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The putrid meat had disintegrated quickly, and with
it now gone, the bones were winking at him, seeming to want to discuss
something. That was all in his head, he knew, but he sometimes got that way
when he watched them burn.
    The bones, he thought. God, the
bones. What the virus did to them, seeing it could drill madness straight into
your brain.
    The break. The fucking break, over and
over and over until they looked like this.

8
    Alan turned away from the flames, and, after closing the window in the fence,
caught up with Rosemary and Senna, who were already through the middle gate and
waiting for him to catch up. Senna still had her arm around Rosemary’s shoulders,
and the girl was trembling. When Alan was beside them, the middle gate closed and
the next one opened, allowing them all to slip into New Crozet proper, where
they belonged.
    Rosemary was walking warily, taking
small, hesitant steps, as if she suspected the ground might give way under her
feet. There was a wheeze here and there, but her breathing was under control.
    “What was that?” she asked, with only
a slight tremor in her voice. “What animal?”
    “A deer,” Senna said.
    “A deer,” Rosemary repeated
thoughtfully. She was trying to drown the strain of what she’d just done in
rational thought, understand and have everything explained so it wasn’t so frightening
anymore, and perhaps less ugly.
    She’d been too scared to look very
closely at the zombie, or rather, to really see what was there, and that was for
the best, at least for now.
    She asked, “Did you ever eat a deer, a
healthy one I mean, before the virus?” The children had heard of meat-eating
from the adults, and knew it was something from the past.
    Senna nodded. “Yes.”
    Rosemary considered this. “Did you eat
all of it, all the parts?”
    Senna thought she understood the
question, because children born during or after the apocalypse, who’d never
eaten meat, didn’t have much of a concept of what parts of an animal were
eaten. “Only some of the meat,” Senna said, then shrugged, thought about telling
Rosemary that pretty much all animal parts had been eaten or put to some
commercial use, but said nothing.
    “Was it good?” Rosemary asked.
    Alan was walking behind them, curious
about what Senna was going to say because he thought she was a lot better with
children; he always seemed to say the wrong thing.
    Raising his right shoulder as he
listened, he tried without success to work the crick out of his upper back.
    The Voltaire II flamethrower he was
carrying was a light model as far as throwers went, but he felt the strain in between
his shoulder blades all the same, and the muscle pain always came with a sharp,
poking feeling at the base of his spine. Now, as always, it was the inside of
his right shoulder blade that was giving him the most trouble, reminding him of
the toll the Voltaire II had taken on his body in the three years he’d carried
it after the outbreak.
    Ignore the ache was the name of the
game, and he played it a lot. He certainly didn’t feel young anymore, not in
any sense of the word.
    Senna frowned and shook her head. “Not
at all. Bitter and tough. Not a bit of fat on it, barely worth the effort of
hunting and eating. I don’t miss it.”
    Pursing her lips, she glanced back at
Alan, and he nodded, understanding that answering with a lie was the right
thing to do, and he knew he would’ve screwed that up. She had an empathy that he
couldn’t manage, and which he wasn’t sure he understood in the first place.
    That’s the problem, Alan thought, I’m
too honest. But shouldn’t they know? Maybe not yet. Digestible bits, here and
there, one at a time. There had been more than enough to chew on tonight.
    Alan remembered meat well, and dreamt
of it often. Apple smoked bacon shone through as the one he missed the most,
but he’d take anything these days: burnt and stringy chicken, an old egg, blue
mold-infested cheese, anything with some animal