“We don’t even know if Hastings is there anymore,” Tony said. “Maybe they stopped transmitting because they got eaten.”
Dax straightened up. “I’ll move the truck. Try to get the existentialist bullshit out of your system before I get back. Come on, Evie.”
He stalked out, the dog running after him.
I sat back on my heels and stared at Tony, unable to keep a reproachful look off my face. “Why?” I asked.
“I don’t want you two thinking we’re playing Candyland only to find out it’s actually Monopoly.”
“That doesn’t even make sense.”
“It does in my head.” He tossed back the ibuprofen, washing it down with a gulp of water. “We gotta be prepared.”
I wiped at my hands with a rag. “Prepared for what?”
“Bad news. If Hastings is gone, we may have to...”
It was probably better not to even let him think about that particular eventuality. “Why are we even going, if you don’t think it’s there?”
He fixed his gaze on me, and I had a sinking feeling I was going to be on the receiving end of one of his lectures. “You just love cross-examining me, but what would you rather we do, Vibeke? We don’t have anywhere else to go. I guess we could go wandering and see if we got lucky, but we’d probably just end up dead. Or undead. Maybe both.”
I didn’t want to look at him, but I was almost too scared to look away. “So you’re just going to take us to this base that might be overrun and hope for the best?”
“You have a better idea?”
“What’s the point of even risking it? Why even make the effort if—”
“I just got shot trying to save your ass! Are you really questioning my fucking motives?”
My throat knotted up, and my chest abruptly tightened. Hell, I was either having the mother of all asthma attacks or I was about to start crying out of sheer frustration. No. No crying. No crying. I couldn’t cry in front of Tony of all people. He’d never let me live it down.
Besides, he’d just gotten me out of a situation that would have undoubtedly ended very badly for me. Now wasn’t the time to start challenging him. I squashed down all my feelings and stared at my hands; they seemed the safest thing to look at. “I’m sorry.”
Tony’s voice softened ever so slightly. “What do you think’ll happen to us if we just wander? You think Dax is up to that? Are you? I don’t think I am.”
I shook my head, not trusting my voice.
“We need a purpose. And the people back in Elderwood need help.”
“Do you even give a damn about them?” My voice cracked.
“Not really. Doesn’t mean I want the bunch of them dead.” Now he gave me a reproachful look. “You know me better than that, Vibeke.”
I did, once. Or I should have. “I don’t know what I know anymore,” I mumbled, glad that I’d managed to beat down the tears for the time being. My self-control remained intact. “I’m not cut out for this shit. I hate the undead and I feel like a murderer and I miss Netflix.”
He sighed, pushing himself up into a sitting position. “One of those things is not like the others.”
He’s right. He usually is. I should be thanking him; he knows how to deal with this shit, or he’s damn good at faking it.
“That kid looked right at me before I shot him.” He let out a ragged breath, rubbing the side of his face with one of his bruised and battered hands. “If I hadn’t done something, he’d have shot me before I could get inside. If it’s us or them, it’s going to be us, and we need to…we need to make those decisions. But he still looked at me. They all did. You put out some dude’s kneecap. I killed all those poor fuckers. I feel like a murderer.”
Oh, hell. I was getting damn good shoving my foot into my mouth. “Sorry,” I croaked, wiping my hand across my forehead and yelping when it left a wet streak. “What the—”
“Darlin’, if you wanted my DNA, all you had to do was ask.” Tony picked up one of the unused paper towels and started dabbing at the blood—his blood—I’d just dragged across my temples. His other hand abruptly closed over mine, squeezing my fingers together. “Those men you killed downtown would’ve done exactly the same thing to me and Dax,” he breathed. “Then they would have had their fun with you. These aren’t decent sorts we’re dealing with, Vibeke. The decent sorts won’t make you dump a fucking magazine into them. You feed a gentle soul like Dax to a zombie, that’s murder. The ones you actually did in? You were just protecting yourself. Cleaning up the riffraff.”
