Eat, Brains, Love

by Jeff Hart

  “I’m just glad you’re okay,” I said, careful of her arm as I squeezed her back. “You are okay, right?”

  “This?” said Harlene, raising her sling. “Pff, believe me I’ve had worse, baby doll.”

  I’m not really sure what could’ve been worse than a zombie bite, so I just smiled and nodded, letting Harlene do her fearless leader thing. It was nice to have her back. I hoped it meant Alastaire was on his way home to Washington.

  “And look at you, all gussied up,” she said, looking over the clothes Tom bought for me. “Your handler sure knows how to pick out a dress.”

  “I feel like I’m going to a funeral,” I replied, feeling a little uncomfortable.

  Harlene frowned at me. “Oh. Tom didn’t tell you?”

  It was standing room only in the town’s big mega-church for the RRHS dedicated Day of Prayer and Remembrance. Kids and their parents crowded into the pews, all of them dressed in black, a lot of them crying. A big screen at the front of the church displayed a montage of photographs, smiling high school kids blissfully unaware that one day they’d be zombie food. Morbid imagery, I know, but thinking like that helped me stay detached from all the grieving; I needed to treat this place like just another crime scene. The dead bodies I’d encountered I could deal with. The live ones, on the other hand . . .

  A lady from the PTA stood by the door handing out armbands in the red and gold RRHS school colors, each with a black 27, memorializing the final victim tally from Jake and Amanda’s rampage. I took an armband but didn’t put it on—it felt phony to do that. It was bad enough I was here spying on these people while they were mourning. I stood in the back with some other latecomers. No one noticed me.

  My mission was to take the town’s psychic temperature. As far as I knew, the NCD had never had to create a cover story this huge before, and I was here to make sure it had taken root. I opened up my mind and let the thoughts cluttering the room drift in, scanning for any stray memory of flesh-eating zombies.

  During NCD training, they told us that some telepaths have problems functioning in crowds, that they find the crush of other people’s thoughts overwhelming, but I’d never had that issue. Letting all those grieving minds into my own was rough, though. Sampling the sadness of, like, three hundred people all at once definitely isn’t something I’d recommend.

  There was Keith DeCarlo’s mind—father of the late Adam DeCarlo. He’d come alone, his wife unable to get out of bed. He’d known Jake since childhood and couldn’t believe the same boy they’d had over for hundreds of sleepovers would do something like this. He hated him for it.

  There was Eliza Brady’s mind. She’d been in the same clique as Amanda Blake but was sort of a hanger-on. Her lesser position at the lunch table had probably saved her life. She accepted that it had been a shooting: she remembered the blood and guts, but she couldn’t remember actually seeing Amanda shoot anyone. It had all happened so fast.

  It was like that in all the kids’ memories. There were fuzzy gaps that any good telepath would notice as psychic screwing around, but I doubted whatever grief counselor the school hired would be trained in the brainwashing arts. As for the parents, they hadn’t been there, so they believed the official story. No one was thinking about zombies. Most of them were totally focused on their grief.

  It was becoming overwhelming, that sadness, seeping in with every mind I scanned. I felt tears well up in my own eyes; my breath got short; my legs started to tremble.

  It was too much. I needed to get out of there. I staggered to the door, wiped my eyes on my sleeve, and burst out into the cold air. I could still feel echoes of sorrow bouncing off the walls of my brain even as I walked quickly away from the church, swearing to myself that I’d examine a thousand of the nastiest zombie crime scenes before I’d go back to a funeral like that again.

  The street was empty outside the church.

  And then I saw someone, a lone girl sitting astride a bicycle across the street. She watched the church apprehensively, a knit hat with a brim pulled down almost over her eyes. There was something familiar about her. Her mind radiated something different from the people’s inside the church—it was sadness, but also guilt and anger.

  Maybe I was still feeling all emotional after the buffet of human suffering I’d binged on in the church, or maybe part of my subconscious recognized this girl before I even realized it, but I found myself crossing the street to talk to her.

