The Living Dead 2

Sarah Langan is a three-time winner of the Bram Stoker Award. She is the author of the novels The Keeper and The Missing, and her most recent novel, Audrey’s Door, won the 2009 Stoker for best novel. Her short fiction has appeared in the magazines Cemetery Dance, Phantom, and Chiaroscuro, and in the anthologies Darkness on the Edge and Unspeakable Horror. She is currently working on a post-apocalyptic young adult series called Kids and two adult novels: Empty Houses, which was inspired by The Twilight Zone, and My Father’s Ghost, which was inspired by Hamlet.

Benjamin Franklin said, “Fish and houseguests start to stink after three days.” It can really be a strain, sharing your living space with another person, and so the decision to have a child is one of the biggest gambles a person can take-you’re essentially inviting a complete stranger to come live with you for a few decades and to be a major part of your life until you die. Most of the time it works out pretty well, at least we like to think so, but there are exceptions-children who are desperately unhappy no matter what you try to do for them, who run away, or get mixed up in crime. Parents torment themselves over how they should handle situations like this-Do you draw the line somewhere? Try to enforce strict discipline or maybe ship your child off to a prison-like reform school? Or do you provide unconditional love and support and hope that somehow they find their way in the world? Sometimes nothing you do seems to work.

Our final story tells of a parent who was in just such a predicament, and who is trying to reach his wayward daughter in the wake of a zombie apocalypse. He knows that his daughter is not the child he might have wished for, but he loves her nevertheless and is willing to do anything to protect her. Or at least…almost anything. After all, the world can be a terrifying place, a place full of monsters.

I. He Gets Bit

The midday sun slaps Conrad Wilcox’s shoulders and softens the blacktop highway so that his shoes sink just slightly. It’s a wide road with a middle island upon which Magnolias bloom. Along the sides of the street are parked or crashed cars, most of them rusted. He’s got three more miles to go, and then, if his map is correct, a left on Emancipation Place. Two more miles after that, and he’ll reach whatever’s left of the Louisiana State Correctional Facility for women. He’ll reach Delia.

Along the highway-side grass embankment lies a green traffic sign that has broken free from its metal post. It reads:

Welcome to Baton Rouge-Authentic Louisiana at Every Turn!

And under that, in scripted spray-paint:

Plague Zone- Keep Out!

Conrad wipes his brow with the back of an age-spot-dappled hand and keeps walking. He’s come nearly two thousand miles, and he buried his fear back in Tom’s River, along with the bodies. In fear’s place came hysteria, followed by paralysis, depression, the urge to do self-harm, and, finally, the enduring numbness with which he has sustained his survival. But so close to the end, his numbness cracks like an external skeleton. His chest and groin feel exposed, as if they’ve loosened from their bony cradles, and are about to fall out.

“I’m almost there, Gladdy,” he says. “You’d better be watching. You’d better help me figure out what to do when the time comes, you old cow.”

“I am.” He answers himself in a fussy, high-pitched voice, then adds, “Don’t call me a cow.”

Another quarter-mile past the city limits brings him to a kudzu-covered 7-Eleven. It’s the first shop since the Hess Station in Howell that doesn’t look bombed out or looted. “Water. Here we go, Connie,” he mumbles in that same, wrong-sounding voice. “See? It’s all going to turn out great!”

He shuffles toward the storefront on a bent back and spry, skinny limbs, so that the overhead view of him appears crablike. He is sixty-two years old, but could pass for eighty.

His reflection, a grizzled wretch with a concave chest and hollowed eyes, moves slowly in the jagged storefront glass, but everything else is still. No crickets chirp. No children scream. It’s too quiet. He grabs his holster-empty-and remembers that he lost his gun to the bottom of the Mississippi River two days ago, and has been without water and food ever since.

“This looks like Capital T trouble. Right here in River City,” he says in the high-pitched voice. It belongs to his wife Gladys. He’s so lonely out here that he’s invented her ghost. “Keep walking, Connie.”

He knows she’s right, but he’s so thirsty that his tongue has swollen inside his mouth, and if he doesn’t find water soon, he’ll collapse. So he sighs, angles himself between the shards of broken doorway glass, and enters the 7-Eleven.

