Eat, Brains, Love (14 page)

“I dunno.”

“Hm,” said Alastaire, then dispassionately, “Chazz. Attack.”

Chazz lunged forward, straining against the chain that still held him to the wall. His teeth snapped at Kelly, fingers clawing just inches from her face. I could hear the wall creaking as Chazz frantically jerked. My instincts took over and, even though I knew Chazz couldn't actually get at Kelly, I grabbed her around the waist and yanked her back from the red line.

“What are you doing?” I shouted at Alastaire, angry tears filling my eyes. “She doesn't know anything!”

“No,” said Alastaire, his voice raised to be heard over Chazz's feral growls. “But someone in this room does. Chazz, heel.”

Chazz snapped once more at Kelly, who I was still holding on to, then slunk back to Alastaire's side.

“This—this isn't what we do,” I stammered.

Alastaire turned his gaze to Kelly, ignoring me. I could feel his psychic fingers curling around her mind. She slipped my grasp and walked forward, shaking me off as I snatched at the back of her shirt, and crossed the red line.

She stopped just a few feet short of Chazz. The zombie was shaking, eyes wide and ravenous. He wanted to feed.

“Shh,” said Alastaire. “Stay, Chazz.” Alastaire looked at me, eyes reflecting a morbid curiosity. “I wonder how long he'll listen, don't you?”

I didn't want to find out. I needed to get Kelly out of here, away from this psycho in a bow tie. It wasn't her fault that her brother was a zombie. This whole demonstration didn't have anything to do with her. It was for my benefit, meant to put me in my place. It did the trick.

“Western Pennsylvania,” I practically shouted. “They're hiding in an abandoned housing development.”

“Good,” said Alastaire, then pointed at the floor. “You dropped my coat.”

 

I stood outside the factory, holding myself, trying to push back tears and failing. I'd seen dozens of horrific post-zombie crime scenes since joining NCD, but today, in that meat locker, that was easily the worst thing I'd ever witnessed. The Pavlov, the way Chazz almost adoringly looked at Alastaire, seeing an NCD agent I basically worked for callously endanger a girl to prove a point. It was all too much.

I was dumbly waiting around for someone to drive me back to the motel when I had the urge to run. Just flee through this desolate part of New Jersey and hope for the best. It had worked out for Jake, so far. I wondered how far I could make it. Would they come after me? Fugitive status seemed appealing at that moment, but that'd mean bailing on my team—they were good people, totally not zombie-controlling maniacs. I needed time to think this through, to measure what I'd just seen against the good I was doing. Or the good I'd
thought
I was doing.

“Ah, the idealism of youth,” Alastaire said from behind me.

I jumped. I hadn't heard him come out of the factory and now he was standing right next to me, like nothing was wrong. I hurriedly wiped my hands across my face and stood up straighter.

“You think I'm a monster,” he stated.

“Are you reading my mind?”

“I don't need to,” he said, his voice all low and understanding, disingenuous, like I was just some confused kid that needed some fatherly empathy. “We
are
monsters, in a way.”

“We?” I spat, staring at him.

“Do you know why they administer those psychometric tests in every high school across the country?” he asked.

I was getting pretty sick of the whole Socratic-method thing, so I decided to stay silent. I wouldn't play along.

“To find the ones like us,” Alastaire continued. “Because before there were zombies to hunt, there was
us
.”

“What are you talking about? We don't hurt people,” I replied. “At least, I don't.”

“No, but we scare them. And when the zombies are gone, who do you think they'll hunt then?”

I shook my head. I didn't want to hear this, his screwed-up worldview. Just minutes ago, I'd still been convinced I was helping people, and now it felt like I was just a cog in something big and ugly.

“We'll never be like them, Cassandra. The normal ones. At best, we're something they use to solve a problem. At worst, we're something frightening to hunt.” He paused. “Unless we make ourselves indispensable. Powerful.”

Alastaire touched his forearm where The Pavlov's nozzle was hidden underneath his coat.

