Face-Slapping20 min read
Seeds, Shelter, and the Zombie Who Learned Manners
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I bought every seed on the stall and felt like I was hoarding hope.
"You're sure you want all of them?" the old seed seller asked, hands already folding a paper bag into a neat cone. "That's a lot."
"I am," I said, because lying felt easier than explaining the truth. "For the end of the world."
He chuckled, which made me want to tell him that laughing was no longer safe currency. I kept my pockets heavy with cash and my head heavier with the memory I'd been given—a second chance and a calendar that counted down to a rain no one would call ordinary.
They called me odd in market murmurs. They called me young—about twenty-two, they guessed. I was younger in the coin of age than the life that had ended for me once before, but older in the way my chest kept secrets.
On purpose, I only used what I could carry. I had sold my apartment, kept two hundred and some thousand left, and bought seeds, canned staples, a battered pickup modified into a tank of a thing, and—most importantly—my small miracle: a space that felt like a pantry and a garden all at once.
"You really think it'll help?" the seller asked as he handed me the final packet.
"It has to," I said.
The world was quiet in a way it isn’t unless you are trying to hear something that should not be there. I crossed the street and let my mind tally: days left, bullets to buy, locks to reinforce. I was thinking about cooking—about preserving the texture of bread with limited power—when the car came.
"Watch out!" someone screamed.
I didn't have time to obey red lights. The car ripped toward me like a thoughtless animal. I saw chrome, then headlights, then the impression of a life ending.
Then a hand shoved me forward.
I flew, landed on the pavement, and watched a small, thin body crumple a few meters behind where I had been. A man scrambled out of the pale sedan; people swarmed him, accusing and furious. I dialed emergency numbers with hands that shook.
At the hospital the boy woke up to my voice.
"Don't move. You hit your head," I told him, and he looked like a creature from a softer dream—fine bone, long lashes, skin too pale to be ordinary in sun.
"I could have died," he said later, voice quiet. "Why did you push me?"
"You were in the path of the car," I said. "I don't do heroic for applause."
He smirked at me then—and the kind of smirk that made you forgive people for being a little alive. His name was Sebastian. He was an orphan, he said. He had nothing. "You saved me," he told me. "Call it fate."
"I just had good timing," I said, less honest than I should have been. "Get well. Buy food. Hide. Rain starts tomorrow."
He laughed. "You are melodramatic."
"I remembered the number on a ticket." I made a small show of pulling out my phone. "And it matched. You can keep the rest of your skepticism."
He watched the numbers with a slow, awkward fascination, then let them go. "So what happens if it's true?"
"Then stay inside," I said. "Don't go out in any strange rain. And if you happen to wake up mad, you call me and I will shoot you before you bite my friends."
He grinned, and for a breath I almost believed in a world where my promises were lighter than bullets.
I bought a house on the edge of town two days later, and a vehicle with armor tastefully welded where doors used to be. I stocked the "space" inside my little miracle-room—its shelves seemed to remember food even if I had not put it there yet. It was less a trick and more a gift I did not deserve: dried goods that did not grow stale, a patch of earth bigger than my hopes but walled in like a secret.
Sebastian left the hospital after a day. He called me "enabler" when I refused to take his money. "You look like you'll live. I like that," he said.
"You'll have to prove it," I said.
He smiled; that smile cost him a scar later.
Late that night the rain began. It smelled wrong. People told me later they could taste it on their tongues, an iron tang like sour pennies. By morning the first sleepy bodies turned ugly and angry.
"Tomorrow," I told Sebastian, handing him an extra scarf. "If you are touched, I will do it."
He was light as a laugh until the second day. On the second day, he wandered in the chaos and was turned. Not precisely like those movies—slow, foamy, animal. He became something else: a shell of the boy who had saved me, but with a pattern of worry that stayed, a little sadness that didn't fit the dead.
He would not bite me. He would not bite others. He did not follow the pattern. When other infected came, they hesitated toward him and then walked away. He moaned in a way that sounded like words, and once he clutched my hand like a child.
