The Living Dead 2 (The Living Dead, #2)(231)

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.