I tapped Ricky on the shoulder. “That work for you?” Suffice it to say, he continued ambling. And groaning. And stinking. And, sadly, not amassing. “I hate to say it,” I hated to say, “but I have a sinking feeling that he’s not leading us anywhere, apart from away from the water, which, I’m afraid, doesn’t bode well for us. That, and it’s starting to get dark out, and if we get lost, we’re screwed.”
“I know,” Dara said. “I’ve been thinking the same thing. Which does leave us one other option.”
I was already thinking the same thing, but was loathe to mention it. “You know I hate turning them, Dara.” In fact, she was the very last one I’d turned in nearly three hundred years. “And then what, we take him with us forever? Or do we just let him eventually revert back?” Even the thought of that made my non-beating heart break. “Plus, once he’s, well, back, there’s no telling if he’ll even help us. Because then he’ll have his own free will again.”
She nodded and kept on following. “When you were turned, did you remember your zombie existence?”
And then I nodded. “Bits of it, like a hazy dream. You?”
“Sadly, yes. Days and weeks and years of nothing but walking and standing and groaning. But I did remember it, awful though it was, and hazy, like you said, though it was.”
We kept on walking and following, both of us obviously considering the consequences of what we were planning on doing. “What if he doesn’t remember his encounter with whomever commanded him, this person that he obeyed at one point in time, the reason, seemingly, he doesn’t obey me now.”
“And what if he does? What if he can lead us right to this person? Then we’re almost there, right? Then all we have to do is gather the troops and attack. Or, better still, aim the troops, let them attack, while we try on new clothes.”
I forced a sigh. “I hate this, Dara.”
“I know you do, Creature. But what choice do we have? Wait until the island is attacked again and hope for the best? Plus, what if they attack and get to us next time? What will happen to your minions then?”
“Ouch,” I replied. “Hitting below the belt now.”
She chuckled. “Well, I do so normally love your below the belt.”
“Not helping.”
“But trying.”
My sigh repeated itself. “Did you bring any salt?”
She nodded. “I never leave home without it.” She reached into her front pocket and removed a satchel. “Just in case.” She swung it his way, my stomach lurching at the sight of it.
Still, as we’d come to the conclusion, what choice did we have now? There was simply too much at stake. And it was no longer just our lives, in a manner of speaking, that we had responsibility for. And so I moved a bit faster until I was side by side with Ricky, and then just slightly beyond. All it took was my foot held out and, boom, down he fell, seemingly in slow motion. Then again, him being a zombie and all, it really was in slow motion.
“Sorry, Ricky,” I said, staring down at his writhing, groaning figure.
“Yeah, sorry,” said Dara as she slowly sunk to her knees, handing me the satchel along the way. She then reluctantly, it looked like, and rightly so, grabbed Ricky’s jaw and pried it open. “Phew,” she added a moment later. “Someone’s been skipping their brushing. Smells like a locker room that’s been pelted by eggs and doused with milk, then left to sit for a few hundred years.”
I loosened the satchel. “Gross.”
“Understatement.”
She held him as still as possible while I positioned the satchel above his now-gaping maw. Without the funnel, I’d have to be exact as possible, not even a few grains to be allowed to miss his throat. “See you on the other side, Ricky,” I managed to say, my very soul filled with dread.
I then helped Dara back to her feet as the two of us waited and watched, necks craned downward as Ricky’s writhing eventually slowed.
He coughed, once, twice, his eyes blinking shut before they slowly opened. Again he coughed. “Ricky?” Dara said. “You in there?”
Another blink, another cough, then the inevitable inevitablizing—and good like finding a grammartician for that one. See, there were bonuses to being in a post-apocalyptic world: Webster was long dead and we could proceed how we liked. In any case, right about then the only words we were hearing were, “What . . . what’s happening?”
“Um.” And that was about all I had. I mean, it’s not easy to recap the past few hundred years in one sentence, let alone figuring out what to tell someone who, by all accounts, just rose from the dead. Mostly.
“Do you remember anything?” asked Dara.
Again his eyes blinked a couple of times, another cough tossed into his repertoire. “Just a bad nightmare.”
She shook her head. “Yeah, about that. See, that wasn’t a nightmare, sugar.”
“I . . . I don’t understand,” Ricky rasped out. “Who . . . who are you. Where . . . am I?” And it was then that he noticed all the walking and groaning undead on all sides of us. “And what the hell are they?” Terror managed its way through his barely-moveable features.
“Don’t worry. They don’t attack their own kind,” I informed. “Our brains aren’t appetizing enough, I suppose.”
“Flesh is kind of nasty, too,” added Dara. “Dry. Like jerky.”
“Moisturizing helps a bit,” I tossed in.
“And sunblock, for sure. Plus a dust bath every so often.”
He shut his eyes good and tight. “Please, you’re giving me a headache.”
“Doubtful,” I retorted.