My head was all fuzzy, and I kept trying to figure out how much of it was the alcohol and what the other part might be.
“Claire stayed,” I said vaguely.
“Yeah.” Hector nodded. “They’re great together. Once you stepped down so he’d notice her.”
“After Rory stepped down and let him notice me.” I followed this train of thought.
“Yeah, Rory’s probably about as girl-pretty as Caleb was boy-pretty, isn’t she?”
Neither of us really had an accurate measure to confirm or deny this, but I thought he’d probably guessed about right. “I promised her I’d help her find Lis,” I remembered out loud.
“Good one,” said Hector. “That’s a pretty good excuse.”
It was a pretty good excuse. It was also just that—an excuse.
“I never thought about staying,” I said honestly.
“I know,” said Hector, taking another swig from the bottle. “Wanna know why I think that is? Even though you were head over heels for the country boy?”
“Hey, wait,” I protested. “There’s a big difference between being hot for someone and being head over heels.”
“Exactly,” he said, like a frustrated private tutor finally dragging a slow student through some long-awaited breakthrough. I guess he said it prematurely, though, because I was still trying to figure out why he was looking so meaningfully at Norman and Rory just then. “There’s a huge difference between hot for and head over heels for. And I think the difference is even bigger when you’re already head over heels for someone else.”
Yeah, there was definitely something important going on, I was sure of that. I just needed to figure out what it was. Who was head over heels for what now?
“Wait . . .” I took a stab at it. “You and me.” Was he coming out to me again? As bi this time? “You and me . . . I was pretty sure that ship had already sailed.”
“Sailed and sunk,” Hector confirmed, “never to see the surface again.”
“So then . . . you and Norman?” I tried again, ready to feel a flood of instant sympathy for what it must have been like for him all this time, watching Norman get all weak-kneed over Rory, but Hector made a face that went above and beyond “he’s not my type.”
That was pretty much it for me and ideas. It was easier to watch the dancing.
“He knew the cat was tame, you know.”
I like to think I would have had trouble finding an answer to that even if I were stone cold sober, but maybe I could have managed a little better than, “huh?”
“He was talking to Caleb before you were awake,” Hector said very slowly, watching to make sure I caught every word. “He knew, before he ‘slipped’ that the cat wasn’t going to eat him.”
I was paying enough attention to hear the quotation marks, but I couldn’t understand what they meant any more than why Norman would bother to hide something so stupid from me. The closest notion I could form was that it was to make me not so embarrassed by the way I’d freaked out. Even that wouldn’t quite add up in my brain.
“Not you and me, not me and him,” Hector summarized for me with that forced, extra-patient, I’ve-solved-the-riddle-and-you-haven’t smile. “What other combination could I possibly be talking about?”
I tried to solve it, I really did. But the ceiling was so spinny and the floor was so soft and the music was so repetitively, rhythmically soothing. When I woke up the next morning with my eyes too achy to open, and the room thankfully darkened by the empty generator, and my arm crushed against the side someone had rolled me onto so I couldn’t drown in vomit, I couldn’t for the life of me remember what it was I’d passed out thinking about.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
Ride on the
Magic Parking Shuttle
“Please don’t,” I muttered hopelessly when I sensed Rory’s outline grasping one of our battery lanterns. The barricaded windows had kept things nice and dim until then.
“Have mercy,” Norman moaned from the ornate hardwood and leather chair he had ended up in a few feet away from my bit of floor, and I wondered for a moment how many luxurious, non-neck-cramp-inducing beds there were in that mansion that none of us had bothered to find.
“Come on,” Rory chided in a croakier than usual morning voice. “It’ll hurt me more than it hurts you.”
“Not possible,” Norman and I croaked back together.
“It’s just like pulling off a Band-Aid,” said Rory. “One, two—”
And just like pulling off a Band-Aid, she pushed the button before we could anticipate it properly. The similarity ended there.
