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Ezra Standish remembered too late why he preferred to stay within the walls of Four Corners. He’d agreed to this journey mostly because he needed some time away from… everything. Nathan Jackson expected him to be the solution to the plague. Chris Larabee expected him to be something entirely different and equally unlikely. Ezra was sick of expectation.
The town had to have medicines that couldn’t be gotten in close proximity, and when the chance came to make the long trip out to Red Fork, Ezra hadn’t exactly jumped at the chance, but he had volunteered rather more quickly than was his usual.
Now, finally, they were nearly home, and for Ezra, tomorrow evening's glimpse of those wood and adobe city walls couldn't come too soon.
He and Buck Wilmington had set out for Red Fork two weeks ago, making the zig-zag journey from town to town so as not to be caught out in the open. Clearly more for Buck than for himself. Zombies had no use for one of their own, did they?
“You ain’t one of them,” Buck growled at him, as they approached the next tiny town. “You’re just… a little different now.”
Ezra chuckled. “Different,” he repeated. “A pleasant way of putting it.” He looked down at his impeccable clothing, the way the silk shirt and fine wool jacket hid the indelible mark of his own damnation. “I am what I was made, Mr. Wilmington,” he murmured fatalistically. “There is no changing it.”
“Don’t mean you ain't human,” Buck insisted. “Hell, Ezra, like it or not, you’re one of us.” Buck slowed his horse as they topped the ridge outside of the town and hissed out a breath. “Well this looks…”
“Indeed it does,” Ezra commented sadly.
Gusselton was dead. In the quiet of late afternoon no person moved, no horse stood out in the paddock. They hadn't come this way headed out to Red Fork. They'd thought the town was still here.
“Hell,” Buck whispered. He pulled himself together and prodded Lady back into movement. “Reckon we should see if anything’s left,” he suggested dully.
Ezra wanted to say something, but there was nothing to say. Buck felt every dead town, every turned soul… Ezra just followed him down the trail.
They tied the horses up at the south end of town and walked, looking in windows and seeing nothing.
“Jensen and that friend of his—Alvarez?—were through here a couple of weeks ago,” Buck said quietly. “Said the place was small and the people weren’t much on outsiders—religious group of some sort. But they were surviving.” He groaned in anger and slammed the swinging door of the saloon against the wall. “Damn place has already been looted.”
“Or they moved on,” Ezra said, looking at the road speculatively.
“What do you mean?” Buck asked, a glimmer of hope in his voice.
Ezra walked out into the middle of the street to get a better look. Night was coming. They’d need to hole up somewhere soon. “Wagon tracks,” he pointed out. “Heavy ones. And quite a number of them.” He gestured to the empty town. "There are no bodies, human or equine."
Buck smiled, relieved. “Well, hell, I guess we should hope they found a safer—” Without warning, he spun around, back toward their horses, his hand on the butt of his gun, though he kept it holstered.
Ezra didn’t ask why he’d stopped, simply sank into the shadows of the saloon’s front door as Buck moved toward the horses, keeping to the dark spaces himself. Ezra heard a sound, then; light running footsteps headed toward the far end of town, back behind the row of buildings.
“Buck!” he whispered, garnering his friend’s attention and gesturing to the alley beside him. He darted down it, hand on his gun. There was no one in the alley, and turning into the open space behind the buildings yielded nothing more.
“Where are you?” he whispered to himself, walking softly down the length of the town. He was nearly to the end when a soft cough, hastily suppressed, brought him to a stop. Feet scrambled in the near distance. The livery…
Buck was suddenly behind him, curious and ready, and the two of them entered the large barn carefully, guns drawn. The cough came again, followed by a tiny sob that had Ezra raising his hand and forgetting his gun.
That was a child…
“Hello?” Ezra called softly, stowing his pistol. “You can come out. We won’t hurt you.”
Buck radiated annoyance, but held his tongue.
The child shifted, somewhere in the empty stalls, and Ezra resisted the urge to move. “I expect you’re cold, aren’t you?” The cough came again, more insistent this time, and Ezra’s ever-ready hacking tried to rise in response. He forced it down.
A small brown head peeked out from the side of a stall halfway down the line, and Ezra smiled, welcoming and safe. “There now, you see?” he said quietly. “You’re safe.”
“Ain’t nobody gonna hurt you, kid,” Buck murmured softly, his voice betraying the fact that he'd only just figured out with whom they were dealing. “What’re you doing all alone here?”
The child wasn’t going to answer, that was clear. He coughed again, deep and wrenching, and the look of terror on his face was a feeling Ezra knew well. “We won’t shoot you,” he said, trying to convince the child. “I promise you that.” And then he let himself cough. Not identical to the child’s, but enough like it to let him know a simple cough wasn’t going to kill him.
