Undead with Benefits (16 page)

From the steps I could see over the partitions, so I took a closer look at the cots. There was the pudgy, snoring guy, a skinny girl curled tightly into the fetal position and burrowed under her blankets, and a middle-aged lady I could tell was awake and secretly listening to us. They were who we'd blown up Alastaire and Truncheon's disturbing arrangement to rescue. I couldn't help feeling that the Save-Mom-Cure-Humanity project had suffered a setback because of these people.

It was the right thing to do, I reminded myself. After months working for the NCD, I needed to grab hold of every possible opportunity to do good.

But what about Jake? If Amanda hadn't found him, that meant he could still be out ghouling around, decomposing further every minute. And that was totally my fault. My instinct was to grope for him on the astral plane, but my brain still wasn't up for any psychic tricks.

“I mean, I was pretty sure she wasn't gonna eat us, you know, on account of her saving us just a few hours ago,” Cody rambled on, “but I got outvoted. Feel pretty lousy about it, actually. She seems like a sweet girl.”

“Sweet,” I muttered in disbelief. In the short time I'd been unconscious, Amanda had managed to charm a hardened Iowa survivor with her boob voodoo. “You this open-minded about every zombie you meet?”

“Naw. I got good instincts for people, though,” Cody replied, without a hint of irony.

“
Attractive
people,” I clarified, not sure why I wanted to argue with this guy. I needed to get beyond this stupid high-school urge to compete with Amanda.

Cody didn't try to hide his abashed smile. “It's not like that,” he replied lamely. “You know, my old girlfriend is a zombie. Ran into her a few weeks back. Hadn't seen her since summer vacation, figured she was dead for sure. But nope, there she was, looking like one of the homeless kids from Peter Pan.
She
didn't try to eat me, and Mandy saved us from Truncheon, so I figure the zombies ain't
all
bad. There are degrees, like with anything.”

I didn't need psychic powers with this guy. He was a freaking open book. Part of me wondered how he'd been surviving out here, being so sweet and dumb.

“Yeah, they aren't all bad,” I said, relenting. I sighed and stood up, dusting off the back of my pants. “I should go talk to her,” I said.

Cody grimaced. “Right now?”

“You worried I'll disturb her beauty sleep?”

“Naw, it's not that,” Cody replied with a sincerity that revealed a very loose grasp of sarcasm. “Around here, we human beings tend to stay inside after dark.”

“I'll be fine,” I said, patting around the waist of my jeans. “I have a . . .”

I
had
a gun. It was gone. Did I drop it in the van during my struggle with the zombies?

Cody knew what I was looking for. “Mandy took your piece. Said she'd keep it safe until you woke up.”

I gritted my teeth. “Okay, now I'm definitely going out there.”

“My pop taught me never to stand in the way of a lady with her mind made up,” Cody said, his folksy chivalry making me cringe. He stood up and slid open a metal hatch installed at eye level in the steel door, peering through it. “Looks clear, but I'll keep a lookout all the same. You get into trouble, you come running, okay?”

“I'll be fine,” I said, forcing a smile. I was more worried about Amanda than any ghouls lurking around. “Thanks.”

Cody lifted the hefty slab of wood that barred the door and set it aside. Before I could head out, he handed me a broom handle that had been propped up next to his stool.

“Take that,” he said. “Aim for the eyes.”

The end of the broom handle was carved into a deadly-looking point. For a moment, a fan-girl thrill went through me; I felt like a vampire slayer.

Outside, the sky was totally cloudless. The half moon lit the sprawling pasture and the nearby boarded-up house a washed-out gray, making everything seem flat and drained. It was disconcertingly quiet. If a ghoul was going to rush me, I'd definitely hear it coming.

Amanda had parked the Maroon Marauder just a few yards from the bomb shelter. She lay on its hood with her back resting against the windshield, one arm draped across her eyes, like a pinup girl from one of those grody hot-rod magazines. She stirred when I approached, hastily brushing the hollowed-out, furry husk of a guinea pig off the hood and into the grass.

“You're awake,” she said, acting aloof as she looked me over. “Nice spear.”

