Rise Again (61 page)

“Danny?” she said.

“I’m right here,” Danny said. Kelley’s eyes drifted around and found her.

“It’s getting dark.”

“I’m right here with you.”

It was afternoon. The sun came through the windows at a low angle, reaching from the front of the house into the back, the light creamy with dust motes. It would be getting dark soon, but Kelley was staring into a different kind of darkness.

There were so many things Danny wanted to say, but as always, when it mattered, she couldn’t figure out how to assemble the words. She held Kelley’s unbitten hand in her own hand and tried to squeeze some warmth into the icy fingers. All she wanted was a single sentence to come together so she could say everything she felt to Kelley, some way to express her gratitude and sorrow and love. Her mind was racing. She had to think of the words. All her skill at coming up with plans and stratagems on the fly, reacting like lightning no matter what happened, and here she couldn’t come up with a simple statement that folded all the important things up into a small bundle Kelley could take with her when she went away. Then it occurred to her. It was so obvious she hadn’t thought of it.

“I love you,” she said.

But Kelley was already gone.

Danny picked up the gun. She felt for a pulse. There was none. No breath escaped the lips. Kelley was dead, and the thought, always present, hit Danny with new force because at last it was true. Danny fell back on her haunches and looked up at her sister’s corpse, face slack, head tipped into the corner of the chair as if Kelley had only fallen asleep in the car with her head against the backseat window, the way she often did when she was a small girl. She had fallen asleep like that when they drove down to the go-kart place in the flatlands for Kelley’s birthday. She had graduated to the front seat by then. Danny wished she could take her sister somewhere again. She wished everything, more wishes than fishes, more wishes than stars, as their mother had said, an eternity ago in a different world. The wishes collapsed into tears and Danny fell forward and sobbed in her sister’s lap, a lifetime of scalding, unshed tears pouring from her eyes.

But there was no time for grieving anymore. It was that kind of world. Danny scrubbed her face on her sleeve, smearing the wet from her eyes and nose. The first of the three choices had already passed; Kelley lived until she died. Danny could shoot her sister’s corpse in the head while she was still in the brief, blessed death-between, or she could wait until reanimation.

Danny thought it would be best if she pulled the trigger on the lifeless shell, rather than executing the alien, deadly thing her sister would become. It was time. She cocked the gun with her stump-hand and looked up once more at her sister.

Too late
, said the voice in Danny’s head.

Always too late
.

The second choice had also passed. That leaden look had come to the flesh. The undead eyes opened, murky and dull. They wandered, then located Danny and fixed upon her. Danny raised the pistol and placed it up under her sister’s chin. Kelley’s slate-gray lips parted.

And spoke.

“I’m still me,”
she whispered.

Nobody writes alone. I owe many thanks to many people. Here are a few of them.

My editor, Ed Schlesinger, is an easy one. He makes me think I know what I’m doing. My wife, Corinne Marrinan, who knows the difference between the weeds and the wanted is just a matter of care. The Aged Crone—you know who you are. Rich Procter. Steven Iammarino. J.M. Finholt. My many writer friends, who make writing seem almost respectable. Assorted members of the LAPD and LVPD. The professional firefighters of Altadena, California. The rest of you I’ll thank in person.

Finally, no work in the realm of zombies can exist without the pioneering efforts of the prophet George Romero, who warned us: we spend our lives and treasure fearing the
other
, when the enemy, after all, is ourselves.