Zombies: More Recent Dead

A Shepherd of the Valley Maggie Slater

The low-lying fog across the tarmac made it difficult to be certain, but the figure moving toward the tower limped like a roamer. James Shepherd lifted his binoculars—it was a girl, a young girl, wearing a jacket so large its cuffs hung over her hands and the waist almost down to her knees. She favored her left leg, or perhaps her ankle. No doubt she’d been walking on it unconsciously for weeks, maybe even months.

I can fix that, Shepherd thought, and it made him smile. It had been a while since a roamer wandered onto his ground space. He’d have to give her a good name. A sweet name. Perhaps Esther. Little Esther, he thought, and tapped in the command for Peter to intercept and incapacitate.

Luke was also in the area, not a hundred meters off by Hanger B.

Adding Esther would make his group an even dozen, and that too made Shepherd smile. He pulled off a piece of masking tape and pressed it beneath the others on the control panel. With a marker, he wrote her name.

Twelve was a good number. A holy number, if the Good Book was right. Peter, Matthew, David, John, Paul, Mary, Luke, Bartholomew, Joseph, Martha, Mark, and now Esther. Yes, twelve was right.

As he watched Peter tromp toward the newcomer, Shepherd heard a strange noise over the radio. At first, he thought it might be a breeze caught in Peter’s microphone, but it grew steadily stronger. The moan reached him across the speakers in the air traffic control tower just as the little red button next to Peter’s name began blinking ferociously.

Not a moment after that, Luke’s light started flashing, too.

Shepherd stared at the lights, hardly remembering what they were meant to indicate. It had been so long since one had flashed.

He snatched up his binoculars and looked out at the three figures, now visible and moving toward one another. As he watched, the girl lifted what he’d mistaken for a long stick at her side and pointed it at Peter’s head.

The girl was alive.

Shepherd’s hands leapt for the microphone button. “No, wait!”

The blast of a shotgun echoed through his tower speakers.

Panicked, Shepherd twisted the knob for Luke’s frequency and slammed the speaker button again. “Wait! Don’t shoot.” He stabbed his fingers onto the keyboard to command Luke to stand still. “Hold your fire. They won’t hurt you. I’m in control.”

The speakers buzzed. “Who’s talking? Where are you?”

Shepherd froze at the sound of the voice and lifted his face toward the window again. “Penny?” His voice cracked when he said her name.

“Hold on,” Shepherd said, ducking under the control panel to plug in the video line for Hanger B’s security camera. A flood of gray light filled the dusking room behind him as he scrambled back into his seat.

The girl stood some twenty yards away from the hanger, and Luke was less than half that distance from her, his back and the glint of his bolted metal spine visible on the video feed. The girl’s shotgun was leveled at his chest. The video was too grainy to see much else in detail.

Shepherd leaned in until the static from the screen crackled at the tip of his nose. “What’s your name?” He couldn’t even be sure of her face shape, let alone her features.

“I’m not telling you shit until you tell me where you are.”

“Sorry—I just need to fix . . . something.” Shepherd squinted and leaned back from the screen, as though blurring the image more would somehow make it sharper.

Is it? He couldn’t be sure. He counted off how old Penny would be now, if she was still safe. She’d been fourteen when she left, so she’d be nineteen now.

Over the speakers, Luke’s wheezing grew stronger. The muzzle of the girl’s shotgun, which had dipped toward the ground as she surveyed the area, snapped back to attention. Shepherd glanced at the light next to Luke’s name, but it no longer blinked.

“How are you doing this?” The girl’s voice had a husky growl in it, too low for Penny. But the longer he looked at the video, the more the girls seemed alike. “How are you controlling that thing?”

“I’m coming down. Wait there.”

“You try to pull any tricks and I’ll blow this motherfucker’s head off just like the last one.”

“No tricks. I’m in the control tower. You’ll see me coming.”

The girl grunted as Shepherd released the microphone button and headed for the stairs. Bart and Mary stood barring the door out to the tarmac where he’d placed them. Their lips and blood-crusted teeth chewed at him around the edges of the speakers he’d installed in their throats. They gave him a cursory glance as he slipped past them with a light touch to their shoulders and a quiet, “Excuse me.”

He’d grown so used to them that he’d forgotten how frightening they must look to a someone who didn’t realize the suits prevented them from acting on their feral instincts. Still, his chest tightened as he turned the corner of the tower and saw the three figures in the foggy distance: two standing and one crumpled on the ground.