It’s small-two narrow aisles flanked by an enclosed counter up front. Dust blankets the stock like pristine brown snow. A morbidly obese woman with a balding black widow’s peak and chipped purple nail polish stands behind the counter, holding a bloodied issue of The Enquirer. “Zombies rise up from Baton Rouge Ghetto!” the lead article screams.

“Hi,” Connie says.

The woman drops the magazine and bobbles in his direction. Something has eaten most of her abdomen and in the weeks or months since her death, the wet climate has not dried her out, but instead made a moldy home of her. He pictures lizards, crickets, even unborn children flying out from her gaping hole. Her apron, which presumably once read, “Thank Heaven for 7-Eleven!” now reads: “Heaven-Eleven!”

“Are you trying to tell me this is heaven?” Conrad asks.

She lunges at him and the force of her weight against the three-foot-high counter opens her stomach, spraying the shrunken Big Bite Hot Dogs’ spit glass and Enquirer with gangrenous green fluid.

“Sorry. I didn’t mean to tease you,” he grunts as he wipes his face and pitches toward the darkened glass refrigerators in the back.

Behind him, Heaven figures it out and climbs the counter, then falls to the floor and crawls after him on a leaking stomach.

Conrad tries to pick up his pace, but he’s so dehydrated that his heart is a trapped bird in his chest, fluttering and in pain.

Do zombies eat cold meat? Do they dream of electric sheep?

“Shut up about the poor, innocent zombies and find the water, Con!” he hisses, only he’s too tired to use Gladys’ voice, so now it’s just him, talking to himself, which strikes him as sort of sad.

Behind, Heaven pushes herself to her feet. Her lips spread into a grin, and then keep spreading until they split open. The heat has turned her blood to thick soup that doesn’t run.

He hurries, but his heart’s not in it. Literally. It’s pumping spastically, as if to Muzak-his wedding song forty years ago:

With all of your faults, I love you still. It had to be you!

Lovely young Heaven lunges and swipes at him. He reaches the refrigerator, whose shelves are lined with new world gold, and lifts a gallon-sized container of Poland Spring Water. Though Heaven’s gaining, he chugs for one second… two… three… as he rounds the second aisle and doubles back toward the exit.

Just then, something cracks. “What the-?” he asks.

Glass skids like sand under Heaven’s feet. To his shock, she isn’t shambling anymore; she’s running. Bad luck. Runners are rare.

“Hurry up, Con,” he pants, but he’s rooted there for a second, water in hand, as her voluminous flesh bounces and thuds. He’s wondering if maybe this is the second coming and he got left behind, because Heaven’s lips have split length-wise like a hag’s clit, and inside, all her teeth are gold.

She dives, fast this time. He doesn’t know she’s got hold of his denim jacket until she reels him into a festering embrace. She’s strong and tall-his toes don’t even touch the floor, so he uses her body as a hinge and kicks up as hard as he can. His knees slop against her chest, hooking gristle as something cracks (her ribs? her hardened kidneys?), and she drops him.

Back muscles screaming like cop sirens, he dives over the counter. His hands find the twelve-gauge on the shelf beneath the cash register, and he reaches over and presses it against Heaven’s ugly face before his physical mind ever recognizes that it’s a gun.

“I’m sorry, Heaven” he intends to say as he squeezes the trigger. But instead, Freudian slip: “I’m sorry, Delia.”

The mention of his daughter’s name trips him up. He hesitates as he shoots, and by luck or intention, she knocks the gun out of the way. He hears the sound of shattering glass, but doesn’t see what the slug hit. All he can see is Heaven as she sinks her gold teeth into his shoulder, down to the bone.

There’s no time to think. He reaches inside her open belly with both hands and pulls her spine until it cracks. She hugs him tighter and then lets go, falling backward and in half.

“I loved you where the ocean met the sky,” he tells the thing named Heaven, though he does not hear himself say those strange words. She blinks, only her eyelids aren’t long enough to cover her rot-bloated eyes. So she watches him, perhaps seeing nothing, perhaps seeing everything, as he pulls the trigger and her head explodes.

