by Jeff Hart
Oh shit. Are my hands turning blue? No . . . gray. Weird. Why is Adam yelling? What’s his problem? Oh shit, Adam looks so tasty.
Hungry.
Eat.
When I came back to my own mind, Harlene had joined Tom, and Jamison stood a few feet off, watching the containment team as they started zipping kids into body bags. He was in his special battle armor that covered him from chin to toe in lightweight plates of superdurable metal and pierce-resistant fiber. He was scowling as usual, probably disappointed he didn’t get a chance to use the shotgun slung over his shoulder. Even for a guy that ordinarily communicates in grunts, Jamison was being especially quiet.
Harlene and Tom stood over me, watching me expectantly.
“Hey, Sweet Pea. What’d ya see?” Harlene asked in her sugary drawl. Like Jamison, she was dressed for a fight: a handgun hanging from one hip and a sheathed machete from the other. She’s probably the world’s only former Miss Georgia Peach with flawless marksmanship and a penchant for really big knives.
Still, even though Harlene’s been a trained government killer for almost twenty years, some habits die hard. She may spend her life lopping the heads off zombies, but she never goes into battle without a full face of makeup.
Sometimes right after I have a flash like that I’m a little disoriented; I have trouble picking out the important details from the stupid ones. So as I recall what I’ve just seen I spend a lot of time telling them about The House of Mirth and some missing golden retriever. My team listened patiently as I muddled through; we’ve worked together long enough that they all know this is how it goes.
When I was done, Harlene’s eyes were cold and resolute. “Two of ’em!” she said. “Let’s hope they stick together, make things easy-peasy. Okay, baby girl. Find me the bastard.”
Clutching the book, I started to reach out with my mind, across New Jersey, past the strip malls and the power lines and the landfills, through the messy web of highways and into the grid of the suburbs. I skimmed over the echoes of thoughts I heard, floating past half-frosted windows of lives I could peek into if I wanted to. But I didn’t.
There was only one person I was looking for.
And I would find him.
JAKE
“JAKE! C’MON, MAN!” I WAS LYING ON THE GROUND, and Amanda Blake was shaking me.
The first real thought I had was, Dude, Amanda Blake knows your name.
The second thought I had was, What the hell is going on?
I didn’t know where we were or how we’d gotten there. I didn’t know why I was with Amanda Blake either, although for some weird reason, I wasn’t really surprised by it.
I sat up on my elbows and looked around. Amanda and I were in a parking lot somewhere.
The sun was bright, the sky that rippling, swimming-pool color, and we were surrounded on all sides by barbed wire and chain-link fence. The view in every direction was blocked by warehouses and crappy, low-slung industrial buildings. Little brown weeds were poking up through the cracks in the concrete.
Amanda was standing over me, glancing nervously over her shoulder every few seconds. “Listen,” she said. “We have to get the hell out of here. Now.”
I stood too. “Um,” I said. I felt weird talking to her like we were friends or whatever. My head was pounding. “Where are we? How did we get here?”
She looked at me impatiently. “Think,” she said.
I thought. Then I thought some more. I rubbed my tongue over my teeth and found they still had that satisfying Hawaiian Punch stickiness to them. I shrugged.
“I dunno. What?” I asked. Just as the words were out, I let loose a huge belch. Gross. What was that taste? My stomach had really been acting up today.
Then I remembered.
I mean, sort of remembered. It was like remembering a dream, or remembering a movie your parents let you stay up late to watch when you were really little but you kept falling asleep.
Still. Even sort of remembering was bad enough.
“Holy shit,” I said.
Amanda didn’t say anything. She just nodded, like, Uh, yeah.
I sat back down, and put my head in my hands. “Holy shit,” I said again. “Did that really happen?”
“Well, if you remember it and I remember it . . .” Amanda said.
“Okay, so wait. Is what you’re remembering something that has to do with us turning into monsters and eating all of our friends?” I asked. I was rubbing my forehead, squinting to keep the sun out of my eyes. I felt a little faint.
