Undead with Benefits (27 page)

Amanda cut me off.

“Where do you think you're going?” she asked, fists balled up in case we fought again. “We need to finish our talk.”

Before she could get too close, I shot her in the chest with the stun gun. She looked supremely mad as she collapsed, seizing, onto the ground. I glanced over my shoulder to see if Cody noticed and was relieved to find him too busy lowering Tara into her grave. I stood over Amanda; her teeth were gritted tight, eyes superwide, looking like she might pop a blood vessel.

“I really enjoyed that,” I told her, twirling the stun gun around my index finger. “See you around.”

I resumed my walk toward the house. For a few paces, Amanda tried to roll after me. Seeing that was almost as satisfying as shooting her had been. Eventually, the seizures too much, she gave up and lay there, jaggedly panting.

With a stick, I knocked the severed pig's head off the hood of the zombie's police car. Inside, the keys still dangled from the ignition.

Off I went. Alone.

It occurred to me as I drove down a deserted stretch of highway that I'd begun a pattern of running away whenever things got ugly and hard, which seemed like all the time lately. I tried to get out of the NCD when my feelings got complicated. Back at the farmhouse, when it seemed like everyone I cared about was getting killed or maimed, I'd wandered unprotected into a full-on zombie blood orgy rather than fight. Heck, if you really wanted to dig deep with the psychoanalysis, maybe part of the reason I'd joined the NCD in the first place was to get away from home after Dad died.

Here I was again—bailing, hitting the road, the lone driver on some of the most human-unfriendly roads in America.

Except that's not what this was. I wasn't running away from anything, not this time.

Like everyone else in this screwed-up world—particularly in this horrible, blood-drenched state—I'd decided to be selfish.

For once, I was going to get what I wanted.

I had a plan.

JAKE

THE THREE OF US WALKED THROUGH THE TREE-LINED plaza in front of Kope Brothers headquarters. I could almost picture the well-to-do business types out here, eating their brown-bag lunches on the ergonomic benches, daydreaming about mergers and acquisitions before the trio of marble fountains. Almost. Because, you know, there were piles of dead bodies in the fountains and someone had hung intestines like tinsel along the backs of the benches. Probably Red Bear.

“Who was she?” Reggie asked. “The one who turned you?”

“Just some girl,” I answered. “Met her at a bar. I remember she had amazing hair.”

“Damn, dude. That's literally one hundred percent more girls than I ever picked up at bars,” Reggie replied, smirking.

“You can't even get into bars, liar,” Red Bear sneered.

“I have my ways.” I shrugged, brushing it off, but Reggie had stopped walking and started mean-mugging Red Bear.

“Walk ahead,” Reggie said sternly.

Red Bear slumped his shoulders. “Aw, come on, boss. I was just messing with the little 'tard.”

“Walk ahead,” Reggie repeated, introducing some of that Lord of Des Moines bass to his voice.

Red Bear shot me a dirty look and then did as he was told. Reggie waited for him to be out of hearing distance before we continued through the plaza.

“You didn't have to do that,” I said.

“Man, I'm sick of not being able to have a normal, civilized conversation,” Reggie complained. He paused for a moment, took a deep breath, and then continued. “Anyway, this was some other zombie too, right? Not your girlfriend.”

“Nah, it wasn't Amanda. She wasn't my girlfriend then,” I said. I was pretty sure I'd spilled all these relationship details to Reggie that first night, but we were pretty stoned then and right now he wanted to talk about something besides drones. So, the topic was girls. “That started up after. We sort of, um, bonded because of the whole undead thing.”

“That's beautiful, man,” Reggie said, patting me on the back. “My heart is so swollen for you right now.”

“Shut up.”

“I'm serious, though,” he replied. “You're in love. That's magical.”

“It's only been like two weeks,” I said, feeling embarrassed, like when Adam and Henry used to bust on my crushes around the lunch table. “It's early.”

“That's a lifetime in undead years, man,” Reggie said. “Enjoy it while it lasts. Treasure it.”

“Uh-huh.”

