Zombies vs. Unicorns (29 page)

“Maybe, maybe not.” She reaches for the fence.

My fingers circle her wrist. Her skin is cool in the night air. “Quit that.”

“Does it make you nervous?”

“Um, yes. Because it’s kind of
insane
.” I squeeze her hand, remembering Mrs. Zimmer growing paler every hour until they finally put her in the isolation hut. “You could get bitten. Don’t you want to be around for the inevitable rain of zees?”

“Mmmm,” she says softly. “That’s the weird thing. I already did.”

4.

I stand there for a moment, her hand in mine, the insect buzz growing louder in my ears. I’m not sure what she just said.

“Um, you’ve already seen a rain of zombies?”

“No. I already got bitten.”

“Very funny.”

Kalyn drops my hand and stretches out her left arm, rolling up the puffy black sleeve of her shirt. Her forearm gleams with moonlight, darkened by a purple scar in the shape of a nine millimeter shell.

“Right there.”

I shrug. “Looks like you cut yourself on a can of peaches. Dessert points of evil.”

“That’s not from metal. I was standing right where you are, looking straight up at the sky. Remember back in the before, how there were, like, … a few hundred stars? And now there’s so many, like the souls of the six billion all flew up there?” She runs a finger across the scar. “I sort of got dizzy thinking about them. And I took a step sideways, with my hand out so I wouldn’t fall.”

Kalyn reaches out toward the fence, and I’m frozen, watching her. Her hand is too close to one of the ruined faces—finger’s length—but the zee doesn’t react at all.

It’s looking at me instead.

“Scratched it pretty bad,” she says. “On bone.”

“When was this?” My hand is on my pistol.

“A month ago.”

Relief runs through me in a shiver. “You cut yourself on the wire, then.”

“It wasn’t metal. It was bone.”

Kalyn reaches out to grab my shoulders. I pop the button on my holster, but she’s only steadying me. I’m inches from the fence, dizzy from all this. She pulls me closer to her.

“Be careful.”

“Quit fucking with me, then!”

She shakes her head, hard. “I felt like shit at first, and puked up meals for two days. I was going to tell everyone, I swear. But then I felt better.”

I take a deep breath, reminding myself that this all happened a month ago. Her scar is old and dry; the ones that turn you never have time to heal.

“Then it was psychosomatic. Or you got infected with something else. A bad can of beans, like Dr. Bill.”

“But I feel better now, Allison. Not just well—
better.
” She does a spin in the narrow space, her skirt flaring out to brush against the fences. “You have to try it.”

“Try it?” My mouth feels as dry as a zee’s. “You want me to stick my hand out there?”

“No, silly. You’d turn. Whatever got inside me must be pretty scarce, or we’d have seen it before.”

“Seen
what
before?”

“Cowpox. Think about it, Allison. Out of all the mutations churning inside the six billion, there must be one that’s cowpox.”

“Cowpox?” I remember the word from Dr. Bill’s vaccine fantasies, but I’m too shaky to put it together.

She explains slowly. “In the old days people who milked cows never got smallpox, because they’d already been infected with
cow
pox. It’s close enough to make you immune, but it doesn’t kill you. It’s a natural vaccine.”

“Bullshit,” I say. “I mean, yeah, I remember all that. But why would it happen
now
? After everyone’s already
dead
?”

“Anything random is inevitable,” she says, as serene as a prayer.
“You just need enough time, and billions of zees carrying trillions of variations, until that lucky mutation pops up.”

I shake my head. “But why would
you
get it?”

“By accident, Allison.” She shrugs. “Accidents happen. I almost fell over, and something bit my hand. So I can leave here if I want. Want to come?”

I turn and walk away from the wire, from the zees straining to get us, from Kalyn’s madness.

But five seconds later I drift to a halt, processing what I’ve been seeing while staring into her eyes—she’s not wearing makeup. That’s not ash; it’s something underneath her skin.

And something else … She said it’s been a month since she was bitten. And how long since I started noticing her? Suddenly started seeing her, like a switch flipped, and I forgot all about Alma and the girls in the dirty pictures on the rec room walls.

Like something lucky came along and made Kalyn
better
.

A cool hand settles on my shoulder.

“They’ll kill me if they find out,” she says simply. “But I know you won’t freak out and tell them.”

