Undead with Benefits (7 page)

Jake slapped the laptop closed.

“Uh, someone edited that,” he said. “There weren't supposed to be bulldogs.”

“I figured.”

“Even though that was pretty cool—how did they get
three
of them to skateboard at once?” He shook his head, trying to stay on topic. “Maybe your, um, Containment people got to it. To hide the truth, distract us dumb people with puppies, you know?”

“You think they've got people discrediting zombie rumors by turning them into internet memes?” I asked, skeptical at first, but the more I thought about it . . . “Actually, that does sound like something they'd do.”

“Anyway,” Jake said, “before the bulldogs got edited in, the Grandfather dude said something about how he cured the undead. And then a bunch of zombies jumped him, so maybe he didn't do such a bang-up job. But the important part is—there's
a cure
.”

“But why haven't the zombies or the NCD or that old Grandfather guy actually used it yet?”

“Because we haven't rescued him. Duh.”

I smiled and nodded, trying to look enthusiastic, because Jake looked so hopeful talking about it. But I didn't like his chances—our chances, I guess—of succeeding where a massive government organization had failed. He must've picked up my skepticism because he immediately put on his serious face, which I think took a real, concerted effort on his part. I wanted to hug him.

“Look, I know it's, like, a crazy longshot suicide-mission thing. But what I'm trying to explain is . . . we want to do better. You bring up our school all casual, but we think about that all the time. We've gotta live with it. If we can find this cure in Iowa, though—which is, like, seriously the only thing we can think of to do—if we find it and cure an apocalyptic plague, that sort of balances things out, right? It doesn't bring back our friends or anything, but it saves humanity. So maybe we could be pardoned or something.”

“The outlaw hero,” I said. “You're like Han Solo.”

“Well, that's about the coolest thing anyone's ever said about me,” he replied.

“It was a good speech. You earned it.”

I smiled at him. I felt like we were having a moment. Then he closed the laptop and stood up.

“All right, I'm gonna catch up with Amanda,” he said, glancing toward the door. “Now that I've, like, told you all my hopes and dreams.”

“Um, okay,” I replied, feeling my smile fade, then trying not to let it show, and ending up with a huge, crazy grin. Jake didn't seem to notice.

“Hopefully tomorrow you can actually get us into Iowa,” he continued thoughtfully, lingering, like we were making plans to hang out and catch a movie. “Then we'll all make good. Us for, you know . . .” He made a chomp-chomp motion with his hand. “And you for helping the NCD kill however many undead-afflicted Americans.”

I hung around the pool for a while after Jake left, watching blue ringlets fight with shadows across the ceiling.

I don't think Jake had meant to make me feel like crap, but he had. First, for getting his hopes up about Iowa, a promise that I had absolutely no way of keeping. And second, for pointing out that he and Amanda weren't the only ones with dead bodies on their conscience.

“I shouldn't be here,” I said, talking to myself. I didn't just mean in the pool after midnight—I meant Omaha, on the run with some zombies, all of it. I wished that I'd flunked that psychic-aptitude test, that I'd never been pulled out of high school, that I had my safe and boring life back, where the most morally objectionable thing I had to deal with was a fourth refill on an endless pasta bowl at the cheesy Italian restaurant I used to work at.

Harlene was going to put it all back to normal for me. Before Amanda killed her.

I found myself out of the pool and padding down the hallway, wet feet leaving dark prints on the faded carpet. I crossed the lobby, the night clerk sparing me just a glance before going back to her romance novel. I was headed for the pay phone.

It wasn't that late in San Diego yet. My mom would still be up. I would tell her everything—and then I'd tell her I was coming home. I'd duck out of here before the zombies woke up and spend the rest of my life trying really hard not to check in on Jake.

She answered on the fourth ring. I could hear the TV in the background.

“Hello?” My mom. My wonderful mom. Just hearing her voice was enough to bring back sensations of home—the smell of the beach from the patio, the burbling of her fancy coffee brewing in the kitchen, the perfect body divot in the long section of our couch. It had been so long since I'd been home.

