Confessions of the Very First Zombie Slayer (That I Know Of)

by F. J. R. Titchenell

  The Eagle Scout had planned ahead, you could always trust him to do that, and he got us out of the mountains as far as possible from downtown anywhere, onto the emptiest, least claustrophobic roads he could. A lot of lanes were still blocked, but there was technically no traffic. There were hardly any signs left of real human life at all, just the occasional flicker of a battery light or fire inside one of the trashed buildings that I hoped meant someone was trying to read or cook.

  The further we got from the relative isolation we’d started from, the thicker the zombies were, and so was the obvious destruction. Even on side streets, there was always at least a small crowd of them, and after a lot of twisting and turning and doubling back through that mess, there was a very boxed-in feeling, almost enough that I might have had the urge to hyperventilate a little if Claire hadn’t already been doing that enough for all of us put together.

  “Your brother’s a very good driver,” Hector noted to her in a way that I know was meant to be very comforting.

  “Yeah,” Norman agreed. “Betcha most of the ones he squashes’ll be in jeans. You want to go for pajamas or business clothes?”

  The next one to run out in front of us was in a lacy floral nightgown, making Claire squeak, “Pajamas.”

  “Damn, in the lead already,” I said. “Business clothes for me.”

  “Dun, dun, dun,” Norman started to sing, “Another one bites the—One for me!” he exclaimed. “Another one bites the—Oh, yeah! Look at those rhinestones fly!”

  The Eagle Scout maintained his obligatory expression of disapproval and stubbornly refused to swerve for the sake of anyone’s count, but he didn’t try to stop us either, probably because that would make Claire stop laughing which would make it only a matter of time before she would burst into full-blown tears.

  We managed to avoid that, thank God, but we lost count somewhere in Apple Valley when we fell into arguing over what those flannel pants that are printed to look like jeans count as, and given enough time, exhaustion always trumps adrenaline anyway, so the mood was already less than chipper when The Eagle Scout pulled into a gas station.

  “I don’t think we’re safe here,” Rory said as if the rest of us couldn’t hear the undead screams not too far behind us. “We’re too close to—”

  “This is as far from anywhere as we can get without stopping somewhere,” The Eagle Scout pointed to the glowing warning light on the gas gauge. “Hector, Norman, I’ll fill the tank and the cans while you two stand guard, and Claire can work on fitting everything in the van so we’ll all be able to get back in it fast.” Somehow, it didn’t surprise me that the Kentmobile came pre-equipped with spare gas cans. He turned to Rory and me. “You two, get to the minimart, close the door behind you, and grab whatever you can until we pull around to pick you up. Mainly, we need protein and water, lots of water, and extra gas cans if there are any left. Everyone ready?”

  “Hey!” said Rory. “Why do we do the shopping? Do you know how to get gas from a gas station when the power’s out?”

  “No,” said The Eagle Scout, “and if you’d asked me that before we’d started, I would have told you, but now I can either figure it out when we get out there, or we can all give up and sit right here for the rest of our lives.”

  Rory stormed out to the minimart without waiting for me.

  On a more idealistic day, I would have stayed and taken over for her, calling The Eagle Scout on his obvious, undisguised bullshit of not wanting me watching his back with my unrivaled non-vehicle-assisted kill count. But this time there was something else I had to do, and my hunting-free, gathering-only assignment was going to make it a lot easier. Not that it had any chance of actually being easy.

  It was the part of having friends that I liked least, the part when you have to second guess whether or not you have them at all. It’s still just a form of listening, but listening is hardest when you have to listen to the blame that falls on you. It wasn’t like anything I could do or say could be worse than doing nothing. At least, that’s what I always told myself in such situations.

  When I caught up with her, Rory was leaning against the counter, her head resting on her hands, her fingers smearing the scratcher lotto ticket display.

  “It’s not too late to tell us all to go back and jump in the water hazard,” I said from the doorway. “I wouldn’t recommend it, but it’s not too late.”

