Eat, Brains, Love (5 page)

Amanda was right outside the window.

She looked down at her clenched fist, as if considering what to do with it. Then she took a swing at us. It wasn't even good form, but the punch shattered the window, spraying Tom with broken glass.

It didn't seem fair. Even halfway zombied-out, this girl still looked drop-dead. Her skin was just starting to go that congealed milk color; a gash from the accident above her immaculately plucked eyebrow had turned a rotten shade of purple. But I bet boys would still go crazy for it.

She wasn't quite in full eat-'em-up mode yet. Even if I could've shoved my way into her mind—which is never an easy task in an intense situation like this—I was too freaked to make contact. Even so, I could feel her mind out there. She was still thinking. That was good. Maybe I could get through to her, try to talk our way out of this situation.

She made a grab for Tom's neck, but he flung himself backward, pinning himself against the passenger door.

“Hey,” I said. “It's Amanda, right?”

Amanda cocked her head, noticing me for the first time. A girl her age in an NCD jumpsuit. She squinted at me, like my being there didn't make any sense.

Her words were sort of slurred, the zombification taking over. “You're a kid,” she said, trying to make sense of my presence along with, you know, the whole undead thing. “What the hell?”

I didn't know what to say. I didn't exactly have a plan. I was just trying to keep her mouth moving in a non-devouring way.

That's when the pay phone receiver smacked Amanda in the temple.

Jamison stood behind her, swinging the receiver by its metal cord.

“Come on, you zombie whore,” he said. “Try me again.”

I felt Amanda's mind shut off. She screamed, a feral noise that turned my blood cold, and lunged for Jamison.

He let her. She buried her teeth in the shoulder of his armor, her fingers scratching at his face.

I smelled burning hair.

Jamison had triggered his armor's zombie-defense system. Only a few of the front-liners, the ones most likely to get bitten in action, have it hardwired into the mesh of their armor. It's a concentrated burst of electricity for when a zombie gets too close. Like, teeth-in-shoulder close. The current shot across the surface of Jamison's armor, into Amanda. She sizzled, the tips of her blonde hair smoking. Her left eye popped, spilling in liquid form down her cheek.

I remembered this stupid trick my ex-sort-of-boyfriend Jason used to do when he'd take me on dates to the diner. He'd palm one of those plastic things of coffee creamer, hold it up to his eye, and stab it with a fork. This was just like that. Except for real.

Amanda fell back against the side of the SUV with enough force to rock the car. Tom grabbed my hand.

Jamison stood over her, the pay phone receiver still clenched in his fist, and started to punch her.

It's probably a good thing I couldn't see it happening. Hearing the bones in Amanda's face crunch under Jamison's blows was bad enough. I felt that afternoon's cheesesteak starting to crawl up my throat.

“Police brutality!” someone shouted.

I hadn't seen them come out of the row houses, but the sidewalks were suddenly filled with people. Watching us. An old lady with curlers in her hair aimed a beat-up camcorder at Jamison. I could imagine what this looked like to them. A huge man in a government truck massacring a couple of innocent teenagers.

“You leave that girl alone!” shouted one of the bystanders.

“Real cops are on the way!” yelled another.

Jamison rounded on the woman with the camcorder, pointing at her with the bloody phone. “You turn that fucking thing off!”

He didn't see Jake coming.

Like a hero out of those corny kung fu movies, Jake came flying in, jump-kicking Jamison right in the ribs. The force sent Jamison skidding to the sidewalk where the emboldened good Samaritans immediately tried to hold him down.

“Oh dear,” Tom said. “We are in so much trouble.”

Jake looked inside our SUV. I could tell he wasn't as bad off as Amanda in the zombie department. Other than the gaping hole in his abdomen, he still looked human. He looked at me, then down at his midsection. He waved at it with shaky hands.

“Does this look bad?” he asked.

I didn't know what to say. I nodded.

“Shit,” he said, and lifted Amanda into his arms.

As I watched him run down the block, I couldn't help but wish someone would come carry me out of this mess.

