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

by F. J. R. Titchenell

  I don’t remember what all we talked about, it couldn’t have been anything that required too much movement or other animation, not with Norman and Claire passed out with their heads on my left knee and right shoulder respectively, and I’m pretty sure nominations for the best ever movie villain quote of all time took up a good third of it. I do remember that we were debating the merits of dream analysis, and I was just saying, quite honestly, that I would be drifting into something for us to analyze in the imminent future, when The Eagle Scout’s voice forced me to sit up.

  “Guys,” he said, “we might have a problem up here.”

  The sky was bright orange by that time, and so was its reflection in the spring remnants of the Rockies’ snowdrifts, leaving us just long enough to find a good sturdy building on the outskirts of the vacation developments to barricade into for the night. It was a gorgeous sunset, really, the kind, I was only just realizing in my almost-dream state of mind, that we usually only got in California after a major brushfire.

  Brushfire plus snowdrifts. Not a classic combination.

  I felt the dusting of ash in my airway right before the first zombie hit the window since Vegas.

  I wish to revoke the title of “extra crispy” from the zombies of the desert. The ones in the Rockies took that title firmly with the streaks of soot and fire-blackened skin they left on the glass. I jerked fully awake with another painfully vivid flashback to the joys of pre-apocalyptic, mass produced fried chicken, but with the aging, rest stop grade turkey and Swiss kneading sluggishly in my stomach at the time, at least this one had the decency to make me slightly sick.

  “Don’t tell me,” I said. “Denver’s on fire?”

  “Glenwood Springs,” said Rory with so little immediate reaction that there was sure to be a really big delayed one building up. “We’re not even in Carbondale yet. But yeah, probably.”

  “So?” I didn’t mean it to sound callous, really, I didn’t, but it wasn’t like I could be expected to be surprised by that sort of revelation anymore. “We weren’t going into the city anyway, were we? Can’t we just drive past it?”

  “That’s the problem,” said Rory, and she jerked me forward by the collar so I could see, making Norman and Claire knock heads behind me.

  The zombies were thicker than I expected, because their exodus from the cities ahead was funneled through one of the paved passes through the Rockies. I saw a few of them stumble off the edges right in front of me, some of them clear into oblivion, but most of them had at least enough instinctive sense to shamble on down the road in our direction. That alone would have been mildly alarming.

  The real problem was that the same thing had happened to the people of Colorado while they were alive, and when live people on the run start to burn, or just burn out, they usually don’t just disappear off the edges of cliffs or collapse into small, squishy speed bumps.

  They leave cars behind.

  It had taken a few tries to find a viable way out of L.A county, but the web of side streets through the suburbs there is so thick, the space to the east so flat and empty, there was always a way around the wrecks. The road out of (and, consequently, into) populated Colorado was stacked solid with ruined or abandoned cars, completely and inarguably impassable.

  By the time I’d processed that fact and woken Norman and Claire thoroughly enough to pass it along, Rory and The Eagle Scout had already moved on, very loudly, to whose fault it was.

  “Okay,” Rory was saying, “your first route didn’t pan out, we’ll just back up to one that cuts across into a less populated area.”

  “This is the one that cuts across into the less populated area,” The Eagle Scout snapped. “That’s why it’s Glenwood Springs we’re smelling instead of Denver. This was the best shot we had at crossing the Rockies directly, like you wanted.”

  I don’t remember whose idea it was. I’m not covering for either of them, I honestly don’t, and I didn’t bother trying to figure it out then. I just waited for the part of the argument where they stopped talking about anything relating to getting across the Rockies and started focusing on how we were going to get around them.

  “New York is to the north,” Rory was saying, “way to the north. I don’t care how long it takes us to get past them that way, we’d have to be closer when we do than if we have to go get ourselves abducted and probed down to fricken’ New Mexico.”

  “Aliens?” The Eagle Scout rolled his eyes. “Really? You want to work our travel plans around your fear of aliens?”