“Lord, have mercy upon them,” Shepherd whispered.

He wanted to run to them, but he fought the urge for fear of making the girl nervous. With each step, he tried to make out the details of her hair, her face, her height—anything to determine with certainty that she was familiar. But as he drew near, and the girl turned toward him, he knew she wasn’t Penny. Just a youth alone in a bitter world clutching to her firepower like a security blanket.

He lifted his hands.

“I’m not going to hurt you,” he said. “It was me you heard. Please, put the gun down.”

“Not on your life,” the girl said, glaring at Luke. His exosuit was locked at the joints, but he didn’t struggle against the sudden stillness of his limbs. Instead, he twisted his head as a trickle of bloody spittle dribbled down his chin from the side of his mouth.

But then, Luke had always been the quietest of the bunch. Shepherd felt a pang of guilt that he was glad that Peter had taken the shot, and not Luke.

What kind of a father thinks like that? His gaze dropped to the form on the ground collapsed in a pile of awkward angles. A marionette with cut strings and stiff metal joints.

The girl aimed her gun toward him as Shepherd knelt beside what was left of Peter. The left side of Peter’s head was gone; pulped gray matter coated the asphalt. The dislodged speaker hung out the open side of his skull. The battery pack strapped to his twisted back hummed.

With a sigh, Shepherd pressed Peter’s remaining eyelid shut and flipped the switch on the pack to shut it down. Then he bowed his head and whispered the Lord’s Prayer. He wished he knew what pastors used to say over gravesites, but all he could remember—which he added to the end of the prayer he knew—was, “Ashes to ashes. Dust to dust.”

The girl shifted her weight on her stronger leg, and the gravel crunched. He could see now that the heel of her favored foot was pushed up and out of the dirty sneaker. There was crusted blood speckled up the ankle.

“You’re hurt,” he said.

The girl scowled at him. “Who the fuck are you? And what . . . what the fuck is that?” Her finger stabbed in Luke’s direction.

“That’s Luke. And this was Peter. You don’t have to be afraid. No one here will hurt you.” He began to rise to his feet, but the girl pushed the muzzle of her shotgun into his chest.

“Don’t move.”

She was younger than he’d first thought, certainly younger than his Penny would be now, but Shepherd knew better than to underestimate the anger of youth, so he sank back down to his heels and lifted his hands again.

“I have a first aid kit in the tower,” he said. “And food, if you want it. I’d be happy to share it with you.”

“Yeah, right.” The girl scoffed, her attention flickering between him and Luke. “You’re just going to be a good neighbor and give me medicine, food, and a big damn feather bed for nothing?” She shook her head, and her sneer twisted into something a little like a smile. “You think I don’t know how this works?”

The girl took a shuffling, unsteady step back, putting a little more space between them. For a moment, a wince cracked her face. “Are there more of those things around here?”

“Yes. There are nine others.”

The girl cursed and reached into a backpack she wore slung over one shoulder. Tucked under her arm and obscured by the bulky jacket, Shepherd hadn’t even noticed it until then. She squinted at him as she pulled out a box of shotgun shells and pried it open with one hand while the other remained on the trigger. She glanced at the box—once, twice—mouthing the numbers she counted without seeming to realize it.

“You won’t need your weapon here,” Shepherd said. “They can’t hurt you. Even if they wanted to, I’ve modified them so that they can’t move without my command.”

“Oh, yeah?” She stuffed the box of ammo back into her bag. “Prove it.”

“How?”

As he stood, she smiled, keeping the shotgun pointed at his chest. “Go up and stick your arm near those nice chompers of his.”

Shepherd nodded and walked to Luke’s side. He put his hand on the roamer’s shoulder, squeezing it. Luke seemed calmer in the eyes today. Perhaps—if he wasn’t reading too much into it—even a little sad when his unfocused gaze rolled down to Shepherd. Perhaps he understood what had happened to Peter.

Perhaps.

“It’s okay, Luke,” he said softly. “It’s all right.”

“What kind of a sicko are you?” The girl watched him with narrow, red-rimmed eyes. “I mean, hey, don’t get me wrong, everyone’s got the right to go ape shit these days, and I’m thrilled to pieces to meet you, Mr. Talks-to-Zombies, but . . . shit . . . ” She shook her head from side to side slowly. “You’re fucking insane, you know that?”

