Undead with Benefits (17 page)

“Fine,” I said to him, sighing. “I'll bottle up these feelings.”

Amanda would be looking for me. I'd told her to meet me back at Truncheon's motor garage/human-trafficking staging area because it seemed like a good idea at the time. Failing that, she'd know that I'd need to make it back to the car for food and probably check for me there. Both those landmarks—well, as much as an abandoned car near a cornfield could be a landmark in the Midwest—were in the same direction. Logic followed that I just needed to head that way.

Except I didn't know which way that was.

So I started walking.

My mind turned from Amanda to Cass. I had faith Amanda could take care of herself—she didn't have to worry about all these rail-thin shambling ghouls popping starvation-induced hard-ons for her. Cass, on the other hand . . . she and the people we'd rescued from Truncheon were literally fresh meat. Back at the van, she'd shouted something incredibly cheesy at me that I couldn't quite remember through the haze of zombie bloodlust, but it made me smile to think about. She was such a weirdo. I didn't want her to get eaten.

My mind wandered along with my feet, so I didn't even notice the music until I was almost right on top of it. It wasn't superloud, but I guess sound carried well when everyone was dead. Just ahead, a flashlight beam danced around from within a smashed-up Gamespot.

It seemed like a good idea not to rush out and introduce myself to someone brazenly scavenging the Deadzone. I pressed myself up against the wall and inched forward, putting my sneaking skills to good use.

I recognized the music. It was Anti-Bellum, this indie hard-core rapper who'd blown up on the blogs a few months ago with his concept album about Civil War battles. Pretty cool, actually.

Inching along, ninjalike, I failed to notice the ghoul on the sidewalk until I stepped in his guts and he started to screech. The poor guy had been cut in half and left leaning against the wall. The undead were literally litter.

“Sorry, sorry, sorry,” I whispered, dancing away from the dark puddle of his intestines.

The music stopped. I cursed my novice-level stealth skills and ducked into the shadows of a doorway. I wished I had the forethought to pick up a weapon—there were all kinds of debris lying around, from boards with nails sticking out of them to loose femurs. I could've clubbed this guy and booked, but it was too late now. I decided on hiding.

I heard heavy boots crunching over broken glass and then a lanky shadow ducked through the smashed-in Gamestop entrance. I couldn't see much beyond the miniature sun of his flashlight, but his silhouette was tall and angular with a huge head, like a Martian scarecrow. He had a backpack on, and the hand not shining a light carried a small boom box. He swept the flashlight beam in both directions, just barely missing my doorway.

“Who's out there?” he rumbled, his voice gravelly and deep, like Christian Bale's corny interpretation of Batman. (I preferred Michael Keaton.) A couple ghouls across the street turned their heads at the noise, but didn't seem interested in rushing him. He was one of them. One of us, I mean. Like me.

Even so, I kept quiet.

“Motherfucker, I
heard
you,” he growled impatiently. “Don't make me come looking.”

He was only a few yards away from me, and my hiding spot wasn't exactly Anne Frank level or anything. He'd find me without much trouble. Why piss him off?

I stepped out of the doorway and cleared my throat. He immediately swung the light into my eyes, blinding me.

“Ow, hey.”

“Who is that?” he snarled.

“Uh, you don't know me.”

“I know everyone. This is my city.”

“Yeah, okay, Bruce Wayne,” I replied, squinting and shielding my eyes. “You can go back to safeguarding the night or whatever. Just point me toward the highway that goes through the cornfield.”

The flashlight beam shook. The guy let loose a self-deprecating, snort-filled laugh.

“Cool, I was going for a Dark Knight thing,” he said, his voice now a couple octaves higher and less like a rock grinder. A normal voice. “Shit is murder on the vocal cords.”

“Your flashlight is murder on my retinas,” I replied.

“Oh, sorry.”

He lowered the beam to my chest. I tried to blink away the huge lava islands floating across my vision.

“Hate to break it to you,” he said, “but every highway in this stupid state goes through a cornfield.”

“Great.” I sighed.

“Where you trying to go?”

“Originally Des Moines, but I lost my girlfriend on the way, so now I'm just trying to get back to where we left our car.”

“Well, the good news is, you made it to Des Moines,” he said, and waved his flashlight around, illuminating the bloodstains and wrecked storefronts in brief splashes.

