“We didn’t make any money,” Dax said. “Shit, we lost money on that CD.”
“And maybe that should have told you something,” I said.
We resumed our pace. “So…he wanted to keep me locked up because he didn’t like my band?”
“It’s not a matter of not liking your band. He thinks you’re Satan’s little personal assistant. That’s why I had to get Lattimore involved on your behalf. Keller would’ve been happy to let you rot in that cell with what’s-his-face—”
“Horace,” I supplied. “Er, Alfred.”
“—until the cows came home. So really, you’re pretty lucky you’re out. I’m not sure I’d push it.”
Dax sputtered for a few seconds, then squawked, “I’m not a devil worshipper!”
A few people glanced our way.
“Shut up, will you?” Tony asked. “I don’t know what kind of place Hastings was before things went down, but they all seem to have developed a pretty healthy fear of God lately. Just keep your mouth closed and clean out the fucking bedpans. It could be a lot worse.”
A few minutes later, we hooked a left and found ourselves in one of the city plazas. The grassy areas had turned brown and everything had taken on the same decidedly gloomy cast as the rest of the world, but rows of brightly-colored food trucks stood out in stark contrast to the neutral shades that now doused the world. Neat lines of people stretched out from each truck, mostly warmly-dressed civilians. A handful of uniformed soldiers walked around, presumably to keep order.
“Grub time,” Tony explained. “If civilians want to go out to eat, they get their food between six and seven.”
Food trucks. Real food? I could smell something meaty, though my nostrils could not entirely discern what it might be, and my mouth started watering in spite of itself. Tony counted the trucks and directed us toward one in the middle. “Our neighborhood is fed by truck seven,” he said.
I grasped Dax’s upper arm. “Food,” I whispered. “Fucking real food.”
“I want sweet potato fries,” he said.
We strode up to a black food truck with orange flames emblazoned across the side, along with a sign declaring it Korean Barbecue. A white printout with the number seven printed on it had been taped next to the window.
Korean barbecue! I loved Korean barbecue. My hopes soared, only to immediately crash and burn when I saw people leaving its side clutching not delicious cuts of meat, but MREs.
MR-fucking-Es.
So Keller had requisitioned the trucks, but not the actual food they contained. Dax and I stared morosely at the trucks, all visions of Korean barbecue and sweet potato fries fleeing our minds.
I tried to be pragmatic about it. At least I was eating.
“He really thinks I’m a devil worshipper?” Dax asked.
We reached the front of the line quickly, probably because no actual cooking was going on. The soldier handing out the grub looked at Tony, then at us, then back to Tony. “Picked up some friends?”
“Yeah, these are the folks I came in with. Vibeke and Dax.”
The soldier’s brow furrowed. “Vi-beck?”
“Close,” I said, pleasantly surprised. “Most people have trouble.”
“Move it along,” one of the patrolling soldiers barked at us from a few feet away. “You can catch up on the chit-chat after eating.”
The soldier manning the food truck set three MREs on the counter. “Good luck, newbies,” he said. “These things are hell on the digestive tract.”
“Move along,” the other soldier snapped. He came toward us, a hand on the butt of his sidearm. “You’re holding up the line.”
Damn, these guys were touchy.
“Do I look like a devil worshipper to you?” Dax asked Food Truck Guy.
The server sized him up. “You look like a goddamn cherub, kid. Now take your pastrami and get out of here before Sergeant Buzzkill does something we’ll all regret.”
Dax pulled his MRE off the counter, bowed in thanks, and stepped away. I took one as well, and Tony picked up his.
“All is well?” Tony asked.
Food Truck Guy barely cracked a grin. “More noise downtown. We’ll talk, though.”
There was no communal eating area. Instead, we went straight home, or at least the house currently acting as our home. “What are you going to talk about?” I asked Tony, if only to fill in the silence on our ten-minute walk through what looked very much like a dead city. “With that soldier.”
