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. 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.
I used to think playing psychic spin doctor for the NCD made sense—we wouldn’t want to start a panic after just a few isolated zombie attacks—but if we’d lost an entire state? That should be on the news, the president doing that whole somber “My Fellow Americans . . .” thing.
Five minutes of uncomfortable silence later, the familiar orange detour signs started to pop up. Amanda disgustedly shook her head and stepped on the gas. I added a fresh X to the road atlas.
“Have you even been to Iowa?” she asked me.
“Not personally, but they briefed us on emergency access points. We just have to keep looking,” I replied, trying to make this lie sound official. Then, for some reason, I kept talking. “I’m from California, originally.”
“Who asked?” she snapped, and turned on the radio.
I went back to studying the road atlas, not sure why I’d bothered to share a detail about myself. I guess I expected more talking on my cross-country drives, but then maybe I’d seen too many ’80s road-trip movies. There’d been only one conversational highlight so far, which at least proved life among the undead didn’t have to be constantly miserable.
It just required Amanda not be around.
We’d stopped at a gas station that morning and I’d decided to stock up on provisions while I had the chance. I had the sinking feeling that microwaved convenience food was going to be my primary diet for as long as I stuck with the zombies. Lucky for me, this minimart had a better selection than most—single-serving boxes of cereal! white-cheddar popcorn!—so I was really loading up.
I noticed that Jake was wandering the aisles behind me. He must’ve come in to pay for the gas. I stopped to watch him run his fingers longingly across a package of beef jerky. He let out a deep sigh that I interpreted as profoundly sad.
“Um, you all right?” I asked, stepping closer with my armload of people food.
“Huh?” I’d startled him out of some daydream. “Yeah, I’m cool. Just sorta jealous of all your options here.”
“Oh,” I replied hesitantly. “Yeah, gas-station burritos are really enviable.”
Jake looked at me seriously. “They are.”
I guess when you’re used to eating small, furry animals to stave off human-sized hunger pains, you’ll take anything. I tried to think of something that might make him feel better.
“Well, I’m a little jealous that you get to eat, uh . . .”
“Guinea pigs?”
“I’m jealous of the guinea pigs,” I said quickly.
Jake grinned. “You’re a bad liar.”
“Where did you even get so many?” I asked, thinking about the huge cardboard box that occupied my former residence in the trunk.
“Pet stores,” he replied, like that should’ve been obvious. “Actually, if you see one while we’re driving, let us know. You can never have too many.”
“Okay, sure.” I paused, not wanting the conversation to end, but flailing for something to say. “Why guinea pigs anyway?”
“Cost-effective. And they’re surprisingly dense, like, meatwise.” I could tell Jake wanted to change the subject. He grabbed a package of Oreos from a shelf and looked at them longingly. “If I were you, I’d get these.”
“Um, I’m more of an oatmeal-raisin girl.”
Jake narrowed his eyes at me. “Oatmeal raisin? Ugh, you’re ruining the vicarious eating experience here.”
“Vicarious eating?”
“Yeah.” He sheepishly rubbed the stubble growing in around his mohawk. “Yesterday I was watching you eat that pepperoni Hot Pocket and it was, like, I don’t know, a spiritual experience. Is that weird?”
“Yes,” I said, laughing. I was secretly aghast that Jake had watched me eat a Hot Pocket that I’d probably barfed up soon after, but also flattered. I think I might’ve blushed. “But I, um—I don’t mind if you watch me eat,” I added quickly. Then mentally smacked myself.
Where’s a conversation supposed to go after that? Right into an awkward silence. Jake put the Oreos back and picked up a package of oatmeal raisin. He raised a dubious eyebrow at me.
“Ready?”
“As I’ll ever be!” I chirped enthusiastically. Apparently, all that time focusing on psychic connections had rendered my social skills totally cornball.
Jake smiled at me, like he didn’t notice or didn’t care what a dork I was being. We paid and returned to the car. I made sure to angle myself so he could see me in the rearview while I ate my cookies. I couldn’t really tell if he was watching me or not, and eventually he started snoring. He’d been asleep ever since.
I brushed some crumbs off the road atlas. What was I doing here?
I watched as a glimmer of drool formed in the corner of Jake’s mouth and tried to figure out why I liked him. As if there weren’t other, uninfected fish in the sea. As if I couldn’t do better than cute-but-decomposing. He was cuter before he let Amanda shave that mohawk onto his head too. I should’ve gotten over this infatuation by now. Maybe I’d been lonelier than I thought in my eighteen months with the NCD. Maybe it was some kind of psychic sympathy—he was my age, his thoughts fun to spy on, and I needed a friend. Who knows? I could plant a feeling or thought in someone else’s mind, but I couldn’t explain exactly why Jake had taken root so firmly in my own.
