by Jeff Hart
“Yeah,” he said, still talking really fast, “yeah, me too, but also—how are you here? All Mom has been saying is that the cops won’t let her talk to you, and they said you shot all those kids, and now—”
“We didn’t shoot anyone,” I interrupted. “They’re lying.”
Kyle stared at me, like he was noticing me for the first time. He studied me for a moment, then pointed.
“Second shooter,” he declared. “Jake Stephens.”
“Uh, yeah. Hi.”
Kyle looked past us, searching the faces in the student union.
“Is Chazz here too?” he asked.
“Why would he be?” asked Amanda, keeping her voice neutral.
“The news said he was in on it,” said Kyle. “Your shooting. That he’d lost his nerve at the school but had already killed his parents beforehand.”
Amanda and I exchanged an uncomfortable look.
“No Chazz,” said Amanda. “That’s done.”
“They’re lying about him too,” I volunteered. “Well, sort of. He probably did kill his parents. It just has nothing to do with us. Also he was sort of a dick, so meh.”
Both Blakes were staring at me. So, brother and sister could share the same please-shut-up look.
“Chazz was a dick,” agreed Kyle. “What the hell is happening, Amanda? Did you escape? Are the cops after you?”
Kyle started looking around again and this time I did too. I was pretty sure we’d gotten in unnoticed, yet I still felt exposed. I wanted to make sure those guys in the beige sedan—or really, anyone that looked the slightest bit like a gun-toting government agent—weren’t closing in.
“No,” said Amanda, cool as a cucumber. “The cops aren’t looking for us because they think we’re caught.”
“But the dudes that set up this whole conspiracy cover-up thing?” I added. “Pretty sure they’re still looking for us.”
Kyle frowned at Amanda. “What’s he saying?”
“You’re literally not going to believe it,” sighed Amanda.
I was about to point out that her brother was wearing a sweatshirt that announced his membership as one of the local ghost hunters so he should probably have an open mind, but then Amanda just launched right into our tale in her typical no-nonsense way. She started with the stomach growling, then segued into the massacre in the cafeteria, actually doing a really good job of avoiding words like massacre and generally glossing over the real gory details.
When she was finished, Kyle glanced between the two of us.
“Bullshit,” he said.
Amanda tossed up her hands. “You believe everything those creeps on the radio and the internet dorks say, but not your own sister?”
“I believe you. I guess. And I don’t believe everything. Look, I’m a skeptic realist, okay? I never actually believed that crap about Aunt Ellie getting eaten. I’m sure she’s fine.”
“Forget Aunt Ellie. This is a little more important, don’t you think? We’re zombies,” insisted Amanda. “Seriously.”
“You don’t look like zombies,” Kyle said. “You look fine. Weird hair, but fine.”
“We’ve been eating rats,” I offered.
“Uh-huh,” said Kyle, and leaned toward Amanda. “Look, I don’t know what kind of trouble you’re actually in and you don’t have to tell me. But we can work it out. I’m just glad you’re safe.”
“We’re not safe,” Amanda blurted, getting annoyed. “They’re hunting us.”
“The government?” Kyle asked skeptically. “The men in black?”
“The same guys that have been watching your house, dude,” I put in.
“Wait. There are guys watching my house?”
Amanda rolled her eyes. “Duh. For a conspiracy freak, you’d think you’d pay a little more attention to that type of thing.”
“Uh. You don’t think they’re monitoring my, um, internet activity too, do you?” He shot me a nervous glance.
“Look. Kyle. I think the government has more important things to worry about than your porn surfing, okay? I just need you to believe me. We’re heading to Iowa,” announced Amanda. “But we need your help before we go.”
“Iowa?” asked Kyle, pushing a hand through his hair, mega-stressed. “Why would—? No, whatever, that’s ridiculous. We’re going to call Mom and a lawyer and”—he looked at me—“your parents too, I guess, and we’re going to straighten this out.”
Amanda slapped the disposable camera onto the table, frustrated.
