The Resurrected Compendium Read online

  Kathy cringes, but the grandmother’s fingers are dug deep into the meat of her upper arm. The grandmother pulls her closer. Kathy can’t get away. She wants to run away, but she’s held tight, too tight.

  “Baby whiners need diapers.”

  The box hits the floor at Kathy’s feet. Adult-sized diapers, the packaging not even opened. She looks at the grandmother, not understanding.

  “Your ass is too big for baby sizes, you baby whiner. But that’s what you need. A diaper for when you shit and piss yourself.”

  “But I don’t —”

  The hand that cracks across her cheek is hard and followed instantly by that same hand cupping the back of her neck, fingers tangling tight in Kathy’s hair to keep her from moving. This close, she can smell the coffee on the grandmother’s breath. She can count the flecks of white in her blue irises and see the gray roots coming in along the part in her hair.

  “Put on the diaper. You’ll wear it to school today.”

  “But I don’t want to! I’m not a baby! I’m in the fifth grade!”

  The grandmother’s lip lifts, exposing her straight but yellowing teeth.

  “Put it on! You’ll wear it, you little baby whiner, and you’ll fill it. Because that’s what baby whiners do, they sit in their own shit and piss and remember how grateful they should be to have clean clothes. And maybe the next time I tell you to bring your laundry downstairs, you’ll do it right away, and the next time I buy you something pretty to wear, you won’t be such a little piglet, such a fatty fatty and spill all over it, or bust the seams.”

  The grandmother shoves Kathy to the floor so she can get one of the diapers. Kathy wants to tell the grandmother it’s not her fault the skirt tore. It was too small. The grandmother bought it in the wrong size. It’s never fit. She can’t help growing.

  “Baby whiner,” the grandmother says in triumph. “Put on the diaper and tell me how it feels to piss yourself.”

  The grannything’s fingers whispered along the front of Kathy’s shirt. No. Kelsey, she thought fiercely. My name is Kelsey now.

  But she was done, used up. Nothing left. She couldn’t run to get away. She couldn’t punch or kick to defend herself.

  The grannything grinned and smacked its lips. “Come give granny a kiss.”

  Kelsey closed her eyes and braced herself for more pain.

  Hot, putrid breath washed over her. She turned her face. Something slick and warm slid across her cheek, and she wanted to vomit but could only shudder.

  Her eyes flew open at the sound of a loud crack. Despite the pain, she took a few stumbling steps back. The grannything disintegrated in front of her, the face sloughing off as its head split in half. The body crumpled to the pavement with a stomach-turning squelch, and lay still.

  “Headshot,” said the man standing just beyond the car Kelsey’d taken. “It’s always got to be a headshot.”

  41

  The blonde woman went pale beneath her tan. Her eyes rolled up to the back of her head, showing the whites. Thank God she was already down, or she’d have fallen and maybe cracked her head open. She was already pretty messed up, by the look of things. Covered in dirt and blood, her hair lank and stringy.

  She wasn’t quite naked, but she might as well have been, the way her breasts pushed out the front of her skimpy top and her skirt rode up to expose her taut, tanned thighs. Her dirty, bare and damaged feet were so small he could’ve easily fit one in his palm. She’d painted her toenails, and somehow that sight nearly broke Dennis’ heart. At some point, this woman had been pretty, had taken care of herself.

  Well, he thought as he moved toward her and caught a whiff of his own rank scent, the past few weeks had been hard on everyone.

  “Hey. Hey, miss.” He shook her gently, then hooked his arms beneath her sweaty armpits and dragged her about ten feet away from Mrs. Granger, who’d been his twelfth grade biology teacher.

  The woman in his arms groaned, eyes opening. She struggled, fighting against him with panic clear in her eyes, and he let her go as nicely as he could without letting her thump to the pavement. He didn’t blame her for being scared. He probably looked like one of them. Hell. They all were one of “them” until that black ooze shot out of them. She could be one of them too.

  “My name’s Dennis,” he said. “You’re okay. She’s dead.”

  The blonde rolled onto her side to stare at Mrs. Granger’s corpse. With a small cry of pain when she pushed up on her wrist, she managed to get to her feet. She wasn’t too steady, though, wobbling and shaky, and Dennis reached out to grab her by the upper arm and keep her from falling.

  She jerked away from him and almost went down again. This time, his grip wasn’t so soft. “Damn it, lady, you’re gonna hurt yourself worse. I’m not gonna do anything to you. Okay? And she’s dead, I shot her.”

  The blonde’s mouth opened and closed. She shook herself but calmed in his grip until he judged she was steady enough to stand on her own. Then he let her go.

  “She was dead before you shot her.”

  “Probably,” Dennis said.

  The woman closed her eyes, but not like she was going to pass out again. When she opened them, all traces of faintness had disappeared, though her brow creased with pain that also thinned her mouth. He saw she’d lifted one foot from the ground so just her toes touched. So she’d hurt her foot and her wrist. She was a mess.

  “Thank you,” the woman said after a moment. “I guess you saved me.”

  “Guess?” Dennis used the rifle to point toward Mrs. Granger’s body. “She’d have chewed off your face.”

  “You knew her.”

  Dennis paused. “Yeah. She taught me about mitosis and meiosis.”

  And once she’d kept him after school, supposedly for detention because he hadn’t turned in several assignments in a row and had miserably failed on of her tests — the one that would’ve broken his grade point average enough to keep him from graduating. She’d given him a sandwich of white bread and bologna, the devil’s manna as his mother said, and tutored him for an hour before allowing him to make up the test. He squeaked by with a c-minus, but he did pass. And so far as Dennis could tell, the sandwich hadn’t actually been laced with tiny nanochips engineered by the government to interact with television signals and control his brain. It tasted good, and it filled his stomach, which felt constantly empty no matter how much organic flax seed casserole his mother force-fed him.

  “Mrs. Granger was a good lady.”

  The blonde’s mouth thinned further. “She’s not anymore.”

  “It wasn’t her fault.”

  “It’s not anyone’s fault,” the woman said. “It just is.”

  Dennis could not argue with that, as bald and pessimistic a statement as it was. It sounded like something his mother would say, as a matter of fact, and that reminded him. “Mom.”

  “Huh?”

  “Sorry. I was on my way to stock up and head out to my mother’s place.” He gestured toward the Costclub he intended to raid. He stopped, studying her. His mother would hate a woman like this, all boobs and hair and big eyes and that tiny waist, those pretty little feet…She was saying something. “What?”

  “My name’s Kelsey,” she said with what sounded like a lifetime’s patience, and waited until he dragged his eyes up from her painted toenails to her face. “What’s your name?”

  “Dennis.”

  She held out a hand, which he took. “Dennis. Thank you. I need to get some medicine and some bandages. And my wrist, I think it’s broken. Hopefully it’s just sprained, but if not, I’ll need you to help me set it.”

  “Oh, sure, right.” She sounded so self-assured, nothing like the shaken woman of a few minutes before. Her eyes had gone a little glassy though, and she looked wobbly again even if she didn’t sound it. “Let’s get you inside, out of this heat. Get you a drink.”

  “Oh, God. Yes, yes. Please.”

  Dennis hesitated before putting his arm around her waist, his othe