Undead with Benefits (26 page)

Well, I'd graduated to killing real things, so there's that.

I wondered what Dad would make of my whole voyage across the country. I mean, outside the gray area of mass murderer. There wasn't anything lazy or underachieving about the way I'd evaded our corrupt government and found a cure for zombification.

And yet, here I was with my ass planted on the couch again.

Before I could properly psych myself up, heavy footfalls started clanging up the fire escape. I quickly hid my vials of Kope Juice in a bandana I'd borrowed from Reggie, stashing them under the couch with Amanda's body spray.

Red Bear appeared outside the window. He paused, peeking in, his gaze inventorying all the treasures Reggie had amassed, his face sagging with that look of profound longing usually reserved for dogs that have to sleep outside. He noticed me and started, like I'd caught him at something. He hastily tapped the window with his hatchet, acting as if all along he'd been trying to get my attention.

“He wants us on the roof!” Red Bear yelled, his words muffled by the glass.

I looked up. I'd figured Reggie was still lazing around in his room, but apparently I was the only one being a total bum.

“What for?” I yelled back.

Red Bear pressed his whole face up against the glass, leaving behind a greasy imprint. “Meeting of the Small Council,” he said, then resumed his trek to the roof.

All right. The roof. At least it'd get me off the couch.

Out Reggie's front door, up one flight of stairs, through a metal door propped open by a loose brick, and there was all of Des Moines spread out before me. On a sunny day like this, from up high, the city didn't look so bad. I mean, if you really squinted it looked like the citizens had endured a rash of spontaneous combustions with bloody spray patterns and singe marks everywhere. But from up here without scrutinizing too hard? Not so bad. The roaming ghouls could've been people on their way to work!

I was relieved to find Reggie dressed like a normal person again—jeans, T-shirt, flip-flops—no leather or goggles or kill trophies. He smiled as I emerged from the building and waved me over to the center of the roof. Red Bear stood nearby, scratching himself with the butt end of his hatchet.

“Dude, you gotta see this,” he said as I joined them, pointing up to the sky. “It's some George Orwell shit.”

Craning my neck, at first all I saw were clouds. But then it moved, zipping across the sky, leaving behind a squiggly contrail. It looked like a floating trash can. I gasped.

“UFO!” I shouted. “Zombies, psychics . . . aliens. It all makes sense!”

Red Bear made a farting noise.

Reggie laughed. “Nah. That's a drone. Sent by our pals in the NCD, probably.” He paused thoughtfully. “Aliens would make sense, though, you're right. Like some human-experimentation shit that got out of hand.”

“That's stupid,” Red Bear grumbled.

“Man, shut up, Gene. You don't know shit about sci-fi,” Reggie replied.

“Um.” I surprised myself by being the one to stay on topic. “Do you guys get a lot of drones? Is this, like, normal? Is there going to be an air strike?”

“They don't have the balls,” Red Bear hissed.

“Haven't seen one in a while,” Reggie answered casually. “Last time was right before the paratroopers.”

I blinked at him. “Paratroopers?”

Reggie shrugged. “Yeah, they keep trying that shit. They don't realize it's like doing a food drop. Like zombies can't look up or something.”

“Should I get . . .
the thing
?” Red Bear asked, staring eagerly at the drone.

“Nah,” Reggie replied, after considering for a moment. “It'd be a waste. You know they gotta be up to something, though. We should probably check in downtown, make sure everything's cool.”

Red Bear nodded and unstrapped a walkie-talkie from his belt. He stepped away to confer with whoever was on the other end.

“What's downtown?” I asked Reggie.

He grinned at me. “The beating heart of our republic, my man. It's what those NCD doofuses want to steal. The reason we've been allowed to flourish, because they're too afraid to blow it up.”

My look must've been totally blank. Reggie grabbed me by the shoulders.

“Jake, I'll loan you a tie,” he said, trying to be serious but finding it hard not to smile at his own goofiness. “We're going to corporate America.”

CASS

THERE WASN'T ANY PRACTICAL REASON TO DO THE death imprint. I hadn't needed to do one since New Jersey, when I'd first started tracking Jake, and I didn't
need
to do this one either.

