Malia’s talking, but I’ve lost track of things. The sun is coming up, shining down on the clearing where everyone’s training, and I notice how happy everyone looks. The older ones, the ones I assume are in charge because of their slightly exasperated expressions, laugh as they help a kid off the ground, and one of the girls brushes her arm across a boy’s while she leans in to him, lips moving quickly. The boy is smiling like he knows a secret, looking down at her and whispering something in her ear that makes her blush and smile back.
And next to them, a girl with a red bandana around her braids fires arrows with unerring accuracy, reloading and hitting the center of the target every time. When she runs out of arrows, the crowd lined up behind her starts to cheer, and Perce, wearing a black t-shirt and a red bandana that pushes his black hair back from his head, runs forward and hugs her. Her steely focus melts into a shy smile.
“Hey, Bitch, excuse me? What are you looking at?” Her gaze follows mine.
“Oh, him,” she scoffs.
“I was just watching that one girl shoot. She’s really good! The one with the braids,” I point her out.
“Oh yeah. Traina. Yeah, she’s like, a total badass. Came here with no one, looking like the devil was on her heels, just said, ‘I need to know how to shoot.’ So we taught her.”
“Why not teach her how to use guns?”
“Because arrows can be retrieved. Bullets can’t. We’ve got a weapons locker with everything from a Colt to an Assault Rifle that Neverland found in an old ranch house, and you saw the grenades yesterday, but we only use them for raids.”
“So how do you know people will know how to use them?”
Malia shrugs. “We let them hold the guns, aim, them, walk around with them. But we just can’t find bullets fast enough to replenish our supply.” A frown creases her eyebrows. “I don’t know what will happen when we run out of bullets.”
“Why don’t you get to a base?” I ask again. “They’d give you unlimited weapons and ammo.”
Her face smooths into stone. She clenches her jaw. “I’m not going to Fort Sam.”
“Why not?” I wish she would tell me, instead of giving me these cryptic answers. It’s making the whole thing feel fragile, like it could fall apart at any second. It’s making me feel like that moment of lightness I felt, surrounded by people screaming and throwing grenades at the dead world, was as foolish as a lightbulb trying to burn out the Sun.
I want to run again.
“They’ll separate me and Mason. Take away everything we’ve been working for and claim it as their own.” She says, still staring at the groups of campers.
I can tell there’s a bigger story than that. Her eyes have faded away, like she’s looking at something only she can see, something that broke her in pieces and sent her running here in the first place. I want to know why she looks so afraid, but I’m afraid, too. I’m afraid the answer she gives me will be one that makes everything, even this, even me running from Ben, back all the way to the first time Jonathan realized he was turning, tear apart, so I have nothing to hold onto anymore.
Then she blinks, and the same self-satisfied cockiness is back. “So you fight bad guys?” I raise an eyebrow.
She grabs my hand. “We. We fight evil.” Her mouth quirks into a side grin, and what she says next is almost comical in its sincerity. “We take the lost, the abandoned, the ones who can’t play by anyone’s rules except their own. We give them weapons and a schedule, and a point to move toward. We give them targets that have taken their houses and killed their families.”
“But we are not going to take them away from themselves.” She nods her head at the hand-to-hand range, where Mason is comforting a boy who looks almost his age, crying on his shoulder. She directs my attention to Traina, who is holding the hand of a small, chubby boy, leaning against him while they watch Perce teach a redheaded kid to shoot.
“We don’t just give people a way to survive.” Malia says. “We’re not interested in drilling, in chain-of-command or orders, or firing blindly because something moved and you’re just too god damn scared to do anything else.” Her voice has venom in it now, like she’s arguing with someone. “We’re not going to stop letting kids be kids.”
Perce looks up from the red headed kid and sees us watching him. He smiles at us, leans down, pats the kid on the shoulder, and jogs over.
“Hey, Malia. Rogue.” His eyes slide to mine, then rake up and down my body, slowly. “Nice outfit.”