“There are pictures on this that prove we’re not arrested, which proves the whole cover story is crap,” said Amanda. “Put them up on your message boards, send them to a newspaper, something. Just help us, Kyle.”
“This isn’t just happening to us,” I added, thinking of Grace and Summer. “There’s something big going on here. Bigger than a bunch of paranoid conspiracy nuts are going to be able to fix. We need to get this out there.”
Kyle picked up the camera, turning it over in his hands.
“And I need my family to know that I’m not a murderer,” I added, feeling my voice catch in my throat. Amanda looked over at me sympathetically.
Kyle was barely paying attention anymore. He hadn’t really needed to be convinced. “This is really happening,” he breathed to himself.
“Yeah,” said Amanda.
Kyle looked up at his sister, his eyes big with fear. Not for himself, I realized, but for her.
“I’m supposed to just sit here while you run off to Iowa for some crazy secret reason with Weirdo-Mohawk here.” He glanced at me. “No offense.”
“None taken,” I said.
“You’re going to help us expose a government conspiracy,” said Amanda. “Come on, Kyle. It’s your dream come true.”
Kyle shoved the camera into his backpack. Then, he rubbed his hands over his face, like he was trying to shake off a bad dream or unscramble the pieces of his blown mind.
“Zombies,” he said at last, with a shaky smile. “I knew it.”
“Yeah,” deadpanned Amanda, smiling a little too, “but the aliens still haven’t landed, there’s no such thing as ESP, and Bigfoot is just some fatty in a gorilla suit. So you’re, like, one for one thousand.”
After that, I shook hands with Kyle and then gave the siblings some space for their discreetly tearful good-bye. I was thinking about my own family again, how rad it would be to have a clandestine meeting with them. Or better yet—a normal meeting, like dinner at home, after I’d cured my zombiism and possibly overthrown a corrupt branch of government. I sort of wished I could see them now, though. For the first time ever, if my dad asked me what I was going to do with my life, I’d have an answer: I was making America safe for zombies.
Or, er, helping zombies and keeping America in the know. Or something. It needed ironing out.
Amanda left Kyle at his back table and we retraced our steps through the student union.
“So, that went awesome,” I said, feeling some mission-accomplished excitement.
“That was hard,” she said, glancing over her shoulder at where Kyle still sat. “So hard to just leave him knowing I might not see him again.”
“Psh,” I said, trying to cheer her up. “Here’s what happens next. We go to Iowa and track down that creepy old guy and his elixir of life. I mean, now we have a lead. We’re already better off than we were a day ago. Meanwhile, your brother exposes the government, and the people of this great nation are, like, whoa, we need to help these poor afflicted zombie children. And then we’re, like—good news, everybody—there’s a cure. They’ll probably throw us a parade and—”
I was so focused on all the plans running through my head that I didn’t see the man in the boxy black suit until I was crashing right into him, spilling his coffee onto the floor. He looked at me, super annoyed, but the whole thing probably would’ve just been written off as a dumb student not watching where he was going if I hadn’t immediately exclaimed:
“Oh shit!”
I
recognized him. It was one of the guys from the beige sedan last night. And there was his partner, a few steps behind.
They were looking right at us, recognition dawning on their faces.
“Oh shit,” said the agent with the spilled coffee, apparently as surprised as we were.
I shoved the agent I’d bumped into—hard—and he slipped on the puddle of coffee, feet flying up in the air, landing right on the back of his head. Some of the students nearby started cheering and laughing.
Then they started screaming. Not because we’d gone zombie, although that’s now my natural assumption for when crowds scream around me, but because the second agent had drawn a gun.
He shot at me, but Amanda shoved me down. The bullet tore through her shoulder instead. I could feel the hot spray of her blood against my cheek as I fell to the ground.
There were kids running and screaming everywhere now. Just the kind of scene I’d feared when we first entered the student union. One of the kids bumped the agent with the gun and he stumbled while trying to line up another shot.
