by Jeff Hart
Some government goon squad wanted to shoot at us, keep us a secret, and stalk our families, and we’re just supposed to take that?
“People should know about us,” I said, thinking out loud. “People should know about zombies. You’re right! They shouldn’t be allowed to just keep us secret.”
“Exactly.”
“He could get the word out,” I went on. “Tell all his conspiracy buddies to, like, sound the cover-up alarm.”
Amanda nodded. “Yup. It’d be like a dream come true for him. His big moment. Finally, I do something nice for my big brother.”
“Okay, so now we just need to get to him. That’s not going to be easy.”
Amanda looked over at me. She looked rejuvenated, excited even. We were doing something besides running. We were being proactive! I wished really hard some Rage Against The Machine would come on the radio.
“I have an idea,” she said.
Half an hour later we were huddled around a computer at an all-night internet café in downtown Ann Arbor. The bored dude at the counter barely looked up from his textbook as we paid for an hour of internet. Besides us, the only customers were two guys engrossed in a marathon session of World of Warcraft, and a college girl typing up a paper while randomly breaking into panicked sobs. Basically, no one in there was paying us any attention.
Amanda logged on to a message board called The Crop Circle. It was a whole online community for people who were into alien shit. There were different sub-forums for different kinds of aliens: Grays; Pod People; Lizard Invaders who were trying to take over the government.
Amanda’s username was UFOphelia.
“Uh, why are you a member of this?” I asked as she scanned the screen.
“I made this account to screw with Kyle,” Amanda admitted. “I pretended that I was an open-minded Swedish supermodel that was really into some of the theories he was posting about our extraterrestrial visitors.”
“That’s really mean,” I said. “Great joke, but totally mean.”
“Yeah, he wouldn’t talk to me for, like, a month,” said Amanda. “Anyway, if those government jerks are checking his phone and email, this is our best way to contact him. It’ll look like just a message from one of his weirdo conspiracy friends, but Kyle will know the truth.”
Amanda opened up a direct message to Kyle’s username, BelieverNJ. She typed in a one-line message: LUNCH TOMORROW IN STUDENT UNION? 2 P.M.
“Good?” she asked, mouse hovering over the SEND button.
“If by good you mean vague and ominous, then yes. Are we seriously going to the student union, though?”
“We want someplace public, right? I don’t think they’ll shoot us in public. That’d be bad for their whole secrecy thing.”
I thought about the guy with the shotgun that nearly killed us in New Jersey, even in front of a whole bunch of bystanders. I wasn’t so sure.
“Also,” continued Amanda, “we want someplace it’s normal for him to go so it doesn’t look suspicious. And we can come up with disguises.”
“Disguises,” I repeated. “Cool.”
Of course, the disguises I pictured only would’ve made us stand out more. Me in a badass trench coat with the collar flipped up, a steaming manhole cover behind me for added coolness, and Amanda dressed in formfitting black leather—because inconspicuous leather is a thing—like a blonde version of the Black Widow.
Amanda was watching my face. “Whatever disguises you’re thinking of, I veto.”
She hit SEND on the direct message. Part of me—the increasingly paranoid part—expected a helicopter to suddenly appear outside, bathing the street in a spotlight as government spooks surrounded the building. Of course, nothing actually happened. The only sound was the furious typing of the other night-owl net junkies.
Amanda started to stand up. “Ready?”
“Hold on,” I said, sliding over to take control of the mouse. “While we’re here, we might as well research.”
“This board is for alien lovers. Zombies aren’t aliens.”
I navigated over to the SEARCH button and typed in ZOMBIE, CURE, and IOWA.
“Worth a shot anyway,” I said, glancing over at Amanda. She nodded, but stifled a yawn. “Isn’t it all basically the same in the end?”
I resisted the urge to say “I told you so” when a post came up. It was dated three weeks ago from a user named Scully88. It read:
Keep hearing rumors that Iowa is completely closed down. No way in and no way out. Rumor is it’s because of a quarantine. I don’t want to throw around the z-word but . . . can you say zombie outbreak? I’m in Denver and am thinking of driving up. Anyone else made the trip? Is it a hoax? Or something boring like small pox?
