Call Me Zombie: Volume I: Rose

by Jasmina Kuenzli

  I cross my arms. “Is that why you think we should stay and fight? Because you want to take them down?”

  “Excuse me, but who was the one who brought up the idea to fight in the first place?”

  “I just meant we were well-defended.”

  Perce rolls his eyes. “Of course you did.”

  That’s it. I grab his arm and pull him out into the hall. Tavi watches, wide-eyed, and Normani looks like she wants to throw something.

  Fine. Let her.

  I pull him down to the end of the hallway, where the old janitor’s closet is.

  “Hey, I’m not going in there. I may be horny, but I’m not stupid.” Perce raises his eyebrows at the janitor’s door.

  “Not funny.”

  “I am well aware that personal hygiene is no laughing matter. To your benefit, I might add— “

  “Will you just shut the fuck up?” I explode. “What the Hell is wrong with you, treating me like I’m an idiot just because we hooked up a week ago?”

  Perce takes a step back, stricken, “I wasn’t— “

  “Yes you were. And what the Hell was that with Normani back there? What, did you just go mark your scoreboard as soon as that happened? Do you tell every girl they ‘matter’ to you, at least long enough for you to get their clothes off?”

  His eyes seem to darken, and he takes a step toward me, “That’s not at all what happened and you know it. I told Mason. You avoided me. I just capitalized on it. You were up there, on that roof, just as much as I was. And” he does that infuriating smirk again, “I didn’t exactly hear you complaining.”

  He’s standing so close now, and it would be so easy to touch him again, to pull him to me and forget everything like I did a few nights ago, forget what I was trying to say and why I was trying to say it, forget why my gut creeps with horror every time I go outside, and the screams that make loud meetings sound like hell and every nightmare that left me lying awake, staring at the ceiling and trying not to shake into pieces.

  He’s so solid, and real. He’s right here, and he’s beautiful, and when he kisses me he makes me forget my own name. He makes me forget everything.

  I could pull him closer, my hands could slide across the bumps in his spine, and everything would be—

  Worse. Because eventually he’s going to pull away. Or something will take him away.

  The Jackals are coming.

  I itch to run the way I haven’t in weeks.

  I take a step back and look him in the eyes, willing my gaze not to drop to his lips. “This is stupid. We’ve got more important things to worry about than the rumor mill. Like why the Hell you think it’s a good idea for us to wait and kill as many well-trained, well-supplied gunmen with bows and arrows and martial arts and a handful of actual guns.

  His mouth twitches, and I can tell by the way he looks down at me that his mind is still on and how close I am to him. But when he talks, he sounds calmer and more mature than he did in the meeting. “We can’t let them decide the way the world’s going to be, Rogue. We have to be able to decide that for ourselves.”

  “Oh my god,” I roll my eyes, mirroring his expression from the meeting. “Stop being so melodramatic. It’s not the end of the world if we just leave. We can keep helping people that way.”

  His mouth flattens, hard now, cold. Like it’s been painted on. His eyes glitter. “What do you think that will do to their confidence? How long do you think it’ll take them to broadcast that everywhere they can: Look at how even our most formidable enemies tremble…”?

  “You read too much medieval fantasy.” I roll my eyes.

  He takes my hand. “Think about it. If we let them take us without a fight, what does that make us?”

  “It makes us alive! It makes us able to live and fight the zombies, the ones who started this whole mess! It makes us able to save more people.”

  “Is that what you really think? What if we can’t find another Heavenly Dreams? What do you think’s gonna happen when word gets out that the Hunters bow to the thugs and bandits?”

  “These aren’t the undead with rotting brains, looking to rip you apart and eat you! These are human beings.” The words I pressed down during the raid, subdued under the shouts in the meeting room, come rushing out of me. I remember my knife slashing across, the burst of blood as one of Jake’s men fell. “They bleed all red, Perce. They’re strong and fast and you don’t—you—.” I reach up to touch his bandana, pushing it back from his face.

