JAKE

I WOKE UP SPRAWLED ON REGGIE’S COUCH WITH A deathly case of cottonmouth. Daylight poured in through the windows, forcing me to shove my face between the cushions for merciful darkness. I remembered this time I slept over at my old (now dead) friend Henry Robinson’s house and did this same head-burrowing routine, only to scrape my forehead on the dried-up carcass of the missing family lizard. That was traumatizing. Slowly, I lifted my head from the couch. I didn’t know Reggie all that well and you never knew what kind of gross stuff could be hiding down in the crevices.

I sat up and worked some moisture into my mouth. In the light of day, the tranquilized magic of last night wearing off, I suddenly felt panicked to be separated from Amanda and Cass. I really needed to figure out my way back to them. What if they were in danger, out there by themselves? What if they’d been eaten? Or, well, what if one of them had eaten the other? And the noneaten one was all mad at me? It wasn’t cool to just be in the wind like this.

But wouldn’t it be the ultimate action-hero move to swoop in and save Amanda and Cass with armloads of zombie penicillin? I was so close!

Outside, some jerk leaned into his car horn. Okay, that was unusual. I didn’t notice a lot of traffic out in Des Moines last night.

“Jake!” Reggie yelled from upstairs, where I assumed his bedroom was. “You up yet?”

I groaned and stood up, my hangover really kicking in without the couch to soothe it. The living room was empty except for me and the remnants of our two-man party: empty beer cans, stems, and records left haphazardly out of their dust jackets.

“Yeah, man,” Reggie called down, hearing my painful moaning. “Ditto.”

“What’s with the honking?” I yelled back.

“That’s our ride,” Reggie yelled. “We’re kinda late. Do me a favor and go down there. Tell ’em I’ll be out in a minute.”

If I’d been less hungover or less distracted by fantasies of flinging handfuls of antidote pills from the back of a parade float while Amanda stood next to me in an evening gown doing that model hand wave, I might have asked some important follow-up questions. For instance: Who’s driving us where, exactly? Or, what’re we late for? Instead, I just stumbled to the door, accidentally kicking over a colony of beer cans on my way. I darted back inside the apartment for one second to grab a taco-mouse, and then I was ambling downstairs.

The honking stopped as soon as I pushed open Reggie’s security door. A limousine idled on the curb, unlike any I’d ever seen. It was one of those big Hummer deals that you could probably fit a hot tub into. Attached to the front grill was a snowplow blade covered in darkened bloodstains. The roof was decorated with defaced Iowa state flags, and spikes that boasted a collection of severed heads. It was the heads that really got my attention, many of them badly rotten, the identifiable ones seemingly all older men with comb-overs. I stopped in my tracks, feeling like I might want to run back inside.

Someone popped up through the open moonroof.

“This guy . . . ,” Red Bear said, pointing at me with his hatchet. Part of his mouth was carved out and permanently widened with little wooden sticks, giving the impression that he was smiling at me—but he definitely wasn’t. He looked the same as when I’d first met him on that bloody night in the fields beyond the farmhouse—greasy, a phony Native American getup, blatantly psychotic. “Don’t we know this guy, Cheyenne?”

Through the rolled-down driver-side window, the intense chick with bleached blonde dreadlocks I remembered Red Bear sucking face with sized me up.

“Farmhouse,” Cheyenne answered, not all that interested.

“That’s right!” Red Bear slapped the limo roof, startling me. “I thought maybe the NCD killed you, bro.”

“Uh, nope,” I said, glancing up and down the block for escape routes.

“Nope, nope, nope,” mimicked Red Bear in a falsetto, as he clamored through the moonroof and jumped onto the sidewalk. “You just keep popping up, huh? Little popper.”

“Little pooper,” Cheyenne said, and stared hard at me while making a farting noise.

I stared back at these two zombie wackadoodles. Red Bear, sporting an arrangement of dried scalps on his belt, was dressed in a leather vest and pants, Cheyenne in a bikini top and a skirt made of probably-human hair. They were more along the lines of the freaks I’d expected from Des Moines. Reggie being cool and having an awesome apartment had lulled me into a false sense of security.

But wait, were he and Red Bear friends? Were they picking him up?

“So, um, you guys know Reggie, huh?” I said, making conversation, trying to feel out the situation.

Cheyenne snickered.

“Reggie?” Red Bear snapped. “Reggie?”

“Yeah, um, upstairs Reggie? He said he’d be right—”

Red Bear flung himself at me. He tackled me around the waist and we fell onto the sidewalk. Before I could think to punch him, he’d straddled my chest and pinned my arms. He held his hatchet under my chin.

“Reggie?” he screamed again, exerting the slightest pressure against my Adam’s apple. “Your bitch ass doesn’t know any Reggie.”

“Dude,” I whispered, afraid to move my throat too much. “I don’t know why you’re mad.”

Cheyenne giggled. That just seemed to incense Red Bear more. I could see the muscles in his hatchet-wielding arm tightening up.

Behind us, the apartment building’s door clattered open.

“Goddamn it, Red Bear,” Reggie snapped, some of last night’s put-on menace vibrating through his voice. Except, I realized, this time it wasn’t a put-on. “Get off him.”

Red Bear took his hatchet away from my neck, twisted my nipple hard with his free hand, and stood up. I rolled onto my side to face Reggie.

“Are you seriously friends with—?”

I trailed off when I got a look at Reggie’s outfit. He didn’t look normal anymore, not like he had the night before. He’d picked his Afro out so it was even bigger, donned a pair of shaded nuclear-scientist goggles, and draped himself in a sleeveless patchwork overcoat. He didn’t wear any shirt under the coat, showing off the DTFU tattoo on his gaunt chest. Tight leather pants and platform boots that increased his height by another few inches completed the ensemble. He looked like the boss from a fighting game.

He looked like one of them.

“Oh man,” I said. “What the hell are you wearing?”

Reggie chuckled, but Red Bear took the opportunity to kick me in the ankle.

“Show some respect,” Red Bear snarled. “That’s Lord Wesley you’re talking to. The Lord of fuckin’ Des Moines.”