Undead with Benefits (18 page)

My knees felt weak.

“Dude,” was all I could manage.

Reggie smirked. “As you can see, I've had a little bit of time on my hands. You like it?”

“It's the greatest thing I've ever seen in my life.” I did a full 360, trying to take everything in, my hands on my head. “You all live like this?”

“Ha, no. Some of the others, they're more into that whole rough-and-tumble anarchy lifestyle. They mostly stay around the Ramada Tropics because it's got a pool. Ramada
Tropics
in
Iowa
? You believe that shit? And dirty-ass water because none of them ever figured out how to work a filter or use chlorine.” He shook his head. “Anyway, this is where I come to get away. My hideout.”

“It's an amazing hideout,” I replied, staring at his collection of video games and trying not to faint from the rush of blood to my nerd boner.

“Heads up,” Reggie yelled, and tossed me a cold can of PBR from the fridge. He grabbed one for himself and then walked over to join me. He carried a tray with neatly arranged rows of dead-looking science mice. “You hungry? Want to try one of these?”

I squinted at the mice. They weren't dead, just unconscious, and coated in something dusty and orange.

“What the hell is that?” I asked.

“So”—Reggie set down the tray self-consciously—“I'm still working on this, but I've been trying to make the whole eating thing a little more, I dunno, palatable? Civilized? I drug these little dudes so they're not all squirming and pissing themselves when you start eating them, and then I roll them in taco seasoning for flavor.”

“Wow,” I said, staring in awe at Reggie. “I think you might be a genius.”

We each ate a couple of the mice. As usual, the little creatures didn't quite satiate my hunger—even barely remembered, Truncheon's brains were the most satisfying meal I'd had in the last week—but I had to admit, these were better than normal critter snacks. Not getting my lips slashed by tiny claws was a nice change of pace, and the taco seasoning made the first bite taste almost like Doritos.

Afterward, Reggie put on a scratchy record, some trippy, cowbell-heavy '60s thing from a band called Strawberry Alarm Clock, and disappeared upstairs. I flopped down on the couch, feeling a little buzzed from the beer I'd chugged and whatever tranquilizers those mice were pumped full of. I felt more relaxed than I had in days, maybe since before that fateful day in the cafeteria. Through that haze of good feeling, a little guilt crept in—Amanda and Cass were out there somewhere, maybe looking for me, maybe in danger. And here I was reclining because holy shit this part of the couch had a built-in footstool. I'd gotten us closer to the cure, though, hadn't I? Hanging out with Reggie was technically, like, infiltrating the Iowa zombies.

Yeah, that's it.

Reggie returned, grinning and dusting off a sizable vaporizer that looked like a gumball machine or a retro robot. He held it up proudly.

“Tom Servo, out of retirement,” he said. “We getting high or what?”

I hadn't smoked in weeks and that Husker Doolittle was not screwing around. It knocked me on my ass. Reggie fired up some imported shooter on his modded Xbox called Bushido Machine Gun, but my fingers were numb and he was really good, shooting me with rocket-propelled katanas over and over. Eventually, we just settled into our separate areas of the couch, laughing about dumb stuff and talking.

Talking and talking.

Man, will I talk when I'm stoned. Like, more than usual. I'm pretty sure I told him everything—about the massacre at RRHS, my magical romance with Amanda, the weird little psychic we'd picked up and how I had a strange attachment to her, which is something I'd never even realized until that moment and man isn't weed just amazing?

“You sound like me,” Reggie said. “I mean, the way you were before. Floundering, man.”

“I wouldn't say floundering,” I replied, too stoned to get defensive. “I was, uh, uniquely open to possibilities up to and including community college.”

“I wasn't doing so hot before,” Reggie said, countering my life story with his own. “I was sick all the time, ever since I was a kid. I had anemia.”

“Like the eating disorder?”

Reggie laughed. “Nah, man, that's anorexia. My blood was all jacked up. All kinds of stuff would go wrong.”

I laughed too, then felt bad. “Sorry.”

“Hard to make a lot of friends when you're sick all the time. Kids are shitty. You know how it goes,” Reggie mused. “I came out here for school because it was far away.”

