Life Among The Dead (Book 3): A Bittersweet Victory (33 page)

His eyes adjusted to the gloom, and the
kitchen brightened for him as the early light of day filtered in
through the windows. Coffee he brewed that morning still scented
the air, and he followed the red light of the coffee pot to the
door of the dining room. That’s where he found Rachael.

The love of his life was on the floor. He
rushed to her and slipped in a pool of her still warm blood on the
hardwood surface. Feeling for a pulse with trembling hands, he
found nothing. He couldn’t believe it at first, but the horror of
finding his wife dead was overshadowed by the manner in which she
died. Something had torn her apart and ate her flesh. The things
that the radio warned about, that Gavin had mentioned, had eaten
his beloved. He found himself unable to think, far too shocked to
even cry. The fact that the killer could still be in the house
didn’t register.

Vain hope that his wife may still be savable
made him gently shaking her ravaged remains. He put his ear close
to her mouth in hopes of hearing breath. He could swear he heard
light crying coming from her, but the sounds were not his
wife’s.

Simon rolled her over and found the baby
monitor clutched in her hands. The light cries became shrill howls
of pain that he hadn’t heard the girl make since her last set of
shots.

He raced for the stairs at the thought of his
little angel in pain. During her inoculations, he had
sympathetically felt her agony. After her first shocked cry, she’d
screamed silently with her eyes closed tight and her face as red as
could be.

The howls came to him in stereo, from the top
floor and from the monitor still attached to Rachael’s robe. He
hopped over the toppled child gate that had been torn from the wall
at the bottom of the stairs and he took the risers fast. He charged
straight into the nursery to find his daughter limp in the hands of
a shadowy figure as it held her to its mouth.

A feral growl of rage and denial erupted from
Simon’s throat as he lunged at the beast that stole his family. The
creature dropped the girl, choosing to go for the fresher fare that
came at it. Emily’s frail body fell from its mouth to the floor,
after hitting the railing of her crib like a ragdoll.

Simon lashed at the evil thing, taking it to
the ground. He held its head down as he pounded his fist into its
face repeatedly. The zombie resisted the small man, it tried to
free itself enough to take a bite out of him, but he wouldn’t let
it. His hands were not enough to still the corpse, or quench his
fury. He grabbed his daughter’s lamp and bashed in the zombie’s
skull.

Exhausted, mentally and physically, Simon
felt like rubber. He crumpled backwards and fell to the floor,
unable to think. He just stared at the mess that was his Emily. His
world was lost.

Even when at his wit’s end over the looming
closure of his store, he had his family. Rachael always held strong
for them both, telling him everything would be all right as long as
they had each other, and Emily. Now Simon was without either of
them, and at a loss as to how to go on. He wasn’t sure if he’d even
try.

Tears flowed down his numb cheeks in rivers
as he sat in the dark nursery. Nothing seemed real. Life as he knew
it had become a nightmare. His greatest fear had come true: he had
failed his family. For a while, he struggled to provide for them,
and now he had failed to protect them, the two people he cherished
most in the world. He blamed himself for insisting on going into
work so early, not getting home sooner. He blamed himself for the
pain they had to endure in the last moments of their lives.

Guilt ridden, he wished he could turn back
the hands of time and save them. That was impossible. He couldn’t
even move at the moment, until Emily did.

Using the stool Simon stood on when putting
her into her crib, Emily rose on uneasy feet. Hope almost made him
rush to his little angel’s side, but she wasn’t crying. The radio
had said to avoid those who had been bitten, but he was torn. Every
parental instinct screamed to go to her, but practical thinking
kept him at bay.

After receiving her shots, she had cried for
a few minutes, once she had the breath to do so, until she was
given a bottle to distract her from the sting. She wasn’t making a
sound, and in the low light the extent of what the monster had done
to her showed. Her nightgown was a torn, blood soaked mess at her
midsection. Grown adults would be yelling in agony from the wound
inflicted on her tender belly.

