Revision of a Tuesday Morning

Amber woke to the sound of the wind blowing through mom's wind chimes. The wind must have picked up. The chimes had been ringing all afternoon, but not with the same volume, the same joi de vive.

She sat up, dimly noting to herself that the wind chimes were every bit irritating as they always had been. She wondered why she hadn't thought to take them down. Too many other things on her mind she supposed.

Listening between the sharp, ringing little notes, she decided after a moment that Louis was still gone. He had left to find some food, even though she warned him, even though it was broad daylight. She had worried, in her own way, and laid down to take a nap. Not eating exhausted her quickly.

Had she slept? She wasn't sure, it was more and more difficult these days to draw a line between sleeping and waking. But yes, she must have slept. She had a dream, a dream about Mom and Kenny. They had been at the hockey rink, letting Kenny take his new pair of skates for a test drive. Kenny had been showing off and fallen on his ass, Amber had pointed and laughed, holding her hands to her stomach, tears squirting out of her eyes, and overbalanced, whap!, flat on her back. Mom had sat on the risers, with her blanket over her dead, useless legs, and laughed and laughed with them. It was a Wednesday and they were the only people in the rink, and Amber could hear their laughter bouncing off the walls around them, like a thousand people laughing.

Definitely a dream.

She got up, stiffly, her body feeling like it was falling apart around her. For all she knew, it was. Some water, that would help. She'd get a drink of water and then go out on the front porch and tear those fucking chimes down. It was starting to feel like every chirping little note was driving itself into her eye.

In the kitchen her eyes wandered over the mess with little interest. Call it apathy or depression, there just didn't seem much point in cleaning these days. Not a lot of people to entertain, har har har. She stepped over an overturned chair without righting it and traced her fingertip along the bloody noseprint on the outside of the stairwell. Some of the blood flaked off and stuck to her fingertip. She stared at the little black-red flakes for some time before rubbing them into so much nothing between her thumb and fingertip.

The faucet coughed and sputtered for a long time before thin, brackish water began to leak out of it. Amber wondered how much longer it would last, and how many other homes on the block were still using the tap for water. After some consideration, she figured, not much longer. No matter how many houses were running it. She didn't wonder too much what they would do when the water did run out. Something, that was for sure. No matter how many of them were killed, they seemed to survive. She drank from the tap until her stomach felt loose and cold.

The change hadn't happened as suddenly as it seemed, looking back. Looking back, days went by in flashes of memory, and moments, weeks streaked along, tied together with newsreels, birthdays, strange deaths and overtime at the office. Looking back, Amber realized with the perfect clarity of hindsight, just how it had all happened in a silent, paced fury. Not with a bang, not a whimper. A sigh.

You wanted them to moan and drag their limbs, their eyes whited and rotting, hands scrambling for purchase, the stink of the grave still on them. Generations upon generations were hardwired to expect their living dead to be slow and stupid, and certainly unaware of their condition. As it turned out, the living dead were completely aware of their condition.

And they seemed to prefer it.

Most of the studies that had been done were rushed at best, incomplete to be certain. As it turns out, even scientists aren't immune to disease, if a disease it what it was. It traveled through the blood and bodily fluids, and it traveled fast. So fast in fact, that, once infected, the body might grow ill and die in a matter of hours. Quietly, peacefully, the way many prayed that they might in fact leave this earth.

And then, between ten minutes and an hour later, you opened your eyes once more, with little changed. Bodily, in appearance, the same. Dead technically, as all normal brain function had ceased upon the initial death of the body. There was some speculation of deeper brain function, and there had to be some truth to it, because the body continued to operate, at least in the basest sense, but by the time it could be proven, very few left were interested in the details. No heartbeat, no breath, although both could and would be faked rather easily by a large percentage of the population before things really started to get interesting. No excretion, and this stumped some of the bigger and better thinkers of the scientific world as they rushed, full speed ahead, into their fate. They ate, oh yes. They had a rather enormous appetite, and a very specific one, as far as that was concerned. No piss, no shit - and here was another good one. No decay either. Bodies that were long 'dead', motoring around like they were fresh off the showroom floor.

A conclusion was drawn, and while there was little conclusive proof, it was accepted without much question in one of the last news casts in the Western hemisphere.

Live cells were going in, and at such a rate as to be utterly overwhelming, especially when the source was considered. Dead beings were operating with equal efficiency and, frankly, greater cunning than their living counterparts.