When he’s finished, he stands over her remains while his shoulder bleeds and infection worms its way through his heart and into his frontal lobe. “I’m sorry, Delia,” he tells her, “for that bloodlust. For Adam, and not testifying. For not believing you that time you called. Especially for that. I’m sorry for everything,” he says. Then he staggers out, a damned man down a long, lonely road that is almost over, toward Delia.

II. How Rosie Perez Foretold the End

Some blamed cockroach feces. Others, the hand of God. Whatever it was, nobody who got the virus survived. It attacked the immune system first, then it devoured the entire frontal lobe. The sick forgot who they were or how to walk, and eventually, how to breathe. After they died, the virus worked its way into the hindbrain’s instinct center, and kept eating. Then something funny happened. They woke up, only this time, the virus was in charge, and it was hungry.

Fox News broke the story on April 1, 2020. At first, everybody thought it was a joke: the dead rising from embalming and autopsy tables, sick beds, basement bedrooms. They spread the blood-borne disease with their bites. It started in Baton Rouge, but quickly spread to all of Louisiana. Overnight, hospitals throughout the south were full. A week later, national radio signals and satellites were offline. Two weeks after that, the army disbanded and went rogue. By Easter, America had dissolved.

Conrad had only been walking for three months since the world ended, but it felt like years. He didn’t like to think about the old days. They were bittersweet.

When his wife got pregnant with Delia more than twenty years ago, Gladys had called the child a gift from God. After three miscarriages, two years of fertility treatments, and, finally, experimental blood transfusions, they’d almost given up hope. “She’s the best thing we could have hoped for,” Gladys said the day she arrived at the hospital, and for once, cynical Conrad had agreed: Delia Christen Wilcox was perfect.

Smart, pretty, full of giggles. They’d doted, indulged, hugged, and kissed until their hearts had overfilled, broken, and grown back larger and more accommodating. And she’d taken. And kept taking. It had started at her mother’s tit, which she’d suckled too hard and drawn blood. Then the bigger things: backyard swing-set, horseback riding lessons, her own room, a lock on her door, hand-sewn boutique clothes, ski vacations, all-night curfews, and finally, the silver and crystal, and even their flat screen television.

Drugs, they’d guessed, though they’d never known for sure. After their dog Barkley went missing, Conrad had imagined it was something much worse. Bloodier. Probably, one of them should have asked.

She moved out at sixteen and began couch surfing at boyfriends’ houses. “Back surfing,” he’d once called it, for which the kid had slapped him. He’d slapped her right back. Then she’d bit his arm hard enough to draw blood.

There were more shenanigans. The house got broken into. The Dodge stolen. Some fool named Butter had called them at all hours, asking for his “Sweet Momma.” They instituted a curfew when the high school kids at Tom’s River started turning up dead, but she’d climbed out the window and come waltzing back at dawn. Then she went missing entirely, and though both of them had imagined this absence in their darkest moments and assumed it would bring relief, it only ushered more misery. Was she cold, frightened, alone? Did she need them, only she was ashamed to ask?

Two years later, they got the call from a special victims unit detective in Louisiana-Delia had been arrested for the human trafficking of her own child.

He’d learned but had promptly forgotten the particulars: A son named Adam born a year after she left home, a kiddie-porn ring, a trannie boyfriend who’d kept her high and happy, a $1000 payoff for her infant son. It amounted to less than the going rate for any of the boy’s individual organs on the black market, as if the living child as a whole was worth less than the sum of his parts.

Though he considered it, in the end Conrad decided not to testify in his daughter’s defense. She was sentenced to eight years at the Louisiana Women’s Correctional Facility. He never visited. She never wrote. He and Gladys legally adopted Adam. They gave away Delia’s pretty things and painted her old room blue. Adam never learned to attach significance to the word mother, and for this they considered themselves lucky.

“It’s like she’s dead,” Gladys once said. Behind her, the section of wall where Delia’s picture once hung had appeared especially white.

“It’s not like she’s dead,” Conrad replied. “It’s like she was never born.”

