“Look—” Dave started, but she was on a roll now. A big, fat, borderline hysterical roll.
“They’re going to come in here and they’re going to take us somewhere awful and we’re all going to end up in some death pit like in a Resident Evil movie and I don’t want to die wearing these ugly clothes,” she said, but then the wind seemed to go out of her sails and with a broken-up sigh she sank down onto one of the cots. “This isn’t safe and it isn’t okay. And-and I don’t want to just go to sleep and figure it will work itself out.”
“No, David is right,” I said softly as I came up to take his hand. I didn’t look at him, but gently squeezed. “There are no zombies here, and if they manage to get into the camp, then there are hundreds of people outside who are going to fight them for us whether they want to or not. The freaks might be the great unknown, but at least until tomorrow morning, they are safe.”
Nicole stared at us for a minute and then shook her head. But she didn’t argue anymore. She just flopped backward onto her cot and rolled over so that her back faced us. I guess the argument was over and the pouting (or maybe it was just soft crying) had begun.
Dave and I exchanged a quick look, then glanced at the two remaining cots in the big army-style tent. There was this weird unspoken communication thing that we had now, stronger than ever since the outbreak. Without any discussion we dragged the two empty beds to the other side of the tent and pushed them together.
Hey, if this was going to be our last night on this burned-out, zombie-infested earth, at least we were going to spoon. Or fork. Maybe.
After a minute to toe off boots and shrug out of sweaters, we lay down, facing each other in the gathering darkness of the tent.
“So you think she’s right. Is this it?” I asked softly. “Has the strange luck of Dave and Sarah finally run out?”
He stared at me for a moment and then smiled. “No way. We always manage to get our asses out of these situations, don’t we? I’m sure something awesomely sitcom-rific will happen in the morning and save us once again.”
I grinned but it fell pretty quickly. “But if it doesn’t… um, thanks for putting up with me during all this. Thanks for not running off with some Swedish secretary who would have been less trouble.”
He leaned forward and kissed me. “Silly girl,” he whispered. “I never knew any Swedish secretaries.”
I laughed even as I swatted him and we held each other as a fitful, less-than-restful sleep finally overtook our fears and sucked us ever closer to the great unknown of the next morning.
Savor your own good life. Or just life in general. Especially when the zombies are coming.
I woke up first. Well, technically that isn’t true, but I’ll get to that in a minute. Anyway, when I did wake up, Dave was still asleep. Light was starting to filter in through a gap in the tent flap and it hit his face. I reached out in the cool, morning air and gently touched my husband’s cheek. He was calm in sleep. Relaxed in a way I never saw anymore while we were running from zombies and cult leaders and hillbillies and a ton of other dangers.
And then I noticed his breathing. One breath in, two short breaths out. One in, two pants out. Over and over. My heart dropped into my rapidly flipping, sick stomach.
Why?
Well, I’d learned some things about zombies. Just a few weeks ago when we’d met the doctor who had nearly gotten us both killed and introduced us to the cure we now carried, we’d seen the drugs he’d developed. He could put a zombie to the closest thing to “sleep” you could hope for, which allowed you to get close and actually observe them (rather than run screaming into the night as you shot at them).
And zombies didn’t breathe in… just out.
Dave wasn’t quite there, but what he was doing as he lay there, totally unaware that I was staring at him, blinking at the tears that stung my eyes, was not normal. For the first time since we left Phoenix, I thought about all the weird things that had happened to my Dave since he was bitten:
The superstrength when he lifted weights. I mean, he’d gone from couch potato to superhulk… and it didn’t seem like he could have done that so quickly, at least not in a natural way. And I wasn’t suggesting he was doing steroids, either. I’d actually prefer that at this point. Juiced not living dead, thanks.
Then there was the lack of sleeping. Dave just didn’t seem to need as much sleep to function now, though when he crashed… well, he crashed hard. Like sleep of the, for lack of a better word, dead. Undead?