It seems that, at some point along the road between consuming and utilizing energy, mother nature had cut out the boring middle man of conversion. The dead were taking in living flesh, living blood and cells and putting them to immediate use. The dead were feeding off of the living and continuing to live.

The first impulse was to dip back into the now failed well of our hardwired cultural impulse and put a bullet between the eyes of anyone caught (pardon the pun) red-handed, and, thankfully, such an approach worked. It crossed many a mind that such a solution was simple beyond words - taking the computer out of a robot would accomplish the same - but it was a solution. The living dead could be killed once more, and with some permanency. At least in as much as it had shown itself thus far.

The problem wasn't killing them, it was identifying them.

Their cleverness was what truly astounded and, ultimately, trumped mankind. One in three of the people you worked with, drank with, went to church with and sat down to dinner with was a Dead-Again. And, when no one was looking, he or she would pull one of the others off to the side - at gun point perhaps, with simple persuasion most likely - and have an afternoon snack. Homes, office parties, bars and clubs - by the time humanity realized it was under attack, it was far too late to do much of anything about it.

And far too late, it was realized, the single identifying feature of the Dead-Again culture, and it was naturally the key to humanity at its core.

While cunning and intelligent and composed, the living dead were missing the blessing and the curse of life. They were emotionally flat. Beyond and outside of being cold or distant, no reaction of any kind would read from the heart. No love, regret, no passion or desire, no anger. No fear.

And this alone was perhaps what allowed for the living dead to become not only the majority, but the dominant species. Quietly, quietly they had crept into society and neatly herded it into a neat little package, and mankind had found it's only natural predator.

They didn't kill for the sake of killing, or relish in the spray of blood against their faces. They didn't tear and rend for the passion of screams of agony. No, in fact, death was preserved, often far longer than anyone would have expected it could be. A body they were feeding from could live for days.

Days.

The undead were clever though, in the same way and by the same nature that a venus flytrap or vase plant is clever. While their anomaly could go undetected under the correct circumstances - say, those of a grieving family member currently out of touch, emotionally numb from loss - their flat expressions, minimal response, their total lack of involvement in the people around them, was soon noticed. Especially once people started looking.

Some began trying emotions on, like masks or costumes. And the quiet hysteria of humanity deepened. Innocent deaths - those of the living - became more prevalent, defending one's self became questionable. Was this a person, driven by constant fear and a loss of loved ones, into gales of uncontrollable laughter, or the undead attempting to master the barking of the living that indicated joy and humor? Was the sobbing child on the side of the road an orphan or bait? Could the grinning grandmother have lost her mind, before or after the events of the year transpired? And how should one find out?

Amber remembered clearly the joy on her mother's face when she came home from work late that August afternoon. She'd missed a class at O'Hara's that day because the AM/PM was understaffed and she'd gotten juggled into a double shift. Now, with the fake plastic head of her hair dummy stuffed under one arm, purse slung over the other, all she could think about was getting her aching feet out of her sneakers and putting her butt on the couch. She needed to do a weave on her dummy before class on Wednesday, but it was going to have to wait. Right now the Ben and Jerry's in the fridge was calling, and there was a horror movie marathon on that night. She wanted her certificate, but she knew how to prioritize.

She'd come in the door and the first thing that seemed odd was the clothing hamper across the hallway. Not odd in the sense that she lived with a twelve year old boy who seemed to think it was illegal to pick up after himself, but odd that it was in the hallway. Kenny could be a booger, a real pain in the ass little brother if there ever was one, but he was careful not to leave anything lying where it would get in the way of Mom's wheelchair. The MS wasn't totally debilitating yet, but getting out of the chair to move something was difficult and painful for her. Both of her children made sure that all passageways were free and clear of clutter. It had become almost subconscious.

Curious but mostly irritated, Amber picked up the hamper and righted it. Even went to the great length of carrying it back to the laundry room where it belonged. She called out to her mother, her brother. No response. Must be watching TV, deep into an episode of CSI or something.

She went up the stairs and into her bedroom, not turning around to look into the den. She didn't notice that the TV wasn't on, and that her brother wouldn't be watching it even if it was. She didn't notice any of that stuff until later, and by then it was too late.