  “Rogue,” he says softly, so softly that it’s like we’re up on the roof again, that moment of space and time where the nightmares receded and I could breathe and the world didn’t feel big enough to swallow me up in it. “Where did you come here from?”

  And I can tell by the way his eyes crinkle that he knows the answer, knows or guessed enough to realize the reason my nightmares push me awake most of the time. Before Levi there was Ben and before Ben there was Mom, and Jonathan, and their screams are the soundtrack to my sleep, lulling me into lullabies that turn every single word into a hiss, and force me to pull a trigger over and over, run through a never-ending trail of cackling trees, hold myself together even as I am being ripped apart.

  “Can you honestly tell me,” he says slowly. “That they don’t deserve to die for what they’ve done?”

  I think about Ben, going off into the woods with friends as we boarded up our windows and stockpiled food and water. Ben, laughing as I told him Mom and Jonathan were dead. Ben, sitting in a lawn chair and watching Turk’s eyes follow me everywhere I went, and never saying anything, never doing anything but drinking and smoking and going out to forget more.

  Even before they brought in those girls and the screams started and I felt a part of me break off and drift into the night, never to return, I wanted to kill him. I wanted to kill them all.

  And as I finally admit those words to myself, the reason for my support of our plan to stay and fight, the reason I went against Jake even though I knew it would make the nightmares worse, the reason I want to stay and fight, even if it means killing people whose flesh isn’t already rotting, comes out in stunning clarity.

  I no longer have room for compassion, for seeing them as human, if I can’t even see my own brother that way anymore. I clench my jaw. “You’re right. They deserve to die, and I want to do it.”

  “But they are human,” Perce reminds me.

  “They’re human,” I agree. “But it doesn’t matter.”

  “It doesn’t matter,” he repeats.

  “We might lose,” and the fear of that happening makes my vision blur for a second, imagining a hundred Turks gliding through the halls, peeking in doorways like an absurd game of hide and seek, hauling everyone outside and laughing as he pulls the trigger. Again and again and again.

  I push Perce’s bandana all the way back, until it comes off completely. He closes his eyes at my touch, and his hair feels silky soft against my fingers. “But they deserve to bleed for this, for all of this. We can’t let them win here.”

  “If we let them win here, then they’re only going to keep coming. Either we face them now, when we can get ready, or we face them later.”

  I nod. I get what he’s saying now. “Maybe we can’t beat them, but if we don’t try, we’ve lost already.”

  He’s so close, I can feel his heart beating. “Sometimes the only way to win is to show that you haven’t given up fighting. Besides, I think we can take them.”

  I smile as I kiss him, and instead of the pain and nightmares being wiped away, or forgotten, they come back harsher than ever. I see Jake in my mind’s eye, his promise that I can tell has Malia worried, even though she still won’t admit it. You are dead.

  Perce’s lips urge mine to respond, and I move them in sync with his, but I still see Jake’s cold smile. You are dead.

  We are not dead. We are not dead, we are here, we are together, we are staying alive even though it’s easier to die. We will fight.

  The Jake in my head la
ughs at my foolishness.

  You are dead.

  We will live.

  I insist the second voice is stronger than the first.

  Girls’ Night

  On top of the roof, I shiver. It’s not cold at night here, but the breeze sometimes blows at just the right angle to make the hairs stand up at the back of my neck and goosebumps crawl up my spine. I turn in a quick perimeter scan, wary of the whisper that seems to be carried in the fluttering of my hair at the nape of my neck.

  It’s been two weeks since we counted the votes. The votes were never really that close; even Mason thought that we should at least try to form a defense before backing off. The only one who was furious about the decision was Chase.

  When Mason announced the tally, his face fell. He screamed, “NO! YOU’RE MAKING A MISTAKE.”

  Next to Perce and Malia, my hands stained with the ink I’d used to write my choice, I felt a twinge of fear and guilt, looking at him. But mostly, I felt disgusted. How dare he think that we weren’t equipped to handle this?

  Chase’s reaction aside, we’d all hunkered down and accepted the new security that had sprung up in the wake of the imminent attack.

