Chapter 13

My father’s face is a Halloween mask. Waxen and slack-jawed, eyes dull with incomprehension. A string of saliva hangs from the corner of his open mouth, glistens in the candlelight.

“Dad—” My throat closes up so fast I choke. Heat burns the back of my eyelids, and I think, No. No no no no no no no.

“Luhhh.” He groans past cracked, white lips, and that L-sound—it’s like he’s trying to say my name, like he knows me.

“Dad?” I swallow down the sob that wants to break free, force myself to take another step toward the bed, though my knees are shaking again, my hands, my fingers. “Dad, can you hear me? Is that you?”

“Luh-uhhhh,” he says, and struggles to stand, eyes rolling so the whites seem huge. Everything in me wants to run and help him; everything in me wants to run the other way.

On his own, he stands, swaying, arms hanging at his sides as if they’ve been forgotten, his flannel shirtsleeves too long, hanging down to his hairy knuckles.

“Luh-uh-uh. Uhhhn.” He staggers toward me, gabbering at me in a watery garble, raising one arm and flexing stiff fingers in my direction. “Uhn-uhmmm…”

I want to believe it’s him. I want to believe it so badly, but as I move toward him with both hands fisted around the base of the candle, I see that deadness in his eyes shift into something else—into need, raw and hungry. And I know he’s gone forever.

He lunges, arms reaching. His beard is matted bloody-wet-dark, his teeth bright white as he comes at me with open jaws.

I throw myself back. My shoulder hits the wall hard, but I push away before I can feel the pain, push away and bolt into the hallway with Dad right behind me. The candle flickers and whooshes out, plunges the hall into darkness. I slam the door shut and hear the lock catch. An instant later, the wood shudders as heavy weight slams into it from the other side.

I breathe in shallow, ragged gasps, back away from the door. My heart beats so fast it hurts, hurts so much I want to scream again, and again and again and again.

From inside the bedroom, Dad batters against the door. It’s much flimsier than the back door of the house, and won’t last nearly as long.

“Lauren! Lauren!”

Light. Mercy spills around the corner, panting. She grabs my shoulder, fingers squeezing tight, her face ghoulish in the flickering light. “Oh, thank you, Jesus, I thought when you screamed—”

She goes silent. I stare at her face, watch as the thank-Jesus drops away from her lips, as horror creeps into her eyes and turns them to shining dark mirrors.

“No.” She pushes me away. Her face folds in on itself, becomes pinched and tiny. “Chet,” she whispers, and steps up to the door, places her hands flat on the surface. “Chet!”

She loved him, I think dumbly. She really loved him.

She reaches for the doorknob, but I grab her wrist.

“It’s too late.” Too late, and I can barely keep my face from copying hers, have to bite down hard on the inside of my lip to keep the tears from spilling out, burning hot and dangerous. “It’s not him anymore. It’s something else.”

But—

Did he try to say my name?

It’s not him. I can’t think about it being him.

I shut my eyes, open them. Same hallway. But the pounding has stopped. Shuffling sounds inside the bedroom, like bare feet moving over the carpet. Jesus.

I relight my candle, dipping my cold wick into Mercy’s flame. “We have to get out of here.”

Mercy doesn’t answer.

“Mercy.” My stomach feels like it’s been kicked in by a steel-toed boot, and numbness creeps along my skin again, promising sweet relief if I’ll just sink into it, but I know I can’t let myself go there again, or this time maybe I won’t come back.

“We can’t leave him like this,” Mercy whispers.

“He’s dead.” I will not cry. “He can take care of himself.”

Mercy turns to face me, her eyes red-rimmed, purple circles lurking below. “If it was you,” she says, “would you want to be left this way?”

If it was me. Gooseflesh rises on my skin. I can’t remember the last time I told my dad I loved him, and that suddenly seems very important. Before I left for Detroit? Before I started high school?

“We have to take care of him.”

I stare back at Mercy. And I understand her perfectly.

We have to kill him.

“Okay,” I say.

She holds my gaze for an endless moment, nods.

“How? We have knives.” But the thought of putting one in his head makes my hands shake harder, until I’m surprised she can’t hear my bones clacking together. “Or something heavier…”

Mercy wipes a hand over her face. “Something I can swing.”

“He keeps a crowbar in the van.”

She nods once. “Bring it.”

It’s a long walk to the garage, and with every step I can hear them beating at the house. My nerves are ratcheted permanently high, and I can’t imagine ever closing my eyes again without seeing that dead look in my father’s eyes.

I glance into the kitchen, but shifting candlelight reveals the door still holding. Not like the one upstairs. I hurry to the garage.

