Zombies vs. Unicorns (30 page)

It feels a little weird to be talking about stealing the Benz,
because it’s Alma’s favorite. But it’s not like she’s ever leaving here, not without the rest of them. And they’ve got their pot plants and their movie nights, their stacks of cans going bad. All those dessert points carved into the dining room wall.

They’d never trade all that for freedom.

Even if we infected them, they’d probably just shoot themselves. Kalyn hasn’t even mentioned the possibility, and I’m certainly not going to. I want her all to myself, forever.

And I want to learn to drive before the highways break down into asphalt puzzles.

“Okay, Allison, we’ll steal the Benz. Four days from now.”

I smile, thinking of a few favorite things I’ll bring. Maybe one of Alma’s raid caps, black with dea in big silver letters on the front. Her raiding days are over, and mine are just beginning. Might as well bring a few guns, in case we run into living people who annoy us.

“Why not tomorrow? Why not
now
?”

“Four days.”

My smile disappears. “Why?”

Kalyn sighs, pulling back a little. Her fingers drum on the wooden floor. The wind steals through the open windows of the watchtower, sending a cool finger down my spine.

Then she says it:

“Because I don’t want Sammy puking in the car.”

7.

It’s four days later and we’re stealing the car—all four of us.

Yes, that’s what Kalyn was doing while I puked and moaned
and
almost died
. She was going after Sammy, bleeding her pox into him. Kissing him.

Ages ago
, my ass.

And then, two days after our conversation in the tree house, we both decided we couldn’t leave Jun behind. He’s only ten; we can’t leave him here alone with the broken grown-ups.

He changed the easiest of all of us, the little twerp. Didn’t vomit once.

So here we are, stealing the Mercedes-Benz together, one big happy semi-zombie family … and we are total crap.

“Push the clutch down first,” Sammy whispers, like anyone outside the barn can hear us. Can’t he
see
that no one’s awake? All those little fireworks are tucked safely in their beds, hearts slow and steady.

“Cars don’t have clutches, dork.” I shift into drive, keeping one foot down hard on the brake.

“The Ford does. Dr. Bill showed me how it worked.”

“Yeah, but the Ford’s, like, a hundred years old. This is a
real
car.”

“Then why isn’t it
moving
?” Kalyn moans.

“Um, maybe because I don’t want it to? The barn doors are closed.”

We both look at Sammy, who jumps and rolls, then scuttles across the dirt floor. He stares at the barn door lock, which isn’t locked—no one locks doors here. An open padlock is just stuck in the hasp, holding it together. We wait while he figures it out.

Like I said, we are crap.

It’s lucky we don’t have to bring anything. We would’ve been crap at packing, too.

Sammy swings the doors open, and I consider plowing past him, just crashing through the front gates and leaving him behind. If the grown-ups wake up quickly enough, they can probably stop the zees from pouring through the hole.

But I couldn’t do that to the Benz’s paint job. Alma spent hours keeping it beautiful while the other cars slowly fell apart.

As my foot comes off the brake, we ease into motion. Kalyn grasps my knee, like everything’s fine between us again. Like she didn’t lie to me about kissing Sammy and everything else.

Well, everything except the pox itself. She was telling the truth about that, and how it feels amazing to be one of us. Every day is better.

I touch her hand. We’re really leaving.

I remember this feeling now, from back in the before and the early days outside the wire—how you can just sit in a car and watch the world slide by.

Sammy jumps onto the hood as we ease from the barn, and soon we’re rolling past the rec hall and the isolation hut, waving good-bye. Past the storage sheds and the barrels full of rusty-tasting rainwater. Past the crappy Ford in its muddle of deflated rubber and broken safety glass.

Toward the wire.

Jun giggles in the backseat, even though we’ve threatened to dump him if he makes a single noise. He was six the last time he sat in a moving car. This must be like Disney World for him.

A little spray of fireworks flares in a corner of my vision.
Someone’s waking up. Even on a hot night with the insects buzzing, the sound of a car engine is alien enough to stir the brain.

I let the brake up a little more, pointing us at the front gates.

