Eat, Brains, Love

by Jeff Hart

  “How did you know that stuff about me?” she asked, her words muffled by the muzzle.

  “Don’t talk to her,” snapped Tom. I wasn’t sure which one of us he meant, but both Amanda and I shut up. I’d never heard Tom’s voice so authoritative, although I’d also never seen him so on edge.

  Tom stood at the window, watching the activity around the farmhouse. Some of the remaining NCD agents had formed a perimeter out front. The rest had gone into the wheat field, looking for Jamison and the other agents who were supposed to be guarding the back of the farmhouse and had disappeared out there. Tom shook his head, looking freaked.

  “This isn’t safe,” he announced, and turned to me. “We’re getting out of here. As your guardian, I insist we do so immediately.”

  “What about Harlene?” I asked, still holding her hand.

  “Cass,” Tom said, softening a bit, “nothing bad can happen to her anymore. You and I, on the other hand, need to be getting away from this shit-show posthaste.”

  “The mission isn’t over, Thomas.”

  Alastaire strode through the front door. Actually, he strode over it, Chazz having knocked it off the hinge and onto the ground during his grand entrance earlier. Chazz trailed along after him, looking worn out even for a mostly decomposed zombie. His knuckles almost dragged on the floor as he shuffled after Alastaire, back hunched, arms limp.

  Amanda struggled into a sitting position when they entered. Her eyes widened with confusion as she saw that Alastaire had Chazz on a leash.

  “Chazz?” she asked quietly. “What did they do to you?”

  Her ex-boyfriend’s only response was to loll his head back and forth on his shoulders. Even if Chazz had the mental capacity to answer, he wouldn’t have found it easy with his jaw laying discarded a few feet away. I’d been pretending not to notice that thing ever since we came in here. It looked like a piece of sparerib that a dog had chewed on.

  Alastaire glanced at Amanda, annoyed, and then looked over at Tom, who hadn’t budged from his spot by the window.

  “Why didn’t we gag her?” asked Alastaire.

  Tom ignored his question. “This mission is over,” insisted Tom.

  “I only see one prisoner,” said Alastaire, waving at Amanda. “I assume you can count as high as two?”

  “And how many dead agents do you count?” Tom seethed.

  Alastaire looked at Harlene’s body for what I thought was the first time. He frowned.

  “Yes, that’s . . . unfortunate.” He paused, seeing something. “Oh, hello, here’s this.”

  Alastaire bent down and picked up the bottom part of Chazz’s jaw. He snapped his fingers in Chazz’s eyes until the zombie straightened up and looked at him. Then, like an artist sizing up a sculpture, Alastaire steadied Chazz’s head by grabbing his hair and shoved the jawbone back onto his face. There was the grinding of bone on bone and when Alastaire took his hands away, Chazz’s jaw hung half-open and crooked.

  “Well, it’s a start,” muttered Alastaire.

  “This is so fucked,” declared Amanda.

  I’m not sure I can put into words how much I hated Alastaire at that moment. He was more interested in putting his pet back together than he was in Harlene. I would’ve never mistaken Alastaire for a good guy, but now I was convinced there wasn’t even a shred of human decency in him. He was as much a monster as Amanda or Chazz.

  “I’m sorry to leave you here,” I whispered to Harlene. “You were so kind and wonderful.”

  No one heard me say my good-bye because Amanda had started trying to get Chazz’s attention.

  “Help me, Chazz,” she said. “I don’t know what they’ve done to you, but we can fix it.” Chazz snarled and began to strain at his leash.

  Alastaire just wiggled his finger. “No, no, Chazz.” Chazz looked into his eyes and gurgled happily. Amanda’s eyes widened, but she kept right on going.

  “You aren’t just going to let them take me, are you, Chazz?” Amanda pleaded. Her dumb ex-boyfriend was her only hope. “Help me get out of here!”

  I’d had enough. I set Harlene’s hand down gently on her stomach and stood up, looking at Tom.

  “Okay,” I said. “I’m ready to go.”

  “Good,” said Tom, pointedly ignoring Alastaire. “Race you to the SUV.”

  Tom and I started for the door. Behind us, I heard Alastaire mutter something, followed by the metallic click of his leash disconnecting.

