Chapter Twenty-Four #2
“Maisie, please. Back up, let’s pull him into the light.
Come on.” Everett’s pleading with me, but I’m frozen with my fingers clutching the blue shirt, or is it red?
I can’t tell in these shadows. My heart hurts.
It hurts. It squeezes, and I can’t breathe.
Everything swims, and I fall, limp, into Everett’s arms. He tugs me backward and holds me, cradling me to his chest like a baby.
Like Mom used to when I had a bad dream. Is this a bad dream?
“She’s dead,” I hoarse out, burying my face in his chest. “She’s under there, and she’s dead.”
“Maisie, it’s Gramps, I think. Old man. Suspenders?”
“No.”
“Thick waist?”
“No!”
“A red plaid shirt.”
I’m shaking my head so hard, the stubble on Everett’s warm neck shreds the tender flesh of my cheek.
“He’s wearing dog tags, sweetheart.”
But I can’t say anything. Not anymore.
Everett holds me, shushing softly as the sobs rack my body, brushing my hair off my hot, swollen face. After a while, he presses a kiss against my forehead. “I need to move him, Maisie. We can’t leave him there. He might…”
“I know.” My voice sounds small and wrong in the still, enclosed air that reeks of his blood. How did I not smell it before? It’s thick and choking and awful.
Everett pulls Gramps out from under the stairs as gently as he can, and my tears start anew. It’s him, of course it’s him. But somehow, under the stairs of this dark root cellar, he looked like everybody I’ve ever lost.
There’s flesh missing from his shoulder, a long, jagged bite. But it’s the bullet hole in his temple that must’ve killed him. We find the gun still tangled between his gnarled fingers and a note in his other hand, folded into a neat square with a hastily penned “Maisie-girl.”
I unfold it, sobbing as I smooth out each crease.
“My sweet Maisie-girl,” it reads.
It is my greatest regret that you’ll find me this way.
After what you went through with your mama, it is a horrible cruelty, and the only comfort to me in these final moments is thinking that maybe you’ll realize I’m gone before you get here and never find me at all.
Maybe I’m just a stupid old man, but I can’t see any other way around it.
After I got stormed by the bandits, and the swarm set upon us and forced me down here, I realized I was already done for.
I refuse to put your life in more danger than I already have, Maisie-girl, which means I have to go and break your heart like this instead.
Please forgive me, sweetheart, and if you’re reading this, promise me that you’ll go and live twice as much now for the both of us.
With all my love and every wish in my heart,
Your Gramps
“He shot himself,” I manage to get out. “Before he could turn.”
“He loved you very much, Maisie.” Everett brushes my hair behind my ear. “So much he chose to protect you the only way he knew how.”
I press the heels of my hands into my eyes, then remove his dog tags, wilbur fagan, jr., and loop them around my neck instead.
“Oh, Gramps,” I whisper. With a shaking hand, I gently touch his cheek, the white bristly stubble there, the sun-worn pink of his skin underneath.
I’ve only seen a few pictures of him over the course of our long friendship.
His profile picture online, a hilarious, awkward close-up angled such that you could see straight up his old-man nose, and a sepia-toned picture of him in his air force uniform, taken during Vietnam, that he sent me to prove he was a young buck once.
My smile is watery as I look down on him now, old and at rest, but the remnants of that young buck are still visible beneath the looser brow, the chapped skin, the heavy smile lines.
I can hear his laughter in my head even now.
Will his voice join Mom’s? My very own prepper council that never leaves me be?
I wipe my tears away roughly. “I’m so sorry, Gramps. You deserve the whole ocean, too.”
“Maisie.” It’s all Everett says. It’s all I need to hear.
I nod quickly. “I know, I know.”
With Gramps hunched forward at the waist, Everett wraps his arms around his torso from behind, then drags him over to the foot of the stairs.
I pick up Gramps’s legs and together we heave him up, step by step, the short flight to the hatch.
I hate this. I hate every part of it. I hate that we have to leave him outside for the night, that the swarm might have their way with him before it’s safe enough to bury him.
But Everett is right, and Gramps died to protect me from himself.
It would be wrong to ignore that sacrifice. It would be stupid.
When we reach the top, Everett pauses, panting from exertion, to listen. “Do you hear something?”
Chicken vocalizes deep in her throat from below. “I hear Chicken. I hear…” I hold my breath, straining to sense whatever’s waiting on the other side of the iron hatch.
A cracked, croupy sound rumbles between us. Too close.