It was the rush of blood to his face that made him suddenly realize that he was angry. It had been so long since he’d let himself feel like that, or screamed, or cursed, or broke things, or released all that pent-up energy inside of him. It was a thought that made him close his eyes and will the flames back into submission. Flames unchecked—like tempers, like pride—rose and consumed, driven only by selfish destruction. Tamed fire was much more productive.

Patience, he reminded himself. It wasn’t a virtue he’d had to practice lately. His flock of injured souls didn’t know what they were doing, and it was easy to forgive them. Years had passed since he’d spoken to someone who could talk back to him, could curse at him, could shout at him. When he opened his eyes, he could see the girl for what she was: alone and scared, just like Penny had been.

“Not insane,” he said quietly. “Just . . . ” If he listened too closely, he could almost hear Penny’s screams still ringing in the dark coils of his inner ear, could almost feel the sting of her fingernails against his arms, his face, and the warmth of her spit in his eye. It made him shiver before he could stop himself.

He looked up into Luke’s bruised and bloodied face, the one empty eye socket that oozed milky puss, the broken teeth in his blackened gums, the spidery blue veins webbing his sagging jaw. “How can I not pity them? They’re misery incarnate.”

The muzzle of the shotgun clicked as it dipped down to the pavement. The girl squinted behind her, at the fringe of trees and the orange haze of the sunset tinting the fog around them. She wobbled on her good leg, and the toes of her injured foot pushed against the ground to stabilize her. She gritted her teeth and sucked a sharp breath through them. She glanced back at him with a softened frown and cleared her throat.

“Look, this is how this is going to work,” she said. “I need that first aid kit. And a place to stay for the night. I’ve got my own food, if you don’t want to share. I get that, so don’t worry about it. I’ve got a little ammo I could give you in exchange, or . . . ” The frown shifted to a hard, motionless expression that seemed to draw her eyes further back into her skull. “Or maybe we can work out something else.”

“I don’t want anything from you,” Shepherd said. “I don’t need anything.”

The girl hoisted the shotgun up so that its muzzle pointed toward the darkening sky, resting against her shoulder. “Sure, you don’t. Just name it. I’m not a prude, so you don’t have to be embarrassed.”

Shepherd looked at the scrawny girl and felt a pang in his chest. She’d been alone for a long time. Alone and very conscious of it. Was Penny like this now? Hardened? Ruthless? Did she know how to pull herself back like that, to disconnect, to escape when there was no one to protect her?

“I don’t want anything from you,” Shepherd said. “Your company is enough. I haven’t spoken to anyone in years. It’s just nice to hear a voice that isn’t my own, and . . . ” He wasn’t sure if he should say anything, but the girl’s doubts shaded her face, and the pang in his chest made him bold. “You remind me of my daughter. That’s all. You can keep your gun and your belongings. I won’t hurt you or trick you. I can swear that in the Lord’s name, if you want. I take my oaths seriously.”

The girl watched him beneath her drooping eyelids, but after a moment, her gaze fell to the ground and she nodded. “Fine. But I’m only staying for one night.”

Sometime in the slow, hobbling trip back to the tower, the fog dissipated, and the evening’s long, wet shadows stretched like steel bars across the asphalt. The girl refused Shepherd’s help as she limped along, despite the sweat pearling on her brow and the lancing wince that crossed her face every time she put too much weight on the injured foot. But despite that streak of stubbornness, she seemed to trust him, at least to a degree. She made no protest other than a hunched-shoulder glance at Bart and Mary as he lead her past them and into the tower. She didn’t ask about the floors they bypassed, moving up to the second highest, and even allowed him to carry her up the final flight of stairs and into the furnished living room.

Her arm over his shoulder felt like a broken wing—thin and fragile beneath the thick bulk of the jacket she wore. She was light, too, and for a moment he allowed his imagination to think she might be an angel sent to give him some kind of message.

He lowered her on the sofa bed he slept on, and sat down beside her. A sigh whistled through her teeth as she gingerly slid her sneaker off, revealing the heel to ankle gash glistening with dark, oozing blood.

“I was following the river,” she said as she settled back and moved her foot onto his lap for closer inspection. “There was a . . . a metal bracket or something. I don’t know. It was hidden in the tall grass.”

She twitched when he put his finger near the inflamed laceration. The pale skin was red and swollen; grains of dirt lined the tender edges. Yellow bruising spread out and up the leg.

“How long have you been walking on this?” Shepherd asked.