“Trust me, I’m freaking out.”

Kalyn turns me around. “I
do
trust you, Allison, because you saw it in me. From that very first day, you noticed. That’s why I chose you to join me.”

“Join you?” I force out a dry laugh. “How’s that supposed to work?”

“It’s inside me now.” Kalyn reaches down and pulls a precious sewing needle from the hem of her dress. She holds it between her thumb and middle finger, the pointy end resting against her
fingertip, not breaking the skin yet. “One drop, to start.”

I stare at my own fingers, then at her. I’m about to explain that noticing her was something completely different. But she leans in and kisses me, like it’s not two different things. Like it’s all wrapped up at tongue’s length—my obsession and her mutation and a way to leave the wire behind.

Kissing her isn’t wet and slippery, like I’ve always imagined it. Her mouth is fever-hot and dry. Her breath draws me in and spins me dizzy. I cling to her so I don’t fall over.

When we pull apart, the needle has broken her skin.

Kalyn smiles and squeezes her finger so a drop wells up, black and shiny in the moonlight. She hands the needle to me.

I still don’t believe any of this,
I tell myself. Her illness was psychosomatic, so her
betterness
has to be too. She scratched herself a month ago and didn’t die from it, and in this piece-of-shit postapocalyptic pot farm, that much luck is enough to make anyone ecstatic. It was enough to make her beautiful.

So why not play along? Maybe she’ll kiss me again.

I take the needle, lick it, and stick it home. I watch the blood well up from my middle finger, as shiny as hers in the moonlight.

We press our wounds together for a while—blood’s length.

And then we kiss some more.

That night I throw up my chocolate pudding.

5.

It feels like the flu at first, my whole body responding to an invasion. My joints ache and buzz, like the swamp bugs are
eating the insides of my kneecaps. My skin is on fire. Nothing stays in my stomach, not even water. I puke up every trickle of saliva I swallow, becoming dry and silent, like the zees.

My brain is buzzing too, wondering if Kalyn has it wrong. Maybe it’s not the virus inside her that’s lucky. Maybe it’s
her
. What if she’s immune, a carrier like Typhoid Mary? I’m blood sisters with Zombie-fucking-Mary.

Which means I’ll turn, and they’ll put a precious bullet in my head like they did with Mrs. Zimmer.

I lie to the grown-ups and say I haven’t been anywhere near the wire, and they decide it’s food poisoning. With no airplanes to bring us new flus, it’s all food poisoning these days. Or maybe an infection from a cut, but our last amoxicillin went bad two years ago, so all they can do is keep me hydrated. Someone’s always with me, forcing me to drink water that I’ll only puke up. They keep me in the isolation hut where Mrs. Zimmer died, even though food poisoning isn’t contagious, and they try not to make a big deal about the pistol on the bedside table.

You can’t be too careful, after all.

But why isn’t Kalyn here? She could have volunteered to watch me. Is she as worried as I am that she got it all wrong?

On the second day I’m still puking, and Alma Nazr comes in and strips me in a no-nonsense way, looking for teeth marks. Dr. Bill watches with a shotgun pointed at the floor. Alma’s hands feel hot on my skin, like she’s the one with a fever. She turns me around and around, going over every inch of me, like in the dreams I used to have.

She doesn’t notice the pinprick on my middle finger.

But I can see it, the little purple circle where Kalyn and I mingled at blood’s length. The rest of me may be turning cold, but that one spot stays warm and tingling.

On the third day everyone relaxes a little, the pistol disappearing from the bedside table. No one’s ever taken three days to turn, so it must be a dented can or some mundane infection.

They don’t notice that mosquitoes have stopped biting me.

I’m seeing things. There are flickers in the corners of my vision when I puke, and at night I can see the tribe sleeping around me, even through my eyelids, even through the walls. Human bodies are hot sprays against the cool of night, like fireworks on a dark horizon. Every night they’re more spectacular, the relentless little engines of their heartbeats astounding me. Five days after my infection I can see them in the daylight, even halfway across the farm.

Slowly I start feeling … better.

And one night when no one’s watching, Kalyn comes for me.

6.

She takes me to the tree house, the watchtower overlooking the front gates. The grown-ups never use it anymore, but we do.

