“What?”

“I was a ward nurse at an old age home, the floor where they kept all the patients with dementia. It was the last stop. They’d already been through the forgetful stage, the confused stage, even the dangerous stage most people don’t know about, when their frustration with a world they no longer understood turned them unreasonable and violent. They didn’t come to me until they’d forgotten who they were, and what they’d lost. Most of them were bedridden, and some were so weak with age that they didn’t have enough energy to move much…but always, always, there were some who’d gotten it in their sixties, or fifties, when they were still ambulatory, with energy to burn. I even had some in their forties, from time to time: one a college professor with a beautiful little wife twenty years younger than him, an ex-student who had to watch as her robust middle-aged husband suddenly started turning into an old man only two years into their marriage. He could run a marathon every day, that one. And we let him walk up the hallway and back, up the hallway and back, up the hallway and back, nodding a kind hello to us on every pass, never remembering that he’d ever seen us before. Understand: we knew that he was in a terrible situation. We knew that he didn’t deserve what had happened to him. But, for a long time, it was almost pleasant, getting that smile from him every few minutes. He wasn’t unhappy, not at all. He didn’t know it was a care facility. He just thought it was a hotel, and figured that he’d be able to return to his life if he could just…if he could just find his room. He just needed to find his room. I always thought, if I ever come down with it, let me be like him. It wouldn’t be too bad, if all I cared about was…finding my room.”

You don’t understand why she’s telling you this. It seems random, not the answer to your question at all. As she winds down, you come within a breath of interrupting. But then she continues.

“After a while, he got worse. The smile went away. He forgot everything else but the shuffling walk up and down the corridor, and the skin of his face went slack, like a blanket draped on a chair. He was no longer looking for anything. There was nothing behind his eyes but the next step, and the step after that. He was transferred to another facility, so I never found out what happened to him. But when the dead rose…when they started coming after us…the look on their faces was nothing new to me. They looked like everybody in my ward. Some of the people I ended up with called them names like ‘those things,’ and ‘those sons of bitches,’ but I always remembered the old people on the ward, the ones who’d also forgotten everything, and had also never asked to become what they were. I never forgot that it wasn’t their fault, that they were just looking for something they couldn’t have anymore.” Her tired gaze, long fixed on the dirt, manages to move upward, long enough to meet yours. “Some of us may have been evil bastards before. But what we did after the infection took us was just the infection. It wasn’t our fault. Unless God’s a total maniac…it wouldn’t condemn us to Hell. And it hasn’t. I believed in Hell. I still believe in Hell. It may have taken me a long time to figure out, but this place isn’t even remotely terrible enough to be Hell.”

“Then…I’m sorry. I don’t get it.”

She stabs the dirt with her thumb, and draws an angry circle, one that fails to connect back to itself as the curve comes around to its starting point. She rubs it out and draws it again, once again breaking the curve at the point where it should become perfect. You get the impression that she has spent much of her time here, however long that’s been, trying and failing to make this one simple shape. And then she says, “After what we’ve done…why would anybody already in Heaven want us there?”

The size of it almost knocks you over. You spin in place, taking in hundreds, thousands of immobile figures with all that horror behind them and nothing that offers comfort in front of them. There must be millions, all told, maybe hundreds of millions or even billions: the poor, abused world getting pretty damn unpopulated by attrition by the time your own life was ripped out. You might be looking at much of the Earth’s population, but for those lucky few fortunate enough to suffer so much damage when they died that the terrible phenomenon was unable to affect them: the lucky few who had not been tainted.

You say, “But that’s so fucking unfair.”

She nods without sympathy before returning to her hopeless drawing. “The whole thing’s unfair. Isn’t it?”

You stumble away, so blinded by despair and horror that you don’t even thank her for the information. You are still stumbling as you pass the next hopeless figure, and the next figure after that; the ones who look up at you and the ones who don’t, the ones who seem half-mad and the ones who act that way because it’s the only rational response to an irrational eternity. You want to scream at them, raise an army of them, and march together toward that light in the east, the one you now know to be the Eden that will never let you in. You know that you will never get another to stand with you, let alone walk with you. They all know they carry the taint. They all know that while they’re not quite damned they’re as close to damned as human beings can be without actual consignment to the pit.

And then the rage rises out of nowhere and you throw your head back and you howl at the empty sky. You know exactly who you’re yelling at, but you don’t care. You only know that what happened wasn’t anybody’s fault. Or even if it was somebody’s, if the plague was some exotic bug escaped from a government lab or something, nobody who caught it had ever been given a choice. You were no more responsible than loving family dogs gone rabid, or sane men turned violent by tumors in their brains. You don’t deserve this emptiness, this punishment that amounts to no more than the stubborn refusal to judge you.

You scream until you run out of breath and stand there panting as you wait for an answer. But nobody answers. Nobody answers. You scream again and this time you face the gray sky and try to bring forth a pattern in the miniscule differences in shade between one patch of emptiness and another: the face of a kind and benevolent, or even stern and maniacal creator, looking down on you, taking note of what you say, and either changing his mind or smiting you for your temerity in daring to criticize him. But again, though you scream for a timeless time, maybe longer than you existed as one of the living dead, maybe longer than you existed as one of the warm, no face emerges. You are alone.

And again you wind down and sink to your knees and face the prospect of doing what all these other lost people have done, which is sit your ass on some forsaken patch of dirt and let the years, the centuries, the millennia accrue like dust.

You want to. That’s the terrible thing. You want to.

But the Bastard has left you with one thing worth doing.

And so you lurch back to your feet and begin to trudge forward, stopping in front of every immobile before moving on to the next, aware that there may be millions or even billions left to go, but not caring at all, because you have nothing but time.

She was just a little girl. Your little girl.

It may take about as much time as it takes some mountain ranges to crumble to dust…but sooner or later, you’ll find her.