Undead with Benefits Page 2

  “But . . .” I looked again at Cass, mentally urging her to wake up. A bug landed on her face. “That’s where we usually keep, you know, our food.”

  “It’s not like that,” Amanda replied. “It’s for everyone’s safety.”

  I sighed. “Okay, but we have to check on her, like, every hour.”

  “I’m sure she’ll kick the backseat when she wakes up,” Amanda countered, then put up her hands when I gave her a stern look. “All right, all right. Every hour or so.”

  Together, we lifted Cass into the trunk. I tried to set her down gently, but Amanda dropped her ankles before I let go of her armpits, so there might’ve been some clunking around.

  With that done, Amanda turned on the radio and pulled me into the backseat for twenty minutes of making out.

  JAKE DAYYYYYY!

  “Fuckin’ guys shooting nets at us,” I said, feeling what I’d call hyperwistful, thinking about last night’s scene at the farmhouse. It was like remembering clips from a really over-the-top action movie as seen through a strobe light while hopped up on one of those direct-to-the-heart adrenaline shots. “That literally happened to us. It figuratively blows my mind.”

  “I know, right?” Amanda replied. She was sitting in the passenger seat, rubbing my leg, because we still couldn’t keep our hands off each other. We couldn’t stop moving. “That guy with the hatchet?”

  “Red Bear!”

  “Who is like that?” she exclaimed. “Seriously, who does that? Who buys a hatchet?”

  “Bananas. Bananas times one thousand.”

  We were only driving through some small town in western Illinois, but a powerful rush had come over me. Everything we’d gone through, plus the lack of sleep, plus hooking up with Amanda this morning—goddamn, I felt invincible. By the way she gripped my leg and how wide her eyes were as she scanned the passing storefronts, I could tell Amanda felt the same.

  “There we go!” she yelled, pointing at the department store that anchored what was otherwise a completely vacant shopping plaza. I swerved into the empty parking lot and slammed the brakes, parking across two spaces because no painted line could contain me. I felt like a bank robber.

  We barged into the store, startling the college-aged dude who stood behind the only open register. There was some horrible Michael Bolton soft rock on the store’s sound system, but it was otherwise library-quiet.

  “Shall we shop?” I asked Amanda, my voice echoing off the linoleum tiles.

  “Hell yes,” she replied as she snatched a pair of sunglasses off a nearby stand and shoved them on.

  We were still wearing our creek-washed gore ensemble—well, I was anyway. Amanda pulled off her shirt as she walked toward the nearby women’s department and tossed it aside. She took her time picking out a replacement, settling eventually on a blue-and-white, striped, sleeveless thing.

  The cashier was staring at her—I had been too, of course, but I stopped before he did. When I started toward him, I noticed him gulp and glance toward the phone next to his register. He was trying hard to look at me without actually looking at me, like he didn’t want to make eye contact. He was scared. I felt kinda bad about that, briefly. But at least we weren’t going to eat him, right?

  “Hey, dude,” I said as I arrived at his register. “Can I get some shopping bags?”

  “Su-sure,” he replied. When he bent down to get them, I yanked the cord out of the back of his phone. Just in case.

  “Don’t make a big deal out of this, but we’re not paying for any of this shit,” I explained. “We’ve been victimized by the government.”

  “Okay, man. C-cool.”

  Amanda tackled me from behind, kissing my neck and ear, cackling as I stumbled into a table of impulse-buy cuff links and earrings. I grabbed her shoulders and kissed her hard. Distantly, I heard the cashier shudder. Who knows what he thought—likely that he was about to be murdered by a pair of horny psychos—a feeling I guess I could understand. We looked the part.

  “Did you tell him to give us all the cash too?” Amanda asked me once we were finished kissing.

  “Not yet,” I said.

  She spun toward the cashier and screamed, “Put the money in the bag, motherfucker!”

  Jake Day involves some crime, okay?

  After the store, it was at least half an hour of frenzied driving before our laughter subsided. We had a stolen car and stolen clothes, and a psychic who had promised to help us get into Iowa, where there was supposedly some kind of zombie cure. Granted, she was unconscious in our trunk, but still. We were in love. Life was good.

