerie, and I push in behind her and immediately slam the window shut. There are too many rotten angels out there now and no possible way for us to stay on the roof without being lifted into the sky and torn apart by hungry mouths and greedy fingers. Even as I'm thinking this, one of them smashes into the shingles less than three feet from the window, prompting Valerie and Dawson to grab the boards that Holly and I have stacked nearby and start nailing them into place. They're so busy doing that and talking about how much ammo we have left that they haven't even noticed Patricia.

  “Holly, Olly, Olly,” says a little blonde boy with blood in his hair and black sockets for eyes. He lifts his tiny fingers and points right at my fiancée's chest. Valerie drops the board that's in her hand, spins around and pulls a pistol on him before she even registers what'
s happening.

  “Holy shit,” she curses as the boy turns back to Patricia and waits there expectantly, stained sailor uniform hanging from his body in rags. Without a doubt, he is the creepiest thing I've seen yet. Patricia reaches out a hand and strokes his hair back. Her fingers are long and feminine with freshly manicured nails painted a bright shade of peach. Her skin reminds me of Holly's, pale and tinted with the slightest flush of pink.

  “Hello Holly,” she says and her voice is soft spoken and pleasant, definitely not the type of voice you would imagine someone who's essentially destroyed the world to have. She doesn't take off the hood of her robe though, keeping her face in shadow and making her look more like a comic book villain than even the dripping DeadBorn behind her can do. Just seeing them there makes me want to run, to fight, to do anything other than just stand there, but that's all I can do, stand there and stare. Dawson finishes nailing the boards to the window, setting the scene with a thundering din that sounds as ominous as if he were putting the final nails in our collective coffin.

  When he turns around, he doesn't react and I'm worried that he might be going into shock.

  “Take it off,” Holly whispers as she glares at the woman who birthed her, who gave her away and then stole her parents and her life in an attempt to get her back. “If you want to talk to me, take the hood off.” Patricia hesitates for a moment as the crashing and the banging around us slows but doesn't cease. I can still hear some shrieking and some commotion, enough to tell me that Patricia's lopers are fighting off the demons. The horde is still around us, still a massive, writhing legion of ten thousand strong, but they aren't a threat at the moment. Patricia is the only threat to us right now. Well, her and the rotten angels that are circling above us like vultures, waiting for us to drop dead so they can eat our quivering flesh by the handful.

  When she finally complies, we all gasp.

  Patricia looks like a carbon copy of Holly with pretty, blonde hair and pink cheeks, a soft jaw and skin like cream. She doesn't look very old either, like maybe she gave birth to Holly at a young age. When she smiles, it's as if we're looking at a portrait of what Holly will look like when she's thirty because there's no way that Patricia is any older than that.

  Dawson and Valerie exchange a horrified glance behind us and I know that they've just realized what Holly hasn't told them.

  “I'm sorry we had to meet this way,” Patricia begins as Holly stumbles forward and lands on her knees in the space between us. She has a knife in her sweater pocket and there's an axe lying partially obscured by the bag of candy. Holly has put herself there on purpose. She's getting ready, even now, even with this big reveal and all of these emotions hanging heavy in the air like smoke. “But I didn't know how else to find you.”

  “Try e-mail,” Holly whispers and her voice trembles, just a bit. “Or a phone call. Anything but this, why this?” Patricia looks away like she's ashamed but doesn't answer Holly's question. Her eyes, although just as round and pretty and blue as Holly's, are foggy and far away like she doesn't even really know where she is or what she's doing. That's a scary thought considering she's the one with all the cards right now. If she were to snap, to lose control of even the few DeadBorn that are in the room with us then the massive horde outside would mean nothing because we're dead either way.

  Patricia turns back to us and her eyes slide right over Holly and land on me. My arm contracts painfully, but I thrust it into the belt and cinch it before it has a chance to do me any harm. The skin around Patricia's eyes crinkles softly.

  “This is Galen?” she asks and Holly doesn't respond. She doesn't need to anyway because it's pretty obvious that Patricia already knows. “He's pretty,” she says absently as she rises to her feet, black robes fluttering around her ankles as she takes a step forward. She bends down and picks up the unborn child, raising him to her chest and pressing a gentle kiss to his bloody cheek. When she pulls away, she has crimson stains on her chin and lips that make her look so different from Holly that I actually have to blink to make sure that I saw her right in the first place. When I look more carefully, I decide that actually, it isn't the blood at all that's making her seem different. It's the look in her eyes, like she's so focused on this one pinprick of light that she can't see the whole sun. She's blocked it all out for a chance at a miniscule portion of what the world has to offer, of what Holly could've offered her had she tried a different way. I know Holly and I'm certain that if Patricia had approached her on the street or knocked on her door at home, that she would've welcomed her with open arms, asked questions about her birth father, got to know Patricia as if she was just an extension of her family, not a replacement, not a throwaway. That's just the way Holly is, but now, Patricia has blown it. Holly will never forgive her for what she's done. If she wanted a relationship, she isn't going to get one.