What
if
she’s
in
shock
? he thought.
Numb
to
the
pain
,
or
in
too
much
to
cry
? “Emily?”

Calling her name shifted her attention, and
she zeroed in on her father. The girl took her first steps now,
into his arms.

Emily flailed and grabbed at him. She tried
to bite him with the few teeth she had, and Simon knew Emily was
one of them.

‘Shoot them in the head, or destroy the
brain,’ the radio announcement back at the store had said.

“I can’t,” he said, while holding his baby
girl away from his throat. She always had an impressive grip, but
she was even stronger as her resolve set on satisfying a hunger no
bottle could slake. “But I can’t leave her like this.”

Failing her in life, he couldn’t fail her in
death and leave her as a crazed monster. He carried his child out
of the nursery and into the bathroom down the hall.
She
deserves
to
be
at
peace
, he
thought as he opened the medicine chest. Emily clung to her
father’s forearm like a koala, trying to bite the hand that was
holding her face under her chin. Simon’s other hand wielded a thin
pair of grooming scissors.

As she gnashed and writhed, the thing he held
no longer looked like his sweet girl. She wasn’t the child he had
put to bed the night before. With a shaky hand, he turned her to
the side and put these slim shears to the small divot behind her
ear. He hesitated, having a hard time convincing himself to go
through with it, but he knew he had to be strong for his little
girl. Gritting his teeth, he closed his tear swollen eyes tight as
he drove the scissors in as far as they would go. She twitched a
few times, then she moved no more.

Simon cradled his child and wept on the
floor. A thump from downstairs indicated his work was not done,
Momma’s
up
. With a kiss to her forehead, he laid
Emily back down in her crib.

Rachael was at the bottom of the stairs,
tangled in the fallen safety gate. Her foot was caught between the
vertical bars and she pulled against these, but one corner of the
gate refused to release its hold on the wall. She clawed in vain at
the carpeted risers, lunging up only to be pulled back down.

Simon just sat on the top stair,
unintentionally taunting his departed wife. He felt sick over what
he had to do to his daughter’s reanimated corpse, but now he needed
to dispatch his dead wife. The grooming scissors wouldn’t be long
enough to reach her brain, and he couldn’t fathom going in through
her eye. Not the eyes he looked into the day he proposed, the day
they took their vows, and every day since.

“You are not Rachael,” he told the ghoul,
leaving it to retrieve one of his wife’s knitting needles. From
beside a chair, on his wife’s side of their marital bed, he slid
out a long metallic green dagger from a skein of yarn. He left the
needle’s mate, remembering the sound of the pair at work together.
Clicking and scraping against one another while the woman wiled the
hours away making crafts. A comforting sound he would never hear
her make again.

Sick to his stomach, Simon waited in the
bedroom for the inevitable crack of the gate breaking free of its
bracket. After the safety measure failed, she clamored up after
him. She made it to the top with much ruckus, since the gate
remained around her ankle, slamming and whacking into everything
around it.

He stood in the bedroom, letting her come to
him. She eagerly approached, limping and catching her entrapped leg
on a small decorative table in the hall, spilling a bowl of plastic
fruit. Simon was in no hurry to fulfill his husbandly duty. Death
had parted them and he now had to keep them parted.

He wasn’t intending on living long after he
dealt with her, but he didn’t want Rachael or himself to exist a
minute longer than necessary as a zombie.

Rachael fought against the gate attached to
her limb in order to enter the room. It caught on the door jamb,
tripping her. The zombie found itself enveloped by a blanket she
had made when alive. The afghan became a stretchy net of yarn, and
the more she fought against it the more tangled she became. Her
fingers stuck out through the holes as she fruitlessly tried to
free herself.

The handmade blanket strained as the corpse
tried to grab Simon when he rolled it over. The needle proved
harder to push in behind her ear. He required more force, putting
all of his weight down on the button-like end to still her.