Turning on the lights on a normal morning when your eyes are adjusted to the dark has that same get-it-over-with factor she was talking about, but the pain of that morning’s light continued after the usual few seconds, refusing to be over with, ever. Even Rory moaned, dropping the lantern and doubling over with her face in her hands.
“Ugh. Manners, people,” she said with as much good cheer as any of us could hope to fake. “Don’t forget to thank Norman for the awesome party.”
Norman replied with a gesture and a matching, blush-free verbal suggestion, both of which were banned from broadcast television back when broadcast television existed, both of which he usually reserved for Hector and me, the small audience he could be sure would only take them in the proper spirit. I wouldn’t have put that bet on Rory, but it turned out to be a smart one.
“Not if you were the last man on earth,” she retorted without missing a beat, and they both burst into laughter, which was stifled almost instantly for being even more painful than the light. That didn’t change the fact that, for a moment, Norman and Rory had been laughing at the same time, at the same joke, and in that moment, I stopped being surrounded by my two best friends and my one other old friend. I was just surrounded by friends.
Hector was a little better off than the rest of us, but not by much. He’d thought far enough ahead to crawl onto one of the couches for the night, and he was the first on his feet that morning. When I saw him, he was using a beer flat to carry an armful of mismatched cans, so he wouldn’t have to pry his left hand away from his forehead.
“There is no devil,” he announced when he reached the top of the stairs.
This wasn’t anything like the kind of thing I felt like saying when my eyes wouldn’t stay open and I kind of wished I could close my ears, too.
“You mean, ‘there is no god’?” I asked.
“Nah, he could still be around, working in mysterious ways and all that, but if there were a devil, he could’ve had my soul by now just for heating up some coffee.”
I made myself open the canned latte he tossed me really fast to get the high, scratchy, hissy sound over with and took a careful sip. It stayed down which already made me feel a little better, but I could imagine with painful clarity how good something steaming hot would feel.
“Two souls,” I agreed.
“Three,” said Norman.
Rory didn’t leave us hanging. “Four.”
“No, I was actually calculating you for the third,” said Norman. “I prefer mine cold.”
“Well, that’ll come in handy if the devil does show up,” said Hector, “since we all know you don’t have a soul to bargain with.”
“Right,” Norman nodded. “I swapped it years ago for my roguish good looks.”
Rory laughed that pained, shortened laugh again.
Friends.
“Come on,” she said again, carrying the lantern in the direction of Norman and me even though she wasn’t quite standing fully upright herself. “Help me move the bags. We are not taking that trailer truck into New England with us.”
Norman found the employee office where they kept the spare keys to those tour group shuttle buses and pried it open easily enough. They were even labeled so we could grab the key for the nearest one, easy as that, none of that process of elimination crap like at the police station. No one really had the strength or reflexes to stand guard whi
le we loaded it up, even at an onslaught rate of only about three zombies a minute, so Hector just backed up the transport until the shuttle was practically inside, and Norman and I climbed onto the roof of the meditation garden gazebo and set off another strand of firecrackers to keep everything in the area clawing up at us while Hector and Rory made the transfer.
In retrospect, swinging a bat might actually have been less painful than listening to those explosions in the open sunlight, but somehow we did manage to hold out until the shuttle circled around to pick us up.
There were flowers still on the graves of Elvis’s family, the freshest ones in about the same stage of decomposition as the ones on the coffee table. As we jumped across to our escape, I wished I had something to add, too, even though there was no one left to see the gesture, certainly not the dead old guy in the ground who would probably think we were all crazy if he could hear the latest sounds we’d paid or stolen to hear. I wanted something to offer that place, though, some sort of thank you, just for the chance to be there for what was probably the last time its music played.
I didn’t have fresh flowers, so I just sort of turned back and waved at no one in particular while Hector threw the shuttle into gear and gunned it back in the direction of the interstate.