The thread was closed after only one response. It came from a moderator with the user name LordDM00:
Rumors are true!
If you’re bold of spirit and hungry for a paradigm shift, we’ve got the cure for what ails you. Take the drive up!
—The Lord of Des Moines
PS: Here’s a fascinating message from one of our honored guests! ;-)
There was a video embedded at the bottom of the post. I looked over at Amanda. “Should we?”
“It’s probably just that Rick Roll guy,” she said skeptically, but gestured that I should play it.
I turned the volume way down on the computer. We both leaned in toward the speakers, our heads close together as I pressed PLAY.
The video wasn’t much to look at, grainy and shaky even for home-video standards. It took place in a dark room, maybe a basement, an eerie green glow lighting the shot from the edges. I couldn’t make out anything else about the room because pretty much the entire frame was filled with the craggy face of a silver-haired old man. He was probably in his late fifties and had that haunted look of a dude that’s seen some heavy stuff.
“This is the Grandfather,” the silver-haired oldster introduced himself, his voice hard to hear over the weird hydraulic sounds behind him, “and this may be my last transmission. I remain stranded in Des Moines with no possibility of escape. If this is truly the end, there are two things you must know: First, the undead of Iowa grow bold and restless. It won’t be long until they do something . . . unfortunate. Second, and more important, my work is finally completed. I have done what you said was impossible, Alastaire.
“I have cured the undead.”
At that point, the camera shook and an inhuman bellow sounded from off-screen. It was totally a noise I was unlucky enough to recognize. That was a zombie scream; the feral noise that signified dinnertime.
The video cut off there.
“Iowa,” I whispered, feeling an odd mixture of hope and fear.
“That kind of freaked me out,” said Amanda, eyes still locked on the screen.
“It makes sense, though,” I explained, suddenly inspired. “This is how it always goes in video games. All the NPCs keep telling you about a seriously scary screwed-up dungeon that no one’s ever come back from, and you just know the one item you need to complete your quest is going to be down there. So you finally go down into that dungeon—and boom—not only do you make it, you come out with, like, a glowing sword.”
Amanda slowly turned to me. “That has to be the nerdiest pep talk I’ve ever heard.”
We drove out of the wealthy college part of Ann Arbor and into the part where the motels weren’t in the habit of checking IDs.
The leering innkeeper at the All Nighter Lodge was surprised we wanted the room for the night and not just for a couple hours. I asked sarcastically about the continental breakfast, and he let loose a wheezing laugh that smelled like wood varnish. On our way in, we’d covered the pet carrier full of rats with an extra T-shirt to hide its contents, but I doubt our esteemed bellhop would’ve even raised an eyebrow if we hadn’t.
Our day ended in a room that probably had a stain-to-square-inch ratio of 1:5. It was about an hour until sunrise.
I went to hit the room’s light switch, but Aman
da slapped my hand away.
“Better not to know,” she said.
I went over to the bed and shoved my hands under the sheets, reaching around the bed carefully. Amanda watched me, an eyebrow raised.
“I saw this thing on the news,” I told her, “where this lady got stuck with a syringe when she got into a hotel bed. Freaked me out.”
“My zombie companion has OCD,” announced Amanda. “Great.”
When I was done inspecting the bed, the two of us stood on opposite sides, staring at each other. I was waiting for her to make the first move, but was it possible she was waiting to take her cue from me? It’d been a hellaciously long day, we were both way beyond worn out, and yet the awkwardness of us kept us from crashing. I didn’t want to just climb into bed and presume that’d be cool, and Amanda—well, she was probably nervously waiting for me to barf again.
Finally, I sighed, pulled a pillow and a blanket off the bed, and started to lie down on the floor.
“Are you nuts?” Amanda practically shouted. “You don’t know what’s down there. There’s probably herpes all over that floor!”
