I’m the leader, do what I say or else. We all knew the translation. We all pretended not to.
“Sure,” I said. “That’s exactly what we’re talking about.”
“Good,” said The Eagle Scout. “Norman!”
Norman was standing on the front desk behind him and had spent most of The Eagle Scout’s attempt at motivational speaking holding the nearest flag up behind him, fluttering it a little for emphasis now and then. This might have worked better with an actual star-spangled banner, but at least the Whitetail Golf League crest had most of the right colors on it.
A sudden snap from The Eagle Scout would have made anyone who wasn’t expecting it drop whatever they were doing. His voice was that commanding. But years of being “led” by it had given us all a certain level of immunity, so Norman didn’t budge.
“Norman?” Rory tried instead. She had always claimed to be annoyed by the effect she had on him, but I noticed that this never stopped her from exploiting it. She asked more quietly than The Eagle Scout, entreatingly, if he would please play things straight just long enough to get the matter at hand taken care of.
She could have sung off-key in Latin and the effect would have been the same. Her spare scrap of attention alone made him drop the flag, and The Eagle Scout jumped on the opportunity.
“What about you?” he asked.
“Well, that depends,” said Norman. He climbed off the desk and went over to lean on Rory’s shoulder. His posture radiated confidence, but I didn’t need to be able to see through the makeup to know that he was blushing. He always was when he talked to her. “On who’s asking.”
Her answer was always the same, as predictable as the color of his face. Only the level of venom sometimes varied. That day it was maxed out.
“Not unless you were the last man on earth.”
Norman mimed looking at a watch, even though I couldn’t remember the last time I’d seen someone actually wear one.
“I think I can wait that long,” he said, “but no promises. Until then, sure, yeah, the more the merrier.”
She decided not to spend any longer arguing with him. “Fine,” she said. “Thank you, everyone, and this is all very nice, solidarity among the last remaining humans and all, but just to be clear, we’re talking about my sister here, not just someone I took shelter in the same hotel with.”
She didn’t look at me then, and I’ll admit it, as catty and manipulative as it was, it hurt. I’d known Rory and Lis since before we needed deodorant. We’d made cootie-catchers, and rated the cutest boys in the second grade, and gotten grounded for trying to cut each other’s hair with pinking shears because we’d somehow believed that if all three of us could look alike, all three of us would somehow count as sisters.
We hadn’t looked alike, of course.
Lis isn’t short for Alissa, by the way, or Melissa, or Elisabeth. It’s short for Borealis, because apparently everyone who gives birth to twins is cosmically obligated to immediately grow a cruel sense of humor. Guess what Rory’s short for.
Yup, Aurora and Borealis, kind of like peanut butter and jelly, not a whole lot of room for improvement there.
I’d always been a few steps outside, looking in, and I knew we’d drifted a bit further than that since I’d started hanging out with Norman and Hector, since I’d realized how much I liked never feeling like I was less than completely one of them.
And I knew that if I hadn’t shot Mark, we all would have found out about the zombies some other way, at some slightly later time, and Lis would have had no reason to freak out and run all the way across the country before then. She and Rory would have been together.
But I didn’t want all of that to reduce me to the level of someone Rory had taken shelter in the same hotel with.
“Everyone who wants to help me is welcome,” Rory continued calmly, “but I am going, as far as it takes, with or without anyone else.”
“Okay,” Hector, started, and I knew he was trying to patch together everything that had been said to make it sound like we were all on the same side. “Okay, so—”
“So.” The Eagle Scout stood up and took the floor, the way he’d been bred and raised to do. “We, Troop 146,” he said, “and Cassie.”
“Of Venturer Crew 23,” I pointed out. I could have thrown Claire a mention, too, but she was more of an appendage than a member.
“Yes. We, as a group, are being offered the option,” he pronounced the word carefully, “of tagging along on Rory’s rescue mission. We may have better survival odds if we take a different direction, but it seems only fair to put it to a vote. She’s not participating in the group decision, so her vote won’t be counted. Majority rules.”
Norman cleared his throat theatrically. “Those in favor, say—”
“By a show of hands,” The Eagle Scout contradicted. “All in favor?”
His own hands stayed at his sides. Despite her visible distress, so did Claire’s.
Hector and I both raised ours. Rory wouldn’t look my way.
“Norman?”
Norman hadn’t raised his hand, but that seemed to be because, by then, it was busy feeding coins into the pinball machine by the door, the one positioned to beckon kids in the direction of the arcade while their parents were busy checking in.
“Do you even remember the question?”
If The Eagle Scout had kept his mouth shut, he might actually have won the vote, but I’ll give him his due credit, that wouldn’t have been in the true spirit of the Boy Scout handbook.
At that moment, the overhead lights flickered once, twice, and then died. The pinball machine gave a sad, shutting down noise, the insides clicking and settling into place.
Norman stared at it for a moment, his painted smile offset by that heartbreaking expression you see on children standing over dropped ice cream cones. Then he shook it off and waved an arm in the air.
“Road trip!” he whooped.
The Eagle Scout almost pretended to hide his sigh. “The hands have it,” he announced.
