Dead and Dead Again: Kansas City Quarantine (37 page)

“We need to go shopping.”

Eight pair of bloodshot, bleary
eyes aimed fiery balls of hatred back at Athena, partly because it was six
o’clock in the morning, but mostly because she was sitting before them in fresh
clothes and bright eyes and her wavy jet-black hair so clean and
well-conditioned that it had a bluish hue under the bright LEDs.

“There are a lot of personal items
everyone needs, and we need to start looking to the future for medical supplies
and other necessities.

“Fine. Right after the funeral of
one of your best friends, we’ll pop off to Kohl’s for an early bird sale,” Trip
grumbled, his head nearly resting in his bowl of oat meal.

“It’s not to buy red pumps and a fuck-me
dress, Trip,” she snapped, her exotic eyes flashing in annoyance. “There are
supplies everyone will need that we don’t currently have enough of and we will
need more medicine and we need to get it before the entire surviving population
of this city realizes they need it too and feels brave enough to come out to
get it, simple as that.”

“You’re right,” Tripper conceded
with a nod of apology. “I’m sorry.”

“It’s ok. Still early yet,” she
accepted his apology appropriately. “And we’re all on edge about Lola.”

“We need to dig the grave,” Boomer
suggested, eating a bowl of cereal with half-closed eyes.

“No. I already did that,” Calvin
informed them, stumping through the door, his blue chain mail sparkling and the
black leather long coat cleaned with shoe polish and shining. He seemed full of
energy, which only added to the annoyance everyone already felt. The dark
circles of yesterday were gone from his green eyes and he would have whistled
as he washed his dishes in the sink if not for the heartbreaking task that lay
before them this morning.

“When did you do that?” Athena
asked in surprise, examining his clean hands and shoes, eyes narrowing in worry
at his surprisingly chipper demeanor.

“I just finished about fifteen
minutes ago. I already got cleaned up and prepared the cabinet we’re using as a
coffin.”

“How?” Tripper asked.

“I only slept a few hours.”

“I never even noticed when you got
up,” Athena said quietly.

“I always get up in the middle of
the night to write some. I try real hard not to wake you, because I love you
and want you to get sleep.”

“That’s sweet,” she walked quickly
to his side and hugged him fondly. Most of the others watched them with various
sickened looks, though the two new girls gushed at such an unabashed show of
romance.

“You know, I was really hoping when
I opened my eyes this morning I would be in my Flintstones rock bed back at the
hotel and that all of this would have been a nightmare,” Scaggs offered
morosely, circles running a dark perimeter around her light brown eyes, crimson
hair spiking in several directions from a serious case of bed-head.

“I know exactly what you mean,” Gus
agreed in a half-mumble, not bothering to take his chin off the stack of
pancakes he was using as a pillow.

Several others nodded and mumbled
similar agreements.

“Well, it’s not a dream,” Calvin
informed them with a cold intensity. “It happened, and we still have to deal
with it. One of our best friends is dead, but there are a lot more people out
there that we don’t know who didn’t make it. I have no doubt we’ve all lost
people we love and don’t even know about it yet. But those of us in this room are
still alive and I intend to keep every one of you in that condition unless you
give me reason to make you not so,” he avoided looking at Brick, but several of
the others sent significant glares that direction.

“So, we have to go out there and
have a funeral for our friend, and then we’re going shopping like my girlfriend
suggested. Either you can suck it up and come along or you can stay here and
mope. No amount of denial is going to change the fact that we’re currently
sitting in the middle of the Zombie Capitol of the World.”

“Damn, dude,” Joel muttered. “You
could at least wait for us to finish breakfast before you start breaking our
balls…or whatever,” he looked at the girls with an apologetic shrug. For their
part, the others favored Calvin with a varying range of saddened grimaces to
annoyed glares.

Lucy had been having the hardest
time of it, crying throughout the night until finally falling asleep sometime
just before sunup. The doctor had offered to give her a sedative from the locked
medical cabinet, but she had refused, wanting to keep sharp in case they were
attacked. Lola had been her best friend and either girl rarely went anywhere
without the other. When Lucy’s adopted parents had died in a car crash and then
her grandmother had become sick, Lola’s parents had been in the process of
adopting her, but Granny Ogleberg had pulled through. Lola was by her side
through it all like the sister she never had and the brother who had died
protecting her from their foster dad’s drunken violence.

