Zombies vs. Unicorns (45 page)

Tahmina laughed out loud, and Javier joined her.

“You always did have the best laugh, girl.” Javier slipped an arm around Tahmina’s waist and drew her close, and for a second all she could smell was Javier and not the smoke from the constant fire for the dead. He sang one of his dad’s songs, exaggerating the sexy parts to make her laugh, but then he sang it for real, soft and low in Spanish. He swayed his hips slowly from side to side, pulling her around gently in a slow dance. His mouth was warm and tasted slightly of peppermint.

“You sure you don’t want to be my date tonight?” he whispered.

Tahmina thought about her mother’s closet, the beautiful beaded gown hanging there. She wondered if she would ever see her mother again. “Sorry,” she said, breaking away. “I’m on duty.”

“Officer Hassani, keeping the world safe from the undead.”

“Something like that. I’ll be taking these.” Tahmina confiscated the boxes of firecrackers.

“Harsh, Hassani.”

“Just doing my job, Ramirez,” she said, heading for the door. “Have fun at the prom.”

Javier laughed bitterly. “Yeah. Fuck you, too.”

Around midnight they checked the east side of town to make sure the fences hadn’t sustained any damage. Tahmina slipped
the night-vision goggles over her eyes, and the desert came into view in black and green.

“Anything?” Jeff asked after a few minutes.

“No. It’s pretty quiet tonight.”

“Nice of them to let us have prom without too much hassle. It’s kind of funny. If they were here, there’d be chaperones checking for booze and breaking up the booty dancing.”

“Yeah. Silver linings and all that.”

“See? Now, that was some good cop talk right there. We have to remember that when we get our show, dude.”

“Noted.”

Tahmina took one last long look east in the direction of the Tower of Silence, following the trail that had been worn by the Hummer.

“Everything okay?” Jeff asked.

She watched the landscape for another minute, debating whether or not to tell him what she knew. He was her partner. Partners were not supposed to keep secrets.

“Tahmina? What’s up?”

“Nothing,” she said, tearing off the goggles. She hoped Jeff couldn’t hear the worry in her voice. The breeze brought a fresh whiff of smoke till it was all she could smell. “I need some coffee.”

The one diner that stayed open this late was the Denny’s over by the high school. Roxie Swann’s parents had owned it, and she kept it going. At the first sign of infection—a cluster of sores down her neck and a fever accompanied by the shakes—Roxie’s mom had walked into the restaurant’s giant freezer and asked
Roxie to lock the door, hoping the cold would either kill or cure her. It did neither. When Roxie opened the door three days later, her mom lunged, and Roxie emptied her gun as she had been told. But Roxie swore that just before her mother attacked, she paused as if she’d recognized her. As if she’d been trying to stop.

“Crazy night for you guys,” Roxie said with a grin. She poured them weak coffee and cut two slivers of pie. The slices had gotten smaller. They were running out of flour. They were low on everything—medicine, gasoline, food. They still had water, which they boiled first just in case. But there was no telling how long that would last. They hadn’t received a radio signal in ages. No planes flew overhead. There were no traffic noises. That’s why they’d started sending volunteers outside, two a month in the past three months, south toward Tucson, east to New Mexico, west to California, north to Flagstaff. No one had come back until Connor Jakes tonight.

A group of prom goers sat in the corner booth, sharing some chips and salsa and arguing over which songs they would request once they made it to the Pima Panthers stadium. Somebody started singing “Rehab,” and everybody joined in on the “No, no, no.”

“Give it a rest,” Tahmina muttered, playing with the pink plastic carnation stuck into a Coke bottle beside the empty napkin dispenser.

“Okay. Seriously. What’s up with you? You’re in, like, a fun-sucking mood tonight.” Jeff took a bite of her untouched pie. “Did you want to go to prom? Is that it? ’Cause I’ll totally take you, if you want. You can be my hag.”

Tahmina rubbed at her eyes, but it was no use. They would just keep stinging. “Just thinking about something my mom said once about how she’d never leave me. I don’t know. I was just wondering, what if there’s some part of the human heart that can’t be corrupted? There might be a cure in that.”

Jeff snorted. “Reality check: I saw parents rip their kids the fuck apart and eat their fucking insides before we pushed them out. Parental love was no match for the power of that infection. Those things roaming the desert only see us as prey.”

