Eighteen

“Are you okay?” The girl asked. Colleen opened her mouth and tried to speak, and if any words came out, she did not hear them. She looked down at the amorphous red dress spread around her like blood in a crime scene photo, and felt the soft moist blades of grass beneath her knees and between her fingers, like gravel and broken glass. She tried and failed to make sense of the scene before her.

It was a playground. There was grass and a concrete path and a swing set and some monkey bars. A bench and a picnic table and a barbecue pit and trees and potted plants and a sandbox, and she was being held captive by the very same people who had forced her to suck her boyfriend’s cock before they sliced it off inches away from her face.

And now there were children. A smiling girl of maybe six, cherubic twin boys with yellow hair and eyes blue like the sky, and a toddler banging together two from a vast array of brightly-colored blocks.

She opened her mouth again, and nothing came out.

“I think she’s sick,” said the girl, looking back at the women seated side by side on the bench, and they all stood, their dresses fluttering like ghosts, it seemed to Colleen, but her eyes, sticky with tears and imbalanced with delirium, had invented the flutter. The air was still. Still because of the high wall encircling the courtyard. The wind sighed through the tress around her, around the enclosure in which she found herself, failing again and again to blink away the image of her boyfriend’s dick lying in the dirt, but it barely reached her—was little more than a whisper against her scalp.

The women approached and encircled and settled around her, their dresses pooling and mingling with her own, a crime scene photo of a massacre.

Guy screamed defiance and she took him into her mouth and the blade came down and the blood was so damned bright and hot. It spilled in a hot gush across her hands, where it cooled in a heartbeat and dried and flaked away.

She blinked, and it wasn’t all of the women before her, just the girl and the first woman, the one the man had called… what had he called her? The other women watched. So too did the twins, who approached Colleen. One of the women on the bench called to them, told them to step back, and they did.

The girl said her name was Lissa. Colleen tried to hold onto that, saying the name over and over in her head, like a mantra, holding it to her heart like a talisman. Lissa, Lissa, Lissa, and the dead are coming to life and eating the living and the last time she saw Guy he was sitting with his back to the truck and packing his groin with dirt and grass. Blood pumped through his fingers like water from a hose on a hot summer day.

Lissa said something and then Beth or Embeth or whatever her name was spoke and Colleen looked from one to the other, one to the other. She struggled to make sense of their faces and words. Lissa was six years old, and she spoke with the intelligence and maturity of someone much older. She found her brothers to be terribly annoying, and was thrilled to have Colleen around. Lissa took her by the hand, and Embeth asked the girl if she’d keep an eye on Colleen for a second.

“Sure,” Lissa said, and Colleen wondered how many times her mind could cave in upon itself before she was screaming at the sky and ripping out her own eyes. She wondered if her mom was blinking into the darkness of her casket, and if the old man with the gun, Crate, was still enjoying himself. She thought of Daniel and Kimberly and Richard and the corpses heaped upon the gravel outside of MISTY’S FOOD AND GAS. Or had it been GAS AND FOOD? She couldn’t remember, just as she couldn’t remember when the last time things had been normal.

Her mouth was open. She had no idea how long it had been open, and she closed it. The woman—Embeth, her name was Embeth, though the old guy with the beard had called her Beth—floated away on her dress like a ghost, and the girl talked and talked and talked. She must have been six, with her sexless body and her little boy’s face and her missing teeth. Her hair was in a braid down her back. Smiling, she asked if Colleen wanted to play Pat-a-Cake. Colleen said nothing and lifted her hands. She barely felt the girl’s little hands upon hers.

The boys watched.

“You’re my new best friend,” Lissa said, nearly whispering. “I like Sally but she’s quiet and doesn’t like to play. Do you know some games?”

Colleen blinked, her head spinning. She tried to focus on the girl’s face, but she just kept seeing the shot they were playing on the TV at Misty’s. The woman stumbling around the morgue with her chest splayed open, her breasts peeled away in symmetrical folds from her ribcage.