Wait, did I say waiting for the cops with the first dead zombie was the most surreal experience of my life? Hmm, watching the six people in that room all agree on something, all at once, without Kim there to make us, that’s a good contender, too. I’ll let you know if I make up my mind.
“But” —he cut Rory off before she could reclaim her meeting— “there’s no excuse for us not to be smart about it, and everyone’s going to have to contribute.”
“Says the guy who’s already stamped his name all over pretty much everything we have,” Rory pointed out. “We actually get the sharing thing, believe it or not.”
“Someone has to keep us organized,” he said. “And I’m not talking about granola bars, anyway. I’m talking about information.”
“Oh, okay, you think I’m not capable of handling supplies intelligently, and now you thing I’m lying to you? You know what? Maybe you should keep your dumbass minions! All the talk would just slow me down anyway!”
“I never said anything about lying.” He had this amazing way of shouting without actually shouting. I often wondered if Kim had taught him the technique, or if it was hereditary. Either way, as mad as Rory was, the sound cut across her without making the debate feel like a full-on, reality-show-worthy bitch fight. “I just mean that we need to swap notes a little. We need a strategy.”
Rory sighed and put a hand to the bridge of her nose. “We’re surrounded by mindless, senseless murder machines. What more is there to know?” At least her tone suggested that she was ready to be reasonable. Actually, at the time, the words seemed perfectly reasonable to me, too.
The Eagle Scout clearly disagreed, so it was probably best for everyone that Hector was the one who answered.
“Well, there’s how to kill them, for a start.”
“Get them in the head,” I said automatically. It hadn’t occurred to me that this needed any discussion.
“No way!” said Claire. “That actually works?”
/> “Yeah.” I had that awkward moment when you realize that people are actually listening to you, and suddenly everything you say feels at least twenty percent dumber. I took a careful recap of my memories, every time I’d seen them go down and stay down, the mortal injuries I’d seen them keep walking around with. “Yeah,” I repeated, “You just have to do a good job. It takes a little more . . . oomph than on a live person.”
Hector was nodding. “Good, yes, that fits with what everyone else has seen, too?”
There were a few nods, mostly what people call “silent assent.”
“We should also know how not to become one of them,” Hector continued calmly.
“That’s easy, too,” said Rory. “Don’t let them bite you.”
“Is that all?” Hector prompted.
One dip into my own thoughts was more than enough for me for one meeting. I wanted someone else to say it. Norman and Hector had figured it out, too, based on the old folks’ home, but I knew Hector wouldn’t do more of the talking than he had to, in case it made Rory or The Eagle Scout see him as one more leader wannabe to worry about, and Norman was still doing his best not to pay attention at all, so that left me.
“I don’t think so. I mean, they definitely bite people, and a lot of the ones I’ve seen look bitten, but . . .” I didn’t want to say his name. Why did I have to say his name? “Mark wasn’t bitten by anything.”
Rory was looking at me like she was going to shout “Blasphemer!” and start piling kindling around a stake, but shutting up then would have been a waste.
“And he didn’t bite anyone, not successfully. I’m pretty sure the only way not to become one of them . . . is to not die.”
“Great,” said Rory. “So we buckle up, drink bottled water, and be careful with the explosives and sharp objects. It’s not like we were planning on dying anyway.”
“Wait,” said Claire. “I’m confused. Why do they bite, then?”
“Same reason they do everything else that kills people,” her brother said like it was even more obvious than head-cracking. “Bites are a great way to cause infection. Do you know how dangerous a bite is even from a healthy, living person? Or weren’t any of you paying attention in First Aid? And these are rotting, decomposing corpses.”
“Yeah,” Hector agreed. “That makes sense.” I could feel him trying to placate The Eagle Scout, make his ideas seem acknowledged. It only half worked.
“Great,” said The Eagle Scout. “Thanks.”
“Hey,” said Rory. “You were the one who wanted to trade info.”
“I know, I know. We’ve just got a few more important issues on the agenda than why it’s a good idea not to go out there and stick our hands in their mouths.”
“Like?”
“Like does anyone actually know how to get to New York from here?”
CHAPTER SEVEN
Fifty Points for the One
in the Flannel
Lucky for us, most hotels, including Whitetail Village, have a decent assortment of guidebooks on hand, if only for the immediately surrounding area. It was also lucky that we’d all taken an orienteering class the previous summer, so the maps were a little closer to our mental grasp than they probably would have been otherwise.
It wasn’t a Google-Maps-quality direct route, but after a few hours, The Eagle Scout was able to draw out a plan as far as Salt Lake City. Rory insisted to him repeatedly that we were sure to find more maps by then, and eventually I guess her point was too airtight for him to argue with anymore. With some cajoling, he backed away enough to let her lead Claire in packing up the supplies for transport while he wrote out his own directions step-by-step, and we all argued over the smaller details, like cars and drivers and weapons.
I offered up Mom’s Prius again, setting Norman off on his T.V. commercial car dealer impression, extolling its economical hybrid technology (and surprisingly roomy interior). There was no pretending it was roomy enough for all of us, but I liked the idea of taking at least two cars, so we’d be less likely to end up completely stranded, and (whole truth, remember?) so I might end up spending less time sitting next to the Kent kids.
