“So what is it then?” I repeated for Hector. “Virus or bacteria? Some crazy mutation of one? A parasite? Magic?”
Alison put the thermometer away. “What is it that’s been killing him since the moment his skin broke with absolutely no discernible origin or weaknesses?” she asked. “Or what is it making corpses stand up and walk without consistent breath, without circulation, without any viable metabolic function? If I had to guess, I’d say it’s in the air. Something not in any textbook, that’s infused the entire atmosphere of the planet. From the inside or the outside, I don’t know. And that’s only a guess. Believe me, no one wishes more than I do that we had someone left to ask who might know, but until we can get scientific research back to the level it was at a week ago, and then about twenty years into the future in the specific direction of discovering that answer, yeah, I’m willing to fill in the blank with ‘magic’ for now.”
Mr. Garret never did bring his class back that night. I’m betting he had them singing campfire songs or something in one of the other buildings, making the occasion of not sitting around watching a tough, ambitious, seventeen-year-old boy die a slow, inexorable death into some special treat of a change of pace.
The rest of us weren’t so lucky.
Caleb tried to coax Claire away from The Eagle Scout’s side for a while, for her sake more than anybody else’s, I know, but when Alison had nothing left to do that Claire could distract her from, she convinced him to leave them together.
The Eagle Scout slipped in and out of lucidity a few times, sometimes sitting up unsteadily, meeting our eyes and calling us by the right names, sometimes crying out to Alison as if she were Kim, saying that she had to sign his early admission application today, or he’d miss the deadline, sometimes just muttering, “I’m sorry,” over and over again.
Claire ignored the phases and told him stories of our day with a forced smile all evening, as if he were listening—how she had been this close to a sea lion, how she had hugged Pussywillows, the friendly cheetah who hated zombies but loved people, how Caleb was teaching her to shoot and drive and tell the difference between animals that had looked the same to her before.
Alison sat close all night, watching, the bottle of aspirin in one hand and a large-carnivore’s-kitchen-sized cleaver in the other.
No one had to ask what she expected to need it for.
Caleb, Rory, Hector, Norman and I laid out the sleeping bags as they had been the night before, but we didn’t gather in them to talk. We didn’t talk at all, or do anything else to get ready for sleep, unless you count Norman washing and repainting his face to fix the smears Pussywillows had left.
Rory looked a little disapprovingly at the paints, like this wasn’t the moment for bright colors. I couldn’t argue with Norman. If anything, the occasion only made me understand his point better—that you couldn’t discount any moment, no matter what was happening in it. Maybe it had always been true, but more so then than ever before. No more cell phones. No more 911. No more ERs or FDA or AAA or dentists. Even if we never saw another zombie, we could get lost in the desert, or another tornado, or any one of us could catch pneumonia or dysentery or some other dark-aged, easily treatable disease and drop dead. We wouldn’t always be lucky enough for things to happen a day’s drive from one of the last doctors standing.
Add in zombies and there were things that could happen, lying in wait in tangles of sugar snap peas, so bad that even that kind of luck wouldn’t be enough.
No moment was meaningless, no moment was safe, no moment was a bad time to be ready.
I spent that night trying to rest, first sitting up against the wall of the shelter, then, when my neck got tired, lying next to it with my head on Norman’s chest, listening to each beat of his heart. I never expected the next one with the full, unquestioning confidence I once had. I guess, eventually, I must have fallen asleep because when The Eagle Scout passed by, resting a pocket-sized, spiral-bound notebook on my folded hands, I thought at first it was a dream.
I thought that for long enough that, by the time I could force my eyes open to really look at it, he was long out of sight.
Day 3
Early morning. The fever has not abated. The subject’s moments, my moments, of clarity, are getting shorter and shorter, so I’ll make this quick.
I’m sorry I lied. I’m sorry I didn’t warn anyone about what I really tripped over in that field. I swear that if we had not found such a secure environment in which to do it, I would not have allowed my condition to progress this far. I only wanted to make the greatest possible use of this opportunity, such as it is.
I’ll confess, I was also afraid. I know enough about the knowledge base of at least half of my companions to guess at the kind of conclusion that might have been jumped to if I had told the truth immediately. I wanted to find out if I could beat it first.
As it turns out, the conclusion would have been entirely accurate, and I can’t. All I can do is record as much about the effects of a zombie bite as possible. The Kent Case Study and Komodo Dragon Theory of Dr. Alison Teach may not be the only research conducted so far on the subject, but it is all that I can be sure exists, so I have asked her to record it in as much detail as possible in the last section of this notebook. The material’s key takeaways are as follows:
1. The bite of a zombie serves no obvious purpose other than the one it shares with all other observed zombie behaviors, that is, the spreading of death at all costs and by any means.
2. The bite of a zombie is, at this time, under even the most ideal of circumstances, un-survivable.
It’s not much, but I want you to have it, Cassie. You because you’re the only person I can be sure will listen, understand, and be listened to, not only one or two of the above. You because I know you care uncompromisingly about truth and knowledge, no matter how small or depressing or bizarre. I’ve known that since the moment you stood in front of my mother and the police and told them, without proof or credibility, that you’d killed the first zombie. Keep it safe, and good luck.
