Undead with Benefits (35 page)

An ear exploded right next to my head, flecking my face with kernel shrapnel. Then it felt like an anvil hit me between the shoulder blades. I hurtled forward, onto my belly, and barely managed to cover my head. My body felt crushed.

The shooting kept on for a solid minute as the Humvee crawled slowly down the road. Once the bullets finally stopped, I lay on my face for another minute, unmoving, my ears ringing. I wheezed and coughed. It felt like a vise had been clamped around my chest. I covered my mouth with both hands, trying to stay quiet.

When no zombies came stumbling out of the cornfield with fresh bullet wounds and insatiable hunger, I guess the soldiers figured us for dead. They didn't bother to stop and check the cornfield for our bodies. They had other things to do, more citizens to gun down.

I listened to the Humvee pull away. When I was sure they were gone, I rolled over and quickly unbuckled the straps of my vest. I tore it off and could immediately breathe again. The two slugs that would've lodged in my spinal column gleamed in the sunlight.

Thanks, Reggie.

I stood up, shaking loose the cob chunks and sliced pieces of husk that were stuck to me.

“Amanda?” I called quietly. “You okay?”

A sob answered.

I shoved through the corn in the direction of the crying, not caring that the leaves were sharp and that the stalks liked to smack me right in the face. I didn't care because it wasn't Amanda crying. It was Cody.

I found them a few yards away. Cody kneeled over Amanda's body and practically convulsed with tears. He didn't look hurt. Not that I gave a shit. He heard me come crashing into his area and stared up at me.

“She—she didn't get down,” he stammered. “She tried to run toward you.”

The gunfire had cut Amanda almost in half. She was perforated. Organs the color and consistency of porridge spilled out into the dirt. She moaned wetly, like one of the worst ghouls back in Des Moines. Her empty eyes turned toward the road and she started trying to drag herself in that direction, her arms working but not her legs. When she did, her body made a slimy
shhhlick
sound and began to pull apart at the midsection.

“Fuck, dude!” I screamed at Cody. “Don't let her do that!”

Startled out of his tears, Cody threw himself on top of Amanda. He pinned her down so that she couldn't split herself in half.

“What do we do?” he begged. “What do we do?”

I knelt down next to them and started—I don't know—shoving things back inside her. Once I'd gotten everything, my hands slick with the oily mess, I scrambled around to Amanda's feet and pushed her body up, trying to get the two halves of her as close together as possible. Maybe if I mushed her into one piece, she'd heal.

“Is this going to work?” Cody asked.

“I don't know,” I growled. “Shut up and hold her.”

I opened my pack and started scooping out the taco mice. One by one I lowered them into Amanda's snapping mouth. She crunched through them like they were nothing, thrashing continuously against Cody's arms, arching her torso in a grotesquely acrobatic way to swallow the meat.

I kept an eye on her abdomen. It definitely wasn't returning to perfect, smooth, and lightly tanned, but I got the sense that her flesh was becoming a little more solid. A little less likely to fall apart if we moved her.

But then I was out of mice.

“Is that it?” Cody asked.

I nodded. “Yeah.”

“She's not much better.”

I squeezed my eyes shut. “No.”

“We've got some guinea pigs in the car,” Cody offered. “I can get them.”

I nodded. “You should do that. I'll hold her.”

We got close together in order to trade positions and that's when I jabbed the syringe of Kope Juice into Cody's neck.

CASS

ON THE SCHOOL BUS, ONCE WE'D MADE IT THROUGH the wall and were able to stop holding our breath, a grandmotherly lady hugging a sleeping child who didn't resemble her in the least turned to me.

“What are we supposed to do now?” she asked.

I guess she assumed I was some kind of authority because I'd been hanging around with Jamison and Tom. I wasn't. None of us were. We were in the zombie-killing business, which rarely overlapped with the people-saving business. I thought about my answer for a full minute.

“Tell everyone what you saw in there,” I said at last. “Or don't, and just try to be safe and happy. Up to you.”

She seemed satisfied with that answer.