After some time, they got used to the boy. They cherished his coos, and the way he cried out with glee when he woke from naps, so happy, once again, to find them waiting. This second time around the scale tilted in the opposite direction, and they did not spare the rod. For this they were rewarded with an obedient, if less spirited child.

Trouble came when the boy turned five. It started with the fevers. When the welts appeared, the specialists diagnosed him with viral meningitis. He’d gotten it, the best anyone could figure, from an act of sodomy while under his mother’s care. This was also how he’d gotten the syphilis.

Conrad and Gladys sold everything Delia had not stolen, from the diamond ring to the Belgian lace linens. When insurance wouldn’t cover the experimental spinal filtration, they mortgaged their house. Little Adam lived in the Columbia-Presbyterian Intensive Care Unit, and as much as they could, they lived there, too.

Two months later, they saw firsthand in the hospital what the virus did to its victims. They survived somehow, in the way that people meant to live through every kind of misery always do. To his own surprise, Conrad got cold blooded. He bashed two infecteds’ heads with an IV pole while Gladys pulled the tubing from Adam’s wrists, and together they ran. Most others, from the administrators to the doctors, surrendered with open hands and horrified expressions. Fighting meant believing, and they hadn’t been ready for that. But by then Conrad’s daughter was a jailbird junkie, his grandson’s skin too tender to touch, and his wife a new-age Jesus freak, praying for the health of her lost family, so what the fuck did a few zombies matter?

He and Gladys took the boy back home to Tom’s River, where he wheezed his final breaths in their arms. Throughout, Adam wore this betrayed expression on his face, like he’d died under the misapprehension that Conrad was God and could have cured him, but had chosen otherwise, to teach him a lesson.

Outside their manicured split-level ranch, sirens blasted. Carnage littered the streets. Inexplicably, his walking buddy Dale Crowther, slick with soap, ran naked down Princeton Road. But the animated dead stuck to old routines, and in the suburbs nobody visits their neighbors, so Conrad dug the shallow grave in the backyard next to the family dog’s bones unperturbed.

On the television the next night, they learned that the research institutes were close to a cure. With Martial Law declared and Civil Rights rescinded, the CDC had turned the southern prisons into laboratories, and begun experimenting on convicts. In thick Brooklyn-ese, Rosie Perez, the fill-in WPIX news anchor, announced that the government had discovered a twenty-three-year-old convict who was immune.

“Isn’t that the lady from the lottery movie?” Gladys asked. Conrad shushed her by putting his hand over her mouth, and they’d sat erect and tense as metal tuning forks while a still photo of their daughter had illuminated the television. She’d looked younger and more pissed off than he’d expected.

“They shot her full of the virus and she’s not sick?” Gladys whispered. “Thank the Great Buddha. My baby, I love you so much. Momma loves you,” she told the angry woman on the glowing screen while Conrad inspected his hands, because the sight of his wife’s tears, when he was helpless to console her, was intolerable.

Then Rosie returned, and spoke off teleprompter. “So, basically, we’re killing a buncha prisoners even though there’s like, a million zombies out there we could capture and test instead. So if this Delia Wilcox winds up curing everybody, then I guess it was worth it. But if she doesn’t…” Rosie had looked directly into the camera, through the screen, at Conrad, and he’d felt like someone who’s done wrong, and been caught.

“Think about it, people! They can’t see and they can’t hear but they’ll still chase you twenty miles, ’cause it’s not your skin these fuckin’ things want. This virus eats souls. That’s not gonna be me. Is it gonna be you?”

Rosie glared. Connie thought about Delia, and the dog Barkley, and that day the ocean met the sky. Then Rosie produced a gun, pressed it to the side of her head while the cameraman shouted, thought better of her strategy, placed the gun in her mouth, and fired. The program went offline.

Conrad and Gladys got close enough to press their faces to the snowy screen, just in case Delia came back. She didn’t. After a half-hour, a rerun of America’s Funniest Home Videos played. Somebody’s cheeky monkey stole a bunch of bananas from a grocery store. Then the signal went out, the television was gone, and America died, just like that.