I kicked some loose rocks or maybe bones. I'd been worried this was Des Moines. It didn't look like a place hiding a zombie cure, or a zombie community, or much of anything at all. It looked like a shithole.

“Freaking paradise,” I grumbled.

“It's what you make of it, man,” the guy replied, sounding a little defensive. He cocked his head, thinking, and then sang a few lines of song at me. “
Keep pushin' 'til it's understood and these Badlands start treatin' us good
. That's what your dude says, right?”

The song was familiar, but I couldn't place it. “Uh?”

“Springsteen, man. Aren't you from Jersey?”

“How'd you know that?”

“Because you sound mad Jersey. I'm from Queens. East Coast represent!”

He shined his flashlight beam under his face. His features turned monstrous and exaggerated, but at least now I understood why I'd thought his head was so big. The guy had a huge, unkempt Afro. Otherwise, he looked pretty normal—couldn't have been more than twenty, black, a weird scar on his forehead that looked like puckered lips.

“Name's Reggie, by the way.”

“Jake,” I said, waving. “Nice to meet you. Thanks for quoting Springsteen instead of, like, trying to shoot me or something.”

“The night is young,” Reggie joked.

A curious ghoul wandered over and stood between us, like she wanted to get into our conversation. Reggie shoved her away and stepped in closer.

“Stupid things,” he mumbled. “Anyway, I don't usually go for that blue-collar, old-white-dude shit, but Springsteen, he gets it. All his songs are about cars, loneliness, and ladies.”

“My dad loves him,” I said, trying to explain this willful gap in my musical knowledge. “So obviously, that makes him lame. Plus, being from Jersey and liking Springsteen is a total cliché.”

“Yeah, true. You could be into him ironically, but that post-hipster guilty-pleasure shit is so played,” Reggie replied. “Sincerity is underrated, man. Anyway, you should check him out.”

“Uh, yeah, I'll put that on my to-do list,” I said, feeling a wave of sad futility as this normal-seeming musical feeling-out was taking place in a blacked-out zombie wasteland. When was I ever going to have the chance to sit around listening to Springsteen? My life was kinda screwed right now.

As if sensing my sudden onset depression, Reggie put his hand on my shoulder.

“You want to hang out, Jake?” he asked. “Listen to some records? Maybe get something to eat? I just liberated a Sega Genesis if you're into that.”

My mouth hung open. Reggie had just ticked off a list of my favorite things, all of which seemed impossible. There were no words capable of expressing the cruelty of his joke, so I just waved my arms.

He laughed again and slapped my shoulder. “Come on, man. I got a place up here.”

“For real?”

He smirked. “Jake, it gets better.”

I hesitated as Reggie started up the block. My experiences with Iowans so far were pretty much one hundred percent murderous. Reggie didn't seem like Red Bear and those others, though. He seemed chill, like the kind of dude I would've been friends with back home. I mean, he listened to indie rap and just looted a Gamestop. How could he not be one of the good guys?

I jogged after him.

We picked our way along the sidewalk and sometimes right down the middle of the street, Reggie leading the way with his flashlight. Each new block was just as gruesome as the last. I sort of missed when I'd been stumbling around in the near-dark. I'm not sure what I'd expected of Des Moines—certainly not some hand-holding zombie utopia, not after meeting those psychos at the farmhouse—but I hadn't been ready for this nasty postapocalyptic hellscape either.

“How long have you been here?” I asked Reggie.

“Since the start,” he replied. “I was here when things were normal, on the black-person exchange program.”

“Um, Iowa had that?”

He laughed. He did that a lot, it seemed. Laughing was easy for him.

“I'm messing with you. I was going to school. Lucked out, actually. I think I was one of the first people to turn. That was like a year ago.”

He'd been a zombie for a whole year, longer even than Grace and Summer. I grimaced. “So that means there's no . . .” I trailed off, not wanting to embarrass myself in front of this veteran zombie.

“No what?” He stopped and shined the flashlight at me.

I sighed, feeling stupid. “No cure. We came out here because we heard there was a cure.”

“That's complicated,” Reggie said, his voice not so easygoing anymore. “I mean, you ever hear that expression
the cure is worse than the disease
?”

I couldn't imagine that being true and didn't bother trying. All I cared about was confirmation that didn't end with a bulldog on a skateboard.

“So it's
real
? The cure?”

