by Jeff Hart
Harlene let loose with her net-chucker. It was like seeing a spiderweb slung through the air at incredible velocity. It reached Grace, flipped her over at an impossible angle, and pinned her on the ground. I could see a jagged edge of bone sticking out of her collar.
Still, she kept coming. Or trying to, at least. The net had to be almost fifty pounds; even firing the gun had nearly knocked Harlene down. Grace clawed her way across the ground, inch by inch, all gnashing teeth and zombie rage now, still trying to reach Jamison. I wondered if she even knew what had just happened. I was too afraid to try touching her mind.
Jamison walked over to her. Grace’s fingers squeezed through the netting, digging fruitlessly at the toe of his boot. She sputtered and gnashed, trying to bite his ankle through the netting.
For a moment, I thought Jamison might just shoot her, but then he turned away in disgust.
“Does this look like an asset to you?” he snarled at Harlene.
I decided not to watch anymore.
JAKE
WE STOPPED AT A TRUCK STOP PAST CLEVELAND. I went inside to pay for the gas and ended up grabbing some other essentials. I could have stolen them, I guess, but after our “shopping spree” at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, I felt like it might be a good idea to avoid attention for a while. We had enough money left from what Grace and Summer had given us, and I figured when we needed more we could always just rob a bank or something.
There were cheap CLEVELAND ROCKS hoodies for sale, thick white socks, and discounted tighty-whitey underwear. I’d never seen underwear for sale at a gas station before. I didn’t want to think about why it was necessary.
Back outside, a potbellied trucker that looked like he spent his cross-country journeys squishing moist towelettes into his swampy armpits stood a few feet from where Amanda was pumping gas, looking her up and down wolfishly, his thumbs hooked through his belt loops. He chomped on a hand-rolled cigarette.
“That offer’s only good if you’re eighteen,” the trucker was saying. I was sort of glad that I hadn’t heard what the offer was. Amanda ignored him as she hung up the gas nozzle, and he glanced over at me as I tossed my newly purchased wardrobe and some disinfectant wipes—to help clean off the rat guts, of course—into the backseat.
“This your faggy little boyfriend?” he asked Amanda. “That’s cool. He can hang out.”
I opened up the passenger door but didn’t get in.
“Are you smoking a cigarette at a gas station?” I asked the trucker.
“Living dangerous, son,” he said, winking at me.
“More than you know,” I told him, glancing over at Amanda. She was studying the trucker. I heard her stomach growl.
“God damn, girl.” The trucker grinned. “You hungry? I’ll fill ya up.”
“Does your wife know you pick up teenage girls at rest stops?” Amanda asked.
The trucker wiggled his thick fingers in the air, showing there was no ring. “You think a stallion like me could ever be tied down?”
Amanda nodded, as if that’s what she expected to hear, and got into the car. I followed, slamming the door on the last heartfelt propositions of the trucker. He wandered away, toward the store.
“I’d eat him,” announced Amanda.
“Really?” I asked, watching the trucker go. “He’s just a gross idiot.”
“Exactly. No one will miss him,” Amanda countered.
I picked up the road atlas. “We’ve got this if you’re hungry. We can go find one of Grace’s handpicked perverts. Maybe tide yourself over with a rat on the way.”
“I’m hungry now,” said Amanda, and I could tell by the way her lips had started to turn a grayish blue that it was coming on fast. “What if we go to one of those addresses and the guy has turned his life around, has a blind puppy he takes care of or something?”
“Then we’d pick someone else,” I said.
“What if I start to lose control?”
I thought back to the way Amanda had thrown herself at the old man that tried to help us back in New Jersey. Sure, the hunger was getting easier to control, but we didn’t know our own limitations yet. If we let ourselves get that hungry again, who knows who we might end up eating?
“We should just eat this guy,” she said. “He’s probably in the road atlas anyway for torturing hitchhikers.”
“Jeez, what did he say to you?”
“Nothing I haven’t heard before,” she replied. “He’s just super convenient.”