  Before we could go another step, Chazz had positioned himself between us and the door. He watched us, eyes wide and hungry, more attentive now than before.

  “Fight them, Chazz,” Amanda kept on. “Please, fight them!”

  I intended to march right through Chazz, to call Alastaire’s bluff. Tom put a hand on my shoulder, though, stopping me before I got too close. We turned to face Alastaire together.

  “You can’t do this,” said Tom, but Alastaire waved him off.

  “Thomas, your insubordination has been noted. You can expect a transfer after this mission.” He looked at me, smiling patiently. “As for you, just tell us where to find the boy and you can head back to Washington. Spend some quality time thinking about how to improve your performance for the next mission.”

  “No,” I said, squaring my shoulders. “I’m done.”

  Alastaire’s smile was unflappable. His thoughts, however, hissed across my brain with the heat and force of steam bursting out of a boiling teakettle.

  I’m losing patience with you, child. Tell me where the boy is or I’ll just rip it out of your little brain.

  My body shook with the force of his thought, but I tried not to let it show.

  I don’t think you’re actually stronger than me, I thought back. You’re just a coward that hides behind soldiers and zombies. You know I’m stronger than you. If I weren’t, you wouldn’t need me. You wouldn’t have needed me to bring you here. I’m stronger than all of you, and that’s why you’re so obsessed with me, you sick freak.

  Alastaire straightened his bow tie. A nanosecond later, it felt like my brain had been locked in a spike-covered vise.

  Really misjudged that one, Cass.

  The pressure was sudden and sharp: behind my eyes, in my ears, down through my sinuses. I felt my nose turn on like a faucet, blood pouring out, but that was a distant thing. More present were the claws in my brain—Alastaire rummaging through my thoughts, my memories, every part of me.

  My body must have wobbled because I felt Tom’s hand on my arm, heard him shouting for Alastaire to stop whatever he was doing.

  Alastaire broke into the place where I’d hidden away the memory of that afternoon’s meeting with Harlene when she granted me my release from NCD. I could feel his psychic laughter.

  It was so trivial to him, so amusing.

  Do you honestly believe I’d ever let you go? One day, you’ll appreciate what I’ve done for you.

  I felt trampled by the force of his mind. I’d never so completely lost control of my being before. I was like a passenger or, worse still, a prisoner inside my own body. I couldn’t think, unless he allowed it. Every memory I had, every secret, was at his psychic fingertips.

  Only seconds had passed outside my body since Tom and I first went for the door. Distantly, I could hear Amanda still trying to convince Chazz to be her knight in shining armor.

  “We can find Jake, he’s cooler than you think,” was Amanda’s latest pitch. “We’re going to Iowa, Chazz. You can come with us. They say there’s a cure there.”

  And just like that, my mind was once again my own. I felt violated and weakened and disgusted, but he was out. Something had distracted him.

  Alastaire rounded on Amanda.

  “What did you just say?” Alastaire barked.

  Whatever she’d said—something about Iowa and a cure—it had gotten Alastaire’s attention. That usual façade of condescending politeness was cracked. She’d freaked him out.

  Amanda just stared at Alastaire, eyes narrowed above her muzzle. />
  “What did you say about a cure?” he practically shouted.

  I wobbled in place. Tom put his arm around my shoulders to steady me. Chazz groaned plaintively from behind us, his jaw clicking as he snapped at the air, testing it. Apparently, the zombie could bite again.

  I wish I could say that I thought about all the disturbing things Alastaire had done since I met him. The severed hand in NCD training, kidnapping Jake’s sister, his complete apathy toward Harlene. The way he just forced himself on me, forced his way into my mind to prove a point.

  I wish I thought about all those things, but I didn’t. Alastaire was distracted, so I acted. That’s all there is to it.

  I forced my way into Chazz’s mind, not bothering to be gentle. I’d been there before. The cold and alien feeling of a zombie mind wasn’t so bad after having Alastaire shove himself into my brain.

  I sent Chazz a mental picture, hoping that his low-functioning zombie mind combined with the NCD tech enhancements that made him so susceptible to suggestion wouldn’t know the difference between my psychic nudge and a real order.