“Keller doesn’t trust me with a lot of facts, but Specialist Andrews likes to chat about his duties with a cigarette or two.”
Evie greeted us with her usual aplomb, then danced around the kitchen table as we sat down with our MREs and bottled water that Tony produced from the fridge. Apparently you could purchase a beverage of some sort at the trucks, but that cost extra, or earned you dirty looks or something, none of which we wanted to deal with..
“How was work?” he asked as we sat down with our pastrami MREs, which, in case you were wondering, were apparently some sort of ill-fated military experiment that should never, ever have been attempted, but some asshole commander decided to order enough to feed an entire state for ten years, and they wound up stockpiled in Hastings for whatever reason. Once the perishables and canned goods ran low, those MREs fed the entire city in those dark days after the dead walked.
I was of the opinion that the dead themselves probably tasted better.
“Lots of blood,” I said. “Lots of blood.”
“Bedpans,” Dax said. “Bedpans everywhere.”
“So a successful day at the hospital.” Tony took a bite of his pastrami, made a face, and forced himself to swallow it. “Some things just aren’t meant to be freeze-dried, I guess. But you’ll get used to it. It’s the only thing we have a ton of.”
“Have you found out what’s happening to Gloria and Vijay?” I asked.
Tony shook his head. “I’m sure they’re fine.”
I stopped picking at my own pastrami. “How can you be so cool about this? Our friends are in God knows what kind of—”
“They aren’t our friends,” Tony snapped, his voice rising. I sat back in surprise, and he quickly softened his tone. “We ran into them. And don’t think they wouldn’t have ditched us if they knew what would happen here.” He glared at me over his water bottle. “Keller’s not going to do anything awful to them. He needs information.”
“What information can she possibly give him? I thought half the time she was spitting back shit she got from his own broadcasts.”
“She was pulling from a lot of places. Yeah, she caught the Hastings feed a few times, but she also had some East Coast reports that I guess he couldn’t get his hands on. So he wants to find out what she knows.”
I shifted in my chair and forced myself to take another bite of the pastrami, silently cursing whoever had decided to create the stuff. Tony was right: Some things really should not be freeze-dried, and pastrami was definitely one of them.
About halfway through the meal, I realized that eating something this disgusting would no doubt really be a poor decision in the long run, particularly if only one toilet in the house worked properly due to water rationing.
Dax glanced up. “I heard cheering last night. What was that?”
Tony looked hard at him. “Cheering.”
“Yeah, like a sporting event?”
“I heard it, too,” I said.
Tony’s expression went from baffled to resigned—had he intended to hide something from us? “They’ve got a soccer league or something, I think.”
I picked around the edges of the pastrami. “A soccer league?”
“Yeah. You know, some of the guys get together, kick a ball around? Helps blow off steam or something? The civilians get involved, too. I guess it’s Keller’s idea of team bonding. Make everyone get along. I’m sure trust falls are next.”
Dinner ground to a halt after that—the three of us could only choke down so much pastrami—an
d we stuck the leftover MREs in the fridge alongside our water and a couple of potatoes that may well have been left there by the previous owners. “Sometimes we get lucky,” Tony said. “Sometimes it’s not pastrami. But I guess since we have a lifetime supply, it will just be mostly pastrami.”
I was fairly certain my stomach did not want to live off pastrami, and only pastrami, for the next however many years—or, if we were talking realistically, months—we had left, though I wasn’t sure the canned goods would be much better.
Or last much longer.
Something had to give. There had to be other surviving cities and states out there, people who were looking for us, or who wouldn’t turn us away if we asked for help. Hastings couldn’t be it, could it? There had to be someone else. Somewhere else.
We migrated to the living room and the television set. Tony walked over to a cabinet and opened it up, revealing a modest collection of DVDs. He skimmed them, and then sighed. “I’m gonna go read,” he said. “Ezekiel is waiting for me.”
