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Reggie jerks upright in his chair, stunned by what he thinks he’s just heard. Can it be real? Is it possible? Did the dead girl — the girl who died nearly thirteen years ago, for fuck’s sake! — actually just recognize and call out for her mama? Or was it just another undead moan, an artifact of air moving over dead vocal chords?
Kelly’s also leaning forward, staring. He bears the same look of disbelief on his face that Reggie knows must be on his own.
“Cassie?” Doctor White says. Her voice is hushed, soothing.
But the girl has gone silent and still.
“I guess she’s sleeping.” Doctor White rests her head on the cushion and shuts her eyes.
Kelly quietly stands up and gestures for Reggie to follow him into the kitchen. There’s a new urgency in the way he carries himself. The lost and bewildered look has vanished. What’s left in its place is fresh determination. It’s almost as if proof of Doctor White’s cure has flipped a switch in his mind. Reggie just doesn’t understand why it would be, though. It changes nothing as far as he’s concerned, nor where Jessie’s concerned. “We’ll leave as soon as the streets clear,” Kelly whispers.
“Oh, so now you’re ready to leave. What the fuck does what just happened in there have to do with Jessie?”
Kelly’s gaze flicks in the direction of the living room. He opens his mouth to reply, but nothing comes out.
“Well?”
Kelly shrugs. It’s all he’s capable of doing right now. He knows he won’t be able to explain it in a way that Reggie will understand. He’s not sure he understands it himself. “Jessie needs us,” is all he says.
“Yeah, no shit. She needed us eight hours ago! That’s eight fucking hours we’ve lost, and we still don’t know where she is!” He stops pacing and spins around. “What about the tracker?”
“Told you. It’s worthless to us without the Stream.”
“Have you even tried?”
“Of course I’ve tried!”
“Damn it!”
He paces some more. Kelly waits a moment for him to say something, then turns to leave.
“You wanna tell me what we witnessed in there, Kel?” Reggie demands, stopping him. “And why it suddenly matters?”
“Hope,” Kelly replies. “She spoke, which means Doctor White was right. Against all odds, she made it happen. She brought the undead back to life, to the kind of living we recognize as living. That little girl in there recognized her own mother, Reggie! I— I guess I was having trouble believing there was any hope, for any of us. But now... Jessie’s out there. I can feel it. I have to find her.”
Reggie still has his doubts— not of Jessie, but of Kelly’s commitment. And of the cure. But he keeps these thoughts to himself. It doesn’t matter what he thinks or believes. It never actually did. And it shouldn’t have mattered to Kelly, either. But if this is what Kelly needs to get him moving again, who’s he to argue?
“We’ll head straight for Jayne’s Hill,” Kelly says. “We’ll take the main roads, leave signs along the way for her, just in case she crosses our path.”
Doctor White steps into the kitchen. Reggie’s shocked at how much she’s physically changed. She seems to have aged a dozen years, as if her dream of saving her dead daughter had held her in a state of suspended animation, and all those lost years finally caught up with her at once when that dream came true. It’s like she’d made a deal with the devil, Reggie thinks. But despite the physical toll of a decade’s worth of bargaining coming due, there’s also a new sense of vitality to her, and Reggie thinks: Hope. Or maybe: Redemption. In any case, there’s a vibrancy to the woman now, underlying it all. The circles under her eyes seem deeper, more permanent, but somehow also less severe. They look... earned, rather than inflicted.
“We’re leaving,” Kelly tells her. If he notices the changes to her appearance and demeanor, he doesn’t mention it.
Reggie braces himself, worried she’ll try to stop them. Worried she’ll expect far more from them.
“There’s a car in the garage,” she says, wearily. “I plugged it into the storage battery a few hours ago to recharge. If it starts, you can take it. No promises, though.”
“You’re okay with us leaving you?”
“I’m not going anywhere for a while, not until Cassie’s recovered enough. She’ll need to regain her strength and flexibility. Then there’s the psychological aspect to consider. It might take weeks to get her to a point where she’s ready to move.”