I suck in air, and it tastes like ruin.
“Gramps?”
The body’s chin jerks up, its bulging eyes bright, opalescent, unseeing. Everett curses, shoving straight upward as though his stooped shoulders could lift the heavy hatch on their own, arms still wrapped around Gramps’s torso.
“Maisie, hurry!”
I let go of the legs and fumble for the Taser strapped to my hip.
It thrums to life, but I hesitate. Some horrible, grieving, furious part of me hesitates.
I had exactly one person in my life, one, before I met Everett.
One friend. One family member. One person who cared if I lived or died or even got a haircut.
Only one. But maybe that’s all I get. The universe decided one’s my limit.
First Mom, then Gramps, and now that I’ve found Everett, the universe is settling the bill.
Gramps lurches for me, but my body feels strangely frozen, as though pain’s rendered my matter inert.
“Maisie!” Everett shrieks again, tugging Gramps away from me.
Gramps’s open mouth finds Everett’s arm instead.
He bites. Blood spurts.
I scream.
Everett
There’s nothing so heavy as dead weight.
A body no longer engaged in the fight to hold itself up, to breathe, to walk through this world and live within it.
You don’t realize how much a person weighs on your life until they’re no longer able to bear their weight, and it falls to you instead to hold it all.
The weight of your love for them. The weight of your grief now that they’re gone.
The weight of their absence. It all combines to bring you, staggering, to your knees.
Some never stand up again. I didn’t think I could.
I think about dead weight now as Maisie, sobbing, sends the electrical current into Gramps’s heart. His heavy, lifeless body slumps in front of mine. He smells like Old Spice and campfires. He smells like blood. I think of his dead weight on Maisie, and I want to cry. She risked so much to be here.
The room spins.
I grab my arm, the area throbbing and raw. Pull away fingers coated in red. More comes.
He bit me.
How much time do I have?
He bit me. I just found her, and—
He bit me. Will she have to bear the dead weight of us both?
“I’m so sorry, so sorry.” The words leave my mouth, slurred. Am I dying? Turning already? Darkness crowds my vision, and all I see is her. My beautiful, strong Maisie, surrounded by the encroaching black.
She’s crying, saying my name. I can’t hear her, but I see her mouth moving along the familiar syllables. Cold pressure against my arm. “Don’t let me hurt anyone, Maisie.” I reach for her face, but it’s far away. “Promise.”
I slip into the darkness, my heart still reaching for what my hands can’t hold.
Voices.
“How much time has elapsed since the bite?”
“Seventeen minutes.” Maisie’s back is to me. Bars separate us.
Bars? Where am I?
Static crackles. Then, “Is he still breathing?” The voice hitches, but smooths out by the end of the question.
Gemma. She’s speaking to Gemma.
Everything hurts. I try to move, and it sends the room spinning again.
“Yes, but he’s out cold.” Maisie twists in her seat to check on me. Her taut, nervous face goes slack, her mouth dropping open. “Oh my god, he’s awake!”
“Oh my god!” Gemma repeats, then repeats it again. “His eyes—are they normal?” Her voice wobbles shrill and intense over the radio waves. Maisie’s talking to her through a ham radio, the one Gramps used to talk to Maisie, I guess.
And I’m in a cage? Yes, a cage. Lying on my side on a thin cot inside an actual cage.
What kind of freak was Gramps, anyway?
Maisie squints at me. “Yes! They’re normal!”
Funny how nobody’s asked me anything yet. I moan, bringing a hand to my aching head. Maisie runs over to me, stopping short a few safe feet away. “Everett? How are you feeling?”
“Awful? Like I fell down a flight of stairs and was dragged across a floor, then stuffed into a cage?” I close one eye, then the other, blinking against the harsh lights. “What happened?”
“You fainted!” Maisie exclaims, wiping tears from her eyes. “Then you fell down the stairs and I dragged you across the floor and stuffed you into a cage.”
“Ah.” I hoist myself up onto one elbow. “That explains things.”
Maisie grins through her tears. She reaches out tentatively for my hand, and I push mine through the cage to meet hers. Her eyes slide closed, relieved, as our fingers intertwine. “Ah, you’re warm still.”
“I’m alive still.” I squeeze her hand. “Ask Gemma what she’s learned about bite transmission. How long do I—have?” My voice cracks along the words.
“Oh, right, I was just getting to that.” Maisie gently releases me, then scoots back to the desk. “Gemma, what have you found about the otherwise immune’s propensity to get the virus from bites?”