  As the sun set, it started to feel like I was coming down. Amanda leaned her head against my shoulder drowsily. We passed a highway ramp toward Des Moines that was blocked by huge, orange detour signs. Neither of us mentioned it, but a few miles later Amanda spoke up.

  “So, what now?”

  I knew Amanda wanted to talk about our future undead-related plans, but I wasn’t ready for that yet. Except for occasional breaks to make sure Cass didn’t suffocate in the trunk, I didn’t want to think about going to Iowa. I wanted to keep living in the incredibly consequence-free moment.

  “I don’t know,” I replied. “We’ve got some cash. Motel room?”

  “No, I meant . . .” Amanda looked up at me and must’ve read my reluctance, because she trailed off. “Yeah,” she said after a moment, kissing my cheek. “That sounds perfect.”

  And it was perfect. Because it was Jake Day. All the heavy stuff didn’t matter so much. We hadn’t eaten all our friends, we weren’t fugitives pursued by a shadowy government agency, and we weren’t going to have to snack on something with a heartbeat sooner rather than later. Things were easy. Somewhere in Iowa, there was a cure waiting and we were going to find it. Piece of cake.

  Then Cass woke up and everything started to change.

  UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE

  HarperCollins Publishers

  ..................................................................

  CASS

  COPING WITH TELEPATHY. THAT’S WHAT THE GOVERNMENT called the special class crammed into the training schedule for us psychic recruits. Not Your Mind Is Magical 101 or something equally positive. Coping. Because our powers aren’t meant to be enjoyed; they’re meant to be managed and endured. The class was three hours long and met six times total, which is literally one-fourth of the class time devoted to the Necrotic Control Division’s Headshot Techniques and Logistics course. Thinking back, I’m not sure if the class was so short because the government didn’t know all that much about psychics, or because they didn’t want us to know all that much about ourselves.

  Our instructor devoted one whole session to nosebleeds. The prevailing wisdom was to recognize that the sight of blood meant you were going too hard. Also, always keep a pack of tissues handy.

  There wasn’t any time spent on blowing beyond your previously understood psychic boundaries by simultaneously knocking out two people at once. None of the pamphlets addressed what to do upon waking up in the trunk of a car driven by zombies, with no idea how long you’ve been unconscious for. And of course our instructors never discussed going AWOL from an organization you’d once had faith in because . . . because why? Sudden objections to living-on-undead brutality? Loneliness? A stupid schoolgirl crush? As I lay there, curled up and trying to figure out what I’d done and where I was going, the car pulled over. Two doors opened. Slammed closed. Keys jingled, clinked in the lock. Sunlight poured in and I had to shield my eyes.

  “Oh, look,” said Amanda. “Sleeping Boring awakens.”

  That’s how I—a government-trained psychic—found myself standing on the side of a deserted country road with the two zombies I’d spent the last week of my life tracking across the country.

  And one of them in particular looked less than happy to see me.

  “All right, Magellan,” Amanda said, one hand on her hip and the other pointing on the map to an empty spot of country on the southern border of Iowa. “We’re here. Where’s this secret entrance?”

  Still clad in my bloodstained NCD jumpsuit, my hair matted and crunchy with sweat, I glanced between the freshly showered Jake and Amanda and felt the keen urge to dive back into the trunk.

  “Guide us,” Jake said, and my heart cooed like a little dove I wished I could’ve crushed the life out of. After all that time in his head, I was kind of thrilled to be talking to him in person. Except that was stupid. He didn’t know me. I mean, they’d been keeping me in the trunk. I’d gotten myself into a dangerous mess, and I didn’t know how to get out of it.

  “We have no idea what we’re doing,” Jake continued.

  That made three of us.

  I accepted the road atlas from Amanda and pretended to study it while trying to mentally compose myself. Even through the haze of my telepathic hangover, the bloodbath at the farmhouse was painfully fresh in my memory, like a bad dream I couldn’t shake. In exchange for saving me from the wild Iowan zombies and the corrupt Necrotic Control Division, who I’d learned had sinister plans of their own, I promised Jake that I’d escort him and his murderous girlfriend into Iowa. He’d kept his end of the bargain. Now, five minutes awake and out of the trunk, it was time to keep mine.

