The Resurrected Compendium (43 page)

Kelsey’s voice slurred. “Dennis, help me. Can you pry it open?”

He shone his own light on it. He would have to cut it off her, then pull the spikes all the way through, the way you would with an arrow or fishhook. He couldn’t do that in a space just barely big enough for her, much less both of them, even if he’d had the tools for it.
 

“There will be wire snippers in the garden shed. If we can get there —”

Kelsey snorted laughter that trailed into a sob. “Oh, God. You think we can? Really?”

“Yes,” he told her firmly. “We can get there, together.”

Kelsey swiped at her face, shiny with tears, but lifted her chin. “Your mom was some kind of bitch, you know that?”

“I know it.” It was stupid but he pulled her close anyway, mindful not to move her leg too much. He kissed her on the mouth. Then again. Her arms went around his neck; they breathed together for a minute.

“It hurts,” she told him in a low voice. But I can move. Can you get the other door open? Will there be more traps?”

He didn’t know for sure about the traps, but he could get the door open. The tiny tunnel stretched away into darkness barely dented by his flashlight. At the end of it, there was one more door. One more set of locks.

“This wall is hot.” Kelsey sounded faint. “The one behind me.”

The fire had been burning long enough that it was entirely possible the house had started collapsing into the basement. Any second could see a beam punching through the ceiling of this small room. Dennis slipped an arm under hers to support her on his shoulder.

“We’ll get out.”

Kelsey didn’t answer him, though with every step she let out a low grunt of pain. The trap on her ankle dragged on the tunnel’s ridged metal floor.
 
Dennis rapped his elbow on the curved wall, and pain reverberated through his jacked-up hand.

At the end of the tunnel, he found the lock set into a small panel at the side of the door. It was another series of numbers, this time on tumblers, not electronic. “In case the power went out by this time,” he explained. “She went old school.”

“I had a bike lock that looked like that,” Kelsey said hoarsely. In the bright white light of the flashlight, she looked too pale. Her ankle was barely bleeding, though. That was good, at least.

His fingers fumbled, but he got the lock open. The door, next. And then they were outside in the smoke-choked night air with an inferno behind them.

In the garden shed, which was not locked — Mom apparently didn’t give a rat’s ass if anyone took her hedge clippers or bags of mulch —
 
Dennis settled Kelsey on the rickety tool bench. He found wire clippers and snipped at the trap, tossing the pieces to the floor. He moved as fast as he could with only one hand and trying not to hurt her more than he had to. The heat from the fire, the crackling snap of it, and the smoke were all getting closer. The shed was wood and would easily burn. They didn’t have much time.

Kelsey said nothing as he pulled apart the bits of wire and spikes. She gripped the edges of the bench and her body jerked with each yank of the wires. When he stripped out of his shirt to tie it around her seeping wounds she gave a strangled cry, but when she looked at him, she had a smile.

“We are really messed up, Dennis. My foot, your hand, my ankle…everything hurts.”

“I know.” He straightened.
 

“And those things are out there.”

“I know that, too.”

Kelsey looked at the piss-poor bandage he’d given her, then held out her hand. He took it in his good one and helped her off the tool bench. He looked around the small room, cataloging what they might be able to use. He strapped a tool belt around his waist, loading it with a hammer and some screwdrivers.
 

“Too bad there’s no chainsaw,” Kelsey said with a hint of humor he admired. “We could totally go Evil Dead on those things.”

Dennis lifted a golf club from a jumble of old sports equipment in a corner. Also a baseball bat, which he handed to Kelsey. “This will have to do.”

“What about those?” She pointed toward a pair of rusted bikes leaning against the far wall. Dennis hadn’t seen them in years, though they’d both been his. “Better than going on foot, since the truck’s…gone.”

He wasn’t sure she could ride with her bad foot, or that he’d be able to balance with his bad hand, but together they managed to limpingly push the bikes into the yard. The house had been almost completely consumed, orange-red flames so bright he had to shield his eyes from the glare.

