STEPHANIE CRAWFORD AND
DUANE SWIERCZYNSKI
“Is it true that the cure made all of you vegetarians?” Carson asked.
Justine was staring at the road ahead, but could see him toying with his digital recorder in her peripheral vision. He was asking a flurry of questions, but at the same time, avoiding The Big Question. She wished he’d just come out with it already.
“Why are you asking me?” she replied. “I’m not the mouthpiece for every single survivor.”
Carson stammered a little before Justine glanced over and gave him a wide grin.
“Oh yes, I referred to former zombies as survivors. Make sure to include that. Your readers will love it.”
As they drove across the desert the sun was pulling the sky from black to a gritty blue-grey. The rented compact car held a thirty-three-year-old man named Carson with enough expensive camera equipment to crowd up the backseat, and Justine, a woman two years younger, who kept her own small shoulder bag between her feet.
The rest of her baggage was invisible.
Some said as far as apocalyptic plagues went, it could have been a lot worse.
The dead didn’t crawl out of their graves. Society didn’t crumble entirely. The infection didn’t spread as easily as it did in the movies—you had to either really try to get infected, or be genetically predisposed to it.
Justine happened to be one of the latter.
After work one night, Justine was nursing a Pabst at her local generic, suburban sports bar while half-listening to the news about a virus that would probably quiet down like H1N1 and texting her late friend Gina. She was just raising the bottle’s mouth to her lips when a thick, dead weight fell against her and knocked her out of her bar stool and onto the sticky, peanut shell covered floor. Too fucking enraged to wait for a good Samaritan to jump up and give a Hey, Pal, Justine started blindly kicking out her heels and thrusting out fists at the drunk bastard. That’s how it played out until the drunk started gnawing at her fists until his incisors connected with the actual bone of her fingers while his mouth worked to slurp up and swallow the shredded meat of her knuckles. After that, Justine remembered little until the cure hit her bloodstream.
That had been six months after the attack in the bar. And in the meantime …
Carson tried to look at Justine without full-on staring at her. Like much of the time he’d spent with her so far, he was fairly certain he was failing miserably. The miracle vaccine seemed to have left Justine with little more damage than a scarred face, a lean-muscled body that bordered on emaciation, and an entire planet filled with people who actively wanted her dead. That was called “being one of the lucky ones.”
Keep her talking, he reminded himself. Carson asked, “I understand your mom paid for the cure?”
Justine kicked the glove compartment while crossing her legs. “Sadly, yes. I guess she meant well.”
“Aren’t you glad to be alive?”
“If you call this living.”
“Better than being dead.”
She turned to face him, squinting and twisting her lips into a pout. “Is it?”
Asking questions was the problem, Carson decided. He wasn’t a real journalist. He’d only brought the digital recorder to please his editor, who couldn’t afford to send both a photographer and a reporter.
Just keep her talking as much as possible, the editor had said. We’ll make sense of it later.
But most important, his editor added, we want her to talk about what it’s like.
What what is like? Carson had asked.
His editor replied: What it’s like to go on living.
A year ago today he’d been out in Las Vegas for one of the most inane reasons of all: a photo shoot for a celebrity cookbook. The celebrity in question was a borderline morbidly obese actor known for both his comedic roles as well as his darker turns in mob flicks. Right before he’d left on that trip the first outbreaks had been reported, but the virus seemed to be contained to certain parts of the country, and Carson thought he’d come to regret it if he turned down the assignment over the latest health scare. Especially if that would leave him stuck in his Brooklyn apartment for months on end while this thing ran its course. They were saying it could be as bad as the 1918 flu pandemic.
Oh, if he had only known.
The outbreak had happened mid-shoot. A pack of zombies had burst in just as the food stylist had finished with the chicken scarpariello. They weren’t interested in the dish. They wanted the celebrity chef instead. Carson kept snapping photos before he quite realized what was happening. He escaped across Vegas, continuing to take photos as the city tore itself apart.
And then he saw Justine, though he didn’t know her name then.
Back then, she was just …
Carson heard his editor’s impatient reminder in his head:
Keep her talking.
Yeah.
