Undead with Benefits (19 page)

As I looked at the huddled form in the farthest cot, something stirred in my mind. The first tickling of the astral plane. It dangled just out of reach, like when a word gets stuck on the tip of your tongue.

“And that's it,” Cody finished. “That's all the living people I know.”

I shot him a look. “Wait, seriously?”

I watched him look into the distance, running down a mental checklist.

“Yup. Well, except for you and Mandy. Pretty much everyone I knew from before is dead,” he mused. “Or one of
them
.”

I didn't know what to say. This wasn't like a pity party; that everyone Cody knew was dead had become simply a statistic, like a home-run record, something that he thought was objectively impressive and interesting. I wanted to give him a hug, or a donut and milkshake, the stuff that cheered me up.

“You'll have to tell me your story sometime,” Cody said, glancing sidelong at me. “We haven't had electricity here in months, so I'm bringing back this thing from social studies. The oral tradition.”

“Yeah. Sometime,” I said, not really feeling like opening up, even though I guess that's probably expected after someone tells you about the holocaust of their entire social network. “It's a pretty crazy story, tho—”

Something slammed against the outside of the metal door. I jumped off the steps and almost out of my skin.

Cody sighed and stood up. I don't think he'd even jumped. I'd startled him before, but zombies throwing themselves against doors he was used to. He opened the metal hatch nonchalantly.

“Just a ghoul,” he said, peering out.

A guttural moan came from behind me and I whipped my head around, expecting to see a zombie closing in. It was just Roy, out of bed, shaking off sleep.

“Are we about to die?” he asked, his voice bringing to mind that suicidal donkey from Winnie the Pooh.

Cody laughed. “Naw, Roy. It's too early in the morning to die.”

“Oh good,” Roy replied halfheartedly.

Lucy had gotten out of bed too, and inched up behind Roy. She was probably in her thirties, curly dark hair, her skin light brown and covered with even lighter freckles. She looked spunky—you could tell she was a reporter, or at least something that required a certain amount of confidence. She caught me looking at her and flashed a tight smile, rolling her eyes at Roy.

The other girl—T, Cody had called her—stayed in bed.

“Everything all right?” Lucy asked.

“It's just the one,” Cody answered. “He didn't bring any friends.”

“Great,” Lucy replied flippantly. “I'll get the coffee on.”

“Can you please kill it already?” Roy complained.

Cody picked up the sharpened broom handle he'd armed me with the night before.

“It's probably going to smell,” Cody warned me.

“I'm used to it,” I replied.

Cody raised an eyebrow at me, then turned back to the slot in the door. I could see the yellowed eyes of the ghoul stupidly trying to shove his head through the tiny opening. Cody held his makeshift spear like a pool cue, patient, waiting for the ghoul to lurch into a position he liked. When he finally did, Cody thrust forward and the spear stabbed the ghoul between the eyes with a sloppy
thunk
. The ghoul collapsed and Cody pulled back the spear, now wet and sticky with blackened brain goo.

“That's that,” he said.

“Roy always wanted a zombie alarm clock, didn't ya, Roy?” Lucy tittered from the small kitchen area.

“Ah, shut up,” Roy grumbled, and sat down heavily on the edge of his bunk.

In the space he'd cleared, there stood T. She looked like a ghost from one of those creepy Japanese horror flicks, her lank reddish-brown hair streaked with gray and half covering her face.

I almost didn't recognize her.

She was skinnier than I remembered—way skinnier—and looked like she'd aged about a decade. We'd never really hung out a ton—we were on different teams and were always out on missions—but jeez. I'd never expected to run into my roommate from NCD headquarters in an outpost of human survivors in the middle of a cornfield crawling with undead ghouls.

“Tara?” I said, taking a step toward her. “It's Cass.”

Tara cocked her head, staring at me like she couldn't quite place me. So I guess bunk beds didn't count for as much as I'd thought.

“Cass,” she said, trying it out.

