Undead with Benefits (31 page)

Anyway, hadn't I gone easy on her? She'd eaten a lot of people. She ate Harlene and would've eaten Tom if I hadn't stopped her. They were the only family I'd had for the past few years. If I'd really wanted to, I probably could've made her forget how to walk. I could've blotted out the important parts from her memory just like Alastaire had done to my mom. But I didn't. Instead of some horrible fate, she got to fall in love with that beautiful, corn-fed mimbo. If only we were all so lucky.

Tactical Romantic Reassignment. That's what the NCD would call it.

Was I lying to myself by pretending this was a purely practical decision? Probably a little, but like I'd decided out in the parking lot, I was done agonizing over the ethics of the ex-NCD, blackmailed, fugitive, psychic, black-hat lifestyle. I wiped a trickle of blood from under my nose and shuddered at my own thoughts.

You've gone this far, might as well keep going.

 

“No, I'm sorry,” I said, focusing hard so the guilt wouldn't leak through and spill like an oil slick all over the astral plane. “I shouldn't be, um, making plans right now. You need time.”

Jake stared at me, looking like he might just fold in on himself.

“It's okay,” he said. “It's not your fault.”

I sunk down in the swivel chair beneath the weight of a burgeoning migraine. My sinuses let loose a high-pitched, depressurizing whistle. I was going to feel like crap tomorrow morning. Even now, it was difficult to stay conscious.

I smiled.

Beyond the psychic fatigue, somehow, I felt loose and relaxed. How long had it been since I could picture a future for myself that wasn't entirely horrible?

As I began to drift off, I envisioned what was to come.

Tomorrow, Jake would bring me the cure. He'd use it on himself and never eat another person again.

We'd escape from Iowa and head west.

I wouldn't be alone anymore. We'd get to know each other for real.

If Alastaire wouldn't leave me alone after I brought him the cure, I'd find a way to kill him. I was stronger now and he had it coming.

I'd rescue my mom, no matter what. I loved her and didn't want to see her hurt, even if lately it felt like she belonged to a past life.

I wouldn't be staying home. Just visiting. I couldn't go back to life in San Diego, not after what I'd seen. Not when I was pretty sure the world was ending.

For however long we had left, Jake and I could go wherever.

We'd be free.

Here's where Tom would say something like,
You barely know each other, your relationship is imaginary, blah blah blah
—but that wasn't so true anymore, and anyway it didn't matter. I'd seen into his mind and he'd seen into mine, admittedly to a lesser extent, and I knew it would work. We'd be good together.

And if you know something is good, what does it matter how it comes about? As long as the end result is worth it.

 

I was really knocked out. I didn't wake up when the Humvee pulled up outside. I didn't so much as stir while they set up a perimeter. The splintering wood as they smashed down Truncheon's barricade didn't even register.

I only became dimly aware that I wasn't alone when they shouldered through the office door. The flashlights mounted on the barrels of their assault rifles shone through my tightly closed eyes. I moaned and groped for a pillow to shove over my face, forgetting that I'd passed out sitting up. Forgetting, in fact, that I was in a very dangerous place.

“Point team, report,” a demanding voice crackled over a walkie-talkie. “Is the asset secured?”

“Ten-four,” replied the man standing in front of me. I hadn't opened my eyes yet. I didn't need to. “Asset secured.”

The military had arrived in Iowa.

I didn't think they were going to shoot me. And anyway, I was too telepathically spent to do anything about it. I decided the smart move was to play dead. It wasn't hard; I was slipping in and out of consciousness anyway. I drifted off to the stomping and jangling of men with guns coming and going.

It could've been minutes or it could've been hours, but eventually a cool hand came to gently rest on my forehead. A man's fingers brushed wild tangles of hair out of my face and started to carefully blot my nose and upper lip with a damp rag.

“Okay,” a familiar voice whispered in my ear. “You're okay, Psychic Friend. I found you.”

JAKE

“JAKE!” REGGIE SHOUTED RIGHT IN MY FACE. “JAKE! Wake up!”

