He stopped speaking as the hand that the bride had once owned reached out and pushed on the door.
The door opened at her touch.
She moved into the next room. A big room that was part dining room and part den. A fire crackled in the stone hearth. And on the floor, wrapped in a thick blanket, with hair and clothes tousled and faces flushed, were the owners of those voices.
A pretty girl.
A handsome boy.
Just the two of them, caught in a moment of shock that had not yet turned to horror.
It would, though.
The bride knew that much.
Horror was what she had brought to this house. It was the only gift she had received at her wedding, and it was all she was allowed to share.
Horror, and all that the horror promised.
Every dark thing.
She spoke that horror in a voice of hunger and of need. The others behind her raised their voices in chorus.
She led the silent procession from the kitchen into the den.
The silence was torn out of the moment as screams filled the air.
5
Hannahlily
The shocked silence that gripped Hannahlily Bryce exploded into a shriek of absolute horror. There were people all around her. Strangers. Muddy and bloody and wrong. White faces with red mouths and black eyes. Plucking at the blanket and at her clothes, her hair, her skin.
“Tucker!”
But Tucker was frozen into the moment for one heartbeat longer than her. One heartbeat too long, his whole body locked into rigid stupefaction. His mouth worked as he tried to say something, ask something that would make sense of this; and the movement mirrored the movements of the hungry mouths around him.
Time suddenly seemed to slow down for Hannahlily. She saw the creatures huddled around her, she saw Tucker—muscular, powerful, capable, and totally frozen in fear—and she glimpsed the impossible future. Blood and pain and death. She didn’t even know how she understood the nature of this attack. It wasn’t a gang beating. This was death of a different kind, a nightmare kind. She saw the red mouths and she knew that.
We’re dead.
The thought was as clear in her mind as if she had spent hours contemplating this very incident.
And then suddenly time jumped back to normal as the mouths descended toward her flesh.
Hannahlily screamed as loud as she could, shoved Tucker away from her, rolled backward onto her shoulders and kicked upward at the creatures. She was slender, but she was strong. Cheerleading, gymnastics, dance. Fear. Her legs shot upward and her bare feet caught two of them under the chins. One foot sent a man with wire-frame glasses flying backward; the other caught the jaw of a woman with frizzy brown hair, and at that angle the woman’s head spun on the neck and there was a huge, wet crack!
As the woman fell backward, Hannahlily was moving. She bashed aside the white hands and scrambled toward Tucker, shoving and punching him until he suddenly snapped out of his stupor.
“God!” he yelled, and then he was on his feet, pulling Hannahlily up. Tucker punched one of the things in the face, smashing its nose with an overhand right that would have put most strong men down on their knees. The creature, a National Guardsman in the remains of a hazmat suit, merely staggered back from the force of the blow.
Two more of the things flung themselves at Tucker, and he went crazy on them. He was fast and powerful, kicking, head-butting, using every trick he’d learned in boxing and mixed martial arts, and he hit everything he tried to hit.
It just did no good.
“Run!” screamed Hannahlily. She grabbed the back of Tucker’s sweater and yanked him away from the grasping, biting, scratching knot of attackers. He stumbled backward and almost fell, but she pulled him back to his feet. Then he turned and shoved her, and they were running through the dining room into the kitchen and out through the open back door.
“The truck . . . the truck . . . the truck!” he bellowed, but Hannahlily was already heading for it at a pace that outstripped his. They ran around the house to where the truck was parked. The strange, hungry, moaning creatures staggered behind. Some chased them all the way to the truck, others seemed to become distracted by the storm and stumbled out into the fields or onto the road.
Then they were inside the truck. The keys were in the ignition. Out here, this deep in farm country, the keys were always in the ignition, and the big engine roared to life as if it, too, were startled into a desperate frenzy. The white figures were in the yard now, coming around the house toward the truck, but Tucker gave the truck as much gas as it would take. The back wheels spun for a moment, kicking up huge arcs of mud that splattered the figures and the side of the house; then the truck found purchase, and it shot forward toward the road.
A figure stood in the way, and it, more than all the others, seemed to be conjured from some bizarre fantasy of madness.
It was a woman in a pretty white bridal gown. Her mouth was open to scream her ugly need at Hannahlily; her hands reached out and clawed the air as if she could tear the young couple from the truck.
Tucker bellowed something incoherent and hit the gas as he steered right toward her. Then Hannahlily did something that she could never thereafter explain to herself. She grabbed the wheel and shoved it the other way, fighting Tucker’s strength to turn the pickup. The bride loomed in the headlights, but the truck swerved and only the rear fender brushed the bride. It was enough to lift her, to fling her into the teeth of the storm, to drop her in a muddy puddle.
But as the pickup roared down the road, Hannahlily turned and looked through the rear window, and in a flash of lightning saw the bride get slowly and shakily to her feet.
Tucker was yelling as the house dwindled behind them. “God . . . oh God . . . oh God! What’s happening? What were they?”