That night, Gladys shook him awake. The bed was just a mattress on the floor-he’d broken apart the cedar frame, along with the rest of the wood furniture, and nailed it against the windows and doors. They were living on saltines and defrosted vegetables. Some days it felt like camp, but mostly it didn’t.

“I’m dying, Connie,” Gladys said.

His belly filled with cold and his heart slowed as it pumped. “You’re healthy as a cow, Gladys,” he told her, though in fact she was sweating now, her breath shallow, and he understood with increasing alarm that there was something he’d forgotten.

“It’s my heart. We’re out of the digitalis.”

“I’ll get it right now,” he answered. The digitalis-why hadn’t she reminded him?

“It’s no good, Connie,” she said, and he realized then that she hadn’t been too upset to help dig Adam’s plot: she’d been too sick. “I didn’t tell you because I didn’t want you to risk it.”

“Stop this talk,” he answered, standing now, in the dark. Orange light played through the cracks in the windows, because something out there was on fire. “I know a little high school chemistry. We’ll cook it on the kitchen stove. What’s digitalis made of?”

“No, Con. I’m on my way, and you’ve got to promise me something.”

He ran his hands along the sheets, and found that they were wet with her sweat. “I won’t promise you anything. You tricked me, you coward.”

Gladys shook her head. “Stop that, Connie. Now promise. I won’t rest peacefully knowing she’s alone. Locked up, even, with no one to remember to feed her. Remember the time with the blood? She drank it all straight out of the freezer bag. Maybe there’s a reason she ran off and it wasn’t just the drugs. We were wrong to give up on her like that. You’ve got to promise to see what’s become of her.”

He looked at his wife, whose complexion had turned orange with the fire. Over these last thirty-nine years, she’d grown wrinkled and fat and timid. He hated her whiny voice, and her old lady stink, and her sagging tits. Mostly, he hated her worthless ticker. “I’m empty, Gladys. I don’t love anything anymore. Not even you.”

She shook her head in what he would later remember as amusement. You’re married to somebody that long, you know better than to pretend like love is a fish. “Oh shut up and find her, you big baby!”

In the morning he dressed her in her comfy bathrobe and plastic-soled slippers, then cut off her head just in case, and buried her next to the boy and the dog. By noon he was gone. Walking south, toward Delia.

III. He Finds the Dog

It’s only been two hours since he left the 7-Eleven, but his water is gone and he’s thirsty again. Dusk has settled like a tall man’s shadow, and though the prison is still two miles of dark, broken road to go, he doesn’t have time to set up camp for the night, so will instead persevere.

His back went out during that last fight, so his crab-walk is exaggerated, but at least his shoulder has stopped hurting and become numb. Veins along his neck shine bright blue and green with infection, and he wonders what those little virions are eating. His defenses probably, then his memories.

That’s when he hears the howl carrying across the broken blacktop. It sounds human-a soulful lament. He thinks it must be the thrumping bass of old world music since he can’t imagine there are any survivors left who’d be so incautious as to wail.

Then again, maybe it’s his imagination. Since he got bit, he’s been hearing voices. They don’t belong to Gladys.

– Sorry I bit you, mister.

– Could you help an old altar boy, Father?

– I saw the multitudes to every side of me, and their howls were loud.

He thinks it might be a disorder of the brain. He hopes so, at least.

“Maybe you didn’t even get bit, Con,” he says in the wrong voice. Gladys’ voice. “Maybe you just imagined it, and you’re totally fine.”

“No, Gladdy. I’m losing it,” he says as a second howl interrupts him. He spots the thing in the middle of the magnolia-strewn street. A black Lab retriever. A dog! It cowers with its head between its paws.

He can’t help it. He smiles and comes to life a little. A dog! He thought they all were dead-eaten up first by the infected, and then by the survivors. He shambles faster. Grinning like an idiot. Remembers games he taught his old mutt Barkley-fetch my beer and lift Gladys’ skirt.

As he crab-walks, he passes a crawling zombie without legs, that is chewing its own flesh-

I like it because it is bitter, and because it is my heart.

– but is too decomposed to chase him.

