That took Claire’s mind off things and, I’ll admit, mine, too. He first offered Rory the key to the cart, citing the fact that he and Claire had had all morning with it, but she declined, and Claire eagerly took the helm. That was fine by me. It left both Caleb and me in the group walking alongside, and it came down pretty quickly to just us and Rory actually talking. Mr. Garret’s class crowded around him, Norman found the exhibits we bypassed without due attention more interesting than Caleb’s narration of his favorites (not that I could blame him—the tiebreaker between the two delights was strictly hormonal for me), and Hector kept a tactful distance. You know the kind of distance. It was the kind that always reminds me of the way people watch the rest of a poker round after they’ve already folded.
That’s how hot Caleb was, so hot that even Rory could feel it. I can’t emphasize that point enough. I mean, Rory was so pretty herself, and popular, back when we had people to be popular with, that her flirting style usually defaulted to the old standard “I’m above caring too much what you think of me” aloofness; I knew her, maybe not as well as I once had, but well enough to catch the way her eyes kept gravitating back to him before being consciously dragged away, the way the pitch of her voice rose about a semitone when she answered him.
It’s not that she stopped caring for a moment about getting back on the road and closer to Lis, that much was obvious, but for as long as we were stuck there by circumstances beyond her control, Caleb’s presence definitely had a calming effect on her. “Calming” is a strange word for The Chase, considering the adrenaline involved, but it’s true. The way it narrows your brain, gives every passing moment that out-of-time significance, doesn’t leave much room to worry about the future.
There are days, like that one, when this effect can be an incredible relief.
Not to knock Caleb or the fun of the time I got to spend with him, but sometimes I think that relief is the real reason I didn’t just fold like Hector and leave him to Rory and Claire.
Oh well, whatever the reason, I didn’t.
“And this big kitty is Aslan,” Caleb introduced us.
I probably don’t need to describe what kind of big kitty he was talking about.
“What was Aslan’s scientific name again?” Mr. Garret prompted his class with the kind of enthusiasm that almost made me nostalgic for elementary school.
“Panthera leo!” they chanted back to him.
There was no college or even middle school left for those kids to prep for, no paid jobs as vets or zookeepers or biology professors, but they looked so happy just to know, like how you always think you’ll feel if you get “accidentally” locked in at some really cool field trip destination, forced to spend a little longer without having to go home. It must have been even harder for them than the rest of us at first, blocking out the Unspeakable Past, but Mr. Garret was doing a hell of a job helping them with that. I hope he’s still alive.
“Who wants to give him a snack?” Caleb called out. He even glanced over at Norman, but Norman was amusing himself with his balance beam act along the railing of the cheetah enclosure. A year earlier, that might have made me nervous, but I’d learned over time to trust his almost superhuman coordination.
All the kids raised their hands like they had at all the slightly less intimidating exhibits we’d hit already, but I’m sure Caleb had already settled on picking someone a little taller and stronger for this one, for safety’s sake.
“Someone who hasn’t taken a turn yet.” He offered a fairly fresh severed arm to Rory. “Just remember, give it a good, strong, underhand toss with a nice high arc for distance.”
Rory smiled weakly at him, but when she looked at the arm, something shifted. She mumbled something about how grateful she was for the tour, but that she really should be working on packing up.
“I thought that was all settled,” Caleb tried to encourage her. She wouldn’t listen. She just mumbled a little more and then insisted on turning straight back to double check everything.
Whole truth? I was sorry for her, and a little giddily victorious. It might have been different if it had just been because of Lis, but it wasn’t the first time I’d seen this happen. A window would open for her to jump from just admiring to connecting, and she’d turn it down. Or maybe she couldn’t see it past the little momentary details like severed arms. Either way, it was the reason that, even though she could catch more eyes than I could, that was all she could ever seem to do.
I hadn’t kept the secret from her. I’d tried to explain it a hundred times, and if we’d been dealing with a guy she’d had dibs on, I’d have been rooting for her to do things right with all my heart, but we’d met Caleb at the same time, noticed him at the same time. He was fair game and, forgive me, I liked winning.
So when he offered me the arm, I took it even though the thought of stepping over the gate to throw it from the best vantage point made me a little weak-kneed, too. Aslan was closer than you were allowed to get to the lions in LA or San Diego, and my brain had never really processed how huge and powerful they were. I could actually see his eyes, big and otherworldly-intelligent, like he was sizing up the twice dead human hand and the live one, mine, holding it at the wrist, and not seeing much of a difference.
It was stalling as much as flirting when I looked at Caleb a while longer, tapping into my fascination with him to make conversation.
“This stuff doesn’t make them sick?” I asked, holding up the arm.
“We were afraid it might, at first,” Caleb admitted. “But when it came down to giving them this or nothing, we had to try it out, and turned out most of them like it just fine. Humans have pretty pitiful immune systems compared with your average carnivore.”
Mr. Garret launched into a quiz behind us on the pH and temperature requirements for botulism cultures, and I wished I’d had an elementary school teacher who’d covered things like that. I guessed that in the pre-zombie classroom, he probably hadn’t.
