I CAME BACK TO LIFE SLOWLY.
The first things I became aware of were my feet, shuffling along across pavement all stupid, like my big toes had been magnetized.
Pick up your feet, dummy. You’re staggering around like a—
Like a zombie. Duh.
I focused on walking like normal and, once I’d mastered that, my other functions started falling in line too. Breathing normal, eyes focused, walking with my arms at my sides instead of stretched in front of me. It was like coming down from a really outrageous high, that sudden sharpness of feeling yourself again.
Speaking of which, I checked my back pocket. The eighth I’d bought from that protester back in Omaha—he’d called it Husker Doolittle—was still intact. Whew. Everything else I owned might have been back in the car, including my sweet authentic peace pipe and the guinea pigs I’d need to eat sooner rather than later, but at least I’d managed to hold on to the first bud I’d been able to score since freaking New Jersey.
“So, I’ve got that going for me,” I said out loud.
A six-pack of ghouls, all of them wearing hospital gowns, their decaying asses swinging around all sloppy and free, turned in unison to look at me. They’d been lurching down the sidewalk on the other side of the street. The cornfields I last remembered shambling through had given way to paved roads and buildings, a town or a city, hard to tell how big with all the streetlights out.
“Sup,” I said, waving to the zombies. “Where are we?”
Their zombie sense must’ve told them I was inedible, because they groaned and turned away, shuffling off to whatever the ghoul nightlife was around here. A beautiful feeling of relief cascaded through me as I realized I wasn’t one of them—I’d come back, puncture wounds healed, fresh as a graveyard daisy. Feeding off Truncheon had been enough.
For now. What was I going to do when I got hungry again?
I turned to watch the ghouls shamble off. They weren’t doing so hot on the whole finding-food tip. The wind picked up, carrying an old fast-food wrapper from the mouth of an alley and sticking it to the bare ass of a ghoul. Mother Nature’s way of taunting us abominations.
If the ache in my feet was any indication, I’d wandered far in my zombie state. I couldn’t be sure if this was Des Moines or not. Wherever I’d ended up, it was a real dump. Broken shop windows, overturned cars, ghouls wandering everywhere—the complete set of collapsed-society clichés. I kept stepping in puddles that could’ve been anything from gasoline to blood. I’d never actually encountered gangrene, but that’s how I interpreted the city’s smell—like a moldy limb that needed lopping off.
It was dark, all the stars visible in the sky on account of the electricity being out. Hands on my hips, I stared up at the constellations, looking for the North Star. Not that I would’ve known what to do with it, if I found it. I’m not an astronaut.
I thought about Amanda. Except for the short time when she’d been captured by the NCD before I’d bravely rescued her like a boss, this was the first time in the last couple weeks that we’d been separated. Like, seriously separated. I don’t want to come off as some emo boy who can’t get to sleep unless he’s sucking on a lock of his girlfriend’s hair, but I missed her. If we’d had a normal relationship, like if we’d miraculously started dating back in Jersey when we were human, I probably would’ve relished the alone time after two weeks straight of being constantly on. (On my charm game, yo.) It was an opportunity to binge on comics and fart loud and free. But there wasn’t anything fun to do in this godforsaken zombie wasteland, and I wasn’t used to confronting this apocalyptic shit by myself. So yeah, I missed her.
“Somewhere out there,” I sang to the stars, “beneath the pale moo—”
A ghoul shouldered past me, interrupting. He stared at me, watery eyes uncomprehending.
“Fine,” I said to him, sighing. “I’ll bottle up these feelings.”
Amanda would be looking for me. I’d told her to meet me back at Truncheon’s motor garage/human-trafficking staging area because it seemed like a good idea at the time. Failing that, she’d know that I’d need to make it back to the car for food and probably check for me there. Both those landmarks—well, as much as an abandoned car near a cornfield could be a landmark in the Midwest—were in the same direction. Logic followed that I just needed to head that way.
Except I didn’t know which way that was.
So I started walking.
My mind turned from Amanda to Cass. I had faith Amanda could take care of herself—she didn’t have to worry about all these rail-thin shambling ghouls popping starvation-induced hard-ons for her. Cass, on the other hand . . . she and the people we’d rescued from Truncheon were literally fresh meat. Back at the van, she’d shouted something incredibly cheesy at me that I couldn’t quite remember through the haze of zombie bloodlust, but it made me smile to think about. She was such a weirdo. I didn’t want her to get eaten.
