A Strange and Savage Garden
Page 10
Each day before going out, she told herself that if she spotted one of them she wouldn’t hesitate to shoot. She wouldn’t be killing them; she’d be setting them free. It would be a mercy, a last act of love from a family member. And she believed that, she really did.
So why couldn’t she pull the trigger?
David wasn’t just her brother. He was her twin. Fraternal, of course, but from the day they were born, they’d shared a bond just as deep as if they had been identical. But that should’ve made it even easier to shoot, shouldn’t it? If their positions were reversed, she’d want David to put a bullet into her brain, and she was certain that was what he’d want her to do for him.
Still, she hesitated.
David stood there, blood smearing his mouth and chin from the squirrel he’d bitten into. Blood on his hands from where he’d torn the animal in two in order to share it with the other zombie—and wasn’t she having a hell of a time wrapping her head around that? She’d never seen a zombie do anything like it before. With them, it was every dead man for himself. He still held on to his half of the squirrel, the back end, she noted with a twist of nausea, tiny entrails dangling from it. He held the nasty thing down at his side, momentarily distracted by the sound of her gunshot, Kate guessed—but not so distracted that he would let go of his grisly little treat. Once zombies got hold of food, they didn’t release it. Not willingly, anyway.
She was surprised by how much he still looked like the David she remembered. His clothes were filthy, covered with old bloodstains, dirt and mud. If she hadn’t known that he always wore a light-blue, short-sleeved shirt to work and navy-blue pants, she would’ve been hard-pressed to guess their original colors. He also always wore comfortable black work shoes, the kind with thick soft-rubber soles for people who were on their feet a lot. He’d lost one of them along the way somewhere, the right one. The black sock on that foot had been worn through some time ago, and its remains hung in tatters around his ankle, leaving his foot exposed. His brown hair hung tangled and matted down to his shoulders, and his face was covered with patchy stubble. Once someone became a zombie, their hair continued to grow for a couple months, although the rate of hair growth eventually slowed and finally stopped altogether. Facial hair ceased growing even faster, usually after only a week or two. She had no idea why. She wondered if there was anyone left alive in the world that did know or—for that matter—cared.
His skin was leathery, his complexion sallow, eyes cataract milky. He stood awkwardly, left shoulder higher than his right, head canted to the side, left foot turned slightly inward. She wondered if he’d been injured sometime during the last six months. Zombies weren’t alive, but they weren’t exactly dead, either. As far as Kate knew, there wasn’t a word for what they were. They ate, they breathed—although infrequently—and they even excreted. They also healed, if slowly and at times imperfectly. She wondered if that’s why David carried himself the way he did.
But for all the terrible changes Blacktide had wrought in her brother, he still looked like David to her. More, he felt like David. And even though she desperately wanted to do her duty to him as his sister, as the last living family member he had in the world, she could not bring herself to shoot him.
The entire time she had been struggling with her feelings, David had merely stood and looked at her, his face expressionless, eyes cloudy, dead and dull. She wondered what he saw when he looked at her and what, if anything, he thought or felt.
On impulse, she reached out to him with her mind.
“David? Are you in there?”
David stood frozen in shock, unable to believe what had just happened. Up to this point, the most serious injury he had ever witnessed in person was when an old man had slipped on a patch of ice outside of Walmart one winter. The man had broken his hip, and David still remembered the horrible snapping sound and the man’s scream as he hit the ground. He’d called 911 and waited with the man, talking with him to keep him calm until the paramedics arrived. But this…this was in a whole different league. Hell, a whole different galaxy. This was the Super Bowl…no, the goddamned Olympics of physical injuries. The woman’s head had exploded right in front of him, like someone had stuck a firecracker inside of a melon filled with red juice and meaty pulp.
But that wasn’t the worst of it. Far worse was the thing that had killed her.
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Samhain Publishing, Ltd.
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A Strange and Savage Garden
Copyright © 2014 by Tim Waggoner
ISBN: 978-1-61922-033-1
Edited by Don D’Auria
Cover by Scott Carpenter
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First Samhain Publishing, Ltd. electronic publication: October 2014
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