“Bingo,” Amanda said.
My heart sank. “What the fuck is going on?”
“A better question,” Amanda said, “is whether we really want to know.”
I looked at her like she was nuts. “Of course we want to know,” I said. “Something truly fucked up just happened here. I want some answers.”
Amanda sighed and looked down at her red tank top. I had a vague recollection that it had been white when I’d seen her earlier. “Ugh, I’ll never get this blood out,” she mumbled to herself.
“Boo-hoo,” I said. “Maybe you still have the receipt somewhere. Forget that! What do you think happened?”
She opened her mouth to speak, but hesitated. “You’re going to think I’m crazy.”
I stared at her. “Amanda. We’re in a strange parking lot covered in blood. I’m pretty sure any explanation has to be crazy.”
Amanda tossed her hair and looked me right in the eye. “Fine,” she said, all matter-of-fact, “I think we’re zombies.”
She stared at me, waiting for me to respond. I stared at her, waiting for the punch line.
“Okay,” I finally said when it was obvious that there wasn’t going to be a punch line. “You’re insane. I don’t know what the hell is going on here, but you’re crazy and I’m going back to school to figure out what happened.” I stood up again and began to dust myself off.
“Just listen,” Amanda said. “It seems crazy to me too, but then again, here we are, covered in blood, with weird bits of food in our teeth. And I don’t know about you, but I always brush after lunch.” For the first time, I looked down at my own shirt. Like Amanda’s, it was so soaked with blood that you couldn’t tell what color it had been originally.
“Yeah, well . . .” I said.
“Look,” Amanda said, “my older brother talks about creepy stuff like this all the time. . . .”
“Is your brother really into Resident Evil?” I asked.
“No,” she said. “I don’t know what that is. What he is really into is conspiracy theories and this crazy radio show called Coast-to-Coast AM.”
“Is that like Rush Limbaugh?”
“It’s like Rush Limbaugh if Rush Limbaugh believed in UFOs and the Illuminati and that the United States was secretly being overrun by an out-of-control zombie menace.”
“Um,” I said, “Rush Limbaugh might believe those things.”
Amanda rolled her eyes. “The point is, my brother’s been saying for at least a year that zombies are real and the government’s covering them up. He’s convinced that the reason Aunt Ellie in Colorado Springs stopped sending us birthday checks is because she’s one too. Well, either a zombie or eaten by zombies; he can never make up his mind which it is.”
“Uh,” I said. “Okay? So you’re crazy and your brother’s crazy. I don’t see what that proves, except that insanity runs in families.”
Amanda shrugged. “Do you have any better theories?” she asked. I tapped my chin and gave it some actual thought.
“Vampires?” I ventured.
Amanda pointed up at the midday sun. “We’re not bursting into flames, dummy. Or glittering.”
“But look,” I countered, deciding I would humor her for now. “Zombies aren’t real. Vampires, maybe—zombies, no. Even if there was such a thing as zombies, we aren’t them. I’ve watched a lot of zombie movies. A lot of zombie movies. Sure, zombies eat people, but they also turn other people into zombies. And there are always, like, tho
usands of them. I don’t totally remember what happened, but there were just two of us today. And do we look like zombies to you? Zombies walk around with their arms all—” I stretched my arms out in front of me and made a zombie face, then dropped them again and relaxed.
“See?” I said. “Not zombies!”
But then I looked at my arms again and shuddered, suddenly picturing them gray and rotting. And was that blood caked under my fingernails?
Amanda and I just looked at each other. We didn’t say anything. Then something occurred to me. I slapped my forehead.
“Fuck! My House of Mirth presentation! That’s twenty-five percent of my grade! It would be one thing if I got an F, but a zero?”
Amanda groaned like, You’ve got to be kidding me, which I guess is understandable. Let’s just say I was having a hard time wrapping my head around all this shit.
“I wouldn’t worry too much about your high school transcript at this point,” she said. “I think both of our chances of getting into Harvard just went out the window.”
