Dearly, Departed

by Lia Habel

  My second crime, in as many days, was stealing the keys to my father’s liquor cabinet. I helped myself to a bottle of wine and practically flew upstairs with it. A few sips, I knew from past holiday experiences, and I would be out like a light. I didn’t even need to get drunk.

  Although, for a second, I thought about it.

  “How often do you have to mention the eating thing?” Nora demanded.

  “Once an hour, every hour, until the day I finally decay,” Tom answered with a sweep of his machete.

  “We need to find you a new hobby.”

  I chuckled. It was late morning, and we were wading through a field of high, dry grass. Nora kept close to me. She’d insisted on coming along, after Wolfe had given the order and left. It wasn’t all that important a mission, but I figured she needed a distraction.

  Tom, of course, had taken every opportunity he could to joke about “the boxed lunch” and “big game safaris,” and it was starting to wear on her.

  “Leave off, Tom,” I said. Nora flashed me a forbidding look, one that told me she wanted to handle it herself. I rolled my shoulders. “Or not.”

  “Ignore him,” Chas said, adjusting her floppy hat. “He just thinks he’s the big man on campus ’cause—”

  I shot Chas a look of my own. She shut her trap.

  “Because what?” Nora asked.

  “Nothing.” I stopped and pointed with my blade to a long, low building about a hundred yards off. “There it is. That’s number three, I think.”

  We’d been assigned the bold, reckless task of … turning one of the power stations back on. The base got power from three biodiesel stations, where algae and some other genetically engineered little buggers turned biological waste into fuel. There was a living staff that worked them all, but it wasn’t large, and at the moment we just happened to be closer to tank three than they were.

  “Here we are,” I said to Nora. “Now, it’s up to us to dodge through the gunfire of our enemies on our way to—”

  “I know, I know, flick a circuit breaker.” She was almost hidden by the grass. “I just … didn’t want to be left alone back there, okay?”

  “Got it.”

  Nora held her position as Tom, Chas, Renfield, and Coalhouse continued toward the tank, their bodies rustling in the grass. Once they were a little ahead of us, she murmured, “I know the others are hiding something from me. If I’d had to sit around back at the base while they all played mum, I’d have started throwing things. I hate being kept in the dark.”

  “Hiding something?” I tried, keeping my tone light.

  She nodded, and turned her face to the sun. “I heard some of the scientists talking about the position of this base, like it was important. And everywhere I go, the last day or so, everybody goes quiet, or up and runs. I go to a girls’ school, I know what that means.”

  I was nervous, but I took a gamble. “What do you think it could be?”

  She picked at the knotted ribbon of her hat. “I’m afraid they’ve found my father, and he’s dead, or something. Or they’re going to give up searching.”

  Guilt knocked on the back of my skull as I found myself rejoicing in the fact that she was completely off base. Guilt—it was guilt, I swear—made me reach out and take her hand as she lowered it from her chin.

  She stiffened at first, turning her brown eyes on me. After a second she relaxed. She let me keep her hand. It was so warm. I couldn’t get over how warm she was. I couldn’t remember ever being like that.

  “Nora, if they stop looking, I’ll start.”

  She rewarded me with a smile.

  “Are you two done making out?” Coalhouse called.

  Nora gripped my fingers reflexively, her mouth going slack. She dropped my hand and started fighting through the grass, pushing it out of her way. “Can I borrow your machete, Bram?” Her tone was nonchalant, as if she were asking me where I kept the butter.

  Really, my only option at this point was to blow my own brains out.

  I followed in her shadow, beating the handle of the machete against my other hand. “Now, you remember what I taught you during our lesson yesterday, Miss Dearly,” I said, mimicking Doc Sam’s professorial voice.

  “Yes, professor,” she sang back, making her girly voice even girlier. “Aim for the cranium and slice it clean off, revealing and destroying the brain—for severing the head alone will do no good.”

  “Excellent, young lady. That will be a merit.”

  “Oh, a merit! My life is complete!”

  “Oh, shut up,” Coalhouse shouted back.

  “You get merits and demerits in Punk schools, too?” she asked, giggling. She emerged from the high grass into a mowed area, and turned around.

