Nausea welled inside me. Crawling to the downstairs bathroom, I threw up again and again, trying to get rid of something worse than any stomach bug. Gasping, covered in sweat, I sat with my back to the wall by the toilet, wondering if I should just call Sampson where Mulch could hear me and openly declare war on the coward who’d just executed a ninety-one-year-old woman in cold blood.
But for almost an hour, my thoughts and actions would not track. Every time I tried to formulate a plan, my brain peeled off and found that image of Nana Mama dead of a gunshot wound in a garish light. It paralyzed me.
The second photograph came an hour later. This time Bree had taken the bullet, lying on her side like Nana Mama in a pool of her own blood, the gunshot wound visible behind her left ear.
I could not control my agony in any way, shape, or form. It simply devoured me and I began screaming for my dead wife from the depths of my soul.
“Stop it!” I shouted when the initial shock had passed. “Don’t do this, Mulch! No more!”
Trembling from head to toe, fighting off the urge to vomit again, I wiped aside my tears with my sleeve and texted him back on Bree’s phone. Please, Mulch. I’ll do anything you say. Just stop killing them.
Feeling scorched inside, I stared at my phone and then went into the dining room where Mulch could see me. I crossed to the spider plant and looked directly into the camera lens. I cried out to Mulch to spare my children from my grandmother’s fate and my wife’s. I begged him until I was hoarse, and I texted him over and over again: Have mercy on them. Have mercy on my children.
At nine o’clock I got a picture sent from Jannie’s phone. It was my son Damon, executed in the same manner, sprawled on his side in his own blood. My disbelief became a raw, tearing sensation, as if someone were literally skinning me alive and disemboweling me at the same time.
Damon. My firstborn. My son. My—
My mind collapsed inward, forgot time, and I saw Damon as an infant, sleeping in the swing Maria had found in a secondhand store, and me sitting by his side, thinking that I had never seen anything so beautiful. Then there he was as a Little Leaguer, unsure up there on the mound, looking to me in the stands for support. And Damon as I’d last seen him up on the Kraft School campus after winning a basketball game in the final seconds with a perfect three-point jumper.
GONE.
GONE.
The word began ringing in my head, like a huge bell tolling, and with each peal—GONE—I got weaker, and weaker, dissolving, turning primitive, unable and unwilling to move a muscle, knowing that no matter what I did, no matter what I said, Thierry Mulch was bent on killing them all.
I left the dining room and went upstairs. I lay on my bed, looking up at the ceiling, feeling as if someone had been harvesting chunks of my brain, seeing everything in my room as if down a long, dark tunnel that was closing with every minute that passed.
At ten o’clock that Saturday night, the photograph of Jannie came. Same position. Same shot to the head. A girl who hours earlier had been told that her life could be extraordinary, that her talent was almost unlimited, was gone.
GONE.
GONE.
It was my only thought.
GONE.
GONE.
Ali died at one minute before eleven, according to the time stamp. My little boy’s eyes were open and vacant, an expression I’d seen on scores of corpses over the years.
GONE.
My entire family was GONE. For a long time I lay curled up in a fetal position on the bed. Then, around midnight, though I was still unable to think at all, my legs swung off the bed as if of their own accord. I stood up, seeing everything around me as if through a scratched and blurry lens.
There was no conscious thought at that point, but my brain was not dead. Fully infected by the overwhelming virus of loss, my mind turned reptilian, and the reptile commanded me to walk.
Chapter
106
Dropping the phone, I trudged out the front door of my house, left it open to the wind of a coming storm. I walked in a state of total shock through the streets of Washington, alternately catatonic and then overwhelmed by grief, sobbing my heart out. People who passed me on the sidewalks seemed creatures from another lifetime. Their laughter was like some foreign language I’d never understand again.
By two Easter morning the streets were deserted. By three, they were empty and dark, and thunderstorms lashed the city.
I’d been walking like that for hours by then but didn’t feel hungry, or thirsty, or tired in any way. When lightning bolts ripped the sky and thunder clapped right over my head, I barely flinched. Not even the pouring rain could slow me or soothe the agony burning through every inch of my body.
I heard my little boy’s voice telling me that the only way to kill a zombie was to destroy its brain.