Page 183 of The End of the World As We Know It

“Well?” he asked.

Lowering her gaze, Amy shook her head. Zeke let out a long sigh and ran a hand over his face. His hands were rough from hard work, but there was an elegance to them that she liked. Now he used those elegant hands to tinker with car engines, making him very important to their group.

“I was expecting this,” he said. “I’ve got to go tell him now, and you know how he can be.”

“I know,” she answered quickly.

“Hell, kid, it’s not your fault,” he said, dusting off one of his knees. “I just hate dealing with his shit-ass moods, that’s all. There’s been a lot going on in town that you don’t see out here.”

“I know. Thanks for taking the bad parts of it so I don’t have to.”

“And take I will, kid. Take I will. Don’t you worry about it, though. I can handle Mal. You go take a little walk while I do this and I’ll be back in a couple hours with more water and a snack.”

“Can you bring me some clean clothes? Some shorts?” she asked.

“Yup, sure can,” he said, scooting her off the rock.

As he walked away, she saw the slump of his shoulders. He got to deal with Mal, which wasn’t the honor Mal tended to think it was. Amy felt sorry for Zeke, but better him than her.

Before everybody died of the old tube neck, Zeke was Ezekiel Marshall. He’d been a computer tech in Los Angeles when the world ended, but he was originally from somewhere she’d never heard of in Illinois.

He was the one who’d found her when the group came through Philippi. She’d been living alone in the dorms of Alderson Broaddus for close to a year and had given up hope of ever seeing another living person. She traveled to the college town from her home in Grafton, West Virginia, after her parents died, gasping and clawing at their blackened necks. The only place she knew to go was Alderson Broaddus, where her sister, Sarah, was going to school. Being only ten years old herself at the time, she was convinced that her brilliant sister, the first in their family to pursue higher education, would know how to navigate the great disaster. It took three days for her to walk it, but when Amy got to the campus, she found chaos and death. Not everybody was dead, but most were. The ones that were still alive were ornery, breaking windows and setting fires.

Sarah’s dorm was empty. She guessed that Sarah had died in a hospital, and shuddered at the thought of her sister rotting in some toothpaste-green medical room.

Not far from Philippi, the group chose their new Eden, a place that had once been called Hepzibah, West Virginia, but Mal had decided to call Flaggston. There were a little over a hundred of them when Amy had been cast out.

She walked through the woods, following the narrow paths kept fresh by deer, an animal that miraculously wasn’t touched by old tube neck. She made a small detour. There was a place in those woods, a place that she visited every so often when her moods turned dark.

When it was still called Hepzibah, the town wasn’t much more than a blip on the map. Zeke called it a one-stoplight town. It was little more than scattered houses and a church and cemetery. The rest was wilderness. It was a beautiful place. Zeke said that the quiet and nature was exactly what his spirit needed after the hell the world had endured. He told her about some of the things he saw, insisting that their stories were an important legacy.

But sometimes Zeke was in a strange mood, and he’d beg her not to ask him about the tail end of the year 1990. He’d try to hide his shaking legs and the big tears that would stream down his face. She noticed that some of the others would get in moods like that, too. They’d go from happy to shaky and sad in the snap of a finger.

Amy walked carefully down a steep bank and found the place. The burn pile. It had been a dumping area for the locals decades before the sickness. There were rusted-out, ancient appliances, moldy mattresses and box springs, engine blocks, and rotting furniture all haphazardly dumped into the area. It was a good place to discard unwanted things. And to keep certain things secret.

A few members of their group had declared it to be a good place to dump pieces of furniture where people had died and then decomposed. But instead of letting the elements take their time rendering them to dust, as the previous residents had, they burned those sullied articles among the rusted-out washing machines and soggy sofas. Bad memories burned into benign ash. She pondered this, staring at the burn pile, at the black, charred skulls of the babies.

There had been only three born to the group since they’d assembled, but paranoia kept their births from being the joyful beginning that a new baby had been before the plague. The survivors lived in a post-sickness world, where their babies’ resistance to the illness was questionable. The first baby, a little girl they called Faith, was fine at first, but within the week, she declined. She wouldn’t rouse from her slumber to eat and her color started to turn strange. It was Mal, whose mania hadn’t fully come to the surface at that point, who raisedthe alarm that the babies could be born to immune parents and yet catch the sickness.

“They could catch it, and it could mutate in them. It could mutate into something we could catch in turn, and then that’s it. Endgame. Bye-bye, human race, what’s left of us,” he’d said.

She’d watched that day as the eyes of the others got wide and wild in fear. They’d already survived the unthinkable, had already seen so much death and desperation that there was no hope for a calm reaction. They were meeting in small groups, whipping each other into hysterical frenzies of fear. Their hard-won senses of safety were being decimated by a seven-pound baby that, for one reason or another, was failing to thrive.

They snatched Faith from her parents and doused her, still wrapped in a blanket, in a single splash of gasoline. She didn’t cry out when they set her on fire. The remaining two babies were burned with less hesitation. The others had their minds set against newborns full stop by then.

Zeke warned Amy about the others a lot. She asked him once if he hated the others, and he’d frowned at her.

“The others are now, by necessity and really shitty circumstance, my people. But they aren’t good people, kid. They chose a side and then abandoned it, and now they’re lost and sad. And they’re going to mask that sadness with anger. We need to keep our heads, and maybe one day, as more people start making their way back east, we’ll move on with a group of kinder, calmer people.”

“What do you mean by sides? What side did they pick? I know they all went to Las Vegas after everybody died, but was that a side?”

“The dreams? The man without a face and the woman in the corn?”

“Huh?”

Zeke got so serious that she thought she was in trouble.

“Amy, do you dream?”