JAKE

I RAN TRACK IN THE EIGHTH GRADE. NO LIE.

That was back when my parents could still guilt me into doing shit. So I showed up at practice a couple of times and ran some laps. Whatever.

Mostly, me and Adam DeCarlo used it as an excuse to sneak into the equipment room and get high. Those big, poofy mats they keep around for the pole-vaulters? Absolute bliss when you're stoned.

(Ugh, Adam. I'm sorry I ate you, man. I'm metaphorically pouring out some Mad Dog for you right now.)

But the reason I bring up my brief stint as a track participant is that, back then? Eighth grade? Pretty much the best shape of my life.

Yet there I was, carrying Amanda in my arms while hauling ass at a full sprint down the block. And I was doing it with a gaping hole in my stomach courtesy of Roadblock-from-G.I.-Joe back there.

That dude was not cool.

Amanda didn't look so good. Her body was cold in my arms, and she was all gray and rotten again like in the cafeteria, but worse than that was the half of her face that was pretty much smashed in, and the eyeball-cord thingy that dangled down her cheek.

But even though she was cold as ice and beaten to shit, she was still alive. She gurgled into my chest, making a guttural noise that reminded me of the sound my stomach had been making all morning.

Which reminded me that it now had a gaping hole in it. A gaping hole that for some reason wasn't bothering me at all. There wasn't pain; it just felt unnatural, like the breeze blowing over parts of my body that should never have been exposed. There's no accurate way to describe the feeling of open air on your large intestine.

And somehow, even without a stomach, I could feel my hunger coming back. My vision was starting to go crimson at the edges. But something told me this would be a really inconvenient time to lose control. I tried to focus.

I didn't even see the old man until he was standing right in our way, his hands held out.

“Son, you're hurt,” he said. He had a deep and soothing voice like Morgan Freeman. “An ambulance is coming.”

“Mister—” I started to tell him to get the hell out of my way, but then Amanda leapt away from me and wrapped her arms and legs around the old man like a freaking capuchin attack monkey.

He never knew what bit him.

I guess it was sort of a dick move to just let Amanda tear that poor dude to shreds. He was only trying to help and if not for him and the fuck-the-police attitude of this whole neighborhood we'd probably never have gotten away from Roadblock and his band of surprisingly young fascists. But, as I watched her tear off one of the old man's ears and try to jam her sucking lips into the bloody hole to get at the brain, all I felt was jealousy.

Not for the ear action the old man was getting. Come on. I wanted Amanda Blake but not that bad.

I was jealous of her getting to eat. It looked so good.

I was really considering getting down on my knees and joining her when a shotgun blast exploded behind us.

I turned to see that Roadblock had somehow gotten his weapon back and fired a warning shot in the air. The people that had bailed us out were scattering. He'd be coming for us soon, and I wasn't sure I could go another round.

In the distance, I heard sirens.

I looked down at my wound. My guts had started to turn gray. One of them was leaking this dark yellow pus, and I'm no doctor but that totally didn't look normal. Also, as I poked at a hanging flap of intestine, I noticed that the skin under my fingernails had turned a purplish black.

I wasn't exactly checking my pulse or anything, but I'm pretty sure my heart had started to beat slower. It should've been pumping like thrash metal considering how keyed up I felt, yet it was stuck on slow-jam R & B.

Basically, I wasn't sure how long I could keep it together. I was starting to figure out that this heart-stopping, dying thing was when we went total zombie. We needed to lam it.

“Amanda!” I shouted. “Come on!”

She replied by tearing one of the old man's fingers off at the knuckle and popping it in her mouth. Come on, if you're going to put us in mortal danger by pigging out, at least go for the meaty parts.

I tried whistling, a trick that used to work on my dog, but she ignored that too.

Finally, I just grabbed her around the waist and took off down an alley.

She struggled at first, trying to pull out of my grasp and go back for seconds. I was a little surprised that she didn't try to bite
me
. Maybe that was a testament to, like, our blossoming friendship or something.