And, god, it smells—

Like my father. His scent covers every inch of the cool cinderblock space, and the tears burn like fire behind my eyes.

Mercy has left the van door unlocked, and I yank it open, climb through to the back where Dad has all his equipment stacked and shelved in greasy piles. It’s a sloppy system, but one that makes perfect sense to Dad—and one that used to make sense to me, too.

The summer I was nine, I complained that my allowance was too small. Dad offered to pay me two dollars an hour if I came to work with him over the summer. He never made me do anything big, but he’d have me bring him things from his van. Things like his crowbar, which he always stored along the back of the top shelf running along the right-side interior of the van.

And there it is. My fingers close around the cold steel, and I can feel the strength running through it. The strength to kill a man. Or a monster.

The dead outside pound on the walls of the garage, and the garage door trembles under the force of all those hands. How can we ever hope to get out past all of them? All of those pressing bodies.

I run.

Out of the garage, down the hall, back to the bedroom. The door is shaking again, and Mercy faces it with her hands folded in front of her, lips moving in silent prayer, because the Lord Jesus can save us from all evil.

“Here.” I hold out the crowbar, hesitate. “Or should I…?”

Should I? He’s my father. Maybe he wasn’t always a good father, but I owe him this. To put him out of his misery. Death by his own daughter’s hands.

Does any man deserve that?

“I’ll do it.” Mercy takes the crowbar from me, rests her hand on the doorknob. “I can do it.”

“I’ll go with you.”

She nods, hands me her candle.

I don’t know why I’m doing this. I don’t want to see it. Dread makes my head light, but my feet move toward the door, carry me to Mercy’s side. I’m going in defenseless to face the monster and watch him die, and my skin breaks out in a clammy sweat.

Mercy leans close to the door, listens. I strain my ears, but now all is ominously quiet on the other side. The silence crawls along my skin like a warning. “Be careful,” I whisper, but Mercy doesn’t answer, just turns the doorknob. The door eases inward.

Inside, all is still, utter blackness.

Mercy pushes the door wider, steps inside. She grips the crowbar with both hands, the clawed end facing up, ready to crack bone and tear into flesh. I think I was wrong about her. I think I wish I were half as strong as she is.

“Chet?” She eases further into the bedroom, jerking her head for me to follow with the light. I lift both candles high, and they shed a soft glow over the empty bed. Shadows lap at the edges of the room.

“Chet, I know you’re here. Why don’t you—”

Movement in the darkness to the left. We both spin, Mercy lifting the crowbar like a club. But then she sees him, she sees my father hurling himself from the shadows, and she freezes. Maybe it’s the sound he makes, the desperate, long-low, “Mehhhh!” Or maybe it’s the way he open his arms to her, like he’s going to sweep her up, tell her everything’s all right. She freezes, and it’s all over.

His hands lock on either side of Mercy’s face, his fingers corpse-white and rigid. She lets out a half-sob—“Chet,”—as he presses close, as his mouth crushes against the soft flesh below her jaw. She drops the crowbar and closes her eyes.

“Mercy!”

My heart trips, rolls. I dive for the carpet, fisting both candles in one hand and grabbing the crowbar, but it’s too late. Before my fingers ever close on cold steel, I hear the wet sound of Mercy’s throat being torn out. Blood splashes the carpet, as red as hate and sin and love. And it flows and flows.

Dad releases his grip long enough to toss back his head and choke down a mouthful of Mercy. Mercy blanches, stumbles back with her arms pin-wheeling and blood streaming down her front. Her knees hit the edge of the bed. Losing her balance, she pitches backward across the mattress, just as Dad finishes and turns back to her.

My ears buzz, and I hear the breath rasping in and out of my lungs, I feel my heart beating hard and heavy. But I’m not thinking, because if I were thinking, I would run. And instead of running, I’m standing up. Standing between Dad and Mercy with the crowbar dangling from one hand.

Dad pauses. Heavy-lidded and open-mouthed, he stares at me, and I stare at the gruesome sight he’s become. Blood runs in thin scarlet trickles out of his beard and down his chin, and the candle’s flame shows jellied eyes with huge fixed pupils. He carries no smell of grease or sweat, only blood, only the fresh scent of decay.

“Hey… Dad.” My voice cracks, hitches. “If you’re really still in there, listen up, okay?”

He drools, twitches.

“I’m going to count to three, and if you don’t back the fuck away, I’m going to bash your skull in. Okay?”

Okay? Because we are all perfectly sane here.

“Luhhhh.”

“One.”

Now my hands are shaking, now a voice in my head is screaming what the fuck are you doing?

“Two.”