I couldn’t think of any more questions just then, so I jumped the safety rail with all the grace and dexterity I had in me, and to my absolute delight, Caleb followed me to demonstrate that throwing technique he had been describing to Rory. I could have gone along with my plan of just showing off my perfectly competent throwing arm, but it was more fun to let him move Piglet from his chest to his shoulder, step in close behind me, and guide my arm in that wonderfully transparent, cornball excuse to touch someone.
His skin was as warm as the toast it reminded me of, he leaned just a little closer than he needed to, just enough to assure me that it definitely wasn’t just a throwing lesson, and the nerves from being so close to the edge of Aslan’s territory amplified everything, like someone had turned up the contrast of the picture I was in but cropped out the edges. No zombies, no Lis, no Unspeakable Past, no Norman rattling the chain link he was walking on as if he were trying to make as much noise as possible. Just me, and Caleb, and Aslan, and The Chase, oh, and a severed limb that for some reason wasn’t a total mood breaker, right up until that moment in my backswing when I heard the unthinkable happen.
Norman lost his balance and slipped down the wrong side of the fence and the hill below into the cheetah exhibit.
CHAPTER TWELVE
Komodo Dragon Theory
Caleb who?
Oh, you mean that guy who was yelling in the background for me to come back? The one I had the annoying task of elbowing away from me on top of having to cross a hedge, two fences, and thirty horizontal feet worth of tornado debris to get to the top of the drop off my best friend had just disappeared over? That guy?
Yeah, I remember him now, fondly, even. At that moment, though, I couldn’t have told you his name.
“Norman!”
That name echoed back to me in my own voice off the contours of the exhibit below. “Answer me!”
“Sure,” Norman called back, “what was the question?”
I watched him get to his feet at the bottom of the drop off. By the way he mo
ved, he was probably pretty bruised up, but nothing was broken. I shouldn’t have been surprised; his reflexes were as sharp as his balance usually was, and years of deliberate pratfalls had taught him how to roll with any impact, but having seen what a bump on the head can do to a healthy but unlucky guy, it was still a relief.
The fall was only half the problem, though.
I knew the posture of that cheetah from way too many sick days watching Animal Planet. Seriously, the semester I went through mono, the airtime on that channel that wasn’t devoted to the Irwin family was made up almost entirely of images exactly like the one in front of me.
The cat’s eyes were fixed on Norman from behind the authentic tall grass at the other end of the enclosure, one of its front paws lifted in mid step, the other three flat on the ground, its shoulders and hips raised high above its lowered spine, ready bolt into its signature sprint.
My eyes automatically circled the rim of the exhibit, driven by a combination of stark terror and something else, something that thankfully brought every detail of the walls into vivid detail, searching for a way up or down.
I didn’t have anything resembling a rope, wasn’t even wearing a belt, not that I would have had one long enough to do any good. Other than the door into the back area on the far side, there was just a retractable ladder a few yards to my left.
“Follow me slowly!” I called down, and Norman mirrored my progress with careful steps as I shimmied along the edge to it. A padlock prevented it from extending.
“The key!” I shouted over my shoulder, rattling the metal, hoping it would make it clear sooner what I was talking about, or maybe even throw off the cheetah’s concentration.
It didn’t.
“Cassie, come back!” that ridiculous directive was the answer I got while it inched closer to him, rising a little further out of its crouch.
“Caleb! Do you have the key?!”
Okay, so I could remember his name when it was important again.
“Cassie, it’s okay!”
This was even more ridiculous, of course. It very clearly was not okay. It was too late.
The cheetah broke out of its stalking stance and into as pounding a run as the length of the enclosure would allow. Norman was fast for a person, but his instinctive little dodge to the side couldn’t scratch the surface of the ground the cat covered. In one unstoppable pounce, it had him flat on his back.
And started licking his face.
Did I have you going there?
Sorry, couldn’t resist. Not after how completely and undeniably it had me going at the time.
“Pussywillows used to be a showcat,” Caleb told me. Even though I can’t blame him now, I really wanted to slug the laughter out of his voice then. I couldn’t quite tell whether I wanted that more than I wanted to laugh myself. “Even the zoo used to bring her out for special demonstrations now and then. Gotta respect the old instincts like they tell you, of course, she’s got them, loves hunting down moving zombies for some reason, but she adores living people. Never even seen her snarl at one as long as I’ve known her.”
Pussywillows was leaping around Norman like a housecat by then. “Frolicking” is probably the most accurate term, always circling back onto his chest to lick his cheek again.
“That’s nice,” said Norman, in a high, shaky voice that barely projected up to us, “but she’s still got a tongue like an industrial wood sander that . . . um, is really starting to hurt now.”
Caleb led the way down a set of stone steps and around to the back entrance, though not quite as quickly as I would have liked him to. Pussywillows released Norman instantly at the sight of Caleb and jumped up on him in greeting.
She was nowhere near the size of Aslan, of course, but still intimidating up close, and the weight of her tested the stability of even Caleb’s practiced stance.
“That’s my girl,” he cooed, handing Piglet off to Claire for safekeeping, and scratching Pussywillows under the chin. The echo chamber of the enclosure filled with deep, resonant purring.