“If you keep objectifying my new best friend, I’m going to take you into the hand-to-hand range and kick your ass, and I’m gonna make this whole place watch, and they will laugh at you for the rest of your life because a girl beat the shit out of you.”
Perce’s face still holds the same self-satisfied grin. “Malia, getting my ass kicked by you is literally the least embarrassing thing that can happen. Remember the first time you came here?”
Malia laughs. “Fair point.”
Perce’s eyes meet mine and hold me there. “Malia’s like, a super-ninja black belt.”
“I was in Mixed Martial Arts, weirdo.”
Perce leans down to me, and I feel my heart stutter. “I suspect she’s a super-spy,” he stage-whispers. “Top-secret, made in a government lab, specifically designed to train the counterinsurgency against zombies.”
Finally, he looks away, and I’m free to look at Malia again, who rolls her eyes. “You’d just never done anything except bar fights your whole life.”
Perce continues on like she isn’t talking. “You should have seen when she took on Mason. Mason’s like, the shit. Best at karate I’ve ever seen, and she nails him in 3 moves. And then, that night, she nailed him again.”
Malia punches him in the arm. “Keep talking. Seriously.”
Perce looks at her for a long minute, like he’s about to say something else, but suddenly we hear, “PERRRRCCCYYY! HELP ME!!” The red headed kid is holding the bow, looking forlorn, staring up at the tree where an arrow is lodged.
“Ed, what did I tell you? Don’t start shooting unless I’m there!” Perce shakes his head and turns to leave, brushing his hand along my arm as he goes. I shiver.
Malia snaps her fingers in front of my face. “Come on!” She starts walking toward the circle in the back, where Mason’s blonde head is visible, grappling with Jeffrey. Mason flips Jeffrey over his shoulder and onto the ground.
“I don’t think he needs to test me,” I say hurriedly, “I’ve never done any of this before.”
Malia’s not even listening; she’s taking long strides across the grass, eyes still on Mason. “You had those knives with you when we found you. That means you can fight. We need to see what you do when you’re faced with a situation you can’t throw things at.”
“But why would that even happen? Zombies aren’t gonna stop if I punch them.”
Malia shakes her head. “This isn’t about the zombies.”
I know what she isn’t saying. It’s about the Jackals. My stomach twists.
Something touches my shoulder, and I whirl around to see Perce, smiling sheepishly at me, like he’s been caught in mischief. His eyes are the color of autumn leaves, burnished brown and gold. The sun catches his eyelashes, and he leans in close and brushes his lips against my cheek. “For luck,” he says.
Before I can ask him what’s going on, why he was with those girls last night, why he’s treating me like I matter when I clearly don’t, he’s gone, loping back towards the archery group, who are making, “Ooh” noises.
I want to run up to him and kiss him, or maybe just run away. Get out of this freaky zombie summer camp and find a loft somewhere where I can hole up, gather supplies, stay out of sight, and wait to die.
But instead I turn and run up to Mason and Malia, who are watching the whole display with identical expressions of exasperation. It confirms what I’ve been told about Perce, but it doesn’t do anything to dampen the slight leap in my chest, the tingling sensation where his lips brushed
against my cheek.
Mason smiles at me, and it contains none of the flirtation in Perce’s gaze, or the challenge he reserves for Malia. It’s more like a school nurse checking you for a fever. Concern, benevolence, protectiveness.
I understand why people follow him everywhere. Mason makes you feel like you’re important.
“Come on, Rogue.” He says. “Let’s see what work we have to do with you.”
I feel the blood drain from my face. “Look, I’d rather just um, train as, um, a beginner or whatever. I don’t know anything about fighting, and I can’t even— “
Mason holds up a hand. “Calm down. This isn’t Ultimate Fighter. I just want to see where you’re at, what your instincts are.” He pulls me into the circle and holds my hands in front of my face.
