“We can do it fast,” she says. “He’s just one kid. He’ll go down easy, and you can bury him in the sunlight, and we can be safe for the whole winter. Don’t you want to be safe?”
I look at her solemnly, and I think about all the times I didn’t listen, and I nod.
I want to be safe.
I want that more than anything in the world.
Her name is Tess; she comes from farther away than I thought. She’s been walking for weeks, sleeping where she can, always moving during the day, scavenging from abandoned gardens and unprotected fruit trees. She’s tough and she’s smart and she’s not quite fearless, but she’s fatalistic, which is practically the same. She’s too good to be true.
I don’t trust her.
There are a lot of dogs between here and Hillsdale. A lot of coyotes, a lot of houses. Even if she wasn’t infected, she should have run into trouble somewhere—the kind of trouble that leads to open wounds and an increased chance of getting sick. There’s no way she made it this far without sickening. It doesn’t make sense.
I watch her out of the corner of my eye as we walk. The sun is too bright for me to make out the fine details of her face, but I think she’s watching me, too. Measuring me. Trying to figure out whether I’m leading her into a trap.
Honestly, I feel like there’s definitely a trap, but I don’t know who’s leading who. Danny is in the house. Danny, who wasn’t that sick the last time I saw him. Sure, he tried to kill me, but he apologized while he was doing it, and I’ve always known, deep down, that he’d let me in if I came home. He can’t make me sick with a sneeze the way a dog could, but he could bury his teeth in my shoulder, he could taste my blood and drip his sickness into the wound, and we could be a family again. He’d accept me once he smelled the sickness on my skin, the same way he and Dad accepted each other. He’d love me again.
My head hurts so bad. I put my hand briefly to my temple, and watch as Tess stiffens. She has a weapon, a baseball bat with a nail driven through it like the tooth of some great, terrible beast.
It should look silly, like a prop stolen from somebody’s Walking Dead LARP. A lot of things that should look silly don’t, anymore.
“Something wrong?” she asks. “Sun in your eyes?”
“I haven’t been able to find clean water for a few weeks,” I say. “I’ve been making do with Pepsi, but it ran out yesterday. I have a caffeine headache.” The lie is easy to tell, and beautifully believable. Humans don’t do well without water.
Tess accepts my words at face value. She relaxes, slightly, and offers me a small, understanding smile.
“I spent a week drinking nothing but the syrup they pack peaches in.”
I blink. “How did you get that many peaches?”
“My grandmother used to buy them from Costco. By the case. I was hiding in the shed in our backyard, going through her emergency supplies.”
That sounds like heaven. A roof, four walls, food… “Why did you leave?”
“My grandmother found me.”
There’s a story in that sentence, something dark and cruel and worst of all, familiar. Remember that they have to win only once, and they’ve been winning once, over and over again, since this nightmare began. “I’m sorry,” I say, and the words are worthless, the words are desert-dry and empty.
Tess shakes her head. “She had this dog. A little Bichon Frise. I guess his rabies shots weren’t up to date. Why would they be? He was always with her, he was never at risk, until the day he was. No one realized he was sick until it was too late and he started biting. No one…” She stops, gaze going distant, and just walks.
The houses around us look like they’ve aged a decade in a single summer. The infected don’t care about mowing lawns or fixing broken windows, and at least in the beginning, the uninfected were all about throwing rocks at houses in the middle of the day, shattering glass and letting the light in. It was like we thought rabies was a form of vampirism, like we could turn the monsters who had replaced our families into ash and memory.
We forgot the infected were as smart as they’d been before they got sick. They painted the rocks nearest the houses with their own saliva, and the rock-throwers unlucky enough to scrape their palms found themselves in the early stages of rabies before they realized the rules had changed again. Dizziness; thirstiness; headaches; increasing photosensitivity; paranoia; and finally, hydrophobia and irrational violence, rages against nothing, and the urge to kill, to kill, to kill anyone who wasn’t already sick.
We lost half our number in a weekend, and we adapted. So did they.
“Remember that I have to win…” I whisper, and stop. There is no comfort there.
We stop in front of the house where I grew up. The welcome mat is still on the porch, still inviting us inside. The windows have been boarded up. Danny’s doing, probably. It keeps the light out, and the wind, and everything else. Dad could never have figured out what needed to be done. He’s not handy.
He’s probably not anything, by now. Rabies is a cruel mistress.
“This the house?” asks Tess.
I nod.
“You’re sure your brother is alone in there?”
“My dad could still be alive.” But I don’t think so.
Tess nods. “We can take him.”
This is all happening so fast. It’s not the worst idea, I guess—winter really is on the way—but that doesn’t mean it should be happening like this. We should have more people. A better plan.
More risks. More mouths to eat whatever food is still in the cupboards. God, I’m hungry. I wipe my mouth with the back of my hand. I’m hungry enough to start drooling at the thought of a bowl of cereal.
Tess lifts her bat.
I step forward and open the door.
The house is dark and smells like rot, like backed-up plumbing and food left on counters and something sweeter, poisonously so, something that makes my nose itch and my stomach rebel. I step inside anyway, and Tess is right behind me.
“Danny?” I call. “It’s Stacy. I came home. I missed you, and I came home.”
Nothing moves. Nothing breathes. I let my feet guide me to the dining room, and there they are, Dad and Danny both, waiting for me. Neither of them turns. Behind me, Tess gasps. I don’t care. It’s so good to see my family again. I missed them so much.
My head hurts.
“Stacy,” says Tess, joy and horror mingled in her voice, “they’re dead. They’re dead! All we have to do is push them outside and close the door and the house is ours! We can—”
She has a bat. I have a chair. I also have the element of surprise, and when the chair smashes against her face, down she goes, not even able to scream. I hit her again, and again, and again, until she stops moving, until she stops trying to get up.
When I’m done, when my hands are raw and bloody, I drop the chair on her body and stand where I am, panting. The dimness in the house is so nice. The sun was so bright. It’s better in here. My head hurts less.
Dimly, I start to understand what my body has been telling me all day. What happened, and how, I may never know, just like I never knew what happened to Danny. A coyote, maybe, too far to bite, but close enough to sneeze, or a bat, with its sharp, sharp teeth, or touching something that had been touched by something else, contagion clinging to a seemingly safe surface. What does it matter? This is the end of the world. But I’m home now, and my family is here, and I’m safe, for now.
There’s a box of cereal open on the table. It’s stale, it’s old, but I don’t mind. I sit down in the chair that’s always been mine, and I stick my hand in the box, and I crunch down a mouthful of sugary flakes.