We left the two busloads of Iowans at a bus station in Omaha. Safe. Well, as safe as they could be as homeless, penniless people who probably didn't technically exist in the eyes of the government, reentering a world with a rapidly escalating zombie epidemic. I watched some of them depart in small groups, shuffling off into the night to figure out their next move together. Others were taken in by locals—people I'd probably seen marching in the streets just a few days ago. Of course, there was no guarantee that all these people were uninfected; no guarantee that the virus wouldn't keep spreading. Setting them free was a risk I was willing to take—and Tom and Jamison obviously agreed with me. We were done trying to
control
things.

Maybe I'd been wrong that everyone just wanted an excuse to metaphorically—and sometimes literally—eat one another. No, not maybe. I'd definitely been wrong. There were still people out there who cared about strangers, and not in that fake NCD way where protecting civilians was just a front for something ugly and wrong. For all the crap I'd been through in the last couple weeks, for all the less than virtuous and sort of selfish stuff I'd done, I'd finally accomplished something unequivocally good.

Well, anyway, I'd ridden on a bus with some people Jamison saved. So maybe it was a baby step. But there was still time to be one of the good guys, one of the people I'd thought I could be when I signed up for the NCD. There was still time to get myself together.

I wouldn't be buying a new black hat.

 

Back at the wall, Jamison had commandeered a black SUV, just like the ones we used to take on missions. The four of us drove west in that: me, Jamison, Tom, and the one refugee we didn't cut loose. Jamison said he'd found the bearded, crazy-haired old man in the Kope Brothers subbasement hooked up to life support. Jamison didn't expect for him to make it long, yet disconnected from his machines the stubborn old goat just refused to keel over. The old man wouldn't wake up, but his breathing seemed steady and he was completely capable of producing a consistent stream of drool. Of course I knew exactly who he was, even without the skateboarding bulldogs. When I told Tom and Jamison his identity, they decided we better keep him.

So, the Grandfather, aka Dr. Nelson Fair, rode in the backseat with me. That pungent hospital aroma wafted around him, but I didn't mind so much. It was a vast improvement over the stench of Iowa.

Jamison played with the SUV's radio, skipping quickly between stations. Reports were coming in from all over about undead attacks. There were frantic transmissions of widespread cannibalism in southern Florida and stories about similar violence in every corner of the country. The NCD had completely lost their grip.

Eventually, Tom reached over and turned off the news. Jamison glanced at him, frowning, but Tom gave him a look like,
Enough is enough,
and we drove on in silence.

Night had fallen and the prairie outside my tinted window looked deep blue and lonely. Out here, you couldn't tell that everything was falling apart. It was peaceful. I rested my head against the cool window and closed my eyes.

Selfishly, I wished that I was making this drive with Jake. I didn't blame him for not coming to find me, though. Those last couple days in Iowa, I'd turned into something I didn't like. I couldn't set right what I'd done to Amanda, but I could at least try to be better. For starters, I could stop living in other people's heads and spend more time working on my own.

With that in mind, I slipped out of my skin and onto the astral plane and . . .

Flopped down on my couch in San Diego.

Alastaire, or his psychic projection anyway, stood next to the fireplace, admiring the photographs on the mantel. He pretended to be surprised to see me, as if he hadn't felt me coming. With an approving smile, he broke into a slow clap.

“Well done, Cassandra,” he said. “Well done.”

I settled back into the couch. It was just as comfortable as I remembered it.

“Do you miss doing that in real life?” I asked him. “Clapping?”

Alastaire stopped. He pushed his glasses up with his forefinger, an unnecessary gesture in here, one that meant he was trying to control his temper.

“I'm on my way,” I told him. “I've got a whole case of the cure and I've got Doctor Fair.”

“I know,” he replied.

“It's not too late, is it?”

He shook his head. “Of course not, dear. Your mother is fine.”

“Well, that's good to hear and lucky for you, but I meant for the world,” I clarified. “It isn't too late for us to fix things in the world, is it?”