When he gets to the pup he offers it his closed fist. Out of habit, he pulls back when he sees the thing’s chewed-up snout and bloated, white eyes. It doesn’t try to bite him, and he’s confused until he realizes that it smells his infection and knows they are kindred. So he does the dog a favor. With one hand, he takes it by the chin, and with the other he draws the butt of his shotgun and smashes it over the mutt’s skull. It whines, just like a real dog.

I loved you where the ocean met the sky, he thinks, even though your mouth was bloody. Then he keeps walking, toward Delia. By his map, he’s almost there.

IV. Bestial Creatures

He’s seen a lot of things, none of them good. In Tupelo he met a band of lunatics who sacrificed their healthiest to the infected in the hopes of pleasing God. Still, they’d been company. In Delaware he met a couple who traveled with him until they got botulism from canned Spam. How can you taste the difference? In Asheville he took pity on an old shut-in and stole a kitchen’s worth of food for her before leaving. On his way out she said, “Stay. Take care of me. You can’t really think your daughter’s still alive.” She wept as he shut the door to her small, airless basement, and it occurred to him that in the old days, he might have wasted more time trying to comfort her.

When Delia was small, he’d carried her on his shoulders from place to place, and pitied his bosses at the accounting firm, who’d considered their children’s rearing the domain of women. Now that seemed smug. Who had he been, to judge? Shit happens. You can blame yourself and God and everybody around you, but sometimes shit just happens.

Like when they went fishing, and the trout flopped in the plastic bucket filled with water. The stillness of the ocean had mesmerized him, and for a moment, he mistook nine-year-old Delia’s bloody mouth for a fever dream. But then he heard the slurping. The sun began to rise, and its color married the water to the sky. Maybe it was the blood treatments, or bad genes, or bad rearing. Maybe some people are just born wrong, and there is nothing you can do. “I love you,” he told her as he’d dumped the dead bluefish back into the water.

A few years later, Barkley turned up drained and hanging from the roof like a Christmas suckling pig. He buried the dog before Gladys ever saw how badly it was mangled.

Once, a long time ago, he got a phone call. Gladys slept through, even while he spoke in hushed tones next to her. The voice on the other line came reluctantly. “…Dad?”

“Yeah?” It had been months by then. She’d left on a Sunday afternoon while they were at church, and had taken her mother’s heirloom pearls with her.

“…I need help,” she said. “Money. I’m in trouble.”

He looked at the phone a long while, thinking. “Did you hurt somebody?”

“It’s not about that. It’s a debt. About five thousand.”

“We’re out, D. You robbed us blind and I’m not working full-time like I used to.”

“They’ll make me pay for it with my body,” she said. “And I’m pregnant, Dad.” She’d been crying, but that hadn’t meant it was true. He’d been so angry, or maybe so shocked, that he’d hung up.

Next time they heard from her was two years later, in Baton Rouge. His heart swelled like a leaking sponge when he found out she’d been telling the truth.

“Did you ever imagine she had a baby?” Gladys asked as they sat on the plane headed south, their IRAs cashed in for bail. “It’s a blessing, maybe,” she said with tearful eyes. “Little feet running around. Burping and pooping. God, I’ve missed that.”

Connie looked out the window at the clouds as they’d kissed the ocean. He thought about how, in purgatory, you relive your life over and over without ever finding resolution or redemption. The colors outside the plane had been blue ocean on blue sky, and, in between, the red of a sunset. “I had no idea,” he’d said.

V. Delia and the Start of It All

The prison is an ordinary building. The cast-iron gate surrounding it is open and rusted. It’s dark out, but with the infection threading his veins, Connie can see. He can hear, too. Already, he knows that the prison is lousy with the dead. They’re looking for things they’ve lost. Children. Love. Ambitions. Their souls.

“Maybe she wasn’t immune, and they only told people that to keep hope alive,” he says in Gladys’ voice as he comes to the end of Emancipation Place. “It’s a lie, just like everything else. Maybe she wasn’t the cure; she was the cause.”

“You’re the optimist, Glady. Not me.”