  “Well?” Amanda prodded, dramatically holding her nose in the air away from me.

  “Sorry,” I replied. “I need a second here.”

  “The little Xs are roadblocks we already drove by,” Jake offered, and pointed helpfully at the map.

  “Oh, okay,” I said, like I knew what I was talking about.

  Unfortunately, I didn’t know the first thing about Iowa.

  As of last week, I hadn’t even known for sure the place was quarantined. I’d heard rumors around Washington, but was never
told anything official. I didn’t know how big the zone was or what kind of security we’d face. I certainly didn’t know how to get us in there.

  “Hypothetically,” I started, testing the waters, “what if the route into Iowa I know about isn’t, um, open anymore? Or if I can’t exactly remember the way?”

  They both stared at me. Amanda clenched and unclenched her fists.

  “I dunno,” Jake said, shrugging. “Guess we’ll figure something else out.”

  “Hypothetically,” Amanda added, mimicking me, “we’d have to figure something else out to do with you too. For instance? Face eating.”

  “Jesus, Amanda,” Jake groaned, rolling his eyes. “She’s kidding.”

  I swallowed hard. It occurred to me then that maybe my decision to roll with the fugitive zombies wasn’t my wisest. I’d badly wanted to bail on the NCD after my boss, Alastaire, revealed himself to be a zombie-enslaving psychopath, and most of my squad got killed. Going on the run seemed like a decent plan when I was desperate and shell-shocked. I guess I hadn’t considered the high probability of getting eaten. Of course, I’d had other reasons for bailing on the NCD, primarily my totally inappropriate psychic crush on the undead guy who, for reasons that I now realized were totally naive, I didn’t think would let anything bad happen to me. Depressed, alone, not being around people my own age for about a year, and living in other people’s heads—yeah, Cass, sure, you’re a good judge of character.

  I rolled up the road atlas and clutched it.

  “I need some time to figure out the best way in,” I explained. The more I talked, the more unsteady I felt; my knees wobbled like string cheese and a colony of floaters soared across my vision. “And I think I need some rest.”

  “You’ve been sleeping for days,” Amanda countered.

  “Rest outside of a trunk,” I insisted.

  “So picky.” Amanda snorted.

  I ignored her and appealed directly to Jake. “I’m not one hundred percent. And I’m starving. Do you guys have any food?”

  He glanced sheepishly at the car. I noticed a large cardboard box in the backseat. While I watched, something small and furry tried to scramble over the edge but couldn’t navigate the flap and fell backward.

  “Uh, probably not the kind you’d want to eat,” he answered.

  “So we have to feed her now?” Amanda muttered.

  A pickup truck rumbled down the road, the driver slowing to gawk at us as he passed. I waved my hand up and down my filthy ensemble.

  “I need new clothes too,” I said. “Also, we probably shouldn’t just be out in the open like this. We’re fugitives, right?”

  “We?” Amanda sneered.

  “You think the NCD won’t be looking for me after I bailed on them?” I asked, cocking my head at her. “Plus, after that mess at the farmhouse, they’ll be looking even harder for you guys. We’re not safe until we get into Iowa, and I need to pull myself together before we even think about sneaking in there.”

  Jake and Amanda exchanged a look. I noticed Amanda’s cavalier attitude briefly slip. I didn’t know for sure the NCD would be looking for me, especially with most of my squad dead and Alastaire hopefully bled out in a field somewhere. Without me to track them, though, Jake and Amanda were likely as safe as they’d been since turning undead. Still, it seemed like a good lie.

  “She makes some good points,” Jake said.

  Amanda sighed. “All right, but we’re rolling down the windows.”

  Jake grinned at me. “Welcome to the Maroon Marauder! That’s what we’re calling the car.”

  “No we’re not,” Amanda said over her shoulder, already ducking into the passenger side.