Fifty feet away Sammy jumps off the hood and runs ahead. Kalyn scrambles out the door to follow, the hem of her long, impractical dress bunched in one hand.

This is the part of our escape plan we’ve actually thought about—getting through the front gates without letting in a thousand zees. We owe the grown-ups that much. Even if they’re broken and pathetic, they kept us after our parents were eaten.

Sammy’s climbing up the chain-links, right at the split between the gates, while Kalyn slides the heavy bar across. The zees shuffle around a little, but they’re not looking at her—they’re watching the fireworks behind us. More people waking up.

I hear a shout, and roll forward again.

The bar falls to the ground just as I reach the gates. The Benz’s bumper scrapes chain-link, pressing the mass of zees backward. Kalyn jumps onto the hood, and Sammy swings overhead as the gates slowly open.

Behind us, bright little showers of consciousness are erupting from every building. I hear them shouting, calling to us, trying to understand.

The zees push back against the gates, but the Benz is stronger, rumbling beneath me as I let the brake out more. I’m driving with two feet, which Alma said was bad. But I’m scared to take my feet off the pedals, like I’ll never find them again down there in the dark.

A gunshot sounds. Probably an alarm, but I wonder if they’ll think of shooting out our tires. They must think we’ve gone insane.

The Benz finally slides through the open gates, zees pressed against every window. On the hood Kalyn is reaching out to pat their heads, and a nervous sound comes from the backseat.

“It’s okay, Jun,” I say sweetly. “They can’t hurt you anymore.”

The zees are surging now, trying to get past the car and at the people waking up inside the wire. But the implacable Benz crowds the opening, and the zees at the sides will only push the gates shut once we’re through. A few may slip past, but Alma will make short work of those. I can see her sparking back there, very awake now, an automatic in each hand.

The gates scrape down the flanks of the Benz, ruining her paint job. Then we’re past, and I see the gates swinging closed. I shift into reverse and complete the work of shutting them, grinding zees beneath my tires.

This is where Sammy comes in. He rides the gates closed, then lashes them together with chain and padlock. It should hold until the grown-ups get the bar back on.

He lands on the car roof with a
thump
, and I wince a little. I hope he doesn’t start bouncing.

I shift back into gear and push ahead again. Not too fast, with one passenger on the roof and another on the hood. Not with a hundred zees pressing against us, still trying to get at the gates.

The road is worse than it looked from inside, broken down
by rain and kudzu. We bump along at a shambling pace, and I notice that some of the zees are following.

They stare in through the windows at me, rotten hands sliding against the glass. What if we were wrong, and suddenly they want to eat us?

But they aren’t trying to get Kalyn. They don’t even look at her, just keep plodding alongside the car like mourners following a hearse.

Another shot rings out, and a zee head splatters across the right backseat window.

“Shit!” Sammy cries, rolling from the roof onto the hood. “They’re trying to save us!”

“Morons,” Kalyn says, ducking low.

More booms rumble behind us, and the back windshield splinters.

“Stay down, Jun!” I shout, wondering if they’re shooting
at
us.

Maybe they’ve figured out somehow what we’ve become. Sammy and I got food poisoning at the same time, and Dr. Bill can’t have missed that all four of us have dark circles under our eyes.

Then a hail of gunfire erupts, fully automatic, like the air ripping itself in half, and the back window shatters completely. They
are
shooting at us!

Because we’ve changed? Or because they’d rather have us dead than eaten alive, or turning into zees and shuffling back to haunt the wire.

But then it gets much stranger. Through the splinters of
back window glass, I see fireworks winking out behind me. Humans are dying back there… .

They’re shooting at each other now.

It’s Alma—I can feel her blazing, stopping the other grown-ups from stopping us. Or it’s all just mayhem, caused by the gates opening for the first time in four years. A few zees slipping through has shattered everyone’s fragile sanity, and they’re spilling precious bullets like it was the old days. Back when every moving thing was a target.

We’ve made a mess, it seems.

But the sheltering crowd of zees presses closer around the Benz, taking our hits for us. If one falls, another takes its place.

