Undead with Benefits (20 page)

All that, and he felt optimistic. It came pouring through our psychic link like sunshine edging under the curtains. Jake felt like he was close. He was going to find the cure. Like, today.

I knew I could depend on him.

I jumped out quickly. I didn't want to push too hard too soon. And I could feel Alastaire out there, burning at the edge of my consciousness. He wanted to communicate with me, but I pushed him away, shut myself off from the astral plane.

As I climbed out of my cot, feeling cheered and rejuvenated, I caught a glimpse of Tara, still in her bunk and basically catatonic. Looking at her, the stockpile of optimism I'd siphoned from Jake took a hit. I worried that I was gazing into my own future as a burnt-out psychic vegetable. I hadn't been able to get any more information out of her and I refused to try making psychic contact. I was scared what I might find in there. Tara was like one of those gruesome antismoking ads where the people talked through harmonicas, except she was the malformed poster girl for everything that could go wrong as a psychic zombie hunter.

But otherwise, things were peachy!

Later, I stood outside the bomb shelter and let the late-morning sun bombard my face. In daylight, I could see that the shelter was built up against a large ranch-style house, the only structure in sight. Otherwise, it was just rolling fields of bright green grass that'd probably never been splattered by even a little brain.

Well, except for this morning.

Anyway, if there were any more zombies out here, we'd see them coming from miles off. It felt peaceful to be in the middle of nowhere, clutching a mug of terrible coffee made from those freeze-dried crystals and cooked over a hot plate. Now that it was just a matter of waiting for Jake to snag the cure, my life seemed suddenly manageable. Granted, I still had to survive in this zombie wasteland, but at least I had some hope to go with my coffee.

“Everyone's got an amazing story,” Lucy was saying to me. “To be surviving in a place like this? Talk about tales of valor, you know?”

“Mhm,” I replied.

Lucy crouched next to me in the shelter doorway, nursing her own mug of coffee and smoking a cigarette. I didn't really mind the company, although I got the impression Lucy'd already pitched her so-called Definitive Oral History of Undead America to the other survivors. I think she was buttering me up to ask for an interview. I wasn't paying much attention.

“I mean, a few months ago I was writing blog posts about farm equipment,” Lucy kept on. “And then, last week, I escaped a horde of undead by jumping off a fire escape onto a moving van. That's gotta be worth a Pulitzer, right?”

“Gotta be,” I replied.

I watched Cody and Roy walking through the field behind the house. They dragged the ghoul from this morning by the ankles, the idea to get him away from the shelter so he wouldn't stink up the place or possibly draw others. It was slowgoing; Roy kept losing his grip and taking dry-heave breaks.

“Take Stud out there,” Lucy said, noticing the direction of my gaze. “Kid used to be some hotshot amateur race-car driver. His dad was a small-town sheriff. They refused to evacuate when it all went down. A father and son, fast cars and guns, saving yokels from the undead.” Lucy shook her head in disbelief. “Can you imagine the bank I'll get for the movie rights alone?”

I snorted. These adults never ceased to amaze me. Everyone was trying to exploit the zombie apocalypse somehow. If it wasn't Alastaire and his zombie slaves, it was Lucy and her crack journalism. She didn't seem to realize how unlikely it was she'd even make it out of Iowa to talk to any kind of film producer.

Degrees of grossness, sure, but grossness.

Still, I was curious.

“What happened to his dad?” I asked.

Lucy looked pleased to gossip, although she lowered her voice in that respectful speaking-of-the-dead way.

“There used to be about twenty of us,” she began, “but some of the others got it in their heads to make a break for the wall. Cody's dad, William, he tried to convince them to stay. To play it safe. He got outvoted. We all went because that's the kind of group we were. Lots of families, some kids. We stuck together.”

I thought of the bullet-riddled cars we'd passed coming in, and braced myself for another tale of NCD cruelty. “Did they get shot crossing over?”

Lucy snorted. “Never even made it. One of the Lord's hunting parties caught us on the road. Only reason me and Roy are alive is because we picked the right car. Cody's like the Steve McQueen of Iowa.”

“And his dad?”