I nodded. It was a fine speech. If I hadn’t been so exhausted, I probably would’ve believed it and moved on.
I miss karaoke, the biker had said right before he got munched. Hell, those were his last words. “I just…they were like us, once,” I offered lamely.
“So were the undead, but you don’t have a problem putting them down. Yeah, they were like us once, but they’re not anymore. Whatever order Hammond held down in Elderwood doesn’t apply out here. You can’t forget that, not even for a minute.”
I nodded again, too drained to say anything else, then jerked away when something flickered beside my face.
“Easy,” he muttered, his hand stopping in midair. “Just want to see this.” Rough fingers trailed across the spot where Blair had struck me. It hurt, but I managed not to flinch.
Tony’s gaze gentled a bit, just enough for me to see a little past the veneer of badassery. “Bastard really got you there.”
“I feel like I’ve had the shit kicked out of me this week.”
“Well, you have.” His fingers grazed my chin, about the one spot on my face that didn’t feel like it’d been hit by a snowplow. My stomach twisted, then flopped around, reminding me I hadn’t fed it anything besides booze and Gatorade for quite some time. “Illegitimi non carborundum.”
I stared at him. “Say what?”
The front door opened, and Evie’s jangling tags announced Dax’s return. Tony flashed me a Cheshire cat smile. “I said you might feel better…if you make me a sandwich.”
***
There was no bread left, so we never did have sandwiches. We dined on canned soup and a few stale crackers, trying to conserve what we had left. Dax turned the radio on, moving the dial around until he found Gloria’s station.
“Good evening, Midlands Cluster!” Her voice all but roared out of the little speaker, and Dax hurriedly lowered the volume. “This is Gloria Fey, coming to you from my safe house…”
“We must be close to her,” I said. “She never sounds this good.”
“We heard some activity nearby,” Gloria went on, “so this will be a short report. Nothing’s come in from the eastern seaboard, but we did eavesdrop on some radio chatter from Hastings Military Base a few nights ago, and I feel it’s my duty as a reporter to pass it on to you.”
“She heard from Hastings.” Tony sounded mildly surprised. “I’ll be damned. Now was it a transmission or internal chatter?”
“What’s the difference?”
“If it was a transmission, it means their machinery didn’t break down at all. They were just ignoring Hammond’s calls.” He reached for the bottle of ibuprofen and shook more pills into his hand. “Passive-aggressive little shits.”
Gloria shushed someone in the background before continuing. “There’s two things I need to tell you. Number one, we’ve received scattered reports of low-grade nuclear weapons being utilized against the living dead. I can’t speak for how successful they’ve been, but in each case, it’s sounded like those in charge turned to nukes in a last-ditch effort to clear out infestations.”
Infestation? That was the terminology the exterminator had used when my roommate had discovered a nest of cockroaches out in the garage. It was kind of an apt comparison.
I wonder how the cockroaches are faring in all of this...
“So now we have nuclear fallout to worry about on top of everything else,” Dax said.
“Kid, we’re in so much shit already, a l
ittle traditional radiation isn’t gonna hurt us that much more.”
“Jesus.” I sat up so fast my back cracked, and my head spun again, reminding me I still had plenty of my own hurts to look after. “That’s what was wrong with Blair and those boys. Radiation burns...really bad ones.”
Tony rolled over to look at me. “When the hell have you seen radiation burns? We don’t have a nuke plant out here.”
I rubbed my eyes. “Not nuclear radiation. Not from a plant, anyway. It was cancer patients. We did a lot of patient transfers when we weren’t seeing to actual emergencies, and the radiation treatments could actually burn.” The burns had scared the shit out of me when I first saw them, but it was a fear I’d learned to conceal behind a chipper tone and bad jokes about the weather. We could never let the patient see how their condition affected us. Ever.
Those people were probably all dead now.
Or worse.
“I’m guessing those bikers weren’t cancer patients, though,” Dax said.