Sincerely,
Peter Kent
That was when I really knew. When I read the name Peter Kent, and my brain didn’t autocorrect it like it always had, that’s when I knew he was gone.
“Peter?” I whispered out loud.
Alison was awake, but she was the only one. Claire was curled up beside her on Peter’s empty bed. Alison put the cleaver to her lips to shush me and whispered back, “Pussywillows.”
I picked up Suprbat from its place beside me, mostly just for comfort, and ran outside. There was just enough light rising up from the eastern horizon to let me find my way back to Pussywillows’ den. She loved humans. She never would have hurt Peter, the real Peter. I know she sat with him to the end.
But by the time I got there, the end was long past, and she was crouched over a few remnants of a bloody Boy Scout uniform.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
LMNOE
I really wished that Rory’s compulsions had left a few clothes for me to fold, something brainless but necessary to do. Once everyone was awake, which happened within the hour, our exit was quick and efficient. No details to resolve, no arguments. We had stayed because Peter needed us to, and now that he didn’t anymore, it was time to go.
Alison and Mr. Garret fussed over us like parents sending their first child off to college, asking if we had enough blankets, enough batteries, enough food, and I ended up having to put my foot down about how much they could reasonably offer us. They still had a second grade class to take care of, after all, and since we were headed directly out of their salvaging territory, it would serve everyone best if we made our own supply run after a couple hundred miles.
It was the kind of thing I never would have needed to think about, much less insist upon, before.
I know they were uneasy about us leaving at all, them being the only real adults around, but with the possibility of reuniting any family in New York, they really couldn’t justify trying to st
op us.
More than that, there was also some vague, unspoken point we’d all passed—I’m not sure when, maybe all the way back at the end of the Unspeakable Past, or maybe when we’d picked up our first blunt objects knowing we’d need them to stay alive, or maybe just when we’d agreed on a plan, no matter how harebrained, and done our very best to see it through—when we’d simply stopped being anyone’s responsibility.
There wasn’t even any friction when Claire announced that she wasn’t coming with us, her hand in Caleb’s and an apology slipped between almost every pair of syllables. If there had been a polite way, I might have suggested it myself. I couldn’t think of a better place for her than with him, the animals, the children, and the real adults. Certainly not fighting for her life and passage into Manhattan with the rest of us, swinging that sparkly purple golf club of hers. They could show her the patience we couldn’t afford. I bet she’s happy there today, living as close to a normal life as is possible anymore. So, no, her decision didn’t surprise me.
What did surprise me was how achingly I missed her.
I only took enough time to give her an abbreviated goodbye hug, leaving the rest for Rory to assure her earnestly that she didn’t blame her a bit, that she was overjoyed to hear that she had already found what she needed, even if she couldn’t say the same herself, and that she was so, so sorry about her brother, that we all were. But as soon as we had maneuvered that great, hulking large animal transport onto the highway, I missed her endless, inane babble—its soothing lack of vital, life-changing importance, and the way it somehow wore her out until she would collapse against my side, radiating un-rationed warmth like we were the best of friends and nothing could ever possibly go wrong in the world.
I guess after you’ve shared a sleeping bag with someone, it must be naturally difficult to process the idea that you’re probably never going to see them again, but it was more than that. It was the fact that if there was one thing we were short of on the road out of Tulsa, one thing we desperately needed, it was a bit of that absence of vital, life-changing importance.
The transport had more than enough room in the back of it for our supplies, but it was a lot slower than the Kent’s van, and there wasn’t much elbowroom for the four of us jammed into the cabin. We communicated mostly about how to convert the colors and squiggles of our maps into actual movement of the transport across the earth, which, without Peter, turned out to be an intensive four-person job.
Rory slipped once into thinking back in dangerous directions, noting, “I gave him such a hard time about so many stupid things,” but Hector stopped her.
“Name one person who didn’t,” he said.
If I’d thought a cop car was the very least likely vehicle for my driver’s ed to take place in, a large animal transport must have carved out at least a few more notches at the bottom of that list.
Short a third driver, Rory and Hector started coaching Norman and me at it in turns. It wasn’t nearly as easy as it looked, staying in one lane, slowing down and speeding up at just the right rate, angling around the stalled cars and other occasional obstacles without scraping the sides. It didn’t help that none of us had even been inside a truck that large, much less in the driver’s seat, but the mostly empty and straight roads of farmland and national parks made it about as easy as it could have been, and probably safer than letting any of us take a full half-day shift with eyes as red-rimmed as all of ours were.
At least that giant fuel tank started off full. I was dreading the moment when one of us would have to rediscover the art of siphoning.
We got in and out of a supermarket just beyond Springdale without fanfare even though it was more real food than we’d seen in days. We were all afraid that if we hung around too long, we’d meet another band of elementary school kids who needed those apples, loaves of bread, and jars of peanut butter more than we did, another group of people who, whether they meant to or not, would make a more notable mark on our lives in less than the space of three days than people who’d had years of Unspeakable Past in which to try.
