CHAPTER 32
Hobbling along on crutches, bandages all over his body, Nate propped the iPad up on top of a tombstone and sat down on the marker opposite it. He scratched at a sticky spot on his neck where the bandage had separated, coughed, and cleared his throat. He drew in a ragged breath and started speaking:
“Hi, I’m Nate Royal.” This isn’t my computer. Or . . . well, I guess it is now. Before me it belonged to this guy named Ben Richardson, who was one of the two smartest men I’ve ever known.
“Ben used to be a reporter for a magazine. I don’t remember which one and I guess at this point it doesn’t really matter. Before everything pretty much went down the toilet Ben set out to write the whole history of the zombie outbreak. Things went south on him before he got a chance to finish, but he didn’t give up. He went on collecting stories. For eight long years he wandered this used-up garbage dump of a world we live in, collecting stories from everyone he met.”
“Nate?” It was Avery, calling to him from the clearing that Nate and the others had been sharing with Fisher and his family for the last week while everyone mended.
He waved to her.
“Over here, Avery.”
He turned back to the iPad.
“Where was I? Oh yeah: stories. Ben believed that stories were the glue that held us together. He said they were as much a part of us as the blood in our veins, and that we needed them just as much. For him, getting somebody to tell their story was as natural as breathing. He had this crazy dream that one day, when the zombies were all gone, all the survivors would gather round and the stories they told would reshape the world into something better than it was. He thought humanity was something wonderful. He thought that we naturally went to the good, that we listened to the better angels of our nature. I . . . don’t know about that. I haven’t done a lot of listening to my better angels during my time on this globe of ours. But, like I said, Ben was a better man than me, and he said that stories were like a magic mirror that showed us what was best about ourselves. Maybe that’s true. I don’t know. But I do know that his eyes used to shine when he talked about it. He really believed it. It wasn’t just words to him. Stories were his religion, and, for him, collecting them was the most holy thing a man could do. It makes me sick to my stomach to think that the world’s got to count on me for that now.”
He shook his head, coughed. Everything hurt.
Nate straightened and blinked away the pain.
This was for posterity. It had to be good.
He said, “I think about the two great men I’ve known in my life—Ben Richardson, who I just told you about; and Dr. Mark Kellogg, who used my blood to figure out a vaccine for the zombie virus—and I want to weep for all that we’ve lost. So much goodness, so many great minds . . . just gone.” He smiled bitterly, and shrugged. “The world is passing on to mediocre men who remember great men. We are only echoes of them, and not very good ones.”
“Nate,” Avery called to him. She was coming up behind him, breathing hard from the climb up the hill. “You almost ready? Dr. Fisher says we need to get going before the day gets too hot.”
“Yep,” he said. “Almost.”
He focused on the iPad again.
“Time to wrap this up. This is Ben’s book that I’m trying to finish here, so I might as well leave you with something Ben said to me a few days before he died. He said we all do the best we can, and that most of the time, that’s good enough to get the job done. And if it doesn’t do the trick, well, we still own it. We may have lost the old world, but that doesn’t mean we can’t find a new one. We just stagger on, zombie-like, one foot in front of the other, and trust we’ll get there eventually. And you know what? I think we will.”
He shrugged, then smiled.
“That’s it. That’s all the wisdom I got.”
He leaned forward and tapped the screen to stop recording.
Avery, wearing a sundress borrowed from Dr. Fisher’s wife, stopped a short way off and waited for him.
“What are you doing up here?” she asked.
He turned.
Richardson was standing on a small rise behind her, facing east, watching a golden haze looming in the trees down by the road.
“Ben . . .”
Avery followed his gaze, her brow wrinkled. “You okay?” she asked. “What are you doing up here?”
Nate stood, favoring his broken ankle as he slid the crutches under his arms. “Can you help me with the iPad?” he asked.
“Sure.” She tucked it under her arm and stood next to him. “Can I help you?”
“Yeah, that’d be nice. Thanks.”
“You didn’t tell me what you were doing up here.”
He gestured at the iPad with his chin. “Just finishing up something for Ben. Something I promised I’d do.”
She smiled uncertainly, as though she didn’t quite know what to say. “Are you ready to go? Dr. Fisher wants to go.”
He looked over at the next rise, but Ben was gone.
To Avery, he said, “Yeah, I’m all set.” And together, the two of them walked down to the camp in the late morning sun.