“TRUNCHEON.” I REPEATED THE NAME AGAIN, BECAUSE I just couldn’t get over the total excess of badassery riding a motorcycle in front of us. “He’s like a freaking video-game character.”
Neither of the girls seemed interested. At this point, I was pretty used to my gaming references falling flat. Not my best opposite-sex material, granted, but I’d never before come across an actual human being that looked like a refugee from a Capcom shooting game as designed by Todd McFarlane. It demanded comment.
“Did you guys see he’s wearing a utility belt? He’s wearing a utility belt. It’s probably where he keeps his power-ups.”
“Okay, we get it,” Amanda said, sitting beside me in the backseat. Our words were muffled thanks to the serial-biter muzzles we’d strapped into. “Maybe reflect on your new crush in silence.”
“Don’t cheapen this by making it sexual,” I replied with mock offense. “There are guys like me who merely know the Contra code. And then there are dudes like my new best friend Truncheon who are living it.”
Amanda sighed, the breath whistling through the air slits in the muzzle. “Do I even want to know what that is?”
“It’s some retro shit,” I explained. “Up, up, down, down—”
“No, I do not.” Amanda answered her own question.
I fell silent. Amanda reached over and took my hand, gave it a squeeze, our chains clanking together. I looked over at her and could only really see her eyes above the muzzle, so it was hard to tell, but I think she was smiling at me. The banter helped, I think. It’d become a kind of coping mechanism for us, especially useful as we were slowly driven toward a giant wall manned by zombie killers.
I winked at her. She rolled her eyes at me.
“You look kind of hot in that muzzle,” I whispered. “Like a supervillain on her way to lady jail.”
She stared at me. “Thanks, but I’m going to pretend you never said that.”
“Me too,” said Cass from the driver’s seat.
Cass didn’t have much to say once I’d gotten her back to the car—verbally or otherwise. She explained the plan was to take us through the wall like we were zombie slaves assigned to her, which Amanda and I had already put together, argued over, and settled on as not having a better option. So we ended up in chains (left those carefully unlocked, thank you very much) and muzzles, and Cass seemed relieved not to have to convince us. I think she passed out with her forehead against the steering wheel while we ate a couple guinea pigs and put on our slave costumes. She looked wiped out. Once we were on the road again and Cass was driving, I’d caught her drifting, the car sliding across lanes toward the median. I kicked the back of her seat and she came up alert, had been clinging to the wheel ever since. We were only going about fifteen miles per hour. Truncheon was up ahead setting the slow and totally nonthreatening pace.
We didn’t talk any more about Cass’s psychic distress call. She seemed embarrassed by it, so I tried not to let on how whispers-in-the-dark creepy it’d been to have an outside voice trample in on my thoughts. I also tried not to overanalyze the ball-shrinking, sizzling guilt feeling that’d raced through me, or how I’d felt something weirdly similar before but couldn’t figure out exactly when. Nope. Let’s just forget about all that.
As we closed in on the wall, I noticed some movement along the top. Those turrets I’d picked out before had operators now, shadowy figures aiming machine gun barrels at us. I swallowed hard and kept this detail to myself. Pretty soon we were close enough to the wall that we couldn’t see the top anymore.
“Glad we didn’t try to climb over,” I said to Amanda, both of us staring at the wall.
“I bet you are,” she said. I could hear her teasing smirk. The wall was sleek metal all the way up and across—smooth-plated titanium or adamantium or some experimental government alloy they didn’t have a name for—there weren’t any handholds anywhere. At some point, while Cass was talking to Truncheon, we’d debated scrapping this whole plan, going back to civilization, and finding a grappling-hook store. That idea had broken down when I told Amanda I’d never mastered the rope climb in gym class.
“My amazing core makes up for my average upper body,” I told her.
“Uh-huh.”
A gap opened up in the wall where it met the highway, loud hydraulics powering the metal plates apart. Flashing lights and a dull siren alerted everyone inside that they had visitors. Truncheon passed through first. We followed.
“Oh man,” Amanda whispered. “So many.”
“It’s like a genocidal Ghostbuster convention,” I whispered back.
Underneath the wall, in a cleared space that served as both parking garage and rec center, the NCD jumpsuits were everywhere. They sat on the hoods of Jeeps, cleaned their guns, and stared at us. They sat around picnic tables, ate buffalo wings, and stared at us. They paused from poring over tactical maps, hastily covered them up, and stared at us. They stopped highly competitive games of Ping-Pong and stared at us.