“Now, the first thing you need to know about this is to keep your guard up.” I raise my fists the way I’ve seen people do in movies, in front of my chest. “Not bad, but keep them up higher, in front of your face. Good. Now, I’m just going to— “
Suddenly, I’m on the ground, feeling a stinging pain in my ear. I didn’t even see his fist coming. I stand up slowly, but I don’t feel dizzy. Mason stands back a little, a slight frown on his face. “I need you to try to block those, okay? I’m not gonna hit you hard enough to really hurt you, but you’re still gonna have some bruises.”
My breathing quickens. I nod.
“Okay.” Mason says, closing in at me again. He reaches for my waist, but I swing a fist at his jaw. He has to swerve to avoid it, taking a few steps back. “Not bad, not bad.” He’s grinning now. “That’s what I like to see. Make sure you do the punch with your whole body, though. Not just your hand. Keep your thumb outside of your fist.”
I feel everything inside me light up, the way it did on that rooftop, when we were all whooping and cheering and nothing could stand against us. Mason seems to slow down in front of me, and it’s easy to see the way his eyes flick to my shoulder, his fist swinging. I spin out of the way, and I come out of my trance long enough to hear an appreciative whoop from Malia.
The air whooshes out of me, and I’m on the ground. I panic for a second, afraid that I can’t breathe. I finally get air back in my lungs, and I let out a gasp, looking up at the sky, and a familiar blonde head. “That was cool, Rogue. That was almost like you’d trained before.” His eyes narrow, but I don’t react.
I haven’t trained before, but I’ve learned to stay out of the reach of Turk when he’s drunk, and when Ben’s too drunk to notice him sidling toward me, trying to wrap himself around me.
“You have good instincts.” He reaches a hand down and pulls me up.
“Thanks,” I say. I feel refreshed, clean. The way I used to when I went on long runs on winter mornings. Like I’m starting over.
Hours later, I’m sitting next to Malia, inhaling a grilled cheese sandwich, trying to ignore the stinging pains in my arms. Mason drilled me on blocking until my arms burned to lift them in front of my face, and my forearms feel like they’re going to be permanently reddened by his blows.
I’ve never been so tired in my life, and I know that tomorrow will dawn painful and messy, because the soreness is already starting to set in. Next to me, Malia eats slowly and methodically, glancing around all the while, eyes scanning the tree line and the sentries positioned in trees Even though she seemed to do twice the training I did---jogging from archery to knives to fists to guns and back again, spending at least an hour at each, she’s practically bouncing in the stool, which she insisted upon dragging out to watch the sunset.
In front of us stretches the field everyone’s been training on, the ground muddied up towards the edge of the trees from the hand-to –hand fighting. I can feel the humidity from the day steaming off the ground. It’s hot and sticky, and if not for the screen over the porch, I feel like we’d be eaten alive by mosquitoes.
The tree line, at the end of the field, stretches in front of us farther than we can see, far enough that I can forget about skyscrapers and quarantines and clogged city streets, that I can pretend things like car crashes and screams and blood-stained mouths are just a nightmare, a bad dream I can wake up from.
It’s so normal, to be here. Tired after a long day in the sun, working hard. Eating an old-fashioned grilled cheese sandwich with a friend. It’s so typically American and normal, and it hurts so much the more I think about it, the more I stare at the horizon and the sunset, purples and pinks and orange clouding across the sky, because I feel like everything could be normal and okay again, and I could look at this sunset without wondering if it is my last, wondering instead about great food and boys and a long day of fun tomorrow.
I can close my eyes and go back to summer camp. It felt like this. I had sunburned lips and dirty fingernails and badges of bruises that I showed off like battle scars, and I was having the time of my life. Camp was the last good thing I got to do without my family, before Ben became a teenager and an addict, and Jonathan grew up, and suddenly I was the one doing the grocery shopping and taking an extra job to help out with the rent, and camp was a distant, sunlit daydream that I indulged in for two minutes between orders at the deli.
I blink, ashamed to notice the tears gathering in my eyes. The sun is sinking lower now, turning the sunlit day into a yellow-washed dusk, and it’s all so achingly familiar. And suddenly, it occurs to me, for the dozenth time, that this is After. This is After, and the camp was Before, and all I want in the entire world is for this to be Before.
