I DREAMED THAT I WAS BEING GENTLY CARRIED IN A pair of big, strong arms; my head nestled against pectoral muscles with the perfect firmness and support of one of those airplane neck pillows. I felt protected. Somehow, I thought, Jake had returned from his latest necrotization all ripped up and muscular. Everything was fixed—he was cured, my mom was saved, and he’d let Amanda down gently. He was carrying me somewhere safe, where we wouldn’t be bothered, where we could finally get to know each other for real.
Pretty sure I was concussed.
I woke up on a cot, a musty-smelling sheet pulled over me. I tensed up, feeling disoriented. Once in a while it’d be nice if I could just fall asleep normally, instead of getting knocked out or pushing myself into a telepathy-induced stupor. I kept perfectly still, just in case something was nearby waiting to eat me.
To my left, on the other side of a flimsy partition, a man snored enthusiastically. Otherwise, the room was quiet.
If it was safe enough for some guy to be snoring, it was safe enough for me to climb out of bed.
The concrete floor was cool under my bare feet. Someone had taken my sneakers and socks off, and left them pushed under the edge of the cot. I slipped them back on carefully, still wary of making any noise.
I peeked around the partition to check out the snorer. He was a hefty, middle-aged dude with receding black hair that fled into a ponytail. Sleeping on his back, the guy’s enormous belly raised up and down, those snores rumbling all the way from his diaphragm. I didn’t recognize his face, but I remembered one of the van hostages carrying a major spare tire.
We’d made it . . . somewhere.
It was definitely underground; the walls were concrete with heavy wood support beams, and the space had that damp-basement feeling. It was pretty spacious for a cellar, though. There were other partitions farther into the room, separating a couple quieter sleepers. Candles flickered from built-in sconces, which I thought was kind of unusual for your average basement. After the eighteenth century we pretty much stopped designing rooms with torch positioning in mind, right? Even farther back, past the cots and partitions, I saw a wall entirely dedicated to canned goods and dry foods. And then, all the way at the back, a small chemical toilet with its own partition.
Well, I was going to have to hold it.
I guessed I was in a storm cellar. Or a bomb shelter. Or a really industrious combination.
“Psst.”
I turned toward the noise. Seated on a stool at the far end of the room, next to the stairs and dead-bolted cast-iron door that I assumed led outside, was the male model we’d rescued from Truncheon. He’d gotten a bandage for the gash on his forehead and had also changed into a fresh T-shirt and jeans. If he had clean clothes that fit so well, this must be his place.
Also, it must’ve been him I deliriously remembered carrying me. I nervously shoved a strand of tangled hair behind my ear. I walked over and he set aside the dog-eared copy of The Sun Also Rises he’d been reading by flashlight.
“Hey,” I whispered.
“Hey yourself,” he replied, reaching out for a gentle handshake. “I’m Cody.”
Of course. He looked like a Cody.
“Cass,” I said.
“How’s your head?” Cody asked, and reached out to brush my hair away from my forehead, softly pressing a bump I hadn’t realized was there. He seemed totally comfortable doing this, like we hadn’t just met. I didn’t mind. “We were worried. You’ve been out for a while.”
“I, um, yeah. I think I’m all right. What about you?”
He poked the bandage. “I’ve had worse, believe me.”
Sure, I believed him. Cody had an aura about him like he couldn’t possibly tell a lie, like the pledges he’d taken in Boy Scouts had set him on the straight and narrow for life. He reminded me—and I mean this in the most complimentary way possible—of a really handsome golden retriever. He seemed like the kind of person that’d be really good at small talk.
“Where are we?” I asked.
“Out in the country,” Cody replied. “Best to stay out here. Less trouble lurking.”
I didn’t mention that all of Iowa seemed like country to me. Instead, I gestured to the wooden struts in the ceiling. “And this is like a bomb shelter?”
“Pretty much,” Cody said. “Most of the houses around here have something for the tornadoes. Some people, like whoever owned this place, sprung for the whole nuke-resistant whoop-de-do. I used to think people like that were nuts, but now . . .”
I took another look around. I hadn’t noticed the hazmat suits piled in one corner.
“I guess sometimes being paranoid pays off,” I said. “You know the owner?”
“Naw, they’re long gone,” Cody said, gazing down at his hands. They were weathered and scarred, way too messed up for a guy barely older than me. “It was the closest safe house I could think of. Mandy drove us out here.”
I blinked. “Mandy?”
“Sorry. Been told I’ve got a nickname problem. Your friend Amanda. She took off for a while, but now she’s back.”