  She saw me coming and immediately hopped on her bike, starting to pedal away. I realized then who she was and, not really thinking that this was probably a major violation of NCD conduct, I waved and shouted her name.

  “Kelly!” I yelled at Jake’s sister, jogging after her. “Hey! Hold on!”

  Kelly stopped reluctantly, eyeing me. She looked nervous. I’d never considered what the whole school-shooter narrative might mean to Jake’s little sister. She definitely wouldn’t be a popular person in town.

  “Do I know you?” she asked.

  I answered without thinking. “I know your brother.”

  “My brother, the school shooter,” she spit, looking away.

  “Um, yeah.” I realized this was probably a really bad idea. What was I doing talking to Jake’s sister? I mean, I did kinda feel like I knew her brother, but that was literally all in my head.

  “Were you there Friday?” Kelly timidly asked. “During the whole . . .” she trailed off.

  “No.” I shook my head. “I was home, sick.”

  “Lucky you,” Kelly replied. “Look, I’m, uh, sorry, if my brother killed any of your friends or anything.”

  “It’s okay,” I replied, because apparently my immediate reaction in these situations is to say the dumbest thing possible. Kelly looked relieved, though. I wondered if she’d talked to anyone since the incident.

  “I just . . .” She hesitated. “This is gonna sound dumb, but he drove me to school that day. He didn’t have, like, a backpack full of guns or whatever. I mean, he was worried about some stupid presentation.”

  Ah, crap. A skeptic. Still, I figured I could just let this one go. It was natural that Kelly wouldn’t want to believe that her brother was a school shooter. And she was just a middle schooler—it’s not like anyone would listen or care if she started spouting off doubts. It wouldn’t be in violation of NCD protocol to let her go on thinking of her brother as not-a-murderer.

  “You knew him, right?” she continued. “He’s, like, a lazy idiot. What they’re saying he did doesn’t make any sense.”

  “It’s what happened, though,” I replied, the words sounding weak when I said them. This conversation was a huge mistake. I needed to bail.

  No sooner had I thought that than a black sedan rolled up to the curb next to us. The passenger window rolled down and Alastaire peered out at us. I had the sudden urge to steal Kelly’s bike and pedal away as fast as I could.

  “Brrr,” said Alastaire. “Sure is cold out. Would you girls like a ride?”

  Such a creep. I was about to turn him down, but then Kelly dropped her bike on the sidewalk and climbed robotically into Alastaire’s backseat. He’d done something to her—given her a psychic shove. Alastaire adjusted his stupid bow tie, watching me closely.

  “Coming?” he asked.

  JAKE

  “SO, WHAT DID YOU HAVE PLANNED THIS WEEKEND?” I asked Amanda.

  “Definitely not this,” she answered.

  We watched through the living room window as Grace tackled a short, hairy little man, driving her shoulder into his gut and pinning him to the ground. Right away she mounted him like one of those professional cage-fighters and just started punching the crap out of him. Outside of Roadblock teeing off on Amanda the other day, this was easily the worst beating I’d ever seen.

  Amanda looked away. I didn’t blame her, really—this was intense. Not zombie-feeding intense, but still.

  Apparently, it was all routine for our hosts.

  The hairy guy’s name was SkiChamp69. That was his scree
n name anyway, and that’s all Grace and Summer knew. They’d lured him here via some chat room. I didn’t really want to know the details, but they assured us that he deserved to get locked in the closet and served for dinner.

  Outside, Summer crossed the lawn and tapped Grace on the shoulder. She immediately stopped punching SkiChamp69, who looked knocked out. They each grabbed a wrist and started dragging him toward the house.

  A thought had occurred to me when I was burying last night’s dinner in the backyard, and it hit me again now: Is this what zombie life is going to be like?

  Yesterday, Amanda had gotten me all inspired to be a fugitive and fight the government or whatever the plan was. It was one thing when it was just the two of us, driving cross-country—hell, I would’ve been down for that experience prior to turning undead. Having Amanda around, even with her shitty taste in music, was pretty much the only good thing that’d happened to me since Friday. But now, watching Grace and Summer shove SkiChamp69 into the closet, it was like . . . maybe this was life now? Maybe the whole road-trip thing was a crappy idea, like we were in zombie denial or something, just trying to outrun our problems.