This may make me a terrible person, but even with a pounding headache and queasy stomach, even though we were still conducting a wake as much as a party or an adventure, that next day’s drive was one of the best of my life. I was the one who had to squint at the map and take the nerve-wracking gamble of telling Rory that we might very well be having dinner with Lis as soon as the next evening.
The shuttle bus had lots of room to stretch out in, and with no one in the mood for tears or real, serious, self-deprecation, we dared to indulge in a little more reminiscence. Most of our memories of the Kents were a step up from the kind of DJ “humor” we would have had access to while driving in another era anyway. Like the time a couple of missionaries, I forget what denomination, wandered into a cabin summer camp and asked Peter if he’d heard the word of some particular version of Christ, and Peter asked them dead seriously if they’d bought their season’s supply of Boy Scout nuts.
Yeah, those are a thing, or at least they were, and yeah, there’s a reason they never reached the same level of acceptance as Girl Scout cookies. Anyway, Peter left with a free Bible, and the missionaries left with two cans of honey roasted peanuts at four bucks each. You do the math.
That wasn’t all the past we talked about. Nothing about other good, absent friends, nothing about cancelled plans, certainly nothing about parents, nothing that Unspeakable, just little things: where our scars had come from, who had the worst ID picture, what our favorite children’s shows had been.
I knew almost all of everyone’s answers already, of course, but it was fun listening to Norman try to convince Rory that Ms. Frizzle could kick Captain Planet’s ass.
It did occur to me how much Claire would have liked to throw in her two cents on that one, but it was probably best that she didn’t get the chance. If sharing a sleeping bag had made it as hard as it had been to say goodbye, sharing our last movie on three TVs with her might have made it downright impossible.
We made good distance, too, in spite of the hour we spent trying to figure out how to open the shuttle’s gas cap to fill the tank, before having to think about the next night’s shelter. We got as far as Charlottesville, Virginia, one of the increasingly frequent midsized cities peppering the forest. Those forests were gorgeous, thick, and moist and vivid, jewel-green, nothing like the pines in New Mexico or the live oaks back home. We couldn’t have explored them even if we’d had the time. With the thicker cities came thicker zombies, and thicker forests are not where you want to go to fight them if you can help it. Our pit stops didn’t take us more than a few feet from the road anymore. I still envied the boys for their comparative convenience, but I’d almost completely tuned out the ick factor. It had taken me less than a week.
Even though those cities were more heavily infested than the ones in the south, they actually felt safer than the wilderness. At least they had nice flat slabs of concrete and tile where you could keep your footing and see things coming, so we were skimming the outlying residential streets for likely options. By that time, we were on the subject of the fast food we were going to miss the most.
I guess it’s a natural place for your mind to stray when you’ve spent all day dipping pretzels into a jar of peanut butter that’s kind of fused itself to the shuttle’s front storage compartment. Not a bad hangover or road snack by any means, but after a while, it really makes you want something fresh and warm and preferably oozing with saturated fat.
“KFC,” I admitted on my turn. Yeah, I know it had developed some pretty unpleasant associations over the past few days, but that pesky fried chicken craving hadn’t gone away.
“You fail at west coast living.” Rory snickered.
“I know, I know.”
“Anyway, catch a fresh chicken and build a fire hot enough to boil oil, and I could make that crap, but nothing’s ever going to taste quite the same as a Big Mac again.” Her face went all wistful. I can’t think of a more appropriate moment for that word, wistful. “There’s probably no one left alive who knows what’s in special sauce.”
“Because it’s got, like, a thousand ingredients—”
“Ninety-five,” Norman corrected me.
“Fine, because it’s full of crazy almost-food substances, that makes it better?”
“No,” said Rory, “it’s just going to make me miss it more.”
It’s probably another major strike against my character that this hadn’t happened until we’d managed to cheer her up a little, but I was starting to remember why Rory and I had been close in the first place.