  “We’re mowing down flesh-eating zombies as we speak, and you haven’t even stopped to think about aliens? And I don’t even care if there aren’t any aliens, it’s still frickin’ New Mexico! It would need a bath and an exorcism to be a state!”

  “You’re thinking of New Jersey,” Norman mumbled, rolling over and brushing stray flakes of theatrical makeup off my jeans.

  “It’s the fastest way, I swear.” The Eagle Scout shoved the map in front of her face, stuck again in that limbo he had between comforting and berating. “Look, unless you’re suggesting that we double all the way back to Cedar Mountain, there’s only one road north from here, and parts of it don’t even have a name. There’s no guarantee we’d be able to steal more gas by the time we’d need it, and it cuts through pure rock until at least Casper. No alternate routes, absolutely no off-roading potential. If there’s anything, anything blocking it—snow, stalled cars, fallen UFOs—anything at all that we can’t move with our bare hands, which there almost certainly will be, we’ll be praying to make it back down to New Mexico before we freeze to death. Can Lis gamble that much time?”

  Brutal but to the point. That’s The Eagle Scout in a nutshell.

  It would be twenty-five miles back the way we had come before we would be able to start moving forward again, even in a roundabout way, and we only made it a little more than half of that before The Eagle Scout called a temporary surrender to the fading sunlight and directed us to the lookout post at the edge of a small, vacant campground.

  We were past most of the traffic, dead and undead, but he still insisted that we all barricade inside, out of sight, to avoid ending up on the receiving end of a siege by morning. One room, concrete floor, six of us, five sleeping bags, and in case you’re getting any creepy ideas about how we handled that little problem, I let Claire crawl into mine, nestled between Hector’s and Norman’s.

  Oh, and before you get all smug about how you would have thought far enough ahead to bring extra comforters from Whitetail, we did think that far, we just didn’t notice until the sun went down that they were barely thick enough to be worth accessorizing a real sleeping bag with.

  Not exactly comfortable, but very non-creepy, and we did survive even though it was exactly the sort of scenario we’d always joked was a few levels above our scouting level of hardiness and expertise.

  I even slept with Claire’s shared warmth almost making up for her snoring, though I don’t remember quite drifting into anything analysis-worthy after all. I would never have told Rory so, but the only realization I came to that night was that I would be very, very happy to take a detour through the UFO state if it meant being warm again for a while.

  CHAPTER NINE

  Nothing, Nothing Everywhere,

  and Not a—What the Hell is

  That Thing?

  I’m going to save us all a bit of time and curiosity whenever pit stops come up, since, by the nature of this story, there are quite a few of them.

  Whenever you stop to wonder, yes, Norman was still wearing that awful costume, and no, that really wasn’t that unusual.

  He’d had manias like it that had burned out sooner, like the time he’d tried to change his dominant hand and given up when he kept dropping his toothbrush. On the other hand, there was that time he’d carried a D20 in his pocket for almost a year and rolled it to predict the advisability of everything he did—and I mean everything—from eating a corn dog at lunch to whether or not he should sign up for the A
rgentinean Exchange Program if Rory refused to accompany him to the Spring Formal (thankfully the D20 declined almost as vehemently as Rory did).

  Based on the fact that the only clothes he’d kept in his duffle since Whitetail were the balloon artist’s collection of spare costumes, this looked like it was going to be the second kind of habit. I didn’t mention it after his first explanation, and after five or six reiterations, the others gave up, too. And really, was it that much weirder an affectation than the uniform The Eagle Scout still put on every morning with the bandana adjusted just so?

  The only thing about it that had me a little worried was how I couldn’t give Claire a hard time for how long her makeup ritual delayed us in the mornings when Norman’s was actually a few seconds longer.

  I timed them.