The child moved out of the stall, staring at him in shock, a glimmer of hope in his eyes. “You won’t shoot me?” He was small and skinny, maybe ten years old. His black skin blended into the shadows.
Buck stepped forward carefully, a charming smile on his face. “Kid, Ezra here? He’d never shoot a child, and I’d never shoot anyone—” Ezra coughed again, in derision of Buck’s claim— “so I figure you’re safe as houses.”
The little boy smiled shyly.
“I do need my saddlebag back, though,” Buck said, causing the boy to start guiltily. That explained Buck’s initial move toward their horses. He must have heard the boy moving over there. “We got food enough to share.”
Which was exactly what they did. Ezra stayed with the boy and Buck went and got the horses. The barn had two entrances, but the back one was blocked by hay bales—whether out of expediency or to protect the horses from the zombies, Ezra couldn’t tell. The remaining door was easily defensible by one man keeping watch, and the horses had comfortable lodgings as well.
The little boy didn’t say another word as the two men bedded down their steeds and went about setting up camp within the structure. He watched avidly as Chaucer misbehaved the way she always did, tossing Ezra’s hat off his head and spitting oats at him while he fit the feed bag over her head.
Buck had a fire going on a clean, hay-free patch of floor, the kettle bubbling above it and a pot with soup fixings warm by the side.
“You two gonna eat, or just make moon eyes at Ezra’s horse?” he asked cheerfully.
Ezra smiled at the boy. “Mr. Wilmington can be cantankerous,” he warned. “We’d better go and do as he says, don’t you think?”
The little boy nodded with a grin.
“So, do you have a name?” Buck asked, as they worked their way through the soup. The child was clearly starved. His cough came in uneven spurts, and every time, he looked up at them in terror.
“Frank,” he admitted quietly. “Franklin. Like Benjamin Franklin.”
Ezra smiled. “A fine name,” he agreed. “You know, Benjamin Franklin was endlessly inventive,” he pointed out. “Resourceful, too—that means he was good at doing anything it took to survive.” The boy ducked his head and Ezra exchanged a glance with Buck. He had an ugly feeling about this child. “You’re clearly well-named.”
Frank nodded and drank his soup. He looked up in surprise when Chaucer whinnied her annoyance at the accommodations. The smile on his face was fond.
“Most pampered mare I’ve ever seen,” Buck said softly. He obviously saw what Ezra had; an opening made by the boy’s love of animals. “I don’t think there’s another horse like her.”
“Reminds me of Thor,” Frank whispered, his fond smile turning tearful. “Daddy used to say I’d take that horse to bed with me if I could.” The pain and loss in his voice was heartbreaking.
“What happened to him?” Buck asked.
Ezra knew, with blinding pain, that Wilmington was asking the wrong question.
“Daddy took him with him when they left.”
Buck went dead white, and Ezra worried he’d explode right there. “I’ll take first watch,” the furious man ground out, bolting for the darkness by the barn door.
Frank, for his part, didn’t notice the change in Buck's temper as he leaned forward in a coughing fit that shook him hard. Ezra took out one of the cocaine drops Mrs. Potter made for him. The little brown candy was shiny in the firelight.
“A very good friend of mine made this for my cough,” he told the child, holding it out to him. “It works quite well, I promise.”
Frank took it carefully, putting his empty dish aside and sucking on the candy. Ezra knew from experience that it tended to make a body sleepy. In a child as small as Frank, who was underfed to boot… The poor thing was listing to the side in minutes.
Ezra laid him down on one of the bedrolls, then rose and joined Buck at the door.
The taller man was still vibrating with anger. “They left him,” he growled, voice low and dangerous. “A whole damn town just up and left him here alone! God damn it, Ezra, he’s a little kid!”
“Not to them.” Ezra didn’t mean to be callous, but the truth was there. To a town full of terrified people, a boy on the way to becoming a zombie was a threat, not a child. “I expect his father couldn’t stomach killing him himself.”
Buck turned on him. “How can you even think that!? Damn it, Ezra, just because someone’s bit—”
“Like me?” Ezra said quietly, stopping him cold. “Shortly before I met you, a 'whole damn town' thought nothing of stoning me on my way out the gates, Buck. I can’t say I’ve found many places that are much different.”
Buck was silent for a long moment as that sunk in. “Eagle Bend?” he whispered.
The clear horror and indignation in his voice was somehow gratifying. Ezra had never told anyone in Four Corners what had happened the night before he came to them. It hardly made a difference.
Except, apparently, to Buck.
“Fear does things to people, Mr. Wilmington.” Ezra looked at the child sleeping by the fire. "The zombies have done more than thin our ranks. They've thinned our humanity."
Buck’s eyes softened as he watched the boy. “The hell they have,” he growled. “We’ll take him back to town with us tomorrow and see what Nathan can do for him.” There’d been no question in Ezra’s own mind that that was exactly what they’d do. “Boy needs to be looked after, not discarded like a broke down nag.” He locked gazes with Ezra. “Being bit don’t make anybody expendable, Ezra.”
