Undead Much
Page 19
“In Aaron’s car,” I said, kicking at the ground. “He took it and threw it in the backseat.”
“Well then, let’s go get it.” Cliff grabbed my hand, but then thought better of it and let me go. Thankfully the awkward pause only lasted a second. “We can head up to your school and break into his car.”
“Or I could just ask him to let me in, Mr. Delinquent.”
“Fine,” he said, though it was clear he didn’t like the idea of me exchanging two words with Aaron. “You can ask him to let you in and I’ll hide out somewhere close to make sure he behaves himself. Then we can look over the records on the way downtown.”
“Downtown?” I asked, following him toward the bus stop.
“Yeah, we need to take a walk by the river. I’ve… realized a few things, and there’s something I want to show you.”
I sighed. “Cliff, I have to go to school.”
“You’re not at school now.”
“But I will be, and if I hurry I won’t miss more than first period, so maybe the principal won’t call my parents. Besides, I’ve told you, I can’t keep Settling you. There are rules about this type of thing, and I have other responsibilities to-”
“What responsibilities? You haven’t had another Unsettled since I showed up by your boyfriend’s car that night,” Cliff said, looking as frustrated as I felt.
He was right, though I hadn’t really thought about how weird that was until just now. “How do you know that?”
“I’ve been keeping an eye on you, Megan. I haven’t made any secret of that, so don’t look at me like I’m some kind of psycho stalker.”
“Oh, right. Wouldn’t want to do that.” I rolled my eyes, angry, though I couldn’t say at exactly who, or what. Cliff was frustrating, yes, but he wasn’t a bad guy, and he’d done nothing but help me. Still, I was just sick of my life being so crazy, sick of things I couldn’t explain, and Cliff was a big one of those things.
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“Nothing.”
“No, it’s obviously not nothing.” He stopped a few feet away from the awning that covered the bus stop and turned to face me. “Listen, you can try to push me away, but I’m not going anywhere. I’m supposed to be here, and I’m supposed to help you. There’s a reason you haven’t had any other Unsettled and I’m it.”
“You are?”
“There’s something I know, something you need to know that-”
“What? What do you know? Just tell me!”
“I will,” he shouted back. “Just come with me and I-”
“I don’t have time for field trips. I need answers.”
“I’m giving you answers! What about those records? You never would have thought to take them without me.”
“And I still don’t know if whatever is in them will help me or not,” I said, gaining momentum. “All I know is that my life was going okay before you and those other weird zombies showed up. And now a girl is dead and I’m in the biggest trouble I’ve ever been in and nothing is-”
“What? You think I have something to do-”
“Maybe. It’s an awful big coincidence, isn’t it? I mean, how do I know I can believe anything you say?” The hurt in his eyes made me cringe, but I couldn’t seem to stop myself. “So just leave me alone. I don’t need-” My new cell buzzed in the pocket of my coat, making me jump. I fished it out and flipped it open. “Hello?”
“Megan, it’s Ethan, where are you?”
“I’m in Little Rock, but I’m on my way back to Carol, what’s up?” I asked nervously, turning my back on Cliff. I couldn’t look at him, not and hope to conceal my guilty conscience from Ethan. Even over the phone he would be able to tell something was up if I wasn’t careful.
“I think I’ve got a lead, and if we hurry we can check it out and get you back at school before lunch. Stay where you are and I’ll come pick you up.”
I gave him directions to the McDonald’s down the street from the Pleasant Mountain clinic and hung up, not bothering to ask what his lead might be. It had to be something good or he wouldn’t advocate skipping more class. The Enforcement selection board looked closely at school attendance records and conduct reports when they were interviewing new recruits. They didn’t want anyone who couldn’t handle real life infiltrating their ranks, and I knew Ethan wanted me in those ranks with him someday.
Speaking of handling real life, was lashing out at one of the few people trying to help me just because he was a freak of Undead nature and filled me with confusing feelings really “handling” anything?
I turned slowly around. “Listen, Cliff, I… ” My words faded away. Cliff was gone, which made me way sadder than I wanted to admit.
CHAPTER 16
“I’m pretty sure I wasn’t supposed to tell you, but-”
“That’s seriously messed up,” Ethan said as we swung through the drive-through at Micky D’s fifteen minutes later. I hated to admit that Aaron was right, but I did need more than donuts for breakfast. “So the Elders have always known what causes SRUs?”
“Guess it’s something they’ve passed down through the ages or something, and why SA stopped working with human governments back in the Dark Ages,” I confirmed. “But they don’t tell the little Settlers about it unless they screw up like Monica and I did last night.”