“Mom,” I said, choking up a little. “It's me.”

“Carrie?” she asked, confused.

She thought I was my sister. “No, Mom, it's me. Cassandra. How—how are you?”

“Oh, dear.” She still sounded confused. “I'm sorry. I don't—could you hold on a moment?”

“What—Mom?” The phone jostled around and I could hear my mom talking to someone. I didn't understand—she'd sounded distant, like I was a stranger calling in the middle of the night. It didn't make sense.

And then a man cleared his throat. A yawn, like he'd been woken up.

“Cassandra,” he said, his voice smooth, familiar, skin-crawly. “I'd been hoping you'd call.”

I hung up the phone, hard, like it'd electrified me. I was rooted in place, an acidic cola-flavored bubble rising in my esophagus.

I could picture him there. Drinking coffee my mom presented to him in a mug and saucer, sitting with his feet up in the same recliner where my dad used to read the paper, straightening his bow tie in the same bathroom mirror where Carrie had taught me how to best conceal pimples.

Alastaire was in my house.

JAKE

HEAVY SHIT, MAN. JUST HEAVY SHIT ALL THE TIME. Eating people/rodents, new psychic friends reminding you of your personal death toll, government conspiracies, zombie road gangs, crazy old men with possible zombie cures.

A lot going on.

I'd developed an appreciation for the normal moments, you know? Those little pockets of time when nothing stupid was happening, when the universe was like,
Shh, dude, take a breath for a second and don't think about how lame I am
.

For instance, Amanda stood in the open bathroom door, steam rolling out from behind her. She was wearing a red polka-dot bra and matching underwear. I'm not sure when she'd stolen those, but it was really cool that she'd hidden them from me. Keep the whole air-of-mystery thing going. If I were a cartoon character, I'd have exaggeratedly wiped the steam off my oversized glasses, then rolled my tongue up and shoved it back in my mouth.

Instead I just stared.

She'd been showering when I got back to the room, so I'd stretched out on the lumpy hotel bed and killed time with a public-access show about monster trucks. My shirt was half off. Because I'd been scratching my belly.

I realize I'm not exactly keeping up in the sexy department, okay?

“I cannot believe you're my girlfriend,” I said, thinking out loud.

Yeah, I went there.
Girlfriend.
Alert the Facebook community—it's time for a status change! Resurrect all the friends I ate two weeks ago so that I can sprint past them getting high fives before tearing through one of those paper banners pep-rally style—it's got CONGRATULATIONS ON ALL THAT BOOTY, JAKE painted on it—and then I bust out my most epic dance moves (sprinkler, so much sprinkler) while the marching band knocks out a rendition of Marvin Gaye's “Let's Get It On.” And one of those male cheerleader guys does backflips in the background.

It's cool. No big deal.

“I can't believe it either,” Amanda said, smirking at me.

I sat up a little bit. “So, before—when you took off. Do you want to, uh, talk about that?”

“Not particularly.”

“All right, cool,” I said, nodding, accustomed to the Amanda Blake method of bottling up feelings. “But you're okay?”

“Don't I look okay?”

“Obviously, you
look
better than okay,” I replied. “But I mean in the emotional sense. Like, is your inner Amanda wearing her happy underwear?”

“Oh my god, you're corny.” She sighed, awkwardly adjusting one of her bra straps. “She just bugs me, all right? I don't trust her.”

I waved this off. It'd only been a few days and I already felt like I'd had this conversation about Cass a billion times.

“She's totally harmless,” I said. “I mean, except for the omega-level psychic powers, but I don't think she'd use those against us.”

“Not against
you
, maybe.”

“What's that supposed to mean?”

“Dude, she's totally crushing on you,” Amanda said, hitting me with a level stare, like I was an idiot. “Little psychic stalker.”

“What?” I snorted. “No, she's not. Wait—really?”

“And you encourage it!” Amanda exclaimed, hands on her hips. “
Oh, Cass, aren't you going to swim with us? Wanna see my butt?
”

“Jeez, we were
in a pool
. Is it so wrong to wonder if she might want to swim?”