No, they were something else entirely. Maybe they’d gotten too close to an impact site and lived to tell the tale? I rolled that thought around in my head.
“This second thing…” Gloria paused, and I dimly heard someone talking behind her. “…no, I think they should know. Wouldn’t you want to know?”
“Uh-uh,” her companion said.
“Well, they can turn off the radio, then. Folks, in the coming weeks, you’re going to hear a lot about how the world ended. You’ve probably already heard plenty of theories.”
“I know how the world ended. We got smacked around by meteors and then the dead got up and got hungry.” Tony gulped down what was left of his water.
“Sssh.”
Gloria spoke quietly: “Some of you have probably heard of the Osiris asteroid. It’s passed by us numerous times without any problems…”
Osiris. I heard something about Osiris, didn’t I?
“…on this particular pass, something knocked it off its trajectory…there’s still some discussion over how it happened. According to the chatter we’ve heard from Hastings, the chances of it actually striking us went up dramatically, although there was great disagreement even in NASA as to whether it posed an actual threat.”
Something clicked back on in my brain. Tony had said something about Osiris the day after it all happened, though no one had ever proven it one way or another. Not that we knew of, anyway.
Maybe Hammond knew. It certainly explained the perpetual sad face he’d wandered around with during the last few weeks. I’d just assumed it was because we were running out of food.
“A decision was made. Listeners, I’ll leave it to you to decide whether it was the right one. A number of nations sent up missiles, hoping to bump it away from the planet.” Oh, hell, I saw where this explanation was headed. “It worked, to a point. It split Osiris into hundreds of fragments.”
“Which promptly pelted us,” I finished. “I bet someone got fired.”
“And you all know what happened next.” She might as well have been in the room with us, speaking into her microphone and reading off half-scribbled notes.
Dammit, and I’d been so proud that we hadn’t managed to destroy ourselves. For all our problems as a species, humanity hadn’t dropped the final bomb, or turned loose the mutated rabies strain, or wiped ourselves out in some cataclysmic final war. I’d been very happy believing the universe had nailed us, as opposed to us offing ourselves.
Except it turned out we had pulled the trigger.
Dax let out a heavy sigh. “That’s…shitty.”
Well, there went my faith in humanity. Maybe I could become an existentialist maniac like Tony and start shooting off one-liners like they were going out of style.
“Gloria,” the male voice said again, “you are goddamn depressing.”
She sounded like she’d turned away from the microphone for a moment. “I’m sorry, shall I crack a few jokes instead?” Her voice got stronger as she returned her attention to us. “Anyway, listeners, I’m pretty sure that wasn’t meant to reach the general public. But that’s what happened, and I think we deserve to know. If any of us get out of this alive, if any of us manage to go on and rebuild, we need to know what happened.”
Tony snorted.
The rest of the broadcast was just as depressing. She droned on about motorcycle brigands preying on the few freeways that had either escaped damage or been cleared out, about the silence from Elderwood.
“I wish I had more good news for you, folks. I haven’t talked to Bogman in about a week, so I’m hoping he’s just having some mechanical troubles. This is Gloria Fey, hanging up. I’ll see you all tomorrow.”
The transmission cut out, and Dax switched off the radio. “Hope Boggy’s okay.”
“Me, too.” Bogman had been one of her eastern contacts, keeping the rest of us somewhat up to date with what was going on outside the Cluster and closer to the big cities. Maybe this was how the world really ended: one spark snuffing out at a time. The big electrical grids were down, severing the ties most of us had with each other—apparently Facebook did do some good—and now all that was left were a few flickering candles, each one in danger of being blown out.
“Well, that was some damned unsettling shit.” Tony clapped his hands together once, startling the dog awake from her slumber. “How about a singalong? The zombie apocalypse could use a few musical numbers. I bet we can write up some holiday songs.”
“I like that idea,” Dax said. “‘Santa Got Devoured by a Zombie.’”