I wanted to.

I was pretty used to corpses in all shapes and sizes and very used to their sad, dead brains. Plunking down in the grass next to Tara's body, I felt an uncomfortable nostalgia, like an arsonist catching a whiff of gasoline. Telepathically jump-starting the synapses of the recently deceased to scrounge around for zombie identification clues—once upon a time that was my whole life.

I should've stayed in California with my mom. But I wanted something else. I wanted new and exciting and interesting.

Where'd that get me?

Sitting in the green grass, the sun big and shiny like it should've been wearing shades and grinning at dancing raisins, birds chirping carelessly, and me focused on the mangled body of my former roommate. Tara'd been bitten once, a chunk taken out of the back of her neck, enough to kill her. I hoped it was quick.

I hadn't been very kind to her. She'd frightened me. Partly because she was a messenger for the person I hated most in this world and partly because she seemed like a cautionary tale for the psychic lifestyle. Was my mind going to break, just like hers had?

Was it already breaking?

I wanted to get a look into that fractured place, see if I could learn anything. See what I had to look forward to.

How lucky for me that he hadn't gotten around to eating Tara's brain. The others back in the shelter weren't so lucky. He'd practically torn their heads clear off to get at the insides. Whatever. I hardly knew them. It wasn't any worse than seeing my whole squad picked off back in Michigan. They were just another crime scene, a couple more half-remembered faces to look back on one day when I thumbed through the mental yearbook of my formative years. Look at all the dead people!

Roy was right. It did get easier.

Maybe I'd actually like it in Tara's brain. Maybe psychic breakdown was preferable to this constant angst. I could nap all the time, waking up only to spout prophetic one-liners and gobble down some canned fruit.

I put my hand on Tara's cold forehead. If I'd learned one thing from Alastaire, it was that the physical-touch stuff was unnecessary, just a crutch to help us psychics focus our powers; it's easier to harness the invisible flow of thought if there's some sense of corporeal action. Still, I wanted to touch her. It felt right that way.

With a death imprint, the broad details come first: what was important to the deceased, who they loved, those kinds of things. It was different with Tara. Even in death, her mind was filled with gaps and missed connections, like one of those redacted government documents with the black marker blotting out all the verbs. There weren't any cherished memories or passions to uncover, nor was there any insight into the NCD or the Deadzone. It had all been stripped out, only the barest foundations left, just enough for her mind to keep functioning.

Had Alastaire done this to her? Or had all the guilt made her do it to herself?

Bare feet. That's what left the biggest impression—Tara liked walking in bare feet, feeling textures on her toes. The simple pleasures of the lobotomized.

Before I could stop myself, I was trying on Tara's final memory. I looked through her eyes as

the blood spatters across the tops of my feet. Warm and sticky. This is wrong. I should run. Up the concrete steps, out of the shelter. Running, running, running. Feels good, even though the grass is sharp.

And then I saw myself through Tara's eyes, pinned underneath Amanda, this wild look of come-at-me-bitch anger stapled to my face. I didn't even know my facial muscles were capable of that; wouldn't ever want to duplicate that look in the mirror.

Oh, look, Cass and her friend are playing too. Is that why I'm running? Is this a ga—?

Oof! He grabs me from behind, too hard. Not fun.

“Hey.”

I broke contact with Tara and retreated back behind my own eyes. I'd snapped out too quickly and had to keep centered against a tremor of vertigo, even though I was sitting down.

Cody stood over me looking, well, looking a lot of things.

Filthy and blood covered, for starters. Filthy because he'd been out in the field, digging three graves. Bloody on account of the others—Tara, Lucy, and Roy, the three we'd rescued from certain death.

The ones Cody had eaten when he first necrotized.

Really should've seen that one coming, Cass.

I'd missed the signs. His pallor this morning; the stomachache; the way that zombie didn't seem interested in biting him. Jeez, he even told me about his nonviolent run-in with his zombie ex-girlfriend a few weeks back. I really needed to learn how to read between the lines.

