Undead with Benefits (10 page)

“No way,” said Amanda, shaking her head. “Total setup.”

Jake sighed, standing up for me, just like I knew he would. “Jeez, Amanda. Why would she go through the trouble? She could've busted us anytime she wanted.”

Amanda fixed Jake with a searching look. Even though I'd never been in there, I knew how her mind worked; she was looking for angles, figuring out motivations, calculating how to work people. Jake smiled at her—a mellow, carefree smile, like we were debating what to see at the movies—and she relented.

“Fine,” she muttered.

“We trust you,” Jake said, flipping that easy smile in my direction. My stomach turned over.

He shouldn't have.

JAKE

THE CROWD ON THE SIDEWALK PARTED JUST ENOUGH to let me nose our car out of the parking lot and into the street. A couple of hippie girls in swishy, patchwork dresses and
FREE IOWA
tank tops sprayed Silly String onto our windshield. I waved at them and hit the windshield wipers.

“I don't even get it,” I said. “Are they, like, pro-zombies? Or against? What're they protesting?”

Amanda eyeballed a shirtless punk-rock dude with suspenders and a huge anarchy symbol shaved into his head. He stomped along the edge of the barricade, practically daring the cops to mess with him.

“Deodorant,” Amanda observed and flipped on the air-conditioning. “That's what they're protesting.”

“No, seriously.”

A harried cop waved me into a line of traffic that was going nowhere slow. The street was one-way, and that way went in the opposite direction of the marchers. We were traveling upstream against a lot of angry and colorful fish, but the cops at least had mostly confined them to the sidewalks. I just needed to find somewhere to turn off.

“They don't even know why they're out here,” Amanda said dismissively. “Someone handed them a flier and they're all, like, oh, cool, a chance to break out my devil sticks.”

I scanned the crowd, but didn't see any devil sticks. A solemn bunch of middle-aged people walked past, linked arm in arm, all of them holding pictures of missing children.

“You think they'd still be out here if they knew about us? Not
us
specifically. I mean the whole people-eating-people thing. Would they march for that? For zombie rights?” I was rambling. The traffic jam plus the exhausted condition of my two lady friends had me feeling the need to make conversation. And, honestly, all the chanting had me sort of amped up.

“If they knew the truth, they'd probably be shooting at us. Or locked away like . . .” Amanda trailed off, getting self-conscious. I don't think she wanted Cass knowing about her brother. She didn't get much sleep last night, even after I fed her some guinea pigs through the cracked bathroom door. She stayed up until dawn looking for more news about Kyle. None of it was good.

Cass, who, from the look of her, totally rivaled Amanda in the up-all-night department, spoke up from the backseat, where she was stretched out with an arm draped across her face.

“It's the not knowing that they're protesting,” she said. “They're mad because they've been kept in the dark. I'd be angry too.”

“Yeah! Let's get angry!” I hollered, honking the horn. “Down with government! Up with people!”

Some of the protesters right outside our car cheered. They waved at me, encouraging me to get out of our car and join them. If I hadn't been on my way to a top-secret world-saving mission that would totally knock all their sandals off, I would have.

“Oh my god,” Cass moaned. “If you honk that horn again, you'll be cleaning up my exploded brains.”

“Mmm,” I said, smirking. “Brains.”

“Not funny,” she replied.

“That's your fault, though,” Amanda said to Cass, having been chewing this over for a few seconds. “They're in the dark because of you guys.”

“Yep,” Cass answered simply. “You're right.”

We inched a little farther down the block, closing in on an intersection where we could hopefully turn off from the protest. Something odd caught my eye in the rearview. A strange ripple passed through the crowd behind us. It was like at a concert, where you could be packed in shoulder-to-shoulder rocking out, but then that one drunk guy starts peeing and the audience reacts like a singular organism, shifting and isolating for the good of all.

“Something's up,” I said. Amanda looked first at me, frowning, and then out the back window. Cass sat up, shielding her eyes.

From back toward the hotel, a skinny, shirtless guy with a yellow peace sign painted on his chest sprinted by our car. His hip slammed hard into the side mirror and he didn't even slow down.