Just like that, Amanda was on him. Her back was to me, but I could see that rotten gray color had spread up her arms, the blood dripping from the exit wound in her shoulder a black sludge. She snarled, drove both her hands into the agent’s midsection, and scooped out a mouthful of fresh guts.
“Amanda?”
The student union was almost totally clear, except for a few kids cowering under tables, watching us with wide eyes. Kyle, though, he stood just a few yards away, eyes wide with horror and disbelief.
Amanda knelt over the agent, devouring him. She looked up at the sound of her name, blood smeared around her mouth, her eyes sunken and feral.
Kyle recoiled, tripped over a chair, and fell to the floor.
“Run!” I shouted, not really sure if that was for our benefit, for Kyle’s benefit, or for the rest of the innocent bystanders. I guess for everybody. Everybody needed to run.
I grabbed Amanda around the waist and fled the student union.
CASS
HARLENE SAT BEHIND HER DESK, IGNORING A STACK OF paperwork in favor of a giant cup of iced coffee. The walls of her office were decorated like a time line of her awesomeness: pictures of a young Harlene posing with bouquets of roses after winning a beauty pageant right next to pictures of a more serious Harlene receiving various commendations from multiple presidents. There was even a gun mounted and framed on her wall—a lot of these military types bronzed the weapons they used for their first kills, like a warrior’s lethal pair of baby shoes. I bet Harlene was the only one to have hers on display next to a tiara, though.
“There’s my Sweet Pea,” said Harlene, greeting me with a smile. “Have a seat.”
I sank into the chair in front of Harlene’s desk, making a concerted effort not to seem too sullen, which probably wasn’t working at all. Harlene looked me over, frowning.
“What’s going on with you, my dear?” she asked gently.
I didn’t know how to even begin answering that question. How do you sum up that your freaky superior who sees you as an unwilling protégé has just promised to make a zombie slave out of the fugitive you’ve developed a hugely inappropriate psychic crush on?
“Feeling down,” I answered.
Harlene nodded. “Tom told me you’ve been having a hard go of it.”
Understatement of the year, maybe? I didn’t reply; I felt pretty burned out on explaining my feelings. I’d done enough of that with Tom. Anyway, it seemed like Harlene was working up to something.
“I wish I could tell you it gets easier,” she said. “It’s never going to be pumpkin pie, hon.”
Some pep talk.
Harlene reached into her desk and pulled out a roll of clean bandages and some gauze pads. She started to unwrap the bandage on her forearm from where Chazz had bitten her, but stopped to glance up at me.
“I’ve gotta change this,” she explained, apologetic. “You’re not squeamish, are you?”
I laughed, actually surprised and a little touched by the question. “I saw Jamison shoot the head off a girl the other day.”
“Right. Silly question,” answered Harlene. She continued to talk as she unwrapped her arm, seeming to pay more attention to the layers of bandages than her words. “You know, I’ve been here since they tossed this whole NCD shindig together after the first outbreak five years ago.”
“I didn’t know that.”
Harlene nodded. “There are three kinds of people in the NCD, way I figure it. First are the soldiers—folks that’re just good at doing what they’re told, not asking too many questions. They’re just doing a job, punching a clock, ya know?”
“Yeah, I guess,” I said, although punching a clock for the NCD was a whole heck of a lot different than working a shift at a cheesy Italian restaurant.
“Second type of folks’re the ones with a reason. They want to be here. Got a personal score to settle with the undead. I think we both know some people like that.”
I nodded my head, thinking of sad, angry Jamison.
“Third type,” continued Harlene, “don’t necessarily want to be here, and they ain’t necessarily good soldiers either. They’re folks the NCD feels have a use in the defense of our country, and they don’t get much choice whether they want to serve or not. In case you’re not following, I’m talkin’ about you, Sweet Pea.”
“I got that,” I said. Feeling curious, I added, “What type are you, Harlene?”
“People been fooled by my pretty face all these years,” answered Harlene, “but I’m just another soldier. I do what I’m told.”
Harlene finished unwrapping her wounded arm and I gasped, my stomach doing a somersault. Not because the bite was hideous or ghastly, but because of what was in its place.