And now there was this weird breathing thing to add to the mix. I hadn’t noticed it when he was awake, but shit, how often do you sit there and listen to your loved ones breathe?
He had been hungrier lately, too, which meant we had to stop more for supplies, part of why we’d been moving so slowly through the Southwest. We’d gone through so many Power Bars and bags of beef jerky that I’d lost count. Those things weren’t brains, but still… it wasn’t like him.
But what was it like?
A zombie? No. I mean, he wasn’t trying to eat my brains. Or chase me across a field moaning or something. It was like something in the… middle, I guess. Not quite Couch Potato Dave, not quite Zombie Dave.
“No, no, no,” I whispered, and hearing my own voice snapped me from my fog.
I sat up. I was just being ridiculous, freaking out over something that meant nothing. Dave was Dave, Dave was fine, and getting all worked up over his breathing was just silly.
I slung my feet off the bed and grabbed my boots. As I started to put them on, I looked across the tent to see if Nicole was starting to stir yet.
And that was when I realized that our tabloid reporter friend was nowhere to be found.
“Shit,” I muttered and I reached back to shake Dave’s arm. “Babe?”
His answer was a very zombielike moan, and out of instinct I was on my feet in an instant and turned toward him, hands raised defensively.
“D-Dave,” I repeated while in my head I kept thinking, Please don’t be a zombie, please don’t be a zombie, please don’t be a—
“What?” he grumbled without opening his eyes.
I lowered my hands with a sigh of relief and shook my head. I had to stop freaking out. At least about him. There were plenty of other subjects I was perfectly free to freak out about. For example…
“Nicole is gone.”
He sat up, wide awake in an instant. “What?” he snapped as he flung himself off the cot and grabbed his own boots in one smooth motion.
I waved my hand toward her empty cot and then around the small tent. “Tada! The fabulous vanishing Nicole has performed her act once again.”
He glared at my lame attempt at humor as he tied his boots. “What the fuck? Do you think she made a run for it, or that they took her?”
I shrugged as I tugged my sweater over my head, then pulled my hair back into a loose, messy ponytail. “I have no idea. You’d think if they took her that we would have heard the noise of it, right? I can’t imagine Nicole being abducted quietly.”
“True,” Dave said with a frown. “But I can’t imagine her sneaking out without at least trying to get us free with her.”
I faced him with folded arms. “Oh really? You mean you believe the smutty tabloid television reporter wouldn’t double-cross someone to save her own ass? Well, of course she wouldn’t. I mean, she’s cute, she must be good, too.”
He glared at me. “Snotty jealousy later, Sarah. Plan now.”
I had a really good retort on my lips (okay, I was going to flip him off, which isn’t really a great retort), but before I could say anything (er, motion anything) and totally crush him with my rapier wit, the tent flap pulled back. Both of us tensed, ready for a fight, but instead of a guard or Lex or something awful, Nicole strolled in with a sunny smile. Like the fact that she’d apparently been hanging outside with our (evil? crazy? both? something?) captors was totally normal.
“Hey, I thought I heard you two talking in here!” she said. “Good morning.”
“Good morning?” I repeated blankly as I stared at her. She was wearing new clothes. Ratty jeans and a long-sleeved top that covered her scratches and cuts from her meeting with the road yesterday. “What the hell do you mean, good morning?”
She tilted her head at me. “Um, I mean I hope your morning is good?”
“Where were you?” Dave asked and for once he didn’t sound like he was ready to worship at our new friend’s altar. “And where did you get the new rags?”
She looked down with a laugh. “They are a little raggedy, aren’t they? Not exactly Prada. But beggars can’t be choosers, as my mom used to say.” Her brow furrowed for a minute. “I wonder if she’s okay…”
“Where did you get them?” Dave repeated. “And where have you been?”
She straightened up and all her sunny, happy morning routine disappeared.
“Shit man, just calm down. Look, I had to pee. I tried to wait, but nature is nature, so I stepped outside and the guard took me to do my business. I figured I might be able to get some info from him.”