“Two, maybe three days, I think.” The girl’s face had gone ashen and she swallowed hard. “Do you . . . do you have some water or something? I think I’m going to throw up.”

She lay quietly, eyes closed, as Shepherd brought her a cup of water and then retrieved his first aid kit. He put on his reading glasses, the kit’s rubber gloves, and carefully lifted her foot back onto his lap.

“I’m going to have to clean this,” he said. “It may hurt.”

The girl grimaced and shrugged. “I can handle it.”

He used the antiseptic wipes to clean out the dirt and gathering puss. The girl’s teeth clicked from time to time as she clenched them, but she said nothing—not a curse, not a whine, not a whimper. But when he tossed the first wipe away, he saw that her cheeks were wet.

His heart ached, watching her fluttering, moist eyelashes, her averted gaze. His own foot tingled along the ankle, and his stomach turned. In the semi-light of the room, and with her hair brushed back, her face struck him with its similarity to Penny’s. In another life, at another time, she could have been mistaken for a daughter of his. Maybe she and Penny might even have been friends, confused for sisters—or twins—while shopping at the mall or volunteering at the hospital. The angle of her nose was like his; her eyes, slightly wide set and pale, could have been Anne’s.

Anne. Shepherd looked down at the blood smeared on the rubber gloves, and the room suddenly spun. The last time he’d had blood that red, that fresh, on his hands . . . His throat tightened. Little trickles of blood dripped down his palms and onto his pants. The antiseptic on the second wipe was wet, and its liquid blurred the red streaks on his fingers, turning them a softer, fading pink.

He tried to be gentle as he continued, but judging from her occasional twitches and hisses of air, he knew he didn’t always succeed. When had he last been near someone who could feel anything, could wince, could ache, or sting, or whisper curses under her breath? The skin he worked on blushed deeper with the irritation. His hands trembled. The silence between them, pierced only by her involuntary reactions to his touch against the wound, crept under his skin and festered into a film of nervous energy.

“Where are you from, originally?” he asked, noting the crack in his voice when he spoke. “Around here?”

The fabric of the sofa hissed as she shook her head against it and sighed. “I can’t really talk right now,” she whispered. “I’m barely holding it in as it is.”

“Then I’ll talk,” Shepherd said. “Sorry, it’s just . . . I haven’t spoken to anyone in . . . years, I think. I mean, I talk to my flock, but it’s . . . ” He paused, closed his eyes against the sudden flicker of a headache. He wanted to pinch the bridge of his nose, or press his palms against his suddenly burning eyes, but he could feel the slime of blood on his gloves between his fingers, could smell it thick in his nostrils. He wasn’t sure when he’d started sweating, but suddenly he felt clammy and cold, and had to fight back a shiver.

“It’s not the same,” he said, the words pushing themselves off his tongue and out of his lips before he had time to even think about what he was saying. “And it’s just nice to know someone hears you—I mean, really hears you—instead of just . . . you know. I don’t even know if they can understand me, and sometimes . . . sometimes you just . . . just . . . ”

“Hey.” He glanced at the girl. She was looking right at him, no hint of smirk or scowl on her face. “I get it,” she said, so softly he almost couldn’t hear it. “Talk if you need to. It’s better than bottling this shit up.”

Shepherd sat back and leaned his head against the wall behind him. He closed his eyes and tried to breath slowly, deeply, imagining all the little particles that made up his body, his cells, his molecules, his atoms, his electrons, and the energy that—for the moment—gave him existence. That same energy that gave everything he could see or touch or smell or taste or hear substance, all of life; the same energy that made dirt, made trees, made animals, made Penny, made roamers, and likewise made planets, stars, galaxies—everything. He was awash in a sea of existence, and it was good.

When he opened his eyes, the shivers had passed and he felt calmer. Though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, he thought, I shall fear no evil, for Thou art with me. Thy rod and thy staff, they comfort me.

He sighed and shook his head, once more leaning forward to apply the antiseptic wipe to the cut. “I’m sorry,” he said, pleased to hear that his voice was steady. “I’m not normally so easily shaken. It’s just that at first glance, I really thought you might be my daughter. It got under my skin. That’s all.”

The girl frowned, eyes closed. “Where is she?”

“I don’t know.”

“Alive?”

“Don’t know.” He shook his head and tilted the foot toward him. The girl winced. “I’m sorry. I’m almost done.”

