V: The Promise

While the spaceman was the only up-and-about corpse in Murray's Mart, he had not been the only corpse in the little grocery store. It appeared as if the thing had itself a miniature buffet, and each aisle catered to the different potentials to the dining experience.

Down aisle three were the bodies of rotund patrons, complete with colorful muumuu packaging; aisle seven carried the leaner folk, for the self-conscious zombie trying to maintain its girlish figure. For domestic flavors, there was the aisle that solely contained light meat. For a more ethnic meal, two aisles over were the darker varieties.

Singer and I tiptoed over, sidestepped around, and crawled under the bodies in order to access what food we could find. The only sensible food happened to be the canned goods; however, once the panic of the oncoming and already here storm of undead had begun, the shelves had been picked clean of anything remotely appetizing. And since several weeks had passed since then, even some of the lesser-appetizing choices had been picked clean, as well. Somehow, we ended up with several cans of beets.

"Well," Singer pronounced, holding several cans aloft as if in victory, "beets nothing!"

That was his thing, Singer: he'd see a random object and make an unusual joke about it. At first, it was a quirk about the man I found refreshing and something desperately needed during such a dangerous time; however, with each pun and throaty laugh to punctuate, the novelty started to wear off. Pretty soon, I found myself half-tempted to whistle out any straggling undead who may have wanted a piece of the funnyman.

A moment after turning down what was left of the store's candy aisle, Singer suddenly stopped. He knelt down to pick up something that was at his feet, and when he came back up, I saw that it was an unopened package of Red Vines.

He stared at the package of red licorice and took a breath. What he said next surprised me, as it wasn't a pun or anything remotely amusing; instead, in a quiet voice unlike the one that had been throwing out volley after volley of wordplay, he said, "These were her favorite..."

I have to be honest: I had started to prepare myself for calling out any zombie that might be in the area. My left hand floated in front of my mouth, ready to stick in the appropriate fingers that, provided the right application of breath, would emit a high-pitched whistle that could call out anything with the capacity to hear it.

Feeling my arm go numb with surprise, my hand fell away from my face, and I said, "They were whose favorite?"

Singer slowly turned to me, and I was taken aback when I saw that his eyes had filled with tears. Quickly sniffling whatever had collected in his nose those last few moments, he said, "My daughter..."

From there, he proceeded to tell me the story of his life before standing in this grocery store, talking to some random kid he had just met.

On the Day Everything Changed, Singer was a single father who was working hard, trying to provide for his six-year-old daughter. He told me her name was Promise,  and ever since the day she was born, Singer had devoted his life to being as good of a father as he could to that little girl. It was not without its challenges, though: shortly after Promise has turned three, Singer's wife ran out on the both of them, leaving Singer alone to raise the child.

Three years later, the infestation of the undead came, adding more challenges to the table.

For the first several weeks, Singer and Promise had fared pretty well against the zombies; they laid low and only changed locations when they ran out of food or when the safety zone had been compromised - not just because of zombies, but because of other survivors, as well. They kept mainly to themselves, Singer not trusting in others, knowing deep down that when push came to shove, the desperate would not think twice about using a six-year-old girl as leverage to get whatever they wanted.

As it happened, it had been a week prior when and several blocks from where we stood where Singer's life changed drastically.

They had made their way into the city and came across the local elementary school. Even after the first weeks of the zombie epidemic, the school looked to be in sound shape, and looked to be a stable place to hole up for the night. They situated themselves in one of the classrooms.

"First grade class, I would have to guess," Singer said, as a side note. He stared at the package of licorice as he continued his story. Promise had been the first one to fall asleep that night, and somehow, possibly because of the innocent feel of the classroom, he had fallen asleep shortly after.

The moment he woke up was the moment his horror began. After rubbing his eyes to wake himself a little more, he reached for Promise... and found his daughter was no longer sleeping by his side. He went from sleep to awake in almost a negative amount of time, and proceeded to look for her, calling her name and checking cabinets and under tables; his fear began to grow, he told me, as he received neither a response nor a visual confirmation of the little girl's presence.

When he noticed the open door leading to the darkened hallway, his gut started to sink. Like a crazed bullet, he shot out of the classroom and into the hallway, not stopping until the opposing wall ceased his forward momentum. He screamed Promise's name louder, and the echo of the empty hallway responded in return with a twisted kind of mockery.

He didn't know which way to go to start looking for her, but he went in a direction anyway. It was, he would find, both the right direction and the wrong one. Finding one of her shoes lying on its side next to one of the bathroom doors, he hastened his pace and slammed himself into the door itself. What the open door revealed crushed his world as he knew it: lying on the tiled floor, under one of the sinks, was Promise.