She did notice that the railing was loose at the bottom, and that was something new. Kenny and his insistences to use the railing as some kind of lever. He'd come down the stairs at a million miles an hour, in socks no doubt so that every time he pulled this particular stunt both his mother and older sister winced, picturing his face swinging full tilt into the wall as his feet lost purchase and ruined several thousands of dollars worth of dental work. Well, she was going to have a word with him about this, no matter what Mom said. It was ridiculous to race around the house like a crazy person.

Had she turned at that point she may in fact have noticed a rather large splatter of blood at the height and volume of a little brother's nose and mouth. May, upon inspection, have noticed the two teeth - one canine the other inscisor - laying at the base of the largest of three pools. Would at that point have followed the drag marks of blood, already drying.

The top of the hallway made her pause for thought, and it was, more than likely this pause that saved her life, no matter the value it later became.

The hallway was strewn from end to end, littered with framed photos and broken glass from the vase beside the bathroom door.

The decorations, simple and homey, were Ambers. It had been years since her mother had been able to make the climb up the stairs, and Amber had taken over the master bedroom and bath for herself. In fact, even Kenny wouldn't have been up here, unless...

Her heart dropped. She pictured bad men, men with guns and ski masks, men with intent to harm, kicking the front door in (although it had been totally intact when she came home, nonetheless, this is how her version of the crime began) and rushing into the home. Seeing her mother and her little brother, watching TV, harmless, helpless. They went for her mother and her little brother ran. Her mother was tipped out of her chair and this is where her imagination went blessedly blank. She shoved all thoughts of rape and torture to the side and ran with Kenny, up the stairs and down the hall, trashing it as he went to make their pursuit more difficult. She saw him slam her bedroom door as the bad men piled into it, kicking, demanding that he came out.

She cried her brother's name and rushed toward the door, closed now as it was closed every day when she left for work. She through the door open, her adrenaline rushing, her mind's eye wide open to the horror she would find within.

But the room was empty. Empty and undisturbed, at least as much as it had been when she had left for work that morning. Amber flicked on the lights, lifting the shadows from the corner of the bed and dresser. Her bed was still made, her school clothes still laid out from this morning when she had expected to come home, change, and head back out. Nothing was -

She hardly noticed the corner of the magazine poking out from beneath her bed. Had she not been looking so hard for something amiss she may never have noticed it, nudging the mag back into it's spot by simply walking around. She even had a moment to think to herself that while her little brother was developing the perversions of puberty, he at least had the sense enough not to get caught.

It was a nudie magazine, and she expected Kenny got an unfortunate surprise when he realized most of the naked figures in it were male. Just a gag gift from a few of her girlfriends at the salon who joked with her about never getting laid. Kenny must have found it and had the good sense to hide it again before -

What? Before he was forced to bolt down the hallway, slamming her door hard enough to knock all the photos off the wall and tear the banister out of it's screws? And what about the glass vase by the bathroom? With a little more strength and a diminishing fear of the evil men in ski masks, Amber called his name again. Then she called her mothers.

And in the silence of the house around her, Amber heard a noise that shocked the breath from her body and turned her knees into water.

Chuckling. A kind of chuffing, deeply breathless laughter. Coming from her closet.

Her closet was the kind of affair with the wooden doors, hinged in the middle and vented all the way up for who knew what reason. The lights were off behind them, but if they were on, she might be able to see inside.

With the lights off, but on in the room, one could see from the inside out. One could even, perhaps, see someone standing in the middle of the room, holding a slightly outdated porno mag.

Her heart took two hard beats and Amber felt her head grow light as her bladder released. The laughter had stopped, but there was no mistaking it had been there. And Amber recognized it. She had heard it's dry coughing sound, seasoned by years of cigarettes, now long quit. She had heard it turn up to its full cackling bark hundreds of times, especially during any of the National Lampoons movies.

She felt her mouth open, and heard herself speak even as her legs threatened to either run or collapse, either one but soon.

She called out to her mother. And the door began to shake.

The hinges were old and the door dragged a little bit, but it still opened faster than Amber had been ready for and even as her eyes fixed upon her mothers eyes and too-wide grin, Ambers legs made the decision for her.

She bolted out of the bedroom and across the hall, skidding on broken glass and photographs, her breath bursting painfully inside her chest.

And behind her she heard her mother running after her.

Running. Perhaps the only thing that saved Amber that evening was the fact that her mother hadn't been standing on those legs, much less running, in the better half of a year. The muscles, driven by something unimaginable, were nonetheless atrophied. They carried her in large, lunging steps, awkward and uncoordinated.

