Heaven's Grief (Sequel to Hell's Reign)

Chapter 1 - Heaven is Overrated

          

Aaron sat in his room, an old guitar balanced on his lap. It was a cherry red electric Gretch, but the color was so worn, that the wooden body showed through in places. He had just restrung it a week ago, after he, his father, and his Uncle Pete had raided an abandoned Guitar Center. He never had understood exactly what his parents or his uncles meant when they referred to old stores as being "abandoned." As far as Aaron knew, they had never been anything different than what they were now; Shells of buildings, most of them nearly empty, and all of them bloodstained.

                Yet, he knew stories. His mother always liked to tell him about the uncle he never met, the one he was named after. Her brother Aaron, she told him, had died during what the adults called the Initial Outbreak. During the Outbreak, hundreds of people in Chicago and other large cities around the world very suddenly developed the Zombie Virus. The Virus took hold of a person's nervous system first, shutting the body down completely one system at a time, before reanimating it with a nasty hunger than only human flesh could satisfy. His Uncle Aaron had turned with the rest of the family, except for his mother, who had been out with her friends at his father's concert. She never would tell him what happened to her other friends before she met his father, but Aaron was old enough now that he could guess well enough.

                His father didn't tell stories much. Instead, he taught Aaron how to play the guitar sitting in his lap. It was a difficult process that Uncle Joe usually helped with, being that his father only had one hand. His mother had told him that story as well, and Aaron often wondered what his dad looked like with two hands and a guitar between them. Still, the only song he knew so far was an old song that his parents both loved. It was called, Drops of Jupiter, and though he had never heard the original, he'd grown up listening to his father singing it to his mother. As far as he was concerned, his father's voice was the original.

                He picked at the strings carefully, his head bent over the body of the guitar as he tried to play as quietly as possible. There was a commotion going on downstairs. Something had happened to his Grandma Ann, though nobody would explain it to him. He had a pretty good idea of what had happened, but his mother had promised that they would talk later. It was well past dinnertime now, and Aaron was hungry, but he knew better than to leave his room and disturb the adults downstairs. So, he played Drops of Jupiter, and softly whispered the words to himself. "Now that she's back in the atmosphere, with drops of Jupiter in her hair, hey, hey...."

                He could hear his mother crying. She sniffled loudly whenever she cried, and it carried through the empty house right into Aaron's room, but it was muffled slightly. His father was holding her. "She acts like summer and walks like rain, reminds me that there's time to change, hey, hey...."

                Out his bedroom window, had he glanced up, he would have been able to see his Uncle Pete and Uncle Joe digging a hole in the ground, six feet deep, with a lump covered by a ratty old blanket in the grass beside them. "Since the return from her stay on the moon, she listens like spring and she talks like June, hey, hey..."

                The sniffling stopped suddenly, but Aaron wasn't listening to it anymore. He was losing himself in the music, desperately trying to understand the words that moved his mother to tears every time his father sang them. He rarely sang it without taking her hands in both of his, pulling her until her arms were draped around his shoulders and his were wrapped around her waist. He would dance with her then, swaying back and forth and whispering the words against the skin of her neck. "Tell me did you sail across the sun? Did you make it to the Milky Way to see the lights all faded, and that heaven is overrated?"