“Thanks,” I replied, turning the weapon over in my hand in a way I hoped was vaguely menacing. “Cody gave it to me.”

“Aw, isn't he sweet? Guy probably whittled it himself.”

“Uh-huh. I see you already worked your magic on him.”

Amanda raised an eyebrow. “What is
that
supposed to mean?”

“Just that he got all gooey talking about you.” I shook my head, wanting to get off the topic. “Whatever. He probably has a zombie fetish.”

“He's not the only one,” Amanda said, and gave me a meaningful look.

Now it was my eyebrow shooting up. “What is
that
supposed to mean?” I parroted.

“Nothing. And anyway, I was just nice to him. It was no big thing.” Amanda sat up, her detached attitude slipping. “What was I supposed to do? You guys, like, abandoned me with these
people
. I'm in this cracked-out dead state, Jake's gone, your dumb ass is knocked out yet again, and I've got four losers tied up and no clue what to do with them. So when the hillbilly hunk wakes up, I flirt a little and get him to bring us out here so I have a place to stash you while I look for Jake. It's called improvising.”

“Okay, jeez, relax,” I said, holding up my hands. “I guess I should be thanking you for not dumping me by the side of the road.”

“I'm not a monster,” Amanda hissed. “No matter what you might think.”

The image of Harlene, the nicest lady and best NCD squad leader ever, bleeding to death from an Amanda bite wound popped into my head. That argued pretty strongly for monster, but I didn't bring it up. It was so hard to be civil with her, especially without Jake around to be our buffer. I wondered if she was having the same problem.

“Jake didn't show up at Truncheon's,” Amanda said, thankfully shifting gears away from degrees of monstrosity. “I went back to where it all went down and he wasn't there either. I took the Marauder and left him some guinea pigs in the van, in case he shows up.”

“Why didn't you stay out there?” I asked, trying not to sound too judgmental, even though I would've waited longer. “What if he shows up during the night?”

“Because you're here,” she replied, like this should be obvious.

“So? I mean, I appreciate the concern but—”

Amanda cut me off with a sharp laugh. “Concern. Right.” She shook her head in disbelief. “You track zombies, don't you?”

I knew where this was going. “Yeah, but—”

“So track
my
zombie,” Amanda said, interrupting me again.

“It isn't so simple,” I replied, tightening my grip on my improvised spear, not sure how this would play out. “He got hurt back there. . . .”

Amanda scooted across the hood toward me. “What do you mean
hurt
?”

“One of those ghouls had a pitchfork sticking out of him. There was an accident and Jake, uh . . .” I waved my hand. “I think he lost control.”

“Are you serious?” Amanda asked, eyes widening. She pushed both her hands through her hair and held them there. “So he could be wandering anywhere. Hungry, alone, stupid.”

I nodded, feeling a stab of empathy as I watched Amanda's face scrunch up.

“I'm sorry,” I said. “It was sort of my fault.”

Amanda leapt forward. I hadn't been expecting it and didn't have a chance to even lift Cody's stake. She grabbed me hard by the shoulders, but I quickly realized she wasn't trying to eat me.

“You can find him, though, right?” Amanda asked, her eyes wide. “That's what you do.”

“It doesn't work like that,” I said gently. Amanda's expression darkened, but I continued anyway. “If he's a ghoul, his mind is dead. It makes him almost impossible to track. And right now my powers are fried, so I can't even tell if—”

She shoved me away.

“Forget it,” she said bitterly. “It was stupid of me to even come back here. I'll find him myself.”

“Hold on,” I protested. “Just give me until morning to rest. I can try finding him on the astral plane then.”

Amanda stood behind the open car door, staring at me. “Astral plane,” she repeated.

“It sounds stupid when you say it out loud.”

She shook her head. “So until then he's just out there decomposing or, like, eating his way through Iowa's last working day care. Or getting his head blown off by some wackjob like Truncheon. And this astral-plane thing might not even work. I get all that right?”

“Pretty much.”

“Perfect.”

