“Are you trying to tell me this is heaven?” Conrad asks.
She lunges at him and the force of her weight against the three-foot-high counter opens her stomach, spraying the shrunken Big Bite Hot Dogs’ spit glass and Enquirer with gangrenous green fluid.
“Sorry. I didn’t mean to tease you,” he grunts as he wipes his face and pitches toward the darkened glass refrigerators in the back.
Behind him, Heaven figures it out and climbs the counter, then falls to the floor and crawls after him on a leaking stomach.
Conrad tries to pick up his pace, but he’s so dehydrated that his heart is a trapped bird in his chest, fluttering and in pain.
Do zombies eat cold meat? Do they dream of electric sheep?
“Shut up about the poor, innocent zombies and find the water, Con!” he hisses, only he’s too tired to use Gladys’ voice, so now it’s just him, talking to himself, which strikes him as sort of sad.
Behind, Heaven pushes herself to her feet. Her lips spread into a grin, and then keep spreading until they split open. The heat has turned her blood to thick soup that doesn’t run.
He hurries, but his heart’s not in it. Literally. It’s pumping spastically, as if to Muzak-his wedding song forty years ago:
With all of your faults, I love you still. It had to be you!
Lovely young Heaven lunges and swipes at him. He reaches the refrigerator, whose shelves are lined with new world gold, and lifts a gallon-sized container of Poland Spring Water. Though Heaven’s gaining, he chugs for one second… two… three… as he rounds the second aisle and doubles back toward the exit.
Just then, something cracks. “What the-?” he asks.
Glass skids like sand under Heaven’s feet. To his shock, she isn’t shambling anymore; she’s running. Bad luck. Runners are rare.
“Hurry up, Con,” he pants, but he’s rooted there for a second, water in hand, as her voluminous flesh bounces and thuds. He’s wondering if maybe this is the second coming and he got left behind, because Heaven’s lips have split length-wise like a hag’s clit, and inside, all her teeth are gold.
She dives, fast this time. He doesn’t know she’s got hold of his denim jacket until she reels him into a festering embrace. She’s strong and tall-his toes don’t even touch the floor, so he uses her body as a hinge and kicks up as hard as he can. His knees slop against her chest, hooking gristle as something cracks (her ribs? her hardened kidneys?), and she drops him.
Back muscles screaming like cop sirens, he dives over the counter. His hands find the twelve-gauge on the shelf beneath the cash register, and he reaches over and presses it against Heaven’s ugly face before his physical mind ever recognizes that it’s a gun.
“I’m sorry, Heaven” he intends to say as he squeezes the trigger. But instead, Freudian slip: “I’m sorry, Delia.”
The mention of his daughter’s name trips him up. He hesitates as he shoots, and by luck or intention, she knocks the gun out of the way. He hears the sound of shattering glass, but doesn’t see what the slug hit. All he can see is Heaven as she sinks her gold teeth into his shoulder, down to the bone.
There’s no time to think. He reaches inside her open belly with both hands and pulls her spine until it cracks. She hugs him tighter and then lets go, falling backward and in half.
“I loved you where the ocean met the sky,” he tells the thing named Heaven, though he does not hear himself say those strange words. She blinks, only her eyelids aren’t long enough to cover her rot-bloated eyes. So she watches him, perhaps seeing nothing, perhaps seeing everything, as he pulls the trigger and her head explodes.
When he’s finished, he stands over her remains while his shoulder bleeds and infection worms its way through his heart and into his frontal lobe. “I’m sorry, Delia,” he tells her, “for that bloodlust. For Adam, and not testifying. For not believing you that time you called. Especially for that. I’m sorry for everything,” he says. Then he staggers out, a damned man down a long, lonely road that is almost over, toward Delia.
II. How Rosie Perez Foretold the End
Some blamed cockroach feces. Others, the hand of God. Whatever it was, nobody who got the virus survived. It attacked the immune system first, then it devoured the entire frontal lobe. The sick forgot who they were or how to walk, and eventually, how to breathe. After they died, the virus worked its way into the hindbrain’s instinct center, and kept eating. Then something funny happened. They woke up, only this time, the virus was in charge, and it was hungry.
Fox News broke the story on April 1, 2020. At first, everybody thought it was a joke: the dead rising from embalming and autopsy tables, sick beds, basement bedrooms. They spread the blood-borne disease with their bites. It started in Baton Rouge, but quickly spread to all of Louisiana. Overnight, hospitals throughout the south were full. A week later, national radio signals and satellites were offline. Two weeks after that, the army disbanded and went rogue. By Easter, America had dissolved.
Conrad had only been walking for three months since the world ended, but it felt like years. He didn’t like to think about the old days. They were bittersweet.
When his wife got pregnant with Delia more than twenty years ago, Gladys had called the child a gift from God. After three miscarriages, two years of fertility treatments, and, finally, experimental blood transfusions, they’d almost given up hope. “She’s the best thing we could have hoped for,” Gladys said the day she arrived at the hospital, and for once, cynical Conrad had agreed: Delia Christen Wilcox was perfect.
Smart, pretty, full of giggles. They’d doted, indulged, hugged, and kissed until their hearts had overfilled, broken, and grown back larger and more accommodating. And she’d taken. And kept taking. It had started at her mother’s tit, which she’d suckled too hard and drawn blood. Then the bigger things: backyard swing-set, horseback riding lessons, her own room, a lock on her door, hand-sewn boutique clothes, ski vacations, all-night curfews, and finally, the silver and crystal, and even their flat screen television.
Drugs, they’d guessed, though they’d never known for sure. After their dog Barkley went missing, Conrad had imagined it was something much worse. Bloodier. Probably, one of them should have asked.
She moved out at sixteen and began couch surfing at boyfriends’ houses. “Back surfing,” he’d once called it, for which the kid had slapped him. He’d slapped her right back. Then she’d bit his arm hard enough to draw blood.
There were more shenanigans. The house got broken into. The Dodge stolen. Some fool named Butter had called them at all hours, asking for his “Sweet Momma.” They instituted a curfew when the high school kids at Tom’s River started turning up dead, but she’d climbed out the window and come waltzing back at dawn. Then she went missing entirely, and though both of them had imagined this absence in their darkest moments and assumed it would bring relief, it only ushered more misery. Was she cold, frightened, alone? Did she need them, only she was ashamed to ask?
Two years later, they got the call from a special victims unit detective in Louisiana-Delia had been arrested for the human trafficking of her own child.
He’d learned but had promptly forgotten the particulars: A son named Adam born a year after she left home, a kiddie-porn ring, a trannie boyfriend who’d kept her high and happy, a $1000 payoff for her infant son. It amounted to less than the going rate for any of the boy’s individual organs on the black market, as if the living child as a whole was worth less than the sum of his parts.
Though he considered it, in the end Conrad decided not to testify in his daughter’s defense. She was sentenced to eight years at the Louisiana Women’s Correctional Facility. He never visited. She never wrote. He and Gladys legally adopted Adam. They gave away Delia’s pretty things and painted her old room blue. Adam never learned to attach significance to the word mother, and for this they considered themselves lucky.