“You should shoot yourself now while you still can. I hate the idea of you turning into one of them. What if there’s a heaven, and you’re not allowed, because your soul is gone?”

He stops and looks up at the vast, brick prison whose windows are all barred. “I’ve come this far, Glady. We both know she was never right, but I can’t chicken out now,” he says, then climbs the steps to the entrance.

The lobby inside is small and long, with reception stations down the entire length of the building. He wanders first the east wing, then the west, where he passes a slender child who sways to the rhythm of the vents that pump hot, wet air. Her eyes are bloody, and out of habit, he kicks her so that she lands against the tiled hall wall. Something cracks (her femur?) but she doesn’t come after him. Only lies against the cafeteria wall like a fractured doll.

“Sorry,” he mumbles, then keeps walking.

It’s okay, she answers in his mind. Have you seen my daddy? He abandoned me.

“That’s a low blow,” he mumbles back, only maybe he doesn’t say the words. Maybe now, he and the dead understand each other.

She grins.

The holding cells are in the back of the building. About thirty in all, they border the periphery of a large, two-story room. Connie walks from cell to cell. Half are empty, the other half singly occupied by emaciated, uninfected women lying mostly in their beds. None bear Delia’s face. It seems a waste to Conrad that no one thought to set them free or feed them. In cell nine, a woman clings to the bars with locked fingers. Her front teeth are worn down to the gums from where she tried to bite her way out.

There are zombies, too, of course. They walk in aimless circles, and have spread nearly equidistant-about one per every ten square feet-like air molecules in stasis, mindless and inanimate. For the most part, they don’t notice him, though he can hear their thoughts:

I’m hungry.

I’m thirsty.

I’m lonely.

It’s so dark in here, and my love is so dry.

In the basement of the west wing, he finds the makeshift laboratory where it looks like surgeries happened in the hallways. He sees the IV trees, monitors, and needles that remind him of Adam. It occurs to him that he and Gladys never asked Delia if she wanted the child. Instead they took him, then abandoned her as if she were junk. In admitting his own fault, it’s easier to admit the greater truth: she murdered the fish, and Barkley, and those high school kids, too. She was born with a bloodlust.

In the basement, he finds the rest of the prisoners chained to gurneys. They must have been injected with the virus, because their heads are cleanly sawed away.

A doctor and nurse, both infected, wander the aisles, forever trapped in their roles of sick and, well, prisoner and captive. They seem to believe they are ministering comfort as they check lifeless wrists for pulses.

“Delia!” he shouts. They look at him for a moment, then return to their work. If she is alive, and I find her, I will be happy, he thinks. Even if she has not changed, I will take comfort from finishing this journey, and be fulfilled.

“Delia!” he cries. Like his joints, his throat is beginning to lock.

Just then, a tiny, faraway voice shouts back: “Here!”

It’s been years since he’s seen her, but her voice transcends time. It is imprinted upon him and dwells in the reptile part of his brain that even the virus cannot devour. His body moves, almost of its own volition. Not even his back hurts anymore. He is entirely numb.

“Delia!”

In reply is that same hesitation from years ago, when she called late at night while Gladys slept. He’s run that moment over in his mind every day since, and recognizes now that her hesitation was shame. It was always shame.

“…Dad?”

He’s racing on stiff, rigor mortis legs, while his favorite memories, long forgotten, surface: the night she stayed home from a party to play chess with him; the poster of dogs playing poker in her bedroom that he never took down, even after Adam moved in; the color red, that he has forever associated with Delia, his perfect child, who was born with a taste for blood. These memories surface like exploding stars, and then just as quickly, disappear. He tries to catch them, but they are mist. By the time he reaches the lower level of the basement, he is aware only of their loss, and not what they contained.

“Delia!” He cries, and now he can’t remember-is he chasing her ghost, or the actual girl?

“Dad, I’m here. In the bomb shelter!” she answers.

He shambles, standing tall now, past the walking dead National Guard and orderlies and reporters, through the second examination room, where the rest of the headless prisoners lay, and toward the back stairs that lead farther down. His muscles tear and creak as he descends. He unlocks another door to another wide room, where there are no zombies. Just a single cell in the center of the room. Several bodies lay half inside the bars, their legs and chests chewed down to the bones. He looks up, and there is Delia, red-cheeked and glowing, peering out from her cage.