“Maybe if I did a couple years at community college first . . .”
“More like a couple years in prison. Or life in prison. Or worse.”
I stared at her, mouth hanging open stupidly.
“Jake, we just killed, like, a ton of people. What do you think—that they’re going to send you to juvie for that, like that creepy kid Frank who set the janitor’s closet on fire?”
“Technically, I don’t think what we did was our fault,” I said weakly.
“Yeah, that’s a good one. Maybe your parents can find a lawyer who specializes in the zombie defense. But I’m getting the fuck out of here. And I think you should come.” She held her hand out for me. I didn’t take it.
I pictured my mom crying in the front row of a courtroom while I stood before a judge wearing one of those scary powdered wigs—because apparently my court fantasies take place in England—banging his gavel and declaring me guilty of, like, eighty counts of cannibalism.
Amanda walked over to the gate at the edge of the parking lot. She rattled it, forced it open, and peeked out. “Come on,” she said. “Coast is clear. Seriously, we have to keep moving.” She turned, put her hand on her hip, and waited for me to follow her.
At that moment, I realized that I had never really looked at Amanda Blake before. Okay, obviously I had looked at her—whenever I possibly could—but the thing about her is you never got the chance to look too closely. You checked her out from the corner of your eye in class, and you glanced at her in profile when she walked down the hall, but you never really got a good look at her.
But now it was just me and her and I didn’t have a choice except to really see her, and fuck, was she beautiful. Even covered in blood she was more beautiful than I’d ever even realized.
The sun was shining on her hair; her eyes were sparkling. Her makeup had mostly come off—other than a little bit of smeared eye-whatever—and she was biting on her lower lip nervously as she waited for me. She looked like something out of some painting, like one of those ones by one of those artists. Whatever, I’m not an art guy.
“Jake!” Amanda snapped her fingers in a circle around her face. “Come. On!”
I didn’t really want to follow her. Or, I did want to follow her, but I didn’t want to leave this parking lot. I wanted us both to stay here. It seemed safe, and I still wasn’t feeling like myself. Would it be such a bad thing to rest here forever?
Tired of waiting for me, Amanda was already moving, though. So I jogged after her into the street.
The block outside the lot was desolate and abandoned, the kind of area that seems dead and colorless until you notice a little piece of electric-blue tape on a broken window or a moldy baby sock in a gutter. A faded red pickup truck sat a few feet away, its back wheels wedged on the curb. Uh, nice parking job, loser.
Then I looked down at my feet. There was a bloody corpse lying there, mangled and barely recognizable. Its ears were ripped off and this pinkish sludge was dripping from where they should have been. The weird part was that it wasn’t even gross to me. I mean, it was disturbing, but it didn’t make me want to puke or anything.
“Did we do this?” I asked.
Amanda glanced at the body, but her face didn’t register any emotion. She stepped right over it like it wasn’t even there, not saying anything. She was just going to pretend it didn’t exist.
I followed her lead. It was too much for me to handle anyway.
“So, maybe an obvious question, but how did we get here?” I asked. “I actually have no idea where we are. The last thing I remember we were in the cafeteria, and, you know. Everything went sort of fuzzy after that.”
“Yeah,” Amanda said. “For me too. I remember chasing someone across the football field. . . .”
A flash of memory came back to me. “It was Henry! Oh man, Henry . . .”
I could only remember bits and pieces of what happened that afternoon, like once I’d gone zombie—if that’s really what happened—my mind had just shut down. What parts I could remember, like chasing a screaming Henry across the football field, seemed like a really bad dream.
“I think we climbed up the hill behind the field and got onto the road behind the school,” said Amanda, her face scrunched up as she tried to remember. “Did we run here?”
I pointed down at the dead guy. “Did we chase this guy?”
Amanda looked at the body, finally acknowledging him. “Bad luck, I guess.”
In the distance, a siren wailed. Were they coming for us? Amanda and I both stopped talking, listening until the siren faded into the distance.
“Whatever happened,” said Amada, “we can’t hang around here. The cops’ll be looking for us. We need to go on the run.”