“It’s going to be okay,” the girl said, and Colleen tried to smile. It felt like a wound on her face and she choked back the impulse to throttle the girl, to sink her thumbs into her windpipe. To listen to it crunch beneath her hand. “You’re safe here. We’re all safe here.”

Safe here. Safe here. Did the girl know what was going on outside? Colleen closed her eyes, and there was Guy’s dick again. Guy’s dick, and Daniel’s face framed against the fabric of the couch in her mother’s house, head jerking, hair dancing. Pot churning in the air. And Kimberly.

She tried to remember the last time she’d seen Kimberly, Kimberly who had been coming apart since the deer; her best friend since childhood, a sweet and honest girl, a friend, was not here in this strange place of women and children. Why was this, and where was Kimberly right now?

Was she alive? Were any of them alive?

Her heart hurt, her stomach tore at itself, and still the girl talked and talked, holding Colleen’s hand and stroking it and assuring her that she was just a little sick and that she’d be better in no time.

Colleen stared at the girl, trying not to want to kill her. Her mother was dead and her friends were gone and the dead were walking around, but this girl, this not-very-pretty girl had done nothing wrong. Colleen put her hands on the girl’s shoulders, a gesture of intimacy, and stared harder. Colleen stared and told herself not to hurt the girl, she was innocent, even as she felt the tips of her thumbs come to rest on the girl’s collarbones and then give a slight little crush, like testing a pear for ripeness. She intended for it to be harder but couldn’t get her fingers to obey.

The girl seemed surprised and Colleen let her back away.

The twins were running in circles and babbling. The women on the bench went on sitting, kept on watching her. There was a second bench nearby, totally empty, but they were packed together on the other bench. Embeth loomed over them, watching Colleen. The little boy with the blocks could not be bothered to do anything other than bang them together upon his colorful blanket. Colleen wasn’t sure, but she thought Sally was the youngest one, the pregnant one who looked like she was about to burst. And there was something about the blanket, dammit, with its candy-colored geometric patterns.

Lissa prattled on, talking about her brothers and the time her father took her down to the river to fish and she fell in and almost drowned. Colleen tried not to vomit, tried to keep the image of the heap of corpses in the parking lot. She waited and waited for the next horror, and all that came was the girl’s smile and the laughter of the twins. The thok thok thok of the toddler banging his blocks together.

“Papa Huff made those for him,” Lissa said.

Colleen stared at her.

“The blocks. He makes the neatest things.”

The twins raced by, screaming laughter. They looked no older than four, straddling the line between toddler and big boy, their faces big-cheeked and baby-like, their bodies beginning to elongate. Identically dressed and chasing one another in endless figure-eights, they looked like some kind of optical illusion.

They ran up to Colleen and stood watching her, panting. One of them had his small hands splayed on his knees. Their eyebrows were so blond they were nearly invisible, standing out only because their faces were nearly purple with exertion.

“Hey,” one of them said.

“Hey,” said the other, smiling.

“Are you Miss Colleen?” The first one said.

“You’re our new mommy,” the second one said.

Colleen felt her face go numb and wanted to ask what they meant but her tongue was made of… she couldn’t really tell, but it wasn’t made of tongue, that much was certain. “No,” she finally made the non-tongue say.

“You’re not?” They both asked, just out of sync with one another.

“Sure she is, you dummies,” Lissa said, beaming.

“I’m Jack,” the first one said, jabbing a small thumb into his chest.

“I’m David,” said the other, showing her a mouth full of little white baby teeth. “We kill giants.”

Colleen moved her eyes away from the twins and across the courtyard, expecting actual giants to lumber from the trees and into view. Why not? It made as much sense and anything else. When she was certain that no goliaths would appear, she looked at the kids.

“Giants are real,” Jack said, looking grim.

“I’m the giant,” David yelled, shoving Jack, who plopped onto his bottom. Laughing, David ran away. Laughing, Jack hopped to his feet and took chase.

Colleen watched them dumbly and then realized that her feet had gone to sleep. She was on her knees in the dirt, and shifted her weight onto her rear. She looked at the small boy who sat on a colorful blanket before the four women on the bench.

