by Jeff Hart
Finally, Amanda turned to me.
“Okay,” she said, sort of hesitant. “I’m going to ask you a question that’s gonna seem really weird, but you need to answer honestly.”
I shrugged, just happy we were talking again. And anyway, that’s what road trips are all about, right? Getting-to-know-you questions and profound spiritual experiences. I remember Adam DeCarlo—RIP—had loaned me a copy of this Jack Kerouac book when he was trying to convince me to take a road trip to some music festival with him. We’d even started planning everything, but then ended up just getting stoned in my basement instead.
“Is Sasha Tremens a zombie?” Amanda asked.
“Huh?”
Amanda was right; that was a weird question. Why would she ask about Sasha? My ex-girlfriend. We started going out junior year, but after the summer she decided to get a fresh start as a senior. We hardly talked anymore, but we’d always have that awkwardly fumbling first time on her stuffed animal–covered bed while her parents were away for the weekend.
“You hooked up with her, right?”
“How’d you know that?”
“It’s high school, dude. Everyone knows about everyone.”
I didn’t think that was true, but then maybe part of maintaining popular status was keeping tabs on the relationships of other kids.
“But why would you ask if she was a zombie?”
“Yeah, you’re right,” said Amanda, toying with her seat belt thoughtfully. “That was forever ago anyway, right? It couldn’t be Sasha.”
“What couldn’t be Sasha? You’re not making any sense.”
Amanda sighed. “Okay, so listen. Chazz and I were broken up. We broke up like a month ago.”
“I didn’t know,” I replied. It was kind of weird that I didn’t know. Unlike my dating status, a newly single Amanda Blake would’ve been front-page news in the school paper.
“Yeah,” continued Amanda, “it was sort of unofficial. Chazz didn’t really accept the breakup.”
“Wait, so you dumped him?”
“Yeah. Well, I tried to. Cindy said she saw him hooking up with some college skank at a party and I believed her, but Chazz denied it and, like, basically said he’d beat up anyone else I tried to date. You know, that possessive thing guys do.”
“Uh, no, I don’t know that move.”
Amanda ignored me. “Anyway, then Chazz stopped coming to school and I figured, whatever, good riddance. He called me a bunch and left these weird rambling voice mails, but I never really listened to them. I was just waiting for him to lose interest.”
“Your romantic life is seriously fascinating to me,” I said.
“Shut up,” she countered, not missing a beat. “He finally showed up at school yesterday—remember, when you interrupted us with all your lame jokes?”
“That’s not exactly how I remember it.”
“So, at the time, I figured it was just, like, desperate guy-talk because he didn’t want to break up. All this bullshit about being soul mates and blah blah blah. But he said one thing that seriously grossed me out at the time and now has, like, some heavy context to it.”
“Please tell me he quoted you poetry.”
“No,” she answered. “He told me I was the only girl in school he didn’t want to eat.”
I laughed. “Is that a pickup line?”
“It is if you’re a zombie.”
I blinked.
“Wait. What?”
“The reason for that huge relationship over-share is that I have a theory,” Amanda continued patiently, “but it relies on you having gotten some action since Sasha. So, spill it, Jacob Albert.”
“Uh, hypothetically,” I stammered, feeling my face start to flush like it always did when the sex talk started up, smooth operator that I am, “let’s say I have. What does that prove?”
“Well, yesterday you pointed out that when we bite people, they don’t turn into other zombies like in the movies. Which makes sense because nobody bit me either. But I’ve done, um, other stuff. With my sort-of ex-boyfriend who probably ate his parents. So, Jake . . . how do you think we caught zombie?”
“Oh,” I said, Amanda’s theory finally clicking. “Oh gross.”
“Yeah. Way worse than anything they told us about in health class.”
“So you’ve got like herpes of the undead?”
“You do too, buddy. Which is why I asked about Sasha. Because I know we didn’t hook up, and I seriously doubt you hooked up with Chazz.”
