“Kim?” I repeated, re-scanning the room, as if she could somehow have hidden from me the first time around. It was still just the three of us.
“Yeah,” he continued, lining up the break and following through with a loud crack. “But when some confused-looking old geezer with blood on his smock ran out into the road, arms waving, guess what she did?”
I groaned. “She was a good scout about it.”
“She was a good scout about it,” Norman agreed. “Stopped her van with Kim’s-Son-the-Eagle-Scout stuck behind it in the other one.”
Kim’s-Son-the-Eagle-Scout. You have to say his name all in one piece like that, or just “The Eagle Scout” for short, or people pretend not to know who you’re talking about.
With a leap a cricket could have envied, Norman was on the table, treading lightly between the pool balls. He cocked his head at an angle that suggested a cape billowing from his shoulders and, in his best Kim Kent voice, which was also his best Superman voice, said, “Citizen! I couldn’t help noticing that you appear to be in distress! How may I assist you today?”
Hector had his face in his hands. I wasn’t sure if he was stifling a laugh or a grimace. Either way, I was pretty sure I was doing the same.
Norman mimed being caught in the neck by something and rolled backward onto the floor, gasping and gurgling.
“You didn’t want me to get out to help her,” Hector interrupted, only half accusing.
“Well, I was right, wasn’t I?” Norman dropped character on a dime, rolled back to his feet, and began lining up his next shot. He ignored the considerable distance most of the balls had travelled from where Newtonian physics had originally left them. “The old guy almost took you down all by himself.”
Crack.
The orange striped ball disappeared into the far corner pocket, and Norman looked briefly up at me. “He’s lucky he got back to the van at all when Kim got back up.”
Hector smacked him on the back of the head, making him cry out “Do-over!” when the cue ball skidded off in entirely the wrong direction.
“You mean you’re lucky,” Hector corrected. “At least I can drive the van.”
Norman was old enough to get a driver’s license, barely, but his father had owned a motor scooter dealership, so he’d been raised mostly riding those instead. He’d been able to handle one solo (and illegally) for years. He had even less experience with actual cars than I did. Hector had passed his driving test on schedule last year, but even the small dimensions of his parents’ Lexus were still a challenge for him to maneuver.
“That’s the spirit,” said Norman. “You can do anything you put your mind t—Crap.”
He scratched and limboed under the table to the pocket he had hit.
“Any idea what happened?” I asked. “How it started, I mean?”
“Nope, still taking all bets!” said Norman, arbitrarily repositioning the cue ball. “My money’s on aliens, but satanic curses and chem warfare are very popular, too.”
“That’s a no,” Hector translated unnecessarily. That left one more very important, but even scarier, question.
“So, who else?” I prompted.
“Oh, right.” Norman dropped his cue and threw open the lobby door. “Good morning, Castaways! Say hello to your surprise teammate!”
He stepped aside with a flourish to frame me in the doorway for the benefit of all of two people who were inside.
Kim’s-Son-the-Eagle-Scout was kneeling in the corner, still in his immaculate uniform as if this were all some advanced exercise, surrounded by medical supplies arranged for cataloguing. His little sister, Claire, fourteen going on ten (forever convinced that because her brother was “successful,” she would be, too), was helping him with a bland expression, which melted into excessive enthusiasm when she saw us enter.
I had always tolerated her because she had convinced her mother to help form our Venturer’s Crew even though Claire didn’t actually like camping or anything else Venturing involved other than being in the same place her brother got all his attention.
“Glad you could make it,” The Eagle Scout said.
“How did you escape?” Claire squealed like a kid begging for a bedtime story, and suddenly I didn’t feel much like bragging, whether my mouth was full or not.
“It’s the drunk tank,” I said, “not Alcatraz.”
“Where?” Claire asked blankly.
I let the silence hang for a moment, wishing for a cricket-filled night. I had to settle for the cries of frustrated zombies. At least it wasn’t hard to come up with a change of subject.