Or maybe I just wasn't appetizing. I tried not to let that thought hurt my feelings.

As I ran with Amanda under my arm, her feet dragging along on the cracked alley beneath us, she turned her face up to mine. I could swear she was smiling, but that might've just been because her upper lip had fallen off, exposing a full row of her perfect teeth.

It seemed like some color was coming back to her face. I mean, don't get me wrong, she still looked very much like something I had just stolen from the mausoleum of hot chicks. Relatively speaking, she looked better. The fucked-up side of her head had regained some of its definition too. Still no eyeball, though.

Her healing like that—it couldn't be possible, right? It was probably just wishful thinking.

Amanda's mouth and cheeks were smeared with the old man's blood. I couldn't help myself; it looked so good, I bent down and licked it off.

“Stop . . . licking me,” she gurgled.

I booked it through backyards. I hopped chain-link fences like some kind of champion hurdler, all with Amanda still slung under my arm. We passed an empty kiddie pool filled with broken electronic equipment. In one yard, a pair of snarling pit bulls made a lunge for us, but shied away, whimpering when they caught our scent. We needed a place to hide. And I needed something to eat.

Amanda fumbled at the side of her face with one of her hands, tugging on the cord that should've been connected to her eyeball.

“Oh no . . . my . . . my face,” she babbled.

I got why she was upset. The hottest girl in school had just gotten her face bashed in. I'd be a little freaked out too. In one day she'd gone from having the world at her fingertips, able to make any dude melt with a look, to being a fugitive that was going to spend the rest of her life wearing one of those
Phantom of the Opera
masks.

I didn't have a ton of experience dealing with the fairer sex, but I'm not a total idiot either. I knew that you're supposed to, like, compliment them on what they're wearing and try to notice if they've gotten a haircut. I figured that still held true in a situation like this.

“Shh,” I said, trying to sound soothing. “You look good. You can hardly notice it.”

I'm not sure how many yards we ran through. Far enough that the sirens were lost to the distance and far enough that I was sure Roadblock couldn't possibly still be chasing us. It seemed like I'd been running forever and we were no closer to finding a place to hide. My hunger pangs were turning into hunger gongs.

Finally, I noticed an open basement window. It was the first one I'd seen that wasn't protected by metal bars.

I shoved Amanda through the opening and climbed in after her.

The basement was huge and smelled like the science wing at school on fetal-pig-dissection day. As my eyes adjusted to the dimness, I realized why.

We were in the basement of a funeral home.

One wall was covered in shelves containing all kinds of chemicals for the bodies, as well as makeup and perfumes—shit I figured might come in handy if we needed to cover up Amanda's face later.

In the corner next to the shelves was an old record player.
That's pretty cool,
I thought. If I was down here playing dress-up with dead bodies all day I'd want to have something to jam to.

In the center of the room were two metal slabs. One was empty, and on the other lay a peaceful-looking old lady in a pale flower-print dress. Probably somebody's grandma. Someone had been working on her recently, but quit before finishing. Half her face was pancaked in fresh makeup, the other looked uncomfortably similar to the splotchy gray skin on the backs of my hands.

Of course, Grandma immediately caught Amanda's attention. Before I could even think to stop her she was crawling on top of the body, sniffing her. Cautiously, she nibbled at the dead lady's forearm.

Amanda spit out the dead-lady meat and rolled onto the tile floor of the basement, curled into a ball, clutching her stomach and moaning.

I didn't know what the fuck to do. She rolled away from me when I tried to pat her back.

“Okay, calm down,” I said. “Just stay here.”

I left Amanda there and crept upstairs.

The basement opened up into the actual funeral parlor, like where they showcase the bodies for the crying families. I guessed this place would be getting a lot of business soon on account of what Amanda and I had done earlier.

Lucky for me there wasn't a funeral scheduled for that day. The parlor was empty except for rows and rows of folding chairs and the big pedestal thing where they put the coffin. I bet it would've really freaked people out if I'd come stumbling upstairs during an actual service. Do funerals have a money-back guarantee if they're interrupted by a wandering corpse?

