Zombies vs. Unicorns

by Holly Black

  “For real?” I ask.

  “Why not, Allison?” Dr. Bill smiles. “Nothing wrong with working up a good sweat.”

  Yes, he actually said “a good sweat.” Because I wasn’t planting potatoes all day yesterday in hundred-degree heat.

  Oh, wait. I was.

  But I start pumping, or jacking, or whatever it is you do with jacks. The car lifts in slow increments, the ancient tires drooping from their rims like rolled down socks.

  This is the boring part—when nothing happens. It’s supposed to teach you that mostly nothing happens, even outside the wire. There are plenty of spots in the world where you can change a tire without any of the six billion shambling along. So sometimes Dr. Bill just leaves everyone waiting in the wings, watching while you fix a flat or clean your gun or count your precious bullets… .

  And the zees don’t come. Just mosquitoes.

  But you can’t let your guard down. That way lies death, zombification, and lost dessert points.

  “Hey, Ally!” shouts Sammy. “Um, I mean—zee alert!”

  I stand up and draw my pistol, smiling. Despite the very important lesson they teach, those nothing-happens drills are really annoying.

  Kalyn and Jun have unfolded their arms. They’re coming toward me, feet shuffling through the broken safety glass and ferns. Jun looks like he’s about to bust out laughing, but Kalyn’s zee shamble is eerily perfect. Her long black skirt drags in the dirt, the hint of a zee limp rippling down its length.

  She hangs out by the wire in her free time, watching the six billion. I hang out there too, watching her.

  But right now I’m all business. “Okay. Get a count!”

  Sammy keeps his shotgun trained on the zees while I take a quick circuit of the car. There’s only four of us kids, but Dr. Bill can be tricky. Sometimes he makes the grown-ups join in, just to keep things interesting.

  But there’s nobody else in sight.

  “I got two.”

  “Me too,” Sammy says. “I mean, also.”

  “Okay, so no guns.” When Sammy makes a whining noise, I holster my pistol and add, “Silence is golden, and bullets are precious.”

  This show of restraint will surely win Dr. Bill’s favor.

  I pull the tire iron from the base of the jack, spinning it in my hands, and take a step toward Jun. I’m still on my backswing when he falls to the ground, like a damsel fainting. He used to be a pretty good zee, for a ten-year-old. But he’s been a wimp since last summer, when I accidentally whacked him with a shovel in a camping drill. I don’t know what his problem is. He was barely bruised, and I was the one who lost five dessert points.

  “One down!” Sammy calls, bouncing on the car roof.

  I wait for Kalyn to come to me, enjoying her shamble. She’s been wearing makeup lately, going for a zee look. Not enough to freak the grown-ups out, just little smudges of ash beneath her eyes. It makes her look wiser, somehow, like she knows what a joke this all is—the drills, Dr. Bill, our whole broken little tribe.

  I don’t rush. For the next few seconds I don’t have to hide that I’m looking at Kalyn. I can gaze straight into her dark brown eyes, and the world gets shiny again.

  She gazes back at me with a cool zee stare, but there’s a smile playing on her lips. I want to ask her what she’s thinking, even if we’re in front of everyone. I want to stand here and let her bite me.

  But Dr. Bill is watching, and a few shambled steps later she must die.

  I heft the tire iron, getting a solid grip with both hands, sharp end pointed at her. With a giant step I thrust it forward like a spear. The point stops two inches from her left eyeball, but Kalyn doesn’t blink. She gives me a little drama as she drops, sputtering like a zee with a tire iron jammed through its brain.

  So there we are: Kalyn lying in a crumpled dead-looking heap, Jun with his hands behind his head, like it’s movie night and I’m the star.

  I pretend to wipe the tire iron off. “How’s my back?”

  “Two down!” Sammy yells, bouncing up and down on the car roof. “Stains for brains!”

  I glance at Dr. Bill, whose expression is all about Sammy’s dessert points draining away.

  “Yeah, but how’s my back!”