She skidded where her younger brother had skidded earlier, but her sneakers caught her skid better than his socks had his, which was the reason Amber had better control heading down the stairs at a million miles an hour. And the banister almost held on as she used it for leverage and pelted toward the door.

Almost. It let go with one complaining squeal and Amber nearly lost her footing coming around the corner. She caught herself, half on her feet as she planted her hands - not her face - into the wall with her little brother's blood all over it.

A cry of disgust and terror welled up from her and her mother chuckled once again from behind her.

Amber had less than the barest moment to look into the den she had so casually disregarded earlier, but it was enough to burn a picture into her mind for the rest of her natural life.

Her brother's eyes were open. Wide open, staring at the ceiling. His body was thrown at a strange angle over the arm of the couch. His head and arms dangled almost to the foot, the middle of his back bent in a severe U. Blood had soaked through the den throw rug and was starting to soak into the hardwood floor.

And he was breathing.

It should have stopped her, stopped her in her tracks. She should have felt that pull, deep inside her guts, in her heart, deep inside her soul to stop, fight, turn back and gather that little twelve year old body into her arms and save it.

But she ran. She ran into the night, into the streets where already half of the street lights were put out by force or neglect, down the road she had grown up on that now felt more foreign and alien than she ever could have imagined. She ran until her lungs were burning and dark butterflies were passing in front of her eyes. She ran and kept running, still hearing that dark, breathy chuckle behind her.

She finally stopped near the edge of the town proper, and caught her breath at the overgrown driveway of the St. Cornelius Baptist Church. They, all four of them, when her dad had been in the picture still, had gone to St. Cornelius. A small wooden building, now boarded up, it's lawn overgrown, it had the smells that still brought back the awe and reverence of a child on Sunday for her. The pews had been hard and uncomfortable, but smelled of fresh stain and polish. The breath of mothballs on spring air, the scent of old paper. When she pushed her way inside and underneath the boarded up doors, the vaguest trace of those old smells were still there, buried beneath the smell of decayed wood and earth. Perhaps that's why she stayed. Or perhaps she was just too tired to go on.

The next morning things should have seemed better. Should have seemed like a dream or something. Something she had made up, something blown out of proportion, like a hysteria from puberty or the morning after a hard drunk. But it was nothing of the sort, and Amber realized she was alone, orphaned in a world that was getting harder every minute.

She started by looking around for places to stay. The YMCA, friend's houses, churches that were more foundationally stable, even abandoned homes. Everything was full to capacity, and questionable at best. Beside every ousted family and homeless vagabond was someone with her mothers smile. Or too many tears. Or nothing at all behind their otherwise normal faces.

The abandoned homes, which at first seemed a childish hope at best, proved most likely. There were more and more of them creeping up. Homes with no porch light on, homes with no cars in the drive. Homes where the mail, still unbelievably delivered, stood in piles on the porch. They were more than serviceable. Most that she either broke - or merely stepped into - were fully powered by gas and electric. She could watch HBO and Cinemax. She could take a hot shower and eat leftovers. Then she could take a cold shower and eat canned food. Then she started saving the water to drink.

She spent just over an entire week On The Run - which was how she thought of it. On The Run, an untied orphan when her hopes and the sun were up, a sad pink little thing, uncovered and unprotected in the wild world when the moon was up and she was lonely and terrified. By the end of that first week, the slow and quiet diminishing of the world as she knew it was undeniable. There weren't any riots in the streets or fires burning unattended (at least not in rural Wisconsin), but the world was coming to an end just the same. Not with a bang. Not a whimper. A sigh.

She learned a great deal that first week, and only by being alone and On The Run did she learn it so well. She learned not to approach anyone. Not anyone. If they seemed infected, healthy, crazy, totally sane, it didn't matter. All people, dead or alive, had become equally dangerous, just as likely to shoot you as eat you - perhaps both, depending entirely where they were on the path to redefinition. She learned that the dead weren't interested much in regular food, and, as there were more and more of them every day, scavenging for food wasn't going to be a problem for at least ten years or so.

She learned that water was a different matter entirely.

The dead were thirsty mothers. Perhaps it was all the salt and fat that the modern man carried in his blood stream. Perhaps it was just that old habits died hard. Any way you spray painted the wall, the message was the same. There was a shortage of water developing, and it was going to become a problem.