Not talking was the reason he’d become a photographer. He preferred to keep the lens between himself and the rest of the world, speaking to subjects only when he absolutely had to.
He was struggling to formulate a new inane question when she spoke up.
“Do you remember the exact place?”
Carson nodded.
“So where was it?” Justine asked.
That surprised him. He assumed she would have just … known. Maybe not when she was in that state, because the former zombies—the survivors—were supposed to have blanked memories. The photo, though … surely she had to have seen the photo at some point.
Or did she?
“Outside of Vegas. Almost near Henderson.”
“Huh,” Justine said. “Makes sense.”
“Does it?”
“That’s not far from where I used to live. So come on. Where did you … um, encounter me?”
Carson pulled onto the 5, which would take them out of the Valley and out through the desert. “I’m hoping I’ll be able to find it again once we’re out there,” he said.
“Don’t count on it, buddy boy,” she said. “My mom tells me they’ve razed a lot of the old neighborhood. There’s even been talk of abandoning Vegas altogether. Clear everyone out, then drop an H-bomb directly on it. Wipe the slate clean.”
Carson, still fumbling, heard the question tumble out of his mouth before he could stop himself.
“Have you, um, seen the photo?”
Justine had woken up in the hospital, still spoiling for a fight. After about a minute her eyes registered that she was in a hospital bed, and she felt her mom squeezing her hand through layers of aching pain and a wooziness that could only be coming from the IV attached to her arm—so she’d assumed. So the bastard actually put her in the hospital?
Justine’s first lucid words were spent reassuring her mom, who herself looked like she’d been put through the wringer.
“Hey ma, it’s alright … you should see the other guy.”
That’s what she attempted to say, at any rate. It came out sounding more like “ACK-em, aight … shouldas … other guy.” Her voice sounded cracked and enfeebled … almost as if her actual esophagus was bruised and coated in grime.
Her mother teared up and went in for the most delicate hug Justine could remember ever having experienced.
“Thank God … He finally showed up. Thank God you’re back, and thank Him that you don’t remember.”
It was only then that Justine noticed that the doctors and nurses surrounding her had what could only be taken as unprofessional looks of pure, barely disguised looks of disgust on their faces. All this for a fucking bar fight she didn’t even start?
Before Justine could ask what exactly was going on, her mom cupped her palm against her daughter’s cheek: Justine couldn’t help realizing how hollowed out it felt against her mom’s warm hand.
“Sweetie … I have a lot I need to tell you. It’s not when you think it is, and you’re not exactly who you think you are anymore. The world got infected and wormed you worse than anyone. You’re going to need to prepare yourself. Just know I love you, always.”
And then her mom told her what the world had been up to.
Justine stared at the passing power lines with an interest they didn’t exactly warrant. “Is this professional curiosity?”
“No,” Carson said. “I’d really like to know.”
Justine glanced over at Carson, who gave her a tight-lipped smile. She had done her research on him, and she was almost personally insulted by what she found. A small part of her was hoping she’d get a gonzo journalist-type that would end the interview with him trying to hunt her in a “most dangerous game” scenario. Carson was, at best, a mid-level photog—his writing credits adding up to captions under his glossy photos of celebrities she had never heard of. There were a few dashes of pretension, but he was clearly paying the bills.
Except for those unexpected, dramatic moments every photographer lives for. He had a few absorbing shots.
The main one starring her ownself.
“My mom kept it from me for as long as possible. She acted a bit as if seeing it would trigger me, somehow. But … eh.”
Justine started absently gnawing on a fingernail with more vigor that she realized.
“I’ll see little thumbnails on Google and squint my eyes to blur it out. I’ve been told about it enough that my taste to see the actual money shot has long been sated.”
Justine glanced over at Carson to see how that landed. She was sleep deprived and barely knew the guy, but he somehow looked … puzzled.
Was she serious? How could she have not looked?
Carson knew he’d created that photo by pure accident. Even the framing and lighting and composition were a happy accident—a trifecta of the perfect conditions, snapped at exactly the right moment. He admitted it. He’d lucked into it. He couldn’t even claim to have created that photo. He’d merely been the one holding the camera, his index finger twitching. That image wanted to exist; he was simply the conduit.
