Page 2

He heard Elaine behind him and realized he was standing by the kitchen knife block.  On the TV they said that some of the risen dead could use simple tools, hit with a rock or a sharp trowel.  He caught his breath, mentally cursing himself for a fool, but Elaine grabbed his arm and tried to bite it.  So Elaine didn't use tools.

Not yet.

He pushed her back into the cluttered living room and shut the kitchen door.  He started the coffee maker and almost asked Elaine if she wanted a cup.

You idiot, he told himself.  She's going to attack you.  Over the chuckle and hiss of the coffee maker he heard her shuffling around the living room, occasionally bumping into furniture.  She's tried twice now.

But she can't hurt me.  She has no teeth.

Outside, the young man had broken one of the slats off the snow fence and was using it to pull himself along.  The fence still held him.

But she might become as smart as that one.

Hank had never shot at a human being, never at anything bigger than a groundhog.  He sighed and went into the basement for the rifle, then into the garage for rounds.  Loaded fourteen rounds into the Marlin.  When he came back into the kitchen, Elaine was jiggling the kitchen doorknob.

He took two deep breaths to steady himself, then pulled the kitchen door open.  Elaine stood there still in her dusty flannel nightgown and she walked towards him, her arms outstretched.  Two paperclips fell from her lips.  He raised the rifle to his shoulder but she had already come too close and he backed up, got the muzzle in front of her face, but she kept walking so he backed up again and then again and then he could go no farther because his back was to the fridge.

Elaine's waxen dead arms were around him.  "Oh, Elaine!" he sobbed as her cool lips searched for his warm skin.  She smelled of her own soap and her medicine and, under it all, death.

He pushed her off again, his arms shaky this time, and raised the rifle again and got the muzzle against the softness under her jaw so the blast would take off the top of her head, would splatter her brains over the blue gingham wallpaper she had picked a year ago Christmas, would kill her for real.

He couldn't do it.

He shoved her away so hard she tumbled akimbo on the linoleum, a discarded doll of meat, and he ran past her into the living room, to the front door.  He ran out, his slippers slapping on the porch, into the outside air rich with lilac and the crickets louder than the distant sirens, across the wet grass to the young man caught in the snow fence.  Hank's first shot missed because his arms were trembling, but the second shot sank into the man's shoulder, and the third into his neck, and the fourth into his head.  Pieces of skull and scalp and skin and flesh flew onto the lawn.  The young man lay still.

Hank stood there, his heart pounding in his throat, taking in huge lungfuls of gun smoke and night air.  This one at least smelled of blood and feces and gore and ruptured guts.  This one was a thing instead of a person.

He stood there unthinking for a long time, until he heard other footsteps in the unkempt grass.  It was Elaine, still barefoot.  Her shins had long pale scrapes where she had bumped into furniture.  She knelt by the corpse of the man, picked up a gobbet of bloody flesh, and stuffed it in her mouth.

Hank made a sound between anguish and disgust and grabbed her wrist.  He dragged her back into the house and threw her onto the living room floor.  Her hand left a bloody smear on the cream carpet.  He left her there while he got a cloth from the kitchen.  When he returned, she was still lying there.  Chewing.

For a crazy moment he thought of getting her dentures for her, to help her eat.

He knelt on Elaine's chest and wiped the blood from her face, then grabbed her hand and wiped it clean too, the same way he had wiped her clean on their honeymoon after they had eaten fresh cut strawberries with their fingers.

After that, though, they had kissed.  Hank shuddered to think of kissing her now, thinking of what was in her mouth.

There was a sound behind him.  Someone on the porch.  He got up--it was Mabel Walter, who a mile up the road.  The Walters used to come over for cards, before Elaine got sick.  Mabel's shoulder was open to the bone and her nightgown was soaked with blood.  Hank slammed shut the door, fastened the deadbolt.

He could shoot a stranger.  Maybe he could shoot Mabel.  He couldn't shoot Elaine.

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