From behind me I hear the gurgle of Mercy trying to breathe. In front of me, my father moans and rolls his lips back from his teeth and reaches for me.

“Three.”

I lift the crowbar. I swing.

The claw end cleaves into my father’s temple with a sharp crack. Flecks of blood spray my face. I stare into his eyes, watch them go flat, go dark, as thick blood oozes from his fractured skull. Silent, his knees fold and he collapses, goes down in a heap of dead meat on the carpet. The crowbar stays stuck in his head.

I stand very still, aware of a trembling in my knees and my knuckles, and a sharp ache in my chest that steals all my breath and leaves me gasping. He tried to say my name. He tried. What have I done?

A choking sound behind me. I spin, and Mercy is lying across the bed, both hands wrapped around her throat, but that does nothing to stop the blood from seeping out between her fingers. It crawls down her neck and stains her peach-silk blouse, and when she chokes, blood spurts from her mouth.

“Mercy. Mercy.” I clamber up and kneel on the edge of the bed. Blood, blood everywhere, but what else have I seen these last days but blood? Enough to drown the world.

“Just hold on,” I tell her between clenched teeth, ripping her hands away and pressing the bed sheet to her throat. “Don’t you dare fucking die, okay?”

The sheet turns red, and so do my hands. Mercy chokes, face twisting and her eyes squeezing shut. I leave her holding the sheet and scramble for something else to staunch the flow, anything. But what stops blood flow?

I yank open the dresser drawers one after the other. Underwear, cologne, condoms. A framed photograph of my parents on their wedding day, veil and tux and big smiles. It’s one of the photos that were missing from the hallway, and the knot in my throat swells, but photos won’t stop Mercy from bleeding to death. She gasps softly, erratically for breath.

I run out of the bedroom and down the hall, tennis shoes pounding the floor, the zombies outside pounding on the walls. Into the bathroom, throw open the medicine cabinet. Bottles of hydrogen peroxide and Ambien tumble into the sink, but there’s not a fucking thing I can use. Snatching a towel from the rack, I race back to the bedroom.

Halfway there, the sound of shattering glass rings through the house, coming from the direction of the kitchen.

They’re inside.

I force myself to slow down, soften my footsteps. The candles throw crazy light on the hallway walls, make my shadow leap out as I slip into the bedroom, past the crumpled corpse on the carpet that I don’t look at, try not to look at.

On the bed, Mercy lies very still. One hand still holds the soaked sheet to her throat, but the other has fallen away, lies limp-fingered on her chest.

“Mercy?” I stand over her, and my heart doesn’t beat at all.

But there, her chest rises, takes forever to fall. Her fingers curl tight into the bloody sheet like twisted talons. She lives.

I crawl onto the bed on my hands and knees, crouch over Mercy and shine the light in her eyes. Pupils dilated as they fix on me. Her lips are losing their color.

“You have to help me,” I tell her, unwinding the sheet and replacing it with the thick terrycloth, not sure what I’m doing, what I think I’m doing. Mercy is dying. But, “We need to go right now,” is what I say, and, “I can’t carry you to the van alone. You have to help.”

The expression on her face is pure white shock, but she jerks her chin down in a nod. Maybe it’ll be okay. Maybe he—maybe it—didn’t bite that deep, only severed some minor vein full of blood. Maybe.

I hitch my arm around her back, and pull until every muscle in my back screams. With a gasp and a choking cough, Mercy comes up, and together we stumble to our feet, still leaning against the bed. Oh God, she’s heavier than I thought. There’s no way I can do this with one arm, but I can’t put down the candles, either.

Another crash echoes, and though I’m sure it comes from inside the house, I can’t tell from where this time. Please, please, let them stay in the kitchen.

Mercy begins to cough. “Quiet!” I hiss, but when I look, bright red stains her mouth, and her eyes don’t focus on me.

We inch to the door. I shine the candles down the hall, see nothing but shadows lining the empty corridor. We edge out, one step after another, and Mercy’s weight starts to drag.

Twelve steps, and the hallway bends around a corner. The edge of the flickering light touches the white outline of the door leading to the garage. Ten more steps, nine if we push, and I do, grit my teeth and haul for safety while my arm feels like it’s going to tear out of its socket.

I leave Mercy leaning against the wall, one eye on the living room doorway—the kitchen just past that. Yank the garage door open, turn just in time to see Mercy’s knees buckle. She slides boneless down the wall, head lolling forward.

“Shit!” I grab for her. And just then, something moves at the edge of the darkness, something with a stumbling pace and grasping hands. “Mercy, get up!”