The trucker was convenient. A jerk that nobody would miss. I tried to think of a downside.
“What if he’s transporting valuable medical supplies and when he doesn’t show up a bunch of orphans die?”
Amanda glanced at the truck. “I think it’s beef jerky.”
The trucker emerged from the store then, but didn’t head back to his ride. He had a magazine tucked under his arm and was headed for the bathroom around the corner. A lot of disturbing things had probably happened in that dimly lit truck-stop toilet. What was one more, right?
“Look,” said Amanda gently, “we won’t do it if you don’t want to. It has to be unanimous. That’ll be our rule.”
“Okay.” I nodded, coming to a decision. “Let’s eat him.”
Amanda glanced into the backseat. “Bring the baby wipes.”
Afterward, with full stomachs, we stood back-to-back in the truck-stop bathroom and changed out of our bloody clothes. We did it in front of the sink where there was an island of clean floor—well, clean in that it wasn’t smeared with the trucker’s viscera. Most of what was left of him stayed in the handicapped stall where we’d found him, his dismembered hand still clutching the latest issue of Hustler. All class until the end, dude.
“We really need to stockpile some more freaking clothes,” said Amanda as she pulled the ugly pink Cleveland hoodie I’d bought over her head. I tried not to watch her reflection in the smudged mirror over the sink because that wouldn’t be at all gentlemanly, but, come on.
She caught my eyes in the mirror as she pushed her fingers through her hair, flipping it free of the sweatshirt’s hood. “What?”
“Nothing,” I said quickly. We’d just eaten a guy in what had to be America’s grossest gas-station bathroom. And yet, despite the less-than-ideal ambiance, I still found myself checking her out. Not one-track-mind-horndog checking out either (okay, maybe a little of that). This was like poetic-appreciation checking out, like thine beauty doth shine even whence thou cheweth yonder intestines. What was wrong with me?
“Come here,” she said, opening the tube of baby wipes. Amanda made me lift my chin and she wiped specks of blood off the underside of my jaw. “You did a really shitty job cleaning up.”
I looked over at the bloodstained sink and the pitiful bar of soap. “These, uh, amenities aren’t up to my usual standards.”
“Uh-huh,” she said, finishing up with my neck. “How am I?” She tilted her face back and forth so I could see all the angles.
“You’re good.”
“I feel like I’ve just been on the weirdest first date ever,” she said casually.
I made an exaggerated look around. “This is your idea of a date?”
“We did an activity. We had dinner. Kind of a date.” She thought about it. “Haven’t had a good one of those in a while, actually.”
“So it was good?” I asked, trying not to sound eager and failing miserably.
“Eh, not bad,” she said with heartbreaking nonchalance. “You were kind of a messy eater. And you didn’t even pay.” She patted her back pocket, where she’d stuck the trucker’s wallet after we’d eaten the rest of him. He’d been traveling with cash—there was five hundred bucks in there. Not a bad score, when you got right down to it.
“Yeah, well, you, uh, chew loud—” I stammered, waving my hands around because I didn’t know what the hell else to do with them. We were standing really close together.
“Good one,” she said. “Ready to go?”
“Sure,
” I replied.
But she didn’t move. And I didn’t move. We just stood there, looking at each other, and I’m pretty sure she was giving me a version of those c’mere eyes from the car, so screw it—trucker breath and all—I went for it.
I kissed Amanda. She kissed me back.
My first lame thought was: Oh man, the guys will never believe this happened.
But then I remembered I’d eaten all my friends, that I had no one to tell about this, and that just made me want to kiss her more. The kiss went from soft and tentative like every first kiss in recorded history to something else, like hungry and desperate, both her hands on the sides of my face, my arms reaching around her hips.
I suddenly felt hot. Not like a good make-out hot, but a weird sizzling sensation that started in my head and shot down through my body like an electric shock. I shuddered and jerked back, had time to utter a highly romantic “ugh,” and then barfed chunks of barely digested trucker down the front of Amanda’s new sweatshirt.
