by Elisa Hansen
Rosa was right; wasn’t she always right? The only way to save the world was to work as hard as everyone else. But to let go of the one thing Emily could control? The thing keeping her from dissolving? She didn’t even know where to begin. What were the chances she could put it off long enough until the world was saved?
“Do you really think we’ll find a cure for zombies?” she asked.
Rosa shrugged. “Who knows, maybe headquarters even figured it out already while we’ve been out here. That’s why LPI gathered all those scientist people in Manhattan, yeah? They’re working on it. All they need is time, and we’re out here doing our thing to give them that time.”
Their thing. Block by block, one by one, shot by shot, bonfire by bonfire. Commune by commune.
“I fucking hate vampires.” It came out of Emily like a whimper, which was so opposite her intention that it made her laugh. She wiped at her eyes.
Rosa shook her head, amused. “Welcome to the LPI.” Letting her hand slide down, she squeezed Emily’s fingers.
Emily squeezed back. She felt lighter and heavier at the same time. “Seriously, though,” she said after taking a moment to stew over it, “maybe they’re not stupid enough to make any more vampires, but they only look out for themselves while the rest of the world gets the meat eaten off its bones.” Did vampires honestly consider their commune system a sustainable plan in a world overrun by zombies? Resources would run out eventually. For supposedly immortal beings, what a ridiculously shortsighted setup. “When you get into the commune, Rosy, you should totally do random petty crap just to mess with them. Like steal all their socks or something.”
“You know, you kind of sound like you want to go in after all.”
Emily flinched, then shook her head apologetically. But she would work twice as hard in other ways. So many roles to Mission 12. So many other things she could do and do damn well.
She managed an uneven smile for Rosa. “You have a few days before the commune shows up. Maybe a week.”
“Never know,” Rosa said. “They could make it here tonight if they found, like, three busses.”
“Three?” How could the humans recruited from Amargosa be crammed into fewer than ten?
Recruited.
Sure, some people in the world joined communes willingly and needed rescuing from their own idiocy, but not the Amargosa people. Coerced, threatened, blackmailed, scared to death. Intel said the commune in question had over two dozen vampires and five times as many armed human guards. They razed the Amargosa human settlement and herded whoever was too weak or apathetic to resist into their caravan. Hundreds of whoevers.
Rosa gave her an amused look. “You’ve never seen a New York City bus at rush hour.”
This time, no ache laced her chest when Emily laughed. And her stomach finally growled. She turned to the cartons on the counter to stuff protein bars into the snap pockets on the sides of her black canvas pants. She grabbed fresh clips for her Glock along with binoculars and the last radio from the charger.
“Emily, checking in,” she said into the radio.
“Too early,” Ramon’s curt voice replied through the soft crinkle of static.
Rosa cupped a hand over her mouth to hold in a laugh.
Emily shot her a look. “What?”
Shaking her head, she slid around the table to her screen.
Emily imagined what she was refraining from saying, that you could never do anything right by Ramon anymore. That he constantly felt pressure to come down hard to measure up to his new authority. It’s what the other guys said, though Rosa never contested his leadership. Even when Daisy challenged him after they lost Michele, when Rosa had ten times more place to be that challenger, she kept her lips zipped.
Ramon had his own style. It worked. And it was time for Emily to show him hers could measure up. Too early, and proud of it, she waved a goodbye to Rosa, slapped Lefty a low-five, and made her way out through the gallery for scout shift.
4
Vampires
The sight beyond the front lobby’s glass doors made Emily’s breath catch. Ramon and Daisy. Their conversation appeared casual enough, but when he noticed her, Ramon darted a frustrated look at Emily through the glass. She hesitated, her fingers sliding over the inside handle.
As Daisy twirled the end of her yellow ponytail around her fingertip and ran her other hand down Ramon’s sleeve, his expression darkened. His eyes flicked to Emily again. Could it be he needed a rescue? What was Daisy up to? If Ramon didn’t like it, he wouldn’t put up with it, right? But despite how obviously his jaw clenched, he nodded along to whatever she was saying.
