“Does she like sugar snap peas?” Norman asked. I didn’t mind him cutting in. It was better than waiting for The Eagle Scout to do it.
“They’re gumophores, mostly, Pagliacci,” said Caleb. He lifted an uncertain eyebrow at Norman’s costume.
“Don’t ask,” said Rory, and she and The Eagle Scout shared a rare, joint eye roll.
Caleb nodded and seemed to file Norman diplomatically in a “miscellaneous” folder in his head, somewhere separate from the spectrum that includes the levels “Eagle Scout” and “Zoo Volunteer.”
“But you can give it a try,” he went on. “They’ll go for insects and fruit when they can find them, and she’s probably hungry enough to try anything right about now.”
The guilt again, this time without the relief.
Norman held out one of the pods. Piglet looked at it uncertainly for a moment, then snatched it eagerly with her tiny hands and began to nibble.
“So, west coast, am I right?” Caleb asked.
“California,” said The Eagle Scout, still compelled to be the voice of the group, but he said it more like it was a task than his calling this time with his head against the side of the tunnel and his eyes half closed, like he was too tired to open them further than he had to, to avoid accidently hitting anyone with the flare. There was still a shimmer of sweat on his face.
That was all he said.
“So, given the state of things,” Caleb prompted politely, “why?”
The Eagle Scout said nothing, so after a few seconds, I started to tell the story myself. I’m not sure how I put it, exactly. I was too lost in marveling at the novelty of The Eagle Scout passing the mic, so I skipped as quickly as I could to the part at the end where you say, “So what about you?”
By the way Caleb sighed, I guessed it was even harder to cut the Unspeakable Past out of his story than ours.
“Just taking care of the animals, like always,” he said. “There’s enough stores and storm cellars around to make supply runs for most things for a while, if we’re careful, maybe enough to last until the danger rots away. We’re sure gonna hold out at long as we can.”
“We?” three or four of us asked at once, including The Eagle Scout, who opened his eyes and sat up straight long enough to wait for an answer. Something about the way he’d said it made it sound like he wasn’t just talking about himself and a pygmy marmoset.
“Yeah!” Caleb sat up straighter too, realizing that he’d forgotten to tell us. “I was stuck at the wrong end of the place when the twister touched down. The others’ll be hunkered down in the elephant shelter. We can join them and get a little more comfortable as soon as it’s safe.”
Again, I expected The Eagle Scout to answer for us, but he didn’t seem to find it of pressing-enough importance. Rory looked a little alarmed by this, too, so as much as a little R&R appealed to me, with a little of The Chase on the side, I tossed her my own support instead.
“I don’t know. . . .” I said.
“It’s gonna be darker out there than it is in here before we can even check how much of the road is clear,” Caleb reasoned. “And trust me, they’re all just aching to see some new faces.”
“Just for a night,” Rory verified hesitantly, “while we get our stuff back together, if we wouldn’t be imposing.”
“Yes, thank you,” The Eagle Scout agreed shortly.
I’d been expecting him to fight a little harder to escape immediately back to nowhere where his leadership was universally assumed, but he had been known to be reasonable before, even when it didn’t suit him, so it didn’t strike me as too unusual. He responded normally enough when Norman remembered the switch in his sleeve that made his bow tie light up, and we all pretended not to be able to see the occasional brief flashes of neon green until The Eagle Scout finally deduced, by the corresponding timing of Piglet’s chittering, that he wasn’t imagining them.
I didn’t mind the excuse to retreat further into Caleb’s corner to avoid being crushed when The Eagle Scout clambered past me again to pin Norman, face first, to the awkwardly curved wall and rip the double A batteries out of his battery pack “to conserve what was left of them.”
When Caleb finally declared it safe to go outside, those were the first two to take advantage of it, sprinting across the littered concrete paths, Norman with The Eagle Scout’s pickpocketed Zippo, trying to keep it out of reach until he could negotiate a trade for the batteries.