  “No. Never went to school, actually. Mom taught us at home. But I read a lot.”

  “I saw. What’s with the adventure books?”

  I laughed. “I want to visit the glaciers someday. Some people still live out there, you know. Survivalists. I think it’d be interesting to try.” I held out my hand, but she didn’t take it again. “Besides, you think I’m cold now. Don’t you want to see how cold I get living like Nanook of the North?”

  “Seriously, I am going to hurl. And I don’t even think I’m capable of that anymore.” Coalhouse had his arms crossed and was drumming his fingers on his biceps. “I will bend the laws of biology and physics and spew if you two don’t stop it.”

  Nora rolled her eyes so largely I thought it must hurt, and turned on him. “Stop what? We’re talking. Like normal, nice people. You should try it sometime.”

  “He’s just jealous,” Chas said with an evil little grin.

  Coalhouse let it drop, but by the look he gave me, I realized that, yeah—he probably was.

  Even though there’s nothing for him to be jealous about, no siree.

  “If you’ll excuse me,” Renfield said, as he started for the biofuel tank. “Since no one else seems to be interested in actually completing our mission, I guess it’s up to me.”

  “Don’t wear yourself out, there,” Tom said.

  Renfield made an angry motion to the heavens without looking back, and entered the building through a side door.

  Nora released a breath of air and sat down on the ground, hugging her knees to her chest, her usual position. Chas flopped onto her back as if she intended to make a grass angel. Nora looked pointedly at Coalhouse. “So! What’s your story, then?”

  Coalhouse sat and fingered his useless eye to make sure it was still in there. “Well,” he began, then stopped. For some reason he looked at me, and then at her.

  “What?” I asked him.

  Coalhouse shook his head and didn’t respond. “Right, then. I’m Punk. I joined the army when I turned sixteen. My parents own a dry goods store in the town of Tesla Lake, but I don’t suppose you’d know where that is. Was always good at shooting game, so I went for the artillery. Saw some active combat with the Vics.” He looked down. “They came eight months after I enlisted. Didn’t get many of us, but I was one of the few they did. We fought ’em at night—brilliant, right? I didn’t even see him, just felt it when he bit me.”

  He pulled up his shirt, showing off the scar on his waist. The bite marks were black along the edges, clearly defined. I saw Nora’s lips thin as she clamped her jaw.

  “Sorry.” He rolled his shirt back down. “Anyway, I managed to climb up into a tree—one of them big ones with the leaves that look like they’ve been polished. I died up there, tucked in amongst the branches, just as day came. Worst sunrise I’ve ever seen. I mean, it looked ugly and sick, like yellow alcohol. I figure, it knew. Woke up a few seconds later. And the first thing I saw was him, still waiting for me.”

  Coalhouse glared at Tom.

  Tom pointed at him and said, “I have told you before, it wasn’t personal. I had you treed! I knew if I just waited long enough, you’d come down! I didn’t know you’d be past your expiration date. I was not there mentally.”

  Nora jumped to her
feet and backed toward me. Situation aside, I loved, loved it when she did that. It made me feel protective, like I was good for something. “You bit him?”

  Coalhouse made a sound of annoyance and turned away from Tom. “Same company,” he grumbled. “He went missing, what, two months before?”

  “Month and a half, maybe. Not that it matters. Geez, how many times do I have to apologize?”

  “You killed me, you loser!”

  “It was an accident.”

  It’d been a while since Tom and Coalhouse had an argument about the Topic, and Chas and I knew what was coming. Chas stood up and put her arm around Nora. “Hey, Ren’ll be done in a trice. Let us walk … er … this way …”

  Nora didn’t move. She was staring at the two zombie boys as they got into it, both rising to their feet.

  “You killed me! That’s not something you can ever apologize for!”

  “Well, then, I’m not sorry.”

  “You son of a—”

  “Hey, you leave her out of this.”

  “You’ve tasted human flesh.”

  Both boys stopped and looked at Nora, who had spoken. Her eyes were round, her cheeks pale. She was looking at Tom.

