“Thank you, Robert,” Gene said.

Melissa, Megan, Michelle. Great. Kia, Andy, Gene and Robert. I sucked at names. “We appreciate it.”

“I can help, too,” Allison said.

“That’s not necessary,” Gene said.

“No. I want to,” she said, and gave me a little wink. I knew what she thought. I had the same idea. I wanted to drink and enjoy a nice glass of water, not worry something might have been slipped into it. Allison would ensure that at least nothing had been tampered with.

She followed them.

Kia returned, and held a small plastic box. “I have it.”

“We don’t have anything for the pain, I’m afraid,” Gene said. “This wound looks like it’s going to take a bit of sewing. It is probably going to hurt a good deal, but we can repair you. I can’t stress how important it is going to be for you to keep it clean, though. Without any antibiotics, you washing this area good is about all you can do to fight the chances of infection.”

“I understand,” I said. “You’ve done this before?”

He shrugged, cocked his head to the side. “Sort of. YouTube.”

I stared at him.

“I’m fucking with ya,” Gene said. He laughed. Slapped a hand against his thigh, against Kia’s back. “I’ve stitched a few times. Like five. It’s not so tough. Just that…that pushing the needle through someone’s skin is awkward. It’s actually pretty weird.”

Chapter Fourteen

I tried to ignore the hooked needle Gene threaded. As he used a lighter to sterilize the tip, Kia knelt beside me. I smiled or tried to. I took quick shallow breaths in anticipation of the discomfort headed my way.

“I was in my house when all of this started to happen,” she said. Talking to me was meant as a distraction. I think I preferred being stitched in silence, but wasn’t in a position to argue the point. “My husband and I. We’d had dinner, and were watching television when we heard sirens outside. There were police cars and fire trucks. About seven houses down, the place was going up in flames. Everyone was outside watching. You know how neighbors are. We weren’t any different. Thing was, the bizarre thing was, I didn’t recognize a lot of the people. They were everywhere. They came out of everywhere.”

I felt like a human quilt as Gene slipped the needle through my skin. The area was raw, and it felt more like a dagger being jammed into my side. “There we go,” he said.

“Look at me,” Kia said, and took my hand. I squeezed it tighter than expected when Gene tugged on the thread and pulled it through before dipping the needle into the next part of flesh. “The people were drawn to the flames it seemed. They reminded me of like, I don’t know, fireflies or something. I noticed that some of them just didn’t look right. They had bite marks, and peeled back skin. They looked like they were rotting. Their skin was purplish, and pasty, and that was when they started attacking the firefighters. Just, they just, went right at them. Tackled them. The fire hose dropped. It went wild. It sprayed everywhere with just tremendous force. It pushed back a lot of the…of those things,” she said.

“They don’t seem to like water,” I said.

Gene nodded. “We’ve noticed. Too bad we’re going into winter and not spring.”

“The police had their weapons drawn, but they hesitated. I mean, the idea of shooting people at the fire, it was all surreal, even to the officers on scene there, I guess. And my husband, he tried to help. He went after the fallen firemen, and tried to get those things off of them. He did, too. He got them off, but the guy he’d saved was apparently beyond help. And then they were on him. They got my husband and I just stood there, watching. They bit him and kept biting him, and…”

I pursed my lips as she cried. I didn’t have comforting words. There weren’t really any to share. “How did you get away?”

The needle hurt like a motherfucker. I couldn’t watch the work Gene did. While I didn’t want Kia’s distraction, I found it worked. Only I didn’t like seeing her this upset.

“Got away just barely. When the police started shooting, when they finally realized something was very wrong and opened fire on these things, on the zombies surrounding us--one of them yelled for me to run, to get out of there. I didn’t want to, you know. I wanted to help my husband. I didn’t go to him. I don’t think he was dead. But I ran. I left him. I…”

Now she squeezed my hand. Her shoulders shook in time with her sobbing. “It couldn’t have been easy,” I said. It was the best I could offer.

She tried to smile; fought to regain composure. “It wasn’t. It hasn’t been for any of us. And I’m sure it wasn’t for anyone in your group, either.”

I thought of Cash. I missed him. My heart felt so empty. “No. It hasn’t been.”

“We have water,” Allison said. She stood beside Kia and me, looking back and forth at us. “You guys okay?”

“Just taking his mind off Gene’s needlework.”

“It helped,” I said. “Thank you.”

#  #  #

“So they learn?” Kia said.

We sat at two tables in the cafeteria. There was indeed a lot of food. We’d prepared a meal of grilled cheese sandwiches and tater-tots. We used napkins and kept the food on trays. The tots were crisp and golden brown, and actually, so were the sandwiches. The flavor was amazing, even brought back childhood memories of similar lunches in similar cafeterias when I had been a teen.

“It’s what I’ve come to learn,” I said, after I’d explained my reasoning behind my assumption. I picked up a tot and drove it through a pond of ketchup and popped it into my mouth. As I wiped my fingers on a napkin, I said, “But I don’t know what that means.”

“Could mean a number of things,” Melissa said. She held a triangle wedge of her sandwich in one hand and a couple of tots on the tines of her plastic fork in the other.  “I was thinking about this earlier. What if the vaccinations infected people, but wear off after a certain period of time? You know almost like it is a virus inside the vaccination. So the things out there,” she pointed at a wall with the sandwich wedge, “are, essentially, you know, sick.”

“And then what?” Gene said. “They become normal, human, again? Slowly, but eventually, they get better.”

“I haven’t seen any evidence of anyone getting better,” I said. “Have you? Has anyone?”

No one nodded. Kind of killed the theory; made it useless without something to support the idea, other than mere wishful thinking.

“What about the people they bit, would they become human again, assuming it was a virus?” Allison said.

“I was thinking about why some are fast and some are slow,” Megan said.

“Did you know Megan worked at The Living Dead Museum? It was created not long after George Romero’s Night of the Living Dead was filmed here. Right here in Butler County,” Andy said.

Go figure. “Didn’t know that.”

“I do. I mean, I did. But what I was saying, what I was thinking was, the problem with a zombie is that it’s dead, right? Reanimated flesh. Like what Frankenstein did with his monster. Brought a corpse to life, right?”

I thought it was rhetorical. When Megan didn’t keep talking, I verbally agreed.

“Okay, so what happens to a body the longer it is dead?” she said.

“It decays,” Charlene said, and dropped a tot back onto the paper plate on her tray.

“They do. That’s right. But until they’ve been embalmed, there is all of that blood in them. And if blood isn’t circulating, it’s pooling. So if a dead zombie is chasing people, sure, at first it’s fast. Eventually, that non-circulating blood is going to catch up with it. It’s going to all sit in the thing’s legs, right?”

“Right,” I said.

“So, rigor mortis sets in. It’s what makes them slower,” she said. “But not just slower. It also means they are decaying. Ever wonder why you can stab them in the skull so easily? The bones are far more brittle. If they were healthy, there’s no way I’d of been able to push a pocket knife, or even a hunting knife into the brain as easy as I have.”