The photo wasn’t his fault, just like her … sickness … wasn’t her fault. They were like two car accident victims, thrown together by chance, and left to deal with the wreckage.
He got all that.
Still … how could she not want to see? How could you ever hope to recover if you didn’t confront it head-on?
“Pull over,” she said suddenly.
“Are you okay?”
“Unless you want to clean chunks of puke out of this rental, pull over now. Please.”
Carson was temporarily desert-blind. He couldn’t tell where the edge of the broken road ended and the dead, dry earth began. Blinking, he slowly edged to the right as Justine’s hands fumbled at the door handle. He saw—felt—her entire body jolt. He applied the brake, kicking up a huge plume of dust. Justine flew out of the passenger seat even before the car had come to a complete halt. She disappeared into the dust. Within seconds, Carson could hear her heaving.
He knew this was what the Cure did to you. It took away the zombie, but left you a very, very sick person.
Should he get out? Did she maybe want a little water, or her privacy? He didn’t know. For a moment, Carson sat behind the wheel, watching the dust settle back down. There were a lot of dust storms out here, he’d read. The Southwest hadn’t seen them this bad since the 30s Dust Bowl days. Some people thought it was nature’s way of trying to wipe the slate clean, one sharp grain of sand at a time.
All was quiet; she’d stopped heaving.
“Justine?” he called out. “You okay?”
He opened the door just as the truck pulled up behind them. Damnit. Probably a good Samaritan, thinking they needed help.
“Justine?”
Car doors slammed behind Carson. He turned off the ignition, pulled the keys from the steering column, pushed open the door with his foot, stepped out into the hot, dry air. There were three people standing there. Carson was struck at first by how familiar they looked, but couldn’t immediately place them. Not until one of them said,
“Where’s the babykiller?”
Fuck me, he thought. It was the protesters.
They’d followed them out into the desert.
When Carson arrived at Justine’s Burbank apartment just a few hours earlier, he was stunned to see them there, carrying placards and pacing up and down the front walkway. They must have been at it all night, and towards the end of some kind of “shift,” because they look tired, haggard and vacant eyed. Ironically enough, they kind of looked like you-know-whats.
Carson was equally stunned by the things coming out of their mouths, the sheer hate painted on their signs.
AN ABOMINATION LIVES HERE.
THAT BABY HAD A FUTURE.
KILL YOURSELF JUSTINE.
Delusional people who had to seize on something, he supposed. There was a whole “Disbelief in the Cure” movement going on now, with a groundswell of people who brought out these pseudo-scientists claiming that the Cure was only temporary, that at any moment, thousands of people could revert to flesh-eating monsters again. There was not a lick of scientific evidence to back this up, mind you. But when has that stopped zealots before?
Carson had parked the car a block away, in the rubble of a lot in front of an old 50s-style motel that had promptly gone out of business a year ago during the chaos. He wiped the sweat from his brow—wasn’t California supposed to be cooler this time of year? At first he grabbed his small digital camera and locked everything else in the trunk, figuring that if he tried to run that gauntlet with his full gear there was a strong chance he’d be molested. Carson was prepared for anything, but wasn’t in the mood to lose ten grand worth of gear that he knew the paper wouldn’t replace.
But then again, when the going gets weird, the weird turn pro … wasn’t that what Hunter S. Thompson said? Carson donned his vest (he hated it, but people associated it with being a pro, so …) and walked right up to the nutcases, smiling. That’s right, he thought. Just a happy photojournalist on assignment, here to take your picture.
That’s the thing: you don’t ask. You keep your camera low and just start shooting. Ask, and there’s a strong chance they’ll think, Hey, wait a minute, maybe I shouldn’t agree to this. But if you act like God Himself sent you down here to record the moments for posterity, most people will step out of your way and let you do His Holy Work. Carson snapped away from waist level. Sometimes you want that feeling of looking up from a child’s POV, right up into the faces of these lunatics, the sun bouncing from their hand-painted signs. Carson was feeling good about the assignment when something hard slammed into the center of his back and he tumbled forward into someone’s fist.
