Undead with Benefits (4 page)

I'd been staying out of his head, though. No more telepathic eavesdropping, not since we'd been together. I thought Tom would be proud of me for that. Actually, he'd probably lecture me for sticking with them and tell me how I was responsible for all the people they'd eat now and in the future. I kept telling myself that I owed Jake. I was suddenly a deeply honorable person. These two might be mass murderers, but I made a promise that I'd help them get into Iowa and find the cure. Now that I'd disowned the NCD, I needed a new cause. Maybe that could be assisting disenfranchised zombies. I could take applications and personal essays, choosing the undead candidates who tried the hardest not to eat people.

I didn't want to admit to myself that maybe I was hanging around because I hoped something might happen with Jake and me, even if I couldn't imagine how that would work.

Anyway, I told myself, I hadn't actually helped Jake and Amanda yet. Not really. I was just a passenger. There was still time to get over my weird crush and do something moral and upstanding. I just needed a little more time.

And that's when the trooper's siren first blared.

At first, I thought it was a sound effect in one of the club remixes Amanda stole from the most recent gas station. Then I noticed the flashing blue-and-reds behind us. Jake jumped awake, wiping his face with both hands and staring around wide-eyed.

“Oh crap,” he said as he glanced past me, out the back window. “How fast were you going?”

“Sixty-five, I swear,” Amanda replied. “I don't know what this pig's deal is, but . . . oh.”

“What?”

She tapped her finger on the speedometer, which still hovered at sixty-five even though we'd pulled over to the shoulder. “It's stuck.”

“And you're just noticing this now?”

“I steal the cars. I don't, like, inspect them.” Amanda looked over her shoulder at me. “Shouldn't you have seen this coming?”

“I'm not clairvoyant,” I told her.

“So you say.”

“Oh, c'mon, Amanda,” Jake interrupted before I could reply. “Give it a rest.”

We all turned to watch the trooper approach in the rearview. He was a well-built middle-aged guy with that swagger you see on a lot of cops, plus the big aviator sunglasses and a toothpick tucked in the corner of his mouth. He already had his book of citations out, flipping the cover open and closed, like he couldn't wait to get started.

“Looks like a dick,” Jake and I said in unison. We stared at each other in surprise for a moment, and I mumbled, “Jinx,” but he'd already turned back to Amanda.

“What're we going to do?” he asked. “We have, I don't know, a lot of criminality happening here.”

“Don't spaz out,” she replied, and pulled the front of her tank top a half inch lower. “I get out of these all the time.”

The trooper wore a chunky class ring on his middle finger, with a big amethyst stone that I thought might crack the driver-side window with the way he knocked against it. Amanda obediently rolled it down and the cop took a step back, sucking his toothpick and eyeballing the three of us, his thumbs jammed through his belt loops.

“License and registration,” he said, overenunciating every syllable so it sounded more like
lie-cents and reggie-stray-shin
. However you pronounced them, we didn't have either.

I'd never been pulled over before, on account of my enlisting with a covert government organization before my road test. My few interactions with local cops over the last year had involved me flashing an NCD credential and them looking seriously bewildered. All that is why it only gradually dawned on me that we—three fugitives in a stolen car with no paperwork and a trunk filled with small animals—were in a bit of a jam.

“Oh my god,” Amanda bubbled, a sudden girly lilt in her voice, like she'd just jumped out of this cop's birthday cake. “I'm so sorry, officer, but my car is totally broken.”

She tapped the speedometer and the trooper leaned his head in to check it out. As he did, Amanda subtly arched her back and leaned toward the window. I rolled my eyes. Next to her, Jake kept his fingers tightly laced across his belly. He stared straight ahead, wide-eyed and stiff, which I put down to the innate panic of stoners when faced with badges.

“Uh-huh,” the cop said, having seen enough. He leaned out of the car and dully repeated, “License and registration.”

“Aw, don't be that way,” Amanda replied, and I couldn't tell if that was really disappointment in her voice from her first attempt at sex kittening getting rebuffed, or just another helpless-bimbo put-on for the cop. She was good at this, I'll admit. “I'll get the car fixed right away, I promise. I'm really, really sorry for wasting your time, officer.”