“This is the way we do that,” he concluded. “You might not like it now. It might offend your childish ideas of right and wrong. But when you grow up, you'll thank me.”

Alastaire walked to the car, leaving me standing on the sidewalk staring after him.

 

I tried to play it cool when I got back to the motel, but Tom saw right through that façade, probably because I was shaking like a leaf. I took a long, hot shower, thinking I'd never be able to scrub off the stench of the abandoned meat factory, my skin turning pink under the generic hotel soap. I thought about curling up into a little ball next to the drain like I'd seen freaked-out people do in the movies.

I thought about Kelly Stephens. We'd dropped her off at her house with no recollection of how she spent the afternoon or of how close she'd come to being zombie food just so my twisted boss could teach me a lesson. Sometimes it must be nice to be brainwashed—Kelly was lucky that she didn't have to remember anything that had happened.

I had to remember.

When I finally emerged from the shower, Tom was waiting with milk shakes at our little motel table. Oreo for me, banana-coconut for him.

“Okay,” he said, “tell me what's been happening, Cass. I know something's up.”

I took a long slurp from my milk shake to delay answering him.

“Do you think brain freeze could hurt my powers?” I asked Tom. “Like, an Olympic sprinter wouldn't smoke cigarettes, right? So, should I avoid quickly ingesting supercold liquids?”

“That's a new one,” he said, watching me patiently. “I'll ask some of the scientists.”

“Don't,” I replied too quickly. “I'm sure they'd love to run the experiments on me.”

Tom leaned forward, trying to look in my eyes. “Don't change the subject on me. Seriously. Tell me what's going on.”

I wanted to talk to him, tell him everything, but I couldn't. I trusted Tom—it wasn't that. Even though he was getting paid to do it, he was still my closest friend. But, ultimately, he was doing a job. Working for Alastaire. How much of what I'd seen at that warehouse—of what Alastaire had told me—did Tom already know?

Or let's say he was as in the dark as I was, convinced he was saving the world from a zombie epidemic while also babysitting. So then if I did tell him, would I just be putting him in danger?

“I'm sorry we sent you to that funeral,” he said, still searching me with his eyes. “That was a little much.”

I laughed bitterly. “The funeral was like the best part of my day.”

“Whatever happened, you can tell me,” Tom said, reaching across the table to squeeze my hand. “I promise it won't leave this room.”

I could've touched his mind if I wanted to, checked to see if he was telling the truth. But that wasn't me. I didn't just go around invading people's privacy. That was an Alastaire thing to do. And who was I to worry about trust if I was just going to be scanning people's minds all the time?

No.
I trusted Tom
. And we were real friends, not just weird, secret-agent work friends. I was sure of it.

It all came spilling out of me. I'm not sure what Tom was expecting—maybe something about how it had been uncomfortable for me to deal with all those grieving families at the funeral. When I brought up Alastaire cruising by like some creep searching for his lost puppy, Tom's expression darkened. By the time I got to the part about Alastaire controlling zombies, Tom had pushed his untouched milk shake aside, the cup sweating a ring onto the table. I left out Alastaire's little speech about us telepaths sticking together; for some reason, I thought hearing about that might make Tom scared of
me
.

“Okay,” Tom said, taking a deep, cleansing breath, trying to calm down. “I know I promised that what you said wouldn't leave this room, but you seriously need to let me report that son of a bitch. Harlene needs to hear about this. Tonight.”

I felt drained after telling my story. I could only breathe a sigh of relief and nod as Tom got all righteous avenger in front of me. I'd made the right choice believing in him.

Tom strode out of the room with purpose, and seconds later I could hear him pounding on Harlene's door down the hall. She didn't answer, but I heard another door open and Jamison gruffly ask Tom what had his designer undies bunched. I couldn't make out Tom's reply, it was a harsh whisper, but it went on for a while and you didn't need to be psychic to know that he was pissed off.

Tom was red-faced and agitated when he brought Jamison back to our room. He forced a smile when I tried to hand him his milk shake, but didn't take the cup. He paced the room, and Jamison sat down next to me, looking stoic as ever but studying me closely.