It was like one of those dreams where you show up for class in just your underwear and all your classmates have rifles with bayonets and start trying to stab out your brain.
“Try not to look, uh, emotional,” said Cass through clenched teeth. “Look zombieish. And don’t hold hands.”
Reluctantly, I released my grip on Amanda. I kept my eyes straight ahead. Slumped my shoulders in the way of disaffected undead. Desperately held in a nervous fart.
One by one, the NCD guys went back to doing whatever they were doing. Up ahead, an older agent with a clipboard was exchanging words with Truncheon. The filthy mercenary didn’t seem even a little intimidated by all the hardware surrounding us. I guess he’d done this before.
“Why are there so many?” whispered Amanda.
Cass didn’t answer. It did seem like the agents were massing here, like it shouldn’t take this many dudes to keep a wall upright. But what did I know about secret military operations?
A young NCD guy who looked fresh out of boot camp, bright-eyed and buzz-cut, sauntered over to our car. He was staring at us zombies, grinning dumbly, like we were animals at the petting zoo and he’d just bought a quarter’s worth of those bran feed pellets. He tapped on Cass’s window and, after a moment’s hesitation, she rolled it down.
“You got two of them things, huh?” he said conversationally. The agent rolled up his sleeve, displaying a bandage on his forearm for Cass’s inspection. “I was supposed to get in on that program, get me a zombie of my own. They even put this damn nozzle thing on me. But I heard it didn’t work, that the bigwig in charge got himself demo—”
“Agent, do you have orders to come talk to me?” Cass cut in coldly, a steel in her voice I hadn’t heard before. She didn’t let him reply. “Do you have orders to even look at me or my property?”
The agent’s grin flickered, but I could tell he wasn’t sure if she was serious or not. She was pretty little and hungover looking to be acting so hard, although I could see her eyes burning like hot coals in the rearview. I wouldn’t have messed with her, personally.
“Hey, whoa there—”
She cut him off again. “I will use you for food and your squad leader won’t even miss you. My zombie will crap you out and they’ll call it a dishonorable discharge.”
I laughed. Couldn’t help it. Luckily, muzzled as I was, the laugh came out harsh and raspy, something a new recruit might mistake for zombie hunger. The agent flinched and backed away.
“Sorr—” he yelped, but Cass had already rolled up the window.
“You’re a terrible Trojan horse,” Amanda said to me.
“Not my fault! I didn’t know she was going to make with the one-liners.”
“You guys have got to stop talking,” Cass said, looking deflated, like acting the part of the NCD hard case had sapped her even further.
“Sorry,” I replied.
“Yeah,” Amanda said, adding hesitantly. “Impressive bitchiness, though.”
Meanwhile, Truncheon had finished talking with the clipboard guy. He revved his motorcycle way louder than necessary, showing off, a plume of black exhaust curling out of the tailpipe. He waved for us to follow him as the NCD guys stepped begrudgingly aside.
We drove through the NCD encampment and out the other side of the wall. As soon as the gate closed behind us, Amanda and I stripped off our chains, helping each other with the straps and buckles of the muzzles. We let it all pool in the footwells.
“Iowa,” I said, feeling a brief flare of triumph. “We made it.”
I turned to watch the wall recede behind us. Unlike the side facing nonquarantined America, the inside of the wall was covered in warning signs—DO NOT APPROACH, most prominently, but the one that stuck out for me was ALL TRESPASSERS PRESUMED HOSTILE CONTAMINANTS. That explained the husk of a station wagon we passed on the side of the road, riddled with bullet holes, a torn white flag with the spray-painted message UNINFECTED mounted on the roof. I couldn’t see if there were any bodies inside because the windows were too spiderwebbed and broken for a clear view. But I bet they were there, cut down trying to escape. It was as if the NCD had left the car there as a warning to anyone else with ideas of rushing the wall.
“Fucked up,” I said quietly.
“Massive, gaping understatement,” replied Amanda, turning her head to stare at the wreck.
For the first few miles, the land on the Iowa side of the wall was cleared of any kind of cover, just like it’d been on the other side. Things changed once the wall disappeared from view. Trees started popping up again, fields of corn, road signs, houses, and farms. We were on a rural back road, cruising, and it was almost normal.
Except there weren’t any people.
