The Resurrected Compendium (34 page)

Kelsey touched him gently on the elbow. "Do you know him?"

He turned to face her, not quite believing what he was seeing...though of course it made sense. Those things out there didn't seem to have held onto any sort of intelligence, but maybe that wasn't true. Maybe they did hold onto whatever they'd been, at least in some manner. And if that were true, it made absolute sense why the guy outside had made it all the way from wherever he was to this place.
 

"Yeah," Dennis said. "He's the only other person who knows how to get inside this place without getting killed...not that it looks like it would matter so much, since I think he's already dead."

Kelsey frowned. "I don't understand."

Dennis sighed. The guy was still staring. His mouth had opened further, tongue lolling. It looked hideously like a grin.

"That guy," Dennis said, pointing. "He's my father."

EIGHT

41

Asphalt had bitten her feet to the bone.
 

She had walked and walked and walked, each step at first deliberate and steady and becoming shuffling and uncertain the farther she went. She had crossed this distance once already in the opposite direction, though the memory of that, like the memory of most things, was nothing but a faded blur.
 

There was no pain.

Now, sand gritted into her bloodless wounds and ground the bones of her toes to dust. A gull, black eyes glittering, swooped at her head to pluck at the tips of her ears, the soft lump that had been her nose. When it went for her one remaining eye, she grabbed it by the throat and tore off the top of its head, then tossed the corpse aside where its brothers and sisters squawked and fought over it; where a thing like her but without the use of its legs pulled itself toward the flock of quarreling birds to snatch them up with broken fingers and cram them in its unhinged mouth.

If she had a name it was as lost to her as everything else. If she forced her thoughts into coherence, a victory she was less and less able to claim, she could recall the sound of small voices calling her “Mama,” but surely that was not her name. Her fingers twitched at the feeling of tiny hands in hers, but her hands were empty.

She did not bleed, because her heart had stopped pumping. Her lungs moved sometimes out of habit, and breath slipped in and out of the gaping slash in her throat where the edge of a shovel had hit her. She didn’t need to breathe, and many times forgot. When she remembered, the air whistled as she drew it in and let it out, and the fringes of her skin fluttered like lace.

Curtains.

Lace curtains.
 

The breeze blows lace curtains against an open window. Outside, the hum of a mower as her husband cuts the grass. Her children play, shouting and laughing.

Screaming.

Her children are screaming.

The images rose up, vivid and brutal, and she went to her knees there on the side of the road, in the dirt and and sand, while the sun beat down and seared her skin. While she dug her fingers into the earth and tried to remember her name.
 

She’s in the kitchen when she remembers how she got home. Someone gave her a ride in a truck. A big truck. The man had put his hand on her leg, high up on the thigh, his knuckles brushing her bare flesh.

She ate his eyes.

The memory of the taste of his blood is fresh and thick and slides down her throat like cream, like sweet cream. She stands at her kitchen sink with this taste on her tongue and coating her teeth. The water runs and runs. She should turn off the faucet, but her fingers twist and slip on the handle — it’s not that she lacks the strength, she simply can’t figure how it works.

Trucks passed her on this road, one after another. Big wheels. Green and black and gray. Men in the back, dressed to match. Guns and masks.
 

She crouched and waited, not moving.

She waited a long time for them to pass. The sun ticked past overhead. Ants found her flesh and made a meal of it. Some crawled into her nose, her mouth, the empty, sodden socket of her eye.
 

This is how it feels to be dead.

It was nothing like she was taught to believe. That her soul would leave her body behind to rot in the ground, that she would go someplace white with clouds, where she’d be greeted by a choir and the people who loved her. Even in her dark days, when God was a concept she could not believe any rational mind would accept, she did believe there had to be something more.

Maybe there was, but not for her. Maybe heaven had been left for those who deserve it. The innocent ones.
 

When she turns from the sink, she knows the man there.
 

“You’re home,” he says. “Where’s the car?”

