His head blew apart into a million chunks and his reaching hands finally fell to the ground and lay still.
I brandished the shotgun over my head and screamed a savage, warrior scream that left my throat raw and looked out at the zombie horde, expecting to see them all falling to the ground. They weren’t.
They were all shaking and vibrating, as if released from some great constraint. This lasted for several seconds before they all lifted their heads to face me and began their stumbling and dragging toward me. All I’d done was release them to come kill me. Mason had apparently been controlling them after all.
That was when I heard the step behind me. I screamed and turned around, bringing the shotgun to my shoulder.
My mother stood there, taking the steps down from the broken trailer door. I felt all the blood rush out of my face as I watched her closing the distance on me. What the hell was this? She’d been dead. Ice cold and frozen into position by rigor mortis. Dead for two days. Unequivocally, unarguably, dead. Yet here she was trying to eat my brains out. What was going on? What was the cosmic joke here? Had killing Mason opened the floodgates and all the dead were now coming to life?
But, wait. I’d touched mom. In the trailer. Touched her and let my tears fall on her and had felt something pass from me to her. Had I somehow raised her? Was that what was going on? I’d killed Mason and he’d come back. Now I’d touched my mom and wished she weren’t dead and now she was coming back.
Thoughts raced through my mind at a thousand miles a second. Everything that had happened over the last two days floated through my brain and I realized that everything that had happened – every zombie that had come back – was all linked with my killing of Mason. The floodgates opened and I reached out to my mom with my mind and felt her there. I felt the connection to her like a single strand on a spider web. I can’t explain it any better than that but once I knew it was there that connection blazed forth in me like a light out of Heaven. I could see my mom in front of me and hear her naked feet shuffling on the gravel, but some other sense inside of me – maybe a sixth one – could feel her in front of me.
I put pressure on that strand and somehow held it there in the front of my mind. A headache immediately bloomed in my head and it was like my brain was pulsating and trying to break its way out. I winced with every heartbeat and pulse of blood through me that threatened to tear me open. I put my hand up to my temple and applied pressure there, trying to stop the pain, but it did no good. While holding that thread of silk, that piece of the web, in the forefront of my psyche, I told mom to stop. The pain overwhelmed me and brought me to my knees and I could barely mutter the words and find the breath to tell her, but I did.
“Mom, stop.”
She did. Freezing to a stop immediately. I could still see the hungry look on her face. The hands still reached for my throat and my heart, wanting to snuff the life out of me.
It was the simplest thing in the world to reach out in my mind and pluck that string. The overwhelming agony it brought to my head was another thing. I felt something trickling out of my nose and brought my hand up to it. My nose was gushing blood like a geyser, flowing out with every beat of my heart.
Mom fell to the ground and in my mind the strand that held me to her darkened and disappeared into the recesses of my heart. I looked at her and could tell she was well and truly dead. Again.
In agony, holding my head with both of my hands, I turned to the waiting crowd of zombies. They’d closed most of the gap between us. The ones in front were mere feet from me. I pulled up that other sight within me and somehow saw all the strands of the web and felt every zombie that still resided in the Acres. Most were in front of me but there were others still on the prowl in the park. Though it was agony to do so I managed to pull in all the strands and hold them in my thoughts, my head feeling like it was about to burst open like an egg thrown from the window of a high-rise.
I cried out to them. “Stop! Stop!” Somehow exercised my will on the threads. They all came shakily to a stop before me. I could feel my tenuous grasp on the threads that were their un-lives begin to slip. It was too much and there were too many of them. The feet began to creep forward, millimeters at a time. They’d never stop. I felt darkness encroaching on me and black spots appeared before my eyes. I fell forward toward the gravel, barely getting my hands down in time. The threads flickered in my mind.
“Enough!” I cried out, feeling power blaze through my words. “STOP!”
The zombies stopped, some crashing to the earth because they’d stopped in mid-step and one foot had been in the air. I felt blood seeping down the corners of my eyes, covering my hands where they lay on the ground. I couldn’t see anything now, the black spots covering my vision and only hearing the roar of silence in my ears. I gathered all the threads in my mind again, pulling them all together with the last vestige of my will. Then I severed them all. All but one.
Blood spurted out of my ears and I fell forward to the ground, bashing my forehead on the gravel. A welcome darkness rushed in.
25.
Light came back to me slowly. I had no idea how long I was out, but at least the pain in my head had fallen to a manageable level. It only felt like a really bad migraine now. I rolled to my back and brought my hands to my head, feeling for the damage. I had a huge scrape on my forehead that brought a sliver of pain when I touched it. My eyes, mouth, nose and ears all had dried blood on them but they’d stopped bleeding.
I slowly brought myself to my knees and crawled along the gravel to one of mom’s lawn chairs. All the pain on my body felt very distant to me now. And every small in comparison to the pain in my head. I felt like I was covered in scrapes and cuts and bruises. I needed about a year to rest. I finally reached the chair and dragged myself into it. The effort brought gasps of pain to my lips and another burst of agony from the area of my head.
I still had a tenuous hold on that lone thread that I’d not severed. Apparently passing out hadn’t been enough for me to let go of it. Lord knows what would have happened if I’d passed out while still holding onto the threads of the whole horde. I shuddered at the thought.
I tweaked the thread, each motion bringing another stir of pain to my head. I could feel the blood begin to flow out of my nose again but I ignored it. I commanded the thread to come before me and it finally did, digging itself out from underneath the pile of dead zombies arrayed out before me. First I saw a hand come out and then another and finally the zombie rose to its feet.
It was Barrett.
I waved him forward, feeling my gut heave as I tugged harder on the thread. He stepped toward me like a marionette on strings, which I guess he kind of was. I made him sit on the chair in front of me, absentmindedly wiping the blood from my nose.
He stared at me impassively, the hunger still in his eyes. My will had imposed itself on his body 100% but I couldn’t override his basic instincts. His dead eyes still flashed on his hunger and I could feel it reverberating through the thread that I held in my mind. I knew that if I let go my control that he’d lunge forward and attack me, trying to eat my flesh, so I had to use every bit of concentration to hold him back.