I leave the bathroom with abnormally purposeful strides. I slip in through the door of the 747 and stand there in the faint oval of light. Julie is lying back in a reclined seat, snoring gently. I knock on the side of the fuselage and she bolts upright, instantly awake. She watches me warily as I approach her. My eyes are burning again. I grab her messenger bag off the floor and dig through it. I find her wallet, and then I find a photo. A portrait of a young man. I hold the photo up to her eyes.
‘I’m . . . sorry,’ I say hoarsely.
She looks at me, stone-faced.
I point at my mouth. I clutch my stomach. I point at her mouth. I touch her stomach. Then I point out the window, at the cloudless black sky of merciless stars. It’s the weakest defence for murder ever offered, but it’s all I have. I clench my jaw and squint my eyes, trying to ease their dry sting.
Julie’s lower lip is tensed. Her eyes are red and wet. ‘Which one of you did it?’ she says in a voice on the verge of breaking. ‘Was it that big one? That fat f**k that almost got me?’
I stare at her for a moment, not grasping her questions. And then it hits me, and my eyes go wide.
She doesn’t know it was me.
The room was dark and I came from behind. She didn’t see it. She doesn’t know. Her penetrating eyes address me like a creature worthy of address, unaware that I recently killed her lover, ate his life and digested his soul, and am right now carrying a prime cut of his brain in the front pocket of my slacks. I can feel it burning there like a coal of guilt, and I reflexively back away from her, unable to comprehend this curdled mercy.
‘Why me?’ she demands, blinking an angry tear out of her eye. ‘Why did you save me?’ She twists her back to me and curls up on the chair, wrapping her arms around her shoulders. ‘Out of everyone . . .’ she mumbles into the cushion. ‘Why me.’
These are her first questions. Not the ones urgent for her own well-being, not the mystery of how I know her name or the terrifying prospect of what my plans for her might be; she doesn’t rush to satisfy those hungers. Her first questions are for others. For her friends, for her lover, wondering why she couldn’t take their place.
I am the lowest thing. I am the bottom of the universe.
I drop the photo onto the seat and look at the floor. ‘I’m . . . sorry,’ I say again, and leave the plane.
When I emerge from the boarding tunnel, there are several Dead grouped near the doorway. They watch me without expressions. We stand there in silence, still as statues. Then I brush past them and wander off into the dark halls.
The cracked pavement rumbles under our truck’s tyres. It abuses the old Ford’s creaky suspension, making a quiet roar like stifled rage. I look at my dad. He looks older than I remember. Weaker. He grips the steering wheel hard. His knuckles are white.
‘Dad?’ I say.
‘What, Perry.’
‘Where are we going to go?’
‘Someplace safe.’
I watch him carefully. ‘Are there still safe places?’
He hesitates, too long. ‘Someplace safer.’
Behind us, in the valley where we used to swim and pick strawberries, eat pizza and go to movies, the valley where I was born and grew up and discovered everything that’s now inside me, plumes of smoke rise. The gas station where I bought Coke Slushies is on fire. The windows of my grade school are shattered. The kids in the public swimming pool are not swimming.
‘Dad?’ I say.
‘What.’
‘Is Mom coming back?’
My dad finally looks at me, but says nothing.
‘As one of them?’
He looks back at the road. ‘No.’
‘But I thought she would. I thought everyone comes back now.’
‘Perry,’ my dad says, and the word seems to barely escape his throat. ‘I fixed it. So she won’t.’
The hard lines in his face fascinate and repel me. My voice cracks. ‘Why, Dad?’
‘Because she’s gone. No one comes back. Not really. Do you understand that?’
The scrub brush and barren hills ahead start to blur in my vision. I try to focus on the windshield itself, the crushed bugs and tiny fractures. Those blur, too.
‘Just remember her,’ my dad says. ‘As much as you can, for as long as you can. That’s how she comes back. We make her live. Not some ridiculous curse.’
I watch his face, trying to read the truth in his squinted eyes. I’ve never heard him talk like this.
‘Bodies are just meat,’ he says. ‘The part of her that matters most . . . we get to keep that.’
‘Julie.’
‘What?’
‘Come here. Look at this.’
The wind makes a ripping sound through the shattered plate glass of the hospital we’re salvaging. Julie steps to the window’s edge with me and looks down.
‘What’s it doing?’
‘I don’t know.’
On the snow-dusted street below, a single zombie walks in a loose circle. It bumps into a car and stumbles, slowly backs up against a wall, turns, shuffles in another direction. It makes no sound and doesn’t seem to be looking at anything. Julie and I watch it for a few minutes.
‘I don’t like this,’ she says.
‘Yeah.’
‘It’s . . . sad.’
‘Yeah.’
‘What’s wrong with it?’
‘Don’t know.’
It stops in the middle of the street, swaying slightly. Its face displays absolutely nothing. Just skin stretched over a skull.
‘I wonder how it feels,’ she says.