“So . . .” I nodded toward the bed. “We’re going to . . . ?”
“Sleep in the same bed, yeah,” she said, and resolutely climbed in, as if to demonstrate. Then her face softened. “Don’t make it weird, Jake.”
“Sorry,” I said. “I was just worried this might be too real for you.”
I climbed into bed next to her and we lay there in the dark, shoulder to shoulder.
“We can make a blanket wall if you can’t control yourself,” suggested Amanda. “Or if you feel like you’re going to hurl.”
“I think I’ll be okay,” I said.
I stared at the ceiling. A cockroach skittered across the cracked plaster, disappearing into the rickety wooden ceiling fan.
Amanda saw it too but she didn’t scream or anything, the way I would have expected her to. “Did you see that?” she asked, pointing. “It’s like a shooting star.”
“Uh,” I said.
“I mean, kind of. If you think about it in a certain way. It’s like the equivalent. Given our situation.”
“Should we make a wish?” I asked.
Instead of answering, Amanda reached over and tentatively grabbed my hand.
I wasn’t expecting that at all. Be cool, I told myself, even as I felt my heart beginning to race. I tried to think of something really suave to say, but nothing was coming immediately to mind. So we just lay there for a few minutes until I finally remembered how to speak English.
“What’s the first thing you’re going to do when you get cured?” I asked. Maybe not exactly the definition of suave, but it was something.
“I don’t know,” she answered. “I’m not sure I want to think about it. I don’t want to get my hopes up.”
“That’s boring,” I replied.
“Fine. What’re you going to do?”
“I’m going to find the best vegetarian restaurant in the world,” I told her. “And then I’m going to take you out to dinner there.”
Amanda laughed. She rolled over onto her side, facing me.
“You think we’re still going to hang out, post-zombie?”
“I hope so,” I said.
“Me too,” she whispered. “It’s a date.”
That night, I had this totally random dream about Vintage Vinyl, the used-record store in New Jersey I used to stop by on afternoons when I was skipping class. It was me and Henry Robinson and we were just rambling up and down the aisles, browsing, looking for bands we could go home and torrent.
The thing is, Henry and I weren’t alone. There was this brown-haired girl with us and even though I didn’t really recognize her, in the dream I felt like I knew her. I was sure she’d come with us for some reason, riding along in Henry’s hand-me-down station wagon. She followed us up and down the aisles, not saying anything, but laughing and smiling at most of our stupid jokes.
Eventually, we had enough of Vintage Vinyl, so we moseyed out to the parking lot. When we reached Henry’s car, the girl kept walking. She glanced over her shoulder at me and I thought about following her, but then I noticed she was headed for a black SUV parked in the next row over.
That’s where I recognized her from! She was that teenage storm trooper that’d been riding around with the shotgun-toting maniac. This was one of those dreams where you’re, like, aware that it’s a dream, but are just going along with the flow. So I thought: Wow, brain, what an obscure choice for a dream cameo. I’d totally forgotten about her.
Secret-agent girl got into the back of the SUV, looking almost sad about it. The driver-side window rolled down and some middle-aged dude wearing glasses and a bow tie peered out at me. I didn’t recognize him, but he looked like the mild-mannered type that secretly spends his weekends stabbing homeless people for the thrill of it. His bow tie started to spin, like a clown’s would, and that made me laugh because I’m an easy mark for physical comedy. Inappropriate things spinning? Usually funny.
When I looked away from the bow tie, I noticed the man had pulled a big chrome-plated gun. He aimed it right at my face.
Whoa, wait a second.
The gun fired with one of those jagged flame-colored bursts you see in comics. It was a thunderous gunshot, and I had time to think about the ringing in my ears as the huge silver bullet spun toward me.
I woke up when the bullet hit me right between the eyes.