  “Oh, right.” Sammy spins around, still bouncing as he checks our three-sixty. And suddenly the rusty metal under his feet is bouncing with him. His zee-killing dance has stumbled on the Ford’s natural frequency …

  The next few seconds unroll in slow motion. The jack folds, popping like a match snapped between two fingers. The car’s rear end thumps down in the dirt, and Sammy’s arms are wheeling. The dropped shotgun smacks barrel-first off the hood, the metal boom so loud I flinch, thinking for a second the gun’s gone off.

  Sammy spins in place once, then tumbles off the far side… .

  The thud of him landing sounds like a punch in the stomach. Everyone runs over, Kalyn and Jun reanimating to scramble across the dirt behind me.

  Sammy’s on the ground, his eyes shut, his neck at a weird angle.

  Kalyn bends over him—much too close. “Are you okay?”

  He doesn’t say anything. He looks twisted and broken and very wrong.

  Dr. Bill pulls Kalyn away, practically throwing her across the dirt. I taste panic and vomit in the back of my throat, but my hands do the right thing and draw my pistol. And I’m thinking, Fuck, fuck, fuck—it isn’t even loaded.

  But I aim at his head anyway.

  Sammy opens his eyes and makes a gurgling noise.

  “Rrrrrrr … kupuch!” he says, then busts up laughing.

  We’re all staring down at him, Dr. Bill and me with pistols drawn, and Sammy’s laughing like an idiot. Like a moron, like a pathetic fourteen-year-old waste of gravity.

  But not like a zee.

  “Got you, dorks,” he finally says.

  Dr. Bill holsters his gun. “Yeah, you got us. And you, my friend, have lost all your dessert points!”

  The words come out quietly, but are as serious as teeth marks. This shuts Sammy up for a moment, but then he’s laughing again.

  Why shouldn’t he? Sammy hasn’t been outside the wire since he was ten. He’s never pointed a gun at a real zee. He’s never seen anyone turn in front of his eyes. So this clearing in the swamp, this rusted-out Ford, these drills—what are they supposed to mean to him? What are they supposed to mean to any of us?

  It’s not worth pretending, even for the promise of canned chocolate pudding or pears in syrup. Maybe Sammy has finally realized what Jun and Kalyn and I have known for ages, except he’s brave enough to say it out loud.

  Or maybe he’s just totally high.

  2.

  The thing is, we live on a pot farm.

  Not that we’re drug addicts or anything; we plowed under most of the original crop when we got here. We weren’t looking for pot, just safety and sustenance.

  The safety part was easy. We’d traveled past plenty of places with thick zee-proof walls: prisons, army bases, airports, gated communities. But those all had people in them in the before, so they were swarming with zees. On top of that we needed to plant our own crops. Aircraft runways and prison yards make for pretty crappy farmland, and we had only one season’s worth of precious cans to learn how to grow food.

  So that was our problem: most high-security establishments don’t have farms in them, and most farms don’t have big-ass fences around them.

  That’s when the beautiful Alma Nazr, our most awesome zee slayer and my previous crush, had her brainstorm. Back in the before, she was a federal marshal, wasting bad guys instead of dead guys. She’d been assigned once to a secret farm in Mississippi where the government grew pot for research purposes. In the last few years of the before, the states were legalizing medical marijuana. So the feds were making the farm bigger and the fences around it taller, just in case one day they wanted to sell the stuff.

  So the wise grown-ups of our tribe led us southward, saying unto themselves, “Primo farmland, primo barbe
d wire, and maybe even some primo weed!”

  Dr. Bill claims that last part didn’t come into it, of course. It was all about safety and sustenance. But he also says that the wire will last forever, that chocolate can grow in Mississippi, and that one day we’ll learn to inoculate for zee bites, or maybe even cure the six billion.

  Dr. Bill is generally full of shit. Just like the rest of them.

  3.

  That night I’m spying on Kalyn again.

  She always goes to the same place along the wire, where two fences meet at an acute angle, a pie slice jutting out into the swampland around the farm. Alma says it’s because the wire follows the old property lines exactly. It’s weird how the whole planet was divided up into little pieces back in the before, every square inch owned by one of the six billion.

  These days there’s just two kinds of real estate: ours and theirs, human and zee.