And then there was the smell. It fell somewhere on the spectrum between rotten meat and spoiled cheese that’d been sprayed with sweet-smelling perfume. It hit me whenever the wind picked up and got stuck inside my nostrils. The weird thing? I didn’t really mind it so much. It was gross, yeah, but I had a tolerance for it. I noticed Cass wrinkling her nose, though, sucking in breaths through her mouth.
“That’s what we smell like, isn’t it?” I asked her.
“Uh,” she replied, “not all the time. Not now. You guys smell fine now.”
“Thanks for that,” said Amanda.
Cass shrugged and pulled her shirt up over her nose and mouth.
As Truncheon led us east, deeper into Iowa, I started noticing the abandoned cars. Some of them were just parked on the side of the road like their owners had wandered off to get gas or otherwise decided to randomly take up walking. Others were straight-up crashed, some head-on into one another, some wrapped around trees, some flipped over like sad turtles. Still no people, though. I’d expected chaos like we’d gotten a taste of back in Omaha, not this eerie quiet. What was the point of building a wall around an abandoned state?
“This isn’t so bad,” I remarked after a few miles.
Amanda elbowed me. Pointed.
Oh yeah, so there was a dead guy hanging from a tree. It wasn’t totally clear whether he’d done it himself or if someone had strung him up. His head was swollen soft and purple above the noose, the body below withered, gray, and partially eaten. His feet were chewed off, toe bones brilliant white in the late afternoon sun. Whatever zombie had gone this-little-piggy on him hadn’t been enterprising enough to climb up for the rest. A cardboard sign that read ISAIAH 26:19 was pinned to the corpse’s ratty flannel shirt.
“Ugh, I stand corrected,” I replied. “Either of you guys know the Bible?”
Both girls shook their heads. Cass looked pretty grim, focused on the road ahead.
“Bet it’s something about the end of the world,” Amanda said.
“Oh, you mean the guy swinging from a tree didn’t pick out a happy quote?”
The corpses started appearing more frequently after that. Grisly sun-cooked lumps on the side of the road—or in the middle of the road, or hanging out of cars, or once smeared gruesomely across a truck’s windshield—usually so torn up and rotten that they didn’t really register as human bodies. Or maybe I was just getting desensitized to the whole thing. So far Iowa looked a lot like the suburbs on the day after Halloween, except instead of pumpkins smashed open everywhere, it was human heads.
I watched a crow take flight from within the hollowed space of a body’s rib cage. The birds were the only sign of life we’d seen so far.
A few miles farther into the middle of nowhere, Truncheon pulled off the road and into the dusty parking lot of an abandoned gas station and auto shop. In normal times, this place would be like an oasis if you popped a tire out in the country. Now, it seemed ominous. The building looked like it’d been ransacked once (gas pumps hung limp off their hooks, windows shattered and boarded up) and then reassembled by some enterprising Mad Max type (barbed wire everywhere, armed bear traps cluttering the parking lot).
“Does he live here?” I asked as Truncheon hopped off his motorcycle and picked his way carefully toward the garage.
“Let’s find out,” Cass said, opening her door.
Truncheon heard the door open and spun toward us.
“Stay in the car!” he shouted, hands cupped around his mouth.
Chastened, Cass shut the door. We waited.
“Uh, can’t we just drive away?” Amanda asked. “Do we still need this guy?”
“He knows the area,” Cass said. “He’ll get us to Des Moines.”
From inside, Truncheon flung open one of the shop’s garage doors. He parked his motorcycle inside and then drove out in a black conversion van.
“What’s with the van?” I asked.
“Not sure,” Cass replied, and I detected a bit of apprehension in her voice. Maybe she hadn’t discussed this part with our esteemed guide.
“Maybe his crotch just hurts,” I offered.
“Maybe,” Cass said.
Truncheon pulled up next to us, hopped out, and went into a stretch where he knuckled the small of his back and stuck out his belly.
“Gross,” Amanda observed.
“Worst thing we’ve seen yet,” Cass added.
Done curling his spine and thrusting his hips, Truncheon motioned for Cass to roll down her window. She complied reluctantly, letting a bunch of fresh odors into the car. In a place overrun with bad smells, Truncheon’s BO conquered all. I’d never considered how badly action heroes must reek.
“Let me see that,” Truncheon grunted, gesturing to our road atlas lying open on the passenger seat.
As Cass handed over the map, Truncheon’s gaze turned toward me and Amanda. I couldn’t really see his eyes through the mirrored aviators, but I got the feeling they lingered on Amanda more than me.