Daisy contributed more than almost anyone to their unit’s success. Without her, they would have all gone soft ages ago. Except Ramon, maybe. Emily couldn’t imagine him ever going soft. But trolling through town picking off shuffling near-corpses didn’t exactly make for hard work. Neither did crouching in the bushes on a hillside, watching flies land on the deserted factory, useless for anything other than its tanks of no-expire diesel.
Emily could have been quite comfortable and healthy doing her daily duties without Daisy’s sets and reps. She varied them often enough to keep several muscle groups burning through each night. But the team couldn’t let getting stationed at a town full of slow zombies make them complacent. If they encountered any of the fast ones, if they couldn’t plan their next mission as well as 12, then they would need the stamina. And, of course, if they ran into unexpected vampires… She shuddered. None of them would stand a chance against a vampire alone. But as a team, a strong, fit team, trained and determined, they could overpower them.
Unfortunately, they had Daisy to thank for that.
Emily leaned into the door, squinting against the bouncing sunlight as it swung open.
Daisy smiled, her wide princess eyes growing wider. “Someone’s up early. You must want to run some drills.”
Emily bit the insides of her cheeks. “Couldn’t sleep.”
“Best time for it. I’ve got a few minutes before I go into town. Get that tight ass out on the loop. Let me see you work it. What are you wearing under there? That’s no sports bra. I love it.”
Emily crossed her arms over her black shirt as Daisy’s gaze raked her. She shouldn’t let it get to her, but Daisy made herself impossible to ignore.
Ramon rolled his eyes and glanced off through the chain-link fence. “What’s up, Em?”
“I’m on scout.” She showed him the radio before snapping it to her belt clip.
“Sherice’s shift isn’t up yet.”
“I know. Thought she might like to come in, start her sleep shift early?”
Daisy let out a sharp laugh. “Little too late to play teacher’s pet, isn’t it?”
Emily flinched. Of course, Daisy would have heard about yesterday. Did Ramon tell her himself? How did he phrase it? Knowing him, he kept it wholly professional. But the gleeful light in Daisy’s eyes made it clear that no matter how diplomatic, Emily didn’t come off looking like anything less than a total asshole.
But no, it wasn’t too late. She still had a chance to show them she could be worth her salt.
Ramon eyed Emily, his lips pressing into a thin line. He seemed about to give her some warning before she went out on the hill, some habitual word of caution, but he only nodded. Emily’s mind dutifully listed through any sage advice he might offer: stay low, stay hydrated, keep quiet, no sudden movements. She knew the drill. He could probably read it right off her face. He turned to Daisy, who launched back into their previous conversation.
Ramon’s shoulders drooped as Emily skirted them to the gate. And, was it her imagination, or did he follow her out of the corners of his eyes even as he nodded along to Daisy?
Despite everything, Emily found herself hiding a little smile. Yes. She would make it up to him. To everyone. And he would let her.
Beyond the gate, she jogged down the path to the cliffs. Precision pops of gunfire floated up from the other side of th
e hill. Town duty squad was at it already. Emily would see the bonfire smoke rise as her scout shift ended.
She turned her back to the noise, and instead of following the windy drive up to the cliffs and the east road, she cut down the hillside through the brittle shrubs. At the lookout perch, Sherice crouched under a rocky overhang. The spot supplied shade all day, which kept lookouts hidden and offered an ounce or two of relief. Even in November, the days still got into the nineties.
Sherice shot up when Emily approached. “What’s wrong?”
“Just felt like getting out. You can break early.”
Her lips puckered into a thick cupid’s bow. “Why? What’s in it for you?”
“I’m—” Emily tensed and shook her head. “I don’t want anything.”
Sherice studied her dubiously, then moved around her with a half smirk. “Uh huh.”
