(Through his jacket, the Stage Manager pats his gun.)
Stage Manager: You try to maintain some semblance of a sense of humor, which is not always as hard as maybe it should be. There’s something to the old saw about horror and humor being flip sides of the same coin. An idiot takes his arm off with his chainsaw trying to play hero—I grant you it’s pretty grim fodder for laughs, but you make do with what’s to hand—so to speak.
A situation like this, though, like this poor woman and her children—those children—I know what she saw when she ran into that living room. I know what that is on her shirt, and how it got there. I can’t—I don’t have the faintest idea what I’m supposed to do with that knowledge. I could tell you, I suppose, but to what end? You know what those things—those eaters, that’s not a bad word, is it?—you know what they did to that little girl and that little boy. There’s no need for the specifics. Maybe you’d rather hear about the scene that greeted Mary when she fled her house in horror, or maybe you’ve guessed that, too: her neighbors’ houses overrun, pretty much without a single shot being fired.
This is the beginning of the second phase of the zombie trouble—what did that newscaster call it? The Reanimation Crisis? From something people were watching on their TVs, or seeing outside the windows of their trains, zombies become something that’s waiting for you when you go to get in your car, that clatters around your garage, that thumps on your door. Situation like this, where folks have known the world’s going to hell and been preparing themselves for it—which mostly means emptying their bank accounts accumulating as many guns as Wal-Mart’ll sell them—you’d expect that all that planning would count for something, that those zombies never would have made it up Mary’s front walk, that one or the other of her neighbors would have noticed what was tumbling out the back of that delivery truck and started shooting. There’d be a lot of noise, a lot of mess, possibly a close call or two, but everything would turn out well in the end. Mary would be home with her kids, her neighbors would be patting themselves on the backs with a certain amount of justifiable pride, and at least one zombie outbreak would have been contained. Instead, Mary’s the only one to escape alive, which she accomplishes by running screaming out of her house, up the street and out onto Route 376, where she’s struck by a red pickup truck driven by an eighteen-year-old girl who received it as a birthday present from her parents last month.
Mary avoids being hit head-on, which would’ve killed her, but she’s tossed to the side of the road. To her credit, the girl stops, reverses, and leaves the truck to see to the woman who collided with it. Actually it’s a risky move—for all the girl knows, she could’ve knocked down a zombie. Mary’s pretty seriously concussed, but it’s clear to the girl she hails from one of the big houses on the side street—the houses from which a few zombies are emerging, doused with blood. The girl doesn’t waste any time: she hustles Mary into her truck and literally burns rubber racing away. The girl—who deserves a name: she’s Beth Driscoll—Beth takes Mary into the center of Goodhope Crossing, to the new walk-in emergency-care place, and stays with her as the doctor examines her with an openly worried expression on his face. Mary’s in what he’s going to call a fugue state—like being part of the way into a coma—and she’s never going to surface from it. The doctor—Dr. Bartram, for the record—tries to arrange for an ambulance to transfer her to one of the local hospitals, but all at once, the ambulances are very busy. By the time he considers driving her himself, the police will have told everyone to stay off the roads. When those same police start stumbling through the front doors with wounds of their own for the doc to treat, Mary will be placed on a cot in one of the hallways and left there. Beth will check on her as she’s able, which won’t be much, because she’ll be busy helping the doc and his staff with the injured. After the medical facilities are transferred to St. Pat’s church hall, Mary’s installed there, given a futon-bed and a molded plastic chair and a garbage bag full of assorted sweatpants, t-shirts, underwear, and socks. Beth tends to her as she can.
Ted doesn’t show up looking for his wife. In fairness to him, that’s due to his having parked in front of his house about two minutes after Beth sped off with Mary. Once he realized what was taking place, he bolted his car for the house, whose front door he’d noticed open and which had him dreading the worst. The worst met him at the door, in the form of the pair who’d devoured his children, one of whom was holding Brian’s stuffed frog, which was dark with blood. You may consider it a kindness that Ted died without seeing what was left of his beloved daughter and son upstairs.
Mary can eat and drink, use the toilet if you take her to it. Speak to her, and she’ll bob her head in your direction. There are times, after Beth’s sat with her for an hour, maybe read to her from the Bible (which Beth secretly hopes might produce a miraculous cure), the girl looks at Mary half-slumped in her chair, or reclining on her bed, and wonders if Mary isn’t lucky to be like this, safe from the chaos that’s descended on the world. She has no idea—she can have no idea that deep within Mary’s psyche, she’s standing at that stove for the ten-thousandth time, watching a pot full of water begin to boil, waiting for her children to start screaming.
(The Stage Manager sighs, looks up, looks down, rubs his hands together half-heartedly, sighs again.)
Stage Manager: I never finished telling you about the town, did I? Not that it makes much difference at this point, but maybe one or two of you are curious.
(Once more, the Stage Manager settles himself on the ground, against the headstone; although he appears to have more trouble finding a comfortable position than previously.)
Stage Manager: All right. What more is there to say about Goodhope Crossing? The longer-term history of the town isn’t that much different from any other in this neck of the woods. There were farms around these parts as far back as the Dutch, but Goodhope Crossing, as the name suggests, owes itself to the railroads. In the years after the Civil War, when track was stitching up the country everywhere you looked, three north-south lines and one east-west line met one another right here.
(From the orchestra pit, a quartet of wooden train whistles sound softly.)
Stage Manager: There was a long, low hill to the east of the junction, a stream and some flatter land to the west. The town was plotted on that axis, the poorer folk crowding their small houses together on the hill, the better off setting up Main Street and its larger dwellings on the other side of the stream. From those two locations, the town spread outward, most of the commercial establishments opening on the other side of the hill; while the majority of new homes went up on and just off Main Street. Lot of Irish settled here; Poles and Italians, too. Big Catholic population: the local church, St. Patrick’s, started on Main Street and by the turn of the century had moved across the stream to the top of another hill just south of the one most of its parish lived on. St. Pat’s was part of the Archdiocese of New York; right before everything fell apart, they were the third or fourth largest congregation in the fold.
Interestingly—you might even say, ironically—enough, pretty much the entire surviving population has relocated to the hill, which remained a location of more… affordable housing. Control the high ground: it’s what a military strategist will tell you, and it’s a good plan, for zombies as much as anything. Once the half-dozen or so who’d staggered up Concord Street were dealt with, and all the dwellings had been checked and double-checked to be sure they were clear, folks started putting up the best barrier they could as fast as they could around the foot of the hill, tipping over cars; running barbed wire; propping up old boxsprings, mattresses; piling whatever looked as if it might hold a walking corpse at bay long enough for you to have a clear shot at it: sofas, bureaus, bookcases, china cabinets.