"You understand me?" I tried, flashlight thrown across his face. He reached, only to jerk away as if embarrassed. He had a way of touching a phone screen and then tapping his thumbs as if typing. The first words he typed back were, I will not wear clothes, in simple blocks.
"I am not changing your pants," I said, too loud. "You are indecent and a public nuisance."
He nodded solemnly. Then, to his credit, he learned what clothes were.
Later, when people came to my barricade—hungry, fragile, begging for ration cards—I let some in and turned others away. People cry worse when you say "no" in daylight.
I learned quickly who to keep and who to hate.
"Anna," she said, when she ran up to me one day with raw fear. She was small, fragile, and called me sister because once—or because it suited her. Anna Saleh was pretty in a way that made me want to box the sun. She was the kind of woman who looked like someone from a postcard—so small I could have hidden her in my palm if history hadn't already taught me to be practical.
"Please," she cried. "They're after us."
She was a saint in the old stories; in the new one she was wet with fear. "Why should I help you?" I snapped and felt mean, because I had learned how cheap mercy was in the bones of a town full of people with knives where compassion used to go.
"Because I will do anything. I will cook. I will sew. I will be worth it."
"Don't say you'll be worth anything until you've quit screaming," I said.
She swore to be quiet. She sat with me while I stabbed lungs into better shape and sewed gashes with clumsy hands. I told her the truth: I had rescued her only because I knew Carsen—because Carsen Boyle was a gentle fool who would rather die than let someone starve. He had been my footnote in college—an unreadable line beginning: good boy, blank heart.
Carsen came late and always looked like he wanted to laugh in the wrong rooms. He arrived the night they broke my door. They came in numbers: men with guns more bravado than aim. They had already learned how to trade bodies and breath for canned corn. The world had taught them the wrong math.
They took Anna. A ring of them had her pinned. Their glances were wolves and their hands the tools of verdict.
"She's mine now," one said. His name was Felix Meyer and his grin was mostly teeth. "We own a woman; we might as well taste our property."
"Shut up, Felix," said Gustav (Gustav Herrera), who had bigger shoulders and smaller wisdom. "We have to be quick."
"Quiet," muttered another—Luca Collier—because polite names are a currency in a market where everything else has been stripped away.
I remember what I used to be: the girl who would count the seconds and think of someone's face at a distance. In my other life I would have calculated, tried negotiation, offered a ration for return. But the girl who had died once and come back had no interest in arithmetic when it involved a humanity ledger.
"Leave," I said. My voice used a gun I didn't point.
Felix laughed. "Or what? You'll shoot, Miss Brave? You have anything to start a war?"
I had a war ready in cartridges and a judger's eye. I took a step forward and shot a deliberate hole through a path that used to be a man.
Screams filled the woods like a chorus. It was crude and quick: I scored them in ways they would remember as a grammar of pain. I shot the first in the knee, then the next in the leg. I aimed at things no one could ignore to make them understand that violence has an anatomy.
They bled and cursed and crawled, and the forest tasted of iron and the shock of things that can break people into sound. Carsen charged then, with a knife and a forgiveness in his face.
"You killed them!" he cried at me afterward, voice raw.
"I stopped them," I said. "I stopped them from owning you."
He looked at Anna and then at me. "Did you have to do that?"
"Yes," I said. "Do you think the world gets kinder?"
He wouldn't look at me for two days. Anna ate, and then she slept. The men who had tried to own her didn't die of their wounds; I had not been that dramatic. They could have taught their story as cautionary tale: fools meet a woman with a gun and greed meets clean ruin.
Not long after, a desperate trade zone called A-Zone rose out of barbed wire and fever. A leader there called Winter—she called herself Ivy Cline—ran the place with a crown of smoke. She had rules and a throne of rust. I went because I had something other survivors wanted: a supply chain and a way to make small engines hum in a world that had turned off most of the power.