He had picked up a novel on our way out to Hastings, and had put a great deal of stock in the supernatural fighting style of its protagonist, a Mennonite named Ezekiel. Frankly, I’d assumed he’d plowed through it the night we got here—he was so damned excited about the thing. “You haven’t finished it yet?”
“Haven’t felt like reading. He was about to fight flying undead demons, though.”
With that, he limped up the stairs, presumably to rejoin everyone’s favorite resurrected farmer in Dead Mennonite Walking.
I stopped in front of the DVD cabinet and scanned the titles. A handful of old sci-fi flicks—Star Wars, Spacetanic—accompanied a number of Disney re-releases. I counted at least a dozen princess films, and a handful of the better Pixar movies. I pulled Finding Nemo down and smiled at it.
“Kids lived here,” Dax said. “No self-respecting adult has this many Disney films.”
“I beg your pardon.” I waved Finding Nemo at him. “I fucking love this movie. I had two copies. One that I broke, the other that I bought to replace it.”
He seemed willing to consider that, at least for the moment.
“I hate bedpans,” he said.
“I have an idea for you,” I said. “Get one of those masks. Spray some perfume or cologne into it. It distills things a little bit.”
His frown was visible even in the dim light. “Won’t that just make shit smell like…like perfumed shit?”
“Better than non-perfumed shit, right? And I think if you wear it long enough it screws up your sense of smell, anyway.” I shrugged. “Couldn’t hurt.”
We poked around the rest of the living room, partially to occupy ourselves, and partially because I was curious about who had lived here before. They had some board games, and I spotted a video game console stashed in the back of the entertainment unit—not that we could find any games for it. All for the best, I was sure; the last thing we needed during a zombie invasion was someone too into their game to even look away from the screen.
With that done we sat on the couch, staring at the blank television screen.
“This feels weird,” I said. “Very…secure.”
“I know.” Dax paused. “Vibeke, I don’t like it.”
I folded my hands tightly in my lap, looking at our distorted reflections in the screen. We both looked very thin, and very tired.
Maybe our reflections weren’t as distorted as I thought.
“I don’t like it either,” I whispered.
CHAPTER FIVE
The enemy of panic is routine.
Hammond had once mumbled that under his breath when he thought I wasn’t listening. I had taken it as his personal rallying cry, the thing he told himself when situations appeared to be at their most dire. Above all, people needed things to do. Needed to be occupied. If they sat around thinking about the dead rising, they would break rank and that would be the end of everything. So Camp Elderwood had settled into an orderly sort of chaos, everyone having something to do at all times.
Keller obviously subscribed to a similar theory, or tried to. As I settled in to life in Hastings, I watched familiar scenes play out. Soldiers drilled constantly, both in the confines of the area they claimed as base and out on the city streets. Civilians had jobs, though most of them were completely unrelated to their pre-apocalyptic careers. Professors had become street cleaners. Line cooks scavenged pantries. Real estate agents patched clothing and maintained storefronts to keep people clothed.
It was order—at least, order of a sort. We got up, ate breakfast, worked, and came home. Lattimore grudgingly allowed me to stay on as medic. Though she made it clear she had expected more from me, she soon left me to my own devices, permitting me free rein of the Main Tent and entrusting most of the minor illnesses and injuries to me.
For a time, there were no bites. I didn’t miss them.
At the end of each day we ate pastrami MREs, washed our dinner dishes, and collapsed into bed, too physically tired and mentally worn out to discuss our situation. Tony refused to address anything serious, repeating the same feel-goodisms he’d been spouting right along, and Dax, upon realizing he would not be moved from the medical center, lapsed into something of a sullen temper.
Every night I asked about Gloria. Every night Tony rebuffed me, saying he hadn’t heard anything but that he was sure she was fine. Then he stomped upstairs to read.
I slept unevenly, often awakened by the cheering throngs at the soccer games. But I slept without fear, and that made me wonder if I might find some peace here.
I know. It was a stupid thought.
I had been out of Zombie Jail and in the workforce for about a week when another attack came.