  She didn’t lift her head, and I didn’t move to an angle that would have let me know for sure whether or not she was crying. “That’s okay,” she said. “I wouldn’t know the first thing about how to loot gasoline either.”

  I nodded, even though she wasn’t looking at me. “Yeah, we’re kind of going to need him. Doesn’t mean you have to like him.”

  She snorted. Her sinuses definitely sounded wet. I braced myself before getting to the point.

  “Or me,” I said.

  Rory took a breath, stood up straight, but didn’t turn around. “We haven’t talked much lately,” she said. “I mean, really talked.”

  I wondered for a moment whether we had anything left to really talk about, or if we had run out when I’d moved from horseback riding with the Girl Scouts to camping with the Boy Scouts and realized that there was more to boys than the relative dreaminess quotient of their eyes. I wondered when I’d stopped putting in the effort to listen to all the stupid, pointless shit she said, and whether I still could like I did whenever Norman went on his endless tangents about the growing, art-crushing influence of CGI, or if my concentration would fail like it did with the jocks. I wondered if she still really talked to Lis, and what they talked about.

  But all I said was, “I know.”

  “If you’d stayed and talked with us instead of running off to play guns with them, she’d still be here.”

  “I know,” I repeated. “Do you hate me?”

  Ask a straight question, sometimes you get a straight answer. Sometimes. Like, three times out of five.

  “No,” said Rory.

  Call me a sucker, but I believed her. I know we’d drifted, but I was pretty sure I still knew her well enough to trust my instinct on that.

  “So, what do you want me to do?” I asked.

  She put up a hand like she was nursing a headache, like she always did when she needed to wipe her eyes, and finally, she looked at me, her face as fresh as a Lysol-drenched living room, like when one of our mothers was expecting guests. If you’d only had a snapshot of her face at that moment, you’d never have guessed that wet sinus sound a few seconds earlier.

  “Help me find her,” she said simply. “And don’t ask me to be completely fair or reasonable before then.”

  Two for two, when it came to simple answers. Not bad, given three out of five odds.

  “Deal,” I said.

  Finally, she let me hug her, awkwardly and only for a few seconds, but she did. And maybe I should have been thinking about how exactly I was going to maximize the odds of successfully keeping my promise, but all I was thinking about was how, eventually, I was going to have to get used to Rory not smelling like Rory because there was going to be nobody manufacturing vanilla body spray anymore.

  I let go when the door opened loudly behind us.

  “Yes, perfect!” Norman exclaimed, and I looked up, wondering if he’d thought of some vital tool we didn’t know we were looking for. After a year and a half, nine years if you count just knowing him without hanging out on purpose, you’d think I’d have known better.

  He tore a scrap of wax paper from under the cold, idle hot dog heater and wrapped it around the pocket comb in his hand. Norman never carried a pocket comb, but I didn’t waste a question on that. He put the comb in his mouth and blew.

  New York, New York, the fourth note squeaked and went sharp.

  “Wait, I’ve got this,” he shushed me as if I were just waiting to criticize his kazoo skills.

  New York, New York—

  He stopped short on the second try to give himself time to run into the
stockroom, out of sight, just as The Eagle Scout tripped over himself running in after him. It was around then that I remembered who it was I knew who did carry a pocket comb.

  “Norman, I swear . . .” The Eagle Scout recovered enough to reroute his momentum into the stockroom after him, his voice getting muffled as he slammed the door and stomped up a set of stairs. “If you break a single tine.”

  I doubled over laughing. With Lis still freshly missing, I didn’t want to be too loud about it, so I did that silent, diaphragm laugh, the bottling-up laugh that sometimes distills itself and becomes several times as funny as it started out. This was one of those times.

  Rory marched over to the glass front door to check that it was locked.

  “Honestly, Cassie,” she said, “I don’t know how you live with that.”