“Dad,” she says.

He doesn’t remember her name, and her young, vigorous face doesn’t look familiar, but he knows her, and he loves her like red dawn. He walks stiff-legged to the bars. She’s crying. The sound is both terrible and beauteous.

There are voices, many voices, whispering words of nonsense.

I’m hungry.

I’m lonely.

It’s so dark.

Nine hundred ninety-nine times out of a thousand, my master will lie.

And then, through all that, so softly he can barely hear it: Connie, promise me. She’s all we’ve got.

The woman is small and sharp-featured with a round belly. Though he has no evidence or memory, he knows she is his daughter. “You’re immune?” he asks.

“Sort of,” she says. She can’t look him in the eyes.

“Why didn’t they make a vaccine?”

She shakes her head. He waits for more. She doesn’t ask about the boy, Adam. He doesn’t remember the name or what the word represents. He only knows he’s disappointed, like always. And she’s ashamed, like always. And the chasm between their two distinct natures is red.

“I got bit,” he tells her. “Where are the keys? I better get you out so you can run away.”

She nods her head at the key ring about twenty feet away and he retrieves it. There is only one key, and it occurs to him that to put her here, they must have thought she was very dangerous.

“Don’t worry about me,” she says. “I can’t get what you have.”

Something clicks inside him. The part that knew this all along. The part that came all this way because it knew, and needed to finish what it had started.

He comes closer. In one hand, he’s got the shotgun. In the other, the key. He feels himself nodding off. He thinks about the ocean and the sky, and the time they went fishing at dawn, and how she told him she loved him, too.

And then there is Gladys, looking down on them both with the baby in her arms like the Virgin Mary.

“Why are you immune?” he asks.

She points to the back of her cell. He notices that the structures he’d first imagined as furniture are bones. She has fashioned a chair, a bed. The rest are piled and polished like shiny rocks. He realizes why this room is free of zombies. Little is left, save their bones. “I feed on their blood. Any blood. It keeps me young. But you knew that.”

He nods, but doesn’t answer, because he has lost the words. He is losing himself, one brain cell at a time.

She licks her lips, and he sees that she’s less happy to see him than hungry. But this is the nature of parents and children. The former give, the latter take. “The key, Dad?” she asks.

It feels sharp in his hand. He remembers those missing high school kids, and after that, the junkies’ bodies he read about in the paper that had been drained of blood. No wonder she developed a taste for heroin.

“The virus came from me,” she says. “I bit someone and they lived. It mutated inside them and spread.”

“I’m dying,” he says.

Her orange jumpsuit is slack in the hips and waist. It’s probably been a while since she fed. If he opens the door for her, she’ll make a meal of him. But what are fathers for, if not sustenance? “Fuck you, Dad. You never understood it was a gift. You made me ashamed.”

He shakes his head. Feels his heart slowing in his chest. It doesn’t remember how to pump, so he hits it, hard. “I love you,” he says.

Her eyes water. He thinks that means she’s sad, but he can’t really tell. Monsters don’t act like normal people. “I love you, too,” she answers. “Now give me the key.”

Are you lonesome, just like me?

Connie, did you know? Gladys asks. Maybe it’s coming from him. Maybe it’s her ghost.

“Yes, I knew,” he whispers. “So did you.”

Behind the bars, Delia licks her lips. “The key.”

He doesn’t remember his name anymore, or this woman before him. All that is left is the emotion underneath it, and instinct.

“Now, Dad.”

He fires the shotgun. His aim is true.

Then he turns the shotgun on himself, but it is too long and his fingers won’t obey him, so he drops it.

The young woman lies motionless while blood pools around her. He thinks about the color blue as he reaches through the bars that will now separate them for an eternity, and squeezes her fingers. She squeezes back as if she is relieved, and then lets go.

In sadness he can no longer comprehend, his heart tears itself into wings and flaps blood. It is a caged bird in there, that has shred itself inside-out but still can’t get free.