  Kalyn’s standing almost where the fences meet, so close to the wire that Dr. Bill would crap his pants if he could see her. He makes us use the words “arm’s length” in practice sentences a lot, and yells if we don’t put the apostrophe in, like bad punctuation will get us bitten.

  Kalyn is definitely within arm’s length of the wire, maybe elbow’s length. But the chain-link is woven pretty tight, so it’s only fingers sticking through, along with a few tongues and broken jaws and loose bones. She’s not even wearing a pistol.

  Some of the grown-ups stood like that in early days—right by the wire or close to a limbless zee—to “desensitize” themselves. But then one day a very pregnant Mrs. Zimmer reached out by accident (or committed suicide by zee), and the grown-ups made the arm’s length rule.

  I crouch there watching Kalyn for a while, the darkness falling around us, the bugs in the swamp starting to buzz, and I tell myself a story. I imagine her long black skirt caught by some withered stick-thin hand. Kalyn looks down in horror, but it’s too late to pull away. She stumbles and her arms wave around, and so her billowy sleeves are snagged by all those bony fingers. I run to her rescue, appearing out of nowhere to slash her clothes right off her.

  And she falls into my arms.

  “Allison?” she says back here in the real world.

  I am busted.

  I stand up, wondering how she spotted me. She hasn’t even turned around.

  “Oh, hey.” I’m all casual. Yeah, just passing by. Not spying on you in some non-world-repopulating girl-crush way.

  “Thought that was you,” she says.

  Thought what was me? I wasn’t making a sound, and even if we don’t bathe much anymore, it’s not like she can smell me over the zees.

  “Yeah, it’s me. What are you … doing?”

  She turns around, her smile catching moonlight. “Waiting for you.”

  Okay. The world is definitely getting shiny again.

  As I walk into Kalyn’s pie-slice corner of fence, the zees all shuffle to face me, like they’ve gotten bored with her. The metal flexes with their shifting weight, the chain-links grinding. Except for the insect buzz, the night is quiet.

  I can still remember right after the before, when the zees made a gargling noise whenever they saw us. Now they’re too dried out, Dr. Bill says.

  It’s nicer this way.

  Kalyn’s looking at me, her pupils huge in the dark.

  “Anyone you know?” I ask. It’s an old joke, but it gives me an excuse to glance away into the crowd, arm’s length from the intensity of her stare.

  “No, never,” Kalyn says, and turns back to the faces pressed against the fence.

  Her ash-smudge makeup is more careful tonight, like she’s made an effort for the zees. I know how weird that is, but it’s not like there’s much else to get fancy for. No one celebrates birthdays since the shed with the calendar marks burned down, and the parties weren’t much fun anyway. The liquor’s been gone for ages (and I never got any of it), the precious Ping-Pong balls are all broken, and the dartboard’s green with mold.

  Movie nights are a big deal, I suppose, since we only run the generator once a month these days. But Kalyn dressed up for … this.

  Is it to perfect her zee impersonation? To desensitize?

  I don’t care which, as long as I get to stand here, closer to her than the zees pressed in around us. She’s so close that her hair moves when I breathe.

  Breath’s length, and my heart’s beating like I’m on the other side of the wire.

  “Do you think Alma’s right?” she asks.

  “That Sammy’s a waste of gravity?”

  “No,” Kalyn says. “About the other thing.”

  “Oh … us all dying.”

  Last year when Dr. Bill had the squirts from a dented can of beans, Alma Nazr was in charge of us for a whole week, the epicenter of my crush on her. She showed us how to crack skulls with police batons, how to reload a shotgun with one hand, and explained why we were doomed.

  More zees come to the wire every day. We don’t know why. In the early days we thought sound drew them to the living. But there’s no way they can hear us from the other side of the swamp, and yet they come. They just know we’re here.

  Alma says it’s only a matter of time before there are too many. Enough to crush the fence. Or to stack themselves higher than its uppermost coil of barbed wire, like rain forest ants using their own bodies to cross a river.

  So we should leave soon, before the crush gets too thick to drive through. Before the roads get any worse, especially here on the rainy kudzu-choked Gulf Coast. You can already see the asphalt breaking down outside the front gate. If we wait too much longer, we’ll have to walk out shooting.

  And bullets aren’t forever.