“Keep driving,” Amanda said.

“Good advice,” I replied.

Traffic wasn't moving. I rolled as close as I could to the bumper of the car in front of me. A cop walked down the yellow line, headed in the direction we'd come from. He was talking all serious into the little radio on his shirt, one hand on his holstered gun.

“I can't tell what's happening,” Cass said. There was definitely a commotion behind us, people jostling for position, spreading into the road.

“Maybe it's just a fight,” I said hopefully. “Like,
I'll show you who believes in the first amendment more
, and shit just gets wild.”

“Green light!” Amanda shouted.

I honked at the car in front of us. He sped up, we cruised into the intersection, and that's when the dam broke.

All at once the protest flipped and now the entire crowd was streaming in our direction. Screaming and running, shoving one another, stepping on backs. The terrified faces brought back half-remembered red-tinged memories of that first fateful day in the cafeteria. I saw the cop who'd walked past us get dumped on his ass, shouldered out of the way by some panicked college kids. And then, farther back, I'm pretty sure I saw a severed arm fly into the air.

“This is bad,” Amanda said.

“Crowds,” I said. “I really hate crowds.”

I swung us hard into the left turn. People sprinted frantically through the intersection, so I had to pump the brakes. I really didn't want to add vehicular manslaughter to my list of crimes if I didn't have to.

“Get us out of here.” Amanda was trying really hard to stay calm.

“Trying,” I said.

A guy who didn't look much older than me slammed right into the side of our car. His T-shirt was all shredded and bloody, making Che Guevara's face look slightly more badass. I could see a mouth-shaped laceration on his shoulder. He slapped his hands against our windows, smearing blood on them, then tried the backseat door. Cass recoiled, but not before jamming down the lock.

“Some bitch back there is eating people!” he screamed. “You gotta help me! Let me in!”

“No, uh, no room,” I shouted through the window.

A gunshot rang out above the screaming. One second Che Guevara was jogging next to our car, and the next he was crumpled on the ground missing the side of his head.

“Oh my god,” Cass gasped.

The panicked crowd shifted then, now running away from a businessman in the crosswalk holding a pistol. He swung it in a wild arc, screaming, “YOU'RE BITTEN,” before aiming at the backs of a young couple trying to get away.

“Fuck it,” I said, and gunned it.

There was enough space for me to drive around the businessman, but I didn't bother. He didn't see me coming. The car wasn't going fast enough to knock him up in the air, so instead he went under. It was like going over a really crunchy speed bump. I glanced in the rearview mirror and briefly caught sight of him lying motionless in the road before he disappeared beneath another crowd surge.

Space opened up in front of us, so I floored it. We outraced the chaos, leaving behind sirens and screaming. I didn't take my foot off the gas until we were safely on the other side of town, away from it all, getting the hell out of Omaha.

I realized then that I was shaking. Amanda had her hand on my leg, steadying.

“I ran a guy over,” I said matter-of-factly.

“He was shooting people,” Amanda replied. “Innocent people.”

I looked into the rearview. Cass's gaze was waiting for mine.

“You did the right thing,” she said solemnly.

I breathed a sigh of relief. I know it's twisted, but it made me feel better that we were in unanimous agreement about my spur-of-the-moment decision to mow down a stranger.

“Just making sure I didn't, like, cross some ethical boundary just now.”

“Psh.” Amanda snorted.

“Let's try not to think about those,” Cass said quietly.

“Someone must've turned,” I said, taking a deep breath. “Just like what happened with us.”

“I hope they're—” Amanda paused, biting her lip. “Shit, I don't know what I hope.”

I tried to catch Cass's eyes again, but she'd closed them. She was rubbing circles into her temples.

“Isn't this just going to keep happening?” I asked. “How could the NCD ever stop this?”

“Oh, it seems like they're pretty much screwed.” Cass shrugged. There was a world-weary grimness in her voice that I hadn't heard before. “I think we're all pretty much screwed, actually. Or am I the only one getting a distinct zombie-apocalypse vibe from the last few days?”