My mind wandered along with my feet, so I didn’t even notice the music until I was almost right on top of it. It wasn’t superloud, but I guess sound carried well when everyone was dead. Just ahead, a flashlight beam danced around from within a smashed-up Gamespot.
It seemed like a good idea not to rush out and introduce myself to someone brazenly scavenging the Deadzone. I pressed myself up against the wall and inched forward, putting my sneaking skills to good use.
I recognized the music. It was Anti-Bellum, this indie hard-core rapper who’d blown up on the blogs a few months ago with his concept album about Civil War battles. Pretty cool, actually.
Inching along, ninjalike, I failed to notice the ghoul on the sidewalk until I stepped in his guts and he started to screech. The poor guy had been cut in half and left leaning against the wall. The undead were literally litter.
“Sorry, sorry, sorry,” I whispered, dancing away from the dark puddle of his intestines.
The music stopped. I cursed my novice-level stealth skills and ducked into the shadows of a doorway. I wished I had the forethought to pick up a weapon—there were all kinds of debris lying around, from boards with nails sticking out of them to loose femurs. I could’ve clubbed this guy and booked, but it was too late now. I decided on hiding.
I heard heavy boots crunching over broken glass and then a lanky shadow ducked through the smashed-in Gamestop entrance. I couldn’t see much beyond the miniature sun of his flashlight, but his silhouette was tall and angular with a huge head, like a Martian scarecrow. He had a backpack on, and the hand not shining a light carried a small boom box. He swept the flashlight beam in both directions, just barely missing my doorway.
“Who’s out there?” he rumbled, his voice gravelly and deep, like Christian Bale’s corny interpretation of Batman. (I preferred Michael Keaton.) A couple ghouls across the street turned their heads at the noise, but didn’t seem interested in rushing him. He was one of them. One of us, I mean. Like me.
Even so, I kept quiet.
“Motherfucker, I heard you,” he growled impatiently. “Don’t make me come looking.”
He was only a few yards away from me, and my hiding spot wasn’t exactly Anne Frank level or anything. He’d find me without much trouble. Why piss him off?
I stepped out of the doorway and cleared my throat. He immediately swung the light into my eyes, blinding me.
“Ow, hey.”
“Who is that?” he snarled.
“Uh, you don’t know me.”
“I know everyone. This is my city.”
“Yeah, okay, Bruce Wayne,” I replied, squinting and shielding my eyes. “You can go back to safeguarding the night or whatever. Just point me toward the highway that goes through the cornfield.”
The flashlight beam shook. The guy let loose a self-deprecating, snort-filled laugh.
“Cool, I was going for a Dark Knight thing,” he said, his voice now a couple octaves higher and less like a rock grinder. A normal voice. “Shit is murder on the vocal cords.”
“Your flashlight is murder on my retinas,” I replied.
“Oh, sorry.”
He lowered the beam to my chest. I tried to blink away the huge lava islands floating across my vision.
“Hate to break it to you,” he said, “but every highway in this stupid state goes through a cornfield.”
“Great.” I sighed.
“Where you trying to go?”
“Originally Des Moines, but I lost my girlfriend on the way, so now I’m just trying to get back to where we left our car.”
“Well, the good news is, you made it to Des Moines,” he said, and waved his flashlight around, illuminating the bloodstains and wrecked storefronts in brief splashes.
I kicked some loose rocks or maybe bones. I’d been worried this was Des Moines. It didn’t look like a place hiding a zombie cure, or a zombie community, or much of anything at all. It looked like a shithole.
“Freaking paradise,” I grumbled.
“It’s what you make of it, man,” the guy replied, sounding a little defensive. He cocked his head, thinking, and then sang a few lines of song at me. “Keep pushin’ ’til it’s understood and these Badlands start treatin’ us good. That’s what your dude says, right?”
The song was familiar, but I couldn’t place it. “Uh?”
“Springsteen, man. Aren’t you from Jersey?”
“How’d you know that?”
“Because you sound mad Jersey. I’m from Queens. East Coast represent!”
He shined his flashlight beam under his face. His features turned monstrous and exaggerated, but at least now I understood why I’d thought his head was so big. The guy had a huge, unkempt Afro. Otherwise, he looked pretty normal—couldn’t have been more than twenty, black, a weird scar on his forehead that looked like puckered lips.
“Name’s Reggie, by the way.”
