The Living Dead 2 (The Living Dead, #2)(104)

Mike would have been just as happy if we walked away and he never saw us again, but Amanda was bored with her dad’s company, and used to getting her own way, so by the end of the week she was coming over to our camp every day to play with the boys. Nick came out of his shell, and would run off after Amanda and Josh, throwing snowballs at them. She got all big-sisterly around him.

One sunny morning, on a day the temperatures shot up to above freezing, we were sitting in our camp eating venison that Mike had shot and cleaned. Mike had built a good-sized fire, without much smoke, and for the first time in weeks, I didn’t feel cold. The kids ran off into the woods pretending to be Indians.

“Have you ever seen the rapeworms?” I asked, voicing something that had been on my mind for a while. “What if they aren’t real?”

“Oh, they’re real. I was stationed at Fort Benning when they fell on Atlanta.”

“No shit?”

“They look like dandelion fluff coming out of the sky. They’ll hitch a ride on anything, but they only do shit to people.” He shook his head. “I went AWOL—so did a lot of other guys after that—and came back to Ohio as fast as I could. Stole Amanda from my ex when she wouldn’t give her up.”

“Ah.”

“It’s us or them, us or them. I hope they nuked ’em all straight back to hell.” He looked away. “What if,” he asked, and then stopped.

“What if what?” I said, helping myself to another plate of stew. I had done my best to shave, and had melted enough water to wash most of the things in our camp, including myself and the boys.

“What if we’re the only people left?” Mike asked, in a tone that said it was painful for him.

“That’s crazy,” I said around a mouthful of the best food I’d had in over a month.

He had his sunglasses on, so I couldn’t see his eyes, and he always had a smile at the corner of his mouth. He lowered his head and spit between his feet. “What if it isn’t?”

I didn’t say anything. I wasn’t ready to think about Josh and Amanda as some kind of Adam and Eve.

“You were smart enough to get out of the cities,” he said, and then didn’t say any more, seemingly on the principle that if you couldn’t say something nice, don’t say anything.

“Yeah?”

He shook his head. Then after a while, he said, “You mind if I take your older boy, Joshua, out in the woods and show him how to use a rifle?”

I was torn. I didn’t let the boys touch the guns we had—my old beliefs were too ingrained. But I could see his reasoning.

Before I could answer him, Josh came running back into the camp. “Dad! Mike! Nick, he found—”

We jumped up from the log we sat on and Josh froze, his mouth moving, but no words coming out.

Mike walked toward him. “What is it? Where’s Amanda?”

“Sh-sh-she was trying to help—”

“Where’s Amanda?”

Josh turned and ran back the way he came, and we ran after him. I stumbled, tripped, ran into trees, trying to keep up—what had happened to Nick?

Mike trotted easily at Josh’s side, his head up, eyes scanning the woods. As soon as he saw Nick’s bright blue coat against the mottled brown of bark and leaves, he bolted for him.

“Where’s Amanda?” he said.

I ran past Josh, who stood rooted well away from his brother, and reached Nick’s side at the same moment that Mike jumped back.

There was a dog, dead at Nick’s knees, a once beautiful golden retriever with a dirty white-and-green collar.

Its coat had gone gray, and it appeared to be molting right before our very eyes.

I jumped back ten feet, just as Mike had.

The dog was covered with hundreds of maggoty worms, silver-gray and slick, sprouting fluff-clouds of micro-wire-thin cilia at one end. The cilia moved, like the tentacles of tiny squids, tugging the creatures across the ground. The cilia sparked, seemingly at random, little blue explosions like static electricity.

“Nick?” I said, circling around to see his face.

His open mouth was full of the worms. Tiny tufts hung from his nose. One worm banged at the corner of his eye, pushing at his tear duct—while we watched, it shoved its way in, wiggling until it disappeared.

“Shit!”

“Dad, I’m so sorry, Dad!” Josh was crying, scared. “We were playing hide and seek—he—”

“It’s okay, son,” Mike said. My tongue was pinned to my throat and I couldn’t speak. “Amanda ran to hide when she saw them, right?”

“She—” Josh sobbed, unable to speak.

“It’s okay,” Mike said, taking a step back, abrupt and unexpected, like a missed heartbeat. “Which direction did she go?”

“They got in her face!” he screamed. “Before we could stop them.”

Mike walked away without a word. I stood there—staring at Josh, staring at Nick, watching the worms crawl off the dog toward my kneeling son. I was sick. I didn’t know what to do, didn’t know who to ask. Josh took another step away, rubbed the corners of his eyes. “It’s not my fault!” he said.

I wanted to scream at him, to say, hell, yes it was his fault, it was all his fault. But I knew the words were really directed at myself.