“You gave her a fucking hat.”

“I was just being nice!” I scuffed a hand through my hair, thinking back to my conversations with Cass. Trying to remember what, exactly? Her making eyes at me or something? They were all just normal, PG, nothing-to-see-here chats. Maybe I was in my boxers before. Big deal. “You're being crazy.”

“I'm a girl, stupid. I have a sixth sense for these things. No psychic powers necessary.”

I pointed at her, grinning, because my realization was profoundly amazing, perhaps the hugest affirmation of the Jake Stephens charm in recorded history.

“You're jealous,” I declared.

“Ha! Unlikely.”

“Then, like, territorial,” I revised. “Possessive!”

“Get over yourself,” Amanda replied, rolling her eyes. “It just needed pointing out because you're so freaking oblivious.”

“You keep saying that—”

“I'm in my underwear here, Jake,” she said. “Before that, I was showering for like ninety minutes. Waiting for you.”

“Waiting for—” I gulped. “I thought you might be, uh, fetal-ball shower-crying or something.”

“Yeah, no.” She shook her head, glancing at the screen. “And I find you out here watching . . . monster trucks?”

“They're kinda awesome.”

“Jake.” She sighed. “You suck at sexy banter.”

“Is that what we're doing? I thought we were arguing.”

“We're transitioning.”

“Oh, okay.” I cleared my throat, going for a deeper register. I picked up the remote. “Check me out, baby. I'm about to hit the power button on these monster trucks. And then I'm gonna turn the volume up. On this macking we're about to do.”

Amanda fought back a smile.

“That'll do,” she said.

Two things about what happened next:

1) That bra had a front clasp. Seriously, the best.

2) It was kinda perfect, although maybe we were just getting good at it. But it also had that melancholy end-of-vacation vibe, as if we both somehow knew this might be our last chance to hook up for a while. No three-star hotels in Iowa. Just zombies and weirdness.

Enjoy the quiet moments, right? Even if they're not quiet in the literal sense.

 

A small, angry voice woke me up later that night. It was an authority voice, the kind you hear on bitter, middle-aged dudes like my uncle Joe who think they know everything and are always lecturing you at Thanksgiving dinner about the right to bear arms. I opened one eye into a slit, not wanting to give away my position in case our room was being invaded by a well-regulated militia of Uncle Joes.

It was Amanda, watching a clip from Fox News on our laptop. Some old fuckface with a waterfall-sized comb-over and a chin like a deflating hot-air balloon was hollering right into the camera. Scrolling and flashing text graphics that said things like
escalating violence
,
red alert
, and
declining morals to blame
surrounded his bloated face.

“—want to talk about moral decay in this country, you need look no further than New Jersey,” the anchor ranted. “You've got this rat, this idiot, Kyle Blake, taking this cockamamie story about his sister—the school shooter, and her little coward accomplice—he takes this story about her to some newspapers that used to have integrity, that used to know the meaning of journalism, but are now just glorified tabloids, liberal rags—”

A black-and-white picture of Amanda's brother, Kyle, appeared in the corner of the screen. He looked grim and beaten up—literally, his left eye swollen closed. I realized it was a mug shot.

“And I'm not even going to glorify this nitwit's story with a recap. He doesn't deserve it. This toad is basically—those kids' bodies, they aren't even cold in the ground—and he's running his mouth, trying to snatch up some spotlight. These bleeding hearts talking about the first amendment, talking to me about freedom of speech—well, it's not free, and this bottom-feeder is going to find that out. You ask me, they should sit him down right next to his sister when it comes time for the needle to get passed around—”

Amanda stabbed the
PAUSE
key. She had other tabs open in the browser, all stories about her brother and his crazy conspiracy theories, stories about his arrest for “agitation,” all stuff we'd missed being on the road the last few days. All stuff that was sort of our fault.

Amanda touched her brother's face on the screen. I figured I should probably stop pretending to be asleep and propped myself up on an elbow. She didn't look over at me. Maybe she was too pissed off to move.

“How much did you see?” she asked through gritted teeth.