by Ben Tripp
Danny’s mind was whirling. There was so much to say, so many things jumbled in her head. She wanted to hear more of that familiar voice coming from the thin, strong woman who looked so much like the girl who had run away, but was also someone else—someone entirely her own.
“It’s good to see you,” Kelley said, as they drove along the narrow two-lane road away from town. The tall grass on either side of them, pale and yellow, had been crops, in past years. Now it was prairie again. Genetically modified corn couldn’t compete with sturdy grass.
“Do you mind if I don’t explain?” Kelley continued. “What happened back in Forest Peak, I mean.”
“Just talk about what you want,” Danny said. “It’s all past now.” Grief was pulling her chest apart and cramming it into her throat.
Kelley smiled a little. “Let’s skip the ancient history, then. You need to know what happened back there in town. They’re smart, Danny. And fast.”
“Yeah,” Danny said. “Like wolves.”
“No—like men,” Kelley said. She had to stop for breath. There was a strip of gingham fabric bound around Kelley’s wrist. It was bleeding through, right where a wristwatch should be. Her skin already had the pallor of the infected, as if she were turning slowly into limestone.
“Like men,” she said again. “They shot at us, Danny. They came after us with weapons…and they could talk.”
“They weren’t zeros, then. They were cannibals.”
“Not with black blood.” Danny heard in Kelley’s reply the old, exasperated tone of voice she’d heard so many times before. Big sister, why don’t you listen? Danny remembered trying to convince Magnussen of the more able zombies, back during her stint in San Francisco, and how frustrated she became when that woman wouldn’t listen. She understood part of what it was like to be Kelley. The recognition fell into place in a moment, without articulate thought.
“I believe you,” Danny said. “I’m listening.” These were words her sister had wanted to hear for many years of her short life. Kelley continued, pausing now and then for breath, sinking slowly.
“They’re like us, Danny. We never saw anything like it. They got us good. Killed a bunch of people. A few day back—“
“I know,” Danny said. “I saw the marker.”
Kelley nodded. “It was horrible. You gotta get away from the cities, Danny. This is new. It’s made another evolution. A quantum leap. We’re in a whole new kind of trouble.”
She paused, then smiled and focused her glassy eyes on Danny. “You are, anyway. My troubles—You know. I’m almost out of troubles.”
As they drove, Kelley told Danny more about the attack, the dynamics of it. It was important, but Danny didn’t care. She would use the information later. Now she was concentrating on the sound of her sister’s voice. Memorizing it, the way she memorized The Note.
She had to remember this, all of this, because it was all she was going to get. Kelley told her then about how she had been bitten in the midst of hand-to-hand combat with the undead, and she remarked on the irony of Danny’s timing. Not that things wouldn’t have happened the way they did, anyway.
“You could make up ‘what if’ scenarios all day long and it would never make any difference,” Kelley said, and paused for breath. “There’s only what is,” she concluded.
Despite her aching heart, Danny smiled. She had spent the better part of a year making up “what if” scenarios. Her sister, meanwhile, had become philosophical in her old age.
They came to a farmhouse set back a little way from the road behind a couple of fields. Danny didn’t bother with recon. She pulled up in the yard and helped Kelley out of the car and Kelley used the shotgun as a crutch while Danny broke in through the front door. The house had the stagnant atmosphere of abandonment. If there were zeros here, they would be dealt with.
For now, she made a fire in the dining room fireplace, breaking the chairs into kindling. Kelley sat in a dingy green velvet wing chair Danny dragged in from the living room. Danny put some bottled water to Kelley’s lips, and her sister drank some and the rest ran down her chin. There was nothing else to do. Kelley rested her head against one of the wings.
“You know the choice about dying,” Kelley said. “I decided to show I had the stones to do it myself. But when the others left me there, I couldn’t. Five minutes before you showed up, I was trying to talk myself into it. Had the gun to my head. I think I could do it now, though.”
“Do I bore you that bad?” Danny said, aiming for a joke. It evaporated in the air.
“You’re pretty famous,” Kelley said. “People have heard of you. I tell ’em I’m your sister. They say you dressed up in black leather and fought the zeros at the Battle of the Bay, and got a lot of people out of San Francisco.”
Danny didn’t want to hurt her sister’s feelings—she could hear the pride in the thin, faint voice. She bent the corners of her mouth up as if smiling.
“They say you’re the one that warned them the zeros were evolving,” Kelley added. “People escaped by sea.”
So maybe some of them had gotten out, after all, Danny thought. The history was garbled, but none of that mattered. Danny knew her exploits got around, but it was only bull to keep the darkness at bay. If a few lives got saved, that was something real. Kelley fell silent and still. Danny was frightened.
