"Was it really paradise?"
She thought about it. "No."
"Oh."
"It made me realize that there's really no magical place out there that's going to fix all of your problems."
He ran this through his mind. "So then... the real paradise is the people you love."
She felt her heart swell at how good-spirited he was and she kissed him on the forehead. "I love you, David."
"I love you too, Mom."
They hugged each other for a long time, neither one of them wanting to let go.
"Are we going to stay here?" he asked.
"I don't know. Where do you want to go?"
He thought about this for a good while, then his face shifted as if he had been struck by the most obvious answer in the world. "The townhouses."
She laughed. "The townhouses? You hated that place. Why would you want to go back?"
"Because that's where you were. That's where my family was."
About a week after Sarah and Wayne gave David the zombie virus cure, when he was fully healed and feeling up to it, the three of them took a walk outside and found their way into a city park. The grass was all wildly overgrown, but Sarah had never seen someone more thrilled to play in it as she watched David experience his first joy since his terrible tragedy.
After a fun day, the three of them lay down on a grassy hill by a bushy oak tree and stared off into the distance.
Eventually, David's eyes lit up. "There's one!" he said, pointing.
Across the park, a single zombie wandered through. It was the latest type of zombie that Jack Glass had unleashed upon the world, but it moved a lot more slowly, seemed a lot more docile. David using his powers to reach out to all the zombies' very cells, urging them to calm down, seemed to have had a profound effect. But they were still dangerous, and it wouldn't be safe to be around them until the cure had been spread to all of humanity.
"How do we give it to them?" David asked.
Wayne took out the large vial with the cure in it and a syringe, and he handed them to Sarah.
"We have to inject it with a needle," she told him.
"Isn't it... dangerous?"
"Think you can help me with that?" she asked.
"I think so."
He studied the zombie for a moment, then he closed his eyes and concentrated.
The zombie's head perked up suddenly and stopped, then slowly turned to face the three of them. He trotted over, its eyes blank and staring forward. Sarah didn't worry about anything, because she knew David had it under control. When the zombie reached them, it stopped, and she let David hold it still as she administered the shot.
It wasn't hard to find a vein on its withered body, and soon enough she had extracted some of the cure from the vial and injected it into the zombie's bloodstream.
Sarah returned to her spot on the hill next to her son and Wayne. "All right, all done," she said. "Can you move it back to the middle of the field?"
David kept his eyes closed.
The zombie spun around and trotted out a little distance from them. And David relaxed and the zombie resumed its normal movements. But then after making its way through the grass a little more, it turned its head and noticed the three of them lying there. It immediately started to approach, but then when it got halfway to them, it faltered. The zombie twitched a little and then suddenly as it stared at them, it seemed to have no more interest, instead turning and heading off toward the road at the edge of the park.
Sarah and David looked over and saw the zombie heading for another one far off in the distance.
She squeezed Wayne's hand and he smiled, then she tussled David's hair.
Her gaze returned back to the zombie she'd injected, and she realized that while David had been the first zombie to be turned back into a human, this one traveling across the field would be the progenitor that started the chain reaction, ultimately bringing about the salvation of all mankind.
Sarah watched the zombie go and wondered if he would ever know that fact. Then she imagined having a barbecue with him and his wife in the new world and having her kids play with his kids. She wondered what his name was, and what he was going to do after this.
All these thoughts created a funny feeling in her. They brought her all the way back to when she and David first set off on their adventure. He reminded her of the struggles she'd had back then, trying to find a shred of hope in this dark world. But even in her times of greatest darkness on their journey, her son kept her going because he taught her a very valuable lesson: he taught her about hope and how powerful it was. Hope had gotten her to Noah's Ark, even though it didn't turn out the way she wanted it to. And as strange as it was, through all the equally dark times she faced after that and the hell that she'd been put through, without hope, she wouldn't have been lying on this grassy hill with the two most important people in her life. If she had stayed in those townhouses—stayed trapped within herself—she never would have learned and never would have grown. All of life required faith in something greater than one's self, and sometimes that was faith in God for some people, faith in one's own inner strength for others, or just simply faith in the hope that everything would turn out okay, no matter what. To her, she finally realized that they were all one and the same.
As Sarah lay on the itchy grass under the warm rays of a hot summer's day with David and Wayne by her side and the whole world in front of them, she chose to always have hope. No matter what.
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About the Author
Jeff DeGordick is a horror and post-apocalyptic novelist currently living in southern Ontario, Canada with his wife Victoria. Writing stories was his first passion as a child, but he's also had forays into testing and designing video games for a living, and a very brief career as a cook.
He began writing in 1994 at age seven, embarking on a long journey of spinning strange and sometimes gruesome tales, penning many short stories and partial novels as a hobby.
He is the author of the Zombie Apocalypse Series as well as a ghost and haunted house author.
Zombie Apocalypse Series Box Set, Vol. 2 [Books 4-7] Page 81