Poor Lola.
Lucy cried silent
tears into her bowl.

Plagued by bouts of depression due
to several chronic illnesses, Lola had never felt loved, never felt as if she
belonged anywhere, even with parents as great as hers were. Calvin had been the
only steady boyfriend in her life and she had pushed him away. As Lucy eyed him
across the table, she noted a controlled tightness around his soft green eyes
as he rattled dishes around the sink. He was still blaming himself for her
death even though she knew first hand that there was nothing he could have done
differently.

“Thank you, Calvin,” Lucy said
quietly. “Lola said you would come, and you did. If she hadn’t run out…I know
she would still be with us. I just wanted you to know, in case you feel
differently, like, if maybe you felt it was your fault or something.”

Calvin turned away from the others
to run some water and wipe at some non-existent stain on the counter top, but a
blush on his cheeks and subtle tenseness in his shoulders confirmed her
suspicion.

“There was nothing you could have
done differently,” her puffy dark eyes intensely assured his turned back.

“I should have sent a text telling
you to stay put until we got to you.”

“You did.”

“I mean a more specific text. Stay
in the room until we escort you out.”

“We had just watched, like, a dozen
people get eaten. I was there. I never would have thought she’d just go running
out like that. She was overly emotional and wanted to tell you why things fell
apart...” she glanced uncertainly at Athena.

“What do you mean?” Calvin asked
uncertainly.

“You mean with their relationship?”
Athena asked.

Lucy nodded.

“We’re all friends here, Lucy,”
Athena said gently. “We all know she and Calvin dated, and she and I talked
quite a bit about it. We were very good friends and I know that she still loved
him.”

“I know, but what she said…you
know, when she was dying…she wanted you to know what happened between you
two…why it happened. She knew it wouldn’t get you back, but I guess she just
needed you to have closure.”

“Was…was she raped?” he asked
quietly.

Lucy nodded.

Sarah rose from the table and
stalked out of the room, grabbing her M-16 on the way. “I’ll be on watch. I’ll
send the doctor down for some food.”

“Who was it?” Calvin asked.

Lucy glared briefly at Brick, but
could say nothing about her suspicions. Brick didn’t seem to notice. He was
clearly already two or three pills into his meds this morning. Sitting in blue
jeans and a t-shirt and wearing the same yellow headphones he had been wearing
in the Hedgehog, his feet were propped up on the table as he watched a movie on
his Ipod.

“She wouldn’t tell me. She only
told me that it happened and that she’d messed up your relationship because of
it.”

“I wish I’d known at the time, but
I was just confused and trying to figure out why she had changed. It took me a
long time to put it all together.”

“None of it was your fault. Neither
was her death.” she continued to glare at Brick.

“Hey, I’ve had just about enough of
your accusing stares,” Brick looked up, eyes flashing blue steel. “I didn’t do
anything—before
or
last night. I was trying to get her to move to the
van instead of sitting there on the floor and she just freaked out.”

“You should have forced her to go
outside!”

“I tried, but she was crazed!” he
argued.

“She was your responsibility!” Lucy
screamed at him.

“I know,” he said quietly. “I’m
sorry, Lucy,” he whispered, sounding truly remorseful. “I didn’t want Lola to
die. No matter what you think of me, I didn’t want that to happen.”

“Don’t smoke-screen me, Brick. You
just stay the hell away from me, you got it?”

“Whatever,” he grumbled, flipping
his plate over, spilling eggs and white gravy everywhere, stomping out of the
cafeteria and storming down the hallway to the back of the building. The heavy
tread of his leather boots echoed for several seconds, eventually cutting-off
at the close of the steel fire door.