On any other day, that might have been pretty amusing. I slouched down further against the wall. “Pass. I don’t feel very musically inclined right now.”
“Some light reading then? Woman, fetch me my Mennonite!”
I looked at Dax. “He’s talking to you.”
“I don’t want to fetch the damned Mennonite. I’m tired of his uninspired wisdom and the schlocky action sequences. It’s not realistic.”
“Because this is realistic?” I asked, gesturing vaguely to the house, the neighborhood, the situation.
Tony transferred a hopeful look to the dog. “Evie? Fetch?”
Evie wagged her tail but didn’t move, thus sparing us another evening spent with Ezekiel.
FOURTEEN
There’s nothing quite like the sound of ammunition spilling all over the floor in the morning.
I opened my eyes, focusing on the dim figure fumbling around in front of me. I recognized the pale hair and tilted my head toward him. “Dax, what the hell are you doing?”
“There’s a goober outside. A few goobers, actually.” He tried to pop shells into the Winchester, but they clattered messily to the carpet. I sat up and forced my eyes to focus on his shaking hands. “Thought I’d take care of them before they attracted more.”
“They are not goobers,” Tony croaked from the couch. “If you must refer to them by some stupid name, call them dingleberries.”
“Okay, I have to go drop some dingleberries.”
Tony smothered a cough. “That just sounds wrong, bro.”
Dax successfully jammed in some shells. No one was sporting a nice tan after weeks without sunlight, but he looked even paler than usual. I made myself stand up, flinching as tired muscles unkinked and complained. “Dax, shouldn’t you use the silencer?”
“Need more ammo.”
Tony sat up. “How many are there, Dax?”
“There’s a lot!” Dax almost dropped the gun when Evie tried to stick her nose into his hand. “There’s a whole shit ton of them. Maybe if I thin them out a little…”
The undead are hanging out in Muldoon. Something clicked on in my brain, and a heavy feeling built up in my throat. “Oh…that’s what I meant to tell you.”
The boys were quiet for a few seconds.
Tony turned to me slowly. “What did you mean to tell us, Vibby?” he asked icily. “What could you have possibly forgotten?”
I took a deep breath. “The biker gang�
�s using the town as a body dump.”
They stared at me. “I don’t follow,” Dax said.
“They’re dumping dead bodies in the town,” I said. “You know. Dead people. Folks who died of natural or decidedly unnatural causes.”
“Oh, that thing we tried in Elderwood with the burial pit,” Tony said. “Remember how that worked out?”
Dax’s eyes got bigger by the second. “Oh…shit…that explains it…”
Tony held out his hands. “Help me up.”
We made a slow, pathetic procession up the stairs to the front bedroom, which the design firm had turned into some sort of study. From there, we had a good view of what was going on outside.
“Oh, fuck me.” Tony sagged against the window frame, probably channeling Hector of Troy’s reaction when he saw the thousand black ships landing on his beach.
Except Hector was facing angry Greeks, not a horde of the undead.
A giant swarm of revenants—or were we calling them dingleberries now?—clogged the street, milling around abandoned cars and human debris. My stomach flip-flopped, then dropped down into my ankles. “Yeah, so they were dumping bodies…”
“And the bodies got up, went to work on the living still sticking around, and moved on from there.” Tony smashed his fist against the wall. “And they heard us making a ton of noise yesterday. Fuck my life.”
I tried counting them but lost track after the first few dozen. No way were we just going to mow a neat path through them. “Um, Dax? What were you planning on doing with your handful of rifle shells?”
“Go out with a bang?” He seemed calmer, though his finger still twitched around the trigger. “What do we do?”
Tony shrugged. “We’re probably going to die, so we might as well work through the bucket list. Vibby, let’s get busy.”
My middle finger has gotten quite a workout since the apocalypse happened. “I’m sorry,” I said. “Impending death doesn’t make me horny.”
He looked mildly disappointed, but swiftly moved on to his next item of business. “What’s the situation in the back?”
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