  Tom threw his arms down in frustration. “Yeah, I have,” he muttered.

  “Mine,” Coalhouse shot out.

  “And others.” Tom looked at him and lifted a finger. “You know what? You need to man up. You need to stop acting like a little girl—wah-wah, I was bitten, my life sucks so bad. All of our lives suck right now, okay? You might think yours is an extra special sparkly rainbow unicorn fart type of suck, but it’s not. Just get on with it! Throw that stupid useless eyeball away and get on with it!”

  And it was on. Coalhouse pressed forward. There’s something in our brains, with the Laz, that makes us prone to acting like posturing animals when interacting with our own. You see it a lot in the wild packs. “Then you admit that you’re a monster, huh? You show us all what you’d really like to do to us. To the girl!”

  Tom shoved Coalhouse’s shoulder. “Oh, come off of it. I haven’t hurt a fly since I’ve been here.” He looked at Nora, and she backed up farther, out of the reach of Chas’s arm, to bump against me. I put my hand on her shoulder.

  “It’s okay,” I told her.

  “He’s eaten people.” She sounded honestly scared.

  “Yeah, I have!” Coalhouse pushed Tom back, and Tom retaliated with a shoulder, sending Coalhouse sprawling to the ground. Tom’s lack of height gave him an advantage sometimes. He looked back at Nora then and took a few steps toward us. “And I’ll tell you what … to the things that made me this way? Those people tasted damned good.”

  Nora started to reach for her gun, and I put my arm fully around her. I lowered my head at Tom and let a bit of a snarl into my voice. “Back off.”

  He stopped mid-stride and put up his hands, submitting. His eyes were intensely focused on Nora, though, and I couldn’t tell what they contained. Anger? Regret? After a moment he looked back at Coalhouse, still on his hands and knees on the ground. “But the fact that I am a man, and not a little boy, means that I can accept it, and get over it, and not do it again.”

  Coalhouse chose that moment to go for Tom’s legs and drag him down into a kicking, scrabbling fight.

  “Stop it!” Chas shrieked, stomping her foot. “I will not have my boyfriend fighting if it’s not over me! Stop it!”

  “Let’s say it’s over you!” Tom grunted as he and Coalhouse wrestled with one another. “If he thinks he’s gonna finally get a girl, he might grow balls enough to beat me!”

  “Screw you, man!”

  Renfield came running from the direction of the tank. “What in blazes is going on?”

  I let go of Nora and marched over to the pair, kicking out at whichever I could reach. I didn’t want to hurt them, but they were already doing enough damage to their bodies, carrying on as they were. “Stop this, right now! You’re both acting like children!”

  A shot rang out and everyone ducked.

  As the bang faded, I turned my head. Nora’d let off a round, her shotgun pointed to the sky. Her hands were white where she gripped the gun. “Listen to Bram,” she said with unnatural calmness.

  I realized that I had to get her out of there. I was just about to stand and start the “let’s head back to base” speech when she added, “It’s Christmas Eve, guys. You can save your fight for Boxing Day, at least.”

  Wait. Her objection to the fight was that it was … Christmas Eve?

  All was still for a few moments, before Tom got to his feet. “Okay. Okay. Boxing Day, whatever that is, it’s on.” He stretched his arms over his head and swaggered a bit, as if everything was perfectly fine. “Not like we won’t be here.”

  “Sure,” Coalhouse said, a little uncertain. “Boxing Day.”

  “Can we go back now?” Nora asked, lowering the gun and looking at me beseechingly. I nodded, and climbed to my feet.

  The journey back to base was largely silent. Coalhouse and Tom drifted back behind the group, toward opposite ends of the horizon, as far from one another as possible. Nora, who’d been keeping her eye on Tom, looked more at ease the farther away he got.

  “Tom really isn’t a bad guy,” Chas said, noticing her wariness.

  “But he—”

  “That was a while ago. I mean, it’s a freaking miracle if you think about it … He did eat people, he was on his own for over a month. It’s amazing that he kept his sanity at all. I really admire him for that.”

  “Is that why you … date him?” Nora sounded a bit incredulous.