It was just after dawn and Reggie was shaking my shoulders. I'd spent the night sprawled out on his couch, at first delightfully buzzed and then thunderously buzzkilled. I woke up with a giant knot in my stomach and an unmistakable urge to paint my nails black and listen to some of that '80s goth hate-yourself music. I wondered if Reggie had any The Cure records in his collection.

“Let me sleep,” I groaned, squeezing my eyes shut. “Love is a lie.”

“Huh?” Reggie replied, annoyed, and then punched me twice in the arm. “Get
up
, man. Jesus. Don't you hear that?”

I couldn't hear anything above Reggie's yelling in my face and/or the howling vortex where my heart used to be. I strained to listen.

Whup-whup-whup
.

I opened my eyes. Oh, right. The army was coming.

Reggie stood over me wearing boxer shorts and a bulletproof vest. The Lord of Des Moines actually looked frightened.

“Helicopters,” he said. “Like those Black Hawk joints from the movie.”

I sat up, trying to figure out how to tell him I'd received advance warning of our impending strafing from a dream. “Yeah, uh, I think we're in trouble, dude—”

“No shit.” Reggie stared at me. “The hell happened to you?”

I touched my nose and upper lip, both stiff with blood thanks to Cass's psychic visit. The couch was stained where I'd had my face too.

“My girlfriend dumped me via third-party telepathy,” I explained. “Sorry about your couch.”

Reggie looked at me like I'd gone crazy. “Fuck your girlfriend! Fuck the couch! I think we're under attack!”

“Yeah, she mentioned that too.”

Reggie gaped at me for a moment, then charged toward the front door. I stumbled after him. He stopped to grab a second bulletproof vest out of a coat closet and shove it in my direction.

“Put that on,” Reggie said.

I pulled it on over my head. It was a lot heavier than I expected.

“Don't you have anything that, like, shields our brains?” I asked.

“No,” Reggie said. “Headshots are hard. They get you in center mass, though, you go all out-of-control wounded zombie, and pretty soon you're dead anyway.”

“Oh,” I replied. “I always go for headshots.”

“
Call of Duty
isn't real life, bro.”

We ran out the door and sprinted up the steps to the roof of Reggie's building.

This isn't a video game.
I said that to myself a lot lately, especially since beginning my vacation in Des Moines, but it'd never been more appropriate than watching those insectoid-looking choppers crisscross the skyline. These weren't like the traffic copters I'd seen floating past my house at rush hour or even like the ominous black chopper that shadowed Amanda and me on that first day. (Agh! Memories! My heart!) They were like flying sharks, huge and fast, with missile teeth.

“They've been circling for fifteen minutes,” Reggie said. He'd produced a pair of binoculars and was peering through them. “They've never come at us like this before. I don't like it.”

“Maybe they're just sightseeing,” I suggested.

Above the constant
whup-whup-whup
came the sound of displaced air, a brief
shoom
, like a car whizzing by on the highway. A red flare broke off from one of the choppers, moving quickly, a shortly lived vapor trail like an accusing finger behind it.

And then a building downtown exploded. Even though we were a few miles off, the roof shook beneath us. The resounding
boom
rattled my back teeth.

“Or not,” I said, my knees bent and ready to run.

Reggie didn't move except to lower the binoculars.

“They just hit the Ramada,” he said. “Paradise lost.”

Another missile from another helicopter. Another explosion. From our vantage point, I saw one of the skywalks crumble and collapse.

“Maybe we should get off the roof!” I yelled.

Reggie seemed dazed, so I grabbed him by the arm and dragged him toward the stairs.

“I always knew this day would come,” Reggie said, pretty much forcing me to drag him along. “Well, I hoped maybe the government would collapse before they got around to wiping us out, but . . .”

I got us into the stairwell doorway because if it was safe in an earthquake, it should be safe during a missile strike, right? I grabbed Reggie's shoulders.

“So what's the plan?” I yelled to be heard over another
whoosh-boom
.

Reggie blinked. “Plan?”

“You're the Lord of Des Moines and your city is under attack!” I screamed. “You said you knew this was coming! Don't you have, like, a contingency plan?”