  Jake moved the cardboard box of furry things into the trunk and we got on the road. In the backseat, I tried to ignore all the plaintive squeaking coming from the trunk. I suppressed a shudder. That could’ve been me back there.

  I was probably being a little too ambitious when I decided that, out of the two bags’ worth of gas-station food Jake bought for me, I was going to eat the microwave burrito first. The cravings of the recently comatose are inexplicable, I guess. After that last bite of chewy tortilla shell and gooey, processed meat, I immediately felt sorry for myself.

  Then I felt carsick.

  Amanda didn’t want me puking in the backseat or anywhere in her field of vision, so we cut the day’s drive short. They bought two rooms for us at a seedy motel just off the highway in western Wisconsin. I didn’t want to know where they’d gotten the money for the food and the rooms; I just wanted to get someplace dark and with better air circulation than a trunk so I could get rid of this throbbing headache and maybe, if my brain pains allowed it, come up with a plan.

  I drew the blinds in my room and stretched out on the lumpy motel bed. It felt amazing; my bones and muscles seemed to gradually uncrinkle, like how a dried sponge expands when you pour water on it.

  I must have dozed off. I woke up when someone knocked on my door. Still half-asleep, I expected to find Tom standing outside with orange juice and donuts. Instead, it was Amanda with a bag of clothes from a nearby outlet mall. My heart sank—those days of NCD-managed TLC were over—but I kept my face stony for Amanda.

  “Here,” she said, handing me the bag. She didn’t wait for a thank-you, immediately breezing off to the room next door, where Jake waited for her. I was actually glad she kept it short and bitchy; she’d eaten Harlene, and a pile of clothes that ranged purposefully from boring-as-heck to straight-up dorky wasn’t going to make up for that.

  At least they were clean anyway. I did appreciate that.

  I spent the rest of the day poring over Jake’s road atlas. It looked to me like the highways in western Iowa terminated before Iowa City and Cedar Rapids. I made a line in the road atlas, connecting the roadblocks, estimating where this mythical zombie barricade would be. It encompassed most of the state’s eastern area. There were fewer towns in northern Iowa along the Minnesota border, and more hardly trafficked rural routes. That seemed like a good place to try slipping through. They couldn’t have locked down every road into the state, right?

  “Gotta start somewhere,” I said to myself. My headache had started to clear and I could feel that familiar tickle of the astral plane out there, beckoning to me.

  I wondered what Jake might be thinking.

  No. None of that. No spying at all, in fact.

  I tried not to listen to Jake and Amanda’s muffled conversations through the wall. I think they were getting drunk. I also tried not to overthink my decision to stick with the zombies. I owed Jake and had nowhere else to go. Simple as that.

  It was a long, lonely night.

  And by midafternoon the next day, we were going nowhere fast.

  “Well?” Amanda asked, catching my eyes in the rearview. She drove while Jake napped in the passenger seat.

  “Keep going until you see the exit for route fifteen,” I answered, studying the road atlas that was open in my lap. “We’ll try that one.”

  “Try,” repeated Amanda dryly.

  “Well, at least we’re in Iowa,” I said defensively.

  “Iowa wasn’t the deal,” she replied. “Infected Iowa: that’s what we want. And anyway, I think we crossed the border back into Minnesota.”

  We’d spent all day hopscotching across the Minnesota-Iowa border. I had made a lot of fresh Xs in the road atlas and was steadily running out of northern routes to try. At least we knew that the NCD quarantine didn’t extend across the Iowa border in a perfectly straight line, although that seemed like a pretty trivial detail. More important was the frightening scope of the NCD’s operation.

  Some of the highways led into detours that just kept on in a circle, always more phantom roadwork to keep you doubling back toward Minnesota. Others ended in roadblocks formed by government standard-issue black SUVs. We were always too cautious to approach those, but I didn’t need binoculars to recognize the NCD jumpsuits turning away cars. We hadn’t seen anyone get through.

  It was the biggest Containment job I’d ever seen. How they’d been able to make such a massive space disappear without anyone asking questions made my skin crawl.