Undead with Benefits (12 page)

I definitely needed my black hat.

I turned away from Truncheon and headed back for our car.

“See you on the other side,” he called after me.

The other side. It kind of felt like I'd already crossed over. Maybe I'd been naive to think I was doing good while I was with the NCD, but at least I'd had something resembling a code. Now I was in this murky, amoral territory populated by creatures like Alastaire and Truncheon. I was becoming one of them.

A fresh swell of psychic hangover broke across my brain. I'd been able to keep myself upright and functional during my conversation with Truncheon and was paying for it now. The reinvigorated headache sent a wave of nausea through me. I felt suddenly hot, like I could feel individual beams of heat reflecting off the wall behind me, and yet a cold sweat spread across my spine. The knapsack suddenly felt like it weighed a ton and that I was carrying it through quicksand. I was about to faint.

I need help.

And then Jake was there. Steadying me. He took the knapsack from me and slung it over his shoulder with a grunt. He led me back toward the car, one of his hands on my elbow, the other on the small of my back. A flash of memory came back to me—him holding me up outside the hotel elevator. I managed to put on a shaky smile.

“We have to stop meeting like this,” I joked badly.
Good one, Cass.

He looked nervous. This display of chivalry probably wasn't winning him any points with Amanda. I tried to zero in on her face, but everything beyond Jake was a blur.

“I heard you,” Jake said to me, sounding dumbstruck.

“Huh?” It was hard to hear him over the thunderclap of my own heartbeat.

“I heard you inside my head,” he said.

Psychic slippage. That's what my instructors had called it, when you couldn't keep your thoughts to yourself. It was an amateur mistake, something that I'd never had to deal with, being such a gifted prodigy of the telepathic arts. Until now, at least.

“Did—did you hear me think anything else?” I asked Jake cautiously.

“It was more like a feeling,” he said as we paused outside the car. I could sense Amanda watching us intently. “A guilty feeling.”

I peered up at him, trying to get a read on his thoughts the old-fashioned way. What are the physical giveaways for when a guy knows you've just used his girlfriend as a down payment to a mercenary? That pretty soon you might double-cross him? I didn't see any in his sweet, confused face.

“Are we going to be okay?” Jake asked, opening the driver-side door so I could collapse into the front seat.

I couldn't answer honestly, so I just pretended not to have heard.

JAKE

“TRUNCHEON.” I REPEATED THE NAME AGAIN, BECAUSE I just couldn't get over the total excess of badassery riding a motorcycle in front of us. “He's like a freaking video-game character.”

Neither of the girls seemed interested. At this point, I was pretty used to my gaming references falling flat. Not my best opposite-sex material, granted, but I'd never before come across an actual human being that looked like a refugee from a Capcom shooting game as designed by Todd McFarlane. It demanded comment.

“Did you guys see he's wearing a utility belt? He's wearing a utility belt. It's probably where he keeps his power-ups.”

“Okay, we get it,” Amanda said, sitting beside me in the backseat. Our words were muffled thanks to the serial-biter muzzles we'd strapped into. “Maybe reflect on your new crush in silence.”

“Don't cheapen this by making it sexual,” I replied with mock offense. “There are guys like me who merely know the
Contra
code. And then there are dudes like my new best friend Truncheon who are living it.”

Amanda sighed, the breath whistling through the air slits in the muzzle. “Do I even want to know what that is?”

“It's some retro shit,” I explained. “Up, up, down, down—”

“No, I do not.” Amanda answered her own question.

I fell silent. Amanda reached over and took my hand, gave it a squeeze, our chains clanking together. I looked over at her and could only really see her eyes above the muzzle, so it was hard to tell, but I think she was smiling at me. The banter helped, I think. It'd become a kind of coping mechanism for us, especially useful as we were slowly driven toward a giant wall manned by zombie killers.

I winked at her. She rolled her eyes at me.

“You look kind of hot in that muzzle,” I whispered. “Like a supervillain on her way to lady jail.”

She stared at me. “Thanks, but I'm going to pretend you never said that.”

“Me too,” said Cass from the driver's seat.