"They want what you have," Ivy said, leaning back with a cigarette like a good omen. "They'll probably string you up if you're lying."
"I don't have much to lie about," I said. "But you want vegetables and power? You asked for three days."
She gave me a bracelet as if a jeweled sentence: come or die. She clipped a thin ticking thing around my wrist on the promise it would detonate if I did not deliver. On Anna she clipped a locational band, a raw sentence of "if you disappear, we will have you."
I held the little ring like a coin from a country I no longer existed in. If Ivy Cline was the law, I had to respect her customs.
When I left, a market commotion pulled me across squares and alleys. Men laughed as if humanity were a certain kind of show, not a currency. A woman—my friend Valeria Cash—was being traded like a sack of grain; price: two bottles of water. I saw the transaction melt a human into numbers.
"It isn't worth it," the buyer said, and then he laughed, and then the world of the transaction became smaller and meaner. I had guns. I had a promise and a bracelet. I also had a camera in my mind that didn't blink.
I fired twice.
Heads exploded into the kind of victory you cannot save your hands from visiting. People scattered like a shook tree. The buyer fell like a rainless storm.
Valeria sobbed into my shoulder. "You came," she said.
"Of course," I said. "You were always the type to get barricade-less."
I had made enemies that day in a market full of traders and men who liked to pretend they were kings. One man—Denali Bishop—had a face that smiled around danger and a belly that grew fond of the idea of using others. He had a minor court, men who would cheer at the sound of someone else's shame. He would remember me because I replaced his hunger with a bared radial bone and more.
"You're brave," Valeria said later, eyes large in the glow of a fired stove. "You kill like you have to."
"Like I have to," I corrected.
We moved into an old house outside the city. The sun slid past our teeth. Sebastian—half keep of the dead, half ghost of the boy who saved me—stayed. He learned to eat cooked meat. He learned to obey. He became, in a way I never bargained for, my odd and gentle guardian.
It was strange to have a town built of bodies and a center that had a queen who liked to smoke. Ivy Cline released us, as if she had all the time in the world.
"You better be useful," she said to Valeria and to me. "I gave you a rope and a clock, not a pardon."
"I will be back," I said to her. I checked the bracelet that now was a thing attached to my wrist. A little fear fit there, a tiny metronome of consequence.
Later, in a back alley, the men returned. They had been at Felix, Gustav, and Luca. They had picked up more bitterness. They had a list of people who were their "rights." At the market they had been vile and obvious. Now, in front of a crowd, they wanted to be restored.
I had not anticipated how small the world would feel when its monsters came to dine in daylight. And I certainly had not expected the stage.
The market had become a chamber. People had come to trade and to say prayers and to watch. A new caravan had come in, and with it came a smug man, a petty prince in a jacket he could not own. He had been one of the men who sold women for a jar of water. He thought the rules wouldn't find him.
"She saved us," someone shouted as my words found their way through the crowd. "She shot the man who tried to sell Valeria. Why are they here?"
The smug man—Denali Bishop—barked a laugh. "You think her shooting ends the law? I will have satisfaction," he announced, loud as brass. "She took from me. I will take from her."
"Ivy—" someone said.
"He will not get to take anything," I said loudly. People stared. The market quieted like a room holding its breath.
"She wears our marks," Denali said, pointing a finger I did not want there. "She is trade now. She has to give back."
"Trade?" Valeria spat. "You are a living corpse."
"Walking corpses and living corpses," Denali cooed. "Either one are fair game."
He would find a public square that day if he tried to take me. Market rules had an odd interest in public eyes. They liked to parade, to punish, to make parables out of people.
I took my phone and I broadcast.
"People," I said, voice steadier than the shaking in my bones. "This man paid for a woman with water today. He sells human bodies and thinks your attention is cheaper than it is."
Denali grinned, thinking he had the right of roar. "You cannot put back what I own," he said.
"You're wrong," I answered.
"Who are you?" he demanded.