  It didn’t sound like she was attacking me, it sounded like she was making an attempt at really talking, so I made an attempt at really listening, and really answering.

  I took a deep breath to stop the laughter and refill my lungs, which had that amazing refreshed feeling you can only get from successfully stretching out a stiff muscle.

  “Honestly, Rory,” I said, “I don’t know how you live without it.”

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  “Mellon” Might Not Cut It

  This Time

  So much for a quick, easy in-and-out supply run.

  The screamers we’d been hearing through fences and hedges had broken onto the parking lot by the time we’d filled the first bag, and even after Hector had circled in the van a couple times to distract and crush as many as possible, The Eagle Scout, Rory, Norman, and I had to fight all the way from door to door.

  Maybe it was stupid to stop for the newspaper from the stand outside, but if it had been your face on it, next to the face of your dead crush, and the words, “FIRST OF MANY?” in big, all caps news header print, would you have been able to leave it alone?

  I’ve got to admit, even though I’d always been well taken care of, nice school district, all the extracurriculars I’d wanted, updated phone and computer and all that, there was a giddy little thrill to just taking that newspaper, not to mention about a month’s supply of Twinkies, Power Bars, Slim Jims, and Smartwater, without owing anyone anything for it.

  I could get used to that.

  Not being able to buy a nice hot serving of nachos to go with them, Google the anonymous snippet of song lyrics repeating maddeningly in my head, or walk across an outdoor parking lot without having to fight for my life on the other hand . . . that was going to take some more adjusting to.

  The space around Rory in the back row was quickly filled in by Claire and her personal bags, and The Eagle Scout claimed the middle one right away, dragging Norman in beside him, so he could keep lecturing him while navigating at the same time, so I settled for shotgun, next to Hector in his less than entertaining “don’t talk to me, I’m trying not to crash and die” mode. If I’d had something better to drink than Smartwater, I could have amused myself by taking shots for every time I felt him graze those bumpy reflector things that separate the lanes.

  Yeah, I had the newspaper, and being as far as I was from Rory spared me the trouble of keeping the picture hidden as I read it, but it was only worth a couple minutes.

  Since these were the last papers ever printed, they stayed on the rack for a lot longer than their recommended shelf life. In fact, as I write this, most of them are still there, some of them still readable. But if you’re reading this far enough in the future that they’ve all disintegrated too far for you to know what I’m talking about, here’s the gist:

  Boy meets girl, boy becomes zombie somehow, girl kills boy, girl goes into police custody, zombies start popping up elsewhere, this reporter believes girl might have had something of value to tell us, police uncooperative, girl not available for comment, blah, blah, blah. All the stuff I already knew, the stuff you already know, even if you’ve never read anything other than this book in your life.

  I’ve seen similar articles in a lot of different publications since then, all pretty much the same, mostly true, completely useless. There was never any explanation for what actually happened to us. There probably never will be.

  And that’s about all I could read anyway before getting really, really carsick, leaning against the glass and waiting for something to help pass the time that didn’t require taking my eyes off the road scrolling by beneath us. And waiting.

  And waiting.

  There’s one thing about the U.S that you can’t learn just by growing up in it, or going to school in it, or watching too much Cops: It’s big. I mean, really, really big.

  Okay, yes, that was in the textbooks. I did learn how to arrange most of the states on a blank map as a kid, and I’m sure at some point I jotted down the figure of how many miles it is from coast to coast, and maybe how many feet there are to a mile, though I don’t remember that one exactly, but at some point, having all the pieces doesn’t mean your brain can actually fit them together. It’s like trying to do a five-thousand-piece jigsaw puzzle on a fold-up card table with a lazy Suzan in the middle of it. You can see the scale-model picture on the box, and you can make little parts of the real thing, but it’s not the same as seeing it all.