* * * * *

They buried Lola as the sun’s
radiance began to peak over the shadowy buildings to the East. A silvery sheen
of frost glittered atop the freshly mown grass in the park, which had been
mowed for the parade less than twenty-four hours before. A mound of dirt from
the freshly dug hole sat in a pile on a blue tarp next to a small yellow
backhoe. The engine compartment of the backhoe was open and various parts lay
scattered about on the ground and two dirty shovels were leaned up against it,
one broken halfway up. The lights and windows on the backhoe were all broken
out and glass littered the area. Sixteen beheaded zombies were stacked in one
corner of the park like cordwood.

It didn’t take a genius to deduce
that after the backhoe had quit working Calvin had tried to fix it and, when
that failed, he’d beaten it to within an inch of scrap metal and then finished
the grave with the shovel he hadn’t broken over the machinery. At some point
during the early hours of the morning he’d been attacked and defended himself.
Since they hadn’t heard any gunshots, either whoever was on watch had run out
to help on the ground or he’d fought them off alone. Judging from the still
noticeable fatigue of Joel, most guessed correctly that he had run out and
helped. Clearly both had gotten a lot of aggression out. But where the
experience had left Joel’s usually bright grey eyes drained, Calvin seemed
refreshed, thriving with renewed purpose.

The nine friends stood in a
half-circle around the grave, shifting uneasily in their armor. Calvin had
insisted that they remain fully clad even with Scaggs and Felicia operating the
turrets in the Hedgehog while the doctor drove them around the park, quietly
keeping it free of any unwanted stalkers. It was an unfortunate consequence of
their current situation that they could no longer leave the ‘house’ without the
armor, but Calvin pointed out that ‘the world has changed and those who can’t
change with it will probably die’ and that had been enough for the rest of the
group.

Some time during the night, the
doctor had sewn up Lola’s injuries and dressed her in a white dress while Scaggs
did a fabulous makeup job and Felicia washed and combed the matted blood from
her long golden hair. Lola could have passed for a sleeping princess in any
fairy tale. Everyone wore black arm bands over Quinn’s classy chain mail. Lucy,
Athena and Sarah each said eulogies and went up for a private moment with their
friend. Then Calvin stepped forward to close the ‘casket’ so they could lower
the heavy wooden cabinet into the ground but Lucy jumped forward with a shout.

“Stop!”

She ran over to the cabinet and pulled
it back open, folding Lola’s arms over her chest. Then with inspiration born
from love, she pulled her dead friend’s bedazzled phone from her purse and laid
it in her cold palms and turned it on.

“Now she’s ready for the
afterlife,” she said through tears with a nod of finality.

They lowered the ‘casket’ into the
ground. Calvin had piled all of the dirt on one side of the giant blue tarp
he’d found in a storage room of the building, hanging about a foot of the
dirt-covered half of the tarp inside the grave and laying the uncovered-half
out away from the dirt and the grave. When it was time to cover the ‘casket’, they
hooked another set of ropes onto the ambulance and pulled the empty side of the
tarp over the side with the pile of dirt on it, slowly sliding the pile into
the hole as the ropes pulled the empty half. When all of the loose dirt was in
the hole, the group stomped it flat over the grave and rolled over it a few
times with the Wagon. The friends then passed a few moments walking across the
park, watching the sun rise over the cityscape. It was a long-standing understanding
amongst their group that the most cleansing part of a funeral was the walk back
to the vehicles after the graveside service. Even without words, there was
nearly always some form of a release, though no one understood why.

When the sun’s light was fully in
the sky, burning away the silvery sheen of mist and already drying out the
dampened streets, Calvin rose and motioned the others to follow. “Hephaestus is
making her a gravestone,” he informed them as he walked.

“Out of what?” Trip asked.

“Not sure. But I
am
sure it
will be appropriate.”

“He always liked Lola,” Athena
remarked.

“He did. In hindsight, I wish I had
never dated her. She and Hef would have made a great couple.”

“Wait,” Lucy paused on her way to
the wagon. “You guys mean to tell me he never hooked up with Lola because she
dated Calvin?”

“He has this code that he won’t
date any of his friend’s ex-girlfriends,” Athena explained. “It’s a personal
oath. He takes it pretty seriously.”