The rest of us hung back with Caleb, partly watching, partly listening to him point out the best-kept enclosures visible by the last of the sunlight, listing off the animals that still lived there and promising to introduce us to them properly when it was time to bring them out of their shelters in the morning.
“I love the animals, don’t get me wrong,” he said, opening a gate that Norman and The Eagle Scout had already vaulted and doing that gentlemanly almost-bow to tell the rest of us to go ahead of him, “but I sure am glad to see some new human beings myself. Even if,” he caught up to walk between Rory and me, glanced at the guys up ahead and then back at the two of us, and lowered his voice, “now, don’t take offence, even if your boyfriends are kinda complete lunatics.”
I didn’t take offence, but I did say, “Hey, not complete lunatics.”
“And not our boyfriends,” Rory added, very emphatically, looking at The Eagle Scout and shuddering. Hector stifled a snort of laughter behind us.
“Oh, yeah, not that either,” I agreed extra fast, realizing by the way Caleb was smiling that Rory’s answer was the info he was looking for.
“Really?” He paused a moment for thought. “Glad to hear it.”
Oh, the things you can get away with saying when you say them in an exotic way.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Think of it as a
Rec Center Lock-In
Day 1
Zombie specimen was in poor condition, not ambulatory, at least five days of decomposition evident. Bite to extremity of living subject is shallow, no damage to arteries or tendons. Immediately cleaned and treated with iodine. Close observation to follow.
No, that journal entry isn’t mine. More on that later. Promise.
It’s a pity we couldn’t have gone straight to the elephant shelter when the tornado hit because it really was the perfect place to hide from one—a huge room of smooth, solid concrete set below the ground behind the elephant paddock to keep it cool.
The rest of Caleb’s group of survivors had outfitted it in advance with plenty of food and bedding, even some spare clothes, if only of souvenir-shop quality.
As promised, they did welcome us with open arms, at least, when the woman’s arms were finished hugging Caleb and violently ruffling his hair while she lectured him for letting her worry all day. She was even shorter than I am, about the right age to be his mother, and definitely on the over-tanned side of the toast balance.
Caleb introduced us, passing along Rory’s advice of “don’t ask” when he got to Norman. The woman stopped him when he got to me.
“You’re Cassie Fremont, aren’t you?”
My sparkling celebrity response was something along the lines of, “Um, yeah?”
She handed me a local paper with that same pair of yearbook photos of Mark and me, and essentially the same article as the one I already had, in slightly different words.
“Small world and getting smaller,” she said. “Nice to meet you.”
“Alison,” Caleb introduced her, “my mentor.”
“Damn right.” She hugged him roughly to her side once more. “They always saved the best shadows for me. Of course, that’s mostly ‘cause I’ve been looking after these animals since twenty years before he could tie his shoes.”
“That’s Mr. Garret,” he continued.
The man sitting in the corner, surrounded by about fifteen kids—a second or third grade class, by the look of them—greeted us with a friendly wave, gesturing to the open book he was reading to them to excuse his not standing up. He was about Ali
son’s age with rimless glasses and the grey beginnings of a beard. Even sitting down, you could tell he had never outgrown his tall-and-gawky phase.
“And that’s Tink.”
When Caleb had told us we were headed to the elephant shelter, it hadn’t occurred to me that there would still be an actual elephant in it.
Tink was small as far as elephants went. She was the Indian kind and probably pretty young, kind of killing the hackneyed irony of giving her a name short for Tinkerbelle, but she was still an elephant, standing and rocking back and forth in her own little stall of the cave, like a huge dog waiting to play. After the first shock, I couldn’t resist the true awesomeness of the chance to see her so close up, and most of us enjoyed an evening of feeding her more of the sugar snap peas, watching the end of her trunk wrap around each one like a gloved hand.
Mr. Garret encouraged his class in naming as many animals with different prehensile appendages as they could. A lot of the novelty must have worn off on them many nights ago already because after a while they seemed more interested in a gift shop board game about penguins than the feeding.
