The Resurrected Compendium (47 page)

“When did you start again?” She pointed at the glass.

“Today. Yesterday, I guess, technically.”

She laughed, uncertain why this struck her as so funny, only that it seemed hilarious. After a moment, he joined her. They laughed together, and it was suddenly so much like it had been, it had always been.
 

Then she wasn’t laughing, anymore.

“Why did you come here, Jake.”

“Because I promised you.”

“In all this time, there was no reason for you to stay where you were? Nothing to keep you…” She swallowed hard.

He was silent for a moment.
 
“I promised you.”

“You could’ve broken it.”

“How could I break a promise to you?” Jake asked quietly. “When I knew that if I didn’t see you again now, there’d be no chance of ever seeing you. Ever.”

A strangled sob choked its way out of her. Maggie closed her eyes, though in the dark she could barely see him. It was better that way. Not being able to see.

“I hated you for a long time,” she told him finally. “I hated you so much.”

The glass clinked. He drank. He poured some more from the bottle, and she heard the sound of him drinking. It made her want to slap him. It made her want to die.

“You let me walk away from you, Jake. You just…let me walk away.”

“When you love someone,” he told her, “you want what’s best for them.”

Maggie hissed. “Is that what you think? That this was what was best for me?”

Jake was silent.

Her hands shook, so she clenched them tight inside each other. Her stomach twisted and turned. She didn’t want the yogurt anymore. She got up from the table and tossed the container in the trash. She put the spoon in the dishwasher.

With her back to him, she said, “I have missed you. Every. Single. Day.”

Her only answer was the click of the lock on the basement door as he closed it after him.

67

“Don’t look, baby. Come on. Let’s get out of here.”

They manage to get all the way to the front door before Jordan comes after them. Moaning, grasping, fingers curled into claws. He looks nothing like her beloved child. Horrifically, he looks more like her husband than he ever had.
 

“Mama!”
 

“Run, Benji! Run!” Shoving him Abbie turns to face her other boy. Hands outstretched, voice calm, as though she’s dealing with a temper tantrum and not this…this thing.
 

This monster.

“No, baby, no,” Abbie says, over and over even as Jordan slashes at the air between them. Even when bites at her, snarling. She holds him back with a hand on his forehead, but he’s strong. So strong.

He sinks his teeth into her forearm, tearing and gobbling at the flesh, though he lets it fall out of his mouth. Not eating it. Just trying his best to hurt her. His arms pinwheel. He gets a handful of her hair and yanks it almost from her head.
 

Abbie punches her younger son in the face, breaking his nose. He stumbles back with a low moan. He trips over his own feet and goes down, hitting his head on the doorframe. The sound of it is like a melon hitting the floor. Her gorge rises, but she can’t give in to sickness. She can’t let herself falter now. She has Benji to think of, Benji who did not run the way she ordered him to. Benji, who stands sobbing and wailing in the grass grown up so high it’s as though he’s standing in a green and yellow sea.

Jordan isn’t moving, but she knows better than to think he won’t get up. She moves back from him, every instinct screaming at her not to abandon him while the other, harder part of her forces her to keep going. She has another son, one who hasn’t yet been infected. And the thing in front of her, though it might look like her boy, has become something else.

“Benji, we need to —”

“Mom?”
 

She turns. Benji as stumbled forward, parting the grass. On his hands and knees. In front of him, humped earth bulging with those flowers, those fucking flowers. The red tendrils, creeping. The smell of them fill her nose, the taste rancid and burning on her tongue, and she screams for him to get away.

But it’s too late.

And behind her, Jordan gets up again.

Damn it. She’d fallen asleep. Abbie fought her way up from the dream, arms flailing, breath catching in her throat. She’d dropped the knife; it was gone. She searched all around her feet, but unless it had slipped between the cracks of the deck boards, it was gone. The boys had taken it, leaving behind another pile of small, broken toys. The detritus of their childhood. Once she’d have ranted and raved about the mess, the destruction, how poorly they treated their possessions. In her worst time, she’d once taken a trash bag and gone through their bedrooms, gathering up everything and hauling it to the garbage despite their wailing protests.