Today, Brass finds his family wrapped in
plastic in the master bedroom, where he had moved them after
contending with Rachael. “Hey, ladies,” he greets them sadly from
the foot of the bed they have laying on for almost an entire year.
“I’m home.”

When he and the people of Rubicon started to
burn the bodies of those turned, he couldn’t bring himself to add
his girls to the pyre. He always imagined he’d join them
eventually, and he almost did that day.

“Sorry I haven’t been around much,” he says.
“The store’s been busier than ever.”

That day, after he placed Rachael and Emily
on the king-sized mattress, he put a razor blade against his wrist.
As it bit into skin, wanting to go deeper, he tried to build the
courage to follow through. It wasn’t the pain or the blood that
stayed his hand. It was the not knowing. He wasn’t sure if he would
come back if he committed suicide this way. Never a gun man, it was
the first time in his life he wished he owned one.

He dropped the small blade to the bathroom
floor where it bounced out of sight, as if disappointed. Simon had
no idea how he was going to exit this world, but he’d think about
it after solving an irritating question that kept popping into his
head:
How
did
it
get
in
?

An investigation downstairs turned up that
day’s paper, dotted with red where blood had soaked into the
newsprint. The boy that delivered it was terrible at his job. More
often than not, the periodical only made it halfway up a person’s
walk.

Maybe
Rachael
went
out
to
get
it
, Simon deduced from the
smear of red on the front door. The front door was cracked open,
and these signs of a struggle suggested to him that she wasn’t
alone when she entered. The hutch he once set his keys upon when
coming home, before Emily was born and everything had to be
baby-proofed, was knocked askew. The groove it wore into the carpet
from years of settlement was exposed.

Puddles and streaks of blood led into the
dining room, where Rachael attempted to escape the zombie that got
into the house. It overpowered her in there and feasted upon her
until it heard Emily upstairs.

Simon wanted to join his girls, but he needed
a definitive means. He needed a gun and had no idea where to get
one. The local gun store was still locked up, he had no doubt. The
police would have enough going on, and weren’t likely to give him
one, and probably wouldn’t want to come home with him to carry out
the act. The next best thing waited back at his market in the store
room--a nail gun.

He made the commute back to his store,
noticing many more zombies roaming. After speeding through the lot
and around the store, he opened up for the second time that day. He
had forgotten all about young Gavin as he searched the back room
for his nail gun.

A sound distracted Simon as he dug through
boxes of tools and supplies. Something moved, then Gavin appeared
from the shadows, dead and hungry, reaching for him. He could only
double his efforts in his quest for the weapon.

The second Simon set his hand on the nail
gun, he swung it up and aimed its business end at the young
slacker. He pulled the trigger and nothing happened. Not certain if
the battery pack was dead or not, he had no time to try again.
Simon slipped out of Gavin’s grasp as the bag boy lunged for him.
The deceased employee landed on the boxes of supplies, and the
stacks collapsed on top of him as Simon exited once again with the
tool and its charger. During the return trip, even more of his
living dead neighbors were out. Slack faces he once knew turned
their attention on him as he drove home.

He dressed for bed, though the sun had just
come up not that long ago. His watch went in its usual spot on the
nightstand after his work clothes went into the hamper, as opposed
to a pile on the floor that drove Rachael nuts. She was still
wrapped in her afghan as he slid into bed next to her, spooning the
curve of her body. His hand found Emily where she lay in front of
her mother, then he brought the nail gun to his head.

The tool had plenty of charge left in it, but
he had forgotten that it wouldn’t fire until the tip was depressed
against a work surface. He made sure to hold it tightly to his
temple. “I’ll see you soon, ladies,” he told them, and closed his
eyes.

Click. He squeezed the trigger and nothing
happened. Click. Click. Click. He felt robbed, his serenity
stolen.

Grumbling, he crawled out of bed and fumbled
with the tool, but could not remember how to open it. He didn’t
want to be in this world any longer than necessary. Not without
Rachael and Emily. They were the only things he liked about it.
When life got bad, he could always count on them to make everything
seem all right.