  The mental picture was of Alastaire.

  In the mental picture, Alastaire said, “Eat me.”

  With a guttural moan that sounded almost grateful, Chazz shoved past Tom and me. Alastaire turned away from Amanda just in time to see his pet zombie bound forward.

  Alastaire threw an arm up to defend himself, but Chazz bit down on him right at the elbow, hard, and twisted his head back and forth like you see those attack dogs do when they get their teeth in the big foam man pretending to be a burglar.

  Alastaire fell backward and Chazz fell with him, biting through tendons and bone. Alastaire was screaming for Chazz to stop, and Amanda was screaming for Chazz to keep going, convinced she’d made this happen through her desperate wheedling.

  I just stood there, not saying anything. Not looking away.

  Tom, very calmly, pulled his gun, took two steps forward, aimed, and shot Chazz in the back of the head.

  Now Amanda flipped out. She tried to lunge at Tom, but her shackles got in the way and she ended up just falling on her face. Tom sidestepped her, moving quickly back to me, looking shocked at his own man-of-action routine.

  “Why’d you stop him?” I asked Tom quietly, ignoring Amanda’s shouted threats.

  Tom studied my face, must have read in it what I’d just done. He shook his head, disapproval mixing with resignation.

  “Oh god, Cass. Did you make him attack?”

  Before I could answer, there was a shout outside followed by a volley of stun-gun fire. That wasn’t right. Come to think of it, it was kind of strange that no agents had come running when Tom fired his pistol.

  What was going on out there?

  Tom pushed me toward the back of the room and walked, gun still drawn, to the farmhouse window.

  “What the he—?” was all Tom managed to say before a pair of zombie hands reached in the window and grabbed him by the front of his shirt. His legs banged painfully against the window frame as a leather-clad zombie dragged him through the window.

  I heard gunshots. Tom screamed.

  “Tom!” I shouted and tried to run toward the door, but I was too dizzy and weak from telepathically pushing Chazz. I fell onto my knees.

  Amanda had gone quiet. We listened and watched together; the night outside was lit by blue electricity fired off from a dozen stun guns. Agents were yelling, sounding desperate and afraid. Over their cries came the fierce snarls of zombies. I could hear them running by outside, the haggard way they tried to breathe through dead lungs, and the wet ripping sounds they made when they fell upon one of the agents.

  Tom. Not Tom too.

  I jumped when Chazz’s body moved. It was Alastaire, crawling out from beneath him. He’d gone deathly pale, the lower part of his arm hanging on by just a strip of exposed muscle.

  “Well played,” he said to me, groaning as he tried to sit up. “Do you know how to tie a tourniquet?”

  I looked at him with disbelief, sitting there expecting me to help him. Then I looked over at Amanda, her eyes wide above the muzzle, waiting for her zombie friends to come rescue her. I felt nothing but disgust for both of them.

  “We can still make it out of here, Cassandra,” Alastaire groaned, groping for his gun with his working hand. “Tonight will be a story we laugh about one day.”

  I got my legs under me, ignoring him. Harlene was dead, Jamison was missing, and Tom had been dragged into the night screaming.

  There was nothing left for me to do but go.

  Alastaire was still calling my name as I walked out the front door of the farmhouse.

  JAKE

  THE ZOMBIE RUNNING NEXT TO ME TOOK A BLAST OF electricity to the chest. His skin sizzled and popped like cooked meat as he flipped head over heels and crashed down in the dirt. Before the agent could get off another round, he was sideswiped by a zombie with dreadlocks. She tackled him, biting down hard on his shoulder. The agent screamed and that was like a dinner bell, two other zombies running over to help the girl with the dreadlocks divide him up.

  I kept running.

  I remembered this stupid game they made us play on spring days in elementary-school gym class. It was called Red Rover. The phys ed teacher would take us out to the grass field behind the school and divide the class up into two lines, all the kids in the line holding hands. Then, kids would take turns yelling, “Red Rover, Red Rover, send blah-blah right over,” and if you were the person named, it was your job to charge that other line and try to break through. I think the only reason we played Red Rover was because our gym teacher had a sick fascination with watching little kids clothesline each other. I bet that did look pretty funny, actually.