I glanced back at the cots. “She’s down here?”
Cody sheepishly rubbed the back of his neck. “The others were scared she might eat us, so they decided she had to sleep outside. Not exactly paying it forward, but I couldn’t convince ’em otherwise.”
From the steps I could see over the partitions, so I took a closer look at the cots. There was the pudgy, snoring guy, a skinny girl curled tightly into the fetal position and burrowed under her blankets, and a middle-aged lady I could tell was awake and secretly listening to us. They were who we’d blown up Alastaire and Truncheon’s disturbing arrangement to rescue. I couldn’t help feeling that the Save-Mom-Cure-Humanity project had suffered a setback because of these people.
It was the right thing to do, I reminded myself. After months working for the NCD, I needed to grab hold of every possible opportunity to do good.
But what about Jake? If Amanda hadn’t found him, that meant he could still be out ghouling around, decomposing further every minute. And that was totally my fault. My instinct was to grope for him on the astral plane, but my brain still wasn’t up for any psychic tricks.
“I mean, I was pretty sure she wasn’t gonna eat us, you know, on account of her saving us just a few hours ago,” Cody rambled on, “but I got outvoted. Feel pretty lousy about it, actually. She seems like a sweet girl.”
“Sweet,” I muttered in disbelief. In the short time I’d been unconscious, Amanda had managed to charm a hardened Iowa survivor with her boob voodoo. “You this open-minded about every zombie you meet?”
“Naw. I got good instincts for people, though,” Cody replied, without a hint of irony.
“Attractive people,” I clarified, not sure why I wanted to argue with this guy. I needed to get beyond this stupid high-school urge to compete with Amanda.
Cody didn’t try to hide his abashed smile. “It’s not like that,” he replied lamely. “You know, my old girlfriend is a zombie. Ran into her a few weeks back. Hadn’t seen her since summer vacation, figured she was dead for sure. But nope, there she was, looking like one of the homeless kids from Peter Pan. She didn’t try to eat me, and Mandy saved us from Truncheon, so I figure the zombies ain’t all bad. There are degrees, like with anything.”
I didn’t need psychic powers with this guy. He was a freaking open book. Part of me wondered how he’d been surviving out here, being so sweet and dumb.
“Yeah, they aren’t all bad,” I said, relenting. I sighed and stood up, dusting off the back of my pants. “I should go talk to her,” I said.
Cody grimaced. “Right now?”
“You worried I’ll disturb her beauty sleep?”
“Naw, it’s not that,” Cody replied with a sincerity that revealed a very loose grasp of sarcasm. “Around here, we human beings tend to stay inside after dark.”
“I’ll be fine,” I said, patting around the waist of my jeans. “I have a . . .”
I had a gun. It was gone. Did I drop it in the van during my struggle with the zombies?
Cody knew what I was looking for. “Mandy took your piece. Said she’d keep it safe until you woke up.”
I gritted my teeth. “Okay, now I’m definitely going out there.”
“My pop taught me never to stand in the way of a lady with her mind made up,” Cody said, his folksy chivalry making me cringe. He stood up and slid open a metal hatch installed at eye level in the steel door, peering through it. “Looks clear, but I’ll keep a lookout all the same. You get into trouble, you come running, okay?”
“I’ll be fine,” I said, forcing a smile. I was more worried about Amanda than any ghouls lurking around. “Thanks.”
Cody lifted the hefty slab of wood that barred the door and set it aside. Before I could head out, he handed me a broom handle that had been propped up next to his stool.
“Take that,” he said. “Aim for the eyes.”
The end of the broom handle was carved into a deadly-looking point. For a moment, a fan-girl thrill went through me; I felt like a vampire slayer.
Outside, the sky was totally cloudless. The half moon lit the sprawling pasture and the nearby boarded-up house a washed-out gray, making everything seem flat and drained. It was disconcertingly quiet. If a ghoul was going to rush me, I’d definitely hear it coming.
Amanda had parked the Maroon Marauder just a few yards from the bomb shelter. She lay on its hood with her back resting against the windshield, one arm draped across her eyes, like a pinup girl from one of those grody hot-rod magazines. She stirred when I approached, hastily brushing the hollowed-out, furry husk of a guinea pig off the hood and into the grass.
“You’re awake,” she said, acting aloof as she looked me over. “Nice spear.”
“Thanks,” I replied, turning the weapon over in my hand in a way I hoped was vaguely menacing. “Cody gave it to me.”
“Aw, isn’t he sweet? Guy probably whittled it himself.”
“Uh-huh. I see you already worked your magic on him.”