"Someone you wronged," I said, thinking of every eye watching. "And someone who can make you the lesson you were hoping to teach others. Bring all your men."
They came with swagger, but the market had already grown teeth. People snapped photos with their phones—old habits survive anything, even the end of the world. They are the small journalists of a dying age. Someone uploaded a clip, and it spread in minutes like oil in water.
"Here," I said when the public formed a ring. "Look." I played what I had: footage of his transactions, names of those he has forced into deals, a record of a woman who had been traded for two bottles. Memory is a currency as lethal as gunpowder.
Faces flushed. Some turned their phones upward to beam the footage to their friends outside the market. A hundred small screens lit the market as if the sky itself were connected.
Denali's arrogance was the sort that comes from believing you are above consequence. He went from smug to pale as the feed rolled. The circle widened, and the market became a courtroom.
"Shut that off," he roared. He tried to punch the phone out of the hands of the man filming.
"Do it," one shouted, and yet no one touched the film. No one wanted to be on the wrong side of this kind of revelation. The market had teeth now, and they were using them.
The spectacle was a recipe: humiliate, then answer.
I spoke first, in the center of the circle, and the onlookers leaned in like people leaning for gossip at a funeral. "You sold women for water," I told Denali. "You traded them and then looked for profit. Who here believed men should be allowed to buy humans? Let us ask very plainly: should he be allowed to keep his life?"
The crowd murmured, a rumble like thunder in small bowls. I watched Denali's face strain, the grin gone, and his bravado evaporate.
"No!" someone shouted.
"Cut him off!" another voice said. People spooled to their feet. The market had decided to perform its own archaic justice. No law left but what people would make.
"Bench," Ivy's voice said from the crowd, and even in that crowd her authority had the flavor of consequence. "Bring him forward."
They dragged him to the center. Denali's hands were still furious, trying to wrench himself free, but the crowd held him in place. I felt the air crackle, like a radio in a storm.
"Show us what you did," a woman called from the back. "Show us everything."
He stammered. That was the first sign of a man who has never learned to be accountable publicly.
I had a plan. Public shame is a stone that can start an avalanche. I used it like a tool.
"Stand," I told Denali. "Kneel."
He spat. "You have no right."
"You already plead your rights away when you sold a human for water," I said.
Denali dropped to his knees in front of one of the wooden crates, and the market quieted as if waiting for a bell. I had the footage on repeat. Phones taped his lies. He looked down—he looked fearful for the first time—and he tried to deny.
"Please," he blurted out at one point, a shift from bravado to panic. His voice was a thin rope in the wind. "Please—"
"Why did you sell a woman?" an old man asked.
"So we could eat," Denali lied. "We—"
"You traded a person for a jar," another voice said. "You sold her for water."
The crowd hissed. A woman near the edge pulled out a recording and played the conversation of the sale back. The market heard its own dulcet cruelty repeated, a chorus of horror growing louder.
Denali's face went through the stages they teach in some drying manuals of cruelty: first, anger; then confusion; then denial; then a flailing attempt to bribe. "I—I'll give back," he said. "I'll give…food. I'll give—I'll do anything."
"Anything?" the old man asked softly.
"Anything," Denali whispered.
"Do anything includes kneeling in the street and begging forgiveness," another shouted. "Do anything includes—"
He moved like a man on a cliff. The crowd had decided a public punishment that would embarrass and correct. A few of them brought him a small mound of grit. Others, small wooden slats used for transporting produce, were laid in front of him.
"Beg," someone demanded.
Denali looked up, eyes bloodshot with panic. "Please." He sounded ridiculous. "Please don't—"
A hundred phones recorded. A chorus recorded the massacre of a reputation and the expensive commodity he had thought himself.
"On your knees," Ivy said. "Say what you did. Confess. Then ask forgiveness. If you don't ask, we will make sure you regret it."
Denali's voice rattled. "I sold women," he said hoarsely. "I—sold them—"
"Hear that?" someone called. "He said it."
