Dave was a beast. I leaned my back against the tree. I felt helpless watching. I wanted to help. Dave didn’t need it. He removed chunks of hard earth with determination, and precision. He’d outlined a rectangle and was now diligently scooping out the center.

It would not take him long.

Allison grabbed my arm, pointed.

The shoveling was a steady noise. The shovel striking earth, scraping rock, dirt landing in a pile.

With no cars. No horns. No anything -- Dave might as well have been a police siren screaming.

“Dave, hold up,” I said.

Three zombies were in the cemetery. They ambled over our way. I looked around the tree. There were more. Outside the fence, groups roaming aimlessly about. They bumped into things.

All of them seemed slow.

It was too dark to make out much. The streetlights were on. Must have been timer activated. “We’ve got to be quiet,” I said.

“Dave,” Allison said.

I turned around. Dave had stormed off. He held the shovel like a baseball bat. He went at all three zombies.

“Shit,” I said, “stay here.”

I snatched Allison’s hedge trimmers and followed after Dave.

Dave took a batting stance feet from all three of the zombies. He had earned their interest. They moved closer, one sluggish foot-dragging a step at a time.

He did not wait.

Before I reached him, his back-up, he’d swung. A head flew off the one zombie on his right. The body stood, arms outstretched for a long five-second count, before toppling over. In those five seconds, Dave had destroyed the remaining two creatures. He drove the shovel blade into the throat of the one standing in the center, and then spun to his right, full circle, and slammed the side of the shovel into the skull of the zombie on his left.

Once that last zombie fell, Dave used the shovel the way a shovel was intended to be used and dug off the creature’s head, stepping onto the shovel rim with all his weight until the zombie was fully decapitated.

I stopped a few feet behind him, bent over, hands on my knees. “We need to get out of here,” I said. I whispered. Dave handled these three fine, but the sheer numbers surrounding us was not on our side. The more I looked around, the more I was noticing -- like looking up at a night sky and not seeing a single star, but then all at once you realize the entire sky is starlit. Only, this was way different. “I mean now.”

“I have to finish burying my brother,” he said.

“I get that, Dave. We’ll come back. Nothing is going to disturb him where he is. He’s actually safer than we are. But us,” I pointed at him, at me, back at him, “we’re in some shit here. We have no car. Once those walkers realize we’re here -- once they smell us, we’re fucked. Okay? Fucked.”

Dave walked at me. His chest in my face. “Go if you want. I’m finishing the job.”

He’d kept his voice down, but the anger and disappointment were clear. Not hidden at all. “Dave,” I said.

“You don’t get it, do you, Chase? You’ve made these last few days all about you. Where you need to go. What you need to do. I get it, man. I got it. Your kids are important to you. They became important to us. All of us. Even Jason was on board. But you didn’t see it. Never saw it. Thought everyone was against you. Or that every one of us was some kind of obstacle bent on preventing you from saving your kids. Even the way you treat Allison,” he said.

“You don’t know what the fuck you’re talking about,” I said between grit teeth. My eyes couldn’t have been open more than narrow slits. I felt my face grow hot, hotter.

“You think I’m just some adult dummy, some retarded guy that has to have his brother looking out for him all the time. You might even be right. I suck at math, keeping a job, getting by at most regular things that people like you take for granted, but you know why Josh always had my back? Because if anything, I know people. I have . . . had a ton of friends. Good friends. The reason for that wasn’t because they felt bad for me, because I was slow, it was because I knew what it meant to be a friend. To put other people’s needs before my own, assface. I think once you figure that out, you won’t be such a dick all the time. You might even start to figure out who you really are. I think I caught a glimpse of you here and there. You’re not that big a dick. Be nice to see someday, to meet the real you. Now, excuse me, I’m headed back that way.”

His forearm swept me aside, and he walked back toward the tree, toward Josh’s corpse, and to where Allison stood with arms folded. She’d been watching the exchange, no doubt. She’d want to know what was said. Someday, if we got out of this, I might even tell her.

We knelt around the shallow grave. Dave was a mess. His tears streamed freely. He made no move to wipe them away. Somehow, we’d managed to dig quietly for the better part of an hour. The roaming zombies stayed outside of the fenced area. At one point, Allison took out a female monster with her hedge clippers. Stabbed it through the chest, and then spread the blades wide like the jaws on a shark before taking of its head.

“My brother could have done a lot with his life. Could have been anything he wanted. I held him back. Because of me, he sacrificed all he could have had. I told him all the time how much I appreciated everything he did for me. I never let a day go by that I didn’t thank him for sticking by me, and he’d punch me in the arm, and,” Dave stopped, lowered his head. He brought an arm up and dropped his eyes onto the sleeve. “He’d punch me in the arm, and he’d tell me he loved me. He always told me he loved me.”

It got me. His love. His openness about the love they had. It hit me hard. I closed my eyes. I felt like I’d been spying on an intimate and private moment between family. I didn’t belong. Dave made it clear to me, and I realized now how right he’d been, that I was an outsider. Selfish. A dick. This wasn’t about me. I was in it. But it wasn’t about just me. I’d made it that way. Made it appear that way.

“I love you, Joshua. I miss you already. I still want you to be here. I don’t want you to be gone,” Dave said.

Allison moved closer, put a hand on Dave’s shoulder. It was all the initiative he needed. He pulled her in tight. His arms wrapped around her. He had his face buried in her neck. I could hear the both of them crying.

And being the dick that I am, that I still am, I felt left out. This was Dave’s moment. Dave’s time, and I felt left out.

My apartment was just east of the I-390 overpass. We couldn’t have been more than a quarter of a mile away.  We were spent. We had nothing left to give. Walking even a quarter of a mile seemed an impossible task.

Dave and Allison sat leaning against the tree until they fell asleep, and I let them sleep. I kept watch.

For whatever reason, not one zombie entered the cemetery all night. Perhaps the smell of death permeated from the ground. Maybe that dissuaded their attention.

I fisted a small handful of loose dirt. “I don’t know if you’d want this, but I’ll keep an eye on Dave for you,” I said, and sprinkled the dirt back in place over Josh’s grave. “I’ll do my best to see that he gets through this. He’s a pretty good guy. He’s taught me some shit. It isn’t so much a favor to you, or to him as much as I like the guy. I don’t deserve him as a friend, but, in time, I hope to. To be worthy of that.”

“You mean that?”

I jumped back. “Are you serious right now?”

Dave was behind me. He hugged me. “I am your friend, Chase.”

I almost shrugged his arm off. Instead, I patted his massive forearm. “Thank you, buddy. Thank you.”

“We’re going to find your kids, Chase. I promise you. We’ll find them.”

When Dave finally let go, I just stared up into that sky, at all the stars and wondered where on earth my kids might be.