The Living Dead 2 (The Living Dead, #2)(227)

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.