DeadBorn (26 page)

“
You could've told us the bitch was your mother,” Dawson mumbles, but Valerie shushes him with a kiss. It should be strange since they've only known each other for a few days, but somehow it isn't. I think it's because they've just traveled through hell together and have now arrived back on earth; everything seems different that way, new, shiny. Even a few days of complete misery is enough to reshape the way you think. I feel respectful of everything and everyone, even the little white moth that lands in Holly's hair and sits there like a bow. I watch Dawson and Valerie for a moment, humbled by how fairytale that kiss looks and then turn back to Holly.

She's still a little sweaty and her eyes are a bit glassy, but I can see that she's working to take on a task that's bigger than any of us could've ever imagined. I wait quietly by her side as zombies and bone bags shuffle in from the forests and the fields and join the mass of quiet death.

“
Seventeen year olds shouldn't be moms,” Holly tells me firmly as she stares into the distance. She's always been a good multitasker. And has always been against teenage pregnancy.

“
I'm sorry,” I say and she's rolls her eyes like I'm crazy.

“
I'm not,” she says as she blinks away some of that crazy power in her pretty baby blues and turns to look at me. “Think about it, if we hadn't been irresponsible, if we'd used a condom, then I wouldn't be pregnant and we'd all be fucking dead.” I think about it for a moment and realize that she's right: our mistake has just saved our lives.

“
Is that irony?” I ask her and she shrugs.

“
I'm going to be a good mother, Galen,” she tells me as her eyes search the sky for rotten angels. I still don't see any. I don't see the water hags either, or the fire faces or the ooze spitters. It's just lopers, just people who've left this world for the next and somehow got trapped in between. “I'm going to be the opposite of the person that Patricia was.” Holly looks down at the shingles on the roof, at the mess of guns and bows and shakes her head. “And I'm going to make sure that I never let the world get me down so hard that I have no choice but to bring it down with me. That isn't right.” She pauses here and even though she looks so strong and heroic and incredible, when she glances over at me, there's this shy uncertainty that I've never seen in her before. “Please tell me that you're going to be right there with me, that you're going to be as good a father as you are a boyfriend.”

“
F
iancé,” I correct and then I kiss her a hundred times
on the lips and know that soon enough, everything will be
right with the world.

Epilogue

Coda

Seventy-Two Hours After …

“
Help me lay the dead to rest,” Holly says as she takes my hand and leads me through a sea of slack-jawed faces. They're all in varying states of decay, some new, some old, some even that are recognizable. There's a few kids from school, a woman from my mother's book club who I can't remember the name of and feel incredibly guilty over, and then there's her. There's my mom, standing right next to Holly's dad, next to her mother, next to a couple that looks an awful lot like Dawson. Dead. They're all dead.

“
Mom?” I say and then tears are falling, so many tears, too many. I take her hand, but she doesn't respond, not even a little. Her skin is unbelievably pale and super thin, like rice paper. Her eyes are the worst part though. I remember them being brown and muddy, like they were too full of emotions to ever come clean. Now they're glossy and kind of pale, like coffee with too much milk. It's then that I know I believe Holly completely about souls and life and death because my mother's soul is not her in body. I can tell. There's such a noticeable difference that I'm surprised that nobody's ever mentioned it to me before. “How did you find her?” I ask as I look over at Holly and see that she's crying, too.

“
I can feel them all,” she tells me as she places her hand over her heart and looks up at the sky. The sun is rising round and beautiful, lighting up the morning with a renewed sense of hope. This is over. This is all going to be over. I can even hear helicopters in the distance, a sign that there is other life out there. “They're all inside me,” she whispers as she drops her gaze to mine and I can see a million flames burning there. It's the souls of all the people, waiting to get out, waiting for Holly to let them leave this place for another. That's my guess anyway. Maybe later, I'll ask her. Right now it just seems too inappropriate. “I know where they all are, what they're all doing.” I don't ask how that's possible, just lean forward and kiss her. I've seen the girl do too many amazing things to start questioning her now.

“
How many?” I ask, but Holly shakes her head. She won't tell me, but that's okay, I understand. This isn't about mourning the past, this is about starting over. It has to be because if we were to think about all of the people and the things that we lost, it would be too much. This is a fresh start because it has to be. It can't be anything else.

Holly turns away from me and approaches her parents. She stands up on her tiptoes and kisses them both on their foreheads before turning to my mother and doing the same. I follow suit and then we both stand silently before Dawson's parents, guilt riding us hard.

“
If we hadn't gone over there … ” Holly starts, but I cut her off.

“
Then Dawson would be dead, too,” I say and I think I actually believe that. “Should we tell him?” I wonder and Holly shakes her head.

“
No,” she says softly. “I don't think he can handle it.” She kisses their foreheads, too, and takes my hand again, pulling me to the head of her birth mother's great army, one that spans generations and decades and all walks of life. The magic was like an equalizer in a way, stripping us down of gender and race and social standing and putting us all in the same place. I'm not saying the apocalypse was a good thing, but that's what it was and now its effects will be felt by all of us. “Stay with me,” she says as she swallows hard and I see that her hands are now glowing with that black and silver light from before.

“
Forever,” I say as I move behind her and put my arms around her waist. Holly smiles gently and closes her eyes, takes a deep breath, and relaxes completely into my arms. That same warmth I feel when Holly touches my zombie arm spreads out from her body and into mine, down into the ground and across the golden grasses and the pine trees and the oaks. It spreads past the lake and into the dirt roads that lead out to the highway and then even further, into the cities and the oceans and mountains until it touches everything somehow, someway.