  “But pretty doesn't mean everything,” she says as she takes another step forward. Holly rises to her feet in an instant and scoots back until she's standing directly in front of me.

  “If your hurt him, or any of them … ” Holly begins and Patricia laughs softly.

  “You think you love him now, but just wait until he leaves you pregnant and alone. Then, when they come to take your baby, you can think of me and what I went through.” Holly doesn't respond, doesn't know how to I'm guessing, and neither do I. I don't even really know what Patricia has just said. “I fell in love with a boy when I was thirteen,” she tells us as she rocks her creepy, little unborn to sleep and sets him in the computer chair that she was using. “I gave him everything I had and then some. I even gave him a daughter.” Patricia looks up at Holly and they lock eyes. For a moment, there's this electricity that fills the room, raises the hairs on my arms and the back of my neck. I even hear Dawson and Valerie gasping behind me, like they can't get enough air into their lungs. I feel that, too, like some of the oxygen's being eaten up with this power and now it's the only thing there is to breathe. I force my lungs to expand, to contract and find that although it feels like I'm choking, I'm not. Then Holly looks away and the feeling stops.

  “My daughter was a deadborn,” she says softly and I can tell by the way she says it that she isn't talking about the zombies or the demons. “A stillborn. I was too ashamed to go to the hospital, so I had the baby by myself in a little room by the sea.” She smiles and her eyes go even cloudier, drift further away into the recesses of her brain and make her next words seem foreign, like they're in another language, one that nobody speaks but her. “But I had this power inside of me, so I saved her.” Patricia stops speaking abruptly and looks up at Holly. “I saved you.”

  “You ruined me,” Holly whispers, holding out her hand to indicate the situation that we're in. “You ruined everything.” Patricia isn't listening though and I can see that she's been waiting to tell this story for a long, long time.

  “When they found me, when they found the marks around the baby's neck from the umbilical cord, they took her away. They said I was trying to kill her, but I wasn't. I wasn't.” Patricia is crying, running her fingers through her blonde hair and pacing frantically. The DeadBorn behind her are getting riled up and I'm worried that they're going to somehow break free of the magic and come charging at us. “When I told them the truth, they locked me up and I've been there ever since.” Patricia smiles and it isn't a happy smile, it's a crazy one. “My parents, your grandparents, they encouraged it and fed them lies and paid so much money to keep me there, so, so, so much money.” Patricia pauses and looks over the half-wall that separates the stairs from the rest of the room. “He never came for me, you know, your father.” Holly takes a step forward and squeezes her fists by her sides. I reach out a hand and place it on her shoulder as a gentle reminder to stay calm. She absolutely needs to stay in control of herself, of this whole, horrible situation, if we want to get out of it alive.

  “My father was Bart Arget,” Holly declares and her voice is strong but transparent. I can hear the hurt there and so can Patricia
, but then, that's what Holly wants. “And my mother was Kelsie Arget. You, you're nothing to me. You could've been, you really could've, but now, what am I supposed to think of you when you've done nothing but hurt me and the people I love?” Patricia turns around slowly and meets Holly's eyes. Again, that whisper of magic fills the room and brushes over my skin, hot and barely contained.

  “It's awake in you now, this same power,” Patricia tells Holly matter-of-factly. “You're going to need my help with it. You don't want to struggle through it like I did.” She smiles and shakes her head. “You don't want to make the same mistakes, do you? Do you think I intended things to get this far?”

  “I know you say you didn't,” Holly tells her. “But now that I've met you, I think otherwise. I think you were mad at the world and you got exactly what you wanted.”

  “Do you?” Patricia asks and I'm afraid she's starting to get angry. If Holly pisses her off, she could kill us all, just like that. The only thing that's keeping us alive right now is the fact that she wants Holly to like her, wants them to be a family. “Do you really think I would want my grandchild to grow up in a world like this? If I could, I'd take it all back, Holly, Olly, Olly.”

  “What the fuck are you talking about?” Holly snarls at the same moment that the unborn wakes up and starts to chant that horrible nickname over and over and over. Patricia smiles nice and big and opens her arms like a bird spreading its wings, folds of fabric dripping to the floor in ebony heaps.

  “You're pregnant, darling,” she tells Holly and my stomach drops to the floor, making the room spin wildly in circles around me. I put both of my hands out and grab onto Holly's shoulders. She doesn't sway, not even a little, doesn't even really seem all that shocked by it. When? I wonder. It couldn't be from today or yesterday and we'd only done it twice before that. The second time was with a condom, but the first time …