The girl was alive.
Shepherd’s hands leapt for the microphone button. “No, wait!”
The blast of a shotgun echoed through his tower speakers.
Panicked, Shepherd twisted the knob for Luke’s frequency and slammed the speaker button again. “Wait! Don’t shoot.” He stabbed his fingers onto the keyboard to command Luke to stand still. “Hold your fire. They won’t hurt you. I’m in control.”
The speakers buzzed. “Who’s talking? Where are you?”
Shepherd froze at the sound of the voice and lifted his face toward the window again. “Penny?” His voice cracked when he said her name.
“Hold on,” Shepherd said, ducking under the control panel to plug in the video line for Hanger B’s security camera. A flood of gray light filled the dusking room behind him as he scrambled back into his seat.
The girl stood some twenty yards away from the hanger, and Luke was less than half that distance from her, his back and the glint of his bolted metal spine visible on the video feed. The girl’s shotgun was leveled at his chest. The video was too grainy to see much else in detail.
Shepherd leaned in until the static from the screen crackled at the tip of his nose. “What’s your name?” He couldn’t even be sure of her face shape, let alone her features.
“I’m not telling you shit until you tell me where you are.”
“Sorry—I just need to fix . . . something.” Shepherd squinted and leaned back from the screen, as though blurring the image more would somehow make it sharper.
Is it? He couldn’t be sure. He counted off how old Penny would be now, if she was still safe. She’d been fourteen when she left, so she’d be nineteen now.
Over the speakers, Luke’s wheezing grew stronger. The muzzle of the girl’s shotgun, which had dipped toward the ground as she surveyed the area, snapped back to attention. Shepherd glanced at the light next to Luke’s name, but it no longer blinked.
“How are you doing this?” The girl’s voice had a husky growl in it, too low for Penny. But the longer he looked at the video, the more the girls seemed alike. “How are you controlling that thing?”
“I’m coming down. Wait there.”
“You try to pull any tricks and I’ll blow this motherfucker’s head off just like the last one.”
“No tricks. I’m in the control tower. You’ll see me coming.”
The girl grunted as Shepherd released the microphone button and headed for the stairs. Bart and Mary stood barring the door out to the tarmac where he’d placed them. Their lips and blood-crusted teeth chewed at him around the edges of the speakers he’d installed in their throats. They gave him a cursory glance as he slipped past them with a light touch to their shoulders and a quiet, “Excuse me.”
He’d grown so used to them that he’d forgotten how frightening they must look to a someone who didn’t realize the suits prevented them from acting on their feral instincts. Still, his chest tightened as he turned the corner of the tower and saw the three figures in the foggy distance: two standing and one crumpled on the ground.
“Lord, have mercy upon them,” Shepherd whispered.
He wanted to run to them, but he fought the urge for fear of making the girl nervous. With each step, he tried to make out the details of her hair, her face, her height—anything to determine with certainty that she was familiar. But as he drew near, and the girl turned toward him, he knew she wasn’t Penny. Just a youth alone in a bitter world clutching to her firepower like a security blanket.
He lifted his hands.
“I’m not going to hurt you,” he said. “It was me you heard. Please, put the gun down.”
“Not on your life,” the girl said, glaring at Luke. His exosuit was locked at the joints, but he didn’t struggle against the sudden stillness of his limbs. Instead, he twisted his head as a trickle of bloody spittle dribbled down his chin from the side of his mouth.
But then, Luke had always been the quietest of the bunch. Shepherd felt a pang of guilt that he was glad that Peter had taken the shot, and not Luke.
What kind of a father thinks like that? His gaze dropped to the form on the ground collapsed in a pile of awkward angles. A marionette with cut strings and stiff metal joints.
The girl aimed her gun toward him as Shepherd knelt beside what was left of Peter. The left side of Peter’s head was gone; pulped gray matter coated the asphalt. The dislodged speaker hung out the open side of his skull. The battery pack strapped to his twisted back hummed.
With a sigh, Shepherd pressed Peter’s remaining eyelid shut and flipped the switch on the pack to shut it down. Then he bowed his head and whispered the Lord’s Prayer. He wished he knew what pastors used to say over gravesites, but all he could remember—which he added to the end of the prayer he knew—was, “Ashes to ashes. Dust to dust.”
The girl shifted her weight on her stronger leg, and the gravel crunched. He could see now that the heel of her favored foot was pushed up and out of the dirty sneaker. There was crusted blood speckled up the ankle.
“You’re hurt,” he said.
The girl scowled at him. “Who the fuck are you? And what . . . what the fuck is that?” Her finger stabbed in Luke’s direction.
“That’s Luke. And this was Peter. You don’t have to be afraid. No one here will hurt you.” He began to rise to his feet, but the girl pushed the muzzle of her shotgun into his chest.
“Don’t move.”
She was younger than he’d first thought, certainly younger than his Penny would be now, but Shepherd knew better than to underestimate the anger of youth, so he sank back down to his heels and lifted his hands again.
“I have a first aid kit in the tower,” he said. “And food, if you want it. I’d be happy to share it with you.”
“Yeah, right.” The girl scoffed, her attention flickering between him and Luke. “You’re just going to be a good neighbor and give me medicine, food, and a big damn feather bed for nothing?” She shook her head, and her sneer twisted into something a little like a smile. “You think I don’t know how this works?”
The girl took a shuffling, unsteady step back, putting a little more space between them. For a moment, a wince cracked her face. “Are there more of those things around here?”
“Yes. There are nine others.”
The girl cursed and reached into a backpack she wore slung over one shoulder. Tucked under her arm and obscured by the bulky jacket, Shepherd hadn’t even noticed it until then. She squinted at him as she pulled out a box of shotgun shells and pried it open with one hand while the other remained on the trigger. She glanced at the box—once, twice—mouthing the numbers she counted without seeming to realize it.
“You won’t need your weapon here,” Shepherd said. “They can’t hurt you. Even if they wanted to, I’ve modified them so that they can’t move without my command.”
“Oh, yeah?” She stuffed the box of ammo back into her bag. “Prove it.”
“How?”
As he stood, she smiled, keeping the shotgun pointed at his chest. “Go up and stick your arm near those nice chompers of his.”
Shepherd nodded and walked to Luke’s side. He put his hand on the roamer’s shoulder, squeezing it. Luke seemed calmer in the eyes today. Perhaps—if he wasn’t reading too much into it—even a little sad when his unfocused gaze rolled down to Shepherd. Perhaps he understood what had happened to Peter.
Perhaps.
“It’s okay, Luke,” he said softly. “It’s all right.”
“What kind of a sicko are you?” The girl watched him with narrow, red-rimmed eyes. “I mean, hey, don’t get me wrong, everyone’s got the right to go ape shit these days, and I’m thrilled to pieces to meet you, Mr. Talks-to-Zombies, but . . . shit . . . ” She shook her head from side to side slowly. “You’re fucking insane, you know that?”