  The Eagle Scout took the first driving shift, the one that took us back to Grand Junction, where we took the turn to the south we had passed up the first time around. That’s the best evidence I have that the whole Rockies detour was probably his fault, the way he took it so firmly upon himself to fix it as well and as quickly as it could be fixed.

  Or maybe it was just because he liked to do as much of the driving as he could rationalize anyway. He did prefer it, which admittedly made it a pretty lame form of apology, but that in no way meant that it couldn’t be his idea of one.

  After that, the nothing around us was a little more scenic than the day before, but even pine forests and snowcapped outcroppings start to run together after a few hours, so much that they almost make you want to join in Claire’s endless list-making game. I could think of plenty of types of sandwiches she’d forgotten to include in her “different types of sandwiches” list.

  Norman filled in a few of them (BLT, egg in a nest, McRib), but when she switched to “different versions of Barbie,” he just started making stuff up. He managed to pass off “Whale Flenser Barbie” as an obscure Sea World cross promotion, and I think he got as far as “Ghostbuster Barbie” before Claire caught on, and “Gynecologist Barbie” before The Eagle Scout punched him hard enough on the arm to make him stop.

  “Would it kill you to be serious now and then?” I asked him even though I was laughing myself, and to be honest, I was mostly just trying to score a few cheap points with The Eagle Scout since we all seemed to be falling dangerously far behind on that front.

  Norman looked at me like he was about to make the deepest confession of his life and said, “You know something, Cassie? I think it just might.”

  He held my gaze for just a few seconds too long before breaking off laughing again, and when he did, I had to laugh extra hard with him to shake off the momentary too-serious feeling.

  It was one of those “be careful what you wish for” moments.

  I was glad for the ready gas cans and heavy steering wheel lock and all, but there were times when I would have killed to have a working stereo in that van instead.

  On the other hand, having one would also have given us one more thing to argue about. In fact, for the past year, music had been the one thing that could put even Hector in a confrontational mood.

  Yeah, that’s one of those things we were supportively not talking about.

  Anyway, without one, we argued about New Mexico.

  “I didn’t expect it to be so . . . wooded.”

  That’s all I said, honestly. I didn’t mean for it to set anything off. The air had been getting nice and warm and thick again as we headed south, closer to the texture I was used to, and I was actually feeling pretty good when I got to take my jacket off during a stop in the nice, dry, blind-spot-filled pine woods.

  The trees hadn’t faded back into flat desert like I’d expected but had followed us all the way into the habitable climate.

  Considering that the nearest city that showed up on our map went by the unprepossessing name of “Farmington,” the scenery was surprisingly close to what might be called breathtaking.

  “Are you sure we’re out of Colorado?” Rory asked when I pointed it out.

  “We saw the welcome sign,” The Eagle Scout reminded her.

  “Need a break from that?” Norman asked, offering to take the wrinkled map. What he meant was, “Need a break from that?” no more, no less. She’d been glued to it for about two hundred and fifty miles, long enough to make anyone lose focus after a sleepless night. But I could easily have told him how Rory would hear it.

  As much as I usually loved the way Norman could say all the things I never would, this wasn’t the first or the last time I kind of wished he could run them all by me first.

  “I can handle it!” Rory snapped. “We all took orienteering together, remember?”

  “Yeah,” said Norman, “we did. I finished the orange course, too.”

  “Oh, right,” said Rory. “It’s ‘helping old people across the street’ that you failed, right?”

  “He wasn’t just old, he was dead,” Norman defended himself on this point for about the hundredth time, and I could tell by the way he laughed at her that she was starting to get to him.

  Of course, she couldn’t tell.

  “You are so out of Scouts.”

  “We’re all out of Scouts,” Hector cut in blankly. “There is no more Scouts. There’s just us and what it taught us.”

  He held out a slightly melted Snickers bar.

  “Like what low blood sugar can do to a person’s judgment.”

  On second thought, maybe we should all have run our thoughts by Hector before trying to communicate them. I’m sure I couldn’t have pulled off getting the chocolate into Rory’s hand and the map into Norman’s with as little ugliness as he did.