  I mean, it seemed like Grace and Summer had a good thing going here, in a way—a nice, low-key place to live, no government hit squads, food showing up on their doorstep.

  But was this it?

  “Thanks for your help out there,” Grace said to us as she slammed the closet padlock back into place.

  “It looked like you had it under control,” Amanda replied.

  “Yeah,” snorted Grace. “Well, eventually, you’ll have to start working for your food if you want to keep hanging out here.”

  She tossed me a set of car keys.

  “At least go see if he’s got anything useful in his car before we ditch it.”

  I saluted. “Yes, ma’am.”

  Amanda and I marched outside to SkiChamp69’s car. It felt like Mom sending the kids out to get the groceries, except in this case Mom was a bitter zombie that could probably moonlight as a bare-knuckle boxer. I could tell Amanda was starting to get tired of this whole scene, particularly of Grace. She was carrying herself like the regal ice queen all the time now, not showing any signs of the secret dorkiness I’d been digging that night at the mortician’s.

  “How long do you want to stick around here?” she asked as we started rifling through the fast-food wrappers and road maps in SkiChamp69’s car. There was a bottle of whiskey hidden in the glove compartment. I tossed it into the yard—maybe our hosts would want to raise a toast with tonight’s feast.

  “I don’t know,” I replied, shrugging. “What if this is, like, the best we can hope for?”

  “Seriously?” She sounded offended by the very idea. “Personally, I don’t want to spend my undeath re-creating Dateline specials.”

  “There’s free food here,” I countered.

  “For now. You heard Grace.” Amanda slid out of SkiChamp69’s backseat, disgustedly brushing her hands off on the backs of her jeans. “You think they’ll keep feeding us forever?”

  “Summer might,” I said, shrugging. “She’s a hippie. They’re nice like that.”

  “And Grace still looks at us like she might put an arrow in us at any time.”

  “Bolt.”

  “That’s what I’m suggesting.”

  “No, I mean, they’re called crossbow bolts. Not crossbow arrows.”

  “Who gives a shit, Jake?” Amanda sighed. “Stay on topic.”

  There wasn’t anything exciting in the car. I sat down on the trunk, looking out over the half-finished houses. Amanda sat next to me.

  “You still want to go to Michigan?” I asked.

  “Yeah,” she replied. “First there, and then I want to check out Iowa.”

  “What? They made it sound like a total shit-show,” I said, thinking back to the evasive way Grace and Summer had talked about the Midwest last night.

  “They mentioned a cure.”

  “Psshh—haven’t you seen any zombie movies? There’s never a freaking cure.” I waved back toward the house where Grace and Summer were waiting. “They even said it was bullshit.”

  Amanda looked unconvinced. “I’ll take bullshit over the alternative. Staying here in our little zombie commune of four, finding people to eat over email. You don’t think someone’s going to come looking for these guys? Like gross-ass pedophiles don’t have families? We’d be safer on the road.”

  She made some good points. But then, she always seemed to make good points. I would’ve put it down to just the hotness factor—like, I’m sure it was easy for girls like Amanda to win arguments and get their way—but I think I’d started to build up an immunity to her good looks. She really had done all the thinking so far. And meanwhile, all I could think about was how much I didn’t want to think about being a zombie.

  Amanda had it all figured out and maybe I was slowing her down. Like, if she’d ditched me back in Jersey she would’ve already unraveled a government conspiracy and turned Iowa into a zombie utopia. Or maybe cured the plague. I wouldn’t put it past her.

  It’s just . . . I didn’t share that can-do attitude. I wanted my basement, my bowl, my Xbox. I wanted normal.

  “You know what I had planned this weekend?” I asked her, totally changing the subject, thus avoiding any big zombie-plan decision. “Nothing. I was just going to hang out in my basement and do nothing. And I was so, so, so cool with that.”