“That’s Huff Junior,” the girl next to her said. “He’s almost two. He’s pretty nice. He—oh, what’s wrong?”

The little girl’s small warm fingers on her face and on her shoulders.

“You’re frowning. You look sad.”

Colleen kept on frowning and looking sad. She opened her mouth again to say something, but all that came out was a scratchy little yelp that reminded her of the sound of dying puppies.

“You should talk,” the girl said, and already Colleen found herself wondering what the girl’s name was, dammit. She’d held onto it and held onto it, but there it was, gone.

Embeth and the other three women sat watching the child and speaking to one another in hushed tones that barely reached Colleen’s ears. She let her eyes drift into the grass before the pool of her dress, and when she looked up, Embeth stood directly over her. She smiled with her eyes.

“Can you give us a few minutes, Lissa,” Embeth said, and there it was—Lissa. Yes, Lissa. She was a nice girl, and Colleen was wrong to imagine her thumbs crumpling the girl’s windpipe.

“Okay, Mama Beth,” Lissa said, hopping up, planting a quick kiss onto Colleen’s forehead, and running over to Jack, who’d pinned David to the ground, tickling him. David’s laughter sounded a second or two away from becoming screams of terror.

“How are you?” Embeth asked, looking down at Colleen. The sound of her voice sliced through the fog churning around Colleen’s head. Like the man whose sons had violently taken them captive, this woman seemed sincere. It made as much sense as the dead walking.

When Colleen didn’t answer, Embeth reached out to her. “Help you up?”

She took the woman’s hand. It was warm and comforting, like Lissa’s, and that didn’t make sense, either. And it was alive and vital, so much more alive and vital than her mother’s hand in the weeks before her death—bones sheathed in papery flesh. Holding this living and vital and senseless hand, Colleen allowed herself to be lifted to her feet.

Embeth guided her toward the women seated on the bench. One of them now held the small boy, Huff Junior, on her knee, bouncing him. Blood flashed in her mind, and Colleen saw herself seizing the child by his small ankles and slamming him against the top of the picnic table until he came apart in her hands like a broken doll.

Lissa chased Jack and David, who laughed and ran a few times around Colleen and Embeth before racing to the other side of the courtyard.

“They’re something else, aren’t they?” Embeth said.

Hanging above the television in the living room of her mother’s house, there was a photograph of her and Daniel playing in a heap of fallen red leaves at the base of a slide. She didn’t remember where or when the photo was taken, but she remembered the way she’d felt then, the way she felt whenever she looked at the photo.

Watching Lissa and the Giant Killers tumble across the grass, she thought of that photo, and reminded her once more that these children had done no wrong.

The three women stood. “Whoo,” Sally said, holding her right hand to her lower back, legs bowed beneath her formless dress, stomach bulging.

“This is Colleen,” Embeth said.

“Hello, Colleen,” the pregnant woman said, bowing her head once.

“This is Sally,” Embeth said.

“Sally has been with us for, how long is it now, Sally?”

“Almost seven months now.”

Been with them. Been with them. Sally had been with them for seven months. Colleen held Sally’s gaze, unsure just what it was she saw in the woman’s eyes, and try as she might, she could not focus on the moment. The realization—what’s she’d been forced to do, what she’d seen, what they’d done to her and to her brother and to her friends—hit her once again. The fiery knot in her stomach tightened, and her head plunged into fog.

The other women rose, and Embeth introduced them.

The woman holding the child was Mathilda. She was thirty-five, with sandy hair and thin lips. Her plain face was deeply-lined and tanned from years spent in the sun. Unlike Sally, Mathilda shook Colleen’s hand. Her hands were rough. She’d been there since she was fourteen.

Evie didn’t nod or shake hands. She held Colleen’s gaze for a few seconds before looking down. She was a few years older than Mathilda and had been with them since she was twenty-two. Her black hair was going gray at the temples, and she was the prettiest of the four women. Her naturally olive skin did not appear to have been toughened by the sun, and Colleen knew that if she shook her hand, she’d find it soft.

“It’s nice to meet you, Colleen,” Sally said. She took one of Colleen’s hands in both of hers. “Be strong, girl.”