Shepherd taped the wound closed with a series of adhesives and pressed a clean square of gauze over the spot, which he bound in place with an ace bandage. The girl sighed as he wrapped up the foot, and rested her head back against the sofa arm. She sniffed and rubbed her jacket sleeve across her face.

“Thanks,” she said. “I don’t think I could have done that myself.”

Shepherd lowered her foot onto the sofa as he stood. “You really should stay off it for a few days. And I’m not just saying that so you’ll hang around.” He smiled, hoping she could sense his sincerity. “The cut needs to close up a little. The bandages won’t hold under too much movement.”

The girl smirked. “Lucky you. What’ll it cost me?”

Shepherd peeled off the gloves and tossed them into the trash. “Is that what it’s like out there now? No one’s willing to help each other without a motive?”

“It’s the way of the world, Pops. You don’t get something for nothing, you know?”

Does Penny think like that, too? He shook his head and sighed, trying not to let his mind carry the thought any further. “Well, I don’t believe in that,” he said.

“What do you believe in, then?” the girl asked, shifting herself up onto her elbows. “I can’t trust you if I don’t know what you want.”

Shepherd smiled and moved toward the door. “What I want?”

What did he want, really? Penny, he thought, but it made him frown. That door had closed a long time ago, and the girl’s presence only made that more clear to him. The Penny who lived now—if she lived at all—wouldn’t be his Penny, wouldn’t be his little girl. She’d be world-hardened, angry, and defensive. He wasn’t even sure she loved him anymore, wherever she was, though he thought about her every day, and prayed for her safety, and ached to comfort her, to explain to her, to show her that he’d taken what she said to heart.

“Meaning.” Shepherd looked down at his hands. “I want meaning. And that’s not something you can give me. That’s for the Lord to reveal.”

“So you’re waiting for a sign? Is that why you take care of those things? Because of some twisted sense of responsibility?”

The gruffness in her tone made him smile despite himself. She sounded like a normal teenager, annoyed by a teasing comment, being grounded, or asked a personal question. He could see now that she wasn’t Penny, wasn’t anything like her. The lines of her face were all wrong; her eyes were set too deep and framed by shadows.

“No,” he said. “Because of a promise. I think you’d have to be a parent to understand.”

The girl shrugged and reclined again. “Whatever. You’ll tell me what you want eventually.”

“Are you hungry?”

Again, she shrugged. “Sure. Rack up the bill.”

Shepherd shook his head, but kept smiling. He brought her some of the prepackaged foods he’d collected from raiding the airport’s vending machines and the local convenience store, and a smoked piece of the salmon he’d caught earlier in the summer. They spoke only a little while eating and that mostly about the choice of the airport as a safe house compared to the others she had seen on her travels, but by the time they finished the salmon and the snacks, the girl seemed more relaxed and even smiled as she scraped the last few smudges of pudding out of the plastic cup.

Shepherd stood and gathered up the trash, moved toward the door. “I’ve got some work to do,” he said. “Will you be all right on your own?”

The girl chuckled at him and lifted her shotgun from the floor. “I’ve been all right so far. I think I can manage.”

Shepherd nodded but then paused in the hall. “What’s your name? You never told me.”

The girl half smiled as she sucked the chocolate pudding off her finger. “What was your daughter’s name?”

“Penny.”

“Then call me Penny.”

“Is your name Penny?”

The girl shrugged. “Does it matter?”

Shadows are everywhere. There are large ones, cast by abandoned buildings on a sunny afternoon; and there are small ones, like the love fading out of a child’s eyes. On the dimmest days, there are shadows so dark they’re like a puddle of night left behind from the previous evening. On the brightest days, there are sharp, unyielding shadows like brick walls.

But the worst shadows cling to you, hang over you, and haunt you in your sleep. They don’t have to be dark; some of the worst are bright and filled with familiar faces that laugh and speak to you like they’ll always be with you, even when they’re not.

Shepherd stood at the door on the third floor of the tower, the key in his hand hovering an inch from the first of three padlocks on the doorframe.

One for Anne. One for Chris. One for Penny.

The metal lock was cold in his palm, and heavy like the grip of the handgun he used to keep in his bedside table. With a sigh, Shepherd slipped the key into the first lock.

Compared to the bright hallway he stood in, the room itself was shrouded by shadow. Even when he flicked the light switch, only one of the fluorescent bulbs turned on. Its pale white light seemed to touch only what was necessary and no more, a weak brushstroke of illumination across the central table, the workbench, the shelves of plastic cartons filled with wires, bolts, metal piping, and tools. Car batteries he’d harvested from the long-term parking lot were piled in a plastic tub in the corner. Stains of red, brown, and black blossomed on the grungy tile floor around the table, spreading outward like grasping fingers.