We couldn’t take any more marks on us just then. I could hardly take walking past that display of Claire’s brand of hot chocolate with the cow jumping over the moon.
I was glad to be back on the road less than ten minutes later.
One thing I really, really hate about road maps, other than how impossible they are to re-fold correctly, is the stuff they don’t show. Or don’t label. Or show in pale colors and label once in some out of the way corner as an afterthought, like no one’s really that interested. I don’t mean the little (if obviously important) details like whether or not a street is one way only, and which way. The mapmakers had no reason to expect that information would ever stop being important. I’m talking about the stuff that shows up magnified and stamped with huge letters on bigger maps that aren’t distracted by things like traffic circles and turnpikes. Big stuff.
We did manage to figure out what that thing was at the edge of Arkansas before we could actually see it out of the windshield. It was a stroke of pure luck that Norman remembered. That washed-out bluish section that didn’t represent Indian Reservation or National Forest, the part with a healthy mess of roads on our side and a healthy mess of roads on the other, but only very sparingly placed bottleneck thoroughfares going through it, stretching all the way down to the Atlantic and up to the point where we would have needed to dig up our maps of Ohio.
Oh, right, the Mississippi River.
We tried to navigate on the move as much as possible for the sake of time, but that discovery warranted a special roadside debate at around Huntsville.
“Well, we’re obviously going to have to force our way through one of the routes on the map,” Hector started. “There aren’t going to be any little forgotten side streets for this. If money is spent on a bridge that big, it’s going to be where people are going to use it. And there’s no way we’re getting across without a bridge.”
Rory nodded. “But almost all of them are escape routes from major cities. They’ll be like the Rockies all over again.”
“Maybe not,” said Hector, though he didn’t sound completely sure of himself. “We’re on flat ground, plenty of room for people to leave in all the other directions.”
“But they wouldn’t all go in other directions,” Rory reasoned. “There’s a pretty isolated crossing to the north in Missouri.”
“Just one,” Hector repeated, “and not another one for hundreds of miles. It’s a gamble. A city might not be so bad. More traffic means more bridges means more possibilities.”
It took me several moments of silence to realize that they were both waiting for me, the one common friend in the equation, to say something mediating about this, like that was a completely normal thing to expect.
Now, I’m not a total moron or anything. I can form a plan and follow it when it’s just me alone (escaping from a police station, anyone?), and I can usually choose sensible people to follow when I’m not. Actually making an effort to convince other people to do things my way, at the price of taking the blame if it goes wrong, wasn’t really something I did. The cost-benefit ratio had never appealed to me.
I’m not sure exactly what made me rethink my automatic response of a shrug and a “what do you think?” Maybe some leftover inspiration hanging around that notebook, newly tucked into the deepest pocket of the killer bunny bag. I like to think so. Whatever the reason, I did do my best, starting by really looking at that map, trying to hold its squiggles in my head, the way you can remember regular words when they’re not in front of you anymore. It wasn’t so hard. I hadn’t been the best of us at orienteering, but I’d been competent.
The river got narrower way up to the north, with more frequent crossings, but it also split and twisted more, so the longer we waited to cross, the more likely it was that we’d have to do it more than once, or double back to the south to avoid it.
“Memphis has two bridges,” I said. “Two chances for the pric
e of one. I think we might as well give it a shot. It’s about as far south as we can aim without it being really out of the way, and if it’s a no go, we trace the river north and take the first chance we get. It’d just suck to miss a good one that might be so close.”
Rory looked over my shoulder to check my logic and grudgingly found no problems with it. I almost hoped that Norman would contradict me and bring us to a deadlock, just to take the pressure off, but he just shrugged.
“I like Memphis,” he said meekly, a comment on a decision already made rather than a vote.
No one took the map back from me, so I guided Rory, and then Norman, and then Rory again, across the rest of Arkansas—if you could call guiding telling them to stay on one highway, then another, and then a third one for a little while. That was all it took to get into the never-again-moving queue onto the southernmost bridge into Tennessee.
Yeah, it was stacked solid, just like Rory had predicted, a pretty uncanny reminder of the pass into Glenwood, except that the air was cleaner, and there weren’t so many zombies around. This was partly because they’d had longer to spread and more space to spread into, like Hector had pointed out, and partly because, unlike walking up cliff faces, which is a pretty instantly discouraging endeavor, zombies don’t notice how much they suck at swimming.
I almost felt like making a note of that somewhere, a section over from all the details of their bites. The mountains had funneled the things forcibly onto the road in Colorado, but the ones in Tennessee ignored the bridges, unless they happened to be right in front of them, and wandered blithely into the water toward us. There were almost none crawling back out on our side, but if you think that made them reconsider trying for a moment, you don’t know zombies.
I figured that was it, I’d just go back to keeping my mouth shut before anyone had to point out how many miles I’d lost us, and let Rory and Hector go on working our way north until one of them came up with an alternative to argue about. I was pretty adamant about that, resolved that I wouldn’t even comment if they decided to do something other than check the north bridge while we were right there next to it, right up until they did circle around to check it.
Confessions of the Very First Zombie Slayer (That I Know Of) Page 12