I could hear the sound of a television tuned to the news. I went toward it.

On the other side of the parlor was a musty little apartment where the owners lived. What went wrong with their lives, you know? I mean, I guess someone has to be the funeral director and the dead-body makeover artist. That's cool, it's noble—like all the jobs no one wants to do. It's just not the kind of work I would want to bring home with me, much less live right on top of. Like, oh man, my commute is such a pain in the ass, I'm going to just start spreading makeup on these dead people in my basement now.

I know I shouldn't judge. Life can take some pretty twisted turns.

I walked past a cramped kitchen that smelled worse than the basement, then down a hallway where the walls were covered in framed photographs of children that were probably taken in, like, the Great Depression. I glanced into a bedroom and saw nothing but stacks of yellowing newspapers surrounding a twin bed.

Finally, I emerged into the living room.

Two people sat rapt, staring at the small, rabbit ears–style TV. They didn't even notice me come in.

The first was just a little mummy lady, wrinkled as all get-out. She was sitting in what had to be the world's creakiest rocking chair, a wool blanket tossed over her lap. She had both her hands covering her mouth, like she was shocked at something, and in the blue glow of the TV I could see the definition of her bones through the backs of her veiny hands.

The second was a middle-aged guy, probably son-of-the-mummy. He was chubby, wearing a black rubber apron and latex gloves, and still holding a pair of weird tong-type things. He was obviously the one who had been in the basement dolling up the corpse. His face was flushed. It looked like he'd run upstairs in a hurry.

On the TV, the news was in we-interrupt-this-program mode. The on-scene reporter looked like she was barely holding back tears. Behind her, some paramedics were carrying a gurney out of a building I sort of recognized. Suddenly, one of them broke away from the gurney and puked into the grass.

Then, I noticed the headline:
SCHOOL SHOOTING AT RONALD REAGAN HIGH
.

“Uh, what the fuck?” I said out loud.

Both the mortician and his mom turned to me with a start. The old lady pointed a shaky hand at the rotten hole in my stomach. The mortician held out his tongs in front of him like they could actually do something.

I could hear their hearts start to beat faster. Just as mine totally, like, stopped.

I was so hungry.

Then all I saw was red.

 

I woke up back in the basement, lying on the slab next to the dead lady that Amanda had tasted. The first thing that I noticed was the stairs and the thick trail of blood that dripped down them, ending in a sizable puddle beneath the last step. The blood was running toward me, into a drain positioned under the tables, the whole basement built on an angle to account for any accidental corpse spillage.

There was a second stream of blood coming from the corner by the stairs. A tarp covered a pile of something pink and copper smelling—I figured that was what was left of the mortician and his mother. Had I dragged those bodies down here? Covered them up? And, oh shit, where was—

Amanda.

She was crouching with her back to me, thumbing through the mortician's record collection. She must have heard me sit up because she turned to look at me.

“Holy shit!” I exclaimed. I couldn't help myself.

“What?” She instinctively reached up to touch her face, a note of panic in her voice.

“You look amazing.”

Amazing. Way to play it cool, dude.
She did look amazing, though. For starters, her eye had grown back inside her skull. The rest of her face was back to normal too. Maybe her hair was a little mussed from not showering after all the people-eating we'd done but, overall, she had that glowing, just-woke-up look about her.

“I mean,” I tried to clarify, “you look better.”

Amanda smirked and looked away. I think she was blushing, but maybe I was overestimating the power of my charm.

“You look better too,” she said.

I glanced down at my abdomen. My T-shirt was all torn to shreds, but beneath that was nothing but perfect pink skin, all of my guts modestly hidden.

“MOTHERFUCKING WOLVERINE!” I shouted.

Amanda glanced at me again. She was trying to look annoyed but I could see there was a spark of something in her eyes—not amusement, I wasn't that funny—but, like, shared excitement. We could heal!

“He's an X-Man,” I explained lamely. “He can—”