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“And you’ll teach them differently? Try to make them less...corrupt?” Nancy didn’t like the taste of the word on her tongue, but it fell out of her mouth unbidden.

The man shook his head once, slowly. “No. We must soon leave this place.”

Nancy’s eyes widened. “But,” she sputtered, “but you can’t just
leave
them! If you’re killing off all the adults with your apocalypse and then you’re leaving, who will
take care
of the babies? They’re helpless! You realize that, don’t you? They’ll all die!” She felt her heart begin to race. She had come to a place where she could accept her own inevitable end, accept that she might be able to join Ken wherever he had gone. But she couldn’t handle the idea of Sarah being left to starve to death, alone and terrified.

“I never said that the children would be left alone.”

Nancy blinked away a few traitorous tears and looked into the man’s bloody eyes. His mental voice had sounded almost
amused
. “What do you mean?” she begged.

His eyes swirled maddeningly for a long time before he spoke. “We seek out not only the progeny of your species, but also suitable caretakers to ensure that they survive to create a better humanity. Do you not comprehend the reason why I am here, speaking to you?”

Finally, Nancy was struck dumb. This piece of information, for whatever reason, refused to compute. Her mind kept throwing out this ridiculous image of her as a post-apocalyptic babysitter, surrounded by orphaned children being dropped off by bloody-eyed angels. She had a sudden psychotic urge to laugh out loud.

For the first time since their conversation had begun, the man shifted his entire body so that Sarah was safely positioned over the deck of the ship. “I will leave this little one to you,” the telepathic voice said.

She should have been grateful, happy even, but all Nancy could do was gesture toward the zombies shambling around on the shore. “I will take her,” she said slowly, “and believe me when I say that I will love her and take care of her, but tell me, what kind of life can I possibly give her when we’re constantly fleeing for our lives, hiding out, never sure when we might be able to eat next?”

The man began to move toward her and Nancy sensed an imminent end to the conversation approaching.

“The plague will not last much longer,” the voice told her. “The reanimated cannot exist for extended periods of time. Before the moon waxes and wanes twice more they shall fall and rot and return to the Earth. You need only survive until then and the planet will be open to you once more.”

He stopped within a foot of Nancy. Suddenly, strangely, she felt small and ashamed. For the life of her she couldn’t have explained why. She pulled herself to her feet and stared straight forward at Sarah. From this close she could see that the baby was sleeping gently, the movement of her chest almost imperceptible beneath the blankets. Nancy bit her lip. She longed to reach out and grab the child, but she found that she was frightened, afraid that if she made the move the baby might vanish without warning. With a great deal of willpower she forced herself to look up into the eyes of the man, her Angel of Death. His face was expressionless, unemotional, but the red of his eyes swirled and stirred. Nancy thought it was both lovely and horrifying at the same time.

Finally, after what seemed like an eternity, he extended his arms and offered the baby. Tentative, her mind filled with a thousand fearful outcomes, Nancy reached out and accepted the little bundle of blankets. Sarah stirred, ever so slightly, opened her small mouth in a large yawn, and snuggled happily against Nancy’s chest. Nancy couldn’t resist; she leaned forward and placed a wet kiss on the child’s forehead.

“Survive, Nancy King,” the man’s voice told her, not unkindly. “Survive and raise your children well.”

“Child
ren
?” she asked with a frown. She glanced at Sarah. “There’s just the one. Are you bringing me more?”

It may have been a trick of the light, or perhaps entirely her imagination, but for just half a second Nancy thought that she saw the ghost of a smile twitch across the man’s face. “No, Nancy King,” he replied. “I am not bringing more. You already have two.” He didn’t move, but his liquid red eyes seemed to shift so that he was looking down, past the baby in Nancy’s arms, and down to her abdomen.

Nancy’s lips parted and her heart seemed to stop dead in her chest. One hand dropped to her stomach and she stared down at it in awe and disbelief. When she finally looked back up, a million more questions suddenly swimming through her head, the man was gone.

She never saw her Angel of Death or any of his brethren again.

Epilogue

Nancy stretched and let out a long sigh. The sun was hot this morning. It felt good on her face, but it was starting to make her sleepy so she decided to get up. She reeled in her fishing line and found it empty. Oh well. She poked at the small cooler that she’d filled with the past couple of days’ catch. She’d painstakingly cleaned the fish of bones and covered them in salt that she’d found in the boat’s kitchen cupboards. She wasn’t exactly sure if that was how salting fish worked, but she figured the smell would warn her if her supplies began to turn.

Sarah stirred in her makeshift playpen, constructed from the rowboat that Nancy had taken from the shore. She rubbed her eyes sleepily and spotted Nancy. Her chubby little arms went up and her face expanded into a playful grin. “Mama!” she gurgled.

Nancy smiled back and thought about how big the baby girl was getting. She was getting heavier too, which made her harder to carry, but it was really a good thing. It meant she was healthy. Nancy happily pulled the girl out of the row boat and into a warm hug. “Mama’s right here, sweet thing,” she cooed.

While Nancy packed her salt fish and a few other supplies into a pack, Sarah crawled around on deck and played with a small stuffed bear that Nancy had concocted. She’d wanted the child to have something in memory of Greg, who had died getting her to safety, so before she’d given the boy a burial at sea she’d taken his shirt. She cut away the parts that were stained with blood and dismembered a couple of pillows for thread and stuffing. Now the baby had something special from the ‘big brother’ she’d never know.

Nancy only wished she could have made something similar for Ken’s son.

She lay down her pack and placed both her hands on her belly, which had only just begun to protrude a bit. She didn’t know how she knew it was a boy, but she just
knew
. She could already picture him with a sweet, shy smile and hair that was black like his father’s. He was going to be beautiful.

With a sigh she slid on her homemade baby carrier, fabricated from another backpack, and slid Sarah into it so that the baby was nuzzled up against her chest. The pack of supplies went on her back, and her fishing knife went into her belt. Now was the hard part. Sarah watched with interest from her carrier as Nancy struggled, panting and puffing, to heave the row boat back over to the pulleys she’d used to retrieve it from the water in the first place. It took longer than she would have liked, but it wasn’t as though she was in a rush.

When the row boat had been lowered back into the calm, blue waters, Nancy leaned against the railing of her fishing vessel to catch her breath and look out onto the shore. There were bodies scattered everywhere, but none of them moved. She’d counted the days and kept a diligent watch. The time that the Angel (she found she couldn’t think of him as anything else) had foretold had come and gone. She’d been fishing off deck when they began to fall, quite suddenly. She had waited five full days after that just to be sure. Not a single body had so much as twitched in those days, so now, finally, it was time.

Crawling down the ladder on the side of the boat was more difficult than it had been when she’d climbed up. She was rested and fed this time, but she was also carrying a lot of extra weight. Sarah giggled at the sight of the water when they dropped into the row boat.

It didn’t take long to make it to the shore. Before she knew it Nancy was standing on the wharf again, looking out into the silent town. She could smell the death from the rotting bodies, but she had nothing to fear from the dead now. Only in her nightmares could they bother her any longer.

“Mama?”

The baby had reached up and grabbed Nancy’s chin and she realized that she’d been staring straight forward, unimpeded, but unsure. Now she smiled and offered a finger to the curious little girl. Her other hand she again lay on her stomach, as though to reassure the child within as well.

“Okay, children,” she said with a deep breath. A world of possibilities laid before them. “Where would you like to go first?”

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