These things happen so fast—your ass getting kicked. In the movies there’s always an explanation. Your antagonists go to great pains to tell you exactly why you’re going to receive a brutal beating right before the beating actually happens. Not in reality. When a mob attacks you, and blood’s filling your mouth, and someone’s kicking you in the back and you can feel your internal organs convulsing … there there are no explanations.
But Carson heard one thing. The most chilling thing he could possibly hear, actually. And that was his name.
They know who I am, he thought. They know I’m the one who had made Zombie Chick famous.
Which was when said Zombie Chick saved Carson from hospitalization.
She didn’t rush down and start growling at the crowd, asking for brains. She merely opened her window and stared down at them. Carson didn’t notice it at first; all he sensed was that the kicks came slower, and then tapered off entirely.
The crowd backed away from Carson and focused on her, up in her window. Cursing at her. Gesturing at her. Spitting. Picking up tiny chunks of broken sidewalk and hurling them at her. Only then did she duck inside and slide the window shut.
Carson wanted to get the hell out of there … pronto. But then he imagined stepping into his boss’s office empty-handed, without a single photo. That simply wasn’t an option. Not if he wanted to eat. So he pushed himself, ribs and legs screaming, and took advantage of the temporary distraction, jogging right up through the center of the crowd, pushing his way past them, blasting through the front door of the apartment complex. By the time they noticed, it was too late—Carson had flipped the deadbolt behind him. As he scanned the mailboxes with the call buzzers he could hear them yelling, threatening to kill him for real …
Looked like they wanted to make good on that promise now, out here in an empty stretch of desert, with no one to interrupt them.
Justine looked down at what she evacuated, noting it was pretty much pure water. She started to straighten up but stopped herself when she noticed the long shadows stumble over themselves.
“Shit.”
Justine stayed bent over, hands on her knees, mind racing. She could hear muffled angry voices and some half-hearted pounding on a car. She figured it was road warriors, insanely persistent Latter-Day Saints missionaries, or they were being followed by her own personal Raincoat Brigade. Whoever it was, she was going to need a decent-sized rock at the very least, and she needed to look as fucked up as possible. The latter was covered, and her eyes scanned quickly for the former.
Jackpot.
Eyes up. Take it slow.
Most of the brigade (biggest bunch of vultures this desert has ever produced, Justine thought) was standing back from the car, attempting to look casual but barely pulling off “vaguely gassy.” There were three men in their mid-forties actually on the car. One was playing the lean-against-the-windshield cop move, with the other two settling for leaning against the side.
Justine crouched in the warm dirt, obscured by a large grouping of banana yucca. If Carson had left the passenger seat unlocked she could probably jump in, he could floor it and ride like hell until they got to a gas station.
Fake cop had just cocked some kind of gun. Seriously? Fuck this. Fuck all of it. She should have never agreed to this interview. She was probably going to be one of those survivors who ended up dead—for real this time—at the hands of a frightened mob.
Unless she could use their fear against them.
Justine stood up, stretched … and moaned. Moaned like some kind of unholy undead piece of hell would yawn after centuries of hungry slumber—or whatever these assholes believed.
“There she is!”
“Why didn’t anyone see her get out?”
“Weren’t you supposed to be watching that patch, Dana?”
“There’s the babykiller! I bet they don’t prosecute in Nevada and he’s smuggling her!”
But the crowd quickly lost interest in Carson and his compact car, and moved en masse towards Justine. Just a yard down was a van with a flat tire facing the road.
Clever dumb bastards, Justine thought. That’ll keep the passing cars moving.
“I’d ask if you didn’t have anything better to do,” Justine called out. “But after watching you all for months out my window I know you don’t.”
Justine found bravado sometimes worked when the rocks weren’t up to snuff.
One of the guys leaning against the car gave a grimace that bordered on a grin at Justine.
“You have served no jail time for killing the most innocent of our Savior’s creations. We just want to … talk to you about it. Maybe get you to turn yourself in. There’s no reason for you to get your bowels in an uproar.”
Some of the gang nodded in agreement, others just eyed Justine as if she was about to leap out like a cat in a closet in a bad slasher movie. Fake Cop kept his fingers moving on the gun that he was holding close to his thigh.