Seriously, somehow I’d let myself spend days being pushed away, annoyed even, by her pining for her lost sister, and then however many seconds it had taken Norman to say those simple words, “when we find Lis,” and mean them, had been enough to brighten everything up. How messed up is that?
“Orange chicken,” said Hector. “No, scratch that. In-N-Out. Hands down. Cass? You okay?”
“What? Yeah, just swallowed a pretzel wrong.”
Needless to say, I hadn’t swallowed a pretzel wrong, or I wouldn’t bother bringing it up. I know how stupid it sounds, with everything else we talked about that day, summer camp and The Magic School Bus and Hector’s mad guitar skills, that In-N-Out, of all things, was what flashed me back home, to California, pre-zombie California, vividly enough for one little accidental moment of missing it. Not just conversational missing it. Really, really missing it.
Lucky for me, the effect on Rory was just the opposite.
“I know where we’re spending the night!” she exclaimed, grabbing the map from the seat between us. “Turn right on Millmont!”
“What am I looking for?” asked Norman.
“Your turn to drive, my turn to be mysterious.”
There was no point in arguing with that, so we let her lead us right up to the back door of a burger place with that same eye-assaulting red and white tile décor. Not an In-N-Out, though, a chain I’d never seen before. Five Guys, the sign read.
“Okay,” I said when we’d dropped our bags on the linoleum and barricaded the door behind us. “Still waiting for the show and tell part.”
“Lis and I used to go to one of these on West Fifty-Fifth every time we visited—every time we were in New York,” she finished in the only way that would let us all keep smiling about it. “It’s kind of like east coast In-N-Out.”
“Um . . .” I didn’t want to be the one to burst her bubble, but even with the nice spirit of friendship we all had going on, I still had the oldest, deepest foundation with her, so I guessed it was sort of my responsibility. “Maybe it was the east coast In-N-Out, but I’m pretty sure they’re closed at the moment.”
The place surprisingly didn’t smell too bad, but I was sure that wo
uld change if we opened any of the big, shiny, depowered meat coolers.
Rory just gave me the ultimate “Duh” expression.
“Ha ha. But there’s one thing this place and In-N-Out have that the nationwide places don’t.” She was already in the kitchen at the end of her sentence, and after a few more seconds she was back, both arms full of fresh potatoes.
They weren’t quite In-N-Out, or KFC, but combined with the real, bonfire-worthy wooden furniture that even In-N-Out couldn’t boast, Rory’s magic touch with aluminum foil, a full burger toppings bar, and plenty of never-rotting, all-American almost-cheese, they could have given any Big Mac a run for its money.
We all gathered our sleeping bags around the embers of the bonfire afterward, pleasantly full, all four of us, not just three, close enough that I could hear Rory mutter as we started to drift off, “Lis loved baked potatoes.”
“Bet she still does,” I whispered back immediately.
“Yeah.”
“Hey, when we find her, we can take her to West Fifty-Fifth Street to celebrate.”
“Yeah,” Rory repeated. “Tomorrow night?”
It didn’t seem like the time to hesitate. “Sure, tomorrow night.”
It’s a good thing we had that damn near perfect day to hang onto because when the sun rose over the outlines of the solid wall of zombies pressed against the glass on all sides, I started to think maybe it was time I stopped making promises like that.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
Who Killed the Pizza Boy?
“Please tell me you’ve got some more of those firecrackers left,” Hector said, very calmly but with none of the warmth of last night’s bonfire, just loudly enough to be clear over the endless chorus of screams from outside.
I wondered when exactly we’d all become such heavy sleepers.
“A few,” I said.
It wasn’t that it was impossible, or even an excessive challenge to our fast-developing skill set, drawing the hoard to one side, sprinting out the other to our already strategically angled shuttle with just a few deflecting swings along the way, and slamming the door behind us.
Confessions of the Very First Zombie Slayer (That I Know Of) Page 14