I’d been staying out of his head, though. No more telepathic eavesdropping, not since we’d been together. I thought Tom would be proud of me for that. Actually, he’d probably lecture me for sticking with them and tell me how I was responsible for all the people they’d eat now and in the future. I kept telling myself that I owed Jake. I was suddenly a deeply honorable person. These two might be mass murderers, but I made a promise that I’d help them get into Iowa and find the cure. Now that I’d disowned the NCD, I needed a new cause. Maybe that could be assisting disenfranchised zombies. I could take applications and personal essays, choosing the undead candidates who tried the hardest not to eat people.
I didn’t want to admit to myself that maybe I was hanging around because I hoped something might happen with Jake and me, even if I couldn’t imagine how that would work.
Anyway, I told myself, I hadn’t actually helped Jake and Amanda yet. Not really. I was just a passenger. There was still time to get over my weird crush and do something moral and upstanding. I just needed a little more time.
And that’s when the trooper’s siren first blared.
At first, I thought it was a sound effect in one of the club remixes Amanda stole from the most recent gas station. Then I noticed the flashing blue-and-reds behind us. Jake jumped awake, wiping his face with both hands and staring around wide-eyed.
“Oh crap,” he said as he glanced past me, out the back window. “How fast were you going?”
“Sixty-five, I swear,” Amanda replied. “I don’t know what this pig’s deal is, but . . . oh.”
“What?”
She tapped her finger on the speedometer, which still hovered at sixty-five even though we’d pulled over to the shoulder. “It’s stuck.”
“And you’re just noticing this now?”
“I steal the cars. I don’t, like, inspect them.” Amanda looked over her shoulder at me. “Shouldn’t you have seen this coming?”
“I’m not clairvoyant,” I told her.
“So you say.”
“Oh, c’mon, Amanda,” Jake interrupted before I could reply. “Give it a rest.”
We all turned to watch the trooper approach in the rearview. He was a well-built middle-aged guy with that swagger you see on a lot of cops, plus the big aviator sunglasses and a toothpick tucked in the corner of his mouth. He already had his book of citations out, flipping the cover open and closed, like he couldn’t wait to get started.
“Looks like a dick,” Jake and I said in unison. We stared at each other in surprise for a moment, and I mumbled, “Jinx,” but he’d already turned back to Amanda.
“What’re we going to do?” he asked. “We have, I don’t know, a lot of criminality happening here.”
“Don’t spaz out,” she replied, and pulled the front of her tank top a half inch lower. “I get out of these all the time.”
The trooper wore a chunky class ring on his middle finger, with a big amethyst stone that I thought might crack the driver-side window with the way he knocked against it. Amanda obediently rolled it down and the cop took a step back, sucking his toothpick and eyeballing the three of us, his thumbs jammed through his belt loops.
“License and registration,” he said, overenunciating every syllable so it sounded more like lie-cents and reggie-stray-shin. However you pronounced them, we didn’t have either.
I’d never been pulled over before, on account of my enlisting with a covert government organization before my road test. My few interactions with local cops over the last year had involved me flashing an NCD credential and them looking seriously bewildered. All that is why it only gradually dawned on me that we—three fugitives in a stolen car with no paperwork and a trunk filled with small animals—were in a bit of a jam.
“Oh my god,” Amanda bubbled, a sudden girly lilt in her voice, like she’d just jumped out of this cop’s birthday cake. “I’m so sorry, officer, but my car is totally broken.”
She tapped the speedometer and the trooper leaned his head in to check it out. As he did, Amanda subtly arched her back and leaned toward the window. I rolled my eyes. Next to her, Jake kept his fingers tightly laced across his belly. He stared straight ahead, wide-eyed and stiff, which I put down to the innate panic of stoners when faced with badges.
“Uh-huh,” the cop said, having seen enough. He leaned out of the car and dully repeated, “License and registration.”
“Aw, don’t be that way,” Amanda replied, and I couldn’t tell if that was really disappointment in her voice from her first attempt at sex kittening getting rebuffed, or just another helpless-bimbo put-on for the cop. She was good at this, I’ll admit. “I’ll get the car fixed right away, I promise. I’m really, really sorry for wasting your time, officer.”
The trooper pushed his aviators up his nose with his middle finger and stared at Amanda, his upper lip twitching like he wanted to snarl. “You think you’re the first piece of jailbait to try flouncing her way out of a citation, sister?”