Amanda blinked and said nothing. She squeezed my leg and I put my hand on top of hers, squeezing back. I think we'd both always assumed that once we straightened out our personal undead thing, there'd be a world to go back to.

“I love your optimism,” I said, and turned on the radio. “How about some music? Any requests?”

It took a while to find a station not reporting on the mayhem in downtown Omaha.

 

We didn't talk much on our way back onto the thruway. I found a mellow soft-rock station—not usually my thing, but I wanted something that couldn't possibly soundtrack an apocalypse. This dude jamming on his acoustic guitar singing about building a soapbox racer with his dad totally fit the bill. Some real everything-is-good-in-the-heartland John Denver bullshit. Living in a fantasy world, but whatever.

Amanda fiddled with my DS for a while, got bored, and ended up staring sullenly out the window. After punching some mysterious coordinates into the GPS, Cass stretched out across the entire backseat, sunk so low that I couldn't see her in the mirror anymore. I turned my head to check on her every few miles. She'd pulled out the black cowboy hat and pushed it over her eyes like she was sleeping, but I'd occasionally catch her mouthing words, arguing with herself. She was radiating some seriously confusing vibes, like something major had changed with her. I wanted to ask if she was all right, but didn't want to give Amanda the wrong idea. Because apparently being a well-behaved, polite, empathic young man in a car with two totally hormonal undead/mutant/post-human ladies was an invitation to do some wack-ass love-triangle like in one of those stupid romance books my sister used to read, where there'd always be two guys with eight-packs, flappy, open dress shirts, and werewolf eyes lustily eyeing one bodice-ripped teenager with blushing virgin cheeks. Except in this metaphor, I guess I'm the one with the ripped dress.

Twenty minutes later, the big orange signs warning of an impending detour started popping up on the side of the highway. We'd passed into Iowa proper a while back and were headed east toward Prairie Rose State Park, where I pictured flowers blooming out of giant ears of corn. I sat up straighter and arranged my hands at ten and two, just in case this entailed some stunt driving.

“The GPS is pointing me toward the closed exit,” I announced.

Cass sat up with a groan. “That's fine. Just drive around it.”

We zipped by a sign that promised Des Moines in 120 miles. The dry British lady on the GPS told me to take the next exit. I could see it up ahead, barricaded by yellow barrels and one of those big, wooden crossbeams. I slowed down and coasted onto the shoulder, rumble strips rattling the undercarriage. It was a tight squeeze, and the side of the car scraped against the metal guardrail, peeling off some paint.

And then we were through. Winding up an on-ramp and emerging on a new stretch of highway, no roadwork in sight.

“Well, that was easy,” I said.

“Don't tell me the solution this entire time was
drive around
,” Amanda complained.

“No.” Cass shook her head. “Look out your window.”

Amanda and I both turned our heads. I noticed coils of dark metal piled on the side of the road. There were dusty tracks on the highway from where they'd been recently dragged aside.

“What are those?” Amanda asked.

“Spike strips,” Cass replied. “Maybe some other, worse stuff. They cleared the way for us.”

That on-ramp had basically transported us into an alternate dimension, one where we were the only people left on Earth. There weren't any other cars on the highway in either direction. I glided back and forth across the lanes before settling smack in the middle of the road.

Amanda turned to look at Cass. “Going to be pretty tough for you to hitchhike back,” she said. “Good thing we got you those sneakers.”

“I'll be fine,” Cass replied, sounding tired. She'd taken off the black hat and stuffed it into the shopping bag with the rest of her things.

“It's very flat,” I observed.

It took me a second to realize that it wasn't just the natural geography messing with my perception. The land we were passing through had been leveled—trees cut down to stumps, cornfields razed, highway signs dismantled.

“So they can see people coming,” Cass explained.

The idea that someone up ahead was watching us through some military-grade telescope, maybe dialing in a drone strike at that very moment, made me drive considerably slower. We were driving toward a bunch of people trained to kill zombies. Whose idea was this? Because it abruptly struck me as a really god-awful one. I mean, the hotel we'd been staying at had a pool. We could have been lounging poolside right then.