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“…Dad?”
He’s racing on stiff, rigor mortis legs, while his favorite memories, long forgotten, surface: the night she stayed home from a party to play chess with him; the poster of dogs playing poker in her bedroom that he never took down, even after Adam moved in; the color red, that he has forever associated with Delia, his perfect child, who was born with a taste for blood. These memories surface like exploding stars, and then just as quickly, disappear. He tries to catch them, but they are mist. By the time he reaches the lower level of the basement, he is aware only of their loss, and not what they contained.
“Delia!” He cries, and now he can’t remember-is he chasing her ghost, or the actual girl?
“Dad, I’m here. In the bomb shelter!” she answers.
He shambles, standing tall now, past the walking dead National Guard and orderlies and reporters, through the second examination room, where the rest of the headless prisoners lay, and toward the back stairs that lead farther down. His muscles tear and creak as he descends. He unlocks another door to another wide room, where there are no zombies. Just a single cell in the center of the room. Several bodies lay half inside the bars, their legs and chests chewed down to the bones. He looks up, and there is Delia, red-cheeked and glowing, peering out from her cage.
“Dad,” she says.
He doesn’t remember her name, and her young, vigorous face doesn’t look familiar, but he knows her, and he loves her like red dawn. He walks stiff-legged to the bars. She’s crying. The sound is both terrible and beauteous.
There are voices, many voices, whispering words of nonsense.
I’m hungry.
I’m lonely.
It’s so dark.
Nine hundred ninety-nine times out of a thousand, my master will lie.
And then, through all that, so softly he can barely hear it: Co
The woman is small and sharp-featured with a round belly. Though he has no evidence or memory, he knows she is his daughter. “You’re immune?” he asks.
“Sort of,” she says. She can’t look him in the eyes.
“Why didn’t they make a vaccine?”
She shakes her head. He waits for more. She doesn’t ask about the boy, Adam. He doesn’t remember the name or what the word represents. He only knows he’s disappointed, like always. And she’s ashamed, like always. And the chasm between their two distinct natures is red.
“I got bit,” he tells her. “Where are the keys? I better get you out so you can run away.”
She nods her head at the key ring about twenty feet away and he retrieves it. There is only one key, and it occurs to him that to put her here, they must have thought she was very dangerous.
“Don’t worry about me,” she says. “I can’t get what you have.”
Something clicks inside him. The part that knew this all along. The part that came all this way because it knew, and needed to finish what it had started.
He comes closer. In one hand, he’s got the shotgun. In the other, the key. He feels himself nodding off. He thinks about the ocean and the sky, and the time they went fishing at dawn, and how she told him she loved him, too.
And then there is Gladys, looking down on them both with the baby in her arms like the Virgin Mary.
“Why are you immune?” he asks.
She points to the back of her cell. He notices that the structures he’d first imagined as furniture are bones. She has fashioned a chair, a bed. The rest are piled and polished like shiny rocks. He realizes why this room is free of zombies. Little is left, save their bones. “I feed on their blood. Any blood. It keeps me young. But you knew that.”
He nods, but doesn’t answer, because he has lost the words. He is losing himself, one brain cell at a time.
She licks her lips, and he sees that she’s less happy to see him than hungry. But this is the nature of parents and children. The former give, the latter take. “The key, Dad?” she asks.
It feels sharp in his hand. He remembers those missing high school kids, and after that, the junkies’ bodies he read about in the paper that had been drained of blood. No wonder she developed a taste for heroin.
“The virus came from me,” she says. “I bit someone and they lived. It mutated inside them and spread.”
“I’m dying,” he says.
Her orange jumpsuit is slack in the hips and waist. It’s probably been a while since she fed. If he opens the door for her, she’ll make a meal of him. But what are fathers for, if not sustenance? “Fuck you, Dad. You never understood it was a gift. You made me ashamed.”
He shakes his head. Feels his heart slowing in his chest. It doesn’t remember how to pump, so he hits it, hard. “I love you,” he says.
Her eyes water. He thinks that means she’s sad, but he can’t really tell. Monsters don’t act like normal people. “I love you, too,” she answers. “Now give me the key.”
Are you lonesome, just like me?
Co
“Yes, I knew,” he whispers. “So did you.”
Behind the bars, Delia licks her lips. “The key.”
He doesn’t remember his name anymore, or this woman before him. All that is left is the emotion underneath it, and instinct.
“Now, Dad.”
He fires the shotgun. His aim is true.
Then he turns the shotgun on himself, but it is too long and his fingers won’t obey him, so he drops it.
The young woman lies motionless while blood pools around her. He thinks about the color blue as he reaches through the bars that will now separate them for an eternity, and squeezes her fingers. She squeezes back as if she is relieved, and then lets go.
In sadness he can no longer comprehend, his heart tears itself into wings and flaps blood. It is a caged bird in there, that has shred itself inside-out but still can’t get free.
Acknowledgments
Many thanks to the following:
Jeremy Lassen and Jason Williams at Night Shade Books, for letting me edit all these anthologies and for doing such a kick-ass job publishing them. Also, to Ross Lockhart and Michael Lee at Night Shade for all they do behind-the-scenes, and to Marty Halpern for his copyediting prowess.
David Palumbo, for yet another fantastic cover.
Gordon Van Gelder, who first infected me with the editorial bug, and made me into the zombie editor I am today.
My former agent Je
David Barr Kirtley for his assistance wrangling the header notes. All the clever things in the header notes are all his work. Anything lame you came across is mine.
Rebecca McNulty, for her various and valuable interning assistance-reading, sca
Christie Yant, my self-described “minion,” for her friendship and her tireless devotion to making my life easier.
My mom, for the usual reasons.
All of the other kindly folks who assisted me in some way during the editorial process: Charlie Campbell, Ellen Datlow, Pablo Defendini, Diana Fox, Regina Glei, Susan Marie Groppi, Wake Lankard, Seanan McGuire, Tom Piccirilli, Julia & R. J. Sevin, Patrick Swenson, Jeremiah Tolbert, Ryan West, Renee Zuckerbrot, and to everyone else who helped out in some way that I neglected to mention (and to you folks, I apologize!).
The NYC Geek Posse-consisting of Robert Bland, Desirina Boskovich, Christopher M. Cevasco, Douglas E. Cohen, Jordan Hamessley, Andrea Kail, and Matt London, (plus Dave Kirtley, who I mentioned above, and the NYCGP Auxiliary)-for giving me an excuse to come out of my editorial cave once in a while.
The readers and reviewers who loved my other anthologies, making it possible for me to do more.
And last, but certainly not least: a big thanks to all of the authors who appear in this anthology.