Abbie wept. Long, hard sobs that tore her up from the inside out and choked her until the world swam and her ears rang. The car accident that had damaged her lungs and made it always impossible for her to fully catch her breath had saved her from the infection, though she’d inhaled the spores so many times now she’d lost track. Three? Four? More than that? And each time she’d waited for them to take root inside her and turn her into one of those things. Instead, she’d merely started feeling like she had the flu. Constant, low-grade fever. Coughing that brought up blood and bits of black froth. Chunks of red-tinged black goo. Her head ached constantly. If she was dying, it was going to be slow, and before she gave in to that, she had to make sure her boys were taken care of.

In the months since she’d made her way home, the leaves had started falling from the trees. Soon there’d be little place for them to hide, though the truth was that she’d been surprised to find either of them capable of hiding at all. None of the others she’d seen since this all began would’ve been capable of such slyness. A mother’s pride, she thought as she swiped the tears from her exhausted eyes and fought to get herself upright. Her boys were different. Better than the others.
 

Or more monstrous, maybe.
 

She’d decided on the plan immediately after watching Benji inhale the spores. Abbie knew the timeframe, or at least guessed at most of it. Three days or so before he’d be overtaken by whatever was already growing inside him. Spores would explode from his eyes and nose and mouth, and he would be dead but moving. He would be violent and strong. No longer her son.
 

Watching him choke on the faint black cloud that surrounded his face, Abbie knew there was no other solution. But she’d been weak. When he’d turned his face to her, mouth damp and lax, eyes cloudy, all she could do was open her arms to him and hold him close.

“What was that stuff?” Benji had asked, but Abbie had not been able to bear telling him that soon he’d end up like his father and brother.

Instead, she’d shushed him. “We have to get out of here.”

But there’d been no time for that, because while she comforted Benji, Jordan staggered upright behind her. She’d seen Benji’s eyes go wide seconds before the pain in her head sent everything else away and the world went dark. When she’d woken on her front porch, she’d been so stiff and sore that at first she’d been unable to move at all. She didn’t know how long she’d been out, but long enough for spiders to have woven their webs in the crooks of her elbows and knees. Long enough for the blood under her head to have formed a stain on the concrete, no longer even sticky.

Long enough for Benji to have turned.

Abbie couldn’t recall when she’d decided on setting the traps. Only that the idea that had formed the instant she watched her son inhaling the spores, that she would take him and end his life as lovingly as she’d begun it, could no longer be possible. That she would have to be clever and ruthless and hard. That she would not be able to give up until it had been done.
 

She hadn’t counted on how hard it would be to catch them. She’d assumed they would be clumsy and stupid in addition to being angry and murderous. She’d thought, too, that even though they’d become something else, she was still their mother. Still bigger and stronger. Still faster. Even though Jordan had taken her by surprise that first time, she wouldn’t be so careless again.
 

She hadn’t counted on them being able to hide, or run. She hadn’t imagined the haunting, taunting sound of their laughter as they ran from her through the woods, leaping or climbing trees to get away from her. It had taken her a full week to accept that she wasn’t going to be able to simply find them and take their lives, then her own. It was going to take more effort than that.

Coughing so hard her vision blurred and she had to bend over, hands on her knees, until she could see, Abbie forced herself to wake up. All the way. She shook her head when the coughing eased. The backyard had grown wild and out of control, but she heard the shuffle-shush of bare feet in the bushes.

There was no point in calling out to either of them. They didn’t respond to their names. Whatever part of them remained was not enough for that. Also, it had become impossible to tell them apart. Both filthy and naked, whatever had made them different from each other had become lost.
 

Abbie looked up to the sky. Gray clouds scudded. Winter was coming, and what would she do, then? She’d been managing to survive on what she’d found in the pantry here, and the house had a well, so there was still water. She could probably find a way to get into town for supplies, if she wanted to settle in to weather the snows.