“Don’t they think we should all know the possible consequences of being observed before we unleash a zombie epidemic?” Ethan asked, proving we were soul mates. And then, proving it yet again, he leaned out the window and ordered me a sausage, egg, and cheese biscuit with no egg. We’d only eaten breakfast together a few times, but he remembered my hatred of egg and egg products.
“That’s what I said. They’re crazy, but this proves we’re not dealing with SRUs. They would be acting like Rogues, not zombies raised to attack a certain person. So there has to be some other reason these things are so hard to get rid of.”
He grunted his agreement; then we both fell silent as he paid for and collected our sandwiches.
“So you really think you were followed?” I asked, keeping my voice to a whisper just in case there were Enforcer operatives lurking behind the plastic Ronald McDonald or the trash can where Ethan paused to throw away the bag that our sandwiches came in.
I was really getting paranoid, but I couldn’t seem to help myself. Between our phones being bugged and my mom withholding evidence, I had reason to be suspicious.
“Barker pulled into the parking lot of the hospital just as I was pulling out. I had glasses on, but my car is pretty distinctive.”
I started in on my sandwich but found myself unable to swallow the food I’d chewed until Ethan pulled out of the parking lot. “Yeah, you should invest in a windowless white van if we’re going to keep with the lurking and sneaking.”
“Not a bad idea.” He gunned it through the red light ahead and turned east on Highway 11, heading out to less populated areas. “I could think of a few things a windowless van would
be good for.” He wiggled his eyebrows at me.
“Right.” I smiled and tried to laugh, but it came out as more of wheeze. Thankfully, Ethan was too busy finishing his own breakfast and checking all the mirrors to make sure we weren’t being followed to notice my minor malfunction.
“So what did you find out?”
“A lot, but… there’s something else you need to hear first.”
“Okay? This is a bad something?” I asked, wadding up the last few uneaten bites of my sandwich in its paper, suddenly losing what was left of my appetite.
“I called Kitty,” he said, making a swift right and then a left, presumably to ditch a tail if we’d acquired one. I hadn’t seen my SA spies since I’d snuck out the back of the donut shop, but he was probably right to be careful. “About the DNA test for you and your mom.”
“Ethan! I should have been the one to do that. I wanted to-”
“I was just trying to help. I knew you probably hadn’t had time to call, and I thought the sooner they got started the sooner you’d be able to breathe easy, you know?”
“But I’m not going to be able to breathe easy?” I asked, heart clenching in my chest.
He sighed. “She wouldn’t tell me anything except that there wasn’t going to be a DNA test because a DNA test was impossible.”
“What?” I barely resisted the urge to hit something. “That doesn’t make any sense! They’re just being pigheaded, stupid-”
“Maybe not. I called Monica after I hung up with Kitty and told her to go back and look through that list of blood types she was researching last night. I don’t remember for sure, but I think some of those can cause mutations in DNA.”
“Mutations that would make DNA tests impossible?”
“Maybe.”
“But I thought Monica said these blood types could only be detected with fresh blood and only with Settler tests,” I said, the pieces of the puzzle not adding up in my mind. “If my DNA is gimped up, wouldn’t a normal medical test be able to detect-”
“I’m not sure,” Ethan said, a little too fast for my liking. If I didn’t know better, I’d have thought he was hiding something. “Let’s wait and see what Monica finds out. She’s going to call me back as soon as she gets a chance to look through her notes.”
I looked out the car window and wondered briefly where he was taking me. We’d turned off the old highway and were moving further west than I’d ever been before.
“Okay,” I said, feeling the tight rope of hope I’d been walking on snap and send me plummeting into the mouths of the alligators beneath. There wasn’t going to be a DNA test, which meant I probably only had a few more hours before Kitty got that blood test back and came to arrest me.
It was looking like I hadn’t just been a jerk to tell Cliff to get lost, I’d been an idiot as well. What if he really had information that could help? I had to think of a way to mend the rift between us, and it was past time for me to tell Ethan about my Undead friend.
“Listen, we’re going to figure this out. I think I’m getting somewhere with the rest of the investigation. You’re not going to believe what I found at the hospital,” Ethan said, a note of forced optimism in his voice that I appreciated even if I didn’t completely buy it. “I’m not sure I believe it, and I saw it all myself.”
“I don’t know-I’m feeling very open-minded these days. A lot of strange things have been happening.” There, I’d given myself a good lead-in to a confession about my recurrent zombie. Now I just had to gather the last of my courage and spill my guts.