“Yeah, right,” I snorted. “I’m sure he was totally forthcoming.”
She arched a brow. “One of the advantages of not being a married lady in the apocalypse, Sarah, is that I have a whole plethora of resources at my disposal that you probably wouldn’t even think to use. I used them.”
Dave and I exchanged a blank look and then I flinched as her meaning became clear. “Ew!”
“What?” Dave asked, suddenly all innocence. I almost felt sorry for him. If my hunch was right, and I totally knew it was, hello disillusionment!
I dropped my voice to a whisper, as if somehow that made what I was going to say better. “You mean you slept with him?”
Nicole wrinkled her nose in disgust. “No!”
“Oh, good,” I sighed.
“I did… something else,” she said with a shrug.
“Ew!!” Dave and I both squealed at the same time and I swear Dave actually turned a little green at the thought.
“Don’t ew me,” Nicole said with a wave of her hand that dismissed the entire reaction like we were the crazy ones. “It not only got me new threads, which I desperately needed, but it got me”—she reached behind her and pulled out the familiar bag she’d had before—“my camera back!! And all the footage is still intact.”
I staggered back a step. “Oh God. Please don’t tell me you filmed what you and the guard… did.”
“Ew!!!” Dave said, his face twisting with disgust.
“No!” Nicole shook her head like we were stupid. “I didn’t get the camera back until afterward. But I did find some shit out. Do you want to hear it, or are you nellies too offended by the way I got the info?”
I looked at Dave and he shrugged before he did a shudder from head to toe, like he had bugs on him or something. I couldn’t blame him. I mean… come on! Standards, Nicole!
“Yeah, we want to know,” I said, reluctant to take such ill-gotten gains. But we needed them, so there you go.
“Okay, so like Lex told us last night, the people here all lived in the same town. The zombie outbreak got here about five days after it started in Seattle. They battled it for a while, but we all know how that goes.”
“Never well,” Dave sighed.
Nicole nodded. “Eventually they burned the town to the ground themselves and headed out here to the plains. And ever since, it’s been fucking Tombstone. Like mob justice and shit. So they started the council about a month into their exile so that they’d be more ‘organized,’ but it’s still a vigilante throw down; they just call it the law.”
“Yeah, I think we figured all that out already,” Dave said with another shudder. I think he had been permanently maimed. “So not worth what you did for the info.”
“Okay, Judge-y McJudgerson, well then how about this,” Nicole said and she was starting to look annoyed that we weren’t more behind her tactics or her information. “Yesterday afternoon Lex and the council voted for one of us to be made an example. I guess it’s some kind of new tradition. But they also voted that the other two would be set free so that we’d spread the word that this ‘camp’ isn’t one to stop near or trade in. They do not want outsiders coming here; that’s for sure. They’re totally xenophobic.”
I blinked. I was trying to process all this, I really was, but there was a lot to think about. “An example?”
“Yeah, they’re going to do something called The Pit to one of us.” Nicole shrugged.
“The… Pit?” Dave repeated as his eyebrows elevated slightly. “And what is that?”
“I don’t know for sure,” Nicole said with a dark glare at us. “I was going to find out and then you two started making a bunch of noise and Ryan got all freaked out and made me go back inside.”
“Ryan?” I repeated.
“Well, yeah. The guard. He has a name,” Nicole said with a shrug. “He’s not so bad.”
“Keep telling yourself that,” Dave snorted. “So which one of us gets The Pit?”
“Dunno,” Nicole sighed. I stared at her and she glared back. “What? I can’t get all the info. You go out there and do something and see if you can do better.”
I swallowed at the idea. “Well, I guess it’s something anyway. Um, thanks?”
Nicole sat there for a minute and I saw just a hint of regret on her face. “No problem. You know, it’s just a part of Hollywood, so it’s not like I haven’t done… that before. How do you think I moved up from beat reporter to anchor on E.N.Z in just a few months?”