I ran past them to where Norman was lying in the grass and helped him to his feet.
Then I shoved him back off of them, hard.
“I told you something like that would happen eventually, didn’t I?” I shouted.
“Yes,” he said meekly, sitting back up and putting a hand carefully to the red patch where Pussywillows had stripped off a patch of his makeup and a layer of skin underneath. “Yes, you did.”
I had said something like that, sometime long before, even though I’d since stopped believing it myself.
“It could have been worse!” I added, “Much worse!” as if someone were trying to argue otherwise.
“Yes, it could,” he acquiesced, and even though he wasn’t arguing, there was something in the very back of his voice, some kind of happy satisfaction, that I didn’t understand or like.
I helped him up again, punching him once more in the ribs before supporting him across the exhibit toward the others.
He could have walked on his own well enough, but like the punch, it gave me a pretext for getting close enough to feel him, healthy and alive, while I was still too pissed off to let him hug me.
Hector gave me a look when we rejoined the group, one I didn’t quite like either. It was the infuriating one he always used when he’d just figured out a riddle or called a twist ending before I did and had started counting the seconds until I caught up.
Caleb was sweet about it. His look was as friendly as ever, if a little annoyingly amused, but I’d blown my moment, and I knew it. I spent the walk back between Norman and Hector, folded, watching Claire claim her winnings.
It was okay. It wasn’t that big a surprise, really, when I thought about it. She fell perfectly in the middle of his obvious love for girls, kids, and animals. Her fascination with him was deeper and stronger than mine, fueled as it was by a vast chasm of childlike ignorance, and he seemed to be okay with that.
It was cute, almost inspirational, watching them and Mr. Garret take an animated lead, tending the animals, entertaining the class and, though Norman and I hadn’t quite finished shoving each other between paces and arguing about exactly how high an edge he was allowed to balance on from that point onward when we circled back to the elephant shelter around dinner time, I was feeling pretty okay about the world. Okay enough that the looks on Rory’s and Alison’s faces when they saw us enter, flat and solemn as AP testing proctors, hit me a lot harder than was necessary to warrant the term “buzzkill.”
Claire got the worst of it. She’d been soaring a lot higher, and the instantaneous, bricklike way she came down almost made me want to cry. Almost as bad was the way Mr. Garret read the room, turned on his heel, and led the little kids back out again.
“He’s not better, is he?” Claire asked.
Day 2
Continued iodine treatment proving ineffective. Bite showing clear visual evidence of infection. Rubbing alcohol and antibiotic ointment also having no discernable effect. Infection appears to have spread beyond the initial injury site, subject currently exhibiting a fever of 40.16 Celsius, an increase of 2.2 degrees since detection the night of day 1. Courses of aspirin and veterinary amoxicillin administered starting this morning, also having negligible effect.
Catching on? Yeah, so was Alison. By the time we got there, she had made him roll up his pant leg and show her what was under the bandages. I don’t know whether he had consciously written off trying to keep it hidden from the rest of us, or if he was done making conscious decisions altogether for the time being. He had his head pressed back hard into that flamingo pillow, and he was gibbering softly with delirium.
“No,” Alison said simply, “he’s not.”
“Why?” asked Claire. Her voice was getting choked, and it was only a matter of time before the tears would start for real. “What’s wrong?”
“He’s been bitten,” she said, straightforward as that, no useless softening.
“That’s . . .” I had
no anecdotal proof of my own, but a lifetime of abstract zombie scholarship gave those words a certain fatalistic impact for me. “That’s really bad, isn’t it?”
“It shouldn’t be,” she said, cleaning her thermometer with a frustrated, compulsive motion, like it was some long-cherished talisman that had suddenly and inexplicably failed. “I mean, human saliva is dirty as hell, and it can’t be any better on a rotting corpse, but the bite was treated immediately. I couldn’t have done a better job on it myself.”
I heard her irritation with having had half the details kept from her clash with a grudging sort of respect.
“Now and then you get a really tenacious virus like rabies spreading this way, but it’s not acting like a virus, especially not the way it showed up in dead things all over the world at once with no possible network of infection. And none of the animals are affected by consuming it, no matter how fresh, not even close relatives like chimps, so—”
“So what is it?” Hector asked.
Alison took a moment, like she was afraid that what she wanted to say might make her sound crazy but then remembered that we weren’t scientists, just a bunch of geeky high school kids. “The closest phenomenon I’ve studied would have to be Komodo dragon bites.”
“Those giant poisonous lizards?” Claire asked.
“Venomous,” Norman, Hector, and I corrected her automatically in deadpan unison. She still didn’t understand the difference even though Mr. Garret had explained it at least twice that same day: poisonous is bad if you bite it, venomous is bad if it bites you.
“Not venomous either, exactly,” Alison corrected us all. “They don’t secrete venom. Their bites kill with a unique bacterial culture found in their saliva. This seems to be something similar, but a bacterial infection should respond to antibiotics, and they don’t even seem to be slowing it down.”
Confessions of the Very First Zombie Slayer (That I Know Of) Page 11
