Bad Taste in Boys (13 page)

After a quick meltdown in the bathroom, I went downstairs. When I turned the corner at the bottom of the basement steps, Jonah leapt at me, waving a plastic bag in my face.

I’d never been so happy to see a Country Market bag in my life.

“It’s a foot! A foot!” He kept waving the bag around like he was the newest member of the flag corp. My unnatural fraternal tolerance quickly wore off. I snatched the bag away and barely restrained myself from hitting him with it.

“Enough! It’s a foot. I get it. Now give it to me so I can hide it in my underwear drawer before we get arrested for possession of dismembered body parts.”

“You’re no fun.” He sulked.

“I don’t have time for fun. I’ve got to prove there’s a communicable disease that makes people act like zombies and figure out how it’s spreading before everyone’s infected. So you’ll have to excuse me for not capering around like an idiot, okay?”

“Okay.” He sat down in his computer chair, looking up at me from under a fringe of overlong hair. I would have been more inclined to take him seriously if he didn’t look like such a wimpy emo-geek hybrid. And the fifteen empty cans of Mountain Dew
that ringed his keyboard didn’t exactly contribute to an air of responsibility. “What can I do?”

“Nothing, Jonah.”

“That’s no fair! You never let me have any fun, and I saved your butt today. Twice! I deserve—”

“Wait a minute.” I held up a hand. “There is something you can do. If you’re interested.”

“What? I’ll do anything.” He was so excited he practically panted.

“Say I wanted to hack into a teacher’s computer. Could you do that?”

“Are you kidding? I hacked into the duct-tape guy’s Roargan Kross account and stole his Ring of Righteous Kills out from under his nose. I can get into anything. Are you talking a remote hack, or do you have physical access to the hard drive?”

“Well, I don’t exactly have it in my pocket. I guess we could wait until tomorrow morning if we had to, but I’d rather not. Could you do it from here?”

“If it was important enough.”

“You’ve seen what’s at stake.” I paused. I was pretty sure he’d do it, but I couldn’t resist adding a little extra incentive. “If Kiki isn’t infected yet, she probably will be soon. It’s spreading fast.”

The thought of a footless Kiki was too much for Jonah to bear. “You can count on me,” he said. His voice cracked midsentence. It actually made me feel better. He sounded like a total computer geek, and that was exactly what I needed.

“Good,” I said. “Coach gave some of the varsity players injections
from a bunch of unmarked vials, and I think that’s how the infection started. I need to know where he got those vials. I’m trying to put a packet of information together to send to Dr. Ho tomorrow, and this is a really important piece of the puzzle. Get what I mean?”

“Gotcha. So this information is stored on his computer at school?”

“I hope so. But I don’t know for sure.”

“Well, we’ll never know until we look, will we?” He cracked his knuckles one by one; the sound made me wince. I hated it when he did that.

“Anything I can do to help?” I asked.

“Dew me. I’m going to need a serious caffeine buzz if I’m going to stay awake, and I don’t know how long this’ll take.”

“I think there’s a six-pack in the fridge. I’ll get it. And if you want, I’ll stay up with you,” I offered, heading for the stairs.

“Don’t bother. You’ll only distract me.” He looked up from the computer screen and grinned. “Besides, you need to rest your zombie-kicking butt. If this thing is spreading as fast as you say it is, we might have an interesting trip to school tomorrow.”

After that comment, it took me forever to fall asleep. I spent hours lying in bed awake, trying to mathematically predict the spread of a zombie epidemic. It didn’t bode well for the human race or for my sleep schedule.

forgot to set my alarm, but I was such an overachiever that I woke myself up without it. I knew I should brush my teeth first, but I couldn’t restrain my curiosity. I went down the hall and tapped on Jonah’s door. No answer. The bed was empty when I opened the door. I told myself firmly that there was no need to panic, because geekboy had fallen asleep at the computer before, but my stomach still twisted with nerves as I went downstairs.

He was snoozing on the keyboard. It was tempting to snap a picture, but I was too tired to go upstairs for the camera.

“Jonah, wake up,” I said, shaking his shoulder.

“Wha—?” He lifted his head and looked at me with bleary eyes.

“Did you find anything?”

He rubbed his eyes and said something that might have been English.

“We don’t have time for this. Go take a shower. I’ll put some coffee on. You can brief me at the bus stop.” I glanced at the clock hanging near the stairs. “I don’t want to be late.”

“Yeah. Okay.”

