"You've never lied to me."
"But you don't really believe that."
"Yes I do." Like the others, she wouldn't look at him, but she said in a tiny voice, "I was just scared."
He kissed her on the cheek and gave her a bit of room to breathe. "It was the man with the black eyes, wasn't it? He came back."
She gave a reluctant nod in reply. Tetch whispered "Good," and kissed her mouth, tasting her breath, his hands trembling against the small of her back. "What's his name, Lily?"
"He doesn't have one."
Tetch's grip relaxed completely. Opening her eyes, Lily backed away from his pale face, his slack arms. He didn't even look at her.
She went back to her bedroom.
Outside the burning shelter, under a dark sky, a pile of crumbled and mutilated remains lay in the folds of a black cloak. There was a sound like dead leaves rustling and Death reconstituted himself.
He sat in the street for a long time, his steed pacing around him, and he thought. These undead hadn't been like any others. They'd been taught to behave and interact in some semblance of mortality. They were the ones from the swamp.
The Reaper spent some time looking through the clothes of the corpses around him, then got back on his horse. The living from the shelter were still nearby, and some of them would be dead very soon. Though he couldn't prevent that, couldn't add a single precious second to their flickering candles — he could at least see that none of them were added to the ranks of the afterdead…
Tetch lay on the floor outside Lily's door, ear pressed to the wood, until her breathing became deep and even. Then he returned to the foyer. The others were still standing there.
"Go out to the shed," he told Gerald, "and bring the crate inside. Be careful with it — Simeon, you help him."
He dismissed Prudence and Bailey as well, then went to the window and peered through the curtain into the blackness of the swamp.
"Can you hear me out there?" He whispered. "I know who you are."
There was a little story a bum had told him once when he was a boy, one that he had never forgotten. Pressing his face to the cold glass, Tetch spoke.
"I am the king of the dead."
28
Dawn
The East Harbor Mall on the next block had been one of the first large buildings to fall when the outbreak began in the early 21st century. Some old movie about zombies had sent dozens of townspeople fleeing to the mall, hoping to barricade themselves inside its stores and wait out the nightmare. Those who didn't kill each other were quickly cornered and ripped apart by the undead.
Clothing outlets, restaurants, a department store and a movie theater were among the empty husks within the mall. Everything from underwear to cash to theater seats had been plundered, and the bloodstained floors were eventually licked clean and the place was abandoned to the elements. Squatters were known to spend a night or two in malls but they were generally regarded as unsafe.
Voorhees led the group, checking each outlet to see if it still had the security gate that would block its entryway. Most had been torn down.
Jenna and Lauren brought up the rear, holding each other to no effect. The terrified couldn't comfort the terrified, Mark Duncan observed. Still he thought he'd give it a shot.
"We'll be okay. We're with these people now." He told the women. Neither responded. "We're better off than we were at Fetish," he continued. "That cop said we're on our way to the police department. He's got it secured."
"The cop who killed that man?" Lauren stammered.
"Here we go!" Mike called. They were ushered into a store with nothing on its walls to indicate what it had once sold. Voorhees pulled down the security gate. "What good will that do?" Said Wendy. "It'll do." Voorhees grumbled.
"I've got to get back to my apartment." Mike told him. "Cheryl, the girl I told you about, she's there. You continue to the PD and we'll catch up."
"Out of the question." Voorhees shot back, then, lowering his voice: "You're the only one I trust. Probably the only one who trusts me, now."
"I'll take Shipley with me."
"Why would you do that?"
"What if Cheryl can ID him as her attacker?"
Cop instincts taking over, Voorhees considered it. He eyed Shipley, who was sitting alone in the back of the room.
"Take my gun, Mike. No one else knows it's empty."
Mike nodded gratefully and motioned to Shipley. "We've gotta go get somebody."
"What? Why me?"
"If you'd rather stay with me, just say so." Voorhees cracked. Shipley narrowed his eyes and got up. "Fuck that."
Mike raised the gate, and Voorhees handed over the pistol. Shipley stopped in front of the senior P.O. before leaving. "You take care of these people."
"That's my job." Voorhees pushed Shipley into the corridor and slammed the gate back down.
Mike led Shipley back the way they'd come, and they searched the mall parking lot for rotters. There were none. The shelter was being rapidly consumed by flames, filling the early morning sky with black smoke.
"Don't try running, or anything else." Mike told Shipley. The other man snorted. "If I wanted to run I'd have already done it. If I wanted to do something else, I'd have already done that too."
Shipley had deserted the military, had run from his prison sentence, but with a purpose. He wasn't a coward. He was running TO something, not FROM it.
He'd deserted with two other soldiers: King, a female, and Bish. The pair were in love, and talked all the time about escaping the badlands and finding some lost beach to fuck on for the rest of their days. Shipley had thought they were both out of their gourds but kept his mouth shut.
They tromped across the dry, barren earth with a few stolen supplies. There was no safe cover under which to set up camp, so they each slept with one eye open. Tried, anyway. More than once Shipley had been stirred from a foggy dream to spy King thrashing atop Bish like she was a porn star. More than once she was watching Shipley while doing it.
"I'm bit." Bish said one morning while picking the charred skin off of an unlucky lizard. He pulled up his camouflage tee and showed Shipley a bite on his side. It was old. "How long ago?" Shipley demanded. They hadn't seen a rotter since they deserted.
"A few weeks?" Bish shrugged. "I don't think I'm infected. The window's five to ten days before you croak, isn't it?"
"They don't know. They don't know shit about it, no matter what they say." Shipley replied. King was relieving herself behind a bush. "She know?" He asked.
"She's seen it." Bish bit into the lizard with a crunch. "She don't care."
Because she can just plant herself on my face once you're dead, Shipley thought. He took a tiny sip from his canteen. "Maybe I can't get infected," Bish mused through a mouthful of guts. "It's like Gerry, you know, how she can't get pregnant."
Bish was functionally retarded, Shipley decided, and went hunting for his own lizard.
It was a few nights later that Bish slipped into a coma. He'd just shot his wad, and King shook Shipley awake with a rumpled shirt held to cover what he'd already seen.
"Maybe it's heat exhaustion." She said while he looked over the unconscious soldier. She'd pulled on the bottoms of her fatigues and was walking around topless; Shipley ignored the swaying of her breasts as she took shallow breaths.
"He's dead." Shipley muttered. They didn't have anything to decapitate Bish with, let alone torch him. The cheap combat knives handed out to grunts by the Army could barely cut a steak. Shipley would have to saw at muscle and bone until the blade broke, then wrench the head completely off.
King wailed. "He can't be! How did it happen? Not the bite! It wasn't the bite!!"
"OF COURSE it was the bite, you fucking…" Shipley spat and turned away. He pulled out his knife and she seized his wrist. "Please don't do this to him! Just leave him in peace-"