by Stacey Jay
“Guess it’s something they’ve passed down through the ages or something, and why SA stopped working with human governments back in the Dark Ages,” I confirmed. “But they don’t tell the little Settlers about it unless they screw up like Monica and I did last night.”
“Don’t they think we should all know the possible consequences of being observed before we unleash a zombie epidemic?” Ethan asked, proving we were soul mates. And then, proving it yet again, he leaned out the window and ordered me a sausage, egg, and cheese biscuit with no egg. We’d only eaten breakfast together a few times, but he remembered my hatred of egg and egg products.
“That’s what I said. They’re crazy, but this proves we’re not dealing with SRUs. They would be acting like Rogues, not zombies raised to attack a certain person. So there has to be some other reason these things are so hard to get rid of.”
He grunted his agreement; then we both fell silent as he paid for and collected our sandwiches.
“So you really think you were followed?” I asked, keeping my voice to a whisper just in case there were Enforcer operatives lurking behind the plastic Ronald McDonald or the trash can where Ethan paused to throw away the bag that our sandwiches came in.
I was really getting paranoid, but I couldn’t seem to help myself. Between our phones being bugged and my mom withholding evidence, I had reason to be suspicious.
“Barker pulled into the parking lot of the hospital just as I was pulling out. I had glasses on, but my car is pretty distinctive.”
I started in on my sandwich but found myself unable to swallow the food I’d chewed until Ethan pulled out of the parking lot. “Yeah, you should invest in a windowless white van if we’re going to keep with the lurking and sneaking.”
“Not a bad idea.” He gunned it through the red light ahead and turned east on Highway 11, heading out to less populated areas. “I could think of a few things a windowless van would be good for.” He wiggled his eyebrows at me.
“Right.” I smiled and tried to laugh, but it came out as more of wheeze. Thankfully, Ethan was too busy finishing his own breakfast and checking all the mirrors to make sure we weren’t being followed to notice my minor malfunction.
“So what did you find out?”
“A lot, but . . . there’s something else you need to hear first.”
“Okay? This is a bad something?” I asked, wadding up the last few uneaten bites of my sandwich in its paper, suddenly losing what was left of my appetite.
“I called Kitty,” he said, making a swift right and then a left, presumably to ditch a tail if we’d acquired one. I hadn’t seen my SA spies since I’d snuck out the back of the donut shop, but he was probably right to be careful. “About the DNA test for you and your mom.”
“Ethan! I should have been the one to do that. I wanted to—”
“I was just trying to help. I knew you probably hadn’t had time to call, and I thought the sooner they got started the sooner you’d be able to breathe easy, you know?”
“But I’m not going to be able to breathe easy?” I asked, heart clenching in my chest.
He sighed. “She wouldn’t tell me anything except that there wasn’t going to be a DNA test because a DNA test was impossible.”
“What?” I barely resisted the urge to hit something. “That doesn’t make any sense! They’re just being pigheaded, stupid—”
“Maybe not. I called Monica after I hung up with Kitty and told her to go back and look through that list of blood types she was researching last night. I don’t remember for sure, but I think some of those can cause mutations in DNA.”
“Mutations that would make DNA tests impossible?”
“Maybe.”
“But I thought Monica said these blood types could only be detected with fresh blood and only with Settler tests,” I said, the pieces of the puzzle not adding up in my mind. “If my DNA is gimped up, wouldn’t a normal medical test be able to detect—”
“I’m not sure,” Ethan said, a little too fast for my liking. If I didn’t know better, I’d have thought he was hiding something. “Let’s wait and see what Monica finds out. She’s going to call me back as soon as she gets a chance to look through her notes.”
I looked out the car window and wondered briefly where he was taking me. We’d turned off the old highway and were moving further west than I’d ever been before.
“Okay,” I said, feeling the tight rope of hope I’d been walking on snap and send me plummeting into the mouths of the alligators beneath. There wasn’t going to be a DNA test, which meant I probably only had a few more hours before Kitty got that blood test back and came to arrest me.
It was looking like I hadn’t just been a jerk to tell Cliff to get lost, I’d been an idiot as well. What if he really had information that could help? I had to think of a way to mend the rift between us, and it was past time for me to tell Ethan about my Undead friend.
“Listen, we’re going to figure this out. I think I’m getting somewhere with the rest of the investigation. You’re not going to believe what I found at the hospital,” Ethan said, a note of forced optimism in his voice that I appreciated even if I didn’t completely buy it. “I’m not sure I believe it, and I saw it all myself.”
“I don’t know—I’m feeling very open-minded these days. A lot of strange things have been happening.” There, I’d given myself a good lead-in to a confession about my recurrent zombie. Now I just had to gather the last of my courage and spill my guts.
“Not this strange. I never even imagined something like this.” His jaw clenched as he turned right onto a small country road I’d never been down before.
The way his jaw jumped reminded me of Cliff. I wondered where he’d gone, and what he’d had to tell me. If he took my last words to heart, I’d probably never know. It made me want to punch myself repeatedly in my big, stupid mouth, and not just because what he knew might help clear my name. I would just . . . miss him. Even sitting next to my boyfriend feeling guilty for keeping my “other guy” a secret, I got sniffly when I thought of never seeing Cliff again.