“You know each other?” Cody asked, mystified. I ignored him.

“What're you doing here?” I asked Tara.

“I . . .” She shook her head violently. “I don't remember. I think I did something wrong. A lot of somethings.”

“Something wro—?”

Without waiting for me to finish, Tara hopped forward and pulled me in close. Her breath smelled distinctly like cat food.

“He's watching us right now,” she whispered in my ear. “You can't feel him because you're tired, but he's here. Daddy's always watching.”

I swallowed. “Do you mean—?”

Tara touched her index finger to my lips. “He says for Truncheon, you're going to get a spanking.”

With that, Tara let me loose, turned back, and face-planted onto her cot. I stared at her, frozen in place.

Cody touched my arm. “What the heck did she say?”

I shook my head. “You wouldn't understand.”

Maybe I shouldn't have been in such a rush to get back onto the astral plane. Alastaire was there, waiting, and according to the creepily childlike skeleton that used to be my NCD roommate, he wasn't too happy with me.

JAKE

I WOKE UP SPRAWLED ON REGGIE'S COUCH WITH A deathly case of cottonmouth. Daylight poured in through the windows, forcing me to shove my face between the cushions for merciful darkness. I remembered this time I slept over at my old (now dead) friend Henry Robinson's house and did this same head-burrowing routine, only to scrape my forehead on the dried-up carcass of the missing family lizard. That was traumatizing. Slowly, I lifted my head from the couch. I didn't know Reggie all that well and you never knew what kind of gross stuff could be hiding down in the crevices.

I sat up and worked some moisture into my mouth. In the light of day, the tranquilized magic of last night wearing off, I suddenly felt panicked to be separated from Amanda and Cass. I really needed to figure out my way back to them. What if they were in danger, out there by themselves? What if they'd been eaten? Or, well, what if one of them had eaten the other? And the noneaten one was all mad at me? It wasn't cool to just be in the wind like this.

But wouldn't it be the ultimate action-hero move to swoop in and save Amanda and Cass with armloads of zombie penicillin? I was so close!

Outside, some jerk leaned into his car horn. Okay, that was unusual. I didn't notice a lot of traffic out in Des Moines last night.

“Jake!” Reggie yelled from upstairs, where I assumed his bedroom was. “You up yet?”

I groaned and stood up, my hangover really kicking in without the couch to soothe it. The living room was empty except for me and the remnants of our two-man party: empty beer cans, stems, and records left haphazardly out of their dust jackets.

“Yeah, man,” Reggie called down, hearing my painful moaning. “Ditto.”

“What's with the honking?” I yelled back.

“That's our ride,” Reggie yelled. “We're kinda late. Do me a favor and go down there. Tell 'em I'll be out in a minute.”

If I'd been less hungover or less distracted by fantasies of flinging handfuls of antidote pills from the back of a parade float while Amanda stood next to me in an evening gown doing that model hand wave, I might have asked some important follow-up questions. For instance: Who's driving us where, exactly? Or, what're we late for? Instead, I just stumbled to the door, accidentally kicking over a colony of beer cans on my way. I darted back inside the apartment for one second to grab a taco-mouse, and then I was ambling downstairs.

The honking stopped as soon as I pushed open Reggie's security door. A limousine idled on the curb, unlike any I'd ever seen. It was one of those big Hummer deals that you could probably fit a hot tub into. Attached to the front grill was a snowplow blade covered in darkened bloodstains. The roof was decorated with defaced Iowa state flags, and spikes that boasted a collection of severed heads. It was the heads that really got my attention, many of them badly rotten, the identifiable ones seemingly all older men with comb-overs. I stopped in my tracks, feeling like I might want to run back inside.

Someone popped up through the open moonroof.

“This guy . . . ,” Red Bear said, pointing at me with his hatchet. Part of his mouth was carved out and permanently widened with little wooden sticks, giving the impression that he was smiling at me—but he definitely wasn't. He looked the same as when I'd first met him on that bloody night in the fields beyond the farmhouse—greasy, a phony Native American getup, blatantly psychotic. “Don't we know this guy, Cheyenne?”