Alastaire smiled at my bluster. “No. We're going to be
heroes
, Cassandra.”

I rolled my eyes at him. “What's your definition of
hero
, Al? The weasel left standing when everyone else is dead?”

“And here I thought you were beginning to understand pragmatism,” Alastaire replied. He picked up a picture from the mantel. In it, Cody and Amanda embraced under a sleeping bag. “I saw what you did to that girl, Cassandra. It was
impressive
.”

I looked away. Alastaire's approval drove home just how badly I'd screwed up.

“Then did you see what I did after?” I asked. “How I showed her where to find Jake?”

Alastaire sat down on the couch next to me and patted my leg. “Such a conflicted young thing. One day, you'll understand.
We
know so much more than
them
. Therefore, why shouldn't we be the ones making the decisions? Even, as in your case, the silly, inconsequential ones.”

I grimaced. What he said was dangerously close to my own justifications back in Iowa. I didn't want to think that way, not anymore.

“How's all that working for you?” I asked, gathering myself. “Making a lot of decisions while you hide at my mom's house?”

He rolled his shoulders. “Touché.”

“Maybe ask the NCD how that whole
control
thing is working for them too,” I continued. “Nah. I think we're done with trying to control things. I've got a cure for the undead and you're going to help me get it out there. We're going to heal people because it's right. Not because we want something in return or to better the standing of psychics or to turn a profit. And you're going to fix my mom too. Got it?”

Alastaire smiled at me indulgently. “What if we should have, shall we call them, philosophical differences?”

This time, I reached out and patted his leg.

“Then like any old, outdated idea,” I said, smiling, “something new is going to come along and stamp you out.”

JAKE

WE CLIMBED UP THE WATER TOWER'S LADDER IN THE dark. Hand over hand, rung after rung, until we were 100 feet up over the darkened state of Iowa. We were in some abandoned suburb in the southwest. We figured it was better not to sleep in the car, just in case some trigger-happy patrol should drive by. And anyway, I'd wanted to climb a water tower ever since I saw those pothead kids do it on that sitcom.

We sat next to each other with our legs dangling off the catwalk. From up here, Iowa looked like a patchwork blanket, farms and houses neatly sectioned off, divided up by those goddamn cornfields. On the horizon, we could see triangles of flickering orange light. Fires.

Amanda made a hiccupping sound like she was trying not to cry. She'd been making that sound a lot since she came back from the undead. She'd also been rubbing her stomach a lot, maybe imagining the horrible wounds she'd suffered and maybe imagining the dude I'd fed her to heal them.

“Do you want to talk about it?” I asked quietly.

She grasped the railing in front of us and squeezed tight. “I—I hardly even knew him,” she whispered. “I don't know why I feel this way. . . .”

She trailed off. I didn't press her.

“Something came over me,” she continued eventually. “Maybe I was lonely or scared or desperate. I don't know. I just needed him. It was like, um, love at first sight or something.”

I cringed and rested my head against the railing. After a second, Amanda rubbed my back.

“I'm sorry,” she said. “I never stopped—I mean, Jake, I still wanted to be with you the whole time. It didn't make sense.”

“You loved us both,” I said, my voice cracking stupidly with the effort I was putting in to keeping it level.

“I guess,” Amanda said, “but, um, differently somehow. I hardly knew him.”

“You hardly knew me when we started.”

“I knew
of
you.”

“We didn't have love at first sight.”

“No, idiot,” Amanda said, and I think she smiled in the dark. “You wore me down.”

She rested her head on my shoulder. Carefully, I put my arm around her. It was the first time we'd really touched since I was shoving all her guts back into her body.

“I'm sorry I made you eat him,” I said after a while.

“It's okay. You saved my life. Or, I guess my unlife. And I mean, I'm sad about him. But I'm glad it was him instead of you.” Amanda knuckled her forehead. “God, my head is so messed up. What is wrong with me?”

I had a feeling I knew, but didn't say anything. For now, I'd keep that broken promise to myself.

“I still want to be with you,” I said.