“Not this strange. I never even imagined something like this.” His jaw clenched as he turned right onto a small country road I’d never been down before.
The way his jaw jumped reminded me of Cliff. I wondered where he’d gone, and what he’d had to tell me. If he took my last words to heart, I’d probably never know. It made me want to punch myself repeatedly in my big, stupid mouth, and not just because what he knew might help clear my name. I would just… miss him. Even sitting next to my boyfriend feeling guilty for keeping my “other guy” a secret, I got sniffly when I thought of never seeing Cliff again.
What a hot sloppy angsty mess I was becoming. I really needed to chill out.
“I tracked down a lab coat when I got to the ICU so I could roam around. At first I didn’t find much, until I got to where they keep the people who are on life support-coma victims mostly.”
“Coma victims?” I asked, not missing the significance he gave the words.
“Yep.” Ethan pulled onto a gravel road that led to a barren field that looked like it would be planted with soybeans come spring. He parked the car behind a clutch of leafless trees that formed a barrier between the field and the road, before turning to face me. “I wanted to wait until we were somewhere secure to tell you this.” I gazed around the field. Pretty much the middle of nowhere. If anyone were to try and spy on us, we’d see them coming for about a mile. Ethan swept some hair out of his eyes. “I-I think I found the zombies who attacked you last night. They were patients from the ICU, coma patients.”
“But zombies are dead, Ethan,” I said, his words banishing all thoughts of spilling the Cliff beans. At least for the moment. “That’s the whole-”
“I know, it sounds crazy, but the nurses were changing the bandages on their feet when I got there. There were three, maybe four whose feet were cut and bruised.” He leaned closer, his excitement clear. “How could that have happened if they weren’t out of their beds?”
“Maybe they were out of their beds, but that doesn’t mean they were transformed into bloodthirsty freaks,” I said, the very idea of living zombies scaring the crap out of me. “The zoo is right next door to the hospital, right? Maybe they just stepped out to take in the new baby elephant. Did you know the zoo has a new baby elephant?”
“Megan.”
“It’s supposed to be really cute. We should go see it. Once it gets warmer.”
“Megan, what’s wrong? This is really important,” he said, grabbing my shoulder and giving it a little shake. “You need to listen to me. This could be the break we’ve been waiting for.”
“How? Just because some people who were in a coma suddenly woke up and-”
“But that’s it, they didn’t wake up. At least, they weren’t awake this morning. They were all unconscious, every last one.” His hand smoothed down my arm, and his fingers interlocked with mine, offering silent support I wished I didn’t need. “Which makes it pretty hard to explain how one of the girls ended up with a broken nose and a dude managed to shatter his kneecap.”
“Oh God.” I closed my eyes, replaying the fight from the night before in my mind and not liking what I saw.
“The theory floating around is that some psycho came in and roughed them up in their beds. Everyone seems to be ignoring the fact that several of the patients have scraped and bruised knuckles. Like they weren’t just lying in be
d taking abuse-they were dishing out a little of their own.”
Crap. What were the chances that this was just a horrible coincidence, and that these people had sustained the same exact injuries I’d inflicted on what I thought were the Undead in some perfectly reasonable way? Or that they’d hurt their hands running into the brick walls outside the hospital or trying to smash the glass keeping them from the precious baby elephant over at the zoo?
Better question, do you really have time for this level of denial?
“So you’re saying I beat the crap out of living people?” I asked. “Very sick, comatose living people?”
“You didn’t know. Besides, they weren’t acting like defenseless sick people. You and Monica did what you had to do to keep anyone else from being hurt or killed.”
“Still, I-Shit!” I brought my fist down hard on the seat beside me. “I should have realized. The pajamas, the lack of dead smell, it all made sense. I can’t believe I-”
“Hey, it’s not your fault,” Ethan said, grabbing my fist when I made to hit the dashboard. He held my hands captive. “Whoever used those people to attack you is the one to blame. They’re sending seriously sick people to do their dirty work.”
I swallowed hard, wishing I’d skipped the breakfast sandwich that was now threatening to make a second appearance. “What about the blood? Did they find blood on the patients? Like, on their pajamas or… in their mouths?”
I rolled down the window and took a deep breath of cold, crisp winter air.
“Not that I know of. Everything had been pretty well cleaned up. I’m guessing by Enforcement.” Ethan cracked his window too, letting in a nice, nausea-killing draft. “There was no trace of blood or mud or anything else on the people’s clothes. The clothes they were wearing last night were probably destroyed, but they couldn’t get rid of the injuries themselves.”