WE CLIMBED UP THE WATER TOWER’S LADDER IN THE dark. Hand over hand, rung after rung, until we were 100 feet up over the darkened state of Iowa. We were in some abandoned suburb in the southwest. We figured it was better not to sleep in the car, just in case some trigger-happy patrol should drive by. And anyway, I’d wanted to climb a water tower ever since I saw those pothead kids do it on that sitcom.
We sat next to each other with our legs dangling off the catwalk. From up here, Iowa looked like a patchwork blanket, farms and houses neatly sectioned off, divided up by those goddamn cornfields. On the horizon, we could see triangles of flickering orange light. Fires.
Amanda made a hiccupping sound like she was trying not to cry. She’d been making that sound a lot since she came back from the undead. She’d also been rubbing her stomach a lot, maybe imagining the horrible wounds she’d suffered and maybe imagining the dude I’d fed her to heal them.
“Do you want to talk about it?” I asked quietly.
She grasped the railing in front of us and squeezed tight. “I—I hardly even knew him,” she whispered. “I don’t know why I feel this way. . . .”
She trailed off. I didn’t press her.
“Something came over me,” she continued eventually. “Maybe I was lonely or scared or desperate. I don’t know. I just needed him. It was like, um, love at first sight or something.”
I cringed and rested my head against the railing. After a second, Amanda rubbed my back.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “I never stopped—I mean, Jake, I still wanted to be with you the whole time. It didn’t make sense.”
“You loved us both,” I said, my voice cracking stupidly with the effort I was putting in to keeping it level.
“I guess,” Amanda said, “but, um, differently somehow. I hardly knew him.”
“You hardly knew me when we started.”
“I knew of you.”
“We didn’t have love at first sight.”
“No, idiot,” Amanda said, and I think she smiled in the dark. “You wore me down.”
She rested her head on my shoulder. Carefully, I put my arm around her. It was the first time we’d really touched since I was shoving all her guts back into her body.
“I’m sorry I made you eat him,” I said after a while.
“It’s okay. You saved my life. Or, I guess my unlife. And I mean, I’m sad about him. But I’m glad it was him instead of you.” Amanda knuckled her forehead. “God, my head is so messed up. What is wrong with me?”
I had a feeling I knew, but didn’t say anything. For now, I’d keep that broken promise to myself.
“I still want to be with you,” I said.
“Me too,” Amanda replied. She smiled up at me. “I didn’t know you were the jealous type, Stephens.”
“Does it really count as jealousy if you actually make out with another guy?”
“Eh. Gray area. Maybe don’t ditch me again.”
“Sorry,” I said. “It was really shitty without you, by the way.”
“Good.”
We kissed then. Slow and gentle, but when I tried to pull away, Amanda sucked on my bottom lip and wouldn’t let me go, so we kissed some more. We kissed until she hiccupped again and broke away to wipe her eyes.
We sat quietly for a while and watched the horizon burn. Eventually, I opened up my backpack and unrolled the bandana. In the dark, I handed Amanda the little bottle of body spray I’d stolen from the mall.
“I got this for you,” I said.
She laughed, easy and surprised, and sprayed a little bit in the air. It was a vast improvement over the heinous combination of fire and rot.
“Thanks,” she replied, and squeezed me.
“I got you a record too,” I continued. “But it broke and I had to use it to stab Red Bear in the eye.”
“Wow. Crazy day.”
“Yeah.”
There was just one last thing left in my bag. I pulled out the remaining syringe of Kope Brothers Un-Undead Super Serum. It glistened with significance in the moonlight, or maybe that was just my imagination.
I tried to hand it to Amanda, but she shoved my hand away.
“No,” she said, shaking her head. “You should.”
“I won’t,” I replied. “Not without you.”
“That’s stupid,” she said. “Stop being all fucking chivalrous and do what we came here for, Jake.”
“You stop being all whatever girl-chivalrous is,” I retorted.
She sighed. Both of us stared down at the syringe in my hand. Amanda pushed a hand through her hair and looked me in the eye.
“If—if I hadn’t gotten shot, if you hadn’t—hadn’t used that one on Cody to save me,” she said shakily, “we could be human right now. It’s my fault. You shouldn’t have to save me twice in one day. It’s ridiculous.”
“No way,” I said. “It’s not your fault at all.”
Because it wasn’t. There were other forces at work here. Other reasons why everything had gotten so screwed up.
Sensing me tense up next to her, Amanda ran her hand across my mohawk. She touched her forehead to mine.
“I don’t mind staying this way with you,” she said. “It’s not so bad.”
I knew she was lying. I pictured her crying in that hotel room when I’d mistakenly yanked out a chunk of her hair. Amanda wanted to be human again more than I did. The last couple weeks had worn her down and today was the worst day yet. And she was lying to me, for my benefit, willing to keep living this miserable existence so that I didn’t have to go it alone.
It made me furious, but not at her.
“There’s another way,” I said. “I know where we can find more.”
Amanda leaned back, searching my face to make sure I wasn’t joking.
“Where?”
I pictured it. Sunshine, fish tacos, psychic manipulation.
“Out there,” I said through gritted teeth, keeping it vague. “Back over the wall. West.”
Amanda was quiet for a moment. “You gave some to her, didn’t you?”
I nodded. On the horizon, something huge exploded, a rippling ball of fire rising into the night sky. The force of the blast reached us a second later, the rusty struts of the water tower creaking.
“World’s ending,” I observed.
“I’m not sure we could make it back to the wall,” Amanda said. “Not sure we could make it over.”
“We could hunt down some of those soldiers,” I suggested. “Figure out how to dodge machine-gun fire this time.”
Amanda smiled sadly. “Let’s just sit awhile longer.”
We both fell silent, the reality sinking in that this night on the water tower might be it. That we were just two rumbling stomachs away from not being us anymore. We didn’t move, though. I think both of us realized that maybe enough was enough—there was only so much highway you could travel, so many people you could eat, before it was time to call it quits.
Amanda reached across me for the backpack and for a moment I thought maybe she’d had a change of heart, that maybe she wanted to take the cure after all. Instead of the Kope Juice, she took out the T-shirt it’d been wrapped in and tore off a strip from the bottom.
“Give me your arm,” she ordered.
I did as I was told and Amanda carefully looped the strip of fabric around our wrists, binding us together.
“In case we turn, this will keep us together,” she explained. “Those ghouls seem so lonely. I don’t want to be like that.”
I smiled and squeezed her hand.
“Okay, but it’s going to make it really hard for us to climb down the ladder.”
Amanda snorted. “If that’s what we decide to do.”
“Yeah,” I replied. “If.”
Amanda put her head on my shoulder, and together we watched the fires gutter and wink in the distance. Pretty soon we’d have to definitively decide the great zombie debate of the modern era: Which is better? Fast zombies that charge relentlessly toward their next meal, or slow, shambling hordes that stick together in undeath because it’d be too unbearable not to?
Pretty soon, but not just yet. For a little while longer, we could just be ourselves. The living dead, living it up.