He seemed to come back to himself, the shock and awe wearing off.

“I do,” Reggie said. “I have a plan.”

I fist-pumped. “There we go! What is it?”

“Run like hell,” he replied. “I'll go be the Lord of Denver or some shit.”

“Good enough for me.”

We booked it downstairs back into Reggie's apartment. The building shook with another nearby missile hit. Dust drifted down from the ceiling and a precarious stack of records toppled. They shouldn't have been piled up, anyway—bad for the vinyl. Reggie took the steps to the loft two at a time, disappeared for a moment, and then flung a backpack down to me.

“Grab whatever you want!” he yelled as he disappeared again. “What's mine is yours!”

I grabbed the bandana I'd wrapped around my two syringes of Kope Brothers Dezombifying Elixir and the dumb body spray I'd picked out for Amanda probably while she was erotically trampling our sacred bond with that Cro-Magnon hay-bale fetishist. I stuffed the little bundle of spurned good intentions into the pack. I scanned the room looking for other essentials. It was all crap, though. Nerd stuff. None of it useful in cases of aerial bombardment.

I wandered over to the capsized stack of records. Amid the swirl of colorful dust jackets and faded faces, something caught my eye. I felt a lurch in my stomach that was nonmissile related as I picked up the worn Frank Sinatra vinyl. The bony-faced old mobster dude stared up at me with his piercing blue eyes, reminding me of when Amanda and I had spun one of his records in a funeral home's basement.

I hoped she was all right and staying well clear of any missiles. And if she was out there, getting bombed in the less-fun sense, I wished it could have been me with her. It should've been, but I'd screwed up, stayed in Des Moines too long, blown it.

I sighed and shoved the album into my backpack because what the hell.

“Glad you've got your priorities straight,” Reggie said, catching me in the act as he raced down from the loft. He had his own backpack pulled over his shoulders and held a heavy metallic carrying case that looked like something stolen from the army.

Reggie went to the fridge and grabbed his supply of drugged-out mice. I should've thought of that. He set down the case with a thud and emptied half of the mice into his backpack.

“Splitsies?” he asked, holding out the tray.

I held my backpack open so he could dump the rest in.

“What's that?” I asked, nudging the metal case with my foot.

“Bazooka.”

“Get out.”

Reggie grinned wildly at me. “I never realized how badly I wanted to shoot down a helicopter until right this second.”

An explosion, this one closer than the others. Whatever strategy was dictating the choppers' bombardment targets, it was bringing them this way.

We ran for the door and blazed down the five flights of steps, leaping from landing to landing. Outside, the air smelled sharply of smoke and that poisonous dust that lurks in the bone marrow of buildings. I hadn't thought the air quality could get any worse, but the choppers proved me wrong. Towers of smoke from downtown explosions climbed into the early-morning sky. Luckily, Reggie's residential block was so far untouched.

“This way!” Reggie yelled.

We jogged instead of sprinted, not wanting to attract attention, ducking up against buildings whenever the ferocious
whup-whup-whup
got too close overhead. It didn't seem like they were targeting individuals—we passed plenty of ghouls wandering around unharmed when they would've made for easy prey. The choppers seemed intent on tearing down parts of the city where zombies had gathered en masse. They were stomping out anthills.

Reggie, in the lead, stopped suddenly. We ducked under the stone archway of a bank. Together, we watched a ghoul with his back consumed by flames wander through an intersection.

“I'm never playing another war game,” I said.

“Were you serious before?” Reggie asked, setting down his bazooka case and flexing his sore hand. “About your girlfriend?”

I shrugged, not really wanting to get into my whole thing at that particular moment. It turned out death from above was a pretty good way to momentarily forget a broken heart. I wanted to keep running.

Reggie tried to look conciliatory, but did an altogether crappy job. He was actually smiling.

“You can come with me, Jake,” he said. “We'll do it up road-gang style. Do you know how to ride a motorcycle?”

I shook my head. Reggie waved this complication away.

“You'll learn. It'll be some badass
Easy Rider
-bros-on-a-destructive-journey-across-the-country shit. You into that?”