Emily swallowed past the tightness in her throat but kept her expression determined. Monitoring the valley for the commune’s arrival was the whole reason her unit chose this spot and the most important thing she could spend her time doing. Even if it would be little more today than watching dust settle on the abandoned factory towers, watching lazy cloud shadows move along the smashed cars in the parking lot, watching buzzards circle for dead things until they gave up and faded into specks on the horizon. Even if she knew that as the hours wore on, she would be less and less able to distract herself from thinking of all she’d lost while the water in her canteen evaporated faster than she could drink it.
She would do it for a thousand hours if that’s what it took.
As Sherice crunched her way back up to the road, Emily settled onto the old rag-filled pillowcase. Alternating the three daily scout duty shifts with Sherice was another upside at least. She’d only have to see her when they changed out. Now Emily had a full day of sitting on her butt to look forward to.
She made her rounds with the binoculars, checked every horizon point, and called in the fact that she saw nothing at all to Ramon, which she would do every half hour. She counted the minutes and looked forward to each of his monosyllabic responses. She told herself it was because it broke up the tedium, but whenever Big Joe worked the radio, it never felt as rewarding to hear him say “check.”
Even though Ramon was younger than Emily, he reminded her of her dad. Except without the salesman-polished bullshitting skills. Any skills Ramon possessed not directly factoring into keeping their unit from dissolving into a bickering nest of frustrated, impatient twenty- and thirty-somethings, he didn’t have interest in sharing. He was that way even before he took charge.
Emily wasn’t sure why she equated Ramon with her dad. She never saw her dad as much of a leader, even though he ran a small company. He was more of a wrangler, a man who gathered conspirators into a huddle and whispered instructions with much nudging and winking. The opposite of Ramon’s quiet unsmiling gravity. Her dad never took anything too seriously; he had a joke to respond to every problem. It helped him get away with “the racket.” People could never stay mad at him.
He and Ramon weren’t very much alike at all. Maybe it was just Emily’s feeling of admiration. Or maybe she just missed her dad enough to be desperate to make any connection at all.
A year, seven months, and two days since she’d lost him. The last image burned into her mind: his bushy gray hair matted with dirt, his mouth stretched wide, his teeth coated with the blood from his broken nose, his fingers contorted as if reaching for a rope from the sky. She grimaced and pummeled the picture from her brain.
Go away, go away. Think of him at work or anything else.
Emily filled in at his used car lot in the summers during college. For her graduation, he drove all the way up to Seattle just to watch her cross the stage and collect a fake diploma. She told him not to bother, she wasn’t even planning on going through the pageantry. But when he showed up that morning at her dorm, she bought a last-minute cap and gown and walked for him. He just looked so excited. He even dragged her brother Chris with him. A culinary school dropout at the time, Chris would start mime school in the fall, but that May, he had nothing better to do than tag along to Emily’s campus and hit on her friends. He said he liked older women, but they snickered at his awkward flirting. The bad puns were great when her dad made them, but on Chris, they dripped desperation.
Emily’s mom, on the other hand, did have something better to do than make the ten-hour drive north. She had one of her headaches, plenty of Vicodin to go with it, and big plans to watch reality shows in her damask rose potpourri-scented king-sized bed.
The last image of her mother wormed its way into Emily’s mind: the complete lack of shame on her puffy face as she trotted like a limping wildebeest to a commune’s entrance. The way the backs of her arms flapped as she scrabbled across the long field. The way she didn’t look back.
They had argued about it for days, but her mom wouldn’t listen to reason.
“They can help us! That’s what they’re there for,” she’d said. “They’ll take anyone. They’ll protect us.”
“Bullshit,” Emily snapped. “That’s what they want you to think.” Protect.
“Susan from work explained it all to me. They’re popping up everywhere, and they move around. We just have to find one of them.”
“That is the last thing we just have to do.” Her mom hadn’t been to work in months. “What the hell does Susan know?”