“Oh, honey,” Embeth said, stroking Colleen’s cheek. “Sit down.”

The bench was warm. Sally sat beside her, leaving a person’s width between them. Embeth said something about her and the other women having things to do, and that Sally would take care of her for now. Mathilda rocked the child, and Lissa and the twins laughed and played, and Colleen tried to hold on to what they said to her, tried to make sense of their words, but she could not—the words came apart at the seams, the letters rearranging themselves into pig latin.

Colleen stared at her hands, folded together as if in prayer on her lap, and when next her awareness expanded enough to encompass her surroundings, the shadows were a little longer, and she was alone with Sally.

“I’ve been waiting for you,” Sally said.

Colleen’s head took a thousand years to turn upon her neck. Sally’s face was unreadable.

“You’re drugged,” Sally said. “You will be for some time, until they’re sure you’re not going to freak out and try to get away. No, no—don’t try to talk. Just listen, okay?”

Colleen nodded once.

“Mathilda was a nurse before Huff got a hold of her. Huff knows people in town. Gets all the medical supplies we could ever need.”

No one said anything for a little while or for longer—Colleen could not tell.

“Anyway, yeah. I’ve been waiting for you.” Sally said, sliding closer to Colleen and speaking quietly. “Not you specifically, but someone like you. Someone new. I’m not one of those brainwashed bitches, so don’t let the act fool you.”

There was hope, just like that. The fog around her mind still held sway, but it had thinned enough to allow Colleen to find her tongue. “Oh, God,” she said, and bit her tongue, hanging on Sally’s next words.

“I’ll make this quick, because one of them could come back at any moment, and you never know where one of the boys are creeping around. Huff steals women. He steals women and he knocks them up and he raises the kids to think he’s some kind of wiseman, and he takes each of the women as his brides.”

Colleen opened her mouth. Closed it. Sally took her hand and gave it a squeeze.

“We were on vacation, my husband and me and our son. William. They were both named William,” Sally said. Her eyes were on Colleen, but Colleen could tell that she was looking someplace else. “Driving down to San Francisco for the week. Huff and one of his youngest boy, the one who got killed yesterday, were on the side of the road. Huff said his truck was broken, and asked for a ride up the hill. We said sure, an old guy and his son, why not? It was just up the hill.”

Tears welled in the woman’s eyes, and she wiped them away. “Oh,” she said, sitting back. Using both hands, she smoothed the cloth of her dress tight across the bulge of her stomach.

“What is it?” Colleen asked, finding her voice.

Sally raised her eyebrows, smiling. “Watch,” She said, biting her lower lip. A single tear inched down her left cheek. The child inside of her kicked. Something—an elbow or a knee or its small butt—traced a path across the tight dome of her belly.

“That’s…” Colleen said, not bothering to finish. She wasn’t sure what it was. It was either beautiful or terrible, depending upon how she looked at it. It made as little sense as anything else, and, like the sight of Lissa playing with the twins, somehow made things so much worse.

“My son isn’t going to grow up here,” she said, placing both of her hands atop the swell of her stomach, fingers interlaced. She chuckled bitterly. “Listen to me. My son, as if I have any idea what it is.”

“What happened?”

“Same thing that happened to you,” Sally said, staring forward, lips tight. “They attacked us as soon as we got up here. They dragged my husband and my son away, screaming and crying, and I never saw them again.

“They took me here, and I went through what you’re going through right now. I met Huff and Embeth and then the others. The kids.”

Sally looked at Colleen, her brow creased, tight like her lips. There was strength in her eyes. Fury.

“Embeth has been here for over thirty years. She believes everything he says. She’s no different from him. Mathilda buys it and eats it too, and so does Evie, for the most part, but she’s starting to see holes in the wall he’s built. She’s noticed…” Sally paused, thinking. She smiled. “Evie has noticed inconsistencies in the bastard’s stories. Maybe she’s starting to see the big picture.” She shrugged. “Maybe she isn’t.”

Sally sighed. Colleen could not tell that Sally had been wound tight until she saw and felt the tension go out of the woman’s form.

