Undead with Benefits (30 page)

“I found the cure,” I said, showing her the injectors, which in my dream space finally glowed. “Well, a sort of nice zombie warlord gave them to me. Except I didn't get enough and I don't know—”

Cass touched my arm, cutting me off. “Jake, it's okay. We'll figure something out. But right now we seriously need to get out of Iowa. Des Moines especially.”

As we walked across the football field, I noticed storm clouds gathering over the end zone.

“Yeah, it sucks here,” I replied, “but what's the hurry? I think I can still talk him into giving me another vial.”

Cass shook her head. “No time. The NCD is coming. The army. It's going to be bad.”

“Eh, Reggie said they've tried stuff before and—”

“It's not going to be like before,” Cass insisted. “No more little squads running extractions. They're going to torch everyone and everything. Zombies, humans, probably anything with a heartbeat.”

I smelled smoke. Barbecue smoke, like someone was cooking hamburgers and hot dogs, but the ominous kind!

“Okay, you're scaring me,” I said.

“I'm back at Truncheon's garage,” Cass replied. “Do you remember where that is? Can you make it to me?”

I blinked. “Wait. It's just you?”

“We have to get out,” Cass said, ignoring me. “Like, right now.”

I stopped in the middle of the field. “Uh, what aren't you telling me? What happened to Amanda?”

Cass stood in front of me and stared down at her feet. “I don't know how to tell you this.”

“You said you guys were
safe
,” I said, my voice rising with panic.

“She is safe,” Cass replied. “She just, um, bailed.”

“On you?”

“On
us
.”

They appeared on the bleachers over Cass's shoulder. It was Amanda and that hunky head-wound guy we'd rescued from Truncheon's meat wagon. She had a blanket thrown over her shoulders and he had his arms around her and they were making out. I stared at this wide-eyed from the fifty-yard line until Cass tracked my gaze, turned around, and gasped. Immediately, Amanda and the Headwound Heartbreaker, as he'll one day be referred to in the death-metal song I write about him, blinked out of existence.

“Sorry, sorry,” Cass said quickly. “You weren't supposed to see that. My subconscious must have—”

I cut her off. “That—that happened?”

Thunder pealed nearby.

Cass nodded solemnly. “That guy, Cody, he's a zombie now. They—I don't know, Jake—they hit it off, I guess.”

“Oh,” was about all I could muster.

“They drove off somewhere,” Cass continued, even though I really wished she wouldn't. “I'm not sure where.”

“We were in love,” I said dumbly.

Cass gently patted me on the back. “I don't know what to say, Jake. I guess she changed her mind.”

It felt like someone had pulled a chair out from under me and then broken that chair across my back. Part of me half suspected this would happen sooner or later—that Amanda would come to her senses, our whirlwind love affair written off as an unfortunate side effect of first turning undead. The other part of me—the apparently self-deluding part that believed it was possible to dig past superficialities and social statuses and get at something real—unfortunately, that's the part of my mind I'd been listening to.

“Did she say anything about me?” I asked Cass. “Did I—I don't know—do something wrong?”

“Um, I guess she just got tired of waiting,” Cass replied, frowning. “You know how girls like that are.”

The grass on the football field had turned brown and dead. A wintery wind carried in brittle leaves. From somewhere, the discordant electric-violin solo from Severed Lung's seminal breakup song “Sadness and Longing for the Rest of My Days (Until the Pavement Rushes Up to Meet Me)” jangled into my ears. So this is what happened in a lucid dream when you got really bummed out.

“Are you all right?” Cass asked, her head tilted, biting her lip.

“I'd like to wake up now,” I said. “I don't want you in my head right now.”

“I know you're hurting,” Cass said, touching my arm. “But will you still meet me at Truncheon's? We really do need to go, Jake.”

I nodded. “Sure. What the hell.”

Her smile was big and relieved, but she quickly toned it down.

“We can cure you,” Cass said, trying to cheer me up. “And then, if you're still up for it, we can do the road-trip thing. I need to go to San Diego and you can come. Have you ever been to California?”