I looked down at my sneakers, feeling overwhelmed but also trying to figure how to play this. If Jake really had gone ghoul—or worse—I was going to need Amanda. Without one of my zombie friends, there was no way for me to find and then smuggle this alleged cure out of Des Moines, which meant I could look forward to some telepathic snapshots of Alastaire murdering my mom. I wondered if I'd even have time to mourn before the army started napalming Iowa.

Yeah, I was starting to feel pretty much screwed.

“Please, Amanda,” I said quietly, repulsed that it'd come to this. “I'll try to help. Just promise you won't bail on me.”

She stared at me for a long couple of seconds, her face a blank mask, eyes chilly at best. Then, without another word, she climbed into the Marauder, started it up, and drove without headlights into the night.

I watched her brake lights until they disappeared.

JAKE

I CAME BACK TO LIFE SLOWLY.

The first things I became aware of were my feet, shuffling along across pavement all stupid, like my big toes had been magnetized.

Pick up your feet, dummy. You're staggering around like a—

Like a zombie. Duh.

I focused on walking like normal and, once I'd mastered that, my other functions started falling in line too. Breathing normal, eyes focused, walking with my arms at my sides instead of stretched in front of me. It was like coming down from a really outrageous high, that sudden sharpness of feeling yourself again.

Speaking of which, I checked my back pocket. The eighth I'd bought from that protester back in Omaha—he'd called it Husker Doolittle—was still intact. Whew. Everything else I owned might have been back in the car, including my sweet authentic peace pipe and the guinea pigs I'd need to eat sooner rather than later, but at least I'd managed to hold on to the first bud I'd been able to score since freaking New Jersey.

“So, I've got that going for me,” I said out loud.

A six-pack of ghouls, all of them wearing hospital gowns, their decaying asses swinging around all sloppy and free, turned in unison to look at me. They'd been lurching down the sidewalk on the other side of the street. The cornfields I last remembered shambling through had given way to paved roads and buildings, a town or a city, hard to tell how big with all the streetlights out.

“Sup,” I said, waving to the zombies. “Where are we?”

Their zombie sense must've told them I was inedible, because they groaned and turned away, shuffling off to whatever the ghoul nightlife was around here. A beautiful feeling of relief cascaded through me as I realized I wasn't one of them—I'd come back, puncture wounds healed, fresh as a graveyard daisy. Feeding off Truncheon had been enough.

For now. What was I going to do when I got hungry again?

I turned to watch the ghouls shamble off. They weren't doing so hot on the whole finding-food tip. The wind picked up, carrying an old fast-food wrapper from the mouth of an alley and sticking it to the bare ass of a ghoul. Mother Nature's way of taunting us abominations.

If the ache in my feet was any indication, I'd wandered far in my zombie state. I couldn't be sure if this was Des Moines or not. Wherever I'd ended up, it was a real dump. Broken shop windows, overturned cars, ghouls wandering everywhere—the complete set of collapsed-society clichés. I kept stepping in puddles that could've been anything from gasoline to blood. I'd never actually encountered gangrene, but that's how I interpreted the city's smell—like a moldy limb that needed lopping off.

It was dark, all the stars visible in the sky on account of the electricity being out. Hands on my hips, I stared up at the constellations, looking for the North Star. Not that I would've known what to do with it, if I found it. I'm not an astronaut.

I thought about Amanda. Except for the short time when she'd been captured by the NCD before I'd bravely rescued her like a boss, this was the first time in the last couple weeks that we'd been separated. Like, seriously separated. I don't want to come off as some emo boy who can't get to sleep unless he's sucking on a lock of his girlfriend's hair, but I missed her. If we'd had a normal relationship, like if we'd miraculously started dating back in Jersey when we were human, I probably would've relished the alone time after two weeks straight of being constantly on. (On my charm game, yo.) It was an opportunity to binge on comics and fart loud and free. But there wasn't anything fun to do in this godforsaken zombie wasteland, and I wasn't used to confronting this apocalyptic shit by myself. So yeah, I missed her.

“Somewhere out there,”
I sang to the stars,
“beneath the pale moo—”

A ghoul shouldered past me, interrupting. He stared at me, watery eyes uncomprehending.