“Jake,” I said, waving. “Nice to meet you. Thanks for quoting Springsteen instead of, like, trying to shoot me or something.”
“The night is young,” Reggie joked.
A curious ghoul wandered over and stood between us, like she wanted to get into our conversation. Reggie shoved her away and stepped in closer.
“Stupid things,” he mumbled. “Anyway, I don’t usually go for that blue-collar, old-white-dude shit, but Springsteen, he gets it. All his songs are about cars, loneliness, and ladies.”
“My dad loves him,” I said, trying to explain this willful gap in my musical knowledge. “So obviously, that makes him lame. Plus, being from Jersey and liking Springsteen is a total cliché.”
“Yeah, true. You could be into him ironically, but that post-hipster guilty-pleasure shit is so played,” Reggie replied. “Sincerity is underrated, man. Anyway, you should check him out.”
“Uh, yeah, I’ll put that on my to-do list,” I said, feeling a wave of sad futility as this normal-seeming musical feeling-out was taking place in a blacked-out zombie wasteland. When was I ever going to have the chance to sit around listening to Springsteen? My life was kinda screwed right now.
As if sensing my sudden onset depression, Reggie put his hand on my shoulder.
“You want to hang out, Jake?” he asked. “Listen to some records? Maybe get something to eat? I just liberated a Sega Genesis if you’re into that.”
My mouth hung open. Reggie had just ticked off a list of my favorite things, all of which seemed impossible. There were no words capable of expressing the cruelty of his joke, so I just waved my arms.
He laughed again and slapped my shoulder. “Come on, man. I got a place up here.”
“For real?”
He smirked. “Jake, it gets better.”
I hesitated as Reggie started up the block. My experiences with Iowans so far were pretty much one hundred percent murderous. Reggie didn’t seem like Red Bear and those others, though. He seemed chill, like the kind of dude I would’ve been friends with back home. I mean, he listened to indie rap and just looted a Gamestop. How could he not be one of the good guys?
I jogged after him.
We picked our way along the sidewalk and sometimes right down the middle of the street, Reggie leading the way with his flashlight. Each new block was just as gruesome as the last. I sort of missed when I’d been stumbling around in the near-dark. I’m not sure what I’d expected of Des Moines—certainly not some hand-holding zombie utopia, not after meeting those psychos at the farmhouse—but I hadn’t been ready for this nasty postapocalyptic hellscape either.
“How long have you been here?” I asked Reggie.
“Since the start,” he replied. “I was here when things were normal, on the black-person exchange program.”
“Um, Iowa had that?”
He laughed. He did that a lot, it seemed. Laughing was easy for him.
“I’m messing with you. I was going to school. Lucked out, actually. I think I was one of the first people to turn. That was like a year ago.”
He’d been a zombie for a whole year, longer even than Grace and Summer. I grimaced. “So that means there’s no . . .” I trailed off, not wanting to embarrass myself in front of this veteran zombie.
“No what?” He stopped and shined the flashlight at me.
I sighed, feeling stupid. “No cure. We came out here because we heard there was a cure.”
“That’s complicated,” Reggie said, his voice not so easygoing anymore. “I mean, you ever hear that expression the cure is worse than the disease?”
I couldn’t imagine that being true and didn’t bother trying. All I cared about was confirmation that didn’t end with a bulldog on a skateboard.
“So it’s real? The cure?”
“Sure,” Reggie replied, sounding disappointed by my enthusiasm. “It’s real.”
I fist-pumped in the darkness, hoping Reggie didn’t see me. Sure, he’d sounded reluctant and sorta ominous about the cure, but I was choosing to ignore that. It existed! I was close!
We kept on walking. I stepped carefully around a gristle-covered rib cage and spinal column, shaking my head in disbelief.
“No offense, man, but I don’t get why you’d live here.”
“Oh, it’s a mess down here, no doubt. We normally stick to the skywalks,” Reggie replied, then shined his flashlight up, illuminating a glass-enclosed walkway built above the street, connecting two buildings. There were others just like it up ahead. “The ghouls haven’t really figured out how to get up there, so it’s not so annoying to walk around. We even cleaned up most of the severed limbs and arterial spray, despite most of the others not being big on chores and shit.”
“The others . . .” I was thinking of Red Bear and the other bloodthirsty, leather-clad nut jobs I’d run into back at the farmhouse.
“The Sovereign Undead of Des Moines,” Reggie answered, a bit of irony in his voice. “Almost two hundred at last count, I think. Plus a few thousand ghouls, but they’re second-class citizens.”