“All right, here’s us,” Truncheon began, turning back to Cass, and pointing to a spot on the map just west of Des Moines. Then he licked his thumb and pressed it onto the nearby city, creating a damp circle on the map. “Everything outside of this radius is anarchy. That’s good. Anarchy ain’t so bad in the country—lots of places for gals like you to run and hide. Inside the circle is where the zombies that haven’t rotted out have organized, where the trouble is. Normally, I don’t go poking around thereabouts unless absolutely necessary, but we got a mission, huh?”
I exchanged a look with Amanda. I thought we were the ones on a mission.
“So here’s the lay of the land,” Truncheon continued. “We take back roads, in case the Lord’s got his people patrolling. They don’t usually scavenge out here anyway. There’s more fresh meat to be had farther east in Cedar Rapids.”
“Why Cedar Rapids?” Cass asked.
“City only just got brought inside the wall a few weeks ago,” Truncheon replied, like this detail was inconsequential. “Still plenty of uninfected holdouts there, waiting for the government to come chopper them to safety. Idiots don’t realize who put up the wall in the first place.”
“Dude,” I muttered in disbelief. “That’s cold.”
Truncheon didn’t even glance at me. “On the outskirts of Des Moines, your entourage here will take my van. Get in there and do whatever they’re supposed to do. You and me will head to a safe house I’ve got nearby and wait shit out. You know how to play gin rummy?”
In response, Cass rolled up her window.
Truncheon stood in the road for a moment, his expression at first dumbfounded and then offended. After glaring at Cass for an uncomfortable thirty seconds, he finally got back on the road, signaling for us to follow.
“You’re not really going to, like, hang out with this guy, are you?” I asked.
“I don’t really have a choice,” Cass replied, adding with quiet resolve, “I’m not playing any freaking cards, though.”
Amanda leaned forward to look at Cass. “So, I appreciate the chauffeur thing and all, but what exactly did he mean about your mission?”
Cass forced a nervous laugh. “Oh yeah. About that.”
Amanda glanced at me, like she wanted my diplomatic help. I could see the first sign of smoke from her temper flaring.
“Uh, is there something we need to talk about, Ca—?”
“Look out!” Amanda yelled.
Without warning, unless you count brake lights, Truncheon’s van went into a skid. Startled, Cass slammed the brakes. We fishtailed for a second, but ended up on the shoulder, dust kicking up around us, inches from Truncheon’s back bumper.
“The hell is he doing?” Amanda asked.
Cass shielded her eyes with one hand. “There’s something up ahead.”
I hopped out to get a better look. Ahead of me, Truncheon had climbed into the front doorway of his van and set his sniper rifle up on the roof. He screwed a silencer into the barrel, but paused to glance at me.
“Want to see something cool?” he asked.
“Uh.”
Amanda and Cass had gotten out of the car too, but they hung back, probably repulsed by Truncheon. I stood next to the rear of the van, squinting down the road.
“You see him?” Truncheon asked me conversationally as he peered through the scope.
I did. The zombie was about a half mile down the road and ambling in our direction. His movements were herky-jerky—one foot dragged uselessly behind him, head lolling from side to side on his shoulders. One of his hands was outstretched toward us.
“Is he waving?” I asked.
“Heh.” Truncheon snorted, then blew the top of the zombie’s head off with a silenced puff from his rifle.
“Whoa,” I said, taking a step back.
“Got it in one.” Truncheon shouldered his rifle and grinned proudly in my direction, but that look faded fast when Amanda started yelling at him.
“Asshole! You just killed that guy!” she shouted.
Truncheon hopped down from the van and pointed his rifle at Amanda.
“You need to stop yelling,” he commanded. “There could be more wandering around in the fields and we don’t want to attract them. Me and your sweet little friend”—he glanced at Cass—“we aren’t at the top of the food chain around here.”
Amanda lowered her voice, but at the same time stepped forward, toward the rifle, letting Truncheon know she wasn’t impressed. Her shoulders were square, chin titled up, going into ice-queen mode. Cass took a couple discreet steps away, toward me.
“That was a person,” she seethed at Truncheon.
Truncheon barked a laugh, shaking his head incredulously. He looked at Cass. “What’d you bring with you? A couple peacenik zombie goody-goodies?” His gaze swung to me. “Don’t you eat people?”
“We’re trying to cut back,” I said, speaking the nonchalant language of badass dudes everywhere. “But we’ve made exceptions before.”