Alison and Caleb just looked happy to see Tink get a good meal.
“She’s the only one we were able to keep,” Alison explained once all the children and, incidentally, The Eagle Scout, were asleep. He had passed out on the floor even earlier than their bedtime, like chasing Norman across the park had completely drained the life out of him.
“She was the smallest. We’ve been able to get by on mostly cultivated foliage for her so far, but I’m not sure how long we’ll be able to hold out.”
I tried not to think too hard about that. In fact, I kind of wished I’d been asleep by then, too, but even then, I didn’t want to go to sleep. It was too nice being around living things, being around people I hadn’t met before, being reminded that there were still people I hadn’t met before.
The sooner I fell asleep, the sooner I would wake to my part in the task of examining what was left of the van and the road beneath it (assuming we could even find the van and that it wasn’t up some tree two counties away), arranging, as always, to put as much distance as we could behind us, between us and the shelter of the night before, and that was fine. It was for the best. I just wasn’t quite ready for it yet.
When Alison and Mr. Garret had dimmed the lanterns and gone to sleep themselves, the rest of us dragged our sleeping bags into a circle so we could keep talking a while longer. Caleb dropped his not-so-randomly beside Rory’s, and Claire did the same on his other side. I ended up right across from him, so I could see his face properly.
I asked all the right questions to help him talk, what the zoo had been like before, how he’d started there, the rarest animal he’d ever seen, what animal was making that deep, booming sound in the distance, and I was the last one awake listening, almost too fascinated to bother keeping track of his fading awareness of Rory’s proximity and the unfair way her features stayed perfect and delicate even while she was asleep.
I don’t know what time it was when he drifted off and I closed my eyes to do the same, but I was there almost immediately.
I knew in the back of my head that I’d still be tired when The Eagle Scout came to wake me, that I’d feel his hand on my shoulder, or hear his voice not being lowered, or see the lights suddenly brighten uncomfortably at any moment. I forced myself not to brace for it, just like I’d trained myself not to listen for the alarm clock before school. It’s the only way to make real use of whatever time you do have left, so I pulled the sleeping bag over my head, curled up against the side of it that was pressed against Norman’s, and slept as if nothing would ever disturb me.
And slept, and slept.
And nothing did.
I thought something felt weird when I realized that I was awake and not tired anymore. I figured it was one of the tricks the cycles of your brain play, and if I tried again, I’d end up wondering how I’d thought I could get by without the extra sleep I’d get, so I rolled over, trying not to let the outside of the sleeping bag move, in case it made someone watching me say, “Oh, good, you’re awake!”
No one did, and I still wasn’t tired.
I let myself pull back the flap enough to check the level of the light, and then that had me sitting up pretty fast.
The lanterns were off, the door to the elephant paddock was open instead, and by the glare coming off the desertscape outside, it had to be close to noon.
“Why didn’t anyone wake me?”
I wasn’t sure exactly who I was asking. Norman was still beside me, awake, but only for about as long as I had been, based on the bleariness of his eyes. The other sleeping bags had been put away. I could hear the kids playing tag or something outside, and Mr. Garret was probably supervising. I couldn’t see Caleb anywhere, just Alison leaning over and looking at something on one side and Rory sitting off to the other, folding clothes really slowly, like she was doing it just to have something to do and was afraid of running out.
“There wasn’t really a point,” Hector answered. He’d been sitting so still behind Alison that I hadn’t seen him. There was a black box with a silver latch open at his feet, and I started trying to guess what was inside it.
“Why aren’t we packed up yet?”
I looked over at Rory. She just kept folding clothes and looking strained but resigned to her task. What on earth could stop Rory from being in a hurry?
“The Eagle Scout isn’t feeling up to it,” said Hector.
I craned my neck a little to see for sure what, well, whom Alison was leaning over, but I had already figured it out. He was sweating worse than the day before.