“Shit, man,” I said and I felt a weird urge to pat her or hug her or something.
But I didn’t.
What? I had no idea where she’d been. Actually, I did have an idea of where she’d been and I didn’t want any part of it. I have standards, and they were slightly different from hers, I guess.
“Don’t give me the pity look,” she snapped as she got up and slung her camera bag onto her back. It flopped against her spine, she did it so hard, and I wouldn’t be surprised if she’d have a bruise later. “I do what I do and I did what I did and I don’t feel bad about any of it. Got me?”
“Yeah,” I said, lifting my hands in the universal gesture of “Chill out, bitch,” “I got you.”
“Okay, okay, ladies,” Dave said as he slipped between the two of us like a referee of a fight about to start. He may have been right on that one. “So we know these freakazoids have a plan for us and that one of us is going to get chosen for this… punishment or whatever it is. Can we focus on that instead of who annoys who the most?”
“We can try,” Nicole muttered with as dark a look as I’m sure was on my own face.
But before we could really formulate some kind of serious plan to battle the great unknown that was The Pit, the tent flap pulled back again and three guards entered the area, guns lifted in a serious display of “Don’t fuck with us.”
“Hey, Ryan,” Nicole said in a little sing-songy voice that was meant to taunt. I guess she didn’t understand the message the guns were sending. Or she didn’t care.
I stared as the youngest of the three guards, a kid probably barely into his twenties, shrank back slightly with a deep, dark blush. One of the older guys snapped him a dark glare and then returned his attention to us.
“Okay, time to move out. Let’s go.”
Instead, Dave sank down on the cot and leaned back on his arms, relaxed as can be. It seemed like he wasn’t really clear on the “Don’t fuck with us” message, either. Seriously, were the two of them trying to get us all killed? Because we hadn’t taken a vote on that or anything and I wanted a say before some looney toon blew my brains across the side of the tent, thank you very much.
I was about to open my mouth and tell Dave to knock it the hell off, but before I could, I actually looked closer. I really saw the way he was laying and the look in his eyes. And in that moment, I realized what he was doing was all an act. The vein in his forehead was throbbing, after all, and that never meant go
od things as many a zombie, some crazy cult leaders, and an equally insane doctor had found out over the past few months.
“Where to, guys?” he asked. “Letting us head out with supplies in hand? Kind of you to be so neighborly.”
He said the last with a perfect mimicry of their Southern accents that had me smothering a smile into my hand. We might all get shot because of him, but at least he was entertaining, which went a long way in the Badlands.
“Just get up,” barked the guard who had spoken before. Neither of the other two had made even a peep, so clearly he was the mouthpiece of this brain trust.
But Dave stayed just where he was, pushing the boundaries and causing major headaches. He was really good at that. I should know; I’d been on the receiving end of a few of them in the past.
“Sure. Tell me where I’m going and I’m happy to come along.”
Without even a word of warning, the younger guard, Nicole’s friend Ryan, strode out in front of the others, swung the butt of his rifle, and smacked Dave right across the stomach with it. I gasped as I stepped forward, only to have one of the other men grab me by my arm and pull me back with enough force that I felt the strain in my shoulder.
Dave grunted and his arms came across his stomach. But damn, that blow seemed like it was pretty hard and he basically just looked annoyed. The kid who had struck him looked just as irritated that he hadn’t hurt Dave as much as he wanted to.
“Get up,” Nicole’s boyfriend said, his voice cracking like he was twelve rather than around twenty.
Slowly, Dave pushed himself from the cot and got to his feet. It was a menacing sort of unfolding of limbs. Also kind of hot, as was his low tone when he said, “I’m going to tag you back for that, kid. Count on it.”
At least Ryan had the sense to back the hell away from Dave’s purple-faced rage, but our other two escorts exchanged a look and then laughed like they knew something we didn’t. And I guess they did. After all, we had no idea what The Pit was or which one of us would be today’s happy participant.
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