“What if you’re wrong?”

“I’m not.”

“But what if that part of them is still alive down deep and it can still be reached? My mom used to say that nothing, not my worst behavior, not even death, could stop a parent’s love—”

Jeff brought his fist down on the table, rattling the grungy silverware. “Stop it, okay? Just stop.” The diner got quiet, and Jeff took a shaky breath, waited for the prom kids to go back to singing and laughing. Finally he said, “Look. When I was little and we’d go to the store, my mom would tell me that if we got separated, just wait for her. That she’d always come back for me. Always. Well, guess what? She did—and it wasn’t because she loved me. It was because she’d become some fucking animal who would have eaten my brain if I hadn’t wasted her. There was nothing human left. I had to kill her before she killed me. So, you know, whatever concept you have of an unconditional love or God or law or humanity or meaning, you can fucking forget it.” Jeff’s eyes were red, and Tahmina knew it wasn’t the soot or the desert dust. “You know what? I don’t want to talk
about this shit anymore. This is too much reality for our reality show. I gotta take a leak,” he said, and walked away.

Tahmina stared at her reflection on the black surface of her coffee. It was her mother who had taught her to love coffee. In the mornings she would drink hers dark and strong from delicate cups that she had managed to smuggle out of the old country, escaping through a secret tunnel that stretched for miles under the city.

“Hmmm, I see your future,” her mother would say playfully as she examined the coffee’s remains like an ancient Persian fortune-teller.

“What is it?” Tahmina would ask, full of belief.

Her mother would tip the coffee-stained cup toward her. “Soon, very soon, you will be washing dishes.”

Tahmina’s mother used to teach at the university three days a week, commuting an hour each way. When the roads had become more dangerous, Tahmina had begged her mother to stay home. But her mother had said that it was important to keep the centers of learning open. To close the schools was to admit to hopelessness. She’d seen that happen in her homeland, and she would not see it happen here in the country of her choosing.

“But what if something happens to you?” Tahmina had asked tearfully as her mother had backed the car out of the driveway.

“I will never leave you,” she’d promised, and Tahmina had watched her car growing smaller as she’d driven away. That night, her mother did not return. There were reports that the campus
had been overrun with the undead. Infection was everywhere. Panicked, Tahmina had called her mother’s phone, and it had gone to voice mail. She’d called through the night and the next day, but her mother never picked up.

“Accept the truth,” her father had said, and he’d held her while she’d screamed and cried. But Tahmina couldn’t accept it. If she had seen her mother die, that would have been one thing. What bothered Tahmina was the not knowing. Was her mother out there still, uninfected but maybe hurt or holed up in a safe house, unable to get home? At times these thoughts came down like a sudden hard rain, flooding her with such anxiety that she had to go to the firing range and discharge until her handgun spun with clicks. Some nights she still rang her mother’s phone just to hear her voice.

Jeff plopped down in the booth again, an apologetic smile in place. “Sorry that took so long. But you know what they say—the longer it is, the longer it takes.” He sipped his coffee. “You okay?”

“Yeah. Sure.”

“Sure sure?”

“Sure sure.” Tahmina worked up a fake smile. “Hey, how about that butt-ugly dress Tansey had on?”

“O-M-G,” Jeff said, and laughed. “Did you see that shit? Like the unholy union of Hot Topic and mother-of-the-bride.”

Tahmina had thought the dress was pretty, but she knew Jeff would go off on it.

“Too bad the infection couldn’t have done something useful like wiping out her craptastic taste,” Jeff said.

Roxie dropped the check. Under “Total” at the bottom, she had scribbled,
Whatever.
“Do y’all mind paying up? I’m thinking about closing early so I can go to prom.”

“Sure. What do you need?” Tahmina asked.

Roxie laughed. “Everything. You could mop the back or fix the faucet or get me more coffee beans.”

“I’ll take a look at that faucet,” Jeff said, and headed back to the kitchen.

Tahmina followed the conga line of prom goers out into the parking lot, and waited by the cruiser. Across the road the stadium lights were on dim, the best they could offer. Inside the diner Roxie hung the closed sign and carried her prom dress into the bathroom. A minute later Jeff came out singing an old R & B song his mom used to like.