Alison reached out and Hector handed her a bottle of something out of the box. It was a medical kit of some sort, obviously a lot more extensive that what we’d picked up in Whitetail.
“What’s wrong with him?” Norman asked before I could. He looked unusually worried.
“Nothing,” said The Eagle Scout when he’d swallowed whatever pills she gave him. He would have been better off not saying anything. I could hear his frustration with how weak his own voice sounded. “Too much sun. My fault. I’ll . . . I just need to rest a little. Sorry.”
“You do need to rest,” Alison agreed, “that’s for sure. But a little sunshine doesn’t turn you into a space heater. Looks more like a nasty flu to me. He’s not going anywhere until this fever breaks, not in this heat.”
“Yeah, I’m working on that,” The Eagle Scout mumbled, lying back on a gift shop cushion with brightly colored flamingos on it.
“Okay, and we’ll be ready to go when he is, right?” I asked.
“Yes,” said Rory.
I think it would have been a while before she brought up the practical subject herself, but she looked glad that I did.
“The van is upside-down, and so are most of the other cars in the area, since the tornado went right over us, but most of the zoo vehicles survived. Alison said we could take the large mammal transport, and it looks pretty zombie-proof even though it gas-guzzles like a bitch and probably can’t break the speed limit if it tries. We’ve transferred most of the supplies that are worth saving already.”
So that wasn’t so bad. It sucked for The Eagle Scout, of course, and for Rory, and for Lis stuck waiting alone in New York. That’s how I always imagined her, just sitting in some tower, watching for us out the window. And it sucked to think about how easily we could be tied down and shorthanded with no notice by a couple of random acts of nature, but of all the places we’d seen so far to be stranded, this was easily my favorite. There was some definite guilty happiness for me when Caleb, Claire, and Piglet came bounding through the door of the shelter to ask who wanted to come along to help with feeding time.
I volunteered right away, of course, almost as fast as the kids who came crowding in after him, guessing what time it was. Rory and Hector both hesitated, but Alison practically kicked them out. She insisted that she could take care of things herself, so we left her with
The Eagle Scout, and the rest of us followed Caleb outside.
The zoo looked, well, like a tornado had hit it with splinters of trees, signs, and kiosk roofing everywhere, but most of the underlying structures were remarkably intact. I guess anything designed to withstand a Cape buffalo stampede can handle a little wind. By then, the air had gone painfully still and, as Alison had pointed out, blazing hot.
Even with her day old sunburn getting steadily worse, none of this seemed to bother Claire at all.
“We’ve been hunting all morning!” she told me proudly. “You won’t believe it when you see how much we caught!”
“Hunting?” I asked. As hard as I usually tried not to encourage her, I had to know. It just didn’t seem like something you did with a guy in a zoo volunteer shirt.
Luckily for me, she didn’t insist on explaining out loud. I got the picture when we reached one of those things that look like a golf cart that the employees use in places like zoos. There was a trailer attached behind it, and it was piled higher than I could reach with dead zombies.
Completely dead, I mean.
“It’s not all from today,” Caleb said right away, like we were going to accuse him of cheating. “But it’s a better haul than ever. Claire sure can handle a modified tranq rifle.”
I was automatically ready to show him that I could handle any projectile weapon at least ten times as well as Claire could even though I knew he was probably only saying it to keep her smiling. It worked, and she needed it, given the circumstances.
She was still glowing in the background a little when she had to get serious and ask, “Is he feeling better yet?”
“Depends,” I said. “Better than what?”
“He’ll be just fine,” Caleb told her, and I tried to gauge by his inflection how many times he’d said it before. Six or seven at least. “Alison’s the best large animal vet in the state. Hell, she might be the best doctor alive today, period. Worst that’ll happen to him with her around is that he won’t get to say he’s handfed a lion.”
Confessions of the Very First Zombie Slayer (That I Know Of) Page 10