CASS
WHEN I TOLD TOM THAT I WANTED TO GO HOME, I hadn’t meant back to Washington and the cold NCD barracks, though that’s where I ended up. I’d meant real home, with my mom and sister. I wanted to be in my old room with the retro movie posters on the walls and the stacks of secondhand books I still hadn’t read. It used to seem like a small and boring place to me, but now I felt like I could just hide there forever.
Instead, we’d been ordered back to DC while the NCD higher-ups figured out our next move. Our team had never allowed any zombies to stay on the loose this long; I guess that was sort of my fault. Now that we were back at base, I let myself hope that we’d just chalk up Jake and Amanda as lost and move on to the next case.
Here in DC, I shared a room with another telepath named Tara. She was in her twenties, and kept to herself, or at least it seemed that way because I hardly ever saw her. If I wasn’t out on a mission, then she was.
Our room looked pretty much like a dorm, so at least I was sort of getting a college experience. Who knew if real college would be in the cards for me, though after my NCD service was over I’d end up with a government-issued high school equivalency diploma to go with what was shaping up to be a serious case of post-traumatic stress. Other than the bunk beds, there were a pair of writing desks with laptops, two closets containing more than enough NCD jumpsuits, and a single window that was too high to really see out of but let in the gray light from early morning DC.
I opened up my laptop and logged on to Facebook. Surprisingly, we’re allowed to keep profiles, we’re just not allowed to post anything to them. I bet there’s some android in a dimly lit office in a subbasement of the Pentagon monitoring our every click. I browsed my newsfeed, filled with news and posts from kids I’d known in my old life: photographs of a hideous aquamarine prom dress, complaints about an unfair teacher, multiple invites to some stupid game where you build a farm. I wondered if any of these people ever wondered what had happened to me. Even if they did wonder, it’s not like we could reconnect. There wasn’t any common ground. They had school dances and term papers; I had corpses and nosebleeds.
If I was going to hang out with someone my own age, it’d have to be someone that could understand what I’d been through.
Casually, I typed JAKE STEPHENS into the search window. Just out of curiosity. About a thousand results popped up and scrolling through them just made me feel awkward and lonely, so I closed the window.
There was a rec room down the hall with a TV, a lame selection of DVDs, and a Ping-Pong table. I c
ould go there if I wanted to kill some time, maybe make friends with some of the other telepaths, share stories about the horrible zombie massacres we’d seen over a frosty glass of Coke. No thanks. I’d always kept my distance from that place and that wouldn’t change now, even if I was in a funk. This is going to sound supremely hypocritical, but the idea of hobnobbing with other telepaths gave me the willies. I didn’t want anyone poking around in the sacred space of my brain.
I curled up on the bottom bunk, thinking about taking a nap even though it wasn’t even noon. Isolation was one of the things they warned us about in our Coping with Telepathy orientation; it was why most of us had handlers like Tom.
Except I wasn’t really isolated, was I? I could do something about this feeling.
I told myself that I was just going to take a quick peek into Jake’s mind. I’d kept my mental distance since the night before, after I’d accidentally transmitted a psychic panic attack into his brain. I hoped I hadn’t hurt him, although part of me wouldn’t have minded if my psychic episode had disrupted his make-out session.
I found Jake sitting cross-legged on the edge of a bed in a motel room that would’ve caused even the cost-cutting government types I worked with to turn up their noses. He was reading a newspaper, or at least pretending to. Really, he was stealing glances at Amanda through the half-open bathroom door as she brushed black dye through her glamorous blonde hair.
So they were disguising themselves. If they only knew that I’d been hanging out in Jake’s brain for the last few days. It would take more than a bad dye job to give me the slip.
Except, maybe it wouldn’t. My mental connection to Jake felt more tenuous than it had the day before. It was now five days since I first made contact, and I’m sure the growing distance between us wasn’t helping. I’d never been connected to a zombie this long. Usually, they were dead—like, for-real dead—within the first forty-eight hours. It was already getting harder to access Jake’s mind, like that feeling you get when a word is stuck on the tip of your tongue. Today I’d found him . . . but tomorrow?