“Take two: Why are you dressed as a clown?”
Norman turned his theatrically painted face down to look at the bright motley of purple, green, and orange like he’d forgotten it. “Oh, this.”
The Eagle Scout scoffed with disapproval. Claire looked pleased with the prospect of a conversation she’d already heard at least once before. It gave her a much-needed head start toward understanding it.
“Well, you know how whenever there are zombies, there’s always at least one dressed as a clown?”
“I guess,” I agreed.
“Well, the poor bastard wearing this had his brain scooped clean out before he ever got to be one of them. So I’m just making sure that when I die, and then un-die, at least I’ll be filling the quota.”
“You’re not going to die!” I shocked myself as much as anyone with how loudly I shouted this at him, grabbing his hands and pushing back his violet sleeves, searching for hidden bite marks or anything else that might coincide with his logic. I’d only just gotten him back, the biggest piece of life as I’d known it that it looked like I might get to keep, and he was not about to be taken away again. I wouldn’t allow it.
He didn’t fight me off, but he was laughing at me. The familiarity of the sound would have been comforting in any other context.
“We’re all going to die, Cass,” he said, finally. I couldn’t decide whether to laugh along or punch him when I caught his meaning. “Sooner or later, older or younger, by zombie or heart disease or falling space junk, and there’s no way to tell when, especially lately, so best to be ready all the time, right?”
I leaned against the doorway, all nonchalance, pretending that I hadn’t just committed the mortal sin of implying that I cared about something in front of what might have been, for all I knew, everyone alive in the entire world, no less. This time the substitute crickets were for me. “Right,” I said, “of course.”
“But in the meantime”—Norman tossed the pool cue from one hand to the other and then offered it to me—“I believe it’s your turn.”
“Norm,” Hector cautioned slowly, looking me over again out of the corner of his eye, like he thought I wouldn’t notice. He’d put it together, all the important details of what had happened to me that morning, especially in the parking lot. “It’s been a long day. Maybe a bath, a nap-”
“I’ll nap when I’m dead,” I said, grabbing the cue. Then I listened to the howls outside for a moment. “Or not.” I shrugged. “Whichever way it works these days.”
I didn’t ask either of them—as we argued over whether “eight ball, corner pocket” means any corner pocket, or if you have to pick just one—about their mornings two days earlier, how much they resembled the one I’d just had. I didn’t ask what, exactly, they’d found in Whitetail Village right next to Mountain View, other than the ladder and sledgehammer they’d fashioned their secure entrance with.
Don’t get me wrong, we were good friends, and among the three of us, we could talk about anything, including caring-too-much stuff, but we were best friends because we could also not talk about anything, like that time I tried wearing a strapless dress with tape that wasn’t quite sticky enough, or like that conservatory rejection letter that had made Hector resign himself to following in his family’s psychiatric footsteps.
Sometimes that was a lot more special.
CHAPTER SIX
All in Favor, Say
“Brains.”
“Should we maybe go in there and help?” I asked after our second hour in the arcade. Norman was beating me at that two-player racing game, but only with five games out of nine. The power was on, for the time being, and he had pried open the coin compartments on most of the games so we could keep playing. Hector watched from behind, waiting to challenge the winner.
I had sort of assumed that whenever they had finished with whatever project they were currently working on, the Kents would relax enough to join in, and by then, I might be up to the task of not talking about things with them as well. I was certain after those two hours that I was right, that I could have handled it, but they hadn’t so much as checked in with us.
“Help with what?” asked Norman.
“I don’t know. Whatever they’re working on.”
He snorted and fed the quarters back through the slot.
“He’s already scoured this whole building for any bit of help he could possibly need, and everything he’s found, he’s sorted, re-sorted, cleaned, sterilized, alphabetized, and sorted again at least three times by now.”
I took a moment to break my personal record for staying on the virtual road before asking, “Well, then, maybe we could invite him . . .”