The trooper pushed his aviators up his nose with his middle finger and stared at Amanda, his upper lip twitching like he wanted to snarl. “You think you're the first piece of jailbait to try flouncing her way out of a citation, sister?”

“Oh, I'm eighteen, if that's what you're worried about,” Amanda purred back without missing a beat.

Honestly, I'd been trying to be good about not invading people's psychic safe zones and about resting my powers after how hard I pushed myself getting us away from the Farmhouse, but I couldn't help it. I peeked at the uppermost layer of the trooper's psyche, wanting to see if Amanda was making any progress. Our incorruptible trooper was remembering the five-day sexual-harassment class he'd had to take after his
last
on-duty incident involving a buxom bimbo. And he was thinking how nice it'd be to get to pepper spray the kind of uppity, um, let's say
lady
that'd gotten him in so much trouble in the first place.

Like the suddenly much creepier agro-trooper had said, we weren't flouncing our way out of this one.

“I'm gonna start a countdown to ten, Miss Thing,” the cop was saying when I broke psychic contact. “And if I'm not holding some papers when I'm finished, you're gonna get to see my nasty side.”

Before Amanda could respond, Jake's stomach let out a thunderous rumble. I'd thought he was just nervous, but now I noticed that his skin had definitely lost some of its healthy glow.

“The hell,” said the trooper, leaning away from the window.

Amanda gawked at Jake, the trooper momentarily forgotten. “Seriously? Right now?”

He shrugged helplessly. “I guess I didn't have a big enough breakfast.”

The trooper pushed his sunglasses up his face, staring at Jake's unnatural pallor. “You all right, son?”

“Maybe you should get out of here, before you see
our
nasty side,” Amanda warned the trooper, the sexpot act totally dropped.

It didn't look like the trooper was going to budge. He was weirded out, but I don't think he grasped that he was in grave danger of being digested. I decided to give him a psychic shove. It was just like working Containment for the NCD—we made sure witnesses believed our zombie cover stories by nudging their brains in the right direction. Here, I just amped up the flight portion of the fight-or-flight instinct anyone with a dangerous job quickly learned to trust. Later, it's unlikely the trooper would've been able to properly explain why he backed away from our car and then sped off down the highway—only that he had the sudden, intractable urge to get as far away from those three strange kids as humanly possible.

“Okay,” the trooper said, backing slowly away. “Just drive carefully, please.”

That left me as the only human in the area of one hungry zombie.

Jake stared at me, his breathing ragged and hoarse, his skin ashen.

“Don't look at me like that,” I said.

“I'm—I'm not,” he stammered, then practically flung himself out of the car, headed for the trunk.

“Make sure you eat enough this time,” Amanda shouted after him. She watched the trooper's car disappear around a bend. “Still got it,” she said to herself. She tossed her hair, dyed black with patches of blonde throughout. “I thought losing the blonde would be a major handicap. I'm sure you know what I mean.”

I had more on my mind than standing up to Amanda for brunettes everywhere. My voice drowned out the panicked chittering of the guinea pig Jake had plucked from the trunk. “If he'd turned zombie just now, would you have . . . ?”

Amanda met my eyes in the rearview. “Protected you?” She flashed me a wild smile. “Gosh, I don't know! Would've been interesting!”

My hands shook. I looked away.

After a few minutes, Jake returned looking normal again. He let out a big sigh of relief and smiled at Amanda.

“Sorry,” he said. “Guess I got stressed there.”

“It's cool.” She plucked a piece of fur off his shirt. “All better?”

Jake nodded, then looked at me. It was the same disbelieving look he'd shot me when the trooper had first driven away.

“You did something, didn't you?”

“Um, what do you mean?”

“Like, you brainwashed that dude.”

I shook my head. “Not exactly. I just, you know, nudged him toward wanting to go.”

Amanda turned around too, and now both zombies were sizing me up.

“Seriously?” she asked. “You did that?”

