They actually were sweet.
Before Rory could gather even a handful, Norman landed a cartwheel in front of her, did that “nothing up my sleeves” magician’s flourish, and then presented her with a full bouquet of the little green pods out of thin air.
I didn’t like it.
That was normal. It was just some sort of overactive protective instinct that always irked me about his crush, I was sure—a feeling that if she didn’t understand him, then she shouldn’t get his attention. I also had the gut feeling that interfering between them could easily get really painful somehow, so I looked the other way as she bypassed his bundle to gather her own, and I took my annoyance out on The Eagle Scout instead.
“Really, you’ve never snuck a bite of something from the produce section before washing it? Ever?”
I munched on one of the pods after asking, savoring each refreshing crunch.
“Really,” he said.
“It’s not like they’re imported from somewhere where you can’t drink the water,” I coaxed between bites. “They’re not even organic.”
“Great,” he said, dropping another untasted handful into one of our emptied snack shopping bags and then holding it to the side to make sure Claire did the same. “So instead of hepatitis, you’ll all get the latest, undiscovered variant of DDT poisoning.”
“Mmm.” I swallowed another sweet, crunchy mouthful without difficulty. “Mutate-a-licious.”
No one can say I didn’t try, or that I didn’t get a kick out of doing so, but he never did give in.
What you can say (and I frequently did, with great amusement, over the course of the next day or so) is that he and Claire, the only two people who didn’t eat the peas fresh off the vine, were also the only two whose health was even slightly damaged by them.
Claire’s cheeks started to redden a little alarmingly with sunburn after less than an hour. The Eagle Scout sent her back to the van (empty-handed so she wouldn’t be tempted to taunt fate with the rest of us), and when he tried to carry their shared haul back by himself, he tripped over a stick or something so spectacularly that his official Boy Scout slacks (not required, but marketed to the true Scouting purists) had a bloody tear on one leg when he got there. He collapsed onto the backseat to make first use of one of the first aid kits underneath it.
Even with the directions not being given from directly over his shoulder by the map keeper himself, somehow Hector didn’t have much trouble following one of the very few roads in northern Oklahoma down in the direction of Tulsa.
The wind only continued to rise as the day went on until I could feel it actually pushing on the broad side of the van, like it was trying to steer us off the road, and I saw a couple of actual tumbleweeds pass us by up ahead. They weren’t on the list of things I was expecting to be surprised by, if it’s possible to have such a list, but they caught me off guard just like the true size of the desert did. They’re one of those things you see so often in movies and never in real life that you start to think of them as a myth, or at least a thing of the past—like covered wagons and buffalo herds, something you can only really hope to see an imitation of in a nostalgic novelty tourist trap.
Oh, there’s one other thing on that same list that we ran into that day, but not until the golf courses and neat, matching beige houses at the north end of Tulsa started to fill in on both sides of us, and the anticipation of resupplying in a place intended for comfort started to sink in.
“Hot chocolate,” Claire was saying. “Wherever we go, I hope they have hot chocolate.”
“There was hot chocolate at the last rest stop,” I said.
“Yeah, but not the good kind with the cow jumping over the moon on the box.”
I thought about pointing out that we probably wouldn’t have hot anything, but then again, maybe we would. If we kept driving for as long as the light lasted, like we had the day before, if cities in the flat states weren’t out of the question anymore, we might end up spending that night gathered around a nice, big, brick fireplace for all I knew.
“I’m okay anywhere as long as . . .”
I couldn’t hear the end of Rory’s sentence over the rush of the wind outside, but it didn’t seem important enough to worry about. I didn’t even think much of the sound of Hector cursing under his breath as he tried to keep a steady course between the more frequent zombies and that whole sail effect the van was having. He usually cursed under his breath as he drove, but it was nothing serious, practically an unconscious tic. He never really lost his cool.