Hector cleared his throat. Too tactful as always to use his dad’s psychotherapy terms word-for-word to bring up things like coping styles, he just said, “He’s happier where he is.”
Agreeable as the current division of activities was with everyone, however, it came to an end around then anyway. It wasn’t The Eagle Scout who made first contact. Claire came to deliver the latest news with nervous good cheer.
“Rory’s talking again,” she said. “And she’s calling a meeting.”
“Rory’s here?” I dropped my hands from the miniature plastic steering wheel and twisted around to look at Norman, peripherally watching my own car fly off a cliff and through a tree on his screen. “Why didn’t you tell me?”
Rory wasn’t close with Norman and Hector—the most contact she usually had with either of them was deflecting Norman’s endlessly hopeful attempts at flirting—so the day probably wouldn’t have gone much differently if I’d known, me with them, her with the others. But she was my friend, and she was a living human we knew by name. Those were in short enough supply that it seemed blatantly unfair of them to have kept one a secret. Even if she would only have been off with Lis, doing Rory-and-Lis-ish things-
Lis.
No one had mentioned Lis.
“We . . .” Norman started to explain with exaggerated sheepishness.
“We weren’t sure she was really here, here,” Hector finished for him in his calm, factual voice, as Rory appeared in the doorway to check on Claire’s progress. I got up to hug her as well, but she put out a hand and I stopped, not wanting to do anything that would make her stop being there again.
“What your friend means,” Rory corrected, “is that Daddy never taught him the difference between catatonia and distraction. But it’s okay, because I’m not distracted anymore.”
She held up her phone in its glittering fuchsia case, exactly the same shade as her nail polish, to indicate that it had somehow un-distracted her, but that we would have to follow her back into the lobby to find out how.
We did.
“Has anyone else been able to get a signal yet?” Rory asked as soon as she had everyone gathered around her.
“Not since eleven thirty, two days ago,” The Eagle Scout rattled off promptly. He’d never been good at letting anyone else lead a meeting (even with Kim, it had been difficult for him), but at least he usually dealt with it by cooperating a little too completely and loudly rather than not at all. “The network seems to be over-trafficked, but at least that means there are other survivors. Did you?” he asked earnestly.
“Not enough to call out,” said Rory, “but with some concentration,” —she glared at Hector, who had probably tried to ease her out of what would have looked like a dangerously compulsive behavior loop— “enough to receive a text that’s been backed up since then.”
She turned her phone around to show us the time stamps, Lis’s name, and a few words.
At Doc Defoe’s, C U Monday.
“Oh,” I said. Claire made a similar sound of recognition and sympathy when the screen turned in her direction, but probably only because she had guessed that some unnamed sad thing had happened.
Defoe was Lis’s therapist. She had been attending sessions for a few years, her “checkups,” as she called them, routine care for acute anxiety.
She was sixteen. You can do the math on how acute her anxiety could get sometimes.
“She ran off when she saw . . . the first body,” Rory said carefully, trying to block out anything that might damage her composure. “She told me she just needed air, or I would have gone with her instead of wasting my time babysitting Cassie’s stupid, psychotic ass.”
Okay, she didn’t actually say that last part, but the look she gave me was clear enough.
“Instead, she freaked out, took the car, and ditched me.”
“Rory.” I let the seriousness in for a moment. It wasn’t quite as hard when it was about someone else. “I’m so sorry.”
“Why?” she chirped with determined, defiant good cheer. “This proves where she went and that she made it there safely. All we have to do now is go and pick her up!”
I was starting to get used to our cricket substitute.
“Uh . . . huh. Good luck with that.”
This was a pretty taxing exhibition of The Eagle Scout’s talent for humor. Simple, basic, but acceptable. If you think he was being completely unreasonable, well, I don’t really have to explain his reasoning, because when Rory pushed the issue, he did that pretty well for himself.