She hid and carried as many bottles as she could in the old backpack she had scavenged from some other home early in the week, but even in rationing, it began to run short. She dipped into toilets and freezers, and learned to carry a minature Brita filter, the kind that looked like a sports bottle from Nasa, everywhere she went. She figured that by the time winter rolled around, she'd be set with all that melting snow. If she was alive that long.

Seemed like everyone else had her idea too, but that was just speculation, based on the raided freezers and toilet tanks she now constantly encountered. She just supposed. There wasn't anyone to ask really.

She might never have met Louis if he hadn't been so clumsy in sneaking up on her. She was raiding the freezer in a trailer home on the far south side of town. She even had time to ponder the shortage of water puddles in the narrow plastic trays, what used to be ice cubes. The generator had run down sometime the day before, and there were still tiny floating squares of ice in each little rectangular divot. Half of the trays were empty, three more full, and one only three quarters full. Odd, not that someone - someone living in a trailer home she not to kindly thought - had put back empty trays, or even a three quarters empty tray, but that the partially empty tray had traces of water in the bottom. When ice broke free, it broke clean. There had been water in the partially full tray, but that didn't make any sense. It meant that someone had sipped the water out of -

The floor creaked behind her and Amber froze, still leaning into the fridge top freezer, hair hanging in her face, eyes fixed on the ice cube trays with their tiny cubes of ice still floating in the water. The floor creaked again. And then sniffled.

Her body was suddenly galvanized with adrenaline. This wasn't like discovering the physical remains of her mother lurking in her bedroom closet. This wasn't terror, or at least not entirely. The black butterflies in front of her eyes dilated into pin points of white light and her nails dug so hard into the palms of her hands that the next day she would find little half moon wounds there. This was fight, not flight, and Amber's body tensed to whirl, all teeth and nails and fury. She was tired of running, tired of being bullied.

She whirled and indeed must have looked like she was ready to inflict some damage, because the six one black man with the heavily muscled arms holding a two by four stepped back not once, but twice.

She held herself, unconscious of her crouched, ready to spring stance, unconscious of the fact that her lips were drawn back up over her teeth and her eyes were squinted half shut. All Amber saw in that moment was the door and the big black man standing in front of it. All she saw was a barrier to her freedom.

Until he dropped the board and shook his head, covering his face with his hands.

"Oh Lord. Oh Lord help me. I can't do it. I can't. She's just a kid Lord, forgive me." He held himself up with the help of the formica topped counter beside him and Amber felt her legs go to jelly. The dead had learned the pretense of human emotion. Not the finer details, like regret. Like self doubt.

Still, she wasn't getting any closer without a weapon.

She got his attention after a few moments. He looked at her looking at him and decided she was alive, really and wholly alive. By that time she realized the same could be said of him, and, without much fuss, they fell in together.

Louis had been haunting the trailer park homes for the last half of the week. The Friday before he had noticed his wife acting funny. He didn't realize just how funny till her found her first numbing and then removing the baby's first two fingers. He never did find out what happened to his older son and this was a point of self loathing for him. He had gone to the trailer park because, as he figured it, if it wasn't a place you had to live, why would you? The living would have fled and the dead have followed. Until he met her, he had been right in his thinking.

He had decided the night before meeting Amber that his personal goal in life was going to be the extermination, in as much as he was able, of the living dead. He said God came to him in a dream and forgave him the blood he would need to spill, as it was void of the souls of his children. Amber had been the first person he had come upon. Having discovered her for her real living soul, he doubted himself too much to slay anyone or anything. Amber thought it for the best. Judging by the way he had snuck up on her, she figured his success would have been limited.

Amber brought him back to her house that night. It may have been a sense of safety in numbers, or that her near run-in with her new friend left her tired of running and tired of being quietly bullied. Maybe the familiarity of contact made broke the final straw in homesickness.

Still, she sent him in first. Not that she hadn't become rather apt at casing a house for activity and determining it's safety before entering. She just didn't want to find her mother. Or her brother. No matter what their state was.

Louis was inside for a long time. So long that Amber began to get nervous and think she might just keep moving. She hadn't been to the West side of town yet, not past the school anyway. She might find water, food, hell she might find more people or a rescue unit or a camp of scientists with a cure for humanity.

Louis poked his head out just as the day began to darken toward twilight. He said that the house was clear. He also had found a case of water bottles in the basement.

