Sophie Littlefield - Banished

I almost couldn’t do it. I squeezed my eyes shut and felt hot tears leaking down my face, and still I couldn’t stop making sounds, quiet little sobs of desperation and horror. But I made myself trace my fingers through the fur around his torso, finding two more dented places where bullets had gone into him. One I could barely feel, lodged deep in the muscle, but one had entered his body far enough that I couldn’t feel it at all, right over his heart.

Rascal had been shot three times. He should be dead. But he wasn’t.

Bullets couldn’t kill him. Because he was already dead.

Because I had made him into a zombie .

I was cursed. I was no Healer-I was a zombie-maker.

I’d known it all along, deep inside. The accident came rushing back and images freeze-framed through my head in rapid succession: all the blood, his organs spilling from his body, the way his eyes rolled up a final time.

Their emptiness when I brought him back.

I brought him back . From the dead.

And now he couldn’t die. He’d been shot and the bullets were in his body as proof; they’d ripped through skin and bone and his very heart, and yet he soldiered on, a robot of a dog.

A zombie of a dog.

I screamed and pushed him from the bed, as hard as I could. His body fell to the floor with a thud, and he got up slowly and stood there unblinking, staring at nothing.

I scrambled to my feet and started backing toward the door, and when the wailing didn’t stop I realized I was still screaming.

The door pushed open and strong arms circled me from behind, practically lifting me off the floor. I fought and kicked and tried to break away as Kaz dragged me down the hall to the living room.

“Stop, Hailey,” he commanded, but he didn’t try to protect himself. Slowly, I ran out of energy and stopped fighting him, and my screams turned to sobs and he held me tight against him.

I heard a door open and Prairie’s and Anna’s voices.

“What happened?”

“Is Hailey all right?”

“He’s not healed,” I cried, letting go of Kaz and running to Prairie. I wanted to throw myself into her arms but I knew how fragile she was, so I just hugged myself, shaking all over. “I turned Rascal into a zombie.”

“YOU HAVE TO TELL ME the truth,” I said as Anna tucked an afghan around me and Prairie. We were sitting together on the living room couch. “ All of it.”

Kaz had taken Rascal out to the yard after I insisted I couldn’t stay in the house with him for another second. He put water on for more tea, and the four of us huddled in the living room. Chub, thankfully, slept through the whole thing.

“We never… I don’t know if zombie is really the right word,” Prairie began hesitantly.

“That’s what Rascal is!” I burst out. “He can’t be killed. He came back from the dead.” I was struggling to control my breathing, and my hands were shaking so badly that I jammed them together. “Just, please, tell me how it happened. Tell me what I did.”

Tell me Milla won’t end up like this

Tell me I’ll never do this to Chub

“This won’t happen again,” Prairie said carefully. She exchanged glances with Anna, who’d said little since I woke everyone up.

They both looked so worried that my anxiety threatened to bubble up again. I felt the scream building inside me, so I squeezed my hands even more tightly together, the knuckles going white. “How can I be sure?”

“It’s only… you must never heal someone who has died. That’s the one rule. Mary taught us that from the start, me and your mom, before we ever healed anything, even a lizard. She wouldn’t even let us heal a dead squirrel or mouse-she made us promise.” Prairie reached for my hands and tugged at them gently until, like a chunk of ice thawing, I relaxed my grip and let her lace her fingers through mine. “I am so sorry you didn’t have anyone to teach you, to explain it all to you.”

You know you’re the future, Hailey

Gram’s words, the dozens of times she’d given me that strange, hungry look-they chased each other around my head, trying to take hold, to grow into full-blown terror. I fought back, focusing on the feeling of Prairie’s warm hands on mine. After a moment, I realized something-the bandages were off her arm, and the wound that Anna had stitched closed already looked better.

Healers can’t help each other, but we’re strong . That was what she’d told me.

I was strong. I grabbed that thought and held it tight.

“So explain it all to me now.”

“There’s not much more to tell. Just the one rule: you must never heal someone who has died. Their body will come back, for a while anyway, but their soul is gone. They don’t feel love, or pain, or any emotion at all. They respond to basic stimuli and will eat and even sleep, though they don’t dream. They can’t make decisions for themselves, though they can hear and process instructions and will do whatever they are told.”

“Rascal does what I say. If I tell him to come, or stay, or-You knew , didn’t you?”

“I… yes, I was pretty sure from the moment I saw him. That’s why I went looking for scars on him.”

“How could you not tell me? How could you know what I had done to him and, and let me keep him in the car with us, let me keep touching him-”

“Hailey, I’m so sorry, but I didn’t know how to tell you without upsetting you-”

“Without upsetting me? I’m so far past upset, I can’t believe-”

“I had to keep you calm,” Prairie cut me off. “I truly am so, so sorry, Hailey, but you weren’t ready to know.”

We were silent for a moment, and I realized it was true. I had been so close to falling apart these past few days. One more thing might have tipped me over the edge.

“How long have you known about… what happens? If you heal, after?”

“Mary used to tell us stories,” Prairie said. “Horror stories, I guess, meant to scare us so we wouldn’t be tempted. When she was a little girl, one of the other Healers couldn’t help herself and she brought back a cat, a pet she loved, and it was just like Rascal. It frightened all the children, the way it just sat on the porch, not moving. People wouldn’t walk by the house.”

“What happened to it?”

Prairie bit her lip. “Mary said it started to… well, its body began to decompose. The bodies of the healed dead can’t sustain life forever.”

“Oh my God,” I cried, fresh horror surging through my brain. Would Rascal start to decompose? Was his body rotting already?

“One day someone-they never found out who-broke the cat’s neck. It was a blessing, Mary said.”

“But I thought they couldn’t be killed.”

“There are a couple of ways-the brain stem has to be destroyed. A… decapitation would work. Crushing of… that area of the brain… A sharp break of the vertebrae could accomplish that, if… Well, you get the idea.”

“It was good person, compassionate person,” Anna cut in.

I noticed Kaz in the doorway and realized he’d been listening, a pair of steaming cups in his hands. He came forward and set the cups down. His eyes met mine and there was sadness in them.

“I’m sorry about Rascal,” he said quietly, “but it’s not your fault.”

“It is . I did it. No one else.” I didn’t add that at some level I had known that what I was doing was wrong, when I felt the energy rushing from me to Rascal’s lifeless body. Even before I knew I was a Healer.

“How… long?” I asked when nobody spoke.

“The decomposition takes longer than it would in a normal death,” Prairie said carefully. “Depending on the health of the person-or animal-it can take up to two or three times as long for the tissues to fail. And other conditions affect it too, of course.”