So it was when he let loose a string of expletives so loud that even Claire could hear them from the backseat, over both the weather and the sound of her own voice, that I looked up and saw the clouds dipping down in front of us in that unearthly, storybook funnel shape.
CHAPTER TEN
Piglet the Pygmy Marmoset
“Oh, holy shit.”
That was all I could think of to say.
Claire went from hot chocolate daydreams to full water works in less than ten seconds.
“No, no, dammit, no!” Rory moaned, slamming her head against the window like this was just one more infuriating roadblock between us and New York.
“What do I do?” Hector asked, reasonable as always even in the absence of reasonable answers of his own. “Eagle Scout!” he barked. “What do I do?”
The Eagle Scout tore his eyes away from the window.
“We need to get below ground level,” he said. “You drive and find us somewhere we can do that before we have to ditch the van.”
Hector nodded and continued along the road, eyes scanning, a little faster than before. It doesn’t sound that difficult, or at least it didn’t to me, but that’s probably because I’m not from Oklahoma. Being in a city meant there were buildings rising out of the flatness, but there wasn’t a single underground tunnel or parking structure, nothing that looked like it might actually cut into that massive slab of earth.
I should have been helping look, but I just kept watching that column of air. I watched it brush the ground, just beyond the edge of what I could see of one of those tidy housing developments, whipping more dirt up into itself, and I was still watching when it barely touched the edge of one of the houses and most of the roof peeled up like it had been shingled with playing cards. I watched the human-shaped figures that had been pacing around that end of the city (all of them already dead, I hope) lift off of the ground and scatter against the houses’ walls like a flock of pigeons that all have either inner ear infections or massive depression.
Debris started to hammer against the side of the van along with the air itself, flecks of wood and gravel and plastic, and what you can only pretend isn’t bone until you’re unfortunate enough to see a full rotted hand among it somewhere.
“I don’t see anything!” Hector yelled over it all without taking his eyes off the road, and I made myself scan the cultivated greenery on my side, hoping for a bridge over a canal or a skate park half pipe, anything that might be strong enough to act as some sort of windbreak.
“Up there, keep going!” the Eagle Scout pointed.
I couldn’t tell what he was pointing at because right about then, my window cracked a little with the impact of a high-heeled boot with the shin bone sticking out of it, so it was taking a lot more of my attention than usual to continue looking cool.
Hector kept going until The Eagle Scout directed him into a parking lot, across a walkway, and onto a wooden bridge over a pond that definitely wasn’t intended for public vehicle traffic access.
“Everyone grab the weapon and bag closest to them!” The Eagle Scout shouted, and without a single muttered joke or argument, we did it, threw the doors open, and followed him over the side of the bridge, onto the grass pond bank, up through a bed of decorative shrubs, and over a chain link fence. Norman boosted me over it first, and while I waited for him to follow with my jacket pulled up over half of my face to block out the dust and fragments, I peaked enough to see a ticket boo
th with a big poster of a sea lion next to it.
There was a ditch in front of us, not much, just the track for a kid’s train ride. The sturdy concrete walkway we were on crossed straight over it, forming a pretty sizeable tunnel, and one end of it was already boarded and tarped over.
I always thought that whole walking-against-the-wind routine that mimes do was ridiculous, even when Norman did it (okay, especially when Norman did it), but walking across that little bit of outdoor space was harder than crossing the same distance in a California parking lot crawling with zombies. I really did lean against the wind like mimes do, just to cut through what should have been thin air, and I honestly thought I might not get as far as the tunnel’s mouth without losing my grip on the ground and wafting away. When I did get there, sheltered only slightly by the dip in the ground, I wasn’t thinking far enough ahead to understand why The Eagle Scout was holding out his hand to stop us from going inside just yet.
“Cassie!”
I’ll never know how The Eagle Scout could keep his voice that loud without losing it.
“CASSIE!”
Okay, it took me a moment to recognize the sound of my own name in all that other noise, but I did get around to shouting back, “What?!”
“Do you still have those firecrackers?!”