“Controlling zombies,” Jamison said, prompting me, and I could tell he didn't want to believe whatever abridged version of my story Tom had told him.

“Yeah,” I said. “Like sit, roll over, eat this person.” And then I launched into the whole tale again, this time for Jamison. When it was over, he leaned back in his chair, arms crossed over his muscular chest in thought. Tom stopped pacing, waiting to see what Jamison's reaction would be.

“That is some motherfucking bullshit,” he said. Jamison always had a way with words.

Tom shook his head, like Jamison wasn't outraged enough.

“I need to find Harlene,” Tom said. He glanced from me to Jamison. “Will you stay with her?”

Jamison and I shared a look of surprise. We'd done dozens of missions together, but I couldn't think of a time we'd been alone. I kind of felt like Tom was going a little overboard with the protectiveness. On the other hand, after what I'd been through today, having a big hulk like Jamison around didn't seem like such an awful idea.

“Yeah,” Jamison grunted. “Just hurry up.”

Tom practically flew out of the room, leaving Jamison and me sitting in awkward silence at the little motel table. After a moment, I pushed Tom's unfinished milk shake toward him.

He shook his head. “No thank you.”

I shrugged and started in on milk shake number two. After a few seconds of my slurping, Jamison cleared his throat.

“Look,” he began, trying to lower his usual gruff quotient by half, “I never apologized to you for the other day. I shouldn't have put you out there, in danger.”

“It's cool,” I replied. Friday's encounter with Jake and Amanda seemed rosy in comparison to my day with Alastaire.

“No, it wasn't,” Jamison rumbled. “I lost my head. Those things, what they did, it got to me. But if you'd gotten hurt . . .”

He trailed off, knuckling his forehead with one of his meaty hands. Then, he reached for the milk shake, pulling a big gulp through the straw.

“I had a daughter,” he said bluntly.

“Oh, I didn't know that. What's—?” I stopped myself from asking his daughter's name, realizing he'd used the past tense.

“Yeah,” he grunted. “The things got her. Doesn't make it right, what I did. Just wanted you to know.”

I nodded, not really sure what to say next. I'm sorry your daughter got eaten, but some zombies might not be so bad if you spent some time in their heads? Probably not what the big guy wanted to hear. Anyway, it seemed like the conversation was over.

“We can watch TV if you want,” Jamison said. “You like sitcoms?”

Tom came back an hour later. He never did find Harlene, but we'd see her at the briefing tomorrow. A unified front of really unhappy NCD campers.

JAKE

I WOKE UP IN THE BACKSEAT OF OUR STOLEN CAR wrapped in Grace and Summer's blanket, with Amanda still asleep, her face wedged against my chest. My back was sore and my eyes were crusty, but I couldn't help grinning. No matter what else is going on, waking up next to a hot girl always makes the world feel a lot less bleak.

I looked onto the floor of the car and saw the empty bottle of whiskey lying there.
Seriously, thanks for everything, whiskey.

I now knew that zombies could get drunk with the best of them. Based on the headache pounding in my skull, we were also still capable of a wicked hangover.

The night before, with our car parked on the side of the highway, Amanda and I had passed the bottle of whiskey back and forth between the two of us, just talking—not about being undead, or the heaping piles of crazy that we'd gone through in the last three days, but just shooting the shit, chattering aimlessly about whatever stupid thing popped into our booze-addled minds.

Amanda told me about the time her brother, Kyle, had convinced her to climb the water tower with him to look for UFOs. She told me about the time her dad had showed her how to hot-wire her fifth-grade teacher's car after she'd sent her home from school in tears.

My stories seemed sort of boring by comparison. Neither of my parents were criminals and the only conspiracies that interested my little sister were the ones between contestants on
Top Model
. I had a lot of stories about getting stoned and waking up in strange places. Like that time I'd woken up surrounded by what I thought were lawn gnomes but had turned out to be plastic statues of sword-waving archangels and crucified Christs. I'd stumbled into a backyard dedicated to bringing all the scary parts of the Bible to life, fallen asleep with my arm around some bearded dude holding a naked baby up to God for smiting. I'd figured out later that it was Assistant Principal Hardwick's backyard.