Reggie knows it’s not what Kelly had meant. Sure, it looks like the cure is working. Cassie’s breathing, or doing something that looks like breathing. But the infection had a decade to insinuate every cell in her body. It took over that girl’s mind. It’s not just going to disappear in the blink of an eye, or even in the relative blink of a few hours or weeks. That little girl out there...? That — he doesn’t want to call it a thing, but that’s what she still is, at least in his mind — that thing isn’t just going to become a little eight-year-old girl again. Certainly not the little eight-year-old girl Doctor White left behind during the outbreak.
Not your problem anymore, brah, he tells himself.
But he still has trouble accepting he can just walk away from it knowing what might happen.
She can take care of herself. She’s not stupid.
He knows this is true. After the way she’d handled herself out in the backyard, it’s clear she hadn’t forgotten what her daughter had become. Reggie just hopes she understands what that girl might still be.
They repack their bags, divvying up the cans that Kelly finds in the mostly empty shelves in the pantry. Doctor White tells him to take them, that she knows where she can find more. Reggie believes she’s so willing to part with it because it’s mostly dog food anyway. But he knows what it’s like out there. He’ll eat dog food in a pinch, if there’s nothing else available.
Kelly collects whatever else he thinks might be useful from the house and throws it onto the back seat and trunk of the car. Then he gets in behind the steering wheel. “Cross your fingers,” he tells Reg.
The Audi’s starter motor clicks, but the engine doesn’t catch. He tries again, then stops.
“What is it?” Reggie asks.
“Don’t want to drain the battery.”
“When I give you the signal, try it one more time.”
He searches the garage and doesn’t locate what he’s looking for, so he settles for one of the cans of dog food. He crawls underneath the front end of the car, tells Kelly to try again, and knocks the can against the ignition motor. After the third click, the car chugs to life. Kelly nurses the gas to keep it running. Black smoke belches from the exhaust. After a great deal of coaxing, the engine settles into a steady, if not entirely healthy sounding, rhythm.
“Tank’s half full,” Kelly reports. “Guess we’re lucky the gas is still good.”
“Stop talking about it, or you’ll jinx us,” Reggie replies. He glances out through the window in the garage door. It’s almost four-thirty. Soon, the sun will begin to rise. “Always gives me the creeps seeing them out there like that,” he says.
Kelly lets the car run for a few minutes before shutting it off again. The noise has attracted a number of the undead. They try to get inside, but the best they can manage is to rattle the garage door. The noise draws more of the dead for a while, but then they start to lose interest, forgetting why they were drawn there in the first place.
Reggie returns to the living room. He stands in the doorway and watches Doctor White and the girl. He’s anxious to go, to get away from this house and the morbid scene playing out before him. He can’t help but draw parallels with the story of Frankenstein. He says nothing, though. He doesn’t want to jinx her by thinking about how the monster turned against its creator.
“Any change?” Kelly whispers, joining him in the doorway.
Doctor White’s resumed her position on the floor, crouching by the girl’s head. She lovingly strokes what little of her hair remains attached to her leathery scalp. Every once in a while the girl’s chest rises and falls. Since that one utterance, the little thing hasn’t moved or made another sound.
Reggie shakes his head. “Nothing.”
“She’s still asleep,” Doctor White says. She slowly lifts her eyes to them. “Sleep is healing.” Her voice quavers. She raises her hand to touch Cassie’s face, but stops before it gets all the way there.
“She feels warmer,” she says. “That’s something.”
Reggie bites his tongue. He’ll keep his opinion to himself.
“You’ve got enough food and water here to last a few days,” Kelly says. “Maybe as long as a week, depending on...” His voice trails off.
Doctor White shakes her head. “She won’t be ready to eat regular food for a while.”
Regular food, Reggie thinks. Or she might just wake up with a healthy appetite anyway.
He suppresses a shudder.
Doctor White places a fingertip to Cassie’s neck and doesn’t move or even breathe for a full minute. “There’s my girl,” she whispers. She lets her hand slide away.
“I thought you were leaving.”
“Few more minutes,” Kelly says. “Waiting for the streets to clear.”
Doctor White has raised herself onto her knees. She bends over Cassie and places her lips on the girl’s half-decayed cheek.
Reggie quickly turns away, suppressing the urge to gag.