“Kelley?”
“What.”
“Don’t stop talking.”
“I’m gonna have to. You know that.”
“Until then.”
Danny’s sinuses ached. Her eyeballs felt too big for their sockets. This wasn’t the same as the grief she had felt when their parents died. It was bigger, something connected to the passage of such tempestuous time. She was twice the age now. There was so much more to be atoned for.
“Maybe you’re immune,” she said. Kelley lifted her good hand an inch above the arm of the chair, the closest she could get to a dismissive gesture.
“Don’t go there.”
“So,” Danny said, trying to think of what they needed to catch up on before they parted ways. “Uh, you had the same boyfriend this whole time. Barry. Did you guys—I mean were you in love?”
“Nah. It was good to know somebody, though.”
“And this whole time you traveled with the Rovers?”
“After they formed up. We were with some people before that. You know, just fighting and staying awake. I’m so tired now. I could really sleep.”
“Sleep later,” Danny said.
Kelley didn’t answer. Danny felt the panic come back. She was kneeling in front of Kelley, now, watching. The gun was in Kelley’s lap. It slipped and Danny tried to catch it, but with her left hand. The gun bounced off her truncated palm and hit the floor. Kelley opened her eyes again.
“Danny?” she said.
“I’m right here,” Danny said. Kelley’s eyes drifted around and found her.
“It’s getting dark.”
“I’m right here with you.”
It was afternoon. The sun came through the windows at a low angle, reaching from the front of the house into the back, the light creamy with dust motes. It would be getting dark soon, but Kelley was staring into a different kind of darkness.
There were so many things Danny wanted to say, but as always, when it mattered, she couldn’t figure out how to assemble the words. She held Kelley’s unbitten hand in her own hand and tried to squeeze some warmth into the icy fingers. All she wanted was a single sentence to come together so she could say everything she felt to Kelley, some way to express her gratitude and sorrow and love. Her mind was racing. She had to think of the words. All her skill at coming up with plans and stratagems on the fly, reacting like lightning no matter what happened, and here she couldn’t come up with a simple statement that folded all the important things up into a small bundle Kelley could take with her when she went away. Then it occurred to her. It was so obvious she hadn’t thought of it.
“I love you,” she said.
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br /> But Kelley was already gone.
Danny picked up the gun. She felt for a pulse. There was none. No breath escaped the lips. Kelley was dead, and the thought, always present, hit Danny with new force because at last it was true. Danny fell back on her haunches and looked up at her sister’s corpse, face slack, head tipped into the corner of the chair as if Kelley had only fallen asleep in the car with her head against the backseat window, the way she often did when she was a small girl. She had fallen asleep like that when they drove down to the go-kart place in the flatlands for Kelley’s birthday. She had graduated to the front seat by then. Danny wished she could take her sister somewhere again. She wished everything, more wishes than fishes, more wishes than stars, as their mother had said, an eternity ago in a different world. The wishes collapsed into tears and Danny fell forward and sobbed in her sister’s lap, a lifetime of scalding, unshed tears pouring from her eyes.
But there was no time for grieving anymore. It was that kind of world. Danny scrubbed her face on her sleeve, smearing the wet from her eyes and nose. The first of the three choices had already passed; Kelley lived until she died. Danny could shoot her sister’s corpse in the head while she was still in the brief, blessed death-between, or she could wait until reanimation.
Danny thought it would be best if she pulled the trigger on the lifeless shell, rather than executing the alien, deadly thing her sister would become. It was time. She cocked the gun with her stump-hand and looked up once more at her sister.
Too late, said the voice in Danny’s head.
Always too late.
The second choice had also passed. That leaden look had come to the flesh. The undead eyes opened, murky and dull. They wandered, then located Danny and fixed upon her. Danny raised the pistol and placed it up under her sister’s chin. Kelley’s slate-gray lips parted.
And spoke.
“I’m still me,” she whispered.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Nobody writes alone. I owe many thanks to many people. Here are a few of them.
My editor, Ed Schlesinger, is an easy one. He makes me think I know what I’m doing. My wife, Corinne Marrinan, who knows the difference between the weeds and the wanted is just a matter of care. The Aged Crone—you know who you are. Rich Procter. Steven Iammarino. J.M. Finholt. My many writer friends, who make writing seem almost respectable. Assorted members of the LAPD and LVPD. The professional firefighters of Altadena, California. The rest of you I’ll thank in person.
Finally, no work in the realm of zombies can exist without the pioneering efforts of the prophet George Romero, who warned us: we spend our lives and treasure fearing the other, when the enemy, after all, is ourselves.
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