I arrived at work at seven o’clock in the morning and was immediately confronted with a sea of injured soldiers. Lattimore gave me a quick rundown: a fence had fallen somewhere in the Quarantine Zone—that place was starting to sound like trouble—and while our brave soldiers had managed to fight back the tide of undead, many of them had been set upon and bitten. “This is the morning rush,” she said, shoving a kit at me. “Bites and injuries right now, and I’ve heard there’s some kind of sickness in one of the neighborhoods. If you think someone's contagious, for heaven's sake, they need to stay here and not go back into the city to spread things around. I’ll need your help cataloging the really bad ones.”
I only understood morning rush and bites, and I took the kit from her, numbly gazing over the wounded men and women. Other medics and nurses had dispersed already, working on those who seemed most bloodied. I searched for a victim—er, patient.
“Hey, Vi-beck.”
I swung around. Food Truck Guy sat on a cot, his right hand pressing a towel against a bloody wound in his left arm. I didn’t see anyone else with a more pressing hurt, so I made my way over and sat down beside him.
He immediately pulled the towel away, revealing a nasty bite that swiftly welled up and ran over with blood.
“Well, that can’t feel good. Take your jacket off.”
He obeyed, though his eyes didn’t leave me as he stripped off the jacket. He discarded it next to him and held out the arm again, and with the sleeve out of the way I realized he had not one but two bites.
“Nice to finally meet you,” he said. “I’m Logan.”
I poked at the arm, feeling his gaze on me. “Did you get bitten so you could come talk to me?”
He laughed aloud. “Would that be creepy? Maybe I just wanted the hot medic for once.”
Oh, great. Post-apocalyptic charmers.
“So where in our fair city have you been hiding?” he asked.
“Did some prison time,” I said. Hey, it wasn’t exactly a lie.
His eyes widened, and his smile took on a rather unnerving gleam. “Prison? What were you in for? Tell me everything.”
Apparently, a prison stint during the endtimes is considered interesting and worthy of further discussion.
I considered Logan for a few seconds. “My
friends and I came in with Gloria Fey,” I said, trying to gauge his reaction. If Tony had stonewalled me regarding Gloria, maybe this soldier wouldn’t. “Captain Keller threw us in the brig. They let me out because Lattimore needed the help.” I paused, not entirely sure whether I ought to go on, then decided I might as well get some information while I could. “Oh, and there was a zombie in the brig with us.”
He frowned. “Alfred?”
“Yeah, Alfred.”
“Yeah, he pissed off the captain.”
Man, I had so many questions. Did Alfred piss off Keller before or after he died? Who threw a zombie in a prison cell? How was Logan so nonchalant about it?
Instead of flooding him with questions, I prodded around the wound. He had definitely been bitten twice: once by a small set of jaws, and then by someone with a much larger mouth. I rinsed out the wounds carefully with a rag dipped in saline, then hunted around in my kit for antibiotics. “How did this happen? You have two of them on you?”
He shook his head. “The kid latched onto me first. Should’ve popped him before he came at me, but…kids are…he’s a kid, you know?”
I had popped a Ralphie lookalike in the lake in Old Town Muldoon, so I just nodded. “So Big Poppa came after you while you were distracted with the kid?”
“No…the adult came after me…it was odd. She went for the exact same spot as the kid. Like she smelled the blood or something.” He peered up at me. “Ever heard of that?”
Doctor Samuels and everyone else I talked to had been adamant that the undead could track via sound, but nothing else—and that they definitely were not bloodhounds. I had no idea if that were the case, and I wasn’t exactly willing to go out there and do heavy experimentation on them. I liked science and all, but not that much.
I considered the wounds. If revenants were going after blood now…
No. Not happening.
“I’m sure it was a coincidence,” I said.
He sat quietly for a few moments as I mopped up his arm and started repairing the worst of the damage. “Gloria Fey, huh?” he finally asked. “Wanted traitor to the good old United States?”
Grave New World (Book 3): Dead Men Don't Skip Page 4