That night Amber and Louis made a feast of her mother's emergency kit, chock full of packaged meat, puddings, nuts and, of course, water. They warmed themselves next to the Coleman propane stove and talked around what was happening out there. Eventually Louis asked her why she kept peeking at the darkened den, did she see something there, did she want him to check it out. Amber quivered on the edge of telling him about her little brother's broken body, about the dark stain that blended into the oriental pattern throw, but that she could still make out.

Instead she burst into the tears of a sixteen year old girl and trembled at the overwhelming comfort of his arms around her, his t-shirt drinking her tears. That night they made an awkward kind of love, the kind that got better as it got along but was best for what it was. An admittance of humanity.

Two days passed, then three and they settled into a routine that was almost like coming home. He would forage for food in the grocery stores and the surrounding homes. She would collect the tarps and garbage bags they had set up in the backyard to trap the dew and filter the water. They would eat, they would nap. Sometimes they made love, sometimes they played board games. Sometimes they talked, but not often and never for long, at least not about anything serious. Least of all about the elephant in the corner. The truth of life as it suddenly was, and as it seemed to be bound to remain, was too sensitive to approach. Sometimes, lying awake, the warm bulk of him her only comfort in the night, Amber wondered what it would be like. Life. Like this. The concept seemed to her a vast and all consuming vacuum, more like nothing at all, forever. She simply could not wrap her mind around it.

And a week or more passed. Amber fell asleep for a nap one afternoon while Louis was out and when she woke up, he was asleep beside her.

Except he wasn't sleeping. She realized that even before she was fully awake. The way his body heat wasn't baking out from his skin, the way it seemed to draw heat from her. The way his chest stood still and his eyes sunk in behind their lids and his lips had taken a bluish cast to them. Amber stared hard at his face, his strong features, a face that was unspeakably handsome to her. Then she got up and made herself some tea.

They tried to use the Coleman stove as infrequently as possible. They had found some replacement propane tanks, but the source was limited. Maybe when they moved on in the spring. Louis talked about that now and again, when he was feeling light and hopeful. In the spring, he figured, they would move on. Head south, toward the heat and the water. He speculated - she thought it was more hope that anything else - that the dead didn't like the heat so much, that there would be fewer of them south. That was their plan, if they had one at all. Amber clung to that plan as the teapot started to whistle on top of the little stove and Louis got up in the bedroom.

She heard him go to the bathroom, then pull on a sweatshirt. She sweetened her tea as he shuffled out into the kitchen and stopped behind her.

He was just under a foot taller than her. She closed her eyes and stirred her tea as he leaned in and, without speaking a word, paused with his mouth beside the nape of her neck. He drew in a breath, breathing in the smell of her skin, her hair, her youth, and placed a kiss lightly on her neck before sitting down at the table. He asked her what was for dinner. She told him she was going to make stew from some of the beef jerky. With the canned potatoes, like he liked it. Canned peaches for dessert.

He nodded. Told her he had some things to do, to eat without him. He left and when he came back that night she pretended to be asleep, even though he had to know she was just laying as still as she could in bed.

Still, he was warm again, and the bulk of his body beside her drew her like a flower to the sun. Before she drifted off she allowed gravity to snug her into the side of his frame and she forced herself to stop questioning why he hadn't torn her limb from limb. She was pretty sure she already knew.

Neither one of them pretended they didn't know what was going on. She just didn't see the value in discussing it. She got used to cooking for one, and got used to his absence in the mornings and the evenings. In fact, he seemed even more handy around the house, fixing things and making life easier.

He rigged the tarps and garbage bags so that the pull of the dew would draw all of the water into a single funnel and that funnel went into a large pail. No more collecting water, all she had to do was filter. He brought home more and better food for her than ever before, although his grin as he brought it into the house made her anxious. It was almost as if he were humoring her.

He even re-arranged the previously electric heating system so that it would tolerate the barrel bottom wood stove he dragged home one night. Soon the entire house was filled with warm, wood scented air. It crossed Amber's mind that it was at the very least a fire danger, but when compared with the danger of the oncoming Wisconsin winter, the threat seemed tolerable at least.

Perhaps it was the heat that allowed her to drift off for so long that early winter afternoon. Perhaps it was the excess of warm food and clean water, or the hot bath she had allowed herself. Either way, she closed her eyes late that morning and opened them after dark.