What will he see on her face? Will he see what happened, first when the music played? Later, in the dark? Will he see what she has become?

Yes, I paid that bill on time.

Of course I like your tie.

No, I didn’t eat the last piece of cake.

She’s told him lies before, but none like this, the one she doesn’t say. Her mouth opens on silence, her tongue pressing the back of her teeth. It hurts, she realizes. Her mouth hurts.

“Oh, my God. Oh, God.” He’s not praying.

This man she knows, her husband, father to her children, stumbles back from the door and into the living room. Shadows there. The lights are out. She follows, hand out, thinking if only he’ll listen, she can explain.

How it was the music and the dancing, how it was something she didn’t expect and didn’t look for.
 

This is the man who rubbed her back and brought her ice chips when she was in labor. He holds her hand through every movie they ever watch. He makes sure her car is filled with gas.

He cannot find the ketchup. He cannot fold a shirt. He cannot change a diaper, replace the toilet paper, return his mother’s phone call.

She is on him in three steps. She bought him the shirt he wears, the one that rips in her grasp as she claws at the front of him. His skin tears easier than the cloth, runners of flesh curling under her nails.

She can smell the blood.

It’s only because of the itching that she lets him go. Scritch-scritch inside her head, something is scraping like the tines of a fork along a varnished table. Lines in her brain, filling with a feathery, wriggling touch. Something is in there.

It threads down her spine and through her nerves. It jerks and twists her. Makes her dance.

They danced together at their wedding, his hand on the small of her back. Box step, waltz, he was clumsy and it didn’t matter because it was their song. Clink, clink, forks on glasses, urging them to kiss.

He is beneath her, her knees pinning his sides, her hands on his wrists. He bucks and thrusts. He cries out her name, low, then louder.

What is this? Making love or making hate, some people call orgasms “the little death,” and she shudders and shakes with desire. Not to fuck him.

She wants to kill him.

42

Madison had a pair of roller skates, the old-fashioned kind, with pom-poms on the laces. They were a little too big for her, but she’d stuffed the toes with an extra pair of socks and laced them up super tight. She pushed off with one now, gliding along the concrete floor, keeping to the side of the wall in case anyone came around the corner.

Nobody probably would. This section of the complex was empty most of the time. The living quarters were in the West section, closer to the canteen and medical labs. This part of the complex contained the climate-controlled storage units full of stuff nobody needed. At least not yet.

Dad said that if they all had to stay down here for longer than a few years they’d start breaking into the storage units, but he didn’t see how boxes of DVD players and mp3 players would do them any good. Those guys who’d tried to steal a bunch of stuff right in the beginning figured out quick enough how stupid it was to take from the complex, that’s what Dad said. Because no fancy piece of electronic equipment could ever be worth your life, and besides, even if they’d made it outside, what would they have done with it?

“Money’s only worth something when someone else needs it,” Dad had told her and Everett, who was sixteen and trying to grow a mustache. “Those days are long gone. Our currency is food and ammunition now.”

Skating, Maddy pushed herself to go a little faster along the curving corridor. At one end, just before the double doors into the next part of the complex, she paused to look up at the men hanging there. Three of them — the fourth had managed to get away, and Dad said good luck to him, he’d be sorry out there.

The smell had been bad at first, worse than Everett’s farts after he ate burritos, and that was really heinous. One of the men had a baseball cap pulled low over his face, which was good because then she didn’t have to look at his eyes, bugged out and staring. She knew they couldn’t see her — these men were dead, really dead, and they weren’t going to come back to life.

Not like the ones outside.

When Maddy was small, she’d woken in the middle of night to the sound of screams coming from the rec room. Everett was having a sleepover with a bunch of his buddies, and they’d put in a gruesome horror movie, the kind she was too young to watch. She’d snuck down the stairs to peek through the railing, watching as a squadron of the undead attacked, dismembered and ate a flock of scantily clad cheerleaders with their boobies hanging out.