“I wasn't so lucky,” Reggie said. “I didn't get a wild one-night stand with some bar skank.”

I slowed down and then stopped entirely. This seemed important. I didn't want to walk and process information at the same time. Multitasking is not my strong suit.

“How did it happen to you?” I asked.

Reggie chuckled. “I feel like we're having the talk. The birds and the bees.”

“Well, you can skip the STD part,” I grumbled. “I already know that much.”

Reggie clasped his hands behind his back, all professorial. “The infection presents in the blood,” he recited, “but also in semen, vaginal secretions, and in some cases breast milk. Saliva and sweat have, so far, proven noninfectious.”

“Huh,” I said, mulling over his speech and also mentally patting my own back for not laughing at
semen
. “So . . . breast milk?”

Reggie patted the inside of his elbow. “I caught it from a blood transfusion. So did Red Bear. So did a ton of other people. If you were just regular sick thirteen months ago, you probably got some bad blood from the nice people at Des Moines General. Then us sickies, we leave the hospital while the virus is still incubating and spread it further. Pretty soon—chomp, chomp, chomp. That's how it all went down.”

“How do you know all this?”

Reggie gestured at the skyscraper before us. “I haven't just been collecting video games over the last year, man. I've been doing research too.”

We started walking again.

“I still don't get why bites don't spread it,” I mused, brow furrowed.

“Didn't I say saliva was safe?” Reggie replied. “You know that means spit, right?”

“Yeah, uh, maybe you're a tidier zombie than me. When I turn, I'm usually oozing all kinds of funky stuff.”

“Oh, it's gotta be
live
blood,” Reggie explained. “That sludge in our veins when we turn, that's what's left behind when the virus burns out and retreats to the brain. Eat some live flesh, the virus gets stronger again, and our bodies are restored. We're only contagious when we're
alive
.”

“Not like the movies,” I said.

“Ugh, I know,” Reggie replied. “I used to be a zombie purist too. I would've shredded this walking, talking, carefree-biting genre-hijacking on my blog.”

As we drew closer to Kope Brothers headquarters, I noticed there were lights on in the lobby. We're not talking burning-furniture lights here either. It was the mellow mood lighting big buildings always leave on after hours. I didn't hear the telltale caterwauling of generator motors like back at Reggie's apartment.

“How does this place have power?” I asked.

“It isn't on the same grid as the rest of the city,” he said, shaking his head. “It generates its own electricity. Not sure how much longer it'll last, but it's been going strong so far.”

I gazed up at the Kope building—the newish, fancy-looking architecture stood out from the rest of Des Moines. In fact, it looked like it took significantly less damage than other buildings had during the undead uprising.

“That's, um . . .”

“Sinister?” Reggie finished for me. “Yeah, man. We're just getting started.”

As we approached the front doors, Red Bear stepped into view along with a trio of serious-looking zombies. They were all older than us, probably in their thirties, and they lacked the sense of drama of the other Des Moines zombies—these guys didn't go in for leather or costume flair. Instead, they were dressed in body armor that looked hijacked from the NCD and carried machine guns. I faltered at the sight of the guns, but Reggie kept right on walking. Red Bear smirked at me.

“Sir,” said one of the guards, snapping off a lazy salute.

“Any problems?” Reggie asked.

“No, sir,” the guard replied.

“All right. We're on high alert until further notice,” Reggie said. He turned to Red Bear. “Stay out here.”

Red Bear frowned, but then turned to one of the guards to bum a cigarette. Reggie led me past them and into the lobby. It was totally posh, pretty much untouched by the madness outside, with the conspicuous exception of a huge pile of smashed computer hard drives.

I glanced over my shoulder. “So, who are
those
guys?”

“We don't eat every army boy the NCD throws at us,” Reggie answered. “Some of them are open to changing sides. We convert them.”

I'd kind of assumed zombiehood was an unhappy accident for everyone. The idea of some soldier choosing to be a zombie didn't surprise me—in Des Moines, the alternative was to get eaten. But the idea of infecting people on purpose gave me a chill.