She was stiff and her joints popped like tiny firecrackers as she dragged herself out of the bed. Her mouth felt dry and she desperately needed a drink, but other than that, Amber couldn't recall a day when she had felt nearly so good. In fact, she felt great.

He was standing in the doorway with an armload of wood as she came down the stairs, passing the Rorschach test pattern of her brother's blood without noticing it for the hundredth or so time since she had come home.

His eyes locked on hers and the smile dropped from his face. For the first time since he had died, Louis allowed himself to relax and something like joy flickered inside of her. Then that was dead too. He kissed her on the mouth, something he did infrequently, perhaps because of their vast age difference.

She tasted blood and something inside of her cramped. His flat eyes met hers and he took her hand and led her into the night.

Now all she could hear was the tinkling of the windchimes, ringing like there was some sort of storm coming. But there was no storm coming. She would have been able to smell it on the wind. She hated those chimes. She was going to take them down, right now, before she forgot about it again and they woke her from another good nap. Another good dream.

Her hand was on the knob to the front door and she was beginning to turn it when something deep inside, something ancient and instinctive, stopped her hand.

She stood, her ears ringing with the piercing sounds of the chimes, and focused. The chimes were going like gangbusters, sure. But that was it. The flag hung, barely a ripple in the old red white and blue. The trees were cased in a light suit of fresh snow, and it clung delicately to the branches. Nothing else to indicate a storm, or even a high wind. The tarps with their cache of frosted water were silent, no breeze sighed in the willow in the front yard. No flag snapped, no leaf fell. So Amber listened harder.

And heard a heartbeat. Two. Three. One of them was nervous, breathing hard, and she thought she could even smell sweat. The nervous one was in the middle, and there was another, further back, she could hardly make him out. But the first, the one with the steady pulse and the slow breath, he was close. Just under the window to the door whose knob she held if she was correct.

They had gotten soft. She should have seen this coming. They had rested on their laurels and assumed too much. The flock was scared yeah, but they had assumed their fear would keep them scattered, disorganized. Now here were three, who had clearly watched and waited for Louis, the bigger of the two, to be gone. Who had induced noise to draw her attention. They intended to kill her. They all three had guns, she could smell the oil and the powder.

But they also had flesh and hot, salty blood. She could smell that too.

Amber might had stood still for another minute or even two, working out different approaches and ideas, calculating the outcomes and options. She had nearly settled on drawing them in by crying out for help - she had mastered the begging, cow eyed look that had gotten her so much in her former life - when she heard Louis approaching and the crying of a baby.

She peeked out to see him, the infant cradled in his powerful arms. He cried out for the men to stop, don't shoot, he was alive, he had found this baby - before they opened fire.

They didn't aim for the baby, but they didn't go to great lengths to avoid hitting it either. That had been Louis's fatal flaw. They had clearly seen the blood drenched cloth it was wrapped in, didn't have to be geniuses to see it only had one arm. Louis never had been able to avoid snacking when he could.

His body was large, well muscled, and so took the first few bullets well. It almost looked like someone was behind him, pulling at his clothes, tugging at him. Then one of the bullets tore into his throat, nearly removing his head. The blood didn't spurt, gush. It barely ran, like thick sap on a cold day. And the men knew they were right about what he was. And they redoubled their fire.

The child had already stopped crying. Whether hit by a bullet or fainted due to blood loss, it didn't matter. It had to be crushed by the body of the man who fell on top of it.

Louis twitched and fought on the ground, his feet still scrambling for purchase. The first man, the one with the level pulse and steady hand, stepped up to him, rolled him over with his foot and shot him in the head. Amber realized she had more to contend with than she had originally planned for, and this was going to take some effort.

The second man bought her some time by retching into the bushes on the side of the house. The third man stood beside him, weapon drawn, as the first re-approached the house. He told them to pull themselves together and Amber forced the fluids to come out of her eyes and run down her cheeks. She hated to lose the moisture, but this was survival.

The first man said they had to go in and finish the bitch now, so the two of them had better be ready to back him up. Amber backed up to the stairs and set her hands to trembling. Her chest hitched as they kicked in the door and she made herself wince as they drew their guns. Her distended belly and wet cheeks held their fire and Amber kneeled before them and begged for her life. One of them said holy shit, she's pregnant and they stood in a half ring around her. And Amber waited for the rest of her life to change.