  “Okay,” said The Eagle Scout because, of course, every slight change in arrangements required his approval, “but if you even think about telling me to make a left turn in Albuquerque, I swear I’m leaving you there.”

  I’m not sure Norman could have resisted, given a good opening, so it’s probably best that we veered north again and skirted Albuquerque by a wide margin.

  The trees eventually did give way to jagged orange rocks, which struck the compromise of making it possible to tell that space was actually going by without acting as a reminder of the previous day, and that had a certain calming effect on everyone for a while.

  But then we got into Oklahoma. A new state, a new argument.

  We kept mostly a straight course along our side of the northern border, but we did have to dip across it once or twice, and after his great restraint in New Mexico when Norman found himself briefly in Kansas and then not in Kansas anymore . . . well, I guess I’ve already given that punch line away.

  The state of the uninspired but aptly named musical, Oklahoma (yeah, Norman had a field day with that, too) was mostly flat again. At least a lot of it was covered by farmland, nicer to look at than emptiness, and potentially more useful.

  That was what caused the first dispute of some substance, a field of sugar snap peas, the first crop that looked ripe.

  Claire was the first to suggest that we stop to gather some, which came as close to turning me against the idea as anything could, but The Eagle Scout’s retort that we hadn’t come this far to die of E. Coli made me realize quickly just how delicious sugar snap peas sounded right about then.

  “We can’t just eat out of wrappers forever,” I put in.

  “Actually, we could,” said The Eagle Scout. “There’s plenty left in the world for how many people are probably left to use it.”

  “I’m not talking about running out.”

  “It’s a needless risk,” he said. “We’d be out in the open dodging them for something we don’t even have enough water to wash properly.”

  “Dodging what?” Claire asked.

  Oh, yeah, the zombies. I probably should have mentioned that they’d started showing up again. Not many, just one or two here and there, and not in great condition, most of them were at least missing sizeable pieces, but the shelter of the massive distances wasn’t perfect anymore. They’d had too
much time to spread. We were still more than three days’ walk from anywhere for a live person, but without having to worry about staying alive, the dead ones had been able to make much better time.

  Still, there were none to be seen at that moment, just miles and miles of sugar snap peas, unwashed or not.

  “Uh, I’ve actually been thinking about that,” Hector began tentatively. “Now that they’ve had some time to clear out, it might not be a bad idea to see if we can get close to an actual city. You know, somewhere with a real supermarket, water by the gallon, soap, some more blankets, full-sized toothpaste—”

  “Yay!” Claire cheered approvingly.

  “Maybe even a working phone or radio.” He directed this at The Eagle Scout, making the miracle of causing him to look thoughtful seem almost easy. “At the very least, there’s sure to be somewhere to clean what we pick.”

  The Eagle Scout pulled over, the steering wheel jerking a little with the ruts in the side of the road that he hadn’t quite slowed enough to handle yet. It’s really hard to judge speed when you can’t judge distance. When we did reach a stop, he looked thoughtfully at the map and then at the piece of junk where a stereo should have been for a few moments more. Half of us were already outside by the time he actually said, “Okay, we wash in Tulsa.”

  I would have been part of that half if I hadn’t been boxed in by Rory, who disembarked with the same “it’s a necessary evil” sigh and reluctant pace she used on stops of every kind. Norman muttered something about “not in Kansas” and “red poppy field” but then ran out past her anyway.

  Of course, the fact that there would be water in Tulsa didn’t actually mean the non-obsessive-compulsives among us were actually going to wait for it.

  I’d never really noticed how much I loved sugar snap peas until that day. In fact, I’m pretty sure I’d complained that their name was a lie, applied to something about as far from confectionary as you could get, but in that field with a perfectly temperate wind rising almost to the howling point and lifting the sweat-matted hair clean off my neck, I took it back.