“Oh, I’m eighteen, if that’s what you’re worried about,” Amanda purred back without missing a beat.
Honestly, I’d been trying to be good about not invading people’s psychic safe zones and about resting my powers after how hard I pushed myself getting us away from the Farmhouse, but I couldn’t help it. I peeked at the uppermost layer of the trooper’s psyche, wanting to see if Amanda was making any progress. Our incorruptible trooper was remembering the five-day sexual-harassment class he’d had to take after his last on-duty incident involving a buxom bimbo. And he was thinking how nice it’d be to get to pepper spray the kind of uppity, um, let’s say lady that’d gotten him in so much trouble in the first place.
Like the suddenly much creepier agro-trooper had said, we weren’t flouncing our way out of this one.
“I’m gonna start a countdown to ten, Miss Thing,” the cop was saying when I broke psychic contact. “And if I’m not holding some papers when I’m finished, you’re gonna get to see my nasty side.”
Before Amanda could respond, Jake’s stomach let out a thunderous rumble. I’d thought he was just nervous, but now I noticed that his skin had definitely lost some of its healthy glow.
“The hell,” said the trooper, leaning away from the window.
Amanda gawked at Jake, the trooper momentarily forgotten. “Seriously? Right now?”
He shrugged helplessly. “I guess I didn’t have a big enough breakfast.”
The trooper pushed his sunglasses up his face, staring at Jake’s unnatural pallor. “You all right, son?”
“Maybe you should get out of here, before you see our nasty side,” Amanda warned the trooper, the sexpot act totally dropped.
It didn’t look like the trooper was going to budge. He was weirded out, but I don’t think he grasped that he was in grave danger of being digested. I decided to give him a psychic shove. It was just like working Containment for the NCD—we made sure witnesses believed our zombie cover stories by nudging their brains in the right direction. Here, I just amped up the flight portion of the fight-or-flight instinct anyone with a dangerous job quickly learned to trust. Later, it’s unlikely the trooper would’ve been able to properly explain why he backed away from our car and then sped off down the highway—only that he had the sudden, intractable urge to get as far away from those three strange kids as humanly possible.
“Okay,” the trooper said, backing slowly away. “Just drive carefully, please.”
That left me as the only human in the area of one hungry zombie.
Jake stared at me, his breathing ragged and hoarse, his skin ashen.
“Don’t look at me like that,” I said.
“I’m—I’m not,” he stammered, then practically flung himself out of the car, headed for the trunk.
“Make sure you eat enough this time,” Amanda shouted after him. She watched the trooper’s car disappear around a bend. “Still got it,” she said to herself. She tossed her hair, dyed black with patches of blonde throughout. “I thought losing the blonde would be a major handicap. I’m sure you know what I mean.”
I had more on my mind than standing up to Amanda for brunettes everywhere. My voice drowned out the panicked chittering of the guinea pig Jake had plucked from the trunk. “If he’d turned zombie just now, would you have . . . ?”
Amanda met my eyes in the rearview. “Protected you?” She flashed me a wild smile. “Gosh, I don’t know! Would’ve been interesting!”
My hands shook. I looked away.
After a few minutes, Jake returned looking normal again. He let out a big sigh of relief and smiled at Amanda.
“Sorry,” he said. “Guess I got stressed there.”
“It’s cool.” She plucked a piece of fur off his shirt. “All better?”
Jake nodded, then looked at me. It was the same disbelieving look he’d shot me when the trooper had first driven away.
“You did something, didn’t you?”
“Um, what do you mean?”
“Like, you brainwashed that dude.”
I shook my head. “Not exactly. I just, you know, nudged him toward wanting to go.”
Amanda turned around too, and now both zombies were sizing me up.
“Seriously?” she asked. “You did that?”
Jake laughed at her. “Did you really think you convinced him with the power of boobs? Dude, it was like the start of a porno where instead of sex there’s just a ton of Tasering.”
Amanda gave Jake a dirty look and then turned away, starting the car.
“That was cool of you,” Jake said to me, smiling. “Just don’t brainwash us. Okay?”
“I won’t, I promise,” I replied, with a solemn tone that made it sound like I was making some major pledge. Jake was only joking around with me, but I took it seriously. I was going to stay out of his mind for good.
Even if every time Amanda said something mean to me or did something casually intimate like pick a piece of dead animal fur off Jake’s shirt, I thought to myself . . . I could make him like me.
That wasn’t me. I really, really didn’t want that to be me. But I could do it, if I wanted to.
Amanda still hadn’t pulled back onto the road. She caught my eyes in the rearview again, a bit of mischief glittering there.
“So . . . ,” she said, “what other tricks can you do?”