What a hot sloppy angsty mess I was becoming. I really needed to chill out.
“I tracked down a lab coat when I got to the ICU so I could roam around. At first I didn’t find much, until I got to where they keep the people who are on life support—coma victims mostly.”
“Coma victims?” I asked, not missing the significance he gave the words.
“Yep.” Ethan pulled onto a gravel road that led to a barren field that looked like it would be planted with soybeans come spring. He parked the car behind a clutch of leafless trees that formed a barrier between the field and the road, before turning to face me. “I wanted to wait until we were somewhere secure to tell you this.” I gazed around the field. Pretty much the middle of nowhere. If anyone were to try and spy on us, we’d see them coming for about a mile. Ethan swept some hair out of his eyes. “I—I think I found the zombies who attacked you last night. They were patients from the ICU, coma patients.”
“But zombies are dead, Ethan,” I said, his words banishing all thoughts of spilling the Cliff beans. At least for the moment. “That’s the whole—”
“I know, it sounds crazy, but the nurses were changing the bandages on their feet when I got there. There were three, maybe four whose feet were cut and bruised.” He leaned closer, his excitement clear. “How could that have happened if they weren’t out of their beds?”
“Maybe they were out of their beds, but that doesn’t mean they were transformed into bloodthirsty freaks,” I said, the very idea of living zombies scaring the crap out of me. “The zoo is right next door to the hospital, right? Maybe they just stepped out to take in the new baby elephant. Did you know the zoo has a new baby elephant?”
“Megan.”
“It’s supposed to be really cute. We should go see it. Once it gets warmer.”
“Megan, what’s wrong? This is really important,” he said, grabbing my shoulder and giving it a li
ttle shake. “You need to listen to me. This could be the break we’ve been waiting for.”
“How? Just because some people who were in a coma suddenly woke up and—”
“But that’s it, they didn’t wake up. At least, they weren’t awake this morning. They were all unconscious, every last one.” His hand smoothed down my arm, and his fingers interlocked with mine, offering silent support I wished I didn’t need. “Which makes it pretty hard to explain how one of the girls ended up with a broken nose and a dude managed to shatter his kneecap.”
“Oh God.” I closed my eyes, replaying the fight from the night before in my mind and not liking what I saw.
“The theory floating around is that some psycho came in and roughed them up in their beds. Everyone seems to be ignoring the fact that several of the patients have scraped and bruised knuckles. Like they weren’t just lying in bed taking abuse—they were dishing out a little of their own.”
Crap. What were the chances that this was just a horrible coincidence, and that these people had sustained the same exact injuries I’d inflicted on what I thought were the Undead in some perfectly reasonable way? Or that they’d hurt their hands running into the brick walls outside the hospital or trying to smash the glass keeping them from the precious baby elephant over at the zoo?
Better question, do you really have time for this level of denial?
“So you’re saying I beat the crap out of living people?” I asked. “Very sick, comatose living people?”
“You didn’t know. Besides, they weren’t acting like defenseless sick people. You and Monica did what you had to do to keep anyone else from being hurt or killed.”
“Still, I—Shit!” I brought my fist down hard on the seat beside me. “I should have realized. The pajamas, the lack of dead smell, it all made sense. I can’t believe I—”
“Hey, it’s not your fault,” Ethan said, grabbing my fist when I made to hit the dashboard. He held my hands captive. “Whoever used those people to attack you is the one to blame. They’re sending seriously sick people to do their dirty work.”
I swallowed hard, wishing I’d skipped the breakfast sandwich that was now threatening to make a second appearance. “What about the blood? Did they find blood on the patients? Like, on their pajamas or . . . in their mouths?”
I rolled down the window and took a deep breath of cold, crisp winter air.
“Not that I know of. Everything had been pretty well cleaned up. I’m guessing by Enforcement.” Ethan cracked his window too, letting in a nice, nausea-killing draft. “There was no trace of blood or mud or anything else on the people’s clothes. The clothes they were wearing last night were probably destroyed, but they couldn’t get rid of the injuries themselves.”
“What about the nurses? Could any of them tell you what happened?”
“No one could remember anything. Smythe did a thorough job.” His scowl made it clear what he thought of stealing people’s memories. There was a time I would have agreed with him, but if what the Elders had said was true and we risked a zombie apocalypse if anyone found out about our world . . .
Let’s just say it put my usually fierce belief in human rights in a slightly different perspective. I mean, what good were rights if we were all afraid to go out of our homes lest we be attacked by the Undead?
But then, wasn’t that saying it was okay for Settlers’ Affairs or the government or whoever to do whatever they wanted to the people under their control in the name of “protecting” them? There were always things to be afraid of—that didn’t mean I wanted Smythe or anyone else to have the power to steal my past, to corrupt my memories, to make me think . . .
Oh no . . . they wouldn’t. Would they?
“Ethan.” I turned to face him, a horrible suspicion growing in my mind. “What if the Enforcers did something to me? What if they made me forget something I did? So now I can’t remember it, but I’m really guilty and that’s why they all—”
“That’s ridiculous. You would never do something like this,” Ethan said, his faith in me as strong as ever. “Why would you? You don’t want to hurt anyone, especially yourself. What possible motive could you have?”