“I’m so sorry,” Kalyn says for the fourteenth time. We’re sitting cross-legged, and her fingernails are scratching at the wooden floor on either side of her. “But I was scared you’d turn.”

“
You
were scared? How do you think I felt?”

“I didn’t know it would be like that, Allison. I only puked
after meals.” She leans forward, taking my hands. “No one even noticed I was sick.”

“Well, that’s just
more
annoying.” But instead of pulling away I squeeze her hands tighter. “I thought I was going to die.”

“I know. I heard you moaning.” Kalyn sighs at my expression. “
Yes
, I came by. But I was afraid to go in. Like, if Dr. Bill saw you and me next to each other, he’d figure out what we were.”

She reaches up and traces the smudges under my eyes. My infection is a deeper color than hers. A pair of black eyes, like I’ve been fighting demons in my dreams. Her fingers are cool against the heat beneath my skin.

“You’re so pretty now,” she says.

For a moment I wonder what she means by pretty “now.” I can’t complain, though. Kalyn only flipped my switch five weeks ago. Before she was infected, I only wanted Alma. But Alma seems like a different species now, just like the other grown-ups, broken and stuck in the before.

And she’d kill me in a second if she found out what I was. Any of them would. They didn’t make it this far by being gun-shy.

“Did Dr. Bill notice your eyes?” Kalyn asks.

“Yeah, he noticed. He said that puking can burst blood vessels. Said it should go away in a few weeks.”

“Don’t worry. It’ll never go away.” Her hand falls from my face, takes the collar of my sweatshirt and draws me near. Our lips press together.

This time my mouth is as dry as hers. Water tastes foul now, but I’m thirsty for the fireworks inside her. She isn’t
showering sparks like the others, but something serene and endless flickers inside her. It’s deep blue, like the hottest part of a flame.

The fireworks must be how the zees find us humans, why they stack up outside the wire, waiting for a stray finger poking out, or a hurricane to pull up the fence. And that’s why Kalyn and I can leave anytime we want now—we aren’t so dazzling anymore. We look more like the zees outside the wire, with their mean, unwavering little lights.

We’re something halfway between, eternal but not rotten. On the way to the tree house, Kalyn made me stick a finger out, and none of the zees even glanced at it.

“I’m sorry I got scared,” she repeats after we pull apart. “That always happens when I kiss someone the first time.”

“Always happens? Hah. You were, like,
eleven
back in the before.”

She gives me the smallest smile. “Maybe I’ve kissed someone since then.”

I stare at Kalyn, making a mental list of everyone on the farm. Even including the people who’ve died since we got here, everyone’s so old. Except …

“Not Sammy?”

She nods.

“When?”

“It was only one kiss,
ages
ago, and it only made me giggle.” She smiles. “Jealous?”

“Of that waste of gravity? Hardly.”

Her eyes close, and she moves closer. “Glad to hear that won’t be a problem.”

We’re like that for a while longer, then we lean out to look at the six billion stars. Their twinkle is stronger than it used to be. Maybe my vision is sharper, or maybe aliens live on those faraway planets, and I can see their fireworks too.

I’d make a great astronaut now. No water, no food, ageless.

“Do you think we’ll live forever?” I ask. “Like zees do?”

Kalyn turns from the stars and sighs. “Dr. Bill says they don’t, because of that thermodynamics law. Just because they’re dead doesn’t mean they won’t run down. Eventually.”

“What’s there to run down? Their hearts don’t even beat.”

She puts her cool palm against my neck. “But yours does.”

“I guess so. Too bad.” I can feel it pulsing where her hand rests—so much for being an immortal astronaut. I’m going to die, or run down, so I’m wasting time here on this stupid farm. “What should we take?”

“Well, we don’t need food. We don’t need guns. We can go into the cities for new clothes.” Kalyn smoothes her homemade dress. “
Real
clothes, finally. So we don’t have to take anything.”

“Sure. But I want a car—the Benz. That’s the only one that still runs.”

“You want to drive?” Kalyn thinks that’s funny, like she wanted to shamble out of here. “Do you even know how?”

“Alma showed me once. It’s easy. You point the car and push the pedals down.” I was paying more attention to Alma than the car, but it didn’t look too hard. “There are no other cars on the road, not moving ones anyway.”