He moved from anger line to denial and back again: "I didn't—" then "I sold, yes," then "but they—" and finally the break.
He started to cry, which made him more human than we'd wanted to see. It made the crowd more cruel. People hate tears from the guilty.
"Ask forgiveness," the old man said. "Do it like a man."
He stumbled into a supplication. He apologized—not to the universe, but in the penny-speech of people with nothing left. "Please," he said, voice ragged. "Please forgive me."
"To whom do you beg?" someone shouted. "To the woman you sold?"
He turned, and the flood of cameras found the faces of girls he had sent away. They were there, for the most part, and they looked like something that would not forget names.
Denali tried to kneel before them, words wrong and hollow, hands outstretched like a supplicant to a god who didn't want him.
"Beg to them for what you did," Valeria said, voice flat as if someone reading off a law. "Kneel. Say you were wrong."
He choked out the words, small and betrayed. He tried to be the kind of man who would be forgiven. The market watched him dissolve.
But public punishment must not stop at words. Punishment is a lesson, not merely humiliation. I had something more rigorous in mind: not death, not the violence of bullets, but something he would never forget—the removal of the leverage he had thought permanent.
"Take him to the tar pits," Ivy said, face like a cut. People murmured—the tar pits were a low place, a place where shame could be made into art. They brought out a rope and tied Denali to a pillar. Someone smeared a mark on his chest with coal—an emblem of his trade.
I recorded the whole thing. Denali's panic peeled through layers of ego. He started to plead again. "I'll pay," he promised. "I will pay—"
"Pay with what?" someone asked. "You have nothing."
"Then pay with the only thing left," another said. "Public apology goes only so far. We will have you in the crate of shame for the day. You will be in the square, and anyone you wronged can come and spit on you. You will stand there and take it. You will hear your own crimes returned to you and you will remember them."
A girl—who had been sold and returned—walked forward and spat. It landed on his cheek. Another took a lighter and burned his sleeve. A man who had once been his buyer slapped him across the face until his cheek blossom.
He went through stages: pride, then pleading, then begging. He asked to be let go.
"No one will let you go," the crowd said. "Only your deeds can."
"Please don't—" he whispered. He looked small, the way people do when they realize the market made them a god for an hour and now the god is only a man with no temple.
He knelt, cried, begged; the circle turned his rhetoric into evidence. Phones sang and the video swelled across the network. The ring of people around him clapped like a jury closing a verdict.
And then, with a cruel, ceremonial logic—because this was the only thing people still remembered as law—they made him confess everything: names, days, prices, locations. He whispered the whole ugly ledger into a cupped microphone so every ear could hear. He hurled himself at the feet of the women he had wronged, and they spat their judgment like a weather.
When he finally fell into silence, the crowd turned, as crowds do, and dispersed. Some patted him on the shoulder. Some left injuries that would complicate his sleep forever. He had been reduced to a parable.
Denali's reaction changed—first shock, then fury, then denial, then the core collapse. He tried to stand and was pushed back. He tried to scream and was mocked. He clutched at his torn dignity and found nothing there but the weight of a phone recording him in perpetuity.
I left the square with Valeria and a bag of beans. The tide of people drifted back into a market that had been rebalanced by the truth. The man who thought he was untouchable had been made small, humiliated, and forced to beg. He would live—but the story would not. The videos would travel, telling every corner that this place had rules: you could not trade people here without paying the public cost.
That night, lying on a cot in the half-house we had salvaged, I listened to Sebastian breathe. He snored like a child, a noisy thing that made me soft in a place I had taught myself to be stone. Valeria slept with her cheek pressed against the leftover of a pillow. The world moved on. People who had been on the edge of starving were on our doorstep asking for canned meat.
"You could have had them killed," Valeria whispered.
"Killing them would have been easy," I said. "But easy is what made us monsters. We will not become the market's black ledger. We will be something else."