Amanda cracked up at that one.

At some point, when the bottle had been empty for ages, we'd crawled into the backseat and curled up together until we were asleep. I guess we'd spent the whole night that way, because now Amanda was snoring into my armpit. It was pretty sweet.

Without thinking about it, I pressed my face to her skull and took a deep whiff. I don't know how her hair smelled so good after everything we'd been through but it did; it smelled like ocean and flowers, with no trace of formaldehyde or musty basements or corpses. I guess a girl like Amanda Blake has her hair-care secrets.

But that was nothing new. Amanda Blake had always been hot. She had always smelled good. But now I was realizing that there was so much more to her too. I never would have guessed that she would be strong enough to survive something like this. Come to think of it, I never would have guessed that about myself either. Had turning into zombies made us into something more than we'd been? Or had we just been waiting for something to come along and force us to prove ourselves?

I was still wondering about that when my stomach rumbled. It wasn't the hide-the-children rumble that came moments before going full, out-of-control eating machine, just a modest growl that announced my system would sure like an injection of living meat. Summer had been right; the hunger was becoming easier to manage.

Amanda stirred, shielding her eyes with the back of her hand.

“Ugh,” she mumbled. “Does your belly have a snooze alarm?”

“Sorry,” I answered.

Amanda sat up, rubbing her face. She yawned and stretched her arms.

“Was I dreaming or were you
smelling my head
?”

“What? No. Definitely a dream.”

She gave me a look but I just slid myself out from under her and hopped out the back door, where I stood by the highway and stretched my legs. A truck rumbled by, honking its horn, and I found myself waving back, smiling.

I was happy in a way that made no sense. But it was sunny out, the air was crisp, and I'd spent the night with Amanda Blake—even if all we'd been doing was sleeping. If little cartoon birds had come fluttering out of the woods to merrily chirp around my head, it wouldn't have surprised me.

I walked around to the back of the car, popped the trunk, and reached my hand into the pet carrier filled with rats. I closed my hands around one, feeling his little claws digging into my palms. I brought him up to my face and looked him in the eye. His little head was poking out between my thumbs.

“Sorry, Templeton,” I said. Then I bit his head off. It wasn't so bad really, no better or worse than eating a banana. A crunchy banana.

As my teeth crunched through bone, I looked down at my hands and saw the little cuts from the rat's claws turn from zombie-gray to blood red and then miraculously close up and disappear.

Amanda was sitting with her legs out of the open back door, rubbing her calves.

“Rat?” I asked, and reached into the trunk.

“Yes, please,” she said, holding out her hands.

“Think of it as breakfast in bed.”

Amanda raised the rat toward her mouth and as she did her lips turned a bloodless shade of gray, corpse lines spreading from her mouth and along her jaw. It was the zombie coming out again. I wasn't shocked by it anymore. It was still her. This is just how we looked now.

“Don't watch,” she said with girly self-consciousness.

 

Amanda drove us west on I-90 through Ohio, singing along to some terrible Auto-Tuned country crap. If I wasn't already undead, I'm sure a cross-country road trip listening to nothing but FM radio would've eroded my life span. Out of the corner of my eye, I watched Amanda bob her head and couldn't help shaking my head.

“Don't judge me,” she said, catching me. “This is great driving music.”

I'd been perusing the zombie atlas Grace had given us, running my fingers from location to location, trying to decide on the least unappealing option for lunch. Sometimes you'd do anything for a damn Cracker Barrel, right?

“Hey, we're going right through Cleveland,” I said. “Let's stop at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. I always wanted to go there.”

“Really?” asked Amanda. “Seems a little touristy for Jake Stephens, all-knowing music critic and Severed Lung superfan. Would Pitchfork approve?”