We bump painfully along the broken highway, the gunfire fading behind us minute by endless minute.

And after a while the night is silent again.

8.

Kalyn is sitting up on the roof, her heels banging on the front window. Sammy sits beside her, his sneakers dangling across my view. I can hardly see the road, and I can’t tell what they’re doing up there.

They better not be kissing.

A piece of jumbled asphalt bangs against the underside of the floorboard, but the Benz keeps rolling. The zees, of course, keep shambling.

We drive for a while.

The road should get better, sooner or later. Maybe not in this swamp, or anywhere in rainy Mississippi. But we’ll find
deserts eventually, with roads lying flat and empty in the sun.

It occurs to me that a map might have been useful. Where did they sell maps back in the before? Gas stations? Bookstores? I can’t remember.

Sammy’s face appears, hanging upside down against the front windshield. He taps the glass.

I roll down my window.

“You guys should see this!” he yells.

“See what?” Jun asks.

“Just come up here. Both of you. I’ll drive!”

I doubt he knows how, but I’m happy to switch places. I put the Benz into park, the zees shambling to a halt around us. They hardly notice when I open the door and step out. They’re waiting patiently, still staring straight ahead.

Jun scrambles over the seat and comes out my door, sheltering himself from the zees behind me.

Sammy doesn’t bother to touch the ground, just crawls in through the passenger-side window. So I lift Jun up, shut the door, and then climb on top of the car.

Kalyn is standing there in her long black dress, so we stand beside her.

The moonlit road behind us is full of zees.

Thousands of them choke the narrow road between the trees, the line stretching back to the gates, at least two miles. Most are still pressing ahead, like they haven’t gotten the word yet that we’ve stopped. The floodlights at the farm gates have snapped on, showing the zees back there still flowing after us.

“What the fuck?” I ask.

“They’re following us,” Jun says.

“No kidding. But where did they all
come from
? There weren’t this many at the gate!”

Kalyn nods. “There weren’t. So they must be coming from along the wire. It’s like they’re all on one long piece of string, and we’re pulling it.”

I see what she means. The wire must be five miles around. So if all the zees that have showed up over the last four years follow us, there’ll be tens of thousands in the line. A parade of zombies.

“But
why
?” Jun asks.

“Yeah, really,” I say. “They don’t want to eat us. So why?”

Kalyn doesn’t answer, and we stand there silently until Sammy manages to get the car in gear. We stagger for a moment, then squat there on the roof, still facing backward.

The Benz makes its slow way along the broken road, bumping even worse now that Sammy’s driving. The swamp trees grow denser, brushing our heads with cool fingers now and then. The shadows of moonlit leaves flicker across our zombie hosts.

Finally we lose sight of the farm, the last glimmer of floodlights disappearing around a bend. But the zees don’t turn around.

“Why are they following us?” Jun asks again.

Kalyn says, “Maybe they were bored too.”

“Bored?” I say. “They’re
zees
, Kalyn. All they do is stand around.”

“Yeah, but they were watching, too. All day. So they must
know that nothing was happening back there. Those drills, those fucking dessert points, all those people going bad like beans in a dented can.” Behind Jun’s back she takes my hand. “It’s death back there, tornado or not. But the zees have
us
now.”

She turns around and sits, dangling her feet against the front windshield again. Jun and I join her, facing the empty, broken road ahead.

I wonder if she’s right.

It’s their planet, after all. The six billion have all the real estate, except for a few little patches that are slowly dying. Maybe they want to do something with it but don’t have any ideas.

They aren’t strong on ideas, the zees.

Sitting there gets annoying fast, with Sammy smacking into every bump like the waste of gravity he is. So I stand up on the roof again, figuring my knees are better shock absorbers than my butt. I put my hands out for balance and spread my feet a little bit apart, like I’m surfing in extremely slow motion, the parade of zombies in my wake.

And then I realize that Kalyn’s right, and everyone else was wrong—from the government scientists in the early days to the know-it-all radio stations who faded out one by one. The six billion didn’t really die. Their lights are still burning around us, however dimly. I mean, just
look
at them.