CASS
THAT NIGHT, WE STAYED IN A MOTEL OUTSIDE Cleveland. Nobody talked much on the way. We checked in. We went to bed.
I found myself lying awake, feeling weirdly alone even with Tom sleeping in a bed a few feet away. I reached across the astral plane, searching for Jake’s mind. It may have been a strange place to go looking for comfort, but I needed to escape. To be out of my own body for a while.
I jumped into his mind just as he was kissing Amanda Blake in a dingy bathroom.
Something welled up in me. The stress of the last few days, the horrible things I’d seen, and now this admittedly totally inappropriate feeling of jealousy because the zombie I’d been spying on was kissing someone else. It was like an involuntary spasm of the brain. A psychic shock wave of icky feelings rolled through me and into Jake.
I gasped and severed our connection, sitting up straight in bed. Ugh, what was I doing?
More important: Had I just made Jake puke?
“Cass?” whispered Tom from his bed after a few minutes. “Are you okay?” Sometimes I wondered if he was a little psychic too.
I took a few deep breaths, thinking about my answer. A thin trickle of blood wormed its way out of my nose and I wiped it away. Not again. I turned my head, trying to find Tom’s eyes in the darkness.
“I want to go home,” I told him.
JAKE
WHAT DO YOU SAY TO A GIRL AFTER YOU THROW UP while kissing her? That’s not an easy thing to come back from, even when the site of your make-out is a gas-station bathroom that could double as the winning image in a World’s Most Heinous Crime Scene photography contest. I’m pretty sure even a girl as confident as Amanda would interpret the smallest amount of kiss-induced barfing as a damning criticism of her technique.
And the shitty thing was, I’d totally been into that kiss. I didn’t know why I’d gotten sick. It was like a sudden surge of gut-bursting panic that was gone as quickly as it came on. Maybe there was some zombie rule that Grace and Summer hadn’t filled us in on; like wait thirty minutes after eating before engaging in any kissing.
“So,” I stammered as we drove across the Michigan border. “I’m really sorry about that.”
“It’s okay,” said Amanda, obviously not wanting to talk about it.
“That’s never happened to me before.”
“You don’t say.”
“It wasn’t, like, your fault,” I said, sounding unbelievably lame.
“Whew,” replied Amanda. “I was worried.”
“It was weird—”
“Yeah,” she interrupted. “Look, the whole thing was weird. We were just caught up in the moment, okay? Like, a last-two-people-on-Earth scenario. Let’s just forget about it.”
Well, that was a bummer of a way to look at our magical moment of ferocious post-cannibalism making out. I drummed my fingers on the steering wheel, mulling over a response.
“So, you wouldn’t want to try again? Like after I’ve digested?”
Amanda looked at me like I had just puked all over again and then, without a word, unbuckled her seat belt and crawled into the backseat to stretch out.
“I don’t know,” she said. “I’m tired. Let’s just not talk for a while.”
“Because I’d try it again,” I persisted. “It wasn’t a last- people-on-Earth thing for me.”
I looked at Amanda in the rearview mirror. She had one arm draped over her eyes and was chewing her lip nervously.
“It’s like we’re stuck on a zombie blind date,” said Amanda. “I mean, we’ve been together four days and it’s been pretty intense. How do we know it’s real feelings and not Stockholm syndrome or something?”
“For starters, because I didn’t kidnap you.”
“You know what I mean,” she said.
“Yeah,” I muttered. “Real feelings. Okay.”
“Look,” Amanda said. “It’s okay that you vommed on me. There’s still a lot about this zombie stuff that we don’t know. Maybe puking is part of the zombie-mating ritual.”
“Yeah,” I said uncertainly. “Maybe.”
“Jake. I just need some time to process. Okay?”
I nodded. Process. That didn’t sound so good. I felt like we were suddenly on one of those relationship-counseling shows where the dude is all incapable of understanding his emotions. But . . . I was “processing.” At least I thought I was. My mind was consumed by what it meant to be a zombie, who it was okay to eat, what the hell my life was going to be like now—and really digging Amanda Blake. That last part was the only thing that really made sense to me, the only feeling that seemed normal and good.