The truck punched a hole through the night, found the main road, and rocketed along it toward town.
Hannahlily heard a voice praying. It took her a moment to realize that it was her voice. Praying. Begging God and Mary and the saints. Using fragments of prayers she’d learned in Sunday school. Old stuff. She hadn’t been to church at all except for Christmas Eve with her folks. But as her awareness caught up with the prayers, she realized that in that moment those prayers were meant. They were meant with every last bit of who she was.
God. Please.
Please.
She remembered the crazy news stories and quickly turned on the radio.
The music stations played music.
The news, though.
The guy who read the news . . .
He was crying. Screaming and crying.
On the radio.
They drove all the way to the edge of town before they saw the first explosions. Then they stopped on a hill, and Tucker put the pickup into park. They sat together and watched.
The road down from the hilltop was clogged with cars. So was the one rising from the burning town.
Their town.
Even with storming winds blowing, there were helicopters in the air.
Hannahlily and Tucker watched in stunned silence. Their mouths slack but their minds screaming. Even in the absence of all information, they both knew that what they had just escaped were not people. Not anymore. They were things. Creatures.
Tucker was shaking his head in denial of everything. His eyes were fever bright as he cut looks at her. “Are you okay?” he asked. “Are you hurt?”
She shook her head. “I’m . . . I’m . . . no . . . no, I’m okay.”
“Thank God,” he said. He gripped the wheel and drove into the night, heading for the road back into town. When Hannahlily reached out to squeeze his arm, he yelped in pain.
“What’s wrong?”
“I don’t know,” he said with a wince. “I think one of those crazoids . . . bit me.”
Hannahlily stared at him in the dark cab of the truck.
“It’s not bad,” he added quickly. “Don’t worry. I’ll be fine.”
<
br /> Hannahlily continued to stare. Just as she had known on an instinctive level that the things that had attacked her were not quite people, she knew with equal certainty that neither of them was going to be fine.
Ever again.
FROM NIX’S JOURNAL
ON LOVE
(BEFORE ROT & RUIN)
I don’t understand love.
I don’t think anyone does.
I know, big surprise, right? Insight of the century.
The whole thing is so weird, though. So hard to make any sense of. Especially in the world as it is.
Before First Night, love was all about meeting the right person, getting together, building something important, and then making a life worth living. Family and kids and all that. At least that’s how it seems from everything I ever read. People find each other and they try to live happily ever after.
The thing is . . . what does that even mean?
How can there be an “ever after” if the world ended? Doesn’t that mean love ended too?
Doesn’t it mean that there’s no point to love? If there’s no future, why fall in love? Why get married? Why have kids? Why hope?
Is this even real love? Without hope for the future, are we just going through the motions? Is love in what’s left of the world just a habit? Or some kind of biological thing that’s only chemicals in our heads reacting? Is it only our minds trying to make sense of animals who follow an instinct to continue to breed? In science class they told us about the “inherent need to perpetuate the species.”
Is that all love is?
Is that all it ever was?
I hope not.
I really hope not.
A Christmas Feast
The First Winter After First Night
(Thirteen and a half years before Rot & Ruin)
1
The living moved like ghosts through the fog.
The dead waited in the swirling mist.
There were screams in the air. A few shouts and gunshots.
And the moans.
Always the moans.
Long, and low, and plaintive. Uttered by mouths that hung slack, rising from chests that drew breath only to moan—never again to breathe. The moans spoke of a hunger so old, so deep, so endless that nothing, not even the red gluttony of a screaming feast, could satisfy it.
The hunger existed.
Like they existed.
Without purpose and without end.
The mists were as thick as milk, white, featureless, hiding everything until far too late. Figures moved through the fog.
And the dead waited for them.
2
The man and the boy heard those moans and huddled together, biting the rags they wore as scarves to keep from screaming.
They were beyond tired. Beyond weary.
Both of them were thin as scarecrows. Barely enough meat on them to allow their bodies to shiver. Clothing was torn, patched with duct tape and rope.
Most of the time the man carried the boy. Sometimes—like now—he was too weak, too starved to manage it. The boy stumbled behind him, clutching his hand, too weary to cry. That was when they moved the slowest. That was when they were the most vulnerable.
The boy, Mason, was six. A lean phantom of the chubby child he’d been when they’d run away in August. It was only four months, but weight had fallen from them like leaves from an autumn tree. There were dead things out there that had more flesh on their bones.
The man—Mason’s older brother, Dan—stuffed the boy’s clothes with wadded-up pieces of old newspaper. It helped some, trapping little bits of warmth.
Dan wore three sets of long johns, and he still looked skinny.
“I’m hungry . . . ,” said Mason. Not for the first time. Or the hundredth.
“I know,” said Dan.
“I’m tired!”
“I know.”
“I want my mommy!”
The man squeezed his eyes shut, but the tears found their way out anyway. “I know,” he whispered. “Me too.”