I had, in that market, enacted a thing I'd promised myself—I would not be small. I realized then I was tired of being the kind of woman who plays by rules until they are the rules of others. I made new rules—less heavenly, more human. We kept the bracelet Ivy had strapped onto my wrist like a badge of debt. It ticked at my pulse like a small drum.
Days later there was a new story. Carsen began to distance himself. He loved Anna, soft and fragile, and I can't pretend that didn't twist something in me. Anna blamed me for taking too long to help. She said I watched and that I had been cold. I did not deny it, because the truth had a way of sinking into the bones quicker than apology.
"I won't stay," Carsen said, one evening, bag over his shoulder. "I cannot be in a house where the air is thick with what you did for me."
"You will go then," I said. "I will not stop you."
He left that night and didn't look back. The world is full of men who say they will rebuild things with hands that shake on the first contract of blood. He was not the only one, but he left a space in me like a cut.
Time moves in thin lines in a world like ours. We scavenged and planted the seeds and made meals from memory. Sebastian learned to water the patch in the space, an anxious little routine he kept like prayer. Anna left with a different caravan—she had a way of finding stupid hope—and Valeria and I built what safety we could.
I trained people to fire, to cover, to pick locks. People came and made bargains. Some were saints and some were devils dressed as saints. We learned language again: bartering with people who had used words as currency.
Then, months after the market's justice, the price of cruelty came to a square.
There was a new leader in a nearby settlement—Gustav Herrera, a man of greedy smile and loud shoes. He thought himself both judge and executioner. He had been one of those men with an appetite for other people's bodies. This time he'd made the mistake of thinking he could take what he wanted and then vanish.
One night, in front of a crowd, I made him kneel on a pile of crushed apples and wait.
"Denali was childish," I said into the open air. "Gustav is greedy."
They brought him forward, eyes full of the kind of hunger that had no dignity left. I had the footage in my hand and a microphone on my tongue. Ivy was there, Valeria was there, and even Carsen—who had returned like a proper regret—was on the edge of the crowd.
When I made the charges, I made sure they were precise. "You sold girls to men for food," I said. "You beat people who tried to run. You trafficked a woman to my neighbor for a sack of rice and expected charity for your conscience. Look at the record, Gustav."
A thousand small screens recorded the woman who had become brave and the man who thought cruelty could be a currency.
He started with denial. "Lies," he said. "She is a liar. She plays for pity."
Then he looked at the faces, and the faces did not look back with pity. A woman he had touched without consent pulled out a photograph of what he'd done. A little boy he had stolen a ration from stood up straight and said his name.
Gustav shrieked. He begged. He tried bargaining: "I'll give food, I'll give guns, I will—" He promised everything and meant nothing. I had seen this before. I let the crowd unravel him piece by piece.
They tied him to a stake and made him confess, and when he was finished the crowd did what crowds do when they've decided a verdict: they dragged him to the center and had him kneel.
This time the punishment was not crude. It was a public unmaking of his power. I made him stand in a circle while those he had harmed came forward. They spat on him. They called his name and described what he'd done, loud, calm, methodical. He could feel the faces, the phone recordings replaying his cruelties, a hundred small people like a net.
He tried to bargain, he tried to deny, he tried to gather his dignity like stones, but the crowd swallowed it. He knelt, and their mockery moved through the scales of human cruelty and then back again: they made him feel the hunger of his victims. They asked him to beg. He begged. Then he screamed when he was forced to hold a sign: I did this, I sold. Forgive me.
When he started to look human, they demanded the next step. "Make him kneel in front of the square tomorrow," one woman said. "Let everyone bring a clay bowl. He will kneel and they will place a grain and a coin in the bowl. He will eat the crumbs of what he forced others to trade for."
He flinched. He begged. He tried to run. They detained him. Next morning, in the square, he knelt and people walked by and dropped a grain of rice into the bowl, each grain a history. Some spat. Some placed a coin and laughed. He ate nothing but his shame, and when it was over the market had taught another lesson: never make your neighbors pay for your appetite. Public punishment had made his power into an artifact of ruin.