“I keep this place under guard because it's where we keep our food,” Reggie continued. “We have strict rules about who can eat what and when.”

“And
who
,” I added. “You
are
talking about people, right?”

Reggie shrugged like that was obvious. “We've got a doctor that sees to them. Keeps them healthy. I like to think of it as the first post-apocalypse occupation. Undead nutritionist. Our communist undead utopia serves only the finest grass-fed humans.”

When I didn't laugh at his joke, Reggie's face fell. We'd reached the elevator, which was amazingly still working. He hit the
DOWN
button.

“I try to treat them decently,” he said quietly.

“Dude, you call that crap yesterday
decent
?” I replied, a little stunned by his level of delusion.

“Those ones don't count,” Reggie said. His voice had become stern, but he avoided looking me in the eye. “A little bloodletting is necessary to keep the real psychos in line. And trust me, the only humans we put through that are the ones who have it coming. NCD goons or Kope cronies, basically.”

I thought about that huddled group of Kope employees in their stupid company-picnic T-shirts, looking terrified. The revulsion I'd felt for Reggie had faded when he'd lost his batshit Lord of Des Moines getup and reverted to normal-guy mode, but now it was back.

“What did those Kope people do? I mean, they were, like, secretaries and old dudes.”

“They tried to profit from this shit,” Reggie spat, and I heard some of that Lord of Des Moines passion in his voice. He gestured at the pile of busted computers. “Innocent people don't sledgehammer computers while a statewide epidemic is happening.”

“Yeah, I'm sure the bosses were scumbags, but damn,” I countered. “You planning to torture the people who, like, mopped the floors?”

“No,” Reggie replied, serious. “I spared the janitors.”

“Oh good.”

The elevator doors hissed open. Inside, Reggie hit the button for a restricted subbasement, then keyed a four-digit pass code into a wall-mounted LCD display. With a sinking feeling in my guts not entirely due to gravity, we started to descend.

“These Kope people, man,” Reggie continued, defending himself. “They probably let the infection loose as an experiment, all confident they'd be able to control it and corner the market on the undead-prevention industry. Snatch up a fat government contract from those dimbulbs in the NCD, retire to their mansions richer than God, with only a few thousand or so regular people dead. But it went tits up.”

“You know that for sure?”

He shrugged. “It's a theory.”

I started to call him paranoid but, thinking about everything I'd seen over the past couple weeks, decided against it.

The elevator doors slid open and we walked into a brightly lit hallway. The place was sterile and spotless, a bewildering change of pace from the chaos outside. It was like stepping onto a neat freak's spaceship. I was glad I hadn't called Reggie paranoid—there was definitely more going on here than baby aspirin and butt wipes.

“All this mad-scientist, secret-laboratory shit was already down here, by the way,” Reggie said. “We don't even know how to use half of it.”

I remembered the crazy old man from YouTube, the Grandfather, whose desperate broadcast about a cure was what brought us out here. That video could've been shot down here.

“Is this where the Grandfather works?” I asked.

Reggie gave me a funny look. “He doesn't really
work
anymore. But yeah, he was squirreled away down here when we first busted in. Everyone else'd abandoned the place except for him, working away on his
wonderful
cure.”

Our footsteps echoed in the empty hallway. We turned left, through a heavy-duty steel door that looked like it was on loan from a prison.

“That's dedication,” I said.

“Sure, the old crackpot has passion,” Reggie snorted.

“I should write him a thank-you card.”

“Come on, we can go see him.”

We walked past holding cells. Crowded holding cells. In padded rooms behind bulletproof glass, hopeless-looking people stared listlessly out as we passed. I gulped.

Here were the uninfected of Iowa. I'd known they were down here, but it was still startling to see them in person. Some of them looked bruised and beaten up, probably from when they were captured, but most just looked pale and despondent. They slept four to a cell, some of them sharing cots. It didn't really look like they were malnourished or anything—I'm sure there was plenty of people food floating around—and they'd been provided with comfortable-looking prisoner pajamas, so at least they had that going for them.