HE SMELLED. THAT WAS THE FIRST THING I NOTICED. AS I walked toward him along the highway shoulder, his stink came bounding out to meet me. It wasn’t like forgot-deodorant-on-a-hot-day smell either. He smelled how I imagined cavemen probably smelled—the unsuccessful ones who got eaten by dinosaurs because their stench gave them away.
He sat astride his motorcycle and smoked a cigar. He was big—tall and wide—but stretch marks and saggy skin pockets gave the impression he used to be bigger. It looked like he’d spent the last few months foraging for food on a deserted island, and the experience had left him sunburned, sinewy, and filthy all over. He had two guns slung over his shoulders—a long rifle with a scope, and a sawed-off shotgun. His belt had to be some kind of special-order survivalist thing because it had more than a dozen compartments and pockets, many of them bulging with what was probably ammunition, totally compromising the theory that belts should hold up one’s pants. His hair was prematurely gray, long, pulled back in a greasy ponytail. He wore a leather vest with no shirt, ripped and bloodstained jeans, and surprisingly clean running shoes.
I stopped in front of his motorcycle. He pushed a pair of mirror aviators down his nose and gave me a skeptical look. Then he wet his chapped lips, snorted like something funny had occurred to him, and put the glasses back on. He didn’t say anything and it didn’t seem like he had any intention to do so anytime soon.
As far as hard-ass mercenary types went, this guy reminded me a little of Jamison, the heavy hitter in my old NCD squad. Except with Jamison I could always tell there was an off switch, that he used to be a regular person before getting swept up in the zombie-killer lifestyle. I didn’t detect any of that muted humanity from this guy. He looked like he was born mean, probably stubbed out cigarettes on his mom during breast-feeding.
I wished I’d worn my black hat. I was afraid it’d make me look silly—which it did—but I could’ve used some of its power. It felt like I was entering a place where looking crazy would be an advantage.
“You’re my guide?” I asked, breaking the prolonged silence. I tried to keep my voice from squeaking. “I’m Cass.”
“Truncheon,” he said, his voice scratchy, like emphysema wasn’t far off.
I gave him a weird look, not sure if that was some password I was supposed to recognize.
“Like the club,” he clarified. “It’s what people call me.”
“Oh.” Nice to meet you, Mr. Truncheon, I thought, but didn’t say. For some reason, I didn’t think cute would play well with a guy nicknamed for a weapon.
Truncheon looked up at the sky, like he was trying to discern something from the position of the sun.
“You’re late,” he said at last. “I’d started to think I’d imagined the whole thing.”
“Sorry. We had problems getting out of Omaha.”
Truncheon didn’t seem interested in my excuse. Now that we were past introductions, he seemed excited to talk to me. Like it’d been a while since he had a conversation.
“That bow-tied dweeb comes to me in a dream last night,” Truncheon said. “You believe that? Haven’t heard from him in months, figured maybe someone’d finally done the world a mercy and offed him. He tells me he needs me to pick up one of his operatives. Got some special mission he’s on about. Tells me, if it’s a success, he can clear up some . . . legal complications for me back in the real world, make it so I don’t have to live in the Deadzone anymore.”
I glanced toward the wall, surprised. “You live in there?”
He grinned at me with teeth like pads of butter. “Honey, I like it in there. I ain’t trying to go back to the real world. I asked our mutual friend, ‘What else ya got?’”
I folded my arms, wishing the government could come build a giant wall between me and this guy. A smell-canceling wall.
“What did he offer you?” I asked, regretting the dread in my voice. I needed to push that down and get tough. Today was going to be a messy day and I needed to be ready for it.
“A squad,” he replied. “I used to be NCD, kid.”
“You’re joking.”
Truncheon grinned, like he was glad not to be recognizable as a government man. “Still am, according to the paperwork. But no one pays me much attention except our mutual friend. He’s a jumped-up prick, but he’s got a real appreciation for the unorthodox.”
“That’s one way of putting it,” I replied, thinking of zombie slavery, my hostage mom, and trademarked bow ties. “Why do you want a team?”
“The jumpsuits and the bureaucracy they can cram up their asses, but I love me some NCD brainpower. He promised me autonomy and a new psychic.” Truncheon shrugged. “Plus, it gets lonely in there.”
My throat constricted. “A new psychic?”
“Yeah. My last one sorta broke.”
I was pretty confident Alastaire was too attached to the idea of me as his psychic prodigy to ship me off to Truncheon’s smelly postapocalyptic boarding school. Even so, I felt the growing urge to get as far away from this NCD lone wolf as possible, preferably to a place that sold lice shampoo. Truncheon wasn’t even paying attention to me, though; he gazed over my shoulder toward the car.
“He said I could probably have the girl too,” Truncheon said, referring to Amanda. “She looks fresh, unlike most of the rot on the other side of the wall. He said I’d be doing you a favor, taking her off your hands. Not sure what he meant by that, exactly. Cryptic jerk-off. All this is after the job is done, of course.”
I glanced back at the car. I could see Jake and Amanda in silhouette, her making animated gestures and him slowly nodding. I swallowed a lump of revulsion before turning back to Truncheon. Tried to make my shrug as nonchalant as possible; I didn’t want to give anything away—not my psychic powers and not my relationship to my zombie passengers.
“Whatever,” I said. “Can we get on with it?”
“She nice to talk to?” Truncheon asked, running a hand over his crusty, bristled chin. “Companionable?”
I glanced back at the car again. It looked like Amanda was yelling now.
“Not particularly, no.”
He shrugged. “Not that it matters. Your standards get real low on the other side.”