I sank deeper into the couch, listening.

“I thought things would be different in college, but they weren't,” he continued. “I had a scholarship for creative writing, but all my professors were dicks, man. They were like, why are you writing about spaceships, write about what you know, like the urban experience . . . and I was like, bitch, my parents were lawyers and sent me to college in Iowa, what am I gonna write about, drive-bys in our fuckin' Prius?”

“Word,” I replied sagely, then started laughing at my own stupid voice. “Word!”

Reggie ignored me, on a roll now. “Then a ton of people here caught zombie and it was like a lawless war zone overnight.” He fingered the weird scar on his forehead. “I'd seen every zombie movie, man, plus all those apocalypse movies. I played the shit out of every
Fallout
. I know my stuff. I was feeling better than ever. And, man, I'm
good
at it.”

“Good at what?” I asked, furrowing my brow.

“Being a zombie,” he answered, grinning at me. “You must be too. Two weeks old and already made it out here to the undead capital. With an NCD psychic hostage too. Goddamn.”

“Uh, thanks, I guess,” I replied, studying a really interesting string of lights, timing my blinking with their breathing, or was it the other way around . . . ?

“Finally found something we're good at, man,” Reggie mumbled, off in his own head now too. “It's the best feeling.”

He was right, I realized. I did feel good. I hadn't made the connection back when Amanda yelled at me for not taking our journey seriously enough, but I did now.

Sometimes I really liked being a zombie.

CASS

I FELT DISCONNECTED.

I lay on my side in my bomb-shelter cot, the dusty-smelling sheet pulled up to my chin, a thin pillow squeezed against the side of my head to drown out the nearby snoring. I was in a state of fitful half sleep; every time I started to really drift off, the icy hand of my anxiety slithered up from the foot of the bed and tried to smother me.

I was alone out here. No NCD squad. No undead traveling companions. Just a dopey farm boy and some other equally scared zombie-apocalypse refugees.

No telepathy. I was truly on my own, even in my own head.

I didn't know when my powers would come back. I'd pushed too hard the other day with all the psychic shoplifting, and later Alastaire's astral-plane home invasion, and now I was paying for it. The migraine I'd been battling since yesterday morning had finally softened to a dull buzz, augmented by a steady throb from the bump on my forehead. But still the astral plane felt out of reach, like my brain's antenna was tuned to static.

I never realized how comforting the presence of other people's minds could be, especially out here where almost everything was dead.

My powers would return soon, I told myself. That's how it always worked; strain until the nosebleeds and then rest. Once they did, I could find Jake. Get the cure. Get safe.

I thought about my mom, at home with that freak Alastaire toying with her mind. It hurt to think about, but it also seemed far away—like the world outside Iowa, with electricity and laws and not as many decomposing cannibals, had frozen in time the second I crossed under that wall.

I guess I slept a little, my ramshackle brain producing ill-formed little quasidreams without any setting or plot, just the sensation of people being out of reach. Jake. My mom. Harlene and Tom.

Birds started to chirp, their calls muffled by the shelter's depth. When I opened my eyes, the room was still dark and candlelit, but that dewy way-too-early morning dampness had also settled in. It would've been the time of garbage men and paperboys, if they all hadn't been eaten.

I figured I'd be the first one awake when I slipped out of bed, but Cody was somehow still astride his stool by the door. He had the slot open and was peering through it with a pair of binoculars. I crept up next to him.

“Is there something out there?” I whispered, not wanting to awaken the others unless it was absolutely time to start running and screaming.

Cody's back tensed; he hadn't heard me coming over the big guy's persistent snoring.

“Naw,” he whispered back, lowering the binoculars and closing the hatch. “Just looking for warblers.”

“Is that some kind of Deadzone lingo for
zombies
?”

“They're birds,” Cody replied. I only now noticed the heavily written-in Audubon field guide in his lap. “When the power goes out, you find new hobbies.”

I pinched the bridge of my nose, a little embarrassed. “Sorry. I'm slow this morning.”