Ezra nodded, warmed by the sentiment. “I’ll relieve you in a couple of hours,” he said quietly. “I expect we’ll both want to make an early start.”
******
They were on the trail as the sun rose, a sleepy Franklin sharing Ezra’s saddle.
The child slept more of the trip than Ezra would have liked, though it wasn’t the damned sleep he himself fell into when injured. Frank coughed and panted as if air were a rarity, and Ezra kept a tight hold on him and prayed.
The ride home was quicker than the two men would have made it normally, and Ezra smiled fondly at the little town as they crested the hill that led to the western wall.
“There now, you see, Frank,” he said softly to the boy dozing in the saddle before him. “A safe place to call home. For now.”
Buck turned in his saddle to look at the two of them. “I’ll ride on ahead and get Nathan,” he said sensibly. “You go ahead and settle Frank in at the quarantine.”
The quarantine was rarely used, unfortunately. Two more people had been bitten and ill since Ezra himself came to the town, but both had died. He hoped the little boy in his arms wouldn’t make it three. There was too much death in this world. Surely it had to stop somewhere, didn’t it?
He carried Franklin upstairs to one of the bedrooms and set about stripping him of the filthy clothes he was wearing, wondering where the child had been bitten. Wherever it was, it would look hideous, as his own bite did. The Mark of… if not Cain, at least some damned creature.
Ezra stopped dead as he had the child’s dust- and dirt-covered body laid out on the bed, gorge rising in his throat.
“Dear Christ,” he whispered. “What have they done?”
*******
He met Nathan and Buck downstairs ten minutes later, and whatever look he still had on his face raised alarm in his friends.
“What happened?” Buck asked, clearly dreading the answer. “He didn’t…?”
“Oh no,” Ezra barked bitterly. “No, he didn’t turn.” He led them up the stairs, movements clipped and vicious. “It’s difficult to become a zombie without being bitten, isn’t it?”
Buck and Nathan gaped at him as he pushed open the door to reveal the sleeping child.
“What are you saying?” Nathan stammered. He looked at Buck in confusion. “You said they left him—”
“Because the idiots didn’t know any better!” Ezra growled, angry for this child in a way he hadn’t been angry for himself or any other victim of this God forsaken world. “Because they saw a child with a wracking cough and assumed he would turn and abandoned him without even bothering—”
Buck’s hand was on his shoulder before he realized there were tears in his eyes.
“Our humanity is thinning,” he whispered desolately. Perhaps being less than human wasn’t quite a curse, was it?
“Not ours,” Buck assured him, squeezing his shoulder in sympathy. “Sure as hell not yours .”
Nathan moved forward and sat quietly on the edge of the bed. Ezra had run a cloth over the child to wash him as best he could without drawing a bath. He watched sadly as Nathan shook the boy’s arm, waking him.
Frank was immediately on guard, and Ezra stepped forward. “It’s all right, Frank,” he told the boy. “This is Nathan Jackson, he’s a healer.”
“Ain’t no one can heal the dead ones,” the boy murmured sadly.
“Well you ain’t dead, now are you?” Nathan asked, just the right amount of levity in the words. “Got yourself a good cough though, huh?”
“Yes, sir,” Frank admitted. His cough obliged by flaring up at the mention of it.
Nathan took out his stethoscope. “Why don’t I get a listen to that, then?” He had the boy breathe a few times before he looked up at the men in the doorway, then back at Frank. “I’m gonna get something for your cough, there, okay?”
Frank nodded solemnly as Nathan rose.
“Kid’s got bronchitis,” Nathan said, fury in the words though he kept his voice down. “A week of rest and a few herbs to strengthen him and quiet the cough, he’d’ve been fine .”
“He’ll be fine now, Nathan,” Buck said firmly. “Though what we do with him once he’s well…”
“You are not suggesting we track down the animals who left him ?” Ezra whispered.
“I’d like to do nothing less,” Buck said coldly. “Don’t know as I’d want them to have him back, though.”
“He ain’t a book or a chair,” Nathan argued. “He’s their child and he deserves a home.”
“Damn right he does,” Buck growled. He looked past Nathan to where Frank was sitting up, coughing. “Do you know where your folks got to?” he asked gently.
Ezra readied for a fight. There was no way they were sending this child back to them. All his logical talk of fear and expediency… Buck’s voice rang in his head. God damn it, Ezra, he’s a little kid!
“Mama said I didn’t need to know,” Frank whispered. “Told me God would find me a home.”
Ezra closed his eyes as Nathan smiled. “I reckon maybe God did, son.”
And a better home it is, Ezra thought to himself. Humanity as thick as grace, here.
He turned without another word and headed into town to find a family with room for one more.
*******
the end