“It wasn’t Sasha.”
“Oh. Who was it then?”
Janine. That night in Princeton, which at the time had seemed like my rite of passage into the world of getting down with hot bohemian college chicks. Now it turns out that was, like, the biggest mistake of my life.
“You wouldn’t know her,” I said. “She’s from out of town.”
Amanda laughed. “First time I’ve ever believed that line.”
We eventually dropped the whole undead sex topic and fell into a mellow silence, just listening to the radio. Still, all those revelations about Chazz and Amanda, their relationship . . . Not to mention, her being single totally changed the dynamic of this road trip. I just had to ask.
“What did you see in Chazz Slade anyway?” I blurted.
Amanda tilted her head at me, half smiling. I could tell she was trying to figure out how honestly to answer me.
“Well,” she said, “have you seen his abs?”
Oh yeah, I’d seen them. Chazz made sure everyone saw them. He’d strut around in the locker room after gym class daring people to break their hands on his six-pack. I shook my head.
“That’s it? Seriously?”
I sounded more disappointed than I’d meant to. Amanda sighed and shook her head.
“No, Jake, that’s not it.” She paused, thinking. “I don’t know. You won’t get this, but it’s like it was expected. He was good-looking, and cool, and could buy beer—I sort of had to date him, you know?”
“You’re right,” I said. “I don’t get it. You really wanted to lock up prom queen, huh?”
Amanda shrugged. “I’m not saying it didn’t get old sometimes, but high school doesn’t last forever. Might as well make the most of it.”
“Yeah, getting cheated on and catching a top-secret zombie plague is really living life to its fullest.”
Amanda crossed her arms and leaned back, the better to study me. I glanced over at her—she was smiling coolly, pulling a version of those c’mere eyes she’d shown me before.
“Why, Jake, are you sniffing around because I’m stuck in a car with you and you just realized I’m on the rebound? Free advice—talking shit about a girl’s ex is not a good way to woo her.”
“I’m not, uh, wooing . . .” I stammered, then reached forward and turned up the radio. “Oh man, love this song.”
I’d never even heard it before.
The sun was setting when my stomach started to quake. We hadn’t even crossed all the way through Pennsylvania. Amanda looked over at me, concerned.
“That can’t be good.”
A few miles later, I lay down in the backseat, and Amanda took over driving. It was a matter of necessity; the people in the other cars had started to look seriously appetizing and unbidden thoughts of ramming those other cars, breaking them open, and sucking out their delicious human filling flooded my mind.
“I’m going to need to eat,” I told her, covering my eyes with my forearm.
“We need to figure that out,” she said. “I mean, we can’t just go around killing people. Right?”
“Right,” I agreed, and my stomach did a loop as if to tell me that I didn’t have much choice in the matter. “I don’t know if I can help it.”
“Maybe—I don’t know—take some deep breaths. Fight it off.”
That sounded stupid but I tried it anyway. While the car sped along, I focused on breathing slow. In, then out. In, then out. I focused on my heartbeat. It was chugging along way too slow, just
like yesterday at the mortician’s, right before I lost control.
Keep beating, you bloody little thing, keep beating.
“Aw shit,” I mumbled, because it was suddenly really hard to talk.
Amanda looked into the backseat, her eyes widening. Her face was starting to get a little pale too, her own hunger not far off.
“Oh gross,” she said.
“Shut up,” I groaned, looking at my hands. They’d turned gray, the veins beneath my suddenly paper-thin skin sludgy and thick. I shook my hands, trying to work feeling back into them, to get the circulation flowing. The fingernail on my index finger came loose and flew right off my hand midshake and into Amanda’s hair. She made a disgusted face and gingerly flicked it out.
Amanda pulled off into the nearest exit. It was dark, hardly any streetlights. We were in some rural part of western Pennsylvania.
“Talk to me, Jake,” said Amanda.
“This sucks,” I replied, my words slurring.