The odor that swept over him as he stepped inside made the gall rise in Shepherd’s throat, as it always did, and he pulled the paper mask up over his nose and mouth.

Luke waited in the hallway, sputtering behind his speaker. His hands twitched against the bolts in his wrists as he held what was left of Peter. Shepherd now took the remains himself, cradled the dead weight of the full-grown man as best he could, and carried him to the workroom table. He laid the body down gently, and pushed the cord restraints off to the side, unnecessary for this operation.

In all the confusion of meeting another conscious person, he had neglected Peter. Good Peter. The first. The rock. The trusty follower. Shepherd pulled his stool up to the table and gingerly brushed back the matted, sticky hair on the good side of Peter’s head. Death had been kind to Peter, even if its means had been abrupt and gruesome. Despite the bruising, the un-healing lacerations, the crusted blood at the corners of his cracked lips, Peter looked like a man again. Peaceful in death despite his trials in life. Shepherd closed his eyes and tried to block out what he could remember of Peter prior to this moment, tried to erase the sound of his moan, the snap of his teeth, the feral glow in his eyes. When he looked back down at the corpse, he thought he could see what Peter had looked like before, when he was a son, a father, a co-worker, a neighbor to someone. He couldn’t be more than just a few years older than Shepherd himself, perhaps looking forward to a first grandchild, or a twentieth anniversary on a cruise ship in the tropics.

Or perhaps he was divorced, living in a one-room apartment alone, drinking at the corner pub morning, noon, and night, feeling the missing presence of his children like phantom limbs he swore were still there.

Shepherd shook his head at the sinking of his stomach. This was not the time to think about things like that. Instead, he took Peter’s cold, rough hand in both of his. Shepherd always thought Peter’s hands looked like a carpenter’s. Little crisscross scars danced up the sides and across the knuckles where a whittling knife might have pushed too hard against a knot of wood, slipped, and cut.

“May you rest in peace, my friend,” he said softly, squeezing Peter’s hand. “Please forgive me for not serving you better and for what I must do now.”

It was messy work, pulling out the motors and the bolts, prying back the cage that had kept Peter safe—safe for Shepherd, and safe for himself—and it took time. Each bolt broke the bones as they came out, spraying his masked and goggled face with moldy blood. The skin slipped and peeled back from the coagulated divots in the muscle. Twice, Shepherd had to get up and stand outside, leaning his forehead against the wall as he took deep, uninhibited breaths to clear the stench out of his nostrils and to settle his stomach.

Shepherd buried Peter in the grassy field beyond the runway. Ringing the grave, Martha, Paul, Matthew, and Luke stood quietly, wheezing and gurgling. Peter’s towel-shrouded body lay beside the grave. In the distance, Shepherd could hear one or two roamers, their moans and shrieks amplified by the stillness of the river and the flat of the runway.

His companions heard them too. Luke pushed his head forward, straining his neck and back against the metal restraints bolted into his flesh and bones. Martha’s eyes rolled from side to side, and her wheezing intensified; she stiffened at a distant howl, and her throat rumbled with a muffled cry in return.

“Stop it,” Shepherd whispered. “Stop it. You’re better than them. You don’t have to give in to the sickness.”

Paul gurgled at this, and a sludge of blood and bile oozed down his throat and dripped from his chin to the ground.

Shepherd hoisted himself up from the hole and laid the shovel aside. Peter’s body was light, what was left of it, and Shepherd carefully placed it in the bottom of the grave. There was a part of him that wished he could give Peter a proper burial, with a coffin and flowers and a minister’s ordained prayers, but the close-hugging blanket of dirt would have to do. At least it would keep Peter’s remains undisturbed by the gnawing teeth of free roamers.

No, not free, Shepherd reminded himself. They’re controlled as much as my flock are. More, because they have nothing to live for, nothing to hope for beyond the torments of this world.

Luke’s gasping, grunting moans grew louder as Shepherd shoveled dirt over Peter’s corpse. Luke wheezed, and the metal restraints groaned as he pushed against them. Back in the control tower, Shepherd knew the warning lights must be blinking, but he did not fear. He had given up on fear a long time ago.