“Damn, that’s a lot of zombies.”
Reggie chuckled. “More show up every day. Like you.”
“I’m, um, just passing through.”
“Suit yourself,” Reggie said, although I could tell he didn’t really believe me. I decided to change the subject.
“So, you guys, like, elected this Lord guy I keep hearing about?” I thought back to what Red Bear had called him on the border. “Uh, Lord Wesley?”
“Heh.” Reggie shook his head. “Elected? Nah. He just started talking and people started listening, I guess.”
“Is he cool? I picture that Humungus dude in the hockey mask from Mad Max. Like, leather chaps with spikes and a slithery little gimp dude on a chain.”
Reggie was laughing again. “Sorta, yeah. But don’t worry, he’s not so bad.”
Reggie led me to the front door of a swank-looking apartment building. Unlike pretty much every other building I’d seen in Des Moines, the windows on this one were intact. Or newly installed, maybe. Reggie produced a set of keys to unlock the security door and I kept right on talking. I was excited. If I had a cell phone, I’d have already sent Amanda like a billion 911 texts. I’d met a friendly zombie! There was a cure! Everything was going to turn around! Hope you’re alive!
“That’s a relief,” I said to Reggie. “I heard I’d need to ransom off some live humans just to get into the city.”
Reggie led me past an empty elevator shaft to a flight of stairs. He glanced back at me with a crooked grin.
“What? You don’t have any human meat to barter? I’m sorta regretting inviting you over.”
“Dude, my inventory totally sucks right now.” A thought occurred to me as we climbed the steps. “Except, I do have a bunch of pot.”
Reggie stopped so suddenly that I almost bumped into his back. He peered down at me from the landing above, his eyes wide.
“Are you messing with me?” he asked, his voice low and Batmanlike again.
I pulled out my baggie of Husker Doolittle and dangled it in the flashlight beam. Reggie practically leapt down two steps and wrapped me in a powerful hug.
“Our meeting was destiny, Jake,” he said, squeezing me. “You’re my new best friend.”
I laughed, struggling against his grip. “All right, all right, let me go.”
It was a hike up five flights of stairs to Reggie’s apartment. On the way, I noticed a trio of thick extension cords running along the edge of the steps. I’d been talking too much to notice it before, but now I could hear the distant rumbling of engines from the building’s basement.
“Generators?” I asked.
“Yeah,” Reggie replied as we reached his door, the extension cords disappearing underneath. “I gotta scavenge a lot of gasoline to keep this place running, but I think it’s worth it.”
Reggie unlocked the door and I stepped into paradise. It was a huge loft apartment, lit by strings of mismatched Christmas lights, with floor-to-ceiling windows looking out on the darkened city. It was a total rich-dude apartment, like something you’d see a stockbroker drinking martinis in, except Reggie had decorated it with all kinds of acid-trip black-light art and posters from Japanese ninja movies I’d never heard of. A plush, sprawling, U-shaped sectional couch dominated the living room, centered before an obscenely huge wall-mounted plasma TV. Hooked to the TV was pretty much every video-game system known to man, some that I didn’t even recognize. DVDs, video games, records, and stacks of graphic novels overflowed from bookshelves and into carefully organized piles on the floor.
My knees felt weak.
“Dude,” was all I could manage.
Reggie smirked. “As you can see, I’ve had a little bit of time on my hands. You like it?”
“It’s the greatest thing I’ve ever seen in my life.” I did a full 360, trying to take everything in, my hands on my head. “You all live like this?”
“Ha, no. Some of the others, they’re more into that whole rough-and-tumble anarchy lifestyle. They mostly stay around the Ramada Tropics because it’s got a pool. Ramada Tropics in Iowa? You believe that shit? And dirty-ass water because none of them ever figured out how to work a filter or use chlorine.” He shook his head. “Anyway, this is where I come to get away. My hideout.”
“It’s an amazing hideout,” I replied, staring at his collection of video games and trying not to faint from the rush of blood to my nerd boner.
“Heads up,” Reggie yelled, and tossed me a cold can of PBR from the fridge. He grabbed one for himself and then walked over to join me. He carried a tray with neatly arranged rows of dead-looking science mice. “You hungry? Want to try one of these?”
I squinted at the mice. They weren’t dead, just unconscious, and coated in something dusty and orange.
“What the hell is that?” I asked.