Cass didn't have much to say once I'd gotten her back to the car—verbally or otherwise. She explained the plan was to take us through the wall like we were zombie slaves assigned to her, which Amanda and I had already put together, argued over, and settled on as not having a better option. So we ended up in chains (left those carefully unlocked, thank you very much) and muzzles, and Cass seemed relieved not to have to convince us. I think she passed out with her forehead against the steering wheel while we ate a couple guinea pigs and put on our slave costumes. She looked wiped out. Once we were on the road again and Cass was driving, I'd caught her drifting, the car sliding across lanes toward the median. I kicked the back of her seat and she came up alert, had been clinging to the wheel ever since. We were only going about fifteen miles per hour. Truncheon was up ahead setting the slow and totally nonthreatening pace.

We didn't talk any more about Cass's psychic distress call. She seemed embarrassed by it, so I tried not to let on how whispers-in-the-dark creepy it'd been to have an outside voice trample in on my thoughts. I also tried not to overanalyze the ball-shrinking, sizzling guilt feeling that'd raced through me, or how I'd felt something weirdly similar before but couldn't figure out exactly when. Nope. Let's just forget about all that.

As we closed in on the wall, I noticed some movement along the top. Those turrets I'd picked out before had operators now, shadowy figures aiming machine gun barrels at us. I swallowed hard and kept this detail to myself. Pretty soon we were close enough to the wall that we couldn't see the top anymore.

“Glad we didn't try to climb over,” I said to Amanda, both of us staring at the wall.

“I bet you are,” she said. I could hear her teasing smirk. The wall was sleek metal all the way up and across—smooth-plated titanium or adamantium or some experimental government alloy they didn't have a name for—there weren't any handholds anywhere. At some point, while Cass was talking to Truncheon, we'd debated scrapping this whole plan, going back to civilization, and finding a grappling-hook store. That idea had broken down when I told Amanda I'd never mastered the rope climb in gym class.

“My amazing core makes up for my average upper body,” I told her.

“Uh-huh.”

A gap opened up in the wall where it met the highway, loud hydraulics powering the metal plates apart. Flashing lights and a dull siren alerted everyone inside that they had visitors. Truncheon passed through first. We followed.

“Oh man,” Amanda whispered. “So many.”

“It's like a genocidal Ghostbuster convention,” I whispered back.

Underneath the wall, in a cleared space that served as both parking garage and rec center, the NCD jumpsuits were everywhere. They sat on the hoods of Jeeps, cleaned their guns, and stared at us. They sat around picnic tables, ate buffalo wings, and stared at us. They paused from poring over tactical maps, hastily covered them up, and stared at us. They stopped highly competitive games of Ping-Pong and stared at us.

It was like one of those dreams where you show up for class in just your underwear and all your classmates have rifles with bayonets and start trying to stab out your brain.

“Try not to look, uh, emotional,” said Cass through clenched teeth. “Look zombieish. And don't hold hands.”

Reluctantly, I released my grip on Amanda. I kept my eyes straight ahead. Slumped my shoulders in the way of disaffected undead. Desperately held in a nervous fart.

One by one, the NCD guys went back to doing whatever they were doing. Up ahead, an older agent with a clipboard was exchanging words with Truncheon. The filthy mercenary didn't seem even a little intimidated by all the hardware surrounding us. I guess he'd done this before.

“Why are there so many?” whispered Amanda.

Cass didn't answer. It did seem like the agents were massing here, like it shouldn't take this many dudes to keep a wall upright. But what did I know about secret military operations?

A young NCD guy who looked fresh out of boot camp, bright-eyed and buzz-cut, sauntered over to our car. He was staring at us zombies, grinning dumbly, like we were animals at the petting zoo and he'd just bought a quarter's worth of those bran feed pellets. He tapped on Cass's window and, after a moment's hesitation, she rolled it down.

“You got two of them things, huh?” he said conversationally. The agent rolled up his sleeve, displaying a bandage on his forearm for Cass's inspection. “I was supposed to get in on that program, get me a zombie of my own. They even put this damn nozzle thing on me. But I heard it didn't work, that the bigwig in charge got himself demo—”

“Agent, do you have orders to come talk to me?” Cass cut in coldly, a steel in her voice I hadn't heard before. She didn't let him reply. “Do you have orders to even
look
at me or my property?”