Justine glanced over to the car. Carson was standing there quietly. Now that their little “freak” was front and center, nobody bothered to keep an eye on him. He had his cell phone in his hand. He made eye contact and gave a short nod.
Please, Justine thought. Don’t come to my rescue, photo boy. From the looks of you, you’ve got the muscle strength of warm butter.
Moving her eyes back to the group, Justine took a deep breath and tried to make eye contact with as many as possible.
“Look, I really understand. I hate myself too,” Justine said. “But I really, truly was not myself when that happened, and believe me they would have found out if I was. I’m cured now and my life is a living hell, so can you just leave me alone to fester it out, please? You guys will just go to jail and I’m really not worth it.”
“Maybe we can just shoot ‘er here,” one of them said.
Another: “Shut up. Just shut up. You weren’t even invited here, you dumb psycho.”
Fake Cop and the one that had been talking had a tension between them that made Justine more nervous than the pure hatred that was being leveled at her.
The man turned back to her.
“I’m sorry, this was stupid. My name is Mike. How about you let your friend leave, and you come with us and we can talk to my brother—he’s a police officer—and we can get you right… .”
Mike stopped himself. Justine could see that he had just spotted the phone in Carson’s hand.
“Well shit, son,” Mike said. “I really wish you hadn’t done that.”
Justine, strangely enough, wished the same thing.
For an awful moment there, Carson thought that Justine’s “cure” hadn’t fully taken.
His fevered imagination put together the sequence of events this way:
She’s riding along, in the sun, next to a living human being. She doesn’t get out much. She’s not around people much. Something in her breaks down. She senses the flesh, the blood beating through his veins. It’s all too much. It makes her sick. She thinks she has to puke. She asks him to pull over and she scrambles from the car when it hits her. She can’t help it, can’t control it. Suddenly she’s acting like a zombie again… .
Because suddenly, she was.
A zombie again.
Forcing this unholy sound out of her throat, clawing at invisible enemies, eyes rolling up in the back of her head …
The protest mob jolted, taking a step away from each other, as if collectively hoping the crazy baby-killing zombie bitch would attack the person standing next to them. Carson jolted, too, from the shock of it, but also the thought that just a few minutes ago, he’d been inside a speeding car with this woman. Thing.
He instantly regretted that it was a cell phone in his hand and not his camera, which was still packed up in the backseat. He hated himself for even thinking it, but … c’mon! The impact of a photo like that would be seismic. Proof that the cure doesn’t work! As shown by its most infamous poster child… .
But those fantasies were dashed the moment he heard Justine scream, in perfect English:
“Carson—the car—NOW!”
The best Justine could hope for was not getting shot.
She dove into the crowd and just started shoving. There was no telling how many other guns were hiding in this group, but she was counting on the stark raving fear factor and element of surprise to keep the men from using them. For a few seconds at least. Until fucking Carson got the car revved up… .
“Carson, goddamnit!’
She couldn’t keep herself from picturing how, if Carson wasn’t here, she’d probably just have gone for it. Her anger and annoyance were burning so hot that she could easier have chosen this day as her last—as long as she took these assholes out along with her.
Baby-Eating Zombie Desert Rampage; 8 Dead!
Justine smiled at the imagined headline; she should have been the journalist.
But no, Justine felt oddly protective towards Carson. He wasn’t much, but right at this moment he was the only one listening. One last blind elbow to what felt like a butt, and Justine scrammed it to the passenger door.
“GO GO GO!” she screamed at Carson as she locked her door, screaming in laughter as Carson fishtailed it out of there with white knuckles. “All we need is some banjo chase music, compadre!”
Once they’d cleared the first quarter mile, Justine patted the shoulder of the poor, shaking Carson.
“The fuck,” Carson sputtered. “The fuck was that?”
“The usual,” Justine said.
“Are you okay? I mean … shit, did they …”
Justine looked behind them, seeing only a random semi-truck. “I’m fine. Actually, no. I’m not fine. I’m hungry. Starving even.”
Carson looked at her, wide-eyed. Justine noticed the stare also contained a bit of apprehension. “What?”
“And in an answer to your earlier question,” she said, “no. I’m not a vegetarian.”
