#24 gurgled, and a rope of spittle dripped down from its steel-plated jaws.
“Huck… anchowies…” it said.
And Eagle was running even before the barrel dropped, running and laughing with tears in his eyes, thanking God in whatever form it chose for this awful moment of mercy and grace…
…as the Dungeon Master went click click click, stomped his feet. Went click click click again. Repeating it over and over.
Staring furiously at the game that utterly failed to obey him.
Betrayed, with every click.
Fifteen minutes later-as he click click clicked-a text window popped up on his primary screen. MUCH IMPROVED.
Good news. Was good news. It was good to be useful. He got recognition, bonuses and perks all the time. He deserved them. Because he was the best.
And yet, with his free hand, he grabbed at his straggly goatee and tugged until the pain cleared his mind, then reached out and grabbed the joystick again, squeezing and squeezing the trigger.
On the screen, #24 suddenly locked on a worker and shot him in the back, cutting him in half. His crew went on bagging and tagging the bodies, all green tags. Definitely not an equipment failure.
“I shot you,” he said to the screen. “I told you to shoot. I gave you a fucking order…”
The replay of Eagle staring down his favorite Death Machine ran on a corner screen until Sherman kicked it in.
It made his foot hurt like a bastard.
War was just so unfair.
Are You Trying to Tell Me This is Heaven? by Sarah Langan
Sarah Langan is a three-time winner of the Bram Stoker Award. She is the author of the novels The Keeper and The Missing, and her most recent novel, Audrey’s Door, won the 2009 Stoker for best novel. Her short fiction has appeared in the magazines Cemetery Dance, Phantom, and Chiaroscuro, and in the anthologies Darkness on the Edge and Unspeakable Horror. She is currently working on a post-apocalyptic young adult series called Kids and two adult novels: Empty Houses, which was inspired by The Twilight Zone, and My Father’s Ghost, which was inspired by Hamlet.
Benjamin Franklin said, “Fish and houseguests start to stink after three days.” It can really be a strain, sharing your living space with another person, and so the decision to have a child is one of the biggest gambles a person can take-you’re essentially inviting a complete stranger to come live with you for a few decades and to be a major part of your life until you die. Most of the time it works out pretty well, at least we like to think so, but there are exceptions-children who are desperately unhappy no matter what you try to do for them, who run away, or get mixed up in crime. Parents torment themselves over how they should handle situations like this-Do you draw the line somewhere? Try to enforce strict discipline or maybe ship your child off to a prison-like reform school? Or do you provide unconditional love and support and hope that somehow they find their way in the world? Sometimes nothing you do seems to work.
Our final story tells of a parent who was in just such a predicament, and who is trying to reach his wayward daughter in the wake of a zombie apocalypse. He knows that his daughter is not the child he might have wished for, but he loves her nevertheless and is willing to do anything to protect her. Or at least…almost anything. After all, the world can be a terrifying place, a place full of monsters.
I. He Gets Bit
The midday sun slaps Conrad Wilcox’s shoulders and softens the blacktop highway so that his shoes sink just slightly. It’s a wide road with a middle island upon which Magnolias bloom. Along the sides of the street are parked or crashed cars, most of them rusted. He’s got three more miles to go, and then, if his map is correct, a left on Emancipation Place. Two more miles after that, and he’ll reach whatever’s left of the Louisiana State Correctional Facility for women. He’ll reach Delia.
Along the highway-side grass embankment lies a green traffic sign that has broken free from its metal post. It reads:
Welcome to Baton Rouge-Authentic Louisiana at Every Turn!
And under that, in scripted spray-paint:
Plague Zone- Keep Out!
Conrad wipes his brow with the back of an age-spot-dappled hand and keeps walking. He’s come nearly two thousand miles, and he buried his fear back in Tom’s River, along with the bodies. In fear’s place came hysteria, followed by paralysis, depression, the urge to do self-harm, and, finally, the enduring numbness with which he has sustained his survival. But so close to the end, his numbness cracks like an external skeleton. His chest and groin feel exposed, as if they’ve loosened from their bony cradles, and are about to fall out.
“I’m almost there, Gladdy,” he says. “You’d better be watching. You’d better help me figure out what to do when the time comes, you old cow.”
“I am.” He answers himself in a fussy, high-pitched voice, then adds, “Don’t call me a cow.”
Another quarter-mile past the city limits brings him to a kudzu-covered 7-Eleven. It’s the first shop since the Hess Station in Howell that doesn’t look bombed out or looted. “Water. Here we go, Connie,” he mumbles in that same, wrong-sounding voice. “See? It’s all going to turn out great!”
He shuffles toward the storefront on a bent back and spry, skinny limbs, so that the overhead view of him appears crablike. He is sixty-two years old, but could pass for eighty.
His reflection, a grizzled wretch with a concave chest and hollowed eyes, moves slowly in the jagged storefront glass, but everything else is still. No crickets chirp. No children scream. It’s too quiet. He grabs his holster-empty-and remembers that he lost his gun to the bottom of the Mississippi River two days ago, and has been without water and food ever since.
“This looks like Capital T trouble. Right here in River City,” he says in the high-pitched voice. It belongs to his wife Gladys. He’s so lonely out here that he’s invented her ghost. “Keep walking, Connie.”
He knows she’s right, but he’s so thirsty that his tongue has swollen inside his mouth, and if he doesn’t find water soon, he’ll collapse. So he sighs, angles himself between the shards of broken doorway glass, and enters the 7-Eleven.
It’s small-two narrow aisles flanked by an enclosed counter up front. Dust blankets the stock like pristine brown snow. A morbidly obese woman with a balding black widow’s peak and chipped purple nail polish stands behind the counter, holding a bloodied issue of The Enquirer. “Zombies rise up from Baton Rouge Ghetto!” the lead article screams.
“Hi,” Connie says.
The woman drops the magazine and bobbles in his direction. Something has eaten most of her abdomen and in the weeks or months since her death, the wet climate has not dried her out, but instead made a moldy home of her. He pictures lizards, crickets, even unborn children flying out from her gaping hole. Her apron, which presumably once read, “Thank Heaven for 7-Eleven!” now reads: “Heaven-Eleven!”
“Are you trying to tell me this is heaven?” Conrad asks.
She lunges at him and the force of her weight against the three-foot-high counter opens her stomach, spraying the shrunken Big Bite Hot Dogs’ spit glass and Enquirer with gangrenous green fluid.
“Sorry. I didn’t mean to tease you,” he grunts as he wipes his face and pitches toward the darkened glass refrigerators in the back.
Behind him, Heaven figures it out and climbs the counter, then falls to the floor and crawls after him on a leaking stomach.
Conrad tries to pick up his pace, but he’s so dehydrated that his heart is a trapped bird in his chest, fluttering and in pain.
Do zombies eat cold meat? Do they dream of electric sheep?