“Pretty much all the human bodies that existed on Earth two days ago, the ones that were annoying when all they usually did was make places crowded, are now actually, actively trying to kill us and everything else that moves, and your plan is to go into Manhattan?”
Yeah, Rory and Lis’s parents were divorced, so they were very frequent fliers. As in every-other-weekend frequent. The apartment they shared part-time with their father, stepmother, and half-brother, and the hospital Defoe practiced out of were both in New York City.
Once more, out of consideration for the future lunar cult escapees in the audience, New York and Hollywood are about 2,788 miles apart. Lis had made it onto what was probably one of the last planes to leave LAX before latte steamers and pencil pushers everywhere gave up and went home to lock themselves in their basements, or started ripping out their coworkers’ jugulars, whichever they’d fantasized about more often. But for us, that meant 2,788 miles of road, covered, by that time, with riot wreckage, potentially as many as three hundred million zombies, and approximately zero gas station attendants.
That’s how cricket-worthy it was.
“I’m going to find her,” Rory said firmly.
“Good luck with that,” The Eagle Scout repeated in exactly the same tone. Maybe his humor wasn’t improving after all.
“I . . .” She faltered, just barely. “I probably can’t do it alone, but I’ll try if I have to.”
“Good luck with that.”
To The Eagle Scout’s credit, the joke would have been on the verge of becoming funny again that time if it hadn’t been so sad.
“There’s a blue Prius in the parking lot,” I spoke up after a few moments. “I know where the keys are.”
I didn’t want to go digging under that slab for Mom’s purse, but I knew it was the least I could do.
This wasn’t quite what Rory had been hoping for, but she nodded her dignified thanks.
“Anything else?” she asked.
Substitute crickets.
I knew what I wanted to say, but I wasn’t really on a roll in the not-making-a-fool-of-myself arena, so I also wanted to keep saying nothing for a while. Like I said before, I’m a listener. People tell me things, I do my bes
t to understand, and that makes them want to tell me more things, and after a while, some of them, like Norman and Hector, start asking me what I think, and then they start listening back, but if I start off by saying things, not a lot of people take me seriously. Even with Rory and Lis’s honorary best-friendship, I was still basically one of the freaks, so that was just how it worked.
But like a freak, I said it anyway.
“Wait. Pretty much everyone we know is dead, the six of us somehow managed to wind up together and safe, and . . . you guys really want to ignore that? We don’t even know when we’ll see other living people again, and there’s no way for us to contact each other again once we split up.” I nodded at Rory’s phone. “Wherever we decide to go, or stay, wouldn’t it sort of make sense for us to stick together, at least until we know a little more about what’s going to happen long-term?”
Substitute crickets.
“I think it’s a good idea,” Hector said simply. Like I said, he wasn’t close with Rory, and he had never really liked the Kent family, but he’d always had more patience for them than most people did. Actually, Hector had more patience for most people than most people did.
Claire looked utterly anguished by the question. I knew she would have loved to have as many people around as possible, it meant a wider rotation of people’s patience to feed off of, but wherever her brother went, she would follow.
“We’re going to have to move around anyway, right? You said it yourself, we’re safe enough, but the stuff won’t last forever.” She picked up a battery from one of the carefully arranged piles, “and we’ll all do better if we pool everything than if we argue over who gets to take what, right?”
The Eagle Scout took several seconds to straighten the pile to exactly the angle it had had before. “That much is true,” he agreed stiffly, making Claire almost faint with relief.
“Of course we’ll stay together!” she gushed all over the rest of us, as if she’d ever had a vote.
“But,” he followed up after her, “I was talking about an actual survival pact. Staying organized, staying civilized, keeping each other alive. I do think, with so few of us left, it is our responsibility to preserve what we can. We could be the difference between the end of humanity and the dawning of another age, maybe a better age, but it’s not going to do any good if not everyone is on board.”
Confessions of the Very First Zombie Slayer (That I Know Of) Page 5