Amanda pulled into a gas station, the only lit building in sight. There weren’t any other cars there. She turned around and gave me a stern look, like she was explaining something to a bad dog.
“I’m going to check it out,” she said. “You stay here.”
“Check it out for what?”
“I don’t know,” she said, sounding panicked. “Maybe they sell raw hamburger?”
“You think that will work?” I exclaimed.
She didn’t answer. I heard her own stomach growl as she got out of the car and jogged toward the gas station, and as soon as she was gone, I forgot what she’d told me. Couldn’t hold on to the thought. It wasn’t about eating, so it didn’t matter. The world around me was going red again.
I’m pretty sure that’s when my heart stopped.
I sat up and tried to open the door but she’d locked it and though I fumbled with the power locks I suddenly couldn’t figure out how they were supposed to work. So I just slammed my head through the window. I spit out a piece of glass along with a rotten brown tooth, climbed through the window, and moved toward the gas station.
I made a real effort to keep my arms at my sides, not wanting to alarm anyone by doing the grasping zombie-arm thing. I was more conscious this time than back at school. More aware. But I really wanted to charge, to dive through the gas station window and bite the kid I could see checking out Amanda from behind the cash register. Even though my limbs felt cold in the places where I could feel them at all, I felt like I could run, could hunt, could kill.
Everything went red.
Next thing I remember, Amanda had her arms around my waist and was dragging me back toward the car. She was surprisingly strong.
“No, Jake,” she was saying. “No. He’s just a kid.”
I screamed. Or howled. Dark phlegm spilled down my chin.
So hungry.
I broke Amanda’s grip easily enough and sent her falling to the pavement. The gas station attendant came outside then—probably trying to play knight in shining armor. When he got a look at me, though, he ran back inside.
I sprinted after him. I could smell him. It was delicious.
And that’s when the headlights washed over me, and the Prius with the devil-horns hood ornament ran me over.
CASS
I WOKE UP FEELING LIKE MY BRAIN HAD GAINED FIVE pounds overnight. Not five pounds of intelligence . . . It felt as if my brain had literally swollen up to the point where my skull was no longer big enough to contain it. A few months ago, Tom had shown me part of this nutso ’80s sci-fi movie called Scanners without thinking about the fact that the sight of telepaths exploding one another’s heads with watermelon-style special effects was maybe not the most comforting viewing material for a teenage telepath. He’d turned it off after he’d come to his senses, but I’d seen enough of it to know that, right now, I felt like the Scanners probably felt right before, you know, splat.
Tom was standing in the middle of our dingy New Jersey motel room, ironing a pair of pleated gray slacks. I’d gotten used to waking up in places like this; our tracking missions sometimes kept us away from Washington for a few days, and the government wasn’t exactly known for splurging on four-star hotels.
Tom was keeping an eye on me. When I leaned up on my elbows and groaned, he grinned in relief.
“There you are,” he said. “Did you have a nice nap?”
I tried to reply, but a weak ugh was all I could manage. My mouth tasted like it’d been dusted with sock-flavored flour. Tom nodded to the bedside table, and I greedily grabbed the bottle of OJ and bag of donuts he’d picked up for me. My head immediately cleared when I started to eat—ah, vitamin C and whatever magical ingredients create strawberry jelly filling.
“So, I don’t want to alarm you,” began Tom, “but you’ve been asleep for sixteen hours.”
“Jeez,” I replied. “How much of that time did you spend ironing?”
Tom guiltily looked down at his aggressively flattened pair of pants. “About four hours.”
I’ve never been a late sleeper, even back when the government wasn’t making my schedule. In fact, the summer when my big sister, Carrie, came home from college a victim of the “freshman fifteen,” she made me promise to wake her up every day and force her to go running. I didn’t even need to set an alarm; I woke every day an hour after sunrise and dragged Carrie down to the track behind the school. So it was kind of worrisome that I’d been passed out for more than half a day.
“What happened?” I asked Tom. “Am I okay?”