They’d grafted one of those feeding nozzles into Harlene’s forearm, just like the one Alastaire had so proudly displayed.
Harlene smiled sadly at my reaction. She poured some alcohol onto a cotton ball and started to dab at the raw edges of the graft.
“Figured you’d already know what this is,” she said, indicating the plastic tube sticking out of her. “Guess the docs decided it was a convenient time to put it in, what with part of my arm already missing.”
The idea of Harlene hooked up to a zombie the way Alastaire was hooked up to Chazz, the thought of her passing fluid down a tube and into a zombie, it made me want to cry. That wasn’t my Harlene. I didn’t want to imagine her going along with that atrocity.
“Oh, Harlene,” I pleaded. “No.”
“Nothing to be done about it, Sweet Pea. I’ve got orders to follow, even if I don’t like ’em, or if I think they push this whole operation one step closer to a royal pig-screw. You know, if that’s what I thought was happening.”
If Harlene was working her way around to telling me how important following orders was, I thought I might just make a run for it. Things could not get bleaker. Subconsciously, I’d started rubbing my smooth, non-cyborg forearms. So, maybe I was wrong and things could actually get worse. I really didn’t want to find out.
“Anyhow,” said Harlene, casually wrapping her forearm in fresh bandages, “I might be just a humble soldier, but I’m also a squad leader. And I make decisions about the usefulness of my squad.”
Here it comes, I thought. Harlene’s going to give me the date of my zombie-slave-implant operation, introduce me to my anesthesiologist, ask if I want the traditional white forearm plate or the new hot-pink one they’re rolling out.
Harlene thumbed through one of the stacks of paperwork on her desk, tugging out a form with the fine print of an iTunes agreement. She slid it across the desk to me.
“This here is an Incapable Asset Disengagement form,” Harlene explained. “I’ve already signed it.”
I stared at the document, trying to skim over its sections and subsections, its impenetrable text blocks of legalese. Wherever there was a blank labeled ASSET, Harlene’s bubbly handwriting spelled out my name.
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br /> “What is this?” I asked.
“It says that you’re no good for the NCD. That we’d be better off going our separate ways.” She winked.
“Seriously?” I asked, unable to keep a rush of joy out of my voice. “I’d get to go home?”
Harlene held up her hand, trying to tamp down my enthusiasm. “Well, it’s not as simple as all that. You can’t just walk away, seeing what you’ve seen. They’d put you in a room full of psychics and they’d go to work on you and remove the memories, like with the civilians you’ve gotten so good at wiping.”
“My memories . . .” I mumbled, considering this. I tried to think of something from the last year and a half that I couldn’t live without. Truth be told, I hadn’t really been keeping a mental scrapbook of all the nasty crime scenes I’d witnessed. Wouldn’t it be kind of nice to just hit the RESET button?
“Not just your memories,” added Harlene. “Your momma’s, too. Anyone outside the NCD that knows about your government hookup.”
“My mom,” I repeated, trying to wrap my head around this. “What would she think? What would I think? What would I remember?”
“Not sure,” Harlene answered. “Whatever the psychics can make work. Maybe you spent a year at some swanky private school in the mountains? Who knows?”
I flipped to the last sheet of the paperwork. There was an empty line waiting for my signature.
“This could happen?” I asked, still not quite believing. “I could go back to normal.”
“Normal as it’ll ever get,” Harlene replied, her voice lowering. “Truth is, Sweet Pea, I think things are going to get worse around here.”
“In Washington?”
Harlene shook her head. “Everywhere. Just between us girls, the Control part of NCD isn’t exactly going gangbusters. I told you once that one day we’d kill them all and everyone’d get to go home with a medal and a grin. I don’t know anymore if that’s happening.”
After everything that’d gone down in the last week—heck, just the last couple hours—a huge part of me so badly wanted to sign that paperwork, declare myself incapable, and forget about the whole zombie-huntress thing. But another part of me thought about that initial pride I’d taken in being the youngest-ever member of the NCD, of doing good, making a difference.