Rot and Ruin

“God …,” Benny said breathlessly.



The artist snorted. “I was never much of a believer, kid, but if there ever was a God, then He wasn’t on the clock that night. That’s something you can debate at Sunday school. For my part, I don’t see much evidence of any divine hand in what happened.”



“What happened then?” asked Benny.



Sacchetto took a breath. “I stayed glued to the Internet all day, mostly watching news feeds of these huge battles in New York and Philadelphia, in Chicago and San Francisco. And overseas. London, Manchester, Paris. Everywhere. One field reporter, a woman who was braver and crazier than I ever was, got all the way into Washington DC when the Air Force tried to reclaim the city. Jets were laying down napalm, and I saw whole masses of zombies burning on the lawn in front of the White House. They were still walking toward the troops who were making a stand on the other side of the Mall, but they burned as they did so, dropping to the ground as their tendons melted. Crawling until the fire destroyed too much of their muscles, or maybe till it boiled their brains. Wave after wave of helicopters fired on them. The helicopters hovered ten feet above their heads and used machine guns. Miniguns, I think they’re called. Firing hundreds of rounds per minute, tearing the zombies to pieces. I guess if you went by that footage, then it looked like we were winning. But I sat at that computer for more than twenty hours, and one by one the news feeds went offline. Then the power went out, and we got no news after that. The TV … It never came back on, so when we lost power, it was useless anyway.”



Even though Sacchetto spoke of places Benny had never seen and technology that no longer existed, the images of carnage and desperation filled Benny’s mind. When they were out in the Ruin, Tom had reminded him that there had been more than three hundred million people living in the United States on First Night. The thought of all those people, fighting and dying in just a few days … It made Benny feel sick and small.



“What about the pregnant lady?” he asked after a long silence.



“Yeah … well, that’s the real story. That’s the story you want to hear.”



“What do you mean?”



“That woman … She gave birth that night. There was a daybed that we wheeled out into the living room, and made her as comfortable as possible, but we didn’t know what we were doing. I sure as hell didn’t. The others helped. I … Well, I just couldn’t. You’d think someone who was around blood all the time—sketching crime scenes and all—you’d think I could take the blood and mess from her giving birth. But I couldn’t. I’m not proud, and I don’t even understand that about myself … but there it is. I was still cruising the Net when I heard the baby cry. It was right about then—right after the baby started crying—that the first of the dead began pounding on the door.”



“The baby … ?”



“It was a girl,” Sacchetto said, but he looked away. “We didn’t know the mother had been bitten.”



“God!” Benny’s mouth went dry, and when he tried to swallow, it felt like he had a throat full of broken glass. “The baby too? Was it a …” Benny couldn’t make his mouth shape the word.



But Sacchetto shook his head. “No. I know there have been a lot of stories about infected mothers giving birth to babies who were, um, monsters. But that’s not what happened.” He cleared his throat. “Years later, when I told this story to Doc Gurijala, he said that maybe the disease, or whatever it was, either couldn’t cross the placental wall or didn’t have time to do it. The woman must have been bitten when we were breaking through the crowds of zombies. None of us noticed.”



“What happened?”



“Well, the infection had already taken hold. We missed it because she was already sweating and moaning from the hard delivery, and we still didn’t understand what we were up against. When they started cleaning her up, she just … died. She fell back against the bed and let out this long, sputtering exhale. It was horrible to hear. It was a series of clicks in the throat as that last breath came out of her. They call that sound a death rattle, but that’s too ordinary a phrase for the sound that I heard. It sounded more like fingernails scraping on a hardwood floor, like her spirit was clawing at life, trying to stay in her body.”



Benny felt the skin of his arms rise with ripples of goose flesh.



“By that time I’d seen hundreds of people die and had seen thousands of zombies … but that death was the worst,” said the artist. “And after all these years it’s still the worst. That poor woman had fought her way out of Los Angeles, had saved her daughter and struggled to survive long enough to bring her baby into the world, and when she’d succeeded—when she was safe—death just dragged her away.”



He abruptly stood and walked over to the counter, snatched up the bottle, and stared at it. He set it down again, thumping the heavy glass against the countertop.



“That baby?” Benny asked tentatively. “Did she live? And … is she the girl on the card? Is she the Lost Girl?”



Sacchetto turned, surprised. “No. She was too young. She’d be only fourteen now.”



“Then I don’t understand. …”



“It was her sister,” said the artist. “The little girl who was on the run with her mother. Lilah.”



“Lilah,” Benny echoed. The name was a cool breeze in the middle of the heat of Sacchetto’s terrible story.



“She watched her sister being born, and she watched her mother die. Poor little kid. She was only two, so all the screaming and the blood must have hit her really hard. Before, while we were still running, while I was carrying her, she was talking. Some words, but mostly nonsense stuff. Kid stuff. After that last breath … the little girl screamed for five minutes. She screamed herself raw, and then she stopped talking.”



“For how long?”



The artist looked away again.



“I don’t know. The rest of that night is kind of a blur. The dead surrounded the place. I think they were drawn to the cottage because of the screams. And after … by the smell of blood.”



“What happened to the mother?”



Sacchetto still didn’t meet his eyes. “She woke up, of course. She woke up, and for an insane moment we thought that she was still alive, you know? That she hadn’t died, that we were wrong about it.” He laughed a short, ugly laugh. “She bit one of the men. He was bent forward, trying to talk to her, trying to reach her … and she craned her neck forward and bit him. Then we knew.”



“What did you do?”



“What we had to do.” He came slowly back to the table and sat down. “We still had our weapons. The sticks, the rocks, the empty guns. We …”



He could not say it, and Benny did not need it said. They sat together for a while, listening to the wind-up clock on the wall chip seconds off the day.