I’m never going to be a kid at camp again; there’s no way there will ever be kids having fun at camp, worried about nothing other than what’s happening tomorrow, when every single second the weight of millions dead and missing and clawing at me out of the dirt threatens to swallow me whole.
I feel a pressure on my hand, and I look up to see Malia grasping it, looking at me with her head cocked to the side. “I feel like you’re getting all melodramatic on me. But here with the Hunters, we don’t have time for you to fall apart over the metaphorical resonance of the sunset. So, if you’d kindly just eat your grilled cheese and wait for Perce to get here, that would be excellent.”
I look around, making sure no one is able to overhear. Everyone else seems to be inside, or in the kitchen. I wave my arm around the Bed and Breakfast, the fields, the kids eating together in the house behind us. “It’s all so normal, and all it does is make me think that we’re never gonna have any normal again. Everything is just going further and further toward bad. How the Hell am I not supposed to think about it?”
“I didn’t say don’t think about it. I said don’t get all dramatic.” Malia rolls her eyes. “Oh, poor me, the sun rises and sets on a zombie-apocalypse world, grilled cheese is so delicious and it reminds me of home and Mom and apple pie, oh if only we could go back to before.”
I rip my hand out of hers. “What the Hell is with you?”
Malia shakes her head. “It’s not about you being sad, Rogue. We’re all sad. We’re all sad and anxious and fucking pissed, because every day we get to go kill a bunch of undead assholes, only to come home with the knowledge that we’ll be doing it again and again until one day we’re too slow and they take us, wondering if it would be easier to save the manpower and put a bullet in our skulls now, before we can end up hurting anyone else.” She stops as though the breath has been cut off, and I seize my chance—
“Well I’m not gonna sit here and pretend everything’s fine and this is all just a vacation when the world is like this. I’m not gonna be the person who’s finally happy for the chance to live the Apocalypse like they did in all the movies. I just want my family back. I want to go home.” The last word comes out choked sounding, and I feel a tightness in my throat and chest. I take a breath. “Why are we even here, Malia?”
“No one’s keeping you here, Rogue,” Malia said, her voice low and even. “If that’s what you really think, if you really think that all this is the proverbial treat dangled in front of a hamster on an exercise
wheel, then get off the wheel. Get the Hell out. You might be right about all this, about it all being pointless, a way to fill up time, and maybe you’re right, but I don’t care. If you’re gonna stay here, you’re not going to shut yourself out. Leave, right now. I’m not stopping you.”
She’s trying to trick me into finding a reason to stay. I don’t care.
If I learned anything from Ben, it’s that trusting anyone only gets you left alone. People might say they love you , but they’ll leave you. They’ll leave every time.
And I’ve always tried to be the one to leave first, crashing through the woods, running down the road to Chinook, covered in sweat but glad to be at least moving, getting away, because where I had been before was only what happens after the good part ends and everything twists into bad, and you look around a dark room with no windows and wait to die.
I should leave now. Get out of here before something bad happens again, before a raid goes bad and Malia comes back as a shell, before I have to go out and act like everything is going to get better when I know it isn’t. What’s the point of pretending?
I can’t do this forever. I don’t even know if I can do this for another day, run and fight and cheer on the destruction, just so I can feel alive for a few seconds.
I start to stand, and Malia grabs my hand again, pulling me down next to her. “I know you’re scared, Rogue.” She says quietly, her eyes steady on mine.
I turn my gaze away. “That’s not even my name.”
“You’ve got to learn to let people in.”
“Why? What’s that gonna do? It’s just gonna make it worse when they die. Or I die. We’re all fucking dying, and it’s gonna hurt a hell of a lot less if I just make it so nothing matters except me.” My mother would have scoffed in disapproval at how selfish I sound, how angry and resentful and unchristian, to care more about self-preservation that the lives and well-beings of others, to prefer solitude and life to companionship and death, to walk away to where I won’t get hurt anymore.
Call Me Zombie: Volume I: Rose Page 6