She began to sob. “I caused it.”
Even with my blurry vision and my bruised brain, I could see that she was telling the truth. I wanted to tell her she hadn’t caused Elise’s death, and to come forward and testify against Prough to avenge her friend. I wanted to tell her that she would be protected and that she wouldn’t have to run anymore.
But was that true? My own family…
I swooned, remembered something about concussions. I wanted to say, “Don’t let me sleep, Bee.” But all I got out was “Don’t let me go…”
The last thing I remember was Ava standing in the doorway staring back at me, hoodie up, chewing her thumbnail and looking like she was getting ready to run.
Chapter
108
In the nightmare that followed many hours later, a blurry figure I knew as Mulch raced through the crack house after smashing my head and stealing my money. Like some cartoon character, I took the hit and still was able to get to my feet and chase him outside, except we were no longer in DC but up on that abandoned farm where Carney had taken Cam Nguyen and the babies.
Mulch went into the farmhouse, giving me just a glimpse of that shock of red hair, and I pursued him down into the basement and through the secret passage. When I left the tunnel and entered the root cellar, Mulch was gone.
But the room Carney had built inside the root cellar was still there in my dream, and light shone inside. I stepped into the light, peered into the room, and saw my family laid out side by side on the floor by the bathtub, all of them in the same position I’d seen in the pictures, lying on their sides, faces turned left, dead, bloody, and head-shot.
Their milky eyes were all open, and their blank stares a universal accusation: I had failed to protect them. I had allowed this to happen. The harshest expression was Nana Mama’s, as if she’d become ashamed of me, as if her life raising me, and protecting me, had mattered not at all when she was in dire need.
That crushed me. I fell to my knees, arms wide, weeping and begging for her forgiveness, and for Bree’s forgiveness, and Damon’s, Jannie’s, and Ali’s. But they just stared at me with their milky eyes, their expressions never changing, and I began to convulse with pain and loss, heaving and sobbing and thinking that this brutal feeling would never, ever end.
Then I heard splashing and looked through my tears at the bathtub, where Mulch had risen up out of the water carrying a hunting rifle. His face was a brilliant aluminum light above that polka-dot bow tie and that shock of red hair, and his voice came to me like a shortwave radio transmission.
“I had to shoot them like that, you know,” Mulch said. “If you head-shoot them, they can never become zombies.”
I said nothing, just stared into the blinding light of his face.
After several seconds, Mulch said, “I figured you’d thank me, Cross.”
“Why?” I whispered.
“For saving them from the doom of the walking dead.”
“No, why are you doing this to me?”
Mulch laughed with irony in his voice, said, “I’m doing it for the only reason anyone does anything. Because I can.” He started to laugh again, caustically.
“Who are you?” I demanded.
Mulch seemed to think about that. “I’m whoever you believe me to be.”
“Why don’t you kill me?”
“Why does a cat play with a mouse?” Mulch replied.
“So you will kill me?”
“Of course.”
“When?” I said.
“I think it’s time right now,” Mulch said matter-of-factly. “Lie down there beside your wife and your grandmother, on your side, right cheek in that perfect puddle of blood, staring left into oblivion.”
I got down without hesitation, gazing one last heartbreaking time at my family, each one of them in turn, before twisting my head from them, eyes wide open and aware of the muzzle of the rifle swinging past my face.
“Shoot straight,” I choked.