That’s why her brother and his friends liked that movie. Well, Maddy kind of liked it too. Not just the boobies, though definitely when she dreamed about what it would be like to be older she always imagined herself hand-in-hand with her new best friend Kaylee, and never with that gross boy Zac from her class who always looked at her with his mouth open. No, Maddy liked the way the zombies fell apart when you shot them.

Blam!

Kaboom!

Blood and guts and gore, brains splattered all over the place, limbs flying. It wasn’t really like that in real life, though. Real people, she thought with a bit of scorn, held together better than the ones in movies.

The hanging men were starting to fall apart. The one on the far left, with the baseball cap, had been dangling a few feet above the floor originally, but now the toes of his bare feet— they’d taken his boots, because shoes were in shorter supply than other things, brushed the floor. When the overhead vent rattled on, sending a gust of stale-smelling air through the corridor, the three of them all started to twist. Slowly, slowly, so slow you wouldn’t notice unless you’d been staring at them for a long time the way she was.

The ropes creaked.

The one in the middle had pooped his pants. Maddy didn’t like to look at that, even if it was sort of funny. The one on the right was the only one she’d known, before. Now she stepped up to him, eyeing his tongue, which was stuck halfway out of his mouth.

The chairs they’d been forced to stand on were all still in the hall. Two of them were knocked onto their backs, but the third she pulled from its spot along the edge of the wall. She settled it in front of him, then sat on it to unlace her skates. In her sock feet, she hopped up on the chair to study him a little closer.

From her pocket, Maddy pulled a small sewing kit she’d pinched from one of the store rooms she’d passed along the way. The travel kits had been packaged for use in hotels and would be useful someday when the other supplies ran out. She should’ve been more scared to take it, considering she was staring at the face of a man who’d died for stealing from the complex, but Maddy didn’t worry too much about it. She was just a kid, after all. They didn’t kill kids.

The kit had a small piece of paper with needles and pins stuck into it. Three needles, each threaded with a length of different colors, white, black and navy blue. Six pins. There were a couple of buttons tucked beneath the paper, along with a few safety pins.

Maddy took the first needle from the package and looked at the dead man. Then she grabbed the edge of his tongue and pulled it out further to jam the needle, thread dangling, into it. His tongue already bristled with needles and pins, his cheeks adorned with buttons attached to the sagging flesh with safety pins, a few of them sewn directly with thread.

“You shouldn’t steal,” Maddy said solemnly. “And you shouldn’t touch little girls.”

She’d been saving the eyes but must’ve waited too long because when she twisted the biggest needle into it, the eyeball didn’t pop the way she’d imagined it would. A tiny bit of fluid leaked out and the needle sagged for a second before falling out. It hit the floor with a little “plink.”

He groaned.

She was startled but not scared — she’d seen the things outside, and he wasn’t one. It was the rope creaking again, rubbing at his throat and neck. His body weight was pulling him down, and when she tugged his tongue, it had shifted his body enough that the rope now dug so far into his skin she couldn’t see it. The man wasn’t groaning with his voice. It was the passage of air along the gash opening in his throat.

She studied this for a minute or two, waiting to see what would happen. Dad said bodies collected gas as they rotted. Dad had told them all stories of corpses groaning, twitching, some sitting up reflexively on the autopsy table. Maddy could believe anything was possible.

When nothing else happened, the man swinging slowly in silence next to his buddies, she frowned, disappointed, then got off the chair and returned it to its place along the wall. She looked for the fallen needle, but it had disappeared. Then she laced up her skates again and took off, moving fast and faster until she whipped past the doors so fast she couldn’t have seen through the windows even if the lights had been on inside the storage units.

She went all the way to the big double doors at the end. These were padlocked and also had blinking keypads beside them that needed a special code to open. Beyond the doors was more storage, of what, she didn’t know. Someday she thought she might find out, but it didn’t matter now. This was the end of her journey.