Thirty-Eight

On the morning following her final encounter with Samson Niebolt, Colleen went down to the place where her brother and her boyfriend had died. The black man and the cop accompanied her, and the woman had stayed behind with Mathilda and Sally and the children.

They cut down Daniel while she stood facing Guy’s tethered corpse. It looked at her, mouth silently working.

“You don’t have to do this,” Reggie said, placing a hand on her shoulder.

She pressed the barrel of her gun to the dead thing’s forehead. She said nothing, not even a hushed goodbye. Guy was not here. This was not him. This was what he’d left behind and he was no longer here.

She closed her eyes and squeezed the trigger.

Reggie and Cardo removed the bodies from the bedroom, took them far away from the courtyard and burned them. All but Huffington Niebolt’s head.

Colleen worked alone.

She found a five gallon plastic paint bucket in one of the supply sheds. It took a while to wash away the remaining paint, and when she was done Colleen dried out the inside of the bucket and dug the hole. She was sorry that Sally could not be there with her. Once Sally had healed, Colleen would bring her to this spot.

She opened the pillowcase and removed Huff’s head. It blinked its eyes and opened its toothless mouth. She’d thrown away Huff’s false teeth.

She placed the head into the bucket, and it looked up at her, blinked once, slowly. She pressed on the plastic lid, encircled it with duct tape. It was an airtight seal, and would last forever. Nothing would get in—not worms, not bugs.

The bucket fit nicely into the hole. She tossed in the first shovelful of dirt.

“Live forever,” she said.

They found the door-covered shack and the bodies within. They buried Kimberly alongside Daniel and Guy. They burned the rest.

No one wanted to deal with Lissa and Jack. The doorknob rattled and rattled, and though Reggie volunteered to take care of it, in the end, Mathilda went into the nursery and did what needed to be done.

Sally named her daughter Lolita.

“You sure you want to do that?” Colleen asked, laughing.

“I wanted a boy,” Sally said, touching her daughter’s cheek. “I mean, before this I wanted a girl. I’ve always wanted a girl, but over the past few months I’ve wanted a boy.”

She stared at Colleen, tears in her eyes, and Colleen closed her mouth. She could tell that Sally was not finished.

“I wanted a boy,” Sally said, weeping now. A tear dropped onto the face of her sleeping daughter, and she wiped it away. “I wanted a boy because I thought maybe a boy would look like my son or my husband, either of them. I just wanted to see their faces again.”

“I don’t know what to call him,” Mathilda said, holding the unnamed boy to her heavy breast.

“It’ll come to you,” Colleen said

“What was your brother’s name?”

“No.”

“Why not? A name is just a name.”

“My brother was an asshole.”

“That’s okay,” Mathilda said, easing the child from her breast and placing him on her shoulder, patting his small back. “He doesn’t have to be.”

Reggie and Cardo retrieved the guns from the house. Huff had been planning for the end of the world, and they were the beneficiaries of his sickness. There were enough rifles, pistols, shotguns, and ammunition to hold off an army.

Colleen woke up screaming a lot. She wanted to get drunk and she wanted to get high. Sometimes she did, there was booze and there was grass—the Niebolt boys had known how to have a good time—but mostly she didn’t, and her mother’s words hung like a fog in her head: that stuff just makes you stupid. You need to stay sharp in this world if you want to make it.

She thought about them a lot, all of them. Guy was dead, and so was her brother. Her friends were dead. Her mother was dead, too, but maybe not the old kind of dead. Daniel and his heroes Nietzsche and Lennon and Bowie had probably been right. There was nothing after life—dead was dead, but not anymore.

Huffington Niebolt deserved to spend eternity gaping into the darkness. Her mother didn’t. Colleen wondered if she could get down to Fresno one day with a shovel and a gun.

Stacy was a natural with the kids. They called her Mama Starshine. She and Cardo weren’t exactly falling in love but they spent time together. A lot.

Reggie and Cardo drove down into Harlow and cleaned out Misty’s. There was no sign of the old woman. Her bedroom door was still closed, still locked, and the old man’s remains were gone.

Reggie refilled his truck from Misty’s diesel pump.

They encountered only three walking corpses.

They brought Richard’s body back to the compound and buried it beside the others.

There was a new TV in one of the three small apartments at the top of the hill. They brought it back to their dwelling and plugged it in, gathered round.

The CBS eye was gone.

On the following evening, the lights went out.