“All our supplies.” She sounded angry. “Our safe place. How could they do that? Make a fire? They’re…dead. They’re dumb, they’re not supposed to be able to do that!”

“He’s the only one who could’ve,” Dennis said. “Tripped the alarms, got around the fireproofing. He knew all that stuff before he died…I guess maybe it stayed with him.”

She glared. “That bastard better be burned up, because if he’s not, I’m going to tear him apart with my bare hands.”

Looking at her face, Dennis believed she’d do her best to try. As it turned out, when they took a wide loop around the house to keep out away from the flames and bits of burning debris, they found the small group that had been led by the man his mother had sometimes referred to as “the sperm donor” all standing in front of the house. Well, most of the group. Dennis remembered there’d been four to start, and now there were only three. They stood close enough to the fire for it to have started scorching their clothes. Smoke curled from the soles of a woman’s shoes, while her hair, lifted by the hot wind coming off the house, was streaked with gray from tendrils of smoke wafting from her searing scalp.

The smell was horrific.

“What…what are they doing?” Kelsey held the handlebars of her bike in one hand, the baseball bat in the other. Ready.

“I don’t know.”

The three stood, ravaged faces tipped to the sky, mouths agape. Above the roar of the fire, Dennis heard a low, buzzing hum. The things rocked slightly in unison, making that noise. It rose the hair on the back of his neck. He followed the line of their gazes to the sky, to the scatter of stars and the moon…and one light brighter than all the rest.

Kelsey moved closer, also staring up at the sky. “What is that? A star?”

Dennis had no idea, only that whatever it was, it didn’t look like it belonged in that dark sky against all the other pinpricks of light. “A satellite, maybe?”

“Once I saw the International Space Station going by overhead, but it moved. It didn’t stay still. It was that bright though. About that size. Is it a planet?”
 

In front of them, the fire raged. The dead things hummed and swayed. “I don’t know.”

Above them, the star went out.

The battered risen dead stopped humming and swaying, and turned toward them.

58

Maddy took in the scent of living earth, of trees and grass and flowers, of water in the air from a far-off storm. Her body shook with how good this all smelled and tasted. She wanted to throw herself down in the grass and roll around in it, to grind her face into it. Eat it up.

She didn’t, though. Instead she spun around and around, arms out, until she was so dizzy she almost puked. She let her head fall back so she could look up at the sky, the real sky, the dark night sky with billions of stars all through it. The moon.
 

“Everything is…” she said. “Everything. Is.”

Mom said nothing, just turned her head and coughed into hand. Then harder, until she bent over from it. She spit out a huge mess of snot and boogers onto the concrete, so gross, but Maddy didn’t care. She’d given that to her mother, and it was working inside her the way the stuff had wanted to work inside Maddy. The difference was, Maddy was the boss, and Mom wasn’t.

Inside Maddy, the voices began again. Pictures and whispers and the wiggle-squiggle of those things, the electric shock and zip and tingle of stuff all through her veins and arteries and nerves and all over her skin.
 

She looked up, up, up. To the sky. To the stars.

To the star.

Brighter than the others, steady and not twinkling. Everything inside her knotted tight at the sight of it. Her mouth opened, and a noise came out of her. Low, buzzing, not a song, not words, it tickled her throat and the inside of her nose but made everything else fade away but the sight of that bright and steady light in the sky.

From far away, she heard her mom saying her name, but Maddy ignored her. The star was singing to her, sweeter than any lullaby her mom had ever sung. Better than anything, ever.
 

And when it stopped, Maddy’s mouth closed. She blinked and blinked. She looked at her mother, who was still coughing into her hand.

“It’s ready now,” Maddy said. “It’s all ready now.”

TEN

59

Sometimes there’s a warning before something extraordinary happens, but most of the time the world changes around you before you have more than a couple breaths of time to prepare. If Maggie had known this morning that everything was going to change she’d have worn something other than a pair of ratty jeans and an ancient, wash-worn men’s button-down shirt rolled up to her elbows. She’d certainly have slicked on some lipstick instead of wearing nothing but last night’s smudged mascara and the under-eye circles of a restless night. Instead she was up to her elbows, literally, in soap suds. On her hands and knees scrubbing the kitchen floor when the door bell rang. When she answered it and saw the man standing there, she instantly understood two things.