“I don’t dare tell her what I’m planning. She’d hear me, and she’d know I was right, but his fingers are in her like she was a wad of dough. She’d run to him, and I’d be dead.”

Sally’s stomach bounced. She smiled, and looked over at Colleen, who pulled her hand away.

“No,” Sally said. “You can touch it. Here.” She took Colleen’s hand and placed it onto her stomach. Within seconds, the little life within moved beneath her fingers.

“Wow,” Colleen said.

“Yeah, really, huh?” Sally said, nodding. “All of the kids here belong to Huff. All but this one.” A gentle tap upon her stomach, and the child within leapt. “I was pregnant before I got here. I was going to tell William as soon as we got to San Francisco.” She smiled at Colleen, blinking away tears. “Huff’s good, the bastard. He has a way about him. You met him, right?”

“Yes,” Colleen said. “Once. This morning.”

“Then you know what I mean. He soothes and he comforts, and you believe everything he says, because it’s so damn smooth, right?”

“I guess so,” Colleen said, and she wanted to close her eyes. Her mind was still made of soup. “He seemed sincere. So sorry that—” She couldn’t finish, and Sally didn’t seem to notice.

“You’ll see just what I mean tonight.” Her words were coming quicker now, tighter, as if she wanted to get it all out and was running out of time. “And if you’re here long enough, you’ll start to buy it. Sometimes I do. And sometimes I think it would be easier if I gave in.” She shrugged. “They seem happy.”

She stroked her belly and gazed into it, her eyes someplace else. Her voice was jagged with anger. “He lies, and his lies are getting more and more ridiculous. I mean, they’ve been far out from the start—you’ll hear the one about the angel, I’m sure—but he’s slipping. He’s pushing it.”

“What,” Colleen said, struggling over her words. Sally watched her, waited. “What do you mean?”

“The whole point of this place is so that a family, his family, can survive the end of the world. He likes to say sometimes that he’s like Noah, which is funny because he doesn’t believe in God.”

“But you said something—”

“The angel?” Sally shook her head. “Crazy never really makes sense, does it? But that’s just it—when Evie was taken, back then? He told the angel story, only it was just about a woman who helped him when he was hurt, not an actual angel from Heaven. At least, that’s how she remembers it, and that’s why she’s having her doubts.”

“Oh.”

“Anyway, my point is, since I got here, he told us that the end would come in our lifetimes. Not the end of the world, but of civilization.”

Colleen stared at the woman’s face, a chill moving through her body.

“Since I’ve been here, he’s told us that nuclear war was around the corner. But just this morning, he changed his tune. His kid got killed somehow, I have no idea how, and maybe that pushed him over the edge. But he spews the crap and they lap it up. They all believe him, Jesus, probably even Evie.”

“About what?” Colleen asked, knowing what would come next.

“He told us this morning that the dead were coming back to life. Can you believe that?” Sally’s eyes were wide. “Coming back to life and eating people.”

“Unbelievable,” Colleen said, deciding instantly, without consideration, that she would let this woman go on believing that up was still up. “What did you mean earlier?”

“What?” Sally said. She sounded a little disappointed, as if she expected Colleen to comment further on Huff’s mad claims.

“When you said you were waiting for me.”

“Oh,” she said, looking around, rubbing her stomach with her right hand, fingers splayed. “I’m getting out of here, and I need help. I can’t trust anyone. You’re the only one whose eyes aren’t glazed over.”

“How?”

“I don’t know yet,” Sally said. “But I do know this: I’m having my child, I’m healing. We’re going to lie low for a little while, and then we’re gone.” She looked at Colleen, eyebrows raised.

“Okay,” Colleen said, dropping her gaze. Sally’s stomach jumped three times. They sat in silence until the sun reached the top of the sky and the clouds parted and the heat became too much to bear.

“Come on,” Sally said, rising to her feet, bowlegged and grunting. She held each of Colleen’s hands in her own and helped her to her feet. “Let’s go inside.”

“Jailbreak,” Colleen said.

“Yeah,” Sally said. “Jailbreak.”