“I'm surprised you even know what Pitchfork is,” I snarked back, though I was kind of flattered that she remembered my love of Severed Lung.

“Cool people have the internet too, you know.”

“Anyway,” I said, “I won't totally respect the Hall's legitimacy until Iron Maiden gets inducted, but whatever. It'd still be kinda cool.”

“So let's go.”

“Seriously?”

“Why not?” she asked, shooting me a carefree smile. “My afternoon is open. What about yours?”

 

Since it was a Monday afternoon, we had the whole Hall of Fame pretty much to ourselves, and didn't have to be paranoid that anyone would recognize us as the notorious Jersey Shooters. It was nice to be normal again for a few hours, just two kids checking out John's badass Sgt. Pepper jacket.

“If I was going to steal one thing from the Hall of Fame, it would be that,” I told Amanda.

“What? That dumb coat thing?”

“If you mean that awesome coat, then yes,” I said. “I'd wear it proudly from the back of my trained elephant, leading my army of rock zombies into battle against the forces of evil.”

“I don't think I'd eat any of the Beatles,” Amanda mused.

“Me neither, no way,” I replied, then reconsidered. “Well, maybe Ringo. They could get by without Ringo, right?”

“I guess,” she answered. “But there's gotta be a more delicious drummer out there.”

“Good point,” I said.

We stopped by Madonna's display, pictures of her evolution through the years from skanky Catholic schoolgirl to sort-of-buff New Age chick. Amanda shook her head, a vehement no.

“No way,” she said. “Lifetime no-eating pass.”

“I don't think we can eat other zombies, so it doesn't matter.”

“Madonna is
not
a zombie,” replied Amanda, then squinted at one of the more recent pictures. “Although it would explain a lot, actually.”

There was a life-size statue of Elvis wearing his sequined white leather suit, doing that splayed-leg thing where he stuck out his junk, his hair swept into a huge, black wave at the front of his head.

“Too handsome to eat,” declared Amanda.

I tried to emulate the king's pose, curling my lips into an about-to-barf sneer, even windmilling an air guitar. Amanda laughed at me.

“Not even close,” she said.

“I'd eat Fat Elvis.”

“I'm not sure you could
finish
Fat Elvis.”

“I bet he'd taste like waffles.”

“Peanut butter waffles,” added Amanda, nodding enthusiastically. “
Fried
peanut butter waffles. Okay, you changed my mind.”

We wandered through the rest of the Hall like that, riffing on who we'd eat, joking around. It was the kind of day that made the brain-eating seem bearable.

“I needed that,” I told Amanda a couple hours later as we headed back to the car. She squeezed my hand in response, and I realized that Amanda was probably having the same things-are-looking-up feeling that I was and—whoa, hold on, when did we start holding hands? It'd just sort of happened, maybe back when we'd been debating the global ramifications of devouring Bono. Had she gone for it or had I? Did that even matter? It felt perfect, and I didn't want to get all twisted up thinking about what it meant.

Just let it happen, Jake
, I thought.
Be cool. Don't acknowledge it.

“I guess there's more to being a zombie than running from the law and eating people,” said Amanda.

It was still a lot of eating people.

Just as we were about to walk out the door, I had a thought. “We should buy something from the gift shop. You know. Just to have a souvenir or whatever.”

Amanda smirked. “Yeah, I can't wait to look back fondly on our time as zombie fugitives.”

Way to dork it up, Jake.
I'd had such a nice time with Amanda that I'd almost forgotten the predicament we were in. Just because Mom always insisted on buying the whole Stephens clan cheesy T-shirts commemorating every family trip didn't mean I should be keeping that tradition alive and nerdy.

“I don't know,” I said, sounding more disappointed than I wanted to let on. “I guess it's stupid. Anyway, we should save our money.”

Amanda gave me a thoughtful look. “No,” she said. “I do want to remember today. No matter what happens. And I think now that we're zombies we can forget about paying,” she added slyly. “What are they going to do? Arrest us?”