I tried not to shudder, to keep my posture loose and detached, like I was ordering a pizza instead of brokering the rights to a pretty, young zombie with this gruesome survivalist in the shadow of a wall that shielded humanity from the country’s one and only undead party zone. No big deal. I let my head loll around, insolent and bored. Truncheon frowned at me, then gazed down at himself like he’d only just realized his disgusting state.
“It’s a different world on the other side,” he said grimly. “You’ll find that out soon enough.”
“Cool story,” I said. “Can we get on with this?”
Truncheon jabbed a thick finger in my direction. “You know, you remind me a lot of him. Same shitty attitude about polite conversation. Same judgmental psychic eyes.”
“What? I’m not a psy—” Without some telepathic nudging, the lie sounded feeble. A bark of laughter from Truncheon cut me off before I could even finish it.
“I was only guessing, sweetheart,” he sneered, and tapped his temple. “We don’t all need magic powers. Some of us are just keen observers of the human condition.”
“Guess that’s why you choose to live with the zombies,” I replied, deadpan.
“Yep,” Truncheon said. “Exactly right.”
Truncheon reached around to the back of his motorcycle, where a burlap knapsack was strapped. He tossed it toward me. I made no move to catch it; the sack landed with a puff of dust at my feet.
“Stuff you’ll need is in there,” he explained.
I knelt down and checked the contents. Handcuffs and chains. Muzzles. A handheld version of the stun guns NCD agents had recently started carrying around. The ones I’d seen before had all been rifle sized; this one fit neatly in the palm of my hand. Turning it over, I noticed MANUFACTURED BY KOPE BROTHERS emblazoned on the grip. Like the Deadzone itself, the weapon was another gift from the NCD’s favorite corporate benefactor.
I shoved the stun gun into the front of my jeans, hidden under my shirt. Truncheon watched me with one eyebrow suggestively raised.
“You know how to use that thing?”
I’d never actually fired one, but he didn’t need to know that. He already knew more than I was comfortable with. I nodded.
“Don’t worry about me,” I said. “What happens next?”
Truncheon jerked his thumb toward the wall. “The boys know I’m bringing you through. All the same, they get jumpy. You just keep up appearances and let me do the talking.”
I shouldered the knapsack with some effort, the chains inside clanking around. Keeping up appearances meant getting Jake and Amanda to put on those chains—not exactly a conversation I was looking forward to having. But what other choice did they have at this point? I’d brought them too far. For that matter, what other choice did I have?
“What’s your plan once we’re in the Deadzone?” Truncheon asked. “You going with the soft touch or the hard?”
“Soft,” I answered quickly. “Definitely soft.”
My plan was to ask Jake and Amanda really nicely if they’d sneak into Des Moines and steal a zombie cure for me. That’s what they were trying to do anyway, right? Alastaire favored playing the zombies until they’d gotten the cure and then ripping them off, but all that Machiavellian crap hadn’t worked out for anyone so far. I’d decided to try honesty. We could share and my mom wouldn’t get killed. Everyone wins. Except for Amanda, I guess, but we could work that out later, once the cure was in hand.
“Hard touch works better in there,” Truncheon warned. “You’ll learn that soon enough too.”
I touched the stun gun hidden under my shirt. “You’ll know if I change my mind.”
My backup plan was to hold Amanda hostage and make Jake go into Des Moines alone. But that was only if things got desperate, if they refused to help me, which I just couldn’t see Jake doing.
I definitely needed my black hat.
I turned away from Truncheon and headed back for our car.
“See you on the other side,” he called after me.
The other side. It kind of felt like I’d already crossed over. Maybe I’d been naive to think I was doing good while I was with the NCD, but at least I’d had something resembling a code. Now I was in this murky, amoral territory populated by creatures like Alastaire and Truncheon. I was becoming one of them.
A fresh swell of psychic hangover broke across my brain. I’d been able to keep myself upright and functional during my conversation with Truncheon and was paying for it now. The reinvigorated headache sent a wave of nausea through me. I felt suddenly hot, like I could feel individual beams of heat reflecting off the wall behind me, and yet a cold sweat spread across my spine. The knapsack suddenly felt like it weighed a ton and that I was carrying it through quicksand. I was about to faint.
I need help.
And then Jake was there. Steadying me. He took the knapsack from me and slung it over his shoulder with a grunt. He led me back toward the car, one of his hands on my elbow, the other on the small of my back. A flash of memory came back to me—him holding me up outside the hotel elevator. I managed to put on a shaky smile.
“We have to stop meeting like this,” I joked badly. Good one, Cass.
He looked nervous. This display of chivalry probably wasn’t winning him any points with Amanda. I tried to zero in on her face, but everything beyond Jake was a blur.
“I heard you,” Jake said to me, sounding dumbstruck.
“Huh?” It was hard to hear him over the thunderclap of my own heartbeat.
“I heard you inside my head,” he said.
Psychic slippage. That’s what my instructors had called it, when you couldn’t keep your thoughts to yourself. It was an amateur mistake, something that I’d never had to deal with, being such a gifted prodigy of the telepathic arts. Until now, at least.
“Did—did you hear me think anything else?” I asked Jake cautiously.
“It was more like a feeling,” he said as we paused outside the car. I could sense Amanda watching us intently. “A guilty feeling.”
I peered up at him, trying to get a read on his thoughts the old-fashioned way. What are the physical giveaways for when a guy knows you’ve just used his girlfriend as a down payment to a mercenary? That pretty soon you might double-cross him? I didn’t see any in his sweet, confused face.
“Are we going to be okay?” Jake asked, opening the driver-side door so I could collapse into the front seat.
I couldn’t answer honestly, so I just pretended not to have heard.