  Some thought we should take the fight to them, attack them where they slept. The two girls we had rescued, the ones Chase led us to, begged to sneak into their camp. Their young faces were scrunched up in misery as they pleaded with Malia to let them take them all out. “We’re quiet.” One of them promised. “They killed our mom. Please.”

  But Mason and Malia, with Lisa and Jeffrey backing them up, agreed it was too risky. There was no way to know for sure when they’d be there, how many they were, whether their prisoners would fight us or them.

  Besides, the two girls were eight years old.

  It sounded ridiculous to Mason at first, the idea that their captives would eventually join them, would agree and enjoy inflicting the same things that had been inflicted on them on others.

  Until I told him I had seen it.

  I pace around the edge of the roof restlessly, peering up and down, at the field that stretches in front of us, the trees where I know at least three of us patrol, hidden and silent. The dirt road bears no signs of having been used in years, like always.

  Mason’s been posting guards since he started this place, but after we brought Chase back, guard duty became more than just one person on the roof with a gun. Now it’s as many of us as can be spared, as many are willing and able to silently watch over the sleeping.

  Even though Mason isn’t letting us go out and bring people in anymore, we still have three families here, not including the kids we took from the activity center. At least twelve people that we need to protect. At least twelve people Jake and the gangs will rip apart if—when--they find us.

  I don’t know Mason as well as Malia does, but I don’t have to know him well to know that Chase’s comments about us stung him. That we could be baiting them by being here, that we could end up destroying the people we’re trying to save, rattles him. It’s the reason I’ve seen him every morning, walking through the woods with his bow strung, starting at the first sign of movement.

  So patrol’s become a constant rotating duty, and we’re feeling the strain. There are only twenty or so of us, and we need at least ten watching every night, positioned at all the possible entrances to the bed and breakfast, on the roof, roaming the woods.

  Even though I want to take them down, avenge and deliver justice with the skills I’ve developed here, I’m secretly relieved every time the sun comes up, and they’re still not here.

  It’s been two weeks now, and I still can’t sleep. Levi’s face screams my name in my nightmares, “Rose, Rose, Rose,” harmonizing with the BANG, BANG, BANG of my weapon, and I always wake up covering in sweat, my hand grasping at the handle of a gun that isn’t there.

  Before, it was always the inhuman faces that taunted me in my dreams. The black emptiness of them, the shuffling that was uneven and stilted and more terrifying for all of that, constantly coming forward.

  Even with Jonathan and Mom, the moments they died lacked the same monstrous quality as my nightmares. They hadn’t fallen ill when they died. My dreams see them as what they would have become, snarling, reaching for me, familiar features twisted into madness, the blackness pulling me in and down into swirls of red and black, dripping from my hands.

  But now, after Levi, it’s always the way they looked before. The way they looked when they were human.

  Levi is looking at me with childish devotion, a boy who hasn’t come to terms with a man’s body, imploring that I promised. I promised nothing would hurt him. And I say that he’s right, and I won’t, nothing will happen, but even as I’m saying it my hand is rising in front of me and the gun is firing, firing over and over as he screams, and I can’t stop shooting, my hand is not part of me, until he is blood and brain and I can’t see for the red clouding my vision.

  Jonathan smiles at me, telling me about his beach trip, how one of his friends tripped and fell on his face trying to impress a girl, and I’m laughing. We’re sitting on the couch like we always do, eating nachos, waiting for Mom to come in so we can start a movie, and then he’s putting a gun to his head and I’m reaching to stop him, but I’m too late.

  I’m too late and he becomes Mom, stirring a pan of spaghetti sauce, laughing with a glass of wine in her hand, and I’m picking up the gun stained with Jonathan’s blood and telling her I love her and shooting, over her laughter, one shot between the eyes, and I’m running out of the house, going back into memory, rushing to where I think Ben will be, and then I’m awake again.