He withdrew the weathered, life-beaten New Testament from his back pocket and turned to a page marked with a bloodstained fingerprint. Seeing it made him pause, catch his breath, remembering all too well the crack of nine-millimeter bullets entering the skulls of two very familiar heads, heads that had born faces twisted beyond recognition by the virus’s grasp on the minds within.

Once upon a time, Shepherd thought, and his trigger finger ached.

He should have realized then what he knew now: that the roamers could be controlled, could be guided and helped, at least for a while.

Luke quieted, as he always did when Shepherd read scripture to him. It warmed Shepherd’s heart to imagine that Luke was a God-fearing man, like himself, or had been before the virus trapped him in his body. Luke’s desire to listen, or appearance of it, was the one shining example of hope—a quiet, patient sign—that perhaps he wasn’t completely insane for thinking they could still be helped.

He was lying on the sofa, dry-eyed but shaking as he staring at the ceiling. Out of the corner of his eye, he could see the dark red streaks smeared down the wall and the lumps of the bodies where they’d fallen to the floor. His lips and the tips of his fingers were stiff and numb. He could feel his chest rising and falling, but he didn’t know if he was breathing.

The front door slammed, shaking the whole house, his eyes in their sockets, his heart in his chest, his brain in his skull. It shocked him back to life, and he sat up. The sofa springs creaked. His breath came in short gasps at first, short bursts he used to whisper her name. But his throat held back the cry. If she stopped, if she turned and came back, what else could he tell her that he hadn’t already tried? What could he say that would work? Would make her stay, make her forgive him?

She had called him, begged him to come home, to help her. Her trembling voice echoed in his ears: “Something’s wrong with Mom. I-I don’t think she’s breathing.”

He could still feel Anne’s fingers clawing at his arms, at his face, see the flashing white of her teeth and the blood oozing from the corners of her eyes. He could still hear Chris’s howling moan as he lurched out of his bedroom, his white T-shirt turned maroon and brown.

He knew what to do, knew what was best, the only option. Even when Penny screamed at the gunshots, caught his arm, tried to pull him away, he hadn’t hesitated. He hadn’t thought about it, and he should have. He should have stopped. Should have controlled himself, or tried harder, anything . . . It was easy to shoot them. What did that say about him?

Clutching his head with his sticky hands, he felt a moan resonating in his chest. It seeped out from between his lips from some dark place within him, and cracked the silence left in the wake of the squeal of tires on asphalt as the last living person he cared about raced away from him into the night.

He awoke in the shadows to the blinking of a warning light. Its red, pulsing bloom beat against his eyelids like a dying heartbeat. Darkness fell away to the sanguine glow, and then descended again, leaving him disoriented.

From somewhere below, he heard a crash. Shepherd’s heart jumped, and he threw back the blankets to scramble from his makeshift bed to the control panel. The warning light was Luke’s.

A gargled moan crept up the hollow cavern of the stairwell. Another crash, and this time, a scream—a girl’s scream—and the blast of a shotgun. It jump-started Shepherd’s feet, and he dove for the door, barreled down the stairs. Another shotgun discharge filled the stairwell with resounding, discordant noise.

The handle of the stairwell door was sticky with blood, and the loosened hinges groaned as he pushed the door partway open before it hit something on the floor and stopped.

It was silent inside. Shepherd slipped through the crack into the darkness and whispered, “Penny?”

A croak came from the far corner where his adjusting eyes located a hunched figure. The croak broke suddenly and became a sob. “Fuck.”

A body lay across the floor, its foot keeping the door from opening all the way. Shepherd tripped over a twisted metal bar connected to a contorted ankle as he stepped over it.

“Fuck,” the girl whispered again, her voice shaking. “Sonofabitch.”

“Are you okay?”

Shepherd climbed over the body and kicked a speaker he hadn’t seen. It bounced off his foot and struck the wall with a hollow thud.

The girl sat pressed into the corner, curled up so tight she almost seemed like a part of the wall. When he knelt in front of her, he saw tears shining on her cheeks.

“Penny—”

“He got me,” she said, and pushed something toward him. It was long, cold—her shotgun. Her eyes were so wide, he could see his shadow in them.

“Where?”

Her lips trembled as she fought back a sudden surge of tremors, and thrust out her injured leg. The ace bandage was torn ragged and soaked with sticky blackness. In the dark, he could only see the deep emptiness beneath the torn fibers where there should have been skin.