Lucy shook her head. “He picked the wrong car.”

“Jeez,” I said quietly, because I'm not great in these one-on-one horror-story situations.

“Mhm,” Lucy replied, stubbing out her cigarette and lighting a new one. “So what's
your
story, new girl?”

“No comment,” I said, smirking. “Always wanted to say that.”

“C'mon,” Lucy persisted. “You're driving around the boondocks with a zombie escort saving people from soldiers of fortune. And you're a baby!”

“I'm seventeen.”

Lucy pointed her cigarette at me. “You don't have the bone structure to be from around here,” she mused, “and you're way too young to be one of those government spooks.”

I smiled and looked elsewhere.

“I gotta know your deal,” she said. “It can be off the record. I prom—”

“You won't make it out of here alive.”

Lucy and I both jumped.

Tara stood behind us, at the bottom of the shelter's steps. Her skinny frame swam in a hooded sweatshirt she'd probably borrowed from Cody, hair all sweaty and stuck to her face, staring at Lucy with big, penetrating eyes.

Lucy grumbled. She'd spilled her coffee when Tara popped up.

“Good morning, Scary,” Lucy said. “Is that today's prophecy?”

Tara didn't reply. Her attention had transferred from Lucy to me; she stared, hands clasped behind her back, rocking back and forth on her heels. I tried to ignore her.

“You know, I don't think it was a coincidence you showed up at our camp just a couple days before Truncheon nabbed us,” Lucy said to Tara, using a singsong voice normally reserved for talking to dogs or plants. “Maybe you're just pretending to be all retarded, hmm?”

“She's
not
retarded,” I snapped, feeling a sudden rush of anger for this woman who thought she was such an authority on everything. I've been around zombies for eighteen months and you're trying to impress me with stories about jumping off fire escapes? Shut up.

Lucy didn't look chastened, more like delighted to have gotten a reaction out of me.

“Maybe we could talk about your relationship,” she suggested casually. “I overheard that you know each other. . . .”

Before I could reply, Tara linked her arm through mine and rested her head on my shoulder.

“We
do
know each other,” Tara said, like she'd just discovered this. “Let's go for a walk, Cass.”

Still holding on to my arm—she was stronger than she looked, considering it looked like a strong gust of wind might disintegrate her—Tara led me away. Even though we'd been roommates back at NCD headquarters, Tara and I definitely weren't on the friendship level of strolling through a meadow arm in arm. We'd see each other for a day or two every couple months and were usually pretty tight-lipped—psychics aren't really comfortable around other psychics. The most detailed conversation I remembered us having was her insisting on bottom bunk because she had seniority.

“So you remember me?” I asked, once we were out of Lucy's eavesdropping radius.

“I remember you from a dream,” Tara answered. “We shared a room. We were sisters.”

I yanked my arm away from her. She peered up at me through her mangy hair, face screwed up and bewildered.

“You're mad,” she said.

“I'm not,” I replied. “I'm fine.”

In truth, I didn't know what I was feeling. I wanted to empathize with Tara; I knew that's what a good person would do. She was like me and she'd been through something terrible and she'd come out of it changed for the worse. But when I looked at her, I couldn't help picturing a fried version of myself obliviously wandering the Deadzone.

I also remembered Truncheon's payment request; he'd wanted a new psychic sent to him. Because his last one was “broken.”

“Were you working with Truncheon?” I asked, trying to figure out what went wrong, even though the obvious answer was
pretty much everything
. “Was he your squad leader?”

Tara answered with a big nod, like her head was loose on her shoulders.

“What were you doing for him?”

“We played a game,” she said, pausing to furiously scratch the top of her head. “A scavenger hunt for people. They always needed new bodies.”

My fists balled up, nails digging into my palms. Truncheon had said humans were like currency in the Deadzone. The way I figured it, he'd been using Tara to track the uninfected instead of the undead. She'd find him survivors and they'd end up bound and gagged in his sicko van, headed for . . . well, definitely not somewhere safe.

“Did he trade them?” I asked, trying to keep my voice gentle despite how repulsed I felt. “To the zombies in Des Moines? Or . . . ?”