Through the rolled-down driver-side window, the intense chick with bleached blonde dreadlocks I remembered Red Bear sucking face with sized me up.

“Farmhouse,” Cheyenne answered, not all that interested.

“That's right!” Red Bear slapped the limo roof, startling me. “I thought maybe the NCD killed you, bro.”

“Uh, nope,” I said, glancing up and down the block for escape routes.

“Nope, nope, nope,” mimicked Red Bear in a falsetto, as he clamored through the moonroof and jumped onto the sidewalk. “You just keep popping up, huh? Little popper.”

“Little
pooper
,” Cheyenne said, and stared hard at me while making a farting noise.

I stared back at these two zombie wackadoodles. Red Bear, sporting an arrangement of dried scalps on his belt, was dressed in a leather vest and pants, Cheyenne in a bikini top and a skirt made of probably-human hair. They were more along the lines of the freaks I'd expected from Des Moines. Reggie being cool and having an awesome apartment had lulled me into a false sense of security.

But wait, were he and Red Bear friends? Were they picking him up?

“So, um, you guys know Reggie, huh?” I said, making conversation, trying to feel out the situation.

Cheyenne snickered.

“Reggie?” Red Bear snapped.
“Reggie?”

“Yeah, um, upstairs Reggie? He said he'd be right—”

Red Bear flung himself at me. He tackled me around the waist and we fell onto the sidewalk. Before I could think to punch him, he'd straddled my chest and pinned my arms. He held his hatchet under my chin.

“Reggie?” he screamed again, exerting the slightest pressure against my Adam's apple. “Your bitch ass doesn't know any Reggie.”

“Dude,” I whispered, afraid to move my throat too much. “I don't know why you're mad.”

Cheyenne giggled. That just seemed to incense Red Bear more. I could see the muscles in his hatchet-wielding arm tightening up.

Behind us, the apartment building's door clattered open.

“Goddamn it, Red Bear,” Reggie snapped, some of last night's put-on menace vibrating through his voice. Except, I realized, this time it wasn't a put-on. “Get off him.”

Red Bear took his hatchet away from my neck, twisted my nipple hard with his free hand, and stood up. I rolled onto my side to face Reggie.

“Are you seriously friends with—?”

I trailed off when I got a look at Reggie's outfit. He didn't look normal anymore, not like he had the night before. He'd picked his Afro out so it was even bigger, donned a pair of shaded nuclear-scientist goggles, and draped himself in a sleeveless patchwork overcoat. He didn't wear any shirt under the coat, showing off the DTFU
tattoo on his gaunt chest. Tight leather pants and platform boots that increased his height by another few inches completed the ensemble. He looked like the boss from a fighting game.

He looked like one of
them
.

“Oh man,” I said. “What the hell are you wearing?”

Reggie chuckled, but Red Bear took the opportunity to kick me in the ankle.

“Show some respect,” Red Bear snarled. “That's Lord Wesley you're talking to. The Lord of fuckin' Des Moines.”

CASS

IT WAS A BEAUTIFUL DAY. EVEN IN IOWA, OF ALL THE states I'd been to the one that made the worst first impression, there could still be beautiful days.

My mind was sharp. My powers were working again.

I reached out to Jake on the astral plane. I know, I know—I'd sworn off psychic spying, but these were definitely extraordinary circumstances. Finding his mind was easy, his psyche familiar and comfortable, the telepathic equivalent of an old T-shirt.

Like me, Jake had just woken up. He lounged on a couch in a fancy-looking apartment that someone had tried very hard to convert into a nerdy clubhouse. I imagined a suited doorman standing next to a hand-painted
NO GIRLS ALLOWED
sign. What mattered here was that Jake was alive, in the nonghoul sense, and that he'd made it to Des Moines.