I shook my head. I kept glancing toward the bleachers, half expecting Amanda and Cody to reappear. Actually, if I focused on it, they did start to flicker back into existence. Except it was a slightly changed version: Cody was supermuscular, they made out with lots of tongue, and Amanda kept laughing cruelly in my direction.

Meanwhile, Cass started ticking off things on her fingers. “No more rotten smells. Fish tacos. Good music. Cowboy hats. I promise, Jake, I'll get you through this.”

I glanced away from the bleachers. “Cass. I want to wake up.”

My chest opened up like the trapdoor on a cuckoo clock and spit out my heart. It was all gray and shriveled and flopped around in the grass like a fish out of water. Cass and I both watched until it split open with a farting noise, the insides completely hollow.

“Wow,” Cass said.

“Sorry,” I replied. “Emo.”

“No, I'm sorry,” Cass said. “I shouldn't be, um, making plans right now. You need time.”

I looked at her and tried for a casual shrug, but my shoulders were stuck in slouch mode. “It's okay. It's not your fault. Let's just get the hell out of this butthole state.”

She stared at me for a second like she wanted to say something more, but whatever it was, she swallowed it. Instead, she went on her tippy-toes and kissed me on the cheek.

“Things will get better, I promise,” she said.

I felt exhausted, which is a really incongruous feeling to have in the midst of a dream. I wanted to sink into that black, dreamless, nothingness part of sleep, turn my mind off, and not think about anything for a while.

I forced a smile for Cass, although being psychic I'm sure she could tell it wasn't the genuine article. “Yeah, so.” I glanced down at my dead heart in the grass. “Let's, uh, forget the awkward parts of this happened and just say good-bye, okay?”

“Sure, Jake,” Cass replied. “See you soon. And hurry.”

The football field opened up beneath me and I plummeted into that deep sleep I'd yearned for.

CASS

GOOD EVENING, CLASS. TODAY AT THE DEADZONE Academy for the Emotionally Stunted and Traumatized, we'll be learning about fun concepts like
shades of gray
and
the end justifies the means
.

After days of studying that road atlas looking for a way into Iowa, I'd gotten a pretty firm grasp on which rural routes and interstates led where. The roads were mostly clear, and where they weren't, the cop car was powerful enough to go over the shoulder and into the fields, looping around the occasional overturned wreck. I didn't see anyone else on my way. Well, I spotted some ghouls, staggering toward the noise of my engine, heads lolled miserably as they realized they'd never catch me. No real people, though.

I made it to Truncheon's in about two hours.

Since our last visit, a lone ghoul had stumbled into one of the bear traps that littered the parking lot outside the garage. He was dressed like a doctor: lab coat, stethoscope, the whole nine. The trap had sunk deep into his hamstring, tripped him, and left him sprawled on the pavement. A bunch of those cheap cherry lollipops pediatricians give you were scattered on the ground around him. When he caught sight of me, the ghoul started trying to army crawl in my direction. The trap was too heavy and his mostly decomposed limbs were too weak, so all he did was make a lot of scraping and gurgling sounds.

I stood next to the cop car and watched him for a few minutes. There was no human left in that ghoul. It was just an eating machine. It'd kill me or someone else if it got loose, or else it'd just struggle on miserably in the parking lot until whenever these things decomposed to dust.

Today was a day for personal improvement, I figured. I was done overthinking things, done grinding my teeth over the morality of every little decision, and done freezing up when something tried to eat me.

I found a cinder block around the corner of the garage, carried it over to the ghoul, and dropped it on his head.

He was the first one I'd ever killed. I didn't feel any great change in me at the loss of my z-card. Putting down that ghoul seemed almost like a mercy. I wondered if all the hardened zombie killers, guys like Jamison and Truncheon, felt the same way with their first one and kept using that justification over and over. Whatever. I'd proved to myself that I could do it. That I could get my hands dirty.

All things considered, it wasn't even the worst thing I planned to do today.