“So”—Reggie set down the tray self-consciously—“I’m still working on this, but I’ve been trying to make the whole eating thing a little more, I dunno, palatable? Civilized? I drug these little dudes so they’re not all squirming and pissing themselves when you start eating them, and then I roll them in taco seasoning for flavor.”
“Wow,” I said, staring in awe at Reggie. “I think you might be a genius.”
We each ate a couple of the mice. As usual, the little creatures didn’t quite satiate my hunger—even barely remembered, Truncheon’s brains were the most satisfying meal I’d had in the last week—but I had to admit, these were better than normal critter snacks. Not getting my lips slashed by tiny claws was a nice change of pace, and the taco seasoning made the first bite taste almost like Doritos.
Afterward, Reggie put on a scratchy record, some trippy, cowbell-heavy ’60s thing from a band called Strawberry Alarm Clock, and disappeared upstairs. I flopped down on the couch, feeling a little buzzed from the beer I’d chugged and whatever tranquilizers those mice were pumped full of. I felt more relaxed than I had in days, maybe since before that fateful day in the cafeteria. Through that haze of good feeling, a little guilt crept in—Amanda and Cass were out there somewhere, maybe looking for me, maybe in danger. And here I was reclining because holy shit this part of the couch had a built-in footstool. I’d gotten us closer to the cure, though, hadn’t I? Hanging out with Reggie was technically, like, infiltrating the Iowa zombies.
Yeah, that’s it.
Reggie returned, grinning and dusting off a sizable vaporizer that looked like a gumball machine or a retro robot. He held it up proudly.
“Tom Servo, out of retirement,” he said. “We getting high or what?”
I hadn’t smoked in weeks and that Husker Doolittle was not screwing around. It knocked me on my ass. Reggie fired up some imported shooter on his modded Xbox called Bushido Machine Gun, but my fingers were numb and he was really good, shooting me with rocket-propelled katanas over and over. Eventually, we just settled into our separate areas of the couch, laughing about dumb stuff and talking.
Talking and talking.
Man, will I talk when I’m stoned. Like, more than usual. I’m pretty sure I told him everything—about the massacre at RRHS, my magical romance with Amanda, the weird little psychic we’d picked up and how I had a strange attachment to her, which is something I’d never even realized until that moment and man isn’t weed just amazing?
“You sound like me,” Reggie said. “I mean, the way you were before. Floundering, man.”
“I wouldn’t say floundering,” I replied, too stoned to get defensive. “I was, uh, uniquely open to possibilities up to and including community college.”
“I wasn’t doing so hot before,” Reggie said, countering my life story with his own. “I was sick all the time, ever since I was a kid. I had anemia.”
“Like the eating disorder?”
Reggie laughed. “Nah, man, that’s anorexia. My blood was all jacked up. All kinds of stuff would go wrong.”
I laughed too, then felt bad. “Sorry.”
“Hard to make a lot of friends when you’re sick all the time. Kids are shitty. You know how it goes,” Reggie mused. “I came out here for school because it was far away.”
I sank deeper into the couch, listening.
“I thought things would be different in college, but they weren’t,” he continued. “I had a scholarship for creative writing, but all my professors were dicks, man. They were like, why are you writing about spaceships, write about what you know, like the urban experience . . . and I was like, bitch, my parents were lawyers and sent me to college in Iowa, what am I gonna write about, drive-bys in our fuckin’ Prius?”
“Word,” I replied sagely, then started laughing at my own stupid voice. “Word!”
Reggie ignored me, on a roll now. “Then a ton of people here caught zombie and it was like a lawless war zone overnight.” He fingered the weird scar on his forehead. “I’d seen every zombie movie, man, plus all those apocalypse movies. I played the shit out of every Fallout. I know my stuff. I was feeling better than ever. And, man, I’m good at it.”
“Good at what?” I asked, furrowing my brow.
“Being a zombie,” he answered, grinning at me. “You must be too. Two weeks old and already made it out here to the undead capital. With an NCD psychic hostage too. Goddamn.”
“Uh, thanks, I guess,” I replied, studying a really interesting string of lights, timing my blinking with their breathing, or was it the other way around . . . ?
“Finally found something we’re good at, man,” Reggie mumbled, off in his own head now too. “It’s the best feeling.”
He was right, I realized. I did feel good. I hadn’t made the connection back when Amanda yelled at me for not taking our journey seriously enough, but I did now.
Sometimes I really liked being a zombie.