Justine had Carson stop at a roadside barbecue joint a handful of miles outside Barstow. She assured him it was the best obscure, outdoor barbecue you could get in the southwest, not to mention that she was pretty sure the owner was a Hell’s Angel and therefore coated the area with a kind of grimy aura of protection.
Carson sat at a picnic table while Justine ordered them two orders of the works. She had put on a pair of large-framed glasses and affected an uneven Texan drawl, claiming it was a disguise while Carson suspected it was mostly to amuse herself.
Roughly half an hour had passed since they were accosted, but in that short span of time Justine had seemed to come alive. Bouncing in her seat, looking behind them in her sun visor’s mirror and squeezing his shoulder every few minutes—she was as enthusiastic as he imagined she might have been on a regular road trip in her life before infection had made her somber and shifty-eyed. Her skin also seemed to take on what he could only describe as a glow, and her stone grey eyes seemed to skew closer to silver.
“How much for one rib?”
Carson sat up straight and turned to see Justine laughing with the barbecue proprietor before shaking her head and walking to their table. She smiled at him before laying down a stack of white sandwich bread and two Styrofoam boxes in front of him.
“Is everything ok? Did you need more money?” Carson asked while he peeked under one of the lids.
“What? Are you not familiar with the comedic stylings of Chris Rock?” Justine was still putting on her weird drawl, which was toeing the line between cute and unsettling pretty aggressively. “I’m Gonna Git You Sucka? No? Boy, we need to hook you up with a movie marathon.”
Justine took the bench across from Carson, popped open her lid, and proceeded to stare at the meat. The only motion she made was to follow in the tradition of countless customers before her in leisurely picking at the peeling red paint of the table with a fingernail. Carson couldn’t help indulging himself in a mouthful of brisket before asking her if everything was okay.
Justine sighed.
“No. Sure. Everything is fine. This is the first time I had even the desire to eat meat since you-know-what, let alone actually ate the stuff. Before that I was a stone cold carnivore.”
She never took her eyes off her meal, but had worked up to poking it around with her spork.
Carson raised his eyebrows and took a long sip of his lukewarm Mountain Dew. He became aware of a weird undercurrent that had seemed to sit itself at their table, but couldn’t place it.
Justine stabbed at a piece of pork until the weak teeth of the spork finally speared it enough to lift. He eyed the meat and her mouth, wishing he had his camera out. She caught him staring. He flashed her a quick, reassuring half smile when their eyes met. Justine saluted him with her spork full of pork, and took it in one bite.
She chewed. Carson took another mouthful of his meal in camaraderie. He waited until they both swallowed and took sips of their respective drinks before asking her how it was.
“Tastes good, but just that one bite already made my jaw ache.”
“Does eating hurt?”
“Aren’t you forward? But no; the little I eat just sits with me funny and makes my tongue feel coated in something like wax. I probably brush my teeth about 10 times a day. I don’t care enough about my check-ups with the therapist or doctor to find out if it’s mostly in my head or if human veal just forever fucked up my stomach.”
Carson coughed in surprise, choking a bit as Justine’s words hit him. She gave him a sad shrug and continued eating the meat.
“This is good though. No coated-tongue feeling, either.”
“Maybe you just needed time. Just try to take it slow.”
Carson took out his camera, nodded as if to ask, Is this okay? Justine paused for a moment before nodding in return. He snapped a few photos of her eating with the large, faded Moose’s BBQ sign behind her.
Suddenly he noticed a man moving at a leaden pace a few feet behind Justine. Carson lowered his camera. The man was gaunt, with gnarled hands reminiscent of arthritic joints and old tree branches. He worked his mouth around hungrily; almost like an infant eyeing a nipple just out of reach. Only when he noticed the old, slow-shambling man pull out a Black & Mild cigar and chomp it between his grinning teeth did he relax.
“I’ll be right back,” Justine said, and put a hand on his shoulder as she passed. Carson thought she might be feeling sick again, but when he glanced across the way a few minutes later he saw that she was on her cell phone.
