“You don’t have to.”
She looks up, eyes huge. “I don’t want to die.”
“Oh. God. Becca.”
I pull her into my arms and she falls apart, huge gasping gulping sobs, and I fall apart along with her—I don’t have to be strong for her this time, not now. This is slow, this is so slow, this is agonizing, but I cannot kill my daughter, not when she is still my daughter. Even though the gray is creeping up to her shoulder, down to her wrist. Even though she has begun to reek.
She pulls back eventually, and in a wavering voice, she just talks. About summer camps and school, best friends and crushes. Becca is my only child. I was young when I had her, and so we have always been friends—parent and child first, but friends second. These are old stories with endings we all know, punch lines that we say in unison. She plays with the wooden beads as she talks, constant punctuation—clackclackclack. The room is dusk—dark with primary colors beaming out of the gloom. It’s quiet and wrong. Everything is wrong. Everything now will always be wrong.
Becca’s hand goes clackclackclack, and I stroke the gun every time; our new rhythm. A reminder.
She is trying too hard to be brave. She is shaking. Clackclackclackplink as one of her fingernails detaches.
She looks at her hand and looks at me. “Mommy,” she whispers.
“I know.” I take a deep, shuddery breath. “Do you want to keep talking?”
“Yeah.”
Her hands are shaking, and the clackclackclacks become more irregular. I am watching her and something is rending my heart, my guts. I struggle for breath, watching my beautiful shining daughter go grey, soften.
I was young when I had her. I didn’t know what to do, and I didn’t have many people around to help; I had to figure it all out on my own. I had a hard time getting her to latch on properly to breastfeed, so it was a huge victory when I finally did, when she finally did; I would prop myself against pillows and cradle her, her head in the crook of my elbow and her butt nestled in my hand, legs kicking idly, and she would look up at me with those big blue eyes as I learned how to be a mother to her. There were classes and her first library card and parks and swimming pools and she grew up; toy xylophones gave way to cell phones and we were going to go look at colleges this summer. A little early, but she couldn’t wait. She was so eager to go out into the world. She had so much she was going to do.
She stops talking. Clackclackclack.
Clackclack . . . clack.
Clack . . . clack.
“Becca?”
She looks up. Her face is sagging oddly. She is not simply gray. There’s a mottling of yellow, green . . .
“Becca.” My hand tightens on the gun.
“Mommy.” Her voice cracks. “You should do it now.”
I carefully turn off the camera and set it aside without releasing the gun or taking my eyes off her. “Not yet, honey.”
“No. Mommy. It’s time.”
“But you’re still there!” It’s torn from me, almost, that plea, physically wrenched. It can’t be time yet. It’s only been an hour. It’s only been sixteen years. She is still here. My baby is still here. It can’t be time.
“Mommy,” she pleads, and the anguish in her voice matches mine. I can barely see her through my tears; when did that happen? My throat is sore from holding in the sob that’s rising, I can’t breathe; absurdly, my nose is running. “Mommy,” she says again, her voice softer. “ . . . I’m hungry.”
Her eyes are still her eyes.
I stand.
I set the gun down on a bookshelf, on top of Pat the Bunny.
“Mommy, no, you have to.”
I walk to my daughter. I kneel before her and I hold my breath, and I hold her hand. “Eat,” I whisper.
She sobs, but the last of Becca slips away with that sob, and I feed my daughter for the last time.
The Naturalist
Maureen F. McHugh
Cahill lived in the Flats with about twenty other guys in a place that used to be an Irish bar called Fado. At the back of the bar was the Cuyahoga River, good for protection since zombies didn’t cross the river. They didn’t crumble into dust, they were just stupid as bricks and they never built a boat or a bridge or built anything. Zombies were the ultimate trash. Worse than the guys who cooked meth in trailers. Worse than the fat women on WIC. Zombies were just useless dumbfucks.
“They’re too dumb to find enough food to keep a stray cat going,” Duck said.
Cahill was talking to a guy called Duck. Well, really, Duck was talking and Cahill was mostly listening. Duck had been speculating on the biology of zombies. He thought that the whole zombie thing was a virus, like Mad Cow Disease. A lot of the guys thought that. A lot of them mentioned that movie, 28 Days where everybody but a few people had been driven crazy by a virus.
“But they gotta find something,” Duck said. Duck had a prison tattoo of a mallard on his arm. Cahill wouldn’t have known it was a mallard if Duck hadn’t told him. He could just about tell it was a bird. Duck was over six feet tall and Cahill would have hated to have been the guy who gave Duck such a shitty tattoo cause Duck probably beat him senseless when he finally got a look at the thing. “Maybe,” Duck mused, “maybe they’re solar powered. And eating us is just a bonus.”
“I think they go dormant when they don’t smell us around,” Cahill said.
Cahill didn’t really like talking to Duck, but Duck often found Cahill and started talking to him. Cahill didn’t know why. Most of the guys gave Duck a wide berth. Cahill figured it was probably easier to just talk to Duck when Duck wanted to talk.
Almost all of the guys at Fado were white. There was a Filipino guy, but he pretty much counted as white. As far as Cahill could tell there were two kinds of black guys, regular black guys and Nation of Islam. The Nation of Islam had gotten organized and turned a place across the street—a club called Heaven—into their headquarters. Most of the regular black guys lived below Heaven and in the building next door.
This whole area of the Flats had been bars and restaurants and clubs. Now it was a kind of compound with a wall of rubbish and dead cars forming a perimeter. Duck said that during the winter they had regular patrols organized by Whittaker and the Nation. Cold as shit standing behind a junked car on its side, watching for zombies. But they had killed off most of the zombies off in this area and now they didn’t bother keeping watch. Occasionally a zombie wandered across the bridge and they had to take care of it, but in the time Cahill had been in Cleveland, he had seen exactly four zombies. One had been a woman.
Life in the zombie preserve really wasn’t as bad as Cahill had expected. He’d been dumped off the bus and then spent a day skulking around expecting zombies to come boiling out of the floor like rats and eat him alive. He’d heard that the life expectancy of a guy in a preserve was something like two and a half days. But he’d only been here about a day and a half when he found a cache of liquor in the trunk of a car and then some guys scavenging. He’d shown them where the liquor was and they’d taken him back to the Flats.
Whittaker was a white guy who was sort of in charge. He’d had made a big speech about how they were all more free here in the preserve than they’d ever been in a society that had no place for them, about how there used to be spaces for men with big appetites like the wild west and Alaska—and how that was all gone now but they were making a great space for themselves here in Cleveland where they could live true to their own nature.
Cahill didn’t think it was so great, and glancing around he was pretty sure that he wasn’t the only one who wouldn’t chuck the whole thing for a chance to sit and watch the Sox on TV. Bullshitting was what the Whittakers of the world did. It was part of running other people’s lives. Cahill had dragged in a futon and made himself a little room. It had no windows and only one way in, which was good in case of attack. But he found most of the time he couldn’t sleep there. A lot of time he slept outside on a picnic table someone had dragged out into the middle of the street.