“The Brothers Kope,” Tara answered, knuckling her forehead. “I couldn't.”

That corporation again. If Lucy wanted a Pulitzer scoop, she should've been grilling Tara instead of me.

“You couldn't what?” I prodded.

“Cope,” she replied, tapping her temple. “It'll happen to you too. Even Daddy's favorite won't be spared.”

I wanted to slap her or shake her or both. But she was so childlike, so totally broken, it seemed cruel to keep pumping her for information. Even if she'd been party to some truly nasty stuff out here, I knew from experience that sometimes the NCD didn't leave you much choice.

Tara reached down and plucked a dandelion, holding it up to me.

“It's not so bad like this,” she said, blowing off the fuzzies.

“Good to know,” I snorted, falling silent.

Our directionless stroll had taken us across the pasture toward the road. Nearby, Cody and Roy had finished their ghoul dumping and were headed back to the shelter.

“He's got secrets,” Tara said to me, staring at Cody. He waved at us.

“Who doesn't?” I replied, returning the wave.

“Sexy secrets,” Tara mumbled.

Encouraged by my wave, Cody veered off to greet us, tipping an imaginary hat. That made Tara giggle. I had to keep reminding myself she was in her twenties.

“Morning, ladies,” Cody said, smiling at us with perfect teeth. He'd sweated his way through spots on his white T-shirt, right around all the muscles. He glanced up at the sun. “Or is it afternoon?”

“Morning!” Tara exclaimed. “We're all in mourning.”

Cody smiled brightly at Tara, like she wasn't weird at all. “Good wordplay, T.”

I looked Cody over. Beyond the sweat he'd worked up dragging the ghoul away, he looked pretty drained in general. I hadn't noticed the dark circles under his eyes last night.

“You look exhausted,” I said. “Did you even sleep?”

Cody waved this off. “Y'all needed rest more than me,” he replied. “Even way out here, it's safest to have someone on guard.”

“Someone else could've taken a shift,” I continued, feeling suddenly protective of these misfits. “You don't have to do it all yourself.”

“You know what's funny?” Cody asked, looking down and rubbing the back of his neck. “I used to yell at my dad for doing the same thing. Pushing himself. He used to tell me,
Cody, I'll sleep when I'm dead
.”

“Which will be soon,” Tara chimed in, her gaze drifting toward the road.

“Goodness,” said Cody, smiling easily at Tara, no offense taken at her soothsaying. “I better catch a nap, then.”

We all turned at the sound of a car. The only access to this place came via a single road that you could see down for miles. I shielded my eyes from the sun, trying to make out the speeding car through the dust it kicked up.

“That's not Amanda,” I said, barely finishing my sentence before Cody shoved me down into the grass. He yanked Tara down too, her spacey giggling totally inappropriate.

“Sorry,” Cody said, apologizing for the manhandling. “We tend to hide from strangers around here.”

It wasn't much of a hiding spot, the three of us on our bellies in the grass. I turned my head to look back at the bunker. Roy and Lucy had smartly hustled inside, but I could see the top of Lucy's head peeking out from the doorway.

The car came down the road slowly. As it got closer, I recognized the red-and-blue roof lights.

“Police car,” I said. “That a good or bad sign?”

“Well, there ain't any more police, so . . .” Cody reached behind him, checking to make sure his broom-handle stake was still hooked through one of his belt loops.

The cruiser sported similar modifications as the freakish limo I'd glimpsed in Jake's mind. Metal studs in the shape of an anarchy symbol glinted on the doors and a decapitated pig's head made for a gruesome hood ornament.

“Definitely not a good sign,” I said.

“It's one of the Lord's scavengers,” Cody replied. “Just stay down. Maybe he missed us.”

“Poor piggy,” Tara added helpfully.

The cruiser creaked to a stop in the middle of the road, shouting distance from our spot in the grass. A rail-thin guy in his twenties with a shaved head climbed out. He was dressed in an acid-washed denim jacket and matching jeans, all ripped up and frayed, looking like the bad boy from an '80s romantic comedy. This Bender wannabe stared in our direction and cupped his hands over his mouth.