“The thing is I’m sort of tired,” I said. “We might’ve run from school when we were all undead and whatever, but I don’t know how far I can run now. I’m not exactly your boyfriend the genetic specimen here.”
“Pfft,” Amanda said. “We’re not going to actually run run. We’re going to drive. Duh.”
Drive. In a car. I felt a twinge of pain in my heart as I thought about my own car. No, fuck it—a pain in my soul. Would I ever see my beloved Honda Civic again?
“Drive in what?” I asked.
“In the car we’re going to steal.” Amanda seemed oddly pleased with herself at the suggestion.
She waltzed over to the red pickup truck—a Chevy Silverado, I noted from the insignia on the fender—pulled a bobby pin out of her hair, and jiggled it in the lock for all of thirty seconds before the door popped open.
“Ta-da,” she said. I was standing there dumbfounded, but Amanda had already slid into the driver’s seat like it was no big deal and was fiddling with something under the dashboard. The engine turned over and the car began to hum. “Bet you didn’t know I knew how to do that, huh?”
Uh, no.
“Well?” she said. “Come on!”
I hesitated for a second, but then I heard a distant thrumming sound. A helicopter. And it was getting louder.
Amanda heard it too: her eyes went right to the sky. “You drive,” she said, hopping over the gearshift into the passenger’s seat. “I hate driving stick.”
I’m not much of a stick man myself but there wasn’t time to argue. The whirring noise was pounding in my head and I could see the helicopter approaching as a speck in the distance. It was growing closer by the second. I jumped in the car, shifted into gear, and tore off, the engine balking.
“Where should I go?” I sputtered, suddenly panicking as I sped down the block, fumbling with the gearshift.
“I don’t know!” Amanda said. “Anywhere! Just make it fast.”
I still had no idea where I was, much less which way I should turn or where I should head. But there was no slowing down now.
So I floored it straight past the warehouses, slamming through stop signs. There were no cars on the streets anyway; whatever part of town we’d found
ourselves in was all but abandoned.
The chop-chop-chop sound was basically overhead now. I heard a screech of tires and glanced in the rearview mirror. A black SUV was bearing down on us. Shit! Where did that come from? I pumped the gas and shifted up. Were we seriously in a car chase? I looked over at Amanda and her face was expressionless. She was just staring straight ahead, gripping the side of her seat, white-knuckled.
The helicopter was screaming, and the SUV was gaining on us fast, way better suited to high-speed chases than this clunker Amanda had picked out. All its windows were tinted so I couldn’t see inside, but whoever was driving was real serious about running us down. If I let them catch us, I had a feeling what happened next would be a lot worse than red-faced judges in powdered wigs.
“Fuck, fuck, fuck!” I said, slamming on the brakes to bang a left down an alley.
Amanda turned to me.
Her face had gone pale. “Um,” she said. “I’m, like, kind of hungry.”
CASS
TOM SNAPPED HIS FINGERS IN MY FACE. “HEY. WHERE are you?”
The literal answer was that I was strapped into the backseat of our tricked-out NCD SUV as Jamison swore to himself and bore down on our targets. But that’s not what Tom wanted to know. He was really asking, Whose head are you in?
Tom knows me well enough by now to recognize when I’ve checked out of my body to take a spin around the astral plane.
Let me describe it this way: every mind has a unique sort of signature that I can pick up on. The thoughts can definitely be ugly, but the minds themselves have a homey glow. They’re beautiful and inviting. Even a letter-jacket douche that you’d swear would be completely brainless has a singular essence that calls out to me like a warm house after a day spent playing in the snow. Except once you’re inside sipping hot chocolate, it’s all boobs and beer pong.
It’s not like that with zombies, though. Imagine tearing that warm house down and replacing it with a kitten graveyard. Their minds are cold, empty places. They don’t have thoughts, just instincts, and usually only one of those: eat. It makes picking zombies out of the psychic crowd pretty easy, especially if I have a trail to follow.