  Amanda studied me for a second, trying to figure out where the hell my mind had gone. Then she shrugged and decided to play along.

  “I didn’t have any big plans.”

  “Seriously?” I asked, stunned. “No big party at Cindy St. Clair’s house?”

  “I was kinda off those parties since Chazz started being all stalkerish. I probably would’ve stayed in, worked on my college applications, hung out with my mom . . .” she trailed off, her voice a little shaky.

  “Wow,” I said. “I never knew popular girls were so boring.”

  Amanda elbowed me. “Says Mr. Cool over here, chilling in his basement. Were you just going to do that for the rest of your life?”

  “Huh,” I replied, actually thinking about it. “Yeah, I guess that sort of was my plan.”

  “Sad plan, Jacob Albert. Time for a new one.”

  “If it’s because of Grace, I promise she’s not always like this,” Summer said. “I think she feels a little threatened. It’s been just the two of us for a while. Well, the two of us and our houseguests.”

  I’d told Summer that Amanda and I planned to leave as we picked our way through the woods behind the housing development, looking for snacks. We took a zigzag route through the trees, stopping every twenty yards so Summer could bend down to check the snares and traps they’d set. So far, we hadn’t come across any squirming wildlife to add to their basement stockpile.

  “We don’t think staying in one place is a good idea for us, that’s all,” I replied. I’d only met Summer yesterday, but I still felt weirdly guilty telling her we were bailing. I guess bonds form quickly when you devour people together. Also, it felt comforting to know there were other zombies out there, making a go of it.

  “I never asked, how long have you guys been zombies?”

  “I don’t know about Grace,” answered Summer, examining an empty loop of rope and then burying it beneath a blanket of leaves. “She doesn’t like to talk about it. Nine months for me.”

  “That’s it? You guys have such a system, I figured it’d be longer.”

  “Nine months is long for our kind,” she replied. “You know, you guys aren’t the first other zombies we’ve met.”

  I didn’t want to ask what happened; I had a feeling that it involved men in black SUVs with heavy artillery. Summer’s mind was off someplace, though, not even paying me much attention as we wandered through the woods.

  “Grace and I were part of a couple larger groups that made it to Iowa about the same time. The place was crawling with ghouls so bad it’s al
l you could smell.”

  “Ghouls?”

  Summer shrugged. “My name for what happens when we don’t eat for too long. Just dead bodies walking around aimlessly, trying to bite anything warm. When you reach that point, I’m not even sure feeding will bring you back.”

  “Did you go to Iowa because of the whole cure thing?”

  “At that point—I don’t know—we were just going. Just to keep moving. The others talked about some doctor there, but it was just talk. Something to keep our spirits up. I guess even zombies need to believe in something.”

  “Oh,” I said, sounding disappointed.

  “If you’re thinking of going there—don’t,” Summer said, her eyes wide with fear as she remembered. “The government—I guess that’s what they were—they’d set up, like, a blockade and were shooting the ghouls from up there. When they saw us, realized what we were, they shot at us too. Killed everyone except Grace and me.”

  “That sucks,” I replied, and even though I totally meant it sincerely, it was the exact same half-ass condolence I gave Henry Robinson when his pet lizard crawled under the dryer and cooked itself. Heavy situations were sort of difficult for me.

  “Yeah,” said Summer, turning away. “But the group I was with, they’d feed on anyone. Like you with the gas station attendant. They weren’t the best crowd to be hanging around with, anyway.”

  “Right,” I said, guiltily kicking a tree branch.

  “Grace went a little over the top beating up that guy today,” continued Summer, “but he’s bad. He deserves to be eaten. We have to eat or our minds shut down, our instinct takes over, and then who knows how many people we hurt. Animals don’t always sate the hunger. But the way Grace and I go after humans, we figure we do the world a favor with every meal, and we keep ourselves in control.”

  I scratched my head, not totally sure how to respond to that outpouring of zombie philosophy. It was like Summer had been practicing that speech—maybe using it on herself a lot.