“More than we do!”
“Mom, Susan’s probably dead.”
“No, she’s not. Shut your mouth. She did it, she joined. That’s what we have to do. Think of how many of them there must be by now!”
And so on and on and on as they got more and more lost on the worst roads their stolen car could navigate through the evacuated San Bernardino mountains. That was a month before Emily joined the LPI. Alone.
Emily snorted away the memories and did her rounds through the binoculars, then radioed Ramon. “All clear.”
“You sure?”
Emily blinked. He didn’t sound like he doubted her; he sounded conversational.
Her pulse floated into her throat. He never said more than “check.” Did he want to talk? Maybe he was bored back there, manning camp while everyone else worked in town or slept. Lonely?
“Well, actually.” She scanned the horizon.
“What? What is it?”
Oops. Now he sounded like he took her seriously.
She smiled to herself, feeling her face grow warm. “There’s a big bird by the tall smokestack. A highly suspicious character. We might want to investigate.”
Silence stretched for half a minute, and then the tinny voice pierced the fluff of static. “Raven big or vulture big?”
“Like roc big.”
“Big.”
“Like I said, highly suspicious.”
“So, you need back up.”
Emily bit her lip to keep back a grin as she stared at the radio’s round speckled face. “Well.” She cleared her throat. “You know what they say. There’s a—” A cloud caught her attention beyond the dent in the far hills. A cloud rising from below. A billowing brown dust cloud. She dropped the radio to her lap and pulled up the binoculars. Something was coming down the highway, definitely more than one vehicle.
The radio crackled on her knees. “Em?”
She held her breath, focused the binoculars past the factory to the road. A truck emerged around the hill. An old Chevy pickup without any solar panels. Puke brown, though the color might be from the dust it plowed through.
The radio’s alert blared three short blasts followed by Ramon’s voice. “Emily. Report.”
She scooped up the radio, holding it to her mouth without pulling her eyes from the lenses. “Trucks.” She gulped for air. “Three of them. No wait, five. Coming through the pass. Like they’ll go right past Suncrest Hill. Tell everyone to get inside.”
“Hostile?”
“Hang on.” She dropped the radio to her lap again and adjusted the binoc
ulars’ focus. No LPI symbols marked the vehicles, but they could be traveling incognito, though it would have to be one intense undercover job. The caravan had every sign of a small nomadic commune.
It couldn’t be the one her team was waiting for; the trucks rumbled along at too high a speed to be leading a herd of hundreds of Amargosans, and no fleet of busses followed. Just three four-door pickups, their loads covered by olive tarps, and two semis with little open windows along the trailers. They looked like farm vehicles, like for transporting cows. But they couldn’t have cows, could they?
Emily’s entire body compressed like a spring. She gripped the binoculars tighter and pushed to her feet. The radio flew out of her lap and somersaulted down the hill.
“Shit!”
As if he sensed what happened, Ramon’s voice came tumbling out of it. “Emily, report.”
She shifted to dive after it when the first in the line of trucks veered off the road and slowed, heading straight for the factory. The others followed like a school of fish.
“Shitshitshit.” The trucks parked, and a man in a sun-bleached leather jacket far too heavy for the desert heat jumped out and headed through the broken gate. Other men soon followed. One of them whipped up a tarp to reveal two metal crates. Two long, narrow, sealed crates. Just the right size to hold a human body. But the bodies inside would not be human.
Emily froze, hanging half out of the shadows, gripping the rocks above her head.
Three high-pitched blasts blared from the radio somewhere below her.
“Augh, shut up!” she hissed, even though the men at the factory couldn’t possibly hear it. But though far out of earshot, it lay in plain sight, and she would be too if she went after it.
She banged the heel of her palm into her forehead. “Idiot.”
The radio blasted again, and she could barely hear Ramon’s voice. “Emily? I’m coming out there.”