“Christ.” Truncheon lowered his rifle and pointed down the road toward his kill. “That was a ghoul. How you kids’ll end up if you don’t manage a balanced diet. No person left. Ain’t no coming back once you’re like that. I saw one of those things chew through a family of five and not come back to life even a little bit.”
“Uh”—I raised my hand—“why did you watch a family of five get eaten?”
“Beside the point,” Truncheon replied.
I looked at Cass, who’d been watching this whole exchange nervously. “Didn’t you get, like, character references before hiring this guy?”
“You cherry Deadzone tourists don’t know a goddamn thing,” Truncheon snapped, glaring at all of us. “Here’s rule number one: see a ghoul, kill a ghoul. They’re bad for the fucking ecosystem.”
“Oh, so you’re a conservationist?” I asked.
Amanda yawned. “All right, whatever. We’re in. I didn’t sign up for any secret missions. What’re we still following Pigpen and his molester van for?” She snapped off a mocking salute at Truncheon and started for the car. “Let’s bail.”
“Good point,” I agreed, and moved to follow her. “Smell ya later.”
“Time for the hard touch?” I heard Truncheon grumble to Cass.
“Hey, wait—” Cass reached out to stop me. “We need to talk about something. I need a favor.”
Amanda was already back at the car. “Hey,” she yelled to Cass, “let’s talk after we ditch the murderous smelly guy, all right?”
I shot a sidelong glance at Truncheon. He was watching this whole exchange with detached interest. It didn’t seem like he was going to shoot us if we tried to leave, at least not right this second, so I turned to Cass.
“Favor, sure, whatever. But let’s go first. You don’t want to hang out with this dude, do you?”
“No, but—”
A loud metallic thud rang out and we all flinched and went silent. I glanced toward the cornfields, worried ghouls or hatchet-wielding Des Moines zombies or pissed-off NCD agents eager to revoke our day pass were going to come charging out at us. But then the noise hit again—like someone stomping a piece of sheet metal—and I realized it was coming from the back of Truncheon’s van.
We all turned in that direction. Something was trying to get out through the back doors. I inched closer to our car, and Cass followed me. Amanda and I exchanged a look.
Truncheon grunted, annoyed, and wrenched the door open.
Immediately, a guy’s body came flying out from the van, like he’d been in the process of lining up another kick. He crashed right into Truncheon, which was pretty much like hitting a brick wall. Somehow, the guy managed to land on his feet in the road. He did a little shuffle-dance as he tried to figure out which direction to run. It was probably a tough call on account of his head being tied up under a burlap sack and his hands being cuffed in front of him.
Truncheon struck him hard in the face area with the butt of his rifle and the guy collapsed, knocked out.
“Uh, what is going on right now?” I asked Cass.
“This—” Cass hesitated. “I didn’t know about this part.”
With a put-upon sigh, Truncheon picked up the body and dumped it back into the van. There were others back there too—three of them, not counting the escape artist—all sacked and handcuffed, and apparently more tightly secured to the van’s metal benches.
Truncheon slammed the van closed and turned to us. We were all staring at him.
“What?” he asked.
Amanda pointed at the van. “Who are your friends?”
“Oh, them.” Truncheon grinned at us. “They’re for you guys. You want to get into Des Moines, right? Well, that psycho Lord in there is gonna be expecting tribute.”
“Are they . . . ?” I trailed off, itching my mohawk. “You’ve got people back there?”
“Oh no,” Cass said quietly, bracing herself against the car, like her knees had just gotten weak again. “I did not—”
Truncheon laughed at us. “What did you kids think? That you’d come to the Deadzone—where the undead outnumber the living, for shit’s sake—and nobody’d get eaten? You like the taste of eggshell in your omelets or what?”
“Where did they come from?” Amanda asked suddenly. “Who are they?”
Truncheon shrugged, acting bored, but I could tell he was one of those dudes who liked to deliver speeches.
“The living are like currency around here,” he answered. “You wonder about every penny you see lying on the sidewalk?”
Amanda and I exchanged a look. I guess we could’ve tolerated Truncheon’s general skeeviness if it meant getting closer to the cure, but in the last five minutes he’d straight-up executed a fellow zombie and then revealed himself as an unapologetic human trafficker. I thought about Grace and Summer, the zombie couple we’d met back in Pennsylvania, and how they tried only to eat bad people. That was a slippery slope to get on, but Truncheon seemed like a pretty clear-cut case.
“I’d eat him,” I said quietly.
“Unanimous,” Amanda replied.