  You can know how many copies of your coffee table can lie end to end between your front door and the Great Divide, but it’s not the same as watching it go by, and by, and by, imagining what it would be like to walk across that space, what it would be like just to be dropped in the middle, how completely trapped you could be without any walls, or fences, how insignificant all the movement you could manage would be against the pure vastness of the continent.

  On the plus side, zombies can’t drive, so once we’d gone a few days’ walk from what had been, until recently, civilization, we stopped seeing them as well.

  I’d thought it was a pity at first that The Eagle Scout was able to arrange such a good detour around Vegas. I’d always wanted to go there, and there would be no one to kick us out of the casinos now, not that we could play the slots or anything, but at least we could see them, maybe stop for lunch around a blackjack table or something, but the smell of the wandering corpses we started seeing around the same time the Vegas skyline came into view kind of turned me off the idea. I don’t know if I’d just lost my acclimation to it as soon as we’d gotten away from L.A, or if the sun-baking of the ones in the desert made them that much worse, but I was glad when we got back out of range, far enough to give our legs a real stretch at the Utah Welcome Center, secure in the knowledge that even if every zombie in the world suddenly began running straight at us, we’d be long gone before they could catch up.

  The Eagle Scout didn’t really take advantage of this for his own legs, as long as they were, and as obvious as it was that they were fast asleep when he tried to step outside. One beeline to the rack of maps and guidebooks, and he was curled right back up on the uncomfortable thin-carpet-over-concrete gift shop floor.

  One thing about the desert, other than the terrifying size of it and the extra-crispy decomposition style of the zombies, there are not a lot of good places to use the bathroom.

  I don’t mean the distance between rest stops, which sort of goes along with the mind-boggling-size thing. No, by the time we got out there, rest stops were only good for looting purposes, and decently sized bushes had become much more important for casual use.

  Well, for about half of us they were important.

  I’ve spent a lot of time around guys, not just since I really started to notice the cute ones, but when I was little because they were what most of my parents’ friends happened to have. I’ve been accused plenty of times of wanting to be one. Actually, that one’s come up almost as often as “slut.”

  Here’s the truth: I like them, I click with them, and yes, I paid enough attention in history class to know how pissed off to be at the unfair advantage they’d have if we were all spontaneously teleported to another randomly determined place and ti
me, but in my own world, this was the first time I really, truly envied them.

  When the toilets stopped flushing.

  After the first few stops, they hardly bothered looking for anything resembling bushes anymore. It was just a turn, a zip, easy as that. It made me gag a little the first couple times, but after that . . . envy. Just envy. No looking for a safe way into the natural blind of a prickly pear thicket, no fiddling with paper, no dirty looks for having to use bottled water on their hands.

  I’d never really been into the whole “let’s all go to the bathroom together” girl thing before, even when it just meant adjacent stalls and bra-adjusting in the same mirror. It was on the road where I started to understand it, where I got the idea that maybe it was a tradition that predated indoor plumbing.

  Rory and Claire started taking turns holding a sheet up in front of each other, and I only lasted a few stops before I had to give in and join their rotation.

  They were a lot more talkative than the prickly pear, particularly Claire, but at least they caused fewer splinters.

  The convenience store section of the Utah Welcome Center was sparser than that first gas station, but at least it was untouched, and its fridges had doors, so the sandwiches and yogurt inside were still edible.

  I don’t care how many times I’ve said I could live on nothing but Hostess cupcakes. I was wrong. The charm wears off by the end of lunch time, and by the time we got to those sandwiches, they counted as an early dinner.

  I’m not sure if it was meant to be a reassurance or a demand when Rory and The Eagle Scout gathered us back into the van before any of our spines had truly unknotted, and he told her he was sure we’d get around Denver by bedtime.

  I don’t mean it as a compliment or anything, but I think that was the first instance I witnessed of The Eagle Scout being wrong.

  He took the front seat this time for navigational purposes. From the backbench, it was easy to ignore their bickering, and I passed a few hours in whispered conversation with Hector, who had the middle row all to himself.