All the entrances to Truncheon's lair were sealed with heavy-duty padlocks and the first-floor windows tightly boarded up. However, Truncheon hadn't bothered with the second floor over the garage. I guess ghouls couldn't jump that high, and if coherent zombies were on the prowl, you'd want the higher ground. If I could climb up onto the gas station's roof, I figured I could scout around for a door or, at worst, make it to one of the upstairs windows.

I parked the cop car right up against the front of the gas station and climbed on top of it. With a good jump, I was able to get hold of the gas station's sign and pull myself over to the building. I'd chosen the
E
in the creatively named GAS AND GARAGE because it made for a makeshift ladder. I tore open the knee of my jeans on the middle branch, but it didn't hurt so much.

After some pretty ungraceful climbing, I swung myself onto the building's roof. My sneakers stuck to the tarred surface. There were a ton of cigarette butts up here along with a rickety beach chair and an empty cooler. It looked like this was where Truncheon spent his free time. Across the roof, a door I was happy to find unlocked led inside the garage. I opened it cautiously, but to my surprise Truncheon hadn't booby-trapped the door with any bear traps or swinging axes or whatever. I guess he didn't expect anyone to make it this far.

Before going in, I paused to catch my breath. I felt a weird sense of pride at having climbed up on that roof; it felt good to do something purely physical. The sun had started going down and even though I didn't have much of a view, I took a moment to gaze out over the flatlands of Iowa.

Man, it sucked here. I couldn't wait to get the cure, save my mom, and get the hell out of Iowa. Kinda ironic, I guess, that I'd bailed on California to join the NCD, and now I was headed back there hoping to start a new life. One where zombie cheerleaders didn't make my life miserable; where the only guy I'd ever really liked wouldn't be obsessed with the most superficial human in existence. He wouldn't be undead anymore either, and I wouldn't be considered a weirdo freak by all who met me. Once I was in California, I could start over.

I touched my throat, where bruises had puffed up from when Amanda choked me. The ache reminded me of what I planned to do. I went inside.

I explored Truncheon's digs, but didn't find much of interest. He'd been living in the upstairs employee-break room, or at least that's where his flea-bitten and sweat-stained mattress sat. Loose ammunition and nudey magazines were pretty much the extent of his decoration. Down below, the garage itself stored his motorcycle and a Jeep. I found a hatch in the floor, which led down to a small basement, probably where the mechanics once stored spare parts. I didn't go down; just opening the hatch released a flood of pungent panic smells and I figured this was where Truncheon had been storing his “human currency.” A different kind of spare parts, I guess.

“Hello?” I called down, and was relieved no one answered. Right then, I didn't want to be responsible for anyone but myself.

Truncheon had pretty thoroughly scavenged the adjoining gas station of anything edible. I poked around the dusty shelves, the day's dying light squeezing in between the narrow cracks in the windows' mismatched lumber barricades. Eventually, I found an unopened package of stale rice cakes. I picked away at them while exploring the little store's small back office. It was the cleanest place I'd found and seemed to carry the least amount of residual Truncheon, so I settled on it as my base of operations.

I thought about what Truncheon said before we'd gone into the Deadzone. He'd liked it in here; the lack of rules suited him. I wondered if maybe I was a person like that, just searching for an abandoned gas station in a derelict state to finally shuck off society's constraints and give in to my worst urges. Maybe that's how it was for everyone. Maybe that's why this whole zombie plague was allowed to get so out of control. Because we all wanted an excuse to eat one another.

I settled into the office's threadbare swivel chair and finished the rice cakes. Then, I closed my eyes and slipped out of my skin, onto the astral plane. It wouldn't be hard to find who I was looking for.

She was right where I'd left her.

 

It'd gotten dark when I finished rearranging things in Amanda's psyche. I'd felt such determination when I slipped into her mind, like with the ghoul in the parking lot. It was something that I had to do. It was impossible for me to turn back once I was in there, even if the content of her thoughts made me feel a little guilty, like I'd misjudged her.

But I had to save my mom. And if doing so meant prematurely ending what was obviously a doomed relationship, so be it. I'd crossed a line, but what choice did I have? She would have done the same thing to me.