“I know, but then why is everyone so sure I summoned these people from their hospital beds? And why is my own mother keeping the truth from me?” I filled him in on the weirdness between Mom and me the night before and the blood-type stuff Monica and I had figured out this morning. “My blood and the blood they found on the coma victims must match and—”
“You’ve got your answer right there. They only think you did it because the blood matches and you’ve got a super-rare blood type. That means there has to be somebody else out there with the same weird blood you’ve got. And believe me, I’m going to do everything possible to find out who it is. I’ve already put a few things in motion so . . . don’t worry.”
“A few things?” He was definitely hiding something. “What kind of things?”
“I don’t want to worry you if it’s nothing. Besides, if you don’t know what I’m up to, you can’t be held responsible,” he said, a hard look in his eyes I’d never seen before.
“Ethan, I don’t want you doing anything illegal to—”
“I’m going to do what I think is right, whether that’s kosher with SA or not.”
“Now you sound like a criminal. You’re supposed to be with Protocol,” I said, scared by the change in my rule-loving boyfriend.
“I’m not a criminal, I just—” He broke off, choosing his words carefully. “Everything that’s happened lately . . . It’s made me think more Settlers should start considering what’s best for the people we’re trying to help instead of just trusting that SA has everything under control.”
“Because I’m a freak of nature?” I turned to look at the silent field with its barren rows of unplanted earth. God, I wished it wasn’t winter and everything didn’t feel so . . . dead.
“It’s not just you, and it’s not just Carol.” His fingers brushed my chin, urging my eyes back to his. “There’s been an increase in Rogue and Reanimated Corpse activity across the entire country. The world is changing and we’ve got to change with it. The people working black magic certainly are.”
“What does that mean?”
“I’ve just noticed some things, that’s all. Things that don’t make sense.”
“What sort of—”
“I promise, once I have something concrete, you’ll be the first to know.” He put his arm around me and pulled me closer to his side of the car. “But that’s totally weird about your mom. I wouldn’t have thought she’d do something like that.”
“Yeah, I know,” I said, allowing the change of subject. I was sick of people hiding things from me, but I was also sick of fighting. Besides, I knew Ethan well enough by now to know he wasn’t going to budge. If he’d decided he wasn’t ready to spill whatever beans he was holding, no amount of pleading, whining, or threat of violence on my part was going to make a difference.
“I mean, she’s always seemed so cool.”
“I guess.” I wrapped my arms around Ethan and buried my face in his chest. I didn’t want to think about Mom or her weirdness right now. I didn’t want to think about anything except Ethan and how good it felt to be close to him.
I guess he was feeling the same way, because when I lifted my face his lips were waiting right there in the perfect position. Just like it had that day in the hospital parking lot, our kiss went from sweet to steamy in under six seconds. My skin was immediately alive with the amazingness of his lips, his touch, his smell—everything that meant Ethan when he was this close. Perfectly close.
We angled our heads, our kiss growing even hotter. Before I really thought about what was happening, he was pushing my coat off my shoulders and I was doing the same. Then we were back together, smushed as close as two people could get.
Or maybe not quite as close as two people could get—there were ways to get closer.
Ethan’s fingers were a litt
le cold as they slid beneath my sweater, but that wasn’t what pulled me out of the happy kiss haze. For some reason, the feel of his bare hands on my bare skin made me think of Aaron, of how awful it had felt to have him touch me. Then I started thinking about how annoyed Ethan had been when I’d pulled away that day at the hospital and how I couldn’t pull away now or he’d get annoyed again.
He was my boyfriend, for God’s sake, and we’d been going out for practically forever in nineteen-year-old-boy time. How much longer would he wait for me if I kept freaking out every time he tried to take the natural next step in our relationship?
But then, should I really do something just because I didn’t want Ethan to freak? Shouldn’t he be patient and understanding about having a younger girlfriend? Even if she was technically not that young and more than old enough to be rounding the bases?
I mean, how many girls my age did I know who were already on the Pill? A lot. And I didn’t judge them. I wasn’t super conservative, and I didn’t have any morally compelling reason not to pounce Ethan. I didn’t plan on waiting until marriage. I loved Ethan, and I knew he loved and respected me too. So what the heck was my problem?
“You feel so good,” he mumbled against my lips.
“You too.” It wasn’t quite a lie, but it wasn’t quite the truth either. He did feel good, but I didn’t. I was approaching seriously crazy head space at a rate not healthy for a teenage girl. But what could I do? How could I gracefully put an end to something that was quickly growing way more intense than any make-out session we’d ever had?
As I inwardly stressed, we continued to kiss like the world was coming to an end and Ethan’s hand inched higher. And higher. And then even higher, until, for the first time in my entire life, a boy was touching me there. The old pink training bra I’d borrowed from Monica this morning because her real bras were too big for my wee chest was still on and all that, but still! Touching. There. Sort of cupping and brushing and obviously thinking about sliding under the lightly padded lace and taking this to a whole other level.