“Sure,” Reggie replied, sounding disappointed by my enthusiasm. “It's real.”

I fist-pumped in the darkness, hoping Reggie didn't see me. Sure, he'd sounded reluctant and sorta ominous about the cure, but I was choosing to ignore that. It existed! I was close!

We kept on walking. I stepped carefully around a gristle-covered rib cage and spinal column, shaking my head in disbelief.

“No offense, man, but I don't get why you'd live here.”

“Oh, it's a mess down here, no doubt. We normally stick to the skywalks,” Reggie replied, then shined his flashlight up, illuminating a glass-enclosed walkway built above the street, connecting two buildings. There were others just like it up ahead. “The ghouls haven't really figured out how to get up there, so it's not so annoying to walk around. We even cleaned up most of the severed limbs and arterial spray, despite most of the others not being big on chores and shit.”

“The others . . .” I was thinking of Red Bear and the other bloodthirsty, leather-clad nut jobs I'd run into back at the farmhouse.

“The Sovereign Undead of Des Moines,” Reggie answered, a bit of irony in his voice. “Almost two hundred at last count, I think. Plus a few thousand ghouls, but they're second-class citizens.”

“Damn, that's a lot of zombies.”

Reggie chuckled. “More show up every day. Like you.”

“I'm, um, just passing through.”

“Suit yourself,” Reggie said, although I could tell he didn't really believe me. I decided to change the subject.

“So, you guys, like, elected this Lord guy I keep hearing about?” I thought back to what Red Bear had called him on the border. “Uh, Lord Wesley?”

“Heh.” Reggie shook his head. “Elected? Nah. He just started talking and people started listening, I guess.”

“Is he cool? I picture that Humungus dude in the hockey mask from
Mad Max
. Like, leather chaps with spikes and a slithery little gimp dude on a chain.”

Reggie was laughing again. “Sorta, yeah. But don't worry, he's not so bad.”

Reggie led me to the front door of a swank-looking apartment building. Unlike pretty much every other building I'd seen in Des Moines, the windows on this one were intact. Or newly installed, maybe. Reggie produced a set of keys to unlock the security door and I kept right on talking. I was excited. If I had a cell phone, I'd have already sent Amanda like a billion 911 texts. I'd met a friendly zombie! There was a cure! Everything was going to turn around! Hope you're alive!

“That's a relief,” I said to Reggie. “I heard I'd need to ransom off some live humans just to get into the city.”

Reggie led me past an empty elevator shaft to a flight of stairs. He glanced back at me with a crooked grin.

“What? You don't have any human meat to barter? I'm sorta regretting inviting you over.”

“Dude, my inventory totally sucks right now.” A thought occurred to me as we climbed the steps. “Except, I do have a bunch of pot.”

Reggie stopped so suddenly that I almost bumped into his back. He peered down at me from the landing above, his eyes wide.

“Are you messing with me?” he asked, his voice low and Batmanlike again.

I pulled out my baggie of Husker Doolittle and dangled it in the flashlight beam. Reggie practically leapt down two steps and wrapped me in a powerful hug.

“Our meeting was destiny, Jake,” he said, squeezing me. “You're my new best friend.”

I laughed, struggling against his grip. “All right, all right, let me go.”

It was a hike up five flights of stairs to Reggie's apartment. On the way, I noticed a trio of thick extension cords running along the edge of the steps. I'd been talking too much to notice it before, but now I could hear the distant rumbling of engines from the building's basement.

“Generators?” I asked.

“Yeah,” Reggie replied as we reached his door, the extension cords disappearing underneath. “I gotta scavenge a lot of gasoline to keep this place running, but I think it's worth it.”

Reggie unlocked the door and I stepped into paradise. It was a huge loft apartment, lit by strings of mismatched Christmas lights, with floor-to-ceiling windows looking out on the darkened city. It was a total rich-dude apartment, like something you'd see a stockbroker drinking martinis in, except Reggie had decorated it with all kinds of acid-trip black-light art and posters from Japanese ninja movies I'd never heard of. A plush, sprawling, U-shaped sectional couch dominated the living room, centered before an obscenely huge wall-mounted plasma TV. Hooked to the TV was pretty much every video-game system known to man, some that I didn't even recognize. DVDs, video games, records, and stacks of graphic novels overflowed from bookshelves and into carefully organized piles on the floor.