The Living Dead 2 (The Living Dead, #2)(102)

“Dad, that’s an old song. It’s so lame.”

“I’m glad you’re here,” I said, tousling his hair.

“Why couldn’t we bring Schrody?”

“Schrody’s a smart cat. He can look out for himself.”

“But who’s going to change his litter box?”

I hugged him close, looking through the window as the dashboard light faded. The trees formed a black wall around us, like the sides of a pit, and the darkness of the sky made the stars seem to twitch like maggots. “We get to camp out and pretend we’re Indians. Won’t that be fun?”

“Where’s Mom? Is Mom safe?”

I checked my cellphone to see if my ex had called, but the battery was dead and I had forgotten to pack the dashboard charger. Their mother and I had gone through a bitter divorce, which we tried to keep from the boys, even though we split custody. Tomorrow was the usual day I turned them back to her. She would be frantic with worry when she didn’t hear from us, but I convinced myself it was better to have no contact until the plague passed. The government had censored pictures of what happened to women infected by the rapeworm, but we heard rumors.

“Yeah, she’s safe,” I promised. “She wants me to tell you that she misses you.”

His eyes brightened for a second, then he sank back down into my arms. “You don’t really know.”

I held him until he fell back to sleep. He started to wake up every time I tried to put him down or move him, so I leaned the seat back and fell asleep myself.

When I woke up in the morning, the windows were frosted over with ice, and the sun coming through them was bright and harsh. Josh was in the car too, in the passenger seat, curled up with his head against my arm.

They both looked untroubled in their sleep, the way they always had until just a few months before. I knew I would do whatever I had to do to keep them safe.





After we woke up, I checked our supplies. We had our fishing gear, and I had my grandfather’s old single barrel shotgun in the trunk, with a couple boxes of shells. There was also his old .38 Special revolver, the one he bought to protect his store and then never needed. I had just the rounds inside that, and no extras. I didn’t like guns, and wouldn’t have owned these if I hadn’t inherited them.

I checked out our supply of canned foods. If we were careful, we could get through the next few weeks until things settled down.

“Dad, you know what we forgot to pack?” Josh said while we ate canned pears for breakfast.

I picked up the can opener where he’d left it on the ground, and put it back in my kit. “No, what?”

“Twinkies. They’re the perfect food. They never go stale. They survive anything.”

I grinned, and he flashed a smile back. For a moment, I thought everything would be okay. “I think it’s better if we have healthier food,” I said.

“I thought you said we were going to have fun,” he said.

The way he said it threw the lie back in my face. But I grinned anyway.





Over the next few weeks, Josh and I ate canned food until the green beans tasted like the corn like the peaches like the ham. Nick ate only peanut butter, until all the peanut butter was gone. The three of us sat inside the tent, playing Uno until the day Nick tore all the cards in half because we were out of peanut butter. We were cold all the time and we started to stink, spending day after day in the tent, until Josh started holding his nose shut every time he sat next to me. I didn’t pack enough toilet paper, and I screamed at the boys when they used the last roll of it to clean up spilled peaches.

We moved camp twice. The first week, we heard cars roaring by on the nearby roads, so we moved to a clearing farther back in the woods. A week later there were days of planes flying overhead—fighter jets and helicopters—so we moved farther back under the trees. We spent our days watching the skies, staring at the roads, jumping every time a squirrel crunched through the leaves, dashing out our fire any time we heard something like a gunshot.

At night, when the boys were sleeping, I listened to the radio for news. Scientists still hadn’t found a way to remove the rapeworms from brain tissue without killing the patients. We were no longer in touch with the rest of the world: the Middle East was the first to go completely silent. Americans were moving north across the border into Canada.

I thought about following with the boys, but the gas gauge in the car read empty after I fell asleep one too many times listening to the radio with the engine running.

It was the second week of December when I took the shotgun out to try for a deer, telling the boys they had to stay in the tent until I came back. I was a half mile away when I heard an explosion, and then another, something far away but powerful enough to make the ground shake. I ran all the way back to our camp, and the boys were running out to meet me, and we all waited together for something else to happen.

Snow fell that night, the first snowfall of the year that was more than just flurries, three or four inches of it before morning. There was a glow on two horizons, west toward Cincinnati and north toward Columbus, and the fresh snowfall caught the light and spread it everywhere.

Nick had the leftover peanut butter jars, which he had filled full of acorns he collected in the woods. He sat there, shaking them louder and louder, like some kind of shaman trying to ward off evil, until I snapped at him, and told him to be quiet, I just needed some quiet to think.