“Near dawn,” the artist said at length, “one of the others said that he was going to try and make a break for it. He said that the creatures outside were slow and stupid. He was a big guy, he’d played football in high school and was in really good shape. He said that he was going to break through their lines and find some help. Everyone tried to talk him out of it, but not as hard as we could have. It was the only plan anyone had. In the end, we all went to the living room and banged on the doors and walls, yelling real loud. The zombies came shuffling from all sides of the house. I don’t know how many. Fifty? A hundred? When the back was mostly clear, the young guy went out through the back door at a dead run. He was fast, too. I closed the door and looked through the crack and watched him in the light of the false dawn as he knocked the zombies away and rushed into the darkness.”



“What happened to him?”



“What do you think?” Sacchetto snapped, then softened his tone. “There was nowhere to run to. We never saw him again.”



“Oh.”



“It was almost a full day later when another one of us tried it. A small guy who used to manage a Starbucks in Burbank. He made a torch out of a table leg and some sheets that he’d soaked in alcohol. He didn’t run fast enough, though. And that myth about the zombies being afraid of fire? That’s stupid. They can’t think or feel. They’re not afraid of anything. They surrounded him. Before he fell, the little guy must have set fire to a dozen of them. But the others got him.”



Benny looked down at the card that lay on the table before him. “You said that seven of you made it to the cottage.”



“Six adults, plus the little girl. And the baby made eight. The mother … died. So did the guy she bit. And you know what’s really sad? I never learned either of their names. The little girl only knew her mother as ‘Mama.’ We couldn’t even respect their deaths with their names. Maybe that doesn’t seem important, but it mattered to us. To me.”



“No,” said Benny, remembering Tom reading the note to Harold Simmons. “I get it. It matters.”



Sacchetto nodded. “So that left two of us. Me and last guy—a shoe salesman named George—played rock-paper-scissors to see who’d try next. Imagine that: two grown men playing a kids’ game during the apocalypse to decide which one was probably going to live and which one was almost certainly going to die. It’s comedy.”



“But it’s not funny,” said Benny.



“No,” said the artist. “No, it sure as hell isn’t. Mostly because neither of us really thought we were going to live. We just didn’t want to be the next to die.”



“You won?”



“No,” he said. “I lost. I was the one who had to try. George stayed back there with the two kids. I tore up a throw rug and wrapped strips of it around my arms, and put on a thick winter coat I found in the closet. When I told Tom all this, he joked that maybe I invented carpet coats. Whatever. I wound five scarves around my face. All I left free were my legs. I found a bag of golf clubs in a closet and took two metal putters, one for each hand. George went through the same ritual, banging on the front door. Zombies are as dumb as they are dangerous. They came lumbering around to the front of the house, and I went out the back. I heard the baby crying and George yelling, but I didn’t look back. I ran. Kid … I ran for my life, and that’s what chews me up every day and night since.”



“I don’t understand.”



The artist gave him a bleak smile. “I ran for my life. Not theirs. Not for George or the little kid or the baby. I ran to save my own sorry ass. I ran and ran and ran. On good nights, when I can find a little scrap of self-respect, I tell myself that I ran so far because I couldn’t find anyone alive, closer to the cottage, but that’s not entirely true. At least, I don’t know if it’s true. I saw smoke a couple of times, and I heard gunfire. I could have gone there and maybe found some people who were still alive and fighting, but I was too scared. If there was gunfire, then they had to be firing at the zombies, and that scared me too much. I was crying and talking to myself as I ran, making up lies to convince myself that the little kids back in the house were safe, that the hunters or soldiers or whoever was firing the guns would find them in time. I ran and ran and ran.”



He stopped and sighed again.



“At nights I slept in barns or in drainage ditches. I don’t know how many days I ran. Too many, I guess. Then one morning I heard voices, and when I crept out of my hiding place, I saw a party of armed men, walking down the road. More than sixty of them, with a couple of soldiers and a few cops leading the way. I rushed out at them, screaming incoherently. They nearly shot me, but I managed to get out a few words in time. They gathered around me, gave me some food and water, and grilled me on where I’d been and what I’d seen. I don’t think I made a whole lot of sense, but when I was finally able to get myself together enough to tell them about the cottage, I realized that I had no idea where it was. I wasn’t familiar with this part of California, and I sure as hell hadn’t paid attention to the crazy path I took. They had a map, and I tried to figure it out, but it was hopeless.”



“What happened?”



He shook his head. “They never found the cottage. Not while I was with them, anyway. A party of about a dozen went to look for it, but they never came back. The main group pushed on, and after a week of fighting and running, we found a reservoir with a high chain-link fence and mountains behind it. It was defensible, and it became a rallying point for survivors.”



“You mean here? That’s how this town was started?”



“Yes. I helped reinforce the fence and dig earthworks and build shelters. I worked as hard as I could each day, every day. … And except for a couple of very short trips into the Ruin with Tom, I never left this town again. I don’t think I ever will.”



“What about the little girls? What about Lilah?”



Sacchetto sat back. “Well, kid, that’s where I left the story of the Lost Girl, and it’s where Tom entered it. You’re going to have to get the rest from him.”



Benny got up and fetched the coffeepot. He poured the artist a fresh cup and set the bottle of whiskey down next to it. The artist stared at the bottle for a while, then poured some into his coffee, sipped it, then got up and poured the coffee out in the sink.



“Thanks for telling me all this,” said Benny. “Most people don’t want to talk about First Night or what happened after. And those that do … They always make it sound like they were the heroes.”



“Yeah, I sure as hell didn’t do that.”