Rory and The Eagle Scout actually banded together to shoot me down on that one, though, on the grounds that we only had three fully qualified drivers, the two of them and Hector, and we’d be able to stop less often if we didn’t have to have two people driving at once. I pointed out that we weren’t exactly going to get busted for driving unlicensed anymore, but given the condition of the cop car I’d showed up in, I couldn’t blame them for their wariness.
So it was decided: we’d all pile into Kim’s minivan—which was in slightly better condition that the hand-me-down version she’d given The Eagle Scout—like this was just one unbelievably long Scout expedition.
The Eagle Scout got dibs on the one crowbar we were able to find. That was okay because he was the only one who might be able to get in more than a few swings with it without giving himself a debilitating case of tennis elbow anyway. Well, Hector could have, but he hadn’t let the steering wheel lock from Kim’s van out of his sight since we’d been at Whitetail.
Norman kept his wrench and, as hard as even I tried to talk him out of it, that foam-covered mallet from the Whack-a-Mole game.
I could have joined the others carrying handfuls of pool cues and golf clubs, even Claire was swinging a sparkly purple kiddie putter and giggling, but I stuck with Suprbat. It had served me well enough so far, and it still felt more sturdy and reliable in my hands than any of the other options.
With all of that settled, The Eagle Scout ordered us all very forcefully to bed, so we could “leave when we’re rested and focused.”
That part I didn’t understand at all. I don’t think anyone actually slept before dawn, not Norman, Hector, or me, in the first room we could break into with two beds and a decent couch, not Rory in whatever deluxe suite she ended up staking her claim to, probably not even the Kents in their sleeping bags, surrounded by the stuff, as if the zombies might try to stealth their way in by night and take it, and by the time any of us were in danger of becoming reasonably rested, The Eagle Scout was making the rounds again to wake us.
“Bet that’s why he’s so crazy about ‘resting.’” Norman proposed the theory as he retouched his face paint where it had smeared overnight and I brushed my teeth with bottled water in front of one of the newly bone-dry taps “Gives him a chance to show off his lame-ass superpower.”
“Morning personhood is a superpower?”
“Sure, as long as you make sure everyone else is in bed by nine, it’s almost as useful as being Hawkeye.”
Theorizing about anything is more fun when you disagree, but with the sunlight still stuck at that cold, grey, almost-rising shade, I couldn’t come up with a good counterargument for that one.
Once everyone was up and dressed and together, though, with all the bags gathered around us—well, remember what I said about the awesome power of unjustifiable confidence? I guess it’s contagious.
The minivan was parked at the far end of the lot, maybe a hundred-foot run. There weren’t too many zombies out there, at least not that we could see from the windows. If nothing else, our attempt at sleeping through the night had probably shaken the interest of a fair number. There were a few, pacing aimlessly around the lot and the green, vocalizing periodically from the backs of their throats. If there were more hiding nearby, the sound of us would draw them fast.
Funny, what with the whole rec center lock-in drama we had going on inside, I’d almost forgotten they were real.
“Just had to find legal parking?” I couldn’t help asking Hector as we all surveyed the task ahead.
“Hard habit to break,” he said.
It was a rush, somewhere between the ecstasy of Christmas morning and the illness of the morning of final exams, when The Eagle Scout gave the countdown, took his sister’s hand, threw open the formerly off-limits front door, and led the charge.
They saw us, heard
us, sensed us, whatever it is they prefer to do given multiple options, and the throat screams began for real. Just like I’d been afraid they would, more of them came out of the more thickly wooded areas to investigate the sound. That weird, overly efficient walk was more than they needed to gain on us, weighed down with all of our luggage. At least walking at us seemed to be about as complex a plan as they could come up with. They didn’t even correct their paths to aim for where we were going to be, instead of where we were, as any gamer will tell you means the difference between a player and a player’s grandmother logged into his account by mistake.
Still, most of them didn’t need an understanding of four-dimensional spatial relations to get to us before we got to the van. I had to hand it to The Eagle Scout, he was handy with that crowbar. He knocked down the first three in as many swings, and they didn’t get up again. This gave me time, between the necessary swings of Suprbat, to wonder if the ones left standing were made more or less dangerous by the fact that they did absolutely nothing to avoid the same fate.
More, I think. Sure, we left almost a dozen of them finished on the asphalt. All six of us did eventually make it behind the closed sliding side door of the van after The Eagle Scout finally fumbled out the right key. That one that managed to get its fingers in Rory’s hair and keep them there for three swings of a sand wedge and one from the wrench . . . a working brain in its head wouldn’t have let it anywhere near her.
Hector climbed in last and slammed the door with a jolt like the “pencils down” timer on a good day when it brings with it the “that wasn’t so bad” tingle.
“Who’s awesome?!” Norman cried.
“We’re awesome!” Hector and I echoed, and so did Claire a beat later. I almost thought for a moment that The Eagle Scout might join in, even if it was just in a condescending, “team building” sort of way. He was smiling, at least, which was rare enough. Even Rory looked happy just to be moving.
Confessions of the Very First Zombie Slayer (That I Know Of) Page 6