Shepherd set the gun on the floor next to what was left of Luke’s skull, his hands cold and shaking as he turned the foot to examine it. “It’s not so bad,” he said. “We’ll bandage it up and see. There’s no saying it’ll be infected. You may be fine.”

“Stop it,” the girl said from somewhere deep in her chest, growling up her throat. “Fuck, Shepherd, I know about survival, okay? I know what this means. So . . . stop it.” With a shaking sigh, she rubbed her face. “You’ve got to shoot me. Do it now before I turn.”

Shepherd shook his head, unable to let go of the slender ankle, even as the blood from her wound dripped into the palm of his hand, trickled down his wrist. Penny jerked her leg back, pulling her knees up to her chest. She choked, and her eyes widened, the whites reflecting the light from the stairwell. There was a thin rim of red around them, red that melted away and ran down her cheeks with her tears.

“Please,” she whispered. “Please, Shepherd. You have to do this for me. I’m begging you!”

Shepherd shivered, and his hand fell upon the muzzle of the shotgun. “I-I don’t . . . ”

Penny spasmed, her head cracking back against the wall. The impact and the sob that escaped her throat tightened his grip on the gun. “Please. Please, Shepherd . . . ”

Her voice caught in her throat, choking her again. This time, it took her a moment to swallow. She gagged, clutched at her throat. When the bubble burst, she gasped for air between clenched teeth. Her eyes rolled.

Shepherd stood, the shotgun weighing down his arm. “I don’t kill them,” he whispered. “I don’t. I just . . . I can’t.”

Penny’s gaze rolled up at him, and her breathing rasped, her nostrils flared. With a shudder, she fell back against the wall, eyelids fluttering, blood trickling from the corners of her mouth. Then she went still. Relaxed, calm, she looked just like Penny. Maybe it was Penny. Maybe it had just been too long, and he couldn’t recognize her anymore.

Shepherd bent down beside her, touched her cheek with his rough fingertips. Every second he spent looking at her face, her eyes, her nose, her lips, her chin—everything about her could have belonged to Penny.

“Sweetheart,” he whispered, and she opened her blood-rimmed eyes.

As Shepherd stepped into the bathroom and locked the door behind him, he caught a glimpse of himself in the mirror: a masked and bloody creature, tiptoeing into the darkness. It made him shiver, made the sticky spots on his hands and cheeks burn. Shaking, he tore off his dirty clothes, his mask, his goggles, and crouched on the tiled floor, his head in his hands. Every inch of him burned like he was lying naked on a bed of coals. There was blood on his hands, blood in his hair, blood on the floor, on his clothes, in his ears, in his nose. He could taste it, smell it, breathe it, feel it everywhere, like a thin film of filth that covered everything and everyone, no matter how many times you scrubbed, no matter how much you cleaned.

He shivered and heard his voice crack in the darkness, a pitiful whimper. His eyes stung and he hung his head, letting the few tears that escaped patter onto the blood-slicked floor. Deep breaths drew up through his nose and escaped through his lips. Once. Twice. The shivering stopped and he could breathe again, and stand.

His hand found the light switch in the dark. The shadows fled, and he stood in the unsteady light, a man naked and vulnerable before an unmerciful mirror. There were no secrets here, no personal barriers, nothing hidden. The Lord could see him here, in his moment of greatest weakness. In this tiny room, with the mirror catching his every move, every blink, every glance, his scars were exposed. They ran up his arms, little lancing crescents of pale and pink tissue, to his shoulders and stopped, though there were a few on his chest and a notch of missing flesh at his hip.

Through the floor he could hear the roamer tied to his workshop table moaning and gnashing her teeth. Even after bolting the motors and metal bars to her, she fought against them, tried to spit out the speaker he’d put in her throat.

Shepherd pressed the palms of his hands to his sweating brow. He could walk away. He could leave. It would be so easy. No one would notice, much less care. His roamers would die eventually. So would he.

The temptation was strong, but it awoke something within him. His hands fell to his sides and he looked into his own eyes in the mirror.

The valley of the shadow of death, he thought. I will fear no evil, for Thou art with me, and I am with them. There’s meaning in that.

With a sigh, Shepherd took up the lavender gift shop soap and scrubbed himself from head to toe, rinsing with the tub of water he’d carried over from the river. He dug his fingernails into the purple and pink-swirled bar, rubbed his skin raw with it, massaged it against his scalp and hair until his head ached. Refreshed, cleansed, and forgiven, he dressed and returned to the control room.