I put my hands over Holly's belly where someday soon our child will be growing and think how wonderful it is that our love saved the world, but then again, that's how it always works, isn't it?

I watch in respectful silence as the dead fall away, collapsing to the ground like they've been pushed by a quiet breeze, ever so gently, ever so softly. It's awe inspiring to see them all together like that, like they're a community in and of themselves, like death brought them together for a reason. I close my eyes, just like Holly, and listen as the silence dissipates and slowly, like they've been waiting for this moment for awhile, the birds burst into vibrant, brilliant song.

***

Five Years After …

Holly and I name our first child 'Martin' after the boy we lost in the refuge and our second 'Patricia' after the woman that started it all. Dawson nearly has a heart attack when he hears, but eventually, he calls to tell us that he understands, but that we can expect him to call her Patsy or something. Holly agrees to that, thankfully, because I think Martin is starting to fall in love with Valerie and Dawson's daughter, Mia, and although they're only four years old, I think it would break their hearts to be separated. Initially, Dawson and Holly also have a fight over the tabby cat but decide that it would be happier living with us. Holly names it Nelly after my mother.

The world is not the same place that it once was. Holly says you can look at that as a good thing or a bad thing, but that she chooses to see it as a good thing because hell, we lived through all of that crap and so the last remaining people in the world are the luckiest people in the world. Therefore, we live in a world full of only lucky people and how bad could that be?

The part that scares me the most, and Holly, too, is that Martin and Patsy are showing signs of having the same power that runs through her veins. That black and silver light is a dead giveaway and even though nobody really knows why the dead walked the earth for those three days, Holly and I are scared. She tells me though that we'll give them a good life and love them so hard that they'll never want to do anything like Patricia did. I believe her.

Holly lets me keep my arm, too, using her magic to make sure that it stays under control. We don't even have to belt it down at night anymore. With Patricia dead, Holly is the only necromancer who has any hold on me and I know there isn't an evil bone in her body. She even trusts me to feed our babies with it, cuddle them, wipe their tears away. That's how confident Holly is of me and I am of her.

We still have cars and telephones and computers, just on a smaller scale. Nations didn't collapse and satellites didn't fall. A lot of people died, but a lot of people lived, too, and were stronger for it. Some people say that things were better before the apocalypse, that life was more luxurious, that it was easier, but we disagree.

We have a house with white shutters and a roof I built myself, a garden with herbs and vegetables that taste like summer, and a herd of horses that Holly tends to like they're her children. But most of all, we have the love that saved our world and that's all that matters.

THE END

Glossary

Galen's DeadBorn Dictionary

Bone Bags
–
skeleton zombies with no flesh. Often reeking of the earth, they're easy to hear coming as they clack when they walk. Their teeth are always chattering, too, like toys. Bone bags are the most prevalent type of DeadBorn next to Lopers, but I think they're really just the same thing, only they've been picked clean.

Fire Faces
–
with skin that crackles like magma, these zombies are souls pulled up from the highest levels of Hell. They're not dead in the sense that they were once alive, but they're certainly not living either. Drawn by the hordes of DeadBorn, the fire faces are out of Patricia's control. Even Holly isn't safe from them. They can be killed with a single shot or blow to their stolen heart.

Flickers
–
these could be body parts from any type of DeadBorn, including unborns, that can
still move, especially large pieces such as arms, legs or torsos. Zombies may or may not reattach their own parts or the parts of others, but I've never seen this myself. Holly tells me that it's true though.

Ooze Spitters
–
not yet seen but according to
… according to Martin, they're tall, maybe eight or nine feet, with skin like green leather and bulbous lumps on their backs. They spew acid and can melt cars, metal, even people. They seem smarter than the other DeadBorn, but maybe I'm just imagining it. We have no idea how to kill them other than just smashing them to bits.

Lopers
–
any corpse that's been raised by Patricia's magic. They smell like shit and look like it, too. I wouldn't be surprised to see one that's covered with maggots or swarming with flies. They're much quieter than the bone bags, but fairly easy to hear coming. That is, if the stench of rotten flesh doesn't warn you first.

Mummies
–
I don't know much of anything about
these creatures, but Holly tells me later that they're made up of the ashes from cremated bodies. My father was cremated, so I'm hoping he didn't end up as one of these things, but I guess I'll never know. They look pretty much like you'd expect: white linen wraps, usually dirty, with bloody splotches for their eyes and mouths. They move half as fast as any of the other DeadBorn.

Rotten Angels
–
they can take down helicopters. Enough said.

Water Hags
–
known as 'hags' for short, these are DeadBorn who faced death by drowning. Bound by the element that took their lives, water hags aren't able to travel more than a few yards from the water's edge. If it weren't for this single flaw, they'd be unstoppable: scentless, fierce and quick as hell. Water hags are highly aggressive and will even kill other zombies that get in their way.

Unborns
–
stillborns, babies, and young children are raised by Patricia's magic into unborns. Without the
aggressive tendencies of
their fellows, unborns are used solely by Patricia to track Holly and to get into places where others might not. I know they're not dangerous, but honestly, these things scare me more than I'm willing to admit.

If you enjoyed this book, look for The Seven Wicked series!