They rode in mostly companionable silence for about ninety more minutes, until the suburban sprawl of Henderson appeared. Carson felt a thrumming work its way up his spine, plucking at his nerves until his skin physically itched. Here was the moment he’d been dreading: setting up a shot where you ask someone to hunker down in a place where they’d experienced the darkest moment of their life.
“You, uh, feeling okay?” Carson asked.
Justine rustled a bit in her seat, looking tiny and weird from the corner of Carson’s eye.
“Yeah. Was worried about all that food I ate, but it’s staying down.”
Carson cleared his throat, and Justine hurried over the sound. “I know that’s not what you’re asking about, but I’m putting off any reaction to this as long as I can. Is that okay with you?”
Carson nodded as he squeezed his hands tighter around the wheel. Justine crammed some more gum into her mouth. She had told him that with her stomach working with rarely any food in it had given her “death breath.” He hadn’t noticed any of it personally, but when she also divulged how often and obsessively she brushed her teeth, he understood that the situation went a little deeper than oral hygiene.
Carson fumbled at the radio dials until he heard Sam Cooke’s voice. He told himself to stop feeling guilty. Everyone in this car was there by choice, right? Of course they were.
Except they really weren’t.
Carson had been there by chance.
Justine had been there because of a fluke of a disease. She didn’t know what she was doing, where she’d gone, who she’d hurt.
And it was only because Carson happened to be there, with his camera, that Justine—and the rest of the world—knew that while she’d been a zombie, she had eaten an infant child.
The area had been cleaned up more than Carson expected. Imported palm trees stood perfectly distanced from each other, as pretty and welcoming as well-trained showgirls. As they pulled into the parking lot of the grocery store, his memory replaced the newly built structures with the way he remembered the place looking the last time he was here—a looted out, broken shell of a place crawling with cops, zombies and “reporters” like himself. There was a rumor that the area was harboring a building full of people who had taken over a grocery store after raiding a gun store, but the virus had gotten in there with them. Carson had been unable to confirm any of this at the time. He was mostly walking around in the area in a horrified daze, snapping photos to give himself a sense of purpose in all of the chaos.
“So, where were you?” Justine asked.
Carson shook himself mentally into the present. “I was walking around the barricades at the back of the lot. I guess luckily nobody was paying much attention to me. My editor just told me to snap anything interesting or fucked up that might pop out.”
Justine turned to him. “And then out I popped, all interesting and fucked up with bells on?”
Carson tried to smile. “Yeah.”
Justine laughed in surprise but it quickly died in her throat.
They slowly pulled themselves out of the car, groaning and stretching as they squinted into the sun. A nervous and false jovial energy permeated the air between them, as if they decided by an unspoken vote to act as if they were here to recreate a photo from a first date rather than an amnesiac murder.
Justine wandered the half-full parking lot while Carson started gathering and preparing his gear. Once he was fully kitted up he inhaled deeply and started towards her.
Keeping her back to him, she said, “I thought maybe standing here there’d be … something. A fragment of memory. But no.”
“In all honesty it’s almost hard to remember it happening myself. It happened so quickly and there was so much chaos …”
“Did anyone try to stop me? Did you?”
Carson stopped fidgeting before answering.
“Stop? I mean … the cops tackled you. The thing is, I think the baby was already dead. I didn’t hear crying.”
“How did I get it?”
“Uh …” Carson wished for a cigarette more than he had wished for anything else in the entirety of his life. “There was a huge crush of people running out of the shopping center when the police smoked them out. They think the baby was inside, and got … trampled. There was a broken stroller nearby.”
It was, in fact, in the photograph.
He heard Justine exhale shakily.
“Fuck me, fuck you, and fuck this. What’s the point of us being here? I’d want me dead, too. Let’s just get this done so I can crawl back to my hole.”
Carson silently worked his mouth open and closed, platitudes at the ready on his tongue. They didn’t want to come out, though; every fiber of his being fully agreed with her that being here was wrong. In for a penny, in for a pound, though. The texts he had been getting from his editor were becoming increasingly insistent.
“Yeah, alright.”
The photojournalist considered the parking lot around them, trying to avoid looking at the photo again on his iPhone and going solely by memory.
“The pile of rubble … I’m pretty sure it was over there.”