“Did you fix the faucet?”

“Totally. Sort of. Okay, not really. I tried, though.” He took the pink plastic carnation from his pocket and handed it to Tahmina.

“What’s this for?” she asked.

“Prom. We’re going.”

“Right.” Tahmina laughed. And then, a second later, she said, “You’re serious.”

“Indeed.” Jeff opened the trunk, took out a straw fedora. He rolled up the sleeves of his uniform, exposing the muscular curves of his biceps.

“We can’t go. We’re the cops.”

Jeff gestured to the empty parking lot. “Who is there to police? Everybody’s at the stadium.”

Tahmina looked down at her rumpled too-tight navy blue officer’s uniform and bulky black sneakers. She wore no makeup, and her unwashed hair was tucked into a low ponytail. She smelled of smoke, spilled gasoline, and sweat. It was not the way she’d envisioned prom.

Jeff opened the passenger side door with a flourish. “Just for a while.”

Tahmina got into the car and tucked the plastic flower behind her ear, and Jeff closed the door. For fun he turned on the lights, letting the kaleidoscopic red-and-white announce their arrival in style.

The football field swarmed with kids of all ages. Tahmina heard a group of senior guys complaining that lowly seventh graders had crashed the prom, but there was no one to stop them from coming, and the guys went back to passing a vodka bottle around the circle, since there was no one to stop that, either. On the fifty-yard line somebody had set up a battery-powered sound dock to play tunes. The speakers were too small, though, and the sound was mostly swallowed by the giant open space. Girls had taken off their shoes to dance, so that their heels wouldn’t sink into the Astroturf. A line of obviously drunk dance team girls threw their arms across each other’s shoulders for a high-kick routine that ended when they fell down on top of each other laughing hysterically. Up in the bleachers brightly clad teens sat in scattered clumps. They looked like one of those tile-strategy games abandoned midway.

Robin Watson had gotten drunker. Her dress was grass-stained and dotted with dirt. She moved unsteadily from
person to person, taking their faces in her hands. “I’m sorry, so sorry,” she’d say before moving on and repeating the gesture and apology. Most people laughed at her. A few girls hugged her. One of the guys copped a feel and high-fived his friends. Robin continued to thread her way through the crowd like an overzealous funeral director.

“Yo, partner!” Jeff shouted. He had found a cluster of dancers and was bouncing inside the circle of them. “Get your ass over here and dance.”

“Sorry, partner!” Tahmina shouted back. “I can’t compete with your promalicious moves. I’m gonna make the rounds.”

“You want me to come with?”

“Nah. It’s okay. You dance.”

“You’re all right, partner. This would be awesome cop-bonding shit for our TV show,” Jeff yelled.

“You guys have a show?” a girl asked him.

“Not yet, but when things get back to normal …”

Tahmina walked away from the dancing, the music, the romance and small pockets of drama unfolding on the field, the sad ministrations of Robin Watson. Under the bleachers she passed the two drug dealers they’d busted earlier. They were back in business. The smaller one caught her eye and smirked. Tahmina let it go. She walked to the fence and stared out at the desert. The wind had changed direction, and the smoke was not as strong. The night air was clean and a little cool. She wondered if she should go back and bust up the drug trading. After all, she was the law. The law was a lie, she knew now, but it was a necessary lie, a construction that was needed so that everyone
felt safe. Like having parents. Believing they would protect you no matter what, that they would bridge the unknowable distance between you and death for as long as possible. But there were no parents anymore, and everyone dancing on that football field had seen death up close. They had seen that it was not always the end, and that there were far worse things to fear than death, things that would not stop just because you said the prayers and fed the fire and kept the laws.

Tahmina took the night-vision goggles out of her pocket and slipped them on. She put her face to the metal cage and looked out toward the Tower of Silence, where the tunnels were. She had first noticed them three weeks ago, faint scars branching off from the burial site in different directions, all of them snaking toward the town. On subsequent visits she’d seen that they were moving, getting closer. In another two weeks, maybe less, the tunnels would reach them. She hadn’t mentioned it to anyone, not even Jeff. What was the point? The law was an illusion. Tahmina would keep that illusion alive for as long as she could.