She was dead.

I'll save on the gorier of the details, but from the way Singer portrayed it, it was obvious that this had not been the work of any zombie; the blood on her legs and the bruises on her arms and neck left no doubt within him that a person of flesh and blood, of supposedly sound mind, had wreaked havoc on his one and only reason to live.

For a moment he merely stood at the bathroom door, his mind trying to convince him that this was not reality; that he was still in the first grade classroom, sleeping peacefully with his little girl snuggled up against him. Unfortunately, the shock dissipated and reality finally made its way to center stage: hello, this is real, this is really happening. Singer scrambled on the floor to his daughter, scooping up the small and lifeless body into his arms. He tried to scream, but it was silent as the noise would not come out.

After several minutes, as he slowly rocked the body in his arms and sobbed silently, he was finally able to scream; loud, primitive, and full of rage, hate, and sadness. He couldn't recall how long he had been screaming, but by the time the noise finally died out and he needed to take a breath, the room had grown darker and his throat felt raw. With nothing else to do, he buried his face into his dead Promise's hair.

That's when he heard the sound. It was soft and he couldn't tell if he had really heard it, but when it repeated, he knew it was real. As everything was, now.

It was the sound of a soft shuffle, accompanied with a groan. Growing louder, Singer knew that it was heading directly toward him. He knew what it was, and realized that his outburst of despair had called it forth; and, to his surprise, he found that he did not care.

So when the zombie appeared in the open door of the bathroom, Singer accepted his fate and allowed the visitor passage to do what it was going to do. His life no longer had meaning, the only thing in it worth fighting for having been ravaged by a monster much worse than the being shuffling slowly up to him. As the zombie moved closer, Singer lowered his head and waited for the moment the creature attacked.

As he waited, he made a decision. It was what saved his life, and his soul, if you believe in that kind of thing.

With the zombie several feet away and his dead daughter bundled in his arms, Singer decided to sing Promise a final lullaby. It had been a staple of their relationship: whenever Singer was happy and with Promise, he would sing to her. He realized that in the month following the Day Everything Changed, he no longer sang to his daughter; any opportunity to do so was used to help keep the two of them alive.

With his final few moments, he decided to amend the tuneless month, and sang to his daughter one last time. It was a lullaby he'd written, solely for Promise. It expressed the love and happiness he felt that she was in his life, and it was one of her favorite songs.

The song itself had been particularly slow and, therefore, somewhat long in duration; so when Singer found himself at the end, he was confused: he was still alive and singing. He was holding onto the last note, one he felt was going to be his last note ever, and looked up to see what had happened to the undead character who had shuffled into the room. To his surprise, the zombie was still there; only, it wasn't moving toward him. In fact, it wasn't moving at all.

In his confusion, Singer cut off the last note and stared at the zombie. A second after he had stopped singing, though, the zombie started making its way toward him once more - this time, with a new-found fervor and hunger; as if its appetite had been made stronger because of the waiting. It quickened its step and was less than a foot away from Singer when he had an idea: he started singing again.

Since it was a last-minute idea, it wasn't anything remotely close to the lullaby. In fact, it ended up being a jingle for a type of gum that had been advertised several times a day, back before the zombies showed up. Either way, Singer was amazed to find that, once he started singing, the zombie calmed down to something of a restive state. Using this to his advantage, Singer was able to stand, holding his daughter's body, and walk out of the bathroom without suffering any harassment from the zombie. For good measure, once he was outside of the bathroom, he closed the door and locked the zombie into the bathroom; it looked as though the zombie was starting to follow him as he sang.

After avoiding any other zombies that were in the area, dodging a couple more with song, he found a safe and secluded place to bury his daughter. He wouldn't tell me where, and I didn't pry. From there, he wandered the streets of the city, trying to figure out the reason to this ability of his, which led him to where we now stood.

"The way I see it," Singer said as he concluded his story, "I was meant to do something with this gift I've been given.

"Until I find out what that something is, though," he said, finally taking his eyes off of the candy and looking at me for the first time since he started his story, "I will continue to wander and help those who may need me. Like you."

I could only nod my thanks to him. A soft smile quirked at the corner of his mouth, and he looked back at his hand. "Oh!" he exclaimed, as if seeing the Red Vines for the first time. "Vine-ally! Something worth eating!"

He looked at me, gave me a quick grin, and winked. As he turned away to forage for more food, I noticed that he didn't open up the package and start eating; instead, he put the candy in his shirt pocket, right above his heart.

Before his back was completely turned to me, I saw him pat the pocket. Gently.