  This one time when my name was called, instead of running at the opposite line, I took off sideways. I ran down the middle of the field and took the long way around the other line until I was behind them, the gym coach blowing his whistle and looking confused.

  Anyway, that’s what it was like in the field outside the farmhouse, like the most intense game of Red Rover ever, with no one following any of the rules.

  The government dudes tried to keep a line, standing shoulder to shoulder, firing their stun guns at us zombies as we came cheering and howling from the wheat field. It just took one agent getting pulled off from the end of the line, though, dragged down screaming by a zombie with huge steel gauges through his ear lobes, for the whole thing to become chaos. These NCD guys might have been zombie hunters but, by the looks of things, they hadn’t trained for a massive pack attack.

  The Iowa zombies, man, they’d done this before. They were gleeful and whooping in those last seconds as they descended on the agents, sank their teeth into them, and came up snarling greedily and gnashing their teeth.

  I watched an agent toss away his stun gun and pull a real pistol from a hidden pocket in his jumpsuit. He shot the first zombie that came close, but there was another one right behind him. The second zombie grabbed the agent by the arms and wrenched him backward, biting down on his neck.

  I got lower, running with my head down. I was trying to keep my distance from the agents, not attacking any of them so they wouldn’t shoot me, yet somehow I didn’t think they’d see the difference between me and the other zombies. Still, I didn’t want to get shot in the head before I could find Amanda. Or after, for that matter.

  Amanda. I didn’t see her anywhere. I really hoped they hadn’t killed her. They wouldn’t do that, right? Why go through all the trouble of capturing us if the plan was just to blow out our brains?

  I skirted around a burly NCD guy using one of their big net cannons to bash a zombie down to the ground. If you’ve got a big weapon, use it for blunt force. That made sense. The whole capturing thing? Not so much. Why would they bother with all that?

  Then again, I was pretty sure they’d sent Chazz after us. Clearly, there was a lot I didn’t understand.

  There was too much to think about. Besides all this mes
s with the government, who may or may not have been cultivating their own zombie slaves, there was also this insane gang of zombie warriors to consider. They were disturbingly gung ho about eating people. It seemed like a no-brainer that these were the kinds of bad zombies Grace and Summer had warned us about. Sure, they’d helped me and all, but I didn’t really want to get mixed up with them.

  I could sort all that out later. I just wanted to find Amanda and get out of here.

  There was Red Bear, standing over a dying NCD agent. He had his tomahawk out, eating a slab of flesh he’d cut from the NCD agent right off the blade. When he saw me, he held out the tomahawk, the fatty part of a thigh glistening tastily at me.

  “Bite?” he offered, his voice husky and wet, like we get when we’re feeding.

  I hate to admit that it looked appetizing. Luckily, I’d just eaten, so my zombie urges were under control. I shook my head. “No thanks.”

  Red Bear shrugged and went back to his meal, the agent managing a weak scream as Red Bear raised the tomahawk above his head.

  There was a gunshot and Red Bear pitched forward, staggering. Another agent a few yards away had shot him in the shoulder. Red Bear let out a frustrated groan and charged the second agent.

  I ran in the opposite direction, not waiting around to see if the agent’s aim was better than Red Bear was quick.

  There were bodies everywhere; agents and zombies fighting. I didn’t see Amanda outside. I figured she must be in the farmhouse and started that way, taking a looping route away from the action.

  I wanted to call Amanda’s name, but thought that might attract too much attention. When I found her, I was definitely going to teach her a birdcall or something. We needed a signal for future hell-on-Earth situations.

  I skidded to a stop. A few yards in front of me, a couple zombies had overwhelmed an agent and thrust their hands into his stomach, pulling his guts out, looking like a morbid version of Lady and the Tramp as they gnawed on the same section of intestine. Gross, yeah, but it wasn’t what made me stop.

  It was the brown-haired girl I’d seen in the back of the SUV chasing us in New Jersey, the same one that appeared in that wacked-out dream I had. She looked pale and shell-shocked, which I guess was a normal reaction to a scene like this, and it looked like she’d just had a rock-star nosebleed.