After the Rain | Page 9

useless, flopping at its side. It charged her, grappling with her, and she couldn't get her bar back for a swing. Its good hand was in her hair, and it didn't stink, that was the worst part. It smelled like fresh-baked bread. It smelled like flowers. Zombies smelled delicious.
The part of her brain that was detached and thinking these thoughts was not the part in the front. That part was incoherent with equal parts rage and terror. The zombie would bite her soon and that would be it. In a day, she'd be a zombie too, in need of medicine, and how many more would she bite before she got cured.
In that moment, she stopped being angry at the zombie and became angry at the besiegers. They had been abstract enemies until then, an unknowable force from outside her world, but in that moment she realized that they were people like her, who could suffer like her, and she wished that they would. She wished that their children would starve. She wished the parents would die. The old people shrivel unto death in their dry, unwatered flats. The toddlers wander the streets until sunburn or cold took them.
She screamed an animal scream, and pushed the zombie off her with her arms and legs, even her head, snapping it into the zombie's cheekbone as hard as she could, and something broke there too.
The zombie staggered back. They couldn't feel pain, but their balance was a little weak. It tottered, and she went after it with the bar. One whack in the knee took it down on its side. It reached with its good arm, and so she smashed that too. Then the heaving ribs. Then the face, the hateful, leering, mouth-open-stupid face, three smashes turned it into ruin. The jaw hung down to its chest, broken off its face.
A hand seized her and she whirled with her bar held high and nearly brained the soldier who'd grabbed her. He wasn't a zombie, and he had his pistol out. It was pointed at her. She dropped her bar like it was red hot and threw her arms in the air.
He shoved her rudely aside and knelt beside the zombie -- the soldier zombie she realized with a sick lurch -- that she'd just smashed to pieces.
The soldier's back was to her, but his chest was heaving like a bellows and his neck was tight.
"Please," she said. "After they give him the cure, they can fix his bones. I had to hit him or he would have killed me. He would have infected me. You see that, right? I know it was wrong, but -- "
The soldier shot the zombie through the head, twice.
He turned around. His face was streaming with tears. "There is no cure, not for this strain of zombiism. Once you get it, you die. It takes a week. Slower than the old kind. It gives you more time to infect new people. Our enemies are crafty crafty, girl."
The soldier kicked the zombie. "I knew his brother. I commanded him until he was killed by a trenchbuster. The mother and father were killed by a shell. Now he's dead, and that's a whole family gone."
The soldier cocked his head at her and examined her more closely. "Have you been bitten?"
"No," she said, quickly. The gun was still in his hand. There was no cure.
"You're sure?" he said. His voice was like her father's had been when she skinned her knee, stern but sympathetic. "If you have, you'd better tell me. Better to go quick and painless than like this thing." He kicked the zombie again.
"I'm sure," she said. "Have you got any bread? A man stole my ration."
The soldier lost interest in her when she asked him for bread. "Goodbye, little girl," he said.
That night, she had a fever. She was so hot. She got them all the time, everyone did. Not enough food. No heat. No vegetables and vitamins. You always got fevers.
But she was so hot. She took off her clothes and let the cool air blow over her skin on her narrow bed. Trover was sleeping on the floor nearby -- he had outgrown his crib long since -- and he stirred irritably as she felt that air cool her sizzling skin.
She ran her fingertips lightly over her body. She was never naked anymore. If you were lucky, you washed your face and hands every day, but baths -- they were cold and miserable, and who wanted to haul water for them anyway?
Her breasts were undeniable now. Her blood had started a few months back, then stopped. Starvation, she knew, that's what did it. But there was new hair in her armpits and at her groin.
She crossed her arms over her chest and hugged herself. That's when