He pointed at a grouping of empty parking spaces, completely indistinguishable from any other in the world. Apparently not everything required a plaque.
They made their way over, the cloud of unease silencing them. Everything was so generic and bright around them that it the entire assignment the feel of some kind of ill-planned playacting. The only piece of reality that didn’t seem a part of their make-believe was a small murder of crows nearby that were effectively edging any pigeons out of their territory.
It seemed easier to just mumble and gesture the whole thing. In the back of his mind Carson supposed he had hoped returning here might summon up at least an emotional memory for Justine, but it was clear that whatever breakthrough he had been hoping for was doomed to die the quiet death of simply going through the motions.
Carson pointed and shot, getting the majority of his pictures framing Justine in front of the rapidly setting sun. She crouched, stood and even sat in a few, looking pensive and disconnected in each one. The stark contrast of a traumatized woman in a new parking lot made the whole thing feel a dust-in-the-blood kind of dirty to Carson. The look in her eyes, though …
“Alright, I think we got it. We can go.”
She didn’t move.
“What’s wrong?” Carson asked.
“Aren’t you going to ask me?”
“Ask you what?”
“All this time together, and you’re too timid to ask the question. I know you want to ask. It’s been all over your face since we met.”
Carson opened his mouth, then closed it and shook his head.
“Go ahead,” Justine said, hands on her hips. “Ask me, how can I possibly go on living after something like that? How can I make jokes and drop stupid pop culture references and eat ribs and laugh and listen to music? Isn’t that what you want to know? Isn’t that what you’ve been dying to ask me this whole time?”
Carson didn’t know how to respond, mainly because she was dead right. It was the question he’d wanted to ask ever since he’d heard the news a month ago that the Famous Baby Eater—the subject of a photo that had won him fame he didn’t want and acclaim he didn’t deserve—was still alive.
How do you go on living after something like that?
Justine sighed and walked past him, muttering: “Let’s get to a hotel with a bar.”
“Thanks for being less of a dick about this than I thought you’d be,” she said.
They were sitting at the bar in some sports-themed joint on the ground floor of a chain hotel on the edge of Henderson, knees almost touching. Carson stared into his beer, already thinking about the new set of photos he’d just made. Wondering if it was going to do more harm than good. Of course he’d sold it to Justine as a way to show the world that she wasn’t a monster, that the Cure did work. But now he wasn’t so sure.
Justine laid her hand over his and gave a gentle squeeze. Her other hand fiddled with her cell phone on the bar top.
“Hey.”
Carson met her gaze. Said nothing. What could he say? That he was about to ruin her life all over again?
The photo of Justine eating ribs alone … ugh. She had no idea what she’d agreed to.
“Look, I’m serious,” Justine said. “You’ve been good to me, despite everything. Which is why I feel bad about doing this.”
“Doing what?”
Without warning she leaned forward and pressed her lips to his.
To a passerby it would have looked like a couple doing a parody of a cover of a historical romance novel, except with the man in the submissive stance. Right in the thick of it, however, was a demented sincerity. Justine used her tongue to pry open his lips. What the hell was she doing?
Justine didn’t have “death breath.” He could taste peppermint and beer; her lips were warm. But still, all he could think about was where her lips had been, and about the chunks of flesh her tongue had once licked away from her teeth …
Before he could break the embrace he heard the sound of a fake camera shutter snapping closed.
Oh God, Carson thought as his eye popped open and saw the cell in her hand. She’s taken a photo of her own.
“Wait,” he said. “Please …”
But Justine’s fingers were already working the keypad, and the photo was already on its way to a wireless cell tower, and from there… who knew? She glanced up at him.
“Sorry, I grabbed your boss’s number when you left your cell alone at the BBQ place. He’s just one, though. I guess I could have sold this as an exclusive, but that felt a little tacky.”
Carson pulled back from the table and just stared. His eyes felt feverish as they flitted from Justine’s face to the phone, to the staring bar patrons surrounding them.
“You want to know what it was like, to have your worst moment broadcast to the world?” Justine asked. “Buddy, you’re about to find out.”
She smiled, and reached back to hold his shaking hand. “But at least we have each other, right?”