The agent's grin flickered, but I could tell he wasn't sure if she was serious or not. She was pretty little and hungover looking to be acting so hard, although I could see her eyes burning like hot coals in the rearview. I wouldn't have messed with her, personally.

“Hey, whoa there—”

She cut him off again. “I will use you for food and your squad leader won't even miss you. My zombie will crap you out and they'll call it a dishonorable discharge.”

I laughed. Couldn't help it. Luckily, muzzled as I was, the laugh came out harsh and raspy, something a new recruit might mistake for zombie hunger. The agent flinched and backed away.

“Sorr—” he yelped, but Cass had already rolled up the window.

“You're a terrible Trojan horse,” Amanda said to me.

“Not my fault! I didn't know she was going to make with the one-liners.”

“You guys have got to stop talking,” Cass said, looking deflated, like acting the part of the NCD hard case had sapped her even further.

“Sorry,” I replied.

“Yeah,” Amanda said, adding hesitantly. “Impressive bitchiness, though.”

Meanwhile, Truncheon had finished talking with the clipboard guy. He revved his motorcycle way louder than necessary, showing off, a plume of black exhaust curling out of the tailpipe. He waved for us to follow him as the NCD guys stepped begrudgingly aside.

We drove through the NCD encampment and out the other side of the wall. As soon as the gate closed behind us, Amanda and I stripped off our chains, helping each other with the straps and buckles of the muzzles. We let it all pool in the footwells.

“Iowa,” I said, feeling a brief flare of triumph. “We made it.”

I turned to watch the wall recede behind us. Unlike the side facing nonquarantined America, the inside of the wall was covered in warning signs—
DO NOT APPROACH
, most prominently, but the one that stuck out for me was
ALL TRESPASSERS PRESUMED HOSTILE CONTAMINANTS
. That explained the husk of a station wagon we passed on the side of the road, riddled with bullet holes, a torn white flag with the spray-painted message
UNINFECTED
mounted on the roof. I couldn't see if there were any bodies inside because the windows were too spiderwebbed and broken for a clear view. But I bet they were there, cut down trying to escape. It was as if the NCD had left the car there as a warning to anyone else with ideas of rushing the wall.

“Fucked up,” I said quietly.

“Massive, gaping understatement,” replied Amanda, turning her head to stare at the wreck.

For the first few miles, the land on the Iowa side of the wall was cleared of any kind of cover, just like it'd been on the other side. Things changed once the wall disappeared from view. Trees started popping up again, fields of corn, road signs, houses, and farms. We were on a rural back road, cruising, and it was almost normal.

Except there weren't any people.

And then there was the smell. It fell somewhere on the spectrum between rotten meat and spoiled cheese that'd been sprayed with sweet-smelling perfume. It hit me whenever the wind picked up and got stuck inside my nostrils. The weird thing? I didn't really mind it so much. It was gross, yeah, but I had a tolerance for it. I noticed Cass wrinkling her nose, though, sucking in breaths through her mouth.

“That's what we smell like, isn't it?” I asked her.

“Uh,” she replied, “not all the time. Not now. You guys smell fine now.”

“Thanks for that,” said Amanda.

Cass shrugged and pulled her shirt up over her nose and mouth.

As Truncheon led us east, deeper into Iowa, I started noticing the abandoned cars. Some of them were just parked on the side of the road like their owners had wandered off to get gas or otherwise decided to randomly take up walking. Others were straight-up crashed, some head-on into one another, some wrapped around trees, some flipped over like sad turtles. Still no people, though. I'd expected chaos like we'd gotten a taste of back in Omaha, not this eerie quiet. What was the point of building a wall around an abandoned state?

“This isn't so bad,” I remarked after a few miles.

Amanda elbowed me. Pointed.

Oh yeah, so there was a dead guy hanging from a tree. It wasn't totally clear whether he'd done it himself or if someone had strung him up. His head was swollen soft and purple above the noose, the body below withered, gray, and partially eaten. His feet were chewed off, toe bones brilliant white in the late afternoon sun. Whatever zombie had gone this-little-piggy on him hadn't been enterprising enough to climb up for the rest. A cardboard sign that read
ISAIAH 26:19
was pinned to the corpse's ratty flannel shirt.