She doesn’t stir, but the thing in the darkness does. It staggers from the shadows, dark uniform stained with splotches of stiff, dried blood. Gaping gray mouth and wide eyes, and one of Officer Petinske’s big ears has been bitten half-off, hangs by a single stitch of skin. The cloying scent of hamburger gone bad saturates the air, creeps up my nostrils and sends a wave of nausea straight to my stomach.

He thrusts a hand out, and fingers like claws close on empty air inches from my arm. With a frustrated bellow, he shuffles forward. From the living room I hear the crashing footsteps of more dead coming.

“Mercy!” I scream, and my voice cracks on her name, but there’s no time. The corpse of the skinny cop lunges, and self-preservation overrules every other thought in my head. I scrambled through the garage door, get one last look at Mercy’s unconscious form slumped at the base of the wall. Then I slam the door, twist the lock.

Thud, against the door, and the heavy dead-meat slap-slap-slap of a hand.

And then nothing. No scream of Mercy waking up. Better for her now if she never wakes up. And I know she would have died, know she’d have turned into one of them, but guilt slices a razorblade line down my chest so it feel like my heart is splitting open, because how many more people around me are going to die. Or—am I already alone?

The rasp of my breath echoes off cinderblock walls, and there is that pounding, rattling against the aluminum garage door. Again the question: How in the hell am I supposed to get past them in a four-wheel drive van on the verge of its final breakdown? I need to distract them, to—

My eye falls on the window, plywood sheet nailed over the frame. Crazy. Suicide if it doesn’t work. But what other choice do I have? They’re behind me in the house, and the garage door won’t hold forever. Escape is my only option, and the window is my last hope.

I lean into the driver’s side of the van, turn the keys in the ignition, wait for the engine to rumble to life. The garage door opener rests on the dashboard. Every other door is shut tight, gallon jugs of water in the back, and paper bags stuffed full of groceries, thank you Mercy.

With the light on in the van, I blow out the candles, leave the driver’s door open, grab a hammer from the tool shelf in the back. Hop down and go to work on the window.

The plywood doesn’t want to give at first, the nails sunk deep into the window frame. But I yank and wrench until sweat rolls into my eyes, trickles down the small of my back. At last, with a last creaking protest, the nails give, and the wood tears away to reveal the jagged glass of windowpanes already shattered.

“Hey, over here!” I shout out into the darkness of early morning, smash the remaining glass with the butt of the hammer. “You’re missing the all-you-can-eat buffet, you lazy fucks!”

At first there’s only the dark night, the pounding on the door, the hellish murmur of moans and groans and grunts. And then suddenly a hand that’s missing two fingers plunges through the window.

“Fuck!”

I leap back, but not soon enough; the remaining fingers and thumb wrap around the hammer’s handle and yank it free, the claw end scraping my palm and leaving a deep gouge as it’s pulled away from me. The hammer disappears from the window, replaced by three drawn, gray faces with bared teeth and rolling eyes, all trying to press through the narrow gap at once.

I scramble into the van and slam the door, wait, one-Mississippi, two-Mississippi, all you motherfuckers get to the window, three-Mississippi, and jab the button on the garage door opener. The electric motor whirs, makes an awful squealing sound but doesn’t budge, and my heart drops somewhere so low I can’t feel it beating anymore. Then the door begins to lift.

“Thank you, thank you, thank you,” is all I can mumble over and over, as a gap appears between the ground and the door. I flip the headlights on, and there are only two sets of feet standing in front of the door as it rises. I watch the feet, watch the window, one zombie in by his head and shoulders, watch the door rise.

The door is almost high enough, almost, when they take notice. Instantly they begin milling around the door once more, and in another second there will be too many, the window ploy all for nothing. But I will not die in this garage, not after all this, not with my heart beating again, this time like a war drum. I gun the engine, and I slam my foot down on the gas pedal.

Tires squeal against cement, and the van lurches forward. The garage door is only a few inches too low now, but still the whole vehicle shudders as it scrapes under, the squealing grate of metal-on-metal.

I stomp down harder, plow right into the crowd of the dead. Two bodies slam against the van’s grill and fall aside, and the van bounces high—crunch—as we roll over a fallen body.

I tear down the driveway, sideswipe the mailbox, and I’m not in control anymore; two tons of steel and gasoline are running the show. I barely make the turn out onto the road. The van spins, and for a second I know we’re going to smash against a telephone pole. But I steer into the turn like Dad taught me, don’t fight it, don’t panic, and the van straightens. I see Piper Lane laid out before us like I’ve never seen it before.

Crashed cars. Houses with doors hanging off their hinges. Bodies. Blood. And the living dead everywhere.

I am alone on the streets.

I drive.