She was moving town to town. It was so easy with more help. The boy was far stronger than any human man, and the twins more than capable of taking down a full grown man. They seemed so fragile. So defenseless, innocent. She sent them forward and they easily took breathers with nearly no fight.They were thirty now, and there were a half dozen laying on the ground who would be coming up out of twilight any minute. Killers. Or they had been in the old world. Being dead took the killer out of you, at least at first it did. But then it came back. You forgot all the little things of the old life. You nearly forgot your name. Where you had lived, what you had done. And then it changed. Every day you got a little more back. It wasn’t exactly a memory, like a memory would be in the old days, like a breather would have. It was more like found knowledge. Not there one second, and then there the next. But it was clearer than the old memories she had had.
Donita didn’t question whether that found knowledge was true or not. It didn’t matter. Just like it wouldn’t matter to these. What would matter to these was getting through the first bit of time. That time where heat still seemed like the only possible source of life and you struggled to find it only to realize it did nothing at all for you any longer. In fact it could kill you.
Then the cold came upon you, found you, along with its understanding and you were fine. You began to understand that life was just a short stop on the way to dead and that dead was just a way station to dead. And dead could be forever. Death was not something as trifling as life. But all of that took time. And these killers would be nothing more than babies for a few nights.
There was a process. She had gone through it, and the others had gone through it. She supposed any of the dead had gone through it. Everything that had to do with life, heat, that world had to come out of you… Sick it up. Shit it out. It had to go. It had to go because it had nothing to do with death. Nothing at all.
The dead used what they took in. There was no waste. So there was no need for a system to dispose of that waste. The dead did not heal in the same way that a breather did. There was no need for time to heal. You couldn’t predict it. You weren’t even precisely injured. You could lose a finger, or a leg, while you were turning and that was that. It was lost. But you could lose one after and it was back in a short time. Or most of it. She had not lost a leg, but she had lost a few fingers. One of the twins had lost an ear a few nights before. It was back. Those things could be. But they did not depend on any kind of healing like the living. No.
These were killers. For a few days they would be babies. Then for a few days they would get used to the gift they had been given. Then they would be killers again. They would be because that is what they were, and you could not change the basic truths of what you were whether you were a breather or dead.
The turnings were coming faster. Where once seven would pass in to death and maybe one would rise, now seven passed into death and five came to be. Soon it would be seven for seven. She knew that. And soon after that the whole world would belong to the dead. The breathers would be done.
She let her silvered eyes pass along the bodies that lay stretched out on the ground.
She was not weak. There was a strength that came with this life. A strength that came to your whole body once you embraced the cold. They had moved silently into the woods and taken these without a sound. They had carried them here. It had been no expenditure of energy at all.