Maybe I should’ve told her all that. Then again, even if I thought Amanda sort of liked me, she’d still once gone for the macho Chazz type. That dude definitely wasn’t wasting his time being introspective about his emotional voyage. So maybe I shouldn’t either.
Ugh . . . feelings. Why couldn’t turning into a zombie have cured me of those?
Then again, maybe I didn’t want to be cured. Because just as I was swearing off human emotion forever, Amanda turned to me. “Look,” she said. “I like you, okay? Don’t make me get all sappy and gross on you. We’ve had more than enough grossness for today, don’t you think?”
We got into Ann Arbor late that night. It was definitely a college town, the kind of place where I would’ve hoped to find myself in the fall if things had gone differently—not just undeath, but, you know, my grades. Even this late, students cluttered the sidewalks, lurching home from bars. We drove past a house where a bunch of bros were playing a game of beer pong right in the front yard. Now that’s freedom, I thought, then reminded myself that I had nothing in my future but the open road. These suckers with their carefree school-night drinking and lack of parental supervision, they didn’t know shit about the real world.
“My brother’s house is on the next block,” said Amanda.
“Just one pass,” I said, and Amanda nodded, already peering out her window. We’d agreed it probably wouldn’t be smart to just knock on her brother’s door—those guys that had chased us back in New Jersey could be watching him. The plan was to swing by, check for his car or see if his light was on—get some sign that he was even still in Michigan—and then skedaddle.
Kyle lived in a house off campus with a bunch of “other nerds,” according to Amanda. I slowed down, cruising my way down the block trying not to look too conspicuous. Ho-hum, just another college kid looking for a parking spot after a tough night in the old lecture hall. Really, I was keeping an eye out for any ominous black SUVs or dudes reading newspapers while talking into spy earpieces. Roof snipers, the whole nine yards.
“He’s there,” said Amanda, pointing at a tall guy smoking a cigarette in the darkness of his front porch. “Yuck, smoking again.”
I shoved her hand down.
“No pointing,” I said. “They’re here too.”
At least, I assumed it was them. A pair of guys parked a few car-lengths down the street in a boring beig
e sedan, one of them reading a newspaper just like I’d imagined, the other tipping back a huge Styrofoam cup of coffee. Amanda and I both sat rigid until we were down the block. When the beige sedan didn’t pull out and start chasing us, we breathed a synchronized sigh of relief.
We drove through Ann Arbor, neither of us sure what the plan should be now. Amanda had gotten really quiet since catching a glimpse of Kyle, and stared out the window, watching the tree-lined Michigan streets glide by.
I cleared my throat. “So, I’m sorry that was a bust.”
“What do you mean?” she asked, looking at me.
“Well, we can’t exactly go see your brother now. They’re watching him. Those government dudes probably have his phone tapped, his email hacked. There’s some total Patriot Act shit going on, I bet.”
Amanda shook her head in denial. “We have to find a way to talk to him. He can help us, I know it.”
“Seriously? We met other real-life zombies, Amanda. And what did we learn? To stay calm and eat furry things. Do you really think your brother will know more than Grace and Summer did? Just because he listens to some radio show?”
Maybe all that came out a little harsher than I’d intended; it was late and I was feeling on edge. I steeled myself for a gust of icy boss-lady Amanda, but she just made a little snuffing sound and looked down at her lap.
“You’re right,” she said quietly. “The thing is, it’s more than me just thinking he can help us. It’s . . . If you had a chance to see your family, to set the record straight, wouldn’t you want to take it? Seeing him back there . . . I mean, what must he be thinking? I can’t stand it.”
I thought about that. Obviously, I missed my parents; I even missed dumb-ass Kelly, and I would’ve killed to see them . . . which I realize is maybe not a figure of speech I should use casually. It wasn’t the family part of what Amanda said that stuck in my head, though. It was the bit about setting the record straight.