He sucked his teeth. “Also, you aren't in some
Deadzone
. You're in Iowa. Guthrie County, Iowa.”

“Sorry,” I repeated. He looked genuinely hurt, like I'd just told him corn was the worst of all the grains. “I'm new here.”

“It's cool,” Cody said, and flashed me a smile. “Just gotta remember we ain't dead yet, you know?”

The springs from one of the cots whined as one of the sleepers rolled over. We were quiet for a moment. Cody wasn't so bad to talk to, I decided, and while I was stuck here without a plan, I should try learning as much about Iowa as I could.

“I just can't believe it's like this,” I said. “I mean—how did it happen?”

“Shoot,” Cody said. “I was hoping you knew. Like maybe they talk about us outside the wall.”

“Most people don't even know this is happening, much less why,” I replied gravely. “There's a whole conspiracy thing.”

Cody's face fell. “Dang.”

“We can take you back with us,” I blurted without thinking. “We're just here to find something and then we're getting out.”

The guy just looked so earnestly bummed, I couldn't help myself. Admittedly, without the cure or my deceased mercenary guide, I didn't know how I expected to get back through the wall. But Cody didn't need to know that.

Cody's smile was gentle and sad. “The others might take you up on that, but not me. I've been here from the beginning and I intend to see it through until it's fixed. This godforsaken plague can't last forever.”

My return smile was shaky. Alastaire said there was going to be some scorched-earth military intervention here, which I don't think was the fix Cody had in mind.

“You're right,” I said, not seeing any point in crushing his spirits. I took a seat on the steps next to him.

“Is that where Mandy took off to last night? To go look for your something or other?”

I winced. “Sort of.”

“She coming back?” he asked, a little too eagerly for my taste.

“She better,” I said, wanting to change the subject quick. “You've really been here since the beginning?”

“I'm
from
here,” he replied, taking pride in it. “First time I saw one turn was at the YMCA they'd been evacuating people to. She used to be my bus driver.”

“Jeez,” I said, shaking my head, thinking about the map in NCD headquarters with the blinking lights for known incidents. None of this had ever been reported, at least not to agents on my level.

“One day, there was just a ton of them, eating people. The next day, there were even more. And then it just kept going.” Cody paused, checking to make sure I was listening. “After the first couple weeks, when it became darn clear that help wasn't coming, my dad and I started looking for places like this. Places we could hide. Once we had a bunch of 'em mapped, we started picking up other survivors. We had a caravan thing going. Had to keep moving because the smart ones, like the one that runs Des Moines, they'd get wise to our hideouts.”

I inclined my head toward the heavyset guy whose snoring had finally tapered off into a soon-to-wake gurgle. “Is that your dad?”

“Naw.” Cody chuckled, and I realized just how ridiculous it was to think they could be related. “That's my boy Roy. Roy Boy.” He grinned crookedly at the chance to use one of his nicknames. “He's pretty funny. Always talking about killing himself.”

“Sounds hilarious.”

“Eh”—Cody waved a hand—“he don't mean it. He's just a pessimist.”

“Hard not to be, I guess,” I said, thinking about what these Iowans had been through.

“Roy's a cameraman for Lucy,” Cody explained, gesturing to the sleeping shape of the woman who'd been listening to us last night. “Or he was, before his gear got smashed. I call her Lucy Lane, like Superman's girlfriend, but she don't much like that.”

“She's a reporter?” I asked.

Cody nodded. “They're from back east, out around Iowa City. That place didn't get put behind the wall until a few months back.”

“So it's gotten bigger?” I asked, shaking my head. “The, um, quarantined area?”

“Yup. Way Lucy tells it, there was a big outbreak out there and those government guys were more concerned with getting the wall extended than helping people.”

Those government guys.
I wondered if I knew any of them. Maybe we'd met at the NCD picnic last summer. The person responsible for condemning whole cities to death could have been strapped to me for the three-legged race.

“And then there's T.” Cody was still introducing me to the sleeping people. He gestured to the last occupied cot. “She wandered into our camp a couple days before Truncheon grabbed us. She don't seem quite right, but that ain't so unusual around here.”