I made it outside first. It was cold, drizzly, and still dark, which did wonders for my nerves. I huddled next to the garage door, because it was the best chance I had of not freezing my butt off, and as an added bonus it was a good way to keep zombies from sneaking up on me. The neighborhood seemed abnormally quiet this morning. Usually I could hear dogs barking and kids on their way to school and stuff. I kept telling myself it was just because of the icy rain, but I didn’t really believe myself because I was a crappy liar.

Jonah walked out with his sword.

“There’s no way the driver’s going to let you on the bus with that thing.”

“Yeah, I thought of that,” he said. “I’m telling her it’s—”

He broke off abruptly, dropped the sword, and dashed to the bushes alongside the garage. I heard the unmistakable sound of puking. I was becoming quite the expert on it.

When he straightened up and wiped black, ropy smears of saliva from his chin, it shook me so badly I forgot to breathe. I had assumed he was out of danger since everyone else I knew
who’d been exposed was already exhibiting symptoms. Maybe it took longer if you contracted the disease by puke instead of by bite. As if that made it okay that my little brother was infected.

From the horrified look on his face, Jonah knew what this meant. I was glad I wouldn’t have to tell him. I didn’t think I could.

“Maybe you should go back inside,” I whispered.

“No.” He picked up the sword and brandished it defiantly, like maybe the virus would manifest in midair so he could whack it.

“But—” I reached a hand out to him.

“No!” He shoved me away and threw the sword. It spun through the air, hitting the side of the garage about two inches from my head. By the time I regained my balance, he was already halfway across the yard.

“Jonah, wait!”

“I’m dangerous,” he panted. “Stay … away.”

He leapt the hedge and sprinted around the side of the house. I heard the crash of his footsteps through the overgrown vegetable garden and the roar of the bus as it shifted gears at the bottom of the hill. It would be here in a minute.

I started to follow him automatically, because when had I ever done anything Jonah told me to? I was his older sister, which pretty much meant that when he gave me an order, I was contractually obligated to do the exact opposite. But I stopped after only a few steps.

He was right. Sure, I could take him in a fight if he lost
control; I had about five inches and fifteen pounds on him. But that didn’t mean I should chase him. The best thing I could do for him and all the other infected was prove the existence of a virus, and that meant going to school and checking my lab results.

The bus hissed to a stop at the end of our driveway. I grabbed Jonah’s backpack off the ground and jogged toward the street, scanning the bushes the entire way.

The sound of some obnoxious eighties tune blared out the open bus door. I climbed the steps and looked for an empty seat. I was the only upperclassman who still rode the stupid thing, so you would have thought I’d have the right to claim a good spot. But in the skewed world of our suburban high school, brain-dead freshman jock outranked senior biology goddess. I just hoped that the whole brain-dead part wasn’t literal, because the only empty spot was directly across from one of the JV linebackers. If he was infected, I was in trouble. His pectoral muscles were about the size of Hawaii.

I sat down, watching Hawaii carefully in case he decided to attack. He smiled at me, but I’d learned my lesson. One minute they were sitting pretty; the next they were trying to bite your kneecaps off.

Jonah didn’t like it when I went through his things, but under these circumstances he’d just have to deal. I was hoping to find some evidence, and I wasn’t disappointed: inside his backpack were a few papers with my name scrawled across them.

It was a short stack of email printouts. The first one said:

I felt like I’d been gut-punched. All those mice I’d worked on for her so-called government project … Had those been test subjects for this performance enhancer? The symptoms—aggression, endurance, pain tolerance—those things described the victims of the zombie virus. Had I helped infect all those people?

I flipped the page with shaking hands.

A couple of brief emails arranged and confirmed a delivery time, nothing very interesting. But then Coach balked.

And then there was another email from Coach. Based on the date, he could have sent it while we were at the bonfire. By that time, he knew something was wrong. I was willing to bet that was when he tore up his office, although I didn’t know for sure. The email read:

But Swannie didn’t respond, or Jonah didn’t print it, or maybe she called like he asked. But I bet she didn’t. She was probably too busy carting all the evidence away in that big box I saw her taking out of the lab.

“How stupid am I?” I muttered, staring out the bus window. I should have known something was up; she wouldn’t even let me touch the freaking thing. And I was so blinded by my whole scientist hero-worship thing that I didn’t even think twice.

When the bus pulled to a stop in the loop outside the school, I launched myself out of the seat. Hawaii got up too. “Move!” I squeezed past him and stalked down the aisle.

For the first time in the known history of the universe, everyone shrank back in their seats to let the geek go first.