Of course I did. The evil bunny bag was the natural one I had grabbed along with Suprbat when we abandoned the van. I handed over a garland and spread my jacket out like wings to divert enough wind from the fuse to let him light it after a few tries.
I still didn’t understand—not until he threw the firecrackers as far into the tunnel as he could—how ready I’d been to run blindly into a dark corner without even thinking to swing Suprbat ahead of me along the way.
The series of bangs and flashes mostly just added to the general noise and confusion, I was even sure for a moment that I did hear something screaming in the dark, but after a few seconds had passed and nothing speed walked or crawled out in search of the source of the disturbance, The Eagle Scout dropped his hand and shepherded us into the relative stillness inside.
The sun was only halfway down from midday. There were hours left of daily travel time being lost, but between the deep shade of the tunnel and the dust the tornado had covered the sky with outside, we couldn’t even see each other’s faces. It was like a third night, only as well as not being able to sleep or see, we also couldn’t talk. There was no point to trying to be heard over the howling, which was even louder at the entrance to the tunnel than it had been outside, like someone was blowing across the end of a giant bottle.
I think it was Rory’s elbow in my left side. There was still a distinct fragrance of vanilla around her. I know it was Norman on my right, and I know I beat him fifty-two times against forty-seven at thumb wars while we waited for it to be possible to do anything else. I have absolutely no idea how long that actually took. The tornado must have been coming toward us because the wind got even louder before it got softer, and sometimes even the cave of the half-boarded tunnel didn’t stop it from feeling like it was trying to crush my eardrums or suck the air right out of my lungs. Just like distance, air is one of those things that’s really hard to imagine being immensely powerful until you feel it for yourself.
It was even darker than it had been when we arrived, either because of the time or the thickness of the particles still hanging over us, I wasn’t sure which, when someone tried again to communicate over the fading roar.
Someone whose voice I didn’t know.
“Welcome to Tulsa Zoo and Living Museum,” he said. “Y’all sure do know how to make an entrance.”
I wish I could say I didn’t scream. At least I can say that I wasn’t the only one who did.
The Eagle Scout flicked his Zippo on in record time, illuminating the very back of the tunnel and the extra figure sitting between the train tracks there.
He was about seventeen or eighteen, holding my burnt out firecrackers in one hand and a tiny, shivering ball of fur with a tail in the other, and the first thought that entered my head when I saw him (whole truth, remember?) was that he and Rory could have gorgeous babies together.
Yeah, even while he was squinting against the sudden light, you could tell he was hot. He had that perfectly tanned skin, that balance as delicate as perfectly toasted bread, just enough to let you know he can take the sun without making him look all leathery, or clashing with baby blue eyes and the exact shade of naturally blond hair that peroxide can almost imitate, but not quite.
“Sorry!” I was the first to say it on everyone’s behalf. It was my firecracker, after all. “We didn’t see you!”
“I could tell,” he said, holding the fluffy thing closer to his chest, trying to calm it.
“We can go find another spot,” Claire suggested timidly. I could actually feel the heat of her blushing in the enclosed space, and for a moment it surprised me, not because the guy wasn’t perfectly blush-worthy, just because I guess I’d sort of assumed she still believed in cooties.
“No offence,” he said, “but no one with an ounce of sense is setting foot outside for another hour, at least.” When he smiled, even the flame of the lighter was enough to confirm that he had really, really nice teeth.
That was all the invitation any of us needed.
“Thank you.” The Eagle Scout lit a road flare as a gesture of settling in. Then he tripped over me to get close enough to play ambassador and introduce everyone, very precisely and thoroughly, like he was scoring major reelection points by demonstrating the ability to remember strings of syllables as long as “Hector Zane,” “Aurora Hart,” and “Norman Kaminsky.”
Most of us ended up correcting him anyway. Even my mother doesn’t call me Cassandra.
Didn’t call me Cassandra.