  Chas laughed. “Well, as far as only options go, he’s a pretty good one, yeah. He can be a misogynistic nitwit at times, but I don’t mind that so much. It’s just words. I don’t buy his bull.”

  “Only option? There’s a whole base of zombie guys here.”

  “Only so many my age. I never got the whole older man thing. And Coalhouse, well … he is immature. It’s not like he walks around with his blankie, but there’re little signs there that tell you that you don’t wanna get involved with him that way. Like this argument he has to have constantly … and he’s desperate for a girlfriend—desperation is never cute. And, well, he doesn’t take a healthy view of the whole thing. He survives well enough, but he doesn’t have a good attitude. It’s only gonna get worse as he nears his final death.”

  “What about Mr. Merriweather?”

  Renfield lifted his eyes from the ground long enough to deliver a dry, “No.”

  “Yeah, no way,” Chas agreed. “The only things that get Renny hot are chess, books, and machinery. Girls just don’t cut it.”

  “A literate girl who could play chess would.”

  “I told you, I just can’t figure out how it works,” Chas said to Ren. “I mean, you won’t even tell me what a rook is. I still say it’s some kinda animal, so I don’t get why it looks like a castle.”

  I felt Nora’s eyes on me and turned to look at her questioningly. She slid a fingernail over her lips. “And Bram?”

  Panic punched me in the chest. So far today she’d been willing to touch me, laugh with me, confide in me, and now she was wondering if Chas shouldn’t go out with me? Had I misread something somewhere?

  Chas shook her head and grinned. “Nah. Bram’s too busy waiting.”

  “Waiting?” Nora didn’t take her eyes from me. Maybe she wanted me to answer.

  “For the right girl,” I said curtly.

  “And he has very specific physical preferences,” Chas said. I grabbed her wrist and squeezed. She’d better not.

  She did. “For some reason, he is terribly attracted to black hair. Tom’s a leg man, himself … attached, unattached, doesn’t really matter. But Bram likes the hair.”

  With all the various methods of Chastity Disposal flying through my imagination—should I just shoot her, or should I open her skull and puree her brains with a motorized mixer, or perhaps set her on fire?—it took me a minute to notice t
hat Nora was giving me a very shy smile.

  I dropped Chas’s wrist. I almost dropped my machete.

  Nora looked away and moved a few steps in front of us, leaping into the grass to flatten it for herself as she went.

  “I win,” Chas whispered.

  “Smoke all you want,” I whispered back.

  I felt surprisingly light for the rest of the day. Normally, I felt heavy and lumbering whenever I moved. I felt like dead weight. But today was different.

  After we returned to base, Nora went off with Renfield to clean up her father’s quarters—and, I suspect, spend the remaining time yelling at anyone who refused to help her call out or order info in, Ren included. I truly admired that man.

  As for myself, I worked with the remaining troops in the western courtyard, discussing strategies and going over formations, in case we needed to head out into the wilderness and help look for Dr. Dearly. A few times I caught Wolfe standing on the edge of the group, watching me with cold, dark eyes. I stared right back at him, daring him to try something. I was doing what he wanted, even if I was growing to hate myself for it.

  An hour or so before dinner I went looking for Nora, blades on my back. I found her sitting on a bench in the med wing, dressed in the clothes Chas had picked out for her. She was holding the edge of the skirt down over her knees with her fingertips, and Renfield was staring carefully at the ceiling.

  When I got near, Nora looked at me and pouted. Coincidentally, I stumbled over my own feet at that exact moment. I finished the walk over, trying to play it off. “What’s wrong?”

  She continued to frown. “I got a demerit, professor.” There was a kind of naughty amusement in her eyes that I found myself really liking.

  I smiled slowly. “What did you do, Miss Dearly?”

  “She henpecked Elpinoy in a most spectacular fashion,” Renfield offered. “I think at one point she was actually hanging on his back.” Nora made a sound of annoyance. “Alas, I was looking at a computer screen with Dr. Samedi at the time, and thus I’m afraid that neither of us can vouch for this with certainty.”

  The laughter bubbled out of me before I could hold it back. “Were you?” I asked her.