Now she’s standing in a parking lot over a pair of corpses. No sign of infection on them. Seems that what’s done them in is that their throats and most of their abdominal cavities have been emptied out. Last night she wiped the clots off somebody’s aluminum baseball bat and now she’s holding it at the ready while she toes the larger corpse. The corpse doesn’t move. For the millionth time she wonders how it works, the zombie virus or whatever they’re calling it on the news now, if there’s any news left to call things anything on. She doesn’t understand why, when they attack you, there seems to be a magic threshold, on one side of which you get bitten and turn into one of them, on the other side of which you get bitten and die. She’s seen a number of them now wounded bad enough they should be dead, they should never have changed to begin with, just went down and stayed down, like these ones. It doesn’t even make sense in the movies, what chance does she have to logic it out here?
She doesn’t check its pockets. What good will anybody’s wallet do her now? There’s something clutched in the corpse’s hand, though, and when she squats down to get a closer look she sees it’s a rosary. She’s not sure why she takes it, but she does.
Then there’s the smaller corpse. It’s not much bigger than Jack. She can’t tell if it was a boy or a girl, before. Corpse, she has to use the word corpse, or she’ll start wondering what its name was, its favorite color, whether it wanted a puppy, whether it hated macaroni and cheese as much as Jack does.
She glances around. The place is dead empty. Sets Jack down on his feet, just beside her, where a parked car casts a piece of shade on the boiling blacktop. She wonders if the car belonged to the corpses. No key in sight. She starts up a little singsong as she goes to work on the smaller one’s shoe. Look at this doll, sweetie, someone got it all messy, you wouldn’t make a mess like that, it must have been some baby, they’re so messy, you’re a big boy now and you would never.
The other shoe’s on the other leg a couple of meters away. She waves the flies off, turns upon the bright green sock a calculating eye. Cold toes, she thinks inanely, and leaves it where it is. Out of the corner of her eye she sees Jack pulling at a stuffed penguin in the corpse’s hand. Somehow it’s lying in the clear of the worst of the blood. The corpse just won’t let go. Me, he shouts at it, annoyed. She bites her lip a second, then kneels and pries the corpse’s fist open. Wipes her fingers on her yoga pants and takes his free hand. They stand together, the three of them, looking down.
Say thank you, she whispers.
Thank you, he sings out, and plants a big kiss on the air.
That night, she barricades them in somebody’s cellar and reads Jack Goodnight Moon from memory, adding in a few extras (goodnight creepy stairs, goodnight dehydration headache, goodnight dead field mouse in the corner, goodnight racecar pajamas that are getting sort of nasty). She keeps adding extras until whatever’s happening in the distance stops, it’s unlike anything she’s ever heard or wants to hear again and she has to keep on talking so he doesn’t hear it too, babbling nonsense with her mouth right up to his ear, he’s always been so sensitive to others’ pain, she can’t so much as cut her nails in front of him or else down goes his little brow into little furrows and he’s grabbing her hand and kissing it and saying mommy ow, mommy ow.
Still she can’t keep talking all night, he needs the sleep and her throat’s so very dry. The second she stops he hears it, points toward the wall, toward outside, and asks.
"Don’t they sound silly?" she says. "Just some people being silly, making silly sounds. Let’s snuggle."
And they do.
Once he’s asleep, she pulls out the rosary. It smells of blood and cedar and perfume. Her parents are lapsed Catholic, she’s only been into a church once and that was for a rummage sale, and she has no idea how to use the thing, feels like a jackass for even framing the notion in those terms, but she finds herself counting the beads of it, one by one, keeping her thumb over the one she’s just counted, just how she’s teaching Jack to do, so he doesn’t count the same thing twice.
As she touches each bead, she’s whispering under her breath. It’s stupid, she knows it’s stupid, it obviously didn’t save the woman in the parking lot with the footprints tracking through her guts four feet to either side, but it keeps unspooling out of her, she’s blubbering and she can’t make it stop. Hail Mary. Hail anybody. I could really use some help here. He’s only three and he’s run out of pull-ups and I wanted to know what he’d grow up to be. I don’t know where my parents are. I think they might be . . . sick. I ran so I could save him. So I could save him from them. I’m running out of water. I don’t know where I’m going. Is there anywhere I can go that’s better? What will happen to us? I can’t kill him don’t make me kill him but if it comes to it let him . . . let him go in his sleep, just get him the fuck out of here, they can have me, just get him out, let him find a safe place, don’t make him do this. I’m seventeen, I wanted to be a marine biologist, I have a baseball bat and a fucking flashlight and I can’t do this, how can I do this, every time I close my eyes I see them pulling him away from me and he’s shrieking mommy, all done, mommy, mommy, help, and what am I supposed to do and I can’t, I can’t, I fucking can’t.
Now they’ve hit the farmland outside town, out where she took Jack apple picking last fall, and this time of year the strawberries are fruiting, acres of them, and she can’t smell the fires from here, just the hay and the sun and the strawberries and it strikes her for a dizzy moment that the listing world has righted. She steps over the few scraggly rows on the end and sets Jack down in the middle of a clump of berries and they’re huge, pristine, untouched, and swollen on the sun. She’s found a pistol with three rounds in it and it’s jammed down in her waistband and the aluminum bat doesn’t leave her swinging hand. She keeps watch. Jack is picking berries and cramming them in with both hands and the juice is running down his chin and then she’s down in the rows with him, one eye scanning, one hand picking. She only allows herself a moment. She needs to be alert, not drunk on summer and a bellyful of sugar after days of crumbs. Jack, seeing this, pauses in his cramming to offer up two berries, one in each fist, both bruised with clumsy picking. Eat mommy! he says, red around the mouth and reaching out to her, and her breath hitches in her throat, and she knows that if she were in a movie this’d be Foreshadowing, or the Calm Before the Storm, but then she starts laughing and laughing because she doesn’t know what else to do with herself except start screaming and she can’t do that, she has to make him believe it’s a game or he’s going to lose it and then they’re done. Anyway it’s almost funny. For the first time all week, he looks just like everybody else.
Now it’s raining, a light sweet twilit summer rain, and she’s holed up in the farm stand, and Jack’s sleeping on her lap, his hair sticky with strawberry juice, and that’s where they find her.
She doesn’t know where they came from, how they knew she was there, what they’re even doing out so far on the county route, a good ten miles from town, only that she wakes and hears a noise outside, a sort of whistling sigh, which first she takes for wind, except there isn’t any. Then she hears something dragging on the gravel of the parking lot, something heavy. And then the doorknob starts to slowly turn, turn and release, turn and release, like it’s being fumbled with a slippery hand.
She’d locked it, she knows she’d locked it. Maybe the lock was faulty, maybe Jack had unlocked it when she wasn’t looking (though when the hell was she not looking?), it doesn’t matter. She folds him to her chest and darts in low toward the doorknob, reaches out against all her instinct to flee, tries to turn the lock, but it won’t turn, not while the doorknob’s turning too.