No one bothered to correct him on his own name, as much as he probably would have liked us to. “Eagle Scout” is the sort of name you can embrace when it’s assigned to you, but you’re not allowed to admit it, and even he understood that much. It’d be like calling yourself “Dragon Slayer.”
Well, almost that bad.
He did keep the flare held nice and high when he reached out his hand, though, showcasing the rank on his shirt, and by the way the other guy’s eyes raked over it, you could tell he knew what it meant. He repositioned the animal clinging to his own khaki shirt so the Tulsa Zoo emblem and Volunteer tag could catch the light, too.
“Caleb Summers,” he answered on his turn.
They both did that sort of half-smiling nod while they shook hands, like they could hide the fact that they were both trying to decide who was in charge of that tiny little cave even though all anyone could do in it was sit and wait anyway. The Eagle Scout was actually sweating a little. I couldn’t understand why at the time. It wasn’t that big a deal.
When they had finished squeezing the life out of each other’s fingers, Caleb returned both hands affectionately to the little ball of fur. “And this here is Piglet, ‘cause she’s scared of everyone and everything, so don’t mind her. She’s a pygmy marmoset,” he added automatically, probably the same way he had introduced her to regular classes and crowds of tourists not too long ago.
His accent was the texture of melting milk chocolate, which was surprisingly pleasant, considering how much melting milk chocolate I’d already been forced to eat over the past couple days, that accent that says, very sweetly and politely, “I dare you to wonder if I’m as dumb as I am pretty.”
It could have gone either way. Personally, I was betting that he wasn’t, which already put him a notch or two above some people I knew.
“What’s a marmoset?” Claire asked, for example.
I would have mocked anyone else mercilessly for this, of course, but it was actually a pretty reasonable question coming from someone who, on a breakfast run during one of Lis’s vegetarian phases, had brought her a cheese omelet but gotten it “without the yolks, just in case she’d gone full vegan.”
Yeah, that actually h
appened. Come to think of it, I’m surprised that she seemed to know what “pygmy” meant.
Luckily, Caleb didn’t need to know about the omelet to be nice about it. In fact, he looked really happy to have a new visitor to ask him questions.
“They’re a category of monkey,” he told her, “a few closely related genera, actually, from South America. Pygmy marmosets like Piglet are the smallest true monkeys in the world.”
Can I lay odds on an IQ or what?
“How old is she?” I asked. Sue me. It’s what I do when I see someone itching to talk about what they love, or to talk about anything to avoid thinking about what’s actually going on. And no, it doesn’t hurt when that someone is a hot guy.
“Two.” Piglet had stopped shaking, so he held her out for Claire and me to pet. She made a clicking, twittering sound, like a nervous version of a purr.
Piglet, I mean, not Claire, although the sounds she made over Caleb weren’t that far off.
“That’s fully grown for a pygmy marmoset, though,” he said.
Piglet was barely the size of a tennis ball and, I had to admit, completely, heartstring-tuggingly adorable.
“They mate for life,” Caleb went on, “and they’re threatened in the wild, or at least they were, while people were cutting it down. The zoo was already arranging some trades, trying to get her a partner, but I guess that’s not going to happen now.”
He didn’t have to say any more about that, I could see it in the way he was holding her, relief that she wouldn’t end up being the one traded away from him, guilt over not wholeheartedly wanting what was best for her. I felt the same way about every single person who had been cut off from the past we never mentioned and stuck with me in my present instead.
“With everything isolated like this, I guess that’s not going to happen for a lot of us,” he said.
It was a corny line, especially the way he made that super intense eye contact with Rory, Claire, and me all in sequence as he said it, the kind of line you can only pull off in a gooey Hershey bar voice. Since he happened to have a gooey Hershey bar voice, he could. I smiled at him and enjoyed that prickly out-of-time feeling, The Chase, realizing that I’d missed it with all the life and death stuff going on.
Confessions of the Very First Zombie Slayer (That I Know Of) Page 9