He fell apart. He changed. He begged. He did not have a mercy that mattered to me. He was a man who had been shown the world he had paid to own and now found himself the property of all.
We left him kneeling in the square, the crowd watching. The video of him went wide and made a new shorthand: if you trade people, we will make you public.
What did that buy me? Not forgiveness, not even peace. But the market changed. The caravans came with better etiquette. The auctions were heavier on food and lighter on people. The tide had turned.
I thought of my space often. I thought of the patch of earth that had a way of feeding us in winter. I thought about seeds and the possibility somebody else could stand where I stood—someone greedy, someone cruel. I thought about what I had learned: that my second life gave me not a chance to be soft but a demand to be sharp.
When the rain started again and the world flinched, I checked my bracelet and my rice bins and Sebastian at my side. We had made ourselves rules: do not trade people, do not trade your soul. Hold power accountable.
At nights I sometimes play the footage of the market in my head, the faces of the crowd recording the man who had thought himself untouchable. The scene curls into me like a coin. I hold it in my palm and remember the lesson: punishment can be public, and sometimes it must be. Sometimes monstrous men must be unmade in the light so others remember that the market had teeth.
I tightened bolts and fixed the generator, and the little light in my kitchen hummed like a promise. I put a seed in the ground and watched it decide to be green. Sebastian watered it with a solemnness that almost looked like prayer. Valeria cooked a soup and offered me half because she thought she should, because generosity was also a choice.
At the edge of the patch, where the earth tilted, I planted the first of the seeds I had bought in that market long ago. It felt right to bury hope in the dirt that had received the blood of my first ally. It felt like making a contract with the future: we will eat together, and we will remember.
Sometimes, at the market, someone will tap their phone and show me the clip—Denali on his knees, Denali begging—and they will smile at my face like a friend of reckoning.
"Do you ever regret it?" Valeria asked me once when the sun loosened off the day. "The public shaming? The arrests? The men you shot?"
"I regret the part of me that believed intimacy could be a shield for cowardice," I said. "I regret nothing I did to stop them."
She rolled her eyes. "You romanticize it."
"Maybe." I poured water onto the sprout. "Or maybe I simply refuse to let them be the dealers of everyone's lives."
That night I shelled out seeds to whoever would plant them right, and I kept the ones I had to save for winter. I learned how to make bread without yeast, how to press fat from the last of the canned fish. I learned to repel small-awful people with a readiness that was not cruelty but muscle.
And when the rain came again, I kept a door locked tight and a gun ready. Sebastian stood watch like a friend with a child's logic: quick to defend, slow to understand. Sometimes he tapped my arm with a rough, undead insistence.
"You okay?" he would ask with a mouth that used the wrong vowels.
"I am," I'd say. "We are getting better."
He would nod the way people do when they understand themselves for the first time. There are small victories—like teaching him how to plant roots and how to accept a tomato without biting it.
My second life gave me this odd ledger: mercy is not a blanket you throw over abusers and say "there." Mercy is possible only if justice has a shape. That is why I let markets decide, and why I used my cameras to show, and why I used the crowd as my witness.
If you ask what my ending is, I will show you this: a pocket watch I brought back from my space, the little thing I wind up every month. The second hand ticks in the night like a small promise, a "tick" that says we will remember, and the seeds in the garden send pale shoots up past the soil like new fingers.
We built a life around the patch of earth in my space, and every morning I wind the watch: "tick." The sound is small, but it fills the room.
I have no illusions about the future. I know cruel men return, and I know their greed mutates. But I also know that crowds learn, and markets remember, and the public—when told—won't let cruelty be currency without cost.
Tonight I watch Sebastian water the plants, his hands careful, his zombie face softer than the moon. He doesn't scare me anymore. He makes me laugh. I wind the watch again, and the second passes, and the tiny "tick" lives in my mouth like a word I will never tire of saying.
The End
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