Amanda raised an eyebrow. “What is that supposed to mean?”
“Just that he got all gooey talking about you.” I shook my head, wanting to get off the topic. “Whatever. He probably has a zombie fetish.”
“He’s not the only one,” Amanda said, and gave me a meaningful look.
Now it was my eyebrow shooting up. “What is that supposed to mean?” I parroted.
“Nothing. And anyway, I was just nice to him. It was no big thing.” Amanda sat up, her detached attitude slipping. “What was I supposed to do? You guys, like, abandoned me with these people. I’m in this cracked-out dead state, Jake’s gone, your dumb ass is knocked out yet again, and I’ve got four losers tied up and no clue what to do with them. So when the hillbilly hunk wakes up, I flirt a little and get him to bring us out here so I have a place to stash you while I look for Jake. It’s called improvising.”
“Okay, jeez, relax,” I said, holding up my hands. “I guess I should be thanking you for not dumping me by the side of the road.”
“I’m not a monster,” Amanda hissed. “No matter what you might think.”
The image of Harlene, the nicest lady and best NCD squad leader ever, bleeding to death from an Amanda bite wound popped into my head. That argued pretty strongly for monster, but I didn’t bring it up. It was so hard to be civil with her, especially without Jake around to be our buffer. I wondered if she was having the same problem.
“Jake didn’t show up at Truncheon’s,” Amanda said, thankfully shifting gears away from degrees of monstrosity. “I went back to where it all went down and he wasn’t there either. I took the Marauder and left him some guinea pigs in the van, in case he shows up.”
“Why didn’t you stay out there?” I asked, trying not to sound too judgmental, even though I would’ve waited longer. “What if he shows up during the night?”
“Because you’re here,” she replied, like this should be obvious.
“So? I mean, I appreciate the concern but—”
Amanda cut me off with a sharp laugh. “Concern. Right.” She shook her head in disbelief. “You track zombies, don’t you?”
I knew where this was going. “Yeah, but—”
“So track my zombie,” Amanda said, interrupting me again.
“It isn’t so simple,” I replied, tightening my grip on my improvised spear, not sure how this would play out. “He got hurt back there. . . .”
Amanda scooted across the hood toward me. “What do you mean hurt?”
“One of those ghouls had a pitchfork sticking out of him. There was an accident and Jake, uh . . .” I waved my hand. “I think he lost control.”
“Are you serious?” Amanda asked, eyes widening. She pushed both her hands through her hair and held them there. “So he could be wandering anywhere. Hungry, alone, stupid.”
I nodded, feeling a stab of empathy as I watched Amanda’s face scrunch up.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “It was sort of my fault.”
Amanda leapt forward. I hadn’t been expecting it and didn’t have a chance to even lift Cody’s stake. She grabbed me hard by the shoulders, but I quickly realized she wasn’t trying to eat me.
“You can find him, though, right?” Amanda asked, her eyes wide. “That’s what you do.”
“It doesn’t work like that,” I said gently. Amanda’s expression darkened, but I continued anyway. “If he’s a ghoul, his mind is dead. It makes him almost impossible to track. And right now my powers are fried, so I can’t even tell if—”
She shoved me away.
“Forget it,” she said bitterly. “It was stupid of me to even come back here. I’ll find him myself.”
“Hold on,” I protested. “Just give me until morning to rest. I can try finding him on the astral plane then.”
Amanda stood behind the open car door, staring at me. “Astral plane,” she repeated.
“It sounds stupid when you say it out loud.”
She shook her head. “So until then he’s just out there decomposing or, like, eating his way through Iowa’s last working day care. Or getting his head blown off by some wackjob like Truncheon. And this astral-plane thing might not even work. I get all that right?”
“Pretty much.”
“Perfect.”
I looked down at my sneakers, feeling overwhelmed but also trying to figure how to play this. If Jake really had gone ghoul—or worse—I was going to need Amanda. Without one of my zombie friends, there was no way for me to find and then smuggle this alleged cure out of Des Moines, which meant I could look forward to some telepathic snapshots of Alastaire murdering my mom. I wondered if I’d even have time to mourn before the army started napalming Iowa.
Yeah, I was starting to feel pretty much screwed.
“Please, Amanda,” I said quietly, repulsed that it’d come to this. “I’ll try to help. Just promise you won’t bail on me.”
She stared at me for a long couple of seconds, her face a blank mask, eyes chilly at best. Then, without another word, she climbed into the Marauder, started it up, and drove without headlights into the night.
I watched her brake lights until they disappeared.