  I can’t sleep, and with the extra patrols, Perce is not available to talk to me or distract me or make me laugh, so I’ve volunteered here, over and over, offering to be on the roof, forcing myself to face the fear of being swallowed up, running and moving constantly to stay awake, watching and listening, keeping silent vigil for the dawn, breathing a sigh of relief as it spells another missed opportunity for Jake, another attack that doesn’t come, and coming down for coffee before training with Mason again.

  I know that Malia and Mason, and maybe Perce, are worried about me. With my constant guard schedule, it’s impossible to talk to me anymore, other than brief mealtimes or updates from one guard shift to the next, or instruction during our training sessions. But they can tell I’m exhausted—it’s impossible to hide. Bags hang under my eyes in the mirror, darker every day, and I’ve barely been keeping down anything except coffee and toast.

  When I sparred with Mason yesterday, I was slower than usual. I’m starting to get to the point where coffee loses its effectiveness. Mason swung a hard punch at me, one I usually blocked or dodged, and I was on the ground, my jaw bursting with pain. Even in the instant after the blow, I could feel it swelling.

  “You know,” Mason said as I staggered to my feet. “Sleep deprivation really messes with your reflexes.”

  “I am sleeping,” I retorted, working my jaw.

  He raised an eyebrow, but before he could say anything, I swung at him, catching him on the shoulder. Not where I had been aiming, but a hit.

  Mason grinned in approval, and the next hour was spent in no conversation other than quick breaths and gasps, and the shuffle of feet over grass.

  It wasn’t like I had lied to him. I was sleeping. In small spurts, fifteen minutes between Mason’s sparring session and hunting with Malia, a few snatched hours after lunch, when everyone sat around and did nothing but chat about Jake and his gangs, bored with Mason’s rules about not going anywhere.

  But I hadn’t slept at night in two weeks.

  I’d read that going without sleep is like being drunk, but so far I’d stayed mostly alert, so I figured I was doing fine with what sleep I had. At least the nightmares hadn’t had time to haunt me either.

  The sky is beginning to lighten, the blackness fading lighter and lighter as dawn approaches. Another night has passed without an attack. I look down, and I see Mason emerge from the
kitchen, stretching and yawning. He was probably up all night cooking what we had left, sending it to the people on the walls when he wasn’t on guard himself.

  The front door slams, and someone strides outside, taking long, quick steps. I see a flash of red on his head—a bandana. Perce glances up at the roof for a moment, a hand shading his eyes. When he sees me, I raise my hand in a wave. He waves back.

  I’ve chalked up our lack of interaction to the increased amounts of patrol and training, but the truth is, I’ve still been avoiding being alone with Perce. I’m just not sure about anything, and he scares me.

  He scares me with his desire to live that burns so fiercely, and the way he can make me feel like the world is something worth holding onto. Every time I’m alone with him, the reasons I shouldn’t touch him, shouldn’t let him kiss me, fly out of my mind. It’s like the drop at the beginning of a roller coaster, too fast and reckless for me to even think.

  Perce drops to the ground and starts doing push-ups. “Show-off,” I mutter, but I can’t stop myself from smiling.

  “Enjoying the view?”

  I jump, and someone bursts out laughing.

  Malia stands there, grabbing her stomach with one hand and what looks like a bottle of wine in the other, cackling.

  “I was just— “I begin, with absolutely no idea how I’m going to finish my sentence.

  “No, no don’t mind me. Hang on.” Malia swaggers up to where I was sitting and looks down. Perce is sprinting now, up and down the field. He runs beautifully, his feet barely seeming to touch the ground before they bound off again.

  “Yep. Nice. I can see you were hard at work making sure our enemies weren’t invading, right?” Malia takes a swig from the bottle and looks at me, curling a piece of hair around her finger with one hand.

  “I was; I was just a little— “

  “Distracted.” Malia finishes quickly. But she doesn’t look angry; she looks amused. “I completely understand.” Her gaze drops to the ground again, watching Perce.

  “It’s all clear,” I talk quickly, trying to skate over the moment. “No sign of anyone, anywhere, the whole night.”