After the Rain | Page 9

she knew even
as she did that she would never outrun it. She was starved and had
already used all her energy chasing the bastard, the fucking bastard
who'd taken her bread.
She ran anyway, but the sound of the zombie's good boots drew closer
and closer, coming up on her, closing on her. A hand thumped her
shoulder and scrabbled at it and she spied a piece of steel bar -- maybe
it had been a locking post for a hover-car in the golden days -- and she
snatched it up and whirled around.
The zombie grabbed for her, and she smashed its wrist like an
old-timey schoolteacher with a ruler. She heard something crack, and
the zombie roared again. "Bread fight asshole kill hungry!" is what it
sounded like.
But one of its hands was now 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