The Living Dead 2 (The Living Dead, #2)(229)
“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 f*ck 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 f*ckin’ 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.”