One, if Jake had come for her, the world was about to end.

And two…so long as he was there, she didn’t much care.

“Promise me,” Maggie says. “Promise that if you ever find out it’s going to happen, you’ll find a way to let me know.”

It’s the talk of lovers, whispered on a summer-hot night against the sleekness of his bare skin. She presses her face to his belly, breathing in the scent of him. She can’t get enough of it.

“I promise.”

“I mean it.” She pushes herself onto one elbow to let her fingers trail along his chest and lower, to his belly where she’s just finished kissing him. Everything about him is still so new. It will always be new.

He stretches under her touch, offering his body to her greedy gaze. Her needy hands. “I promise you, if I find out the zombie apocalypse is coming, I’ll let you know. I’ll do better than that. I’ll come for you.”

And then there’s no more talk of the end of things. There’s only love that feels like a beginning.

But of course that had been a reminder to them both of just how unlikely that would ever be. How it would take the end of the world before he could make that leap from the tangle of sheets and the sweat-salt taste of lust into something more, or before he’d allow it from her. Now here he was on her front porch, and time had passed but Maggie was both ashamed and unsurprised to discover that her feelings for him hadn’t changed, not even with time and distance to soften all the jagged edges of her love.

They stood and stared at each other, and she remembered how once they’d been able to share so much with just a look.
 

She couldn’t read his face now, however. His hazel eyes were without spark, his face expressionless, no hint of the ready smile she’d missed so much all these long years without so much as an email or a text. She’d thought of that smile more than anything else, though the truth was, she’d given up remembering him the way you give up booze or cigarettes or sugar, a hard-won self-denial that was supposed to be better and never really was.

“Hi.”
 

The last words they’d ever spoken to each other had been bland and nondescript, the weight of what was not being said heavy on her tongue. So it was no surprise to her that the first thing he said to her after so long was equally as unexciting. Even so, the sound of his voice left her so stunned that at first, she couldn’t reply.

“Can I come in?”

“What? Of course.” She stepped aside to let him in, holding the door and sucking in a breath as he pushed past her.

She closed the front door behind him. He stood in her foyer. Taller, somehow, than she remembered. Broader. Still so beautiful it made every part of her ache.

“Are you alone?” he asked.

“No. Bill’s here. He’s downstairs.” Simply saying her husband’s name aloud to him sent home the fact that all of this was different.

Things had changed.

“Good. I was worried he might be at work.” Jake hesitated. Put a hand to his forehead for a second. She wasn’t used to him looking uncertain. “Shit. What is today? I’ve lost track of time. I got on the road as soon as I knew for sure.”

“Oh, God. So it’s true? Something is happening?”

“Yes. Or it will be, soon. Have you been watching the news?”

She usually didn’t. Too much shit in the world, too many bad things. But she knew what he was talking about now.
 

“The tornados?” There’d been a lot of them recently, a spate of odd, out-of-season or unusually located storms. The devastation had made national news, hitting even her limited radar.

“Yes. Can I get something to drink?”
 

She felt instantly stupid. Embarrassed. “Of course. Water? Soda—”

“Liquor. Whatever you have. I need a drink.”

This gave her pause. Jake didn’t drink. He’d been sober for fifteen years when she met him, and he’d worn his sobriety not like a cloak or a shield, not like something to either shame or laud him, but simply as the most important part of him. Jake did not drink alcohol.
 
That was who he was.

Maggie went to the liquor cabinet anyway and found an ancient bottle of Bushmill’s that had been a gift from a long-ago Christmas party. She wiped the dust off it and poured him a healthy dose. No ice.

The first sip sent a shudder through him. The second seemed to warm him, and with the third he drained the glass. He held it out for another shot. She hesitated, but poured.