But she didn’t. She was tired. So tired.
 

She looked again into the woods, thinking of the times they’d all been out here on the deck for barbecues. Laughing. Back in the days before, when she and Ryan had been happy. Before she’d lost herself in the drink and given up everything she’d ever loved. Before, before, before.

Determined, Abbie went to the shed and got herself a shovel. She took it into the woods, a softish spot just below where they’d buried all their pets. On the slope of the hill in view of the back of the house, where she could easily watch it while hiding, herself. She dug into the earth and hit rock, the clang of it sending a tremor up her arm and shoulder. So hard it clicked her teeth together, and she bit her tongue.
 

From the woods around her, she heard the soft, muttered sound of laughter that had no humor in it. She ignored it and bent back to her task. This time, she would not fail. This time, she would make this work.

This time, Abbie vowed, she would take care of her children.

68

Hot water. Hot, unlimited water and real soap and real shampoo and oh, God, soft, fluffy towels. It was enough to send Kelsey into paroxysms of ecstasy. The food, she thought as she stood in line to pick up a tray, was something rather less than heaven. But it was hot, too. Steaming noodles, salty broth. The bread was hard and the green beans soggy, but she hadn’t had to cook any of it over an open flame, so there was that. Nor would she have to clean it up, after, at least not unless they assigned her to KP duty at some point, as she figured would happen.

Dennis had already been assigned to some kind of guard duty, which was why he wasn’t with her, now. He was off patrolling the corridors of this enormous place. They hadn’t asked Kelsey to do that. It was pretty sexist, though that wasn’t surprising. She looked around now at the rest of the people here, feeling a little out of place. Everyone had been surprisingly friendly, considering two strangers had shown up with very little to offer other than a couple carts of canned goods. Kelsey had expected a lot more resistance. Dennis had been surprised, too.

Two days they’d been here, that was all, but already things had fallen into a routine. Being here was much like being in boarding school. Breakfast, lunch, dinner. There were classes in Tai Chi and book club discussions, to which she’d been invited. Meetings about the running of the place, to which she was not, and that was fine.

Safe or not, warm or not, unlimited hot water or not…Kelsey didn’t think she wanted to stay here. Maybe through the winter. Take advantage of the safety and supplies, but after that, how could she spend the rest of her life in here? Underground, this same group of people. Nothing new. Nothing much changing. And, call her pessimistic, but Kelsey was pretty sure that eventually, sooner rather than later, someone was going to get on someone else’s nerves so much that there’d be trouble.
 

“Hi.” This was Maddy, her hair in twin pigtails. She had a broad smile and wore roller skates.
 

She kind of gave Kelsey the creeps, though she wasn’t sure why. Something in the kid’s eyes didn’t match the grin. Something in the way she had the run of the place didn’t seem right.
 

Something, Kelsey thought suddenly, about this whole place didn’t seem right.

The people were all too quiet. Too complacent. They all shuffled their feet and didn’t really look anyone else in the eyes.

“Hi,” Maddy said again when Kelsey didn’t answer. “I’m talking to you.”

Kelsey dragged a spoon through her soup and brought it to her mouth, blowing on it to cool it. “Hi.”

“You don’t like me.”

Kelsey gave the little girl a slow, steady stare. “I don’t even know you.”

Maddy rolled back and forth a little on her skates and put a hand on her hip. “Everyone knows me. Because I’m Maddy. I’m the boss.”

“Uh huh.” Kelsey had never been overly fond of children. She’d never planned on having any of her own, even if in that other lifetime she and Tyler had discussed parenting a brood. She sat back in her chair.

“You know, my dad says that when people join a group, they’re supposed to try to fit in.”

Kelsey kept her expression neutral. “Your dad’s right, I guess.”

“So you should try to fit in.” Maddy gave Kelsey another of those broad grins that didn’t seem to be real. “Everyone else here does what I say. So you should do that, too.”