“They said you knocked that zombie out with your mind,” Tom answered. “What’s okay after that?”
“I don’t know what I did, really.”
“Well, whatever it was, you probably saved Harlene’s life. You deserved a good sleep.” He said it casually, but I could tell Tom was a little freaked out too. Whether by my Sleeping Beauty routine or by my telepathic knockout punch, I couldn’t tell.
“I screwed up,” I replied quietly, studying my half-eaten donut. “I read that scene and only saw two zombies, not three.”
Tom shook his head. “Slade didn’t change at the school with the other two. We sent a team to his house last night. Found his parents eaten along with a bunch of dogs from the neighborhood. The prevailing theory is that he necrotized weeks back and had been hiding out.”
I thought of the big map in Washington with its little red lights for zombie incidents. There hadn’t been any other blinking alerts in the area. “How is that possible?”
“If nothing gets reported, I guess it’s possible for a zombie to slip through the cracks,” answered Tom.
I’d never thought of the NCD as anything but this infallible zombie-hunting agency. If a guy like Chazz Slade could go unnoticed, though, I wondered how many other zombies could be out there undetected. The thought made me shudder.
Tom set his ironing aside and sat down next to me on the edge of the bed. “How are you feeling?” he asked. When I sat up to answer him, I noticed a rust-colored stain on my pillow. I picked at it curiously with my thumbnail.
“Your nose bled a little during the night,” he explained.
“Again? I never get nosebleeds.”
He shrugged. “I wouldn’t worry about it, Psychic Friend.”
My head felt a million times better after a hot shower. Before I’d even finished getting dressed, there was a knock on the motel room door. I padded out of the steamy bathroom in my jellies—I thought they were dorky, but Tom insisted I never let my bare feet touch the floor of a rented bathroom—to find Jamison waiting in the doorway. Tom was giving him a dirty look, yesterday’s bad judgment still not forgiven, but Jamison wasn’t paying him any attention.
“Boss wants to see you,” Jamison said to me.
“Harlene?” I asked, glad to hear she was up and giving orders. “How’s she doing?”
Jamison shook his head. “The other boss.”
At first, I didn’t know who he meant. Then, I remembered last night’s weirdly con
venient appearance of the man from Washington.
“Mr. Bow Tie?”
Now Jamison and Tom exchanged a look, their animosity momentarily forgotten.
“I wouldn’t call him that,” muttered Jamison.
“His name is Alastaire,” Tom offered helpfully.
“Is that his first name or last name?”
“You know,” said Tom, “I’m not really sure.”
“Just stick with ‘sir,’” said Jamison.
It was cold and dark, the sky spitting sporadic bursts of rain. I pulled a thick wool hat on over my wet hair, shivering. I suddenly really wanted to get out of New Jersey. The barracks in Washington where Tom and I lived in between missions may have had terrible food and a seriously limited DVD collection, but right now they seemed like the coziest place in the world.
Tom and I crossed the motel parking lot to where Alastaire was waiting, leaning against the side of a black sedan, furiously typing on his phone. A blank-faced, burly G-man in a drab gray suit was standing next to him, holding an umbrella so not a drop of rain dampened his bow tie. As we approached, Alastaire slipped his phone into one of those lame leather hip holsters.
“Ah, there you are,” he said.
“Good evening, sir,” I replied, sticking to the governmental tone Tom and Jamison recommended.
The guy in the gray suit promptly folded up the umbrella and opened the back door of the car.
“Shall we go for a ride?” Alastaire asked.
I climbed into the car, trying not to show how nervous I felt being around this guy. Tom tried to climb into the car behind me, but Alastaire put a hand gently on his shoulder.
“We’ll be okay without you, Thomas,” he said.
“But I’m her guardian,” replied Tom meekly.
“I know that,” said Alastaire, and his patient smile was a tight thing that seemed almost painful for him to use. “I hired you. Don’t worry, I’ll bring her back safe.”