  Dr. Bill came back to teaching early, still sickly and squeezing crap-farts into his pants. Alma wasn’t supposed to say that stuff to us kids, I guess. She probably wouldn’t have, except that the other grown-ups had stopped listening to her. They can’t imagine ever going outside again.

  Even Dr. Bill, for all his drills and shouting, never talks about leaving.

  And the thing is, the grown-ups are right. If we roll out of those gates now, the zees will eat us in five minutes.

  Alma’s right too, of course. The wire can’t last forever.

  Doomed if we do, doomed if we don’t.

  But I decide to sound strong. “Don’t worry. The zees won’t break through.”

  Kalyn sighs with disappointment. “So we’re stuck in here forever?”

  “Well … no. Not that either.” Here at breath’s length, I want to say whatever she wants to hear. “What I mean is, we’ll have to leave way before the zees crush the fence.”

  She turns to me, her eyes bright. “Really?”

  “Sure.” My mind is scrambling. “Sooner or later, something random has to happen.”

  “Um, random how?”

  “Like … a tornado.”

  Kalyn laughs, opening her hands to the triangle of sky above us. “You mean it’ll scoop up a bunch of zees, then drop them inside? Like a rain of frogs, but zombies?”

  “Okay, maybe not a tornado. But what about a major hurricane? They come around every ten years or so. That could pull this fence up. Then we’d have to leave.”

  She nods slowly. “Everything random is inevitable. You just need enough time.”

  I’m nodding stupidly, because our eyes are locked again. It’s much better than the zee stare she gave me that afternoon, and this time no one’s watching.

  I wish there were a drill for this. Step one: take her shoulders?

  But I look away again. “We should start having tornado drills. Dr. Bill would love that.”

  “Yeah, he would.” Kalyn snorts a laugh. “But he won’t like it when the zees come raining down.”

  “Step one … kiss your ass good-bye.”

  “Maybe, maybe not.” She reaches for the fence.

  My fingers circle her wrist. Her skin is cool in the night air. “Quit that.”

  “Does it make you nervous?”

&n
bsp; “Um, yes. Because it’s kind of insane.” I squeeze her hand, remembering Mrs. Zimmer growing paler every hour until they finally put her in the isolation hut. “You could get bitten. Don’t you want to be around for the inevitable rain of zees?”

  “Mmmm,” she says softly. “That’s the weird thing. I already did.”

  4.

  I stand there for a moment, her hand in mine, the insect buzz growing louder in my ears. I’m not sure what she just said.

  “Um, you’ve already seen a rain of zombies?”

  “No. I already got bitten.”

  “Very funny.”

  Kalyn drops my hand and stretches out her left arm, rolling up the puffy black sleeve of her shirt. Her forearm gleams with moonlight, darkened by a purple scar in the shape of a nine millimeter shell.

  “Right there.”

  I shrug. “Looks like you cut yourself on a can of peaches. Dessert points of evil.”

  “That’s not from metal. I was standing right where you are, looking straight up at the sky. Remember back in the before, how there were, like, … a few hundred stars? And now there’s so many, like the souls of the six billion all flew up there?” She runs a finger across the scar. “I sort of got dizzy thinking about them. And I took a step sideways, with my hand out so I wouldn’t fall.”

  Kalyn reaches out toward the fence, and I’m frozen, watching her. Her hand is too close to one of the ruined faces—finger’s length—but the zee doesn’t react at all.

  It’s looking at me instead.

  “Scratched it pretty bad,” she says. “On bone.”

  “When was this?” My hand is on my pistol.

  “A month ago.”

  Relief runs through me in a shiver. “You cut yourself on the wire, then.”

  “It wasn’t metal. It was bone.”

  Kalyn reaches out to grab my shoulders. I pop the button on my holster, but she’s only steadying me. I’m inches from the fence, dizzy from all this. She pulls me closer to her.

  “Be careful.”

  “Quit fucking with me, then!”

  She shakes her head, hard. “I felt like shit at first, and puked up meals for two days. I was going to tell everyone, I swear. But then I felt better.”

  I take a deep breath, reminding myself that this all happened a month ago. Her scar is old and dry; the ones that turn you never have time to heal.