After Cody chased down and mauled Tara, Amanda had managed to get hold of him. I grabbed the guinea pigs from the car, which was probably the first time in recorded history fat rodents were someone's go-to in an emergency. I handed them to Amanda one by one while she held Cody down and shoved them into his gnashing blue-gray zombie mouth. The two of us watched in stunned silence as he went from thrashing corpse back to handsome farm boy. The teeth marks on his cheek even healed.

Then, the crying started.

He'd bawled out of control for like a half hour with Amanda rubbing his back and whispering gentle things to him, freaking guidance counselor for the newly undead. Whatever, I guess she had experience in this sort of situation. While all that was happening, I went back to the bunker. I thought about grabbing Truncheon's rifle and putting Cody down, but Lucy's severed hand was still clutching it and anyway I knew that I wouldn't pull the trigger.

Peeking in on the mess Cody had made of Roy and Lucy reminded me of my days of analyzing zombie massacre scenes, and that's what put the death-imprint idea in my head. That and morbid curiosity, and shell shock, and maybe a general feeling that there was nothing in the world that could ever go right, so maybe let's find out what it's like to just turn off.

That's what put me in the grass next to Tara when Cody came to collect her body for its freshly dug grave.

“Hey,” he said again, even though I was looking right at him. I must've looked glassy eyed and spaced out, my usual expression when I've detached from someone's brain. “You okay?”

He flinched when I laughed at him.

Cody crouched down opposite me, Tara's body in between us. I definitely wasn't giving off a hey-let's-have-a-heart-to-heart vibe, but that didn't stop the doofy zombie hick from trying.

“I didn't mean for this to happen,” he said shakily, his watery gaze on Tara. “I was just trying to keep them safe. I didn't know that—that I'm a—I didn't know. It makes me sick, what I did. You understand that, right?”

I shrugged. “I hardly know you, man.”

“But still,” he said, turning his desperate gaze on me. “You saw what I was like, what I was doing. I was trying to
help
.”

“Did you want a medal or something?”

“You know I'd never hurt her or—or—or any of them.”

“All right, whatever.” I sighed. “I absolve you. It doesn't matter.”

Cody touched my shoulder, but I jerked away. Out of my peripheral vision, I noticed Amanda take a step toward us. She'd been hanging out over by the car ever since Cody—spouting some folksy crap about needing to do it himself—turned down her offer to help dig graves. She was keeping an eye out, in case he tried to eat me. After all, she still needed me to find Jake.

“It does matter,” Cody insisted. “You—you know me best now. Out of everyone left, you know me best.”

“That's sad,” I said. “That's really, really sad.”

Cody stared down at his hands, at the blood crusted under his fingernails.

“Can I take her?” he asked, motioning to Tara. “I've—I've already buried the others.”

I stood up, dusting off the backs of my jeans. “Do what you need to do.”

Cody stared up at me, as if he was puzzled by my coldness. Like he couldn't possibly understand why I wasn't sympathizing with him. I guess that's what made me want to twist the knife. I wanted to pound a little self-awareness into him.

“There's something I don't get,” I said as he gathered Tara into his arms.

“Yeah?” he replied, almost hopeful.

“You've been fighting zombies for
a year
. You've got to know how the disease spreads or, at the very least, what the symptoms are, right?”

Cody didn't respond, so at least he understood what rhetorical questions sounded like. He watched me, face scrunched up like he was getting ready to take a punch.

“So, I'm wondering, after you hooked up with your zombie ex or whatever—were you in denial about getting infected, or are you genuinely so mind-blowingly stupid that it didn't occur to you as a possibility?”

He actually seemed to consider my question, even though I'd mostly meant it as an insult.

“Mind-blowingly stupid, I guess,” he said, hugging Tara's body to him. “My dad had just died and—”

I threw up my hands, and Cody finally shut up. Everyone had justifications for the crappy things they did. I was tired of hearing them.

I had a ticking clock and crappy things of my own to accomplish.

I left Cody hunched over and whispering quiet apologies into Tara's unhearing ear. I walked toward the house, ready to put some distance between me and these zombies.