3
Almost the worst thing for Dan was how much he envied the dead.
They were always hungry, sure, same as him and Mason. Hunger was everywhere. But the dead didn’t seem to mind it. They never wept for the want of food. They hunted, sure. That’s all they did. But once Dan and Mason had slept in a church tower, and all day Dan watched the dead ones walk around or stand or sometimes kill and eat. When they feasted, they did it like dogs. Like jackals. They tore people apart and consumed everything as fast as they could. Like they were starving. As Dan and Mason were starving.
But when there was no meat, when there was no one to kill, they just . . . were. They didn’t fall down from hunger. They didn’t scream with the pain of needing food.
They just kept being. . . .
Being what?
What were they?
The newspapers threw a lot of words around before it all went silent. Walkers. Rooters. Flesh-eaters. Ghouls.
Zombies.
Them.
Whatever they were, they never seemed to actually mind being hungry.
Like they never minded the cold. Or the rain. Or the wind.
They just were.
Dan hated the thought of envying them.
He hated himself for feeling that envy.
He hated himself.
He hated.
And he hungered.
4
They’d left the highway four hours ago.
That was the route most of the refugees had used, even though none of the cars worked anymore. Something had happened to them. There had been big explosions, high up and far away, and all the cars died. Cell phones, too. Everything electric.
The two of them had been following a highway for days. The highways were straight routes. The cars offered some protection when the dead found them. You could hide in cars. At least for a while. Some of the dead could pick up rocks and smash the glass. If you were still, if you were quiet, you could wait out the night, and in the stillness of the morning you could steal away.
But then there was a spot where hundreds and hundreds of the dead crowded the road. Everyone ran. Dan tossed Mason over the guardrail into the thick grass, leaped the rail himself with half a second to spare, scooped up his brother, and ran.
And ran.
And ran.
The people who ran down into the valleys didn’t make it. There were rumors about that. It was worse in the lowlands. When the dead weren’t following prey, they followed the path of least resistance. They crowded the lowlands because gravity pulled with subtle insistence on stumbling feet. Fewer of them fought that pull to walk uphill. Not unless there was meat to find. A handful of travelers out scavenging shared this new lore with Dan. When the highways became impossible, Dan took his brother up the slopes, into the foothills of the mountains.
At first there were just as many of the dead. Hungry, tireless. Awful.
But soon there were fewer. The higher they climbed, the fewer there were.
Fewer.
Never none.
They passed places where people had fought and died. Some of them were still there, but these were not the staggering dead. These bodies had terrible head wounds. Gunshots, blows from blunt weapons.
“Don’t look at them,” Dan warned his brother.
But the boy looked. Of course he looked. His eyes were filled with . . .
Nothing.
Mason had been too young to understand much of what was happening when the plague swept out of the TV news and into their lives. Since then there had been no chance to give him a sense of what the world was like. What the world should have been like. Horror was everyday. Horror was everywhere. So how could his brother, how could little Mason, have any understanding of how bad things were? For him—for both of them—every moment was built around moving forward, staying safe, scavenging food, finding water. Finding warmth.
Beyond where the bodies lay, a small lane spurred off from the main r
oad. A wrecked car blocked the entrance, but when Dan leaned over the crumpled hood, he saw that the lane was clear.
Dan nodded, accepting it as a gift. Believing it to be so.
He picked Mason up, kissed him on the forehead, set him down on the hood of the car, and pushed him gently to the other side. Then he climbed up and over to help him down onto the ground again. A signpost wrapped in withered creeper vines read SULLIVAN LANE.
He didn’t know where it went, but any road was good as long as it wasn’t the one they were on. Besides, the lane was lined on both sides by heavy pine trees that blocked the fierce winds. Without those winds, the temperature was bearable. The snow was piled in long drifts against the trees, but the center of the lane was barely dusted.
“Come on,” he said again. Mason tried to walk, and he made it for a quarter mile before his stumbling feet failed. Dan scooped him up before he could fall, and though his own strength was flagging, he carried his brother into the wintry night.
Snow fell the way snow does. Soft, quiet, quilting the world with whiteness, hiding the truth of what lay beneath. It dampened down the sounds from farther down the road. The moans. The cries. The gunfire. All of it was distant anyway, and the snow shushed it to silence.
It was powdery and dry, and it blew slow drifts across the road. The air was frigid and the temperature was dropping. Rags and newspaper were not enough.
Dan saw the uneven lumps in the road ahead and knew what they were. A fight that had ended the way these fights do.
Badly.
He kept going, though. What else was there to do? Keep moving or lie down here and wait for either the teeth of the wind or the teeth of the dead to do their work.
The only grace, and it was small, was that the wind blew at his back rather than in his face. It pushed him, ever so subtly, uphill.
So it was uphill he walked, clutching his brother in his arms, feeling the ten tons of the little boy turn to twenty tons, to thirty. Dan never once let go, though. No, sir, he did not do that.