Jake laughed at her. “Did you really think you convinced him with the power of boobs? Dude, it was like the start of a porno where instead of sex there's just a ton of Tasering.”

Amanda gave Jake a dirty look and then turned away, starting the car.

“That was cool of you,” Jake said to me, smiling. “Just don't brainwash us. Okay?”

“I won't, I promise,” I replied, with a solemn tone that made it sound like I was making some major pledge. Jake was only joking around with me, but I took it seriously. I was going to stay out of his mind for good.

Even if every time Amanda said something mean to me or did something casually intimate like pick a piece of dead animal fur off Jake's shirt, I thought to myself . . .
I could make him like me
.

That wasn't me. I really, really didn't want that to be me. But I could do it, if I wanted to.

Amanda still hadn't pulled back onto the road. She caught my eyes in the rearview again, a bit of mischief glittering there.

“So . . . ,” she said, “what other tricks can you do?”

JAKE

IF YOU EVER MAKE FRIENDS WITH A GOVERNMENT-TRAINED psychic, I highly recommend getting them to steal awesome stuff for you. It's the best.

The nearest place to test out psychic shoplifting was the sleepy burg of Pipestone, Minnesota. It was named for the local Native Americans' tradition of turning the area's magic rocks into pipes that allowed communication with the spirit world when you smoked from them. I read that in a brochure.

A town literally named for getting stoned. How could I resist?

Unfortunately, Pipestone turned out to be a buzzkill. And not just because there wasn't a giant sandstone bong rising up from the horizon.

“This place is like a diorama,” Amanda said.

“No kidding,” I replied. “Do you think we might see a real-life tumbleweed?”

I'd never been to a place like this before, where it seemed like you could stand at one end of Main Street and see clear through to the other side of town. I'd never been to a place where Main Street was synonymous with Only Street. It was flat, the buildings no higher than two stories, the main road wide enough for a dozen covered wagons to pass side by side. Hell, we were in a place where it wouldn't be strange to see a covered wagon in the first place. Everything was so weirdly spread out. I suddenly missed the clutter of New Jersey.

There were a few people on the sidewalks and all of them turned their heads to watch us drive by. I think some of them even ducked into buildings and closed their windows, like when the bandit gang rides into town in one of those old westerns.

“Is there something off about this place or is it just me?” Amanda asked.

“It feels kind of like a ghost town that people forgot to leave,” I said.

Amanda parked our car outside the Pipestone Trading Post and Gift Shop, an actual log cabin with signs advertising local crafts and hiking supplies. Apparently there was a big, rocky quarry and waterfall nearby, presumably where the ancestors of this town once mined for magic rocks before they died of boredom.

I turned around to look at Cass. She'd been pretty quiet since working her psychic mojo on that cop, although I'm sure Amanda replying to her every word with nuclear-level sarcasm didn't exactly encourage conversation attempts. She smiled weakly at me.

“So how does this work?” I asked her.

“Um . . .” Cass thought about my question. I could tell it wasn't so much that she hadn't worked out an answer, but that she wasn't totally convinced she wanted to tell me. “We'll go in and you'll take whatever you want up to the register. When the cashier asks you for money, just say . . .” Her voice dipped suddenly into spaced-out surfer territory. “Uh, hey, dude, I just, like, gave you a hundred, man.”

I squinted at her. “Is that how I talk?”

“Yeah, actually,” Amanda put in.

Cass smiled a little. I realized it was the first time her and Amanda had come close to agreeing on something.

“Just try to sound confident,” Cass continued. “I'll handle the rest.”

“Sweet,” I said, clapping my hands. “Mutant-powers time!”

“What if it doesn't work?” Amanda asked.

Cass shrugged. “What do you guys normally do when you need something?”

“Steal it and run away,” Amanda answered.

“Like badass outlaws,” I added.

“If it doesn't work, do that.”

Amanda shook her head. “I'll keep the car running.”

“One last question,” I said, stopping Cass before she could get out of the car. “Should we be worried that you might suddenly go all Dark Phoenix?”