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Part of him wants to say it’s just another hallucination. But he can hear the thing, teeth clacking. And he can smell it. More than that, he remembers what happened to Caleb.

Whatever attacked Caleb wasn’t the same as what Henry or Ellie had seen earlier. Wasn’t the same as what Raymond reported.

The bartender said they’d die horribly, killed by their greatest fear.

Was that Caleb’s greatest fear? Some horror movie that terrified him, about a creature living inside you. Was that Alien? Henry had no idea—his knowledge of horror films was limited to what he’d picked up in popular culture.

The point was that if that monster was Caleb’s fear and it did kill him, then Henry can’t write this off as a harmless hallucination.

The zombie keeps coming at him, and Henry keeps backing up.

At least it’s slow.

He chokes on a laugh at that. He seems to remember Ivy saying something about fast ones in a movie, but because this is his nightmare, it’ll apparently follow what he knows of the monsters.

Slow-moving zombies. If they bite you, you turn into one.

He swallows and pushes that thought away. This one missed its chance to bite him, and it’s not getting another shot.

Shot.

That’s the solution, right? According to the show, to kill a zombie, you need to shoot it in the head. Or put something through its skull. In the show, they often used knives, and Henry had pointed out how difficult it would be to get a knife through bone, but his daughters had shushed him.

If this follows his nightmare version of zombies, though, he can kill it by putting something through its skull, logic be damned.

Without turning his back on the crawling zombie, he retreats and looks from side to side. He needs a weapon. The forest is to his right, the vehicles to his left.

A sharp tree limb? Did that ever work in the show? He thinks it might have, but he’s not staking his life on it.

Staking your life?

A small snorting laugh at the pun. His coworkers would applaud him for finally finding his sense of gallows humor.

His gaze snags on something just to his left, partly under the old man’s car, and Henry lets out a sound, somewhere between a laugh of relief and a moan of dismay. It’s the crowbar. Right under the back tire of the old man’s car.

He hadn’t dropped it near the forest after all. How much different things could have been if he’d looked under the damn car. He’d have been here when the dog—or whatever it was—came for the old man.

Edgar. The bartender called him Edgar. If Henry had been here, Edgar wouldn’t have died and—

And that is bullshit because they’re all going to die. That’s their fate. Thwarted once by Maggie, now to be returned by the bartender.

He looks at the zombie—Edgar—and he feels a pang of grief and guilt, but in the end, does it matter? The old man isn’t a boy by the roadside, dying because Henry doesn’t have the experience to save him. And even if he had saved that boy? What did the bartender say he’d have become?

Kissinger for the twenty-first century.

Responsible for the deaths of millions.

Henry wants to scream at the universe. Does any of it matter? He took a career saving people and threw himself into it heart and soul, only to discover that the person he feels worst about losing would have grown up to be a monster.

Up is down, and down is up, and none of it matters. He couldn’t have saved the old man. He shouldn’t have saved the boy. It’s all meaningless.

Henry stops himself and inhales. His daughters’ faces flash through his mind. They’re not meaningless, and he is responsible for bringing them into the world and helping make them what they are, and that was more important than saving—or not saving—the life of a stranger.

They are more important.

Damn it, he is more important. Fuck that bartender. Fuck fate, weighing lives and deciding a scientist is worth more than a little girl. That a future monster is worth more than Henry.

He reaches down for the crowbar, and lets the rage fill him. Rage at a world that decides who is important and has been telling him all his life, in ways subtle and not, that he isn’t. Working in a system that decides who gets to live and die. Every goddamn person weighed and most found wanting based on nothing they have or have not done.