Eat, Brains, Love (6 page)

“Yeah, I know who he is. Hugh Jackman.”

I rubbed my belly, just happy to have it back.

“We made it.”

“Uh-huh. We made it to the basement of a funeral parlor in Newark.”

Well, it didn't sound so good when she said it like that. Still, I felt a deep sense of relief. We'd escaped those psychos in the black SUV and were whole again. I mean, don't get me wrong, we had some serious problems to figure out, but when you see a girl grow back her face, everything else seems way more workable.

“So, Jake,” she said, awkwardly fingering a clump of dried blood in her hair. “You sort of saved me back there.”

“You saved me too.”

“Yeah.” Amanda shrugged. “Thanks, though. You didn't have to do that.”

I didn't know what to say. The way she thanked me, it seemed like Amanda Blake wasn't used to dudes sticking their necks out for her. I thought of Chazz Slade and what he might've done if he had been the one turned into a zombie with his girlfriend. Probably would've copped a quick feel while he was carrying Amanda down that alley, that's for sure.

I should've thought of that.

“My dad loves this old stuff,” Amanda said, still looking through the mortician's records.

“Is there anything with, like, sixty guitars? Because I feel like rocking out.”

“Uh, no,” she said. “This is a good one.”

She took the record out of its dust jacket carefully, as if the dead mortician would give a shit, and gently placed it on the record player.

It was a Frank Sinatra recording: “The Way You Look Tonight.” Not really my thing, but something told me that after that night in the basement it'd be a song I committed to memory.

We listened to the beginning in silence—Sinatra doing that old-man crooning stuff over some horns. Amanda drummed her fingers on her thighs.

Before the second verse, she grabbed some weird metallic plunger from the mortician's toolbox. That thing had probably scooped so much goop out of so many corpses, but that didn't stop Amanda from lip-synching into it. She mouthed the words in perfect time with Sinatra, working an imaginary crowd of lounge-goers, even doffing an imaginary hat, all while barely containing her laughter.

I watched in amazement. Holy shit. Amanda Blake was kind of dorky.

We'd just turned into flesh-eating brain-sucking monsters and eaten a bunch of our friends. And some other people. We'd also narrowly escaped some gun-toting government hard case. Plus, if I remembered that fuzzy TV report I'd seen upstairs correctly, they were calling us “school shooters” on the news. That's a day of heavy transformative shit right there.

And yet, for some reason, I felt content. Almost normal.

Maybe it was the Sinatra, although honestly I thought he was kind of boring. Maybe it was just the fact that down in that basement, right then, we could take a deep breath and shut out all the craziness for a minute. Whatever it was, as random as the timing seemed, I'm pretty sure seeing Amanda lip-synch into that cadaver-spatula was the moment I fell in love for the first time.

CASS

“IT'S KILLING ME!”

I hummed a few bars of the song for Tom. It'd popped into my head out of nowhere and I couldn't shake it loose. In my experience, the only way to exterminate one of these earworms was to play the song in question. Before I could look it up on my government-provided off-brand MP3 player, I had to figure out what the name of the song was.

“No clue,” Tom said distractedly. He wasn't really listening. He was still pretty shaken up from the fight earlier. Just like I had never actually seen an out-and-out blood-spattered zombie showdown, neither had my handler. Tom was an exploding-brains virgin too. We made quite a pair.

“You did a good job, hon,” Harlene had told Tom when we'd returned to Ronald Reagan High School. “You kept my Sweet Pea safe.” He looked relieved to hear it, although the color still hadn't totally returned to his face.

Then Harlene had rounded on Jamison, and for a second I thought she might grab him by the ear and drag him off for a serious scolding. He had it coming, disobeying a direct order, almost getting us killed. Harlene kept up the sugary southern belle sweetness, though, touching Jamison gently on the arm.

“How you feeling?” she asked.

Jamison looked down, sheepish. The top of his shaved head was covered in little nicks from where the girl—Amanda—had launched him through the telephone booth.

“I lost it,” he muttered. “It won't happen again.”

“It better not,” replied Harlene, and that was that. Matter settled. Back when I actually went to school, the best teachers always had this way about them—they wouldn't yell or lecture or threaten bad grades—you just wanted to do well in their class because, if you didn't . . . That was unthinkable. They'd be so disappointed. Harlene had that way about her. It's probably what made the pageant judges love her so much back in Georgia, and it's what made her such a good squad leader now.

“I want people to think of me as calm and cool like that,” I told Tom as soon as Harlene and Jamison were out of earshot.

“Unflappable,” offered Tom.

“Yeah,” I agreed.

“I was far from that today.”

“We were both pretty flapped.”

Tom flashed me a guilty look. “But I'm supposed to be your guardian.”

I waved my hands, demonstrating my aliveness. “You guarded.”

“I've never seen one of them talk before,” he said. “The girl one talked to us.”

“Yeah, that was freaky,” I said, although I hadn't really been thinking about my brief exchange with Amanda. I was more stuck on Jake—the gruesome wound on his abdomen, his wide-eyed look, the way he carried Amanda out of danger.
He
had seemed pretty unflappable. Were zombies supposed to be unflappable? It was all kind of confusing.

I had to remind myself—again—that he had eaten a bunch of kids and needed to be put down.

Anyway, Tom and I stood on the lawn back at RRHS as the chaos unfolded around us. NCD reinforcements had arrived: guys in jumpsuits like mine, other more important-looking ones with cheap suits and earpieces. The local cops had shown up too, manning a perimeter of yellow tape and flashing blue lights. They kept the journalists at bay and gently escorted the crying parents away. We never let the cops near the actual scene—they'd get fed the same cover story as the rest of the civilians, a cover story I'm sure Harlene and her boss back in Washington had already cooked up.

“School shooting,” Tom said as if he'd read my mind.

“Seriously?”

Tom nodded.

“That's screwed up.”

Containment—that's a nice way to describe killing a zombie—was only part of my unit's job. The other part, the one that wasn't nearly as cool as doing telepathic CSI on the freshly eaten, was called “Incident Management.” A bunch of dead kids was an “Incident” and we were here to “Manage” it.

 

They handed out the color pamphlet during the second week of NCD training. The cover read
AM I READY TO LEARN ABOUT ZOMBIES?
and pictured an elderly man with a curious look on his face. Inside the pamphlet were a bunch of pictures of people with similar wondering looks, each of them helpfully labeled, like
SMALL-TOWN SHERIFF
, or
KINDLY DOCTOR
, or
YOUR MOM
.

In bright-red block letters above each picture was the word
NO
.

“The point is,” our instructor intoned, “that our leaders in Washington don't think the general populace is ready to learn about the zombie outbreak.”

Oh good, because the pamphlet didn't make that clear.

I'll be honest; this part kind of freaked me out. If I was just an ordinary civilian, I'd definitely want to know if there was a plague that might one day turn my neighbor into a superstrong, decomposing, human-eating machine. That's what they invented that annoying emergency-broadcasting thing for, right?
This is not a test, there are monsters coming to eat you. . . .
I'd want to know that. I'd want to know that big-time.

On the other hand, and this probably doesn't sound very mature, but it felt like I was
in
on something. The president himself trusted me with top-secret information. I was the first line of defense between America and the undead. Sort of. That was pretty freaking cool. So what if, in every disaster movie I'd ever seen, government secrecy led to even bigger disasters? This was real life. We were doing the right thing, keeping the public safe.

One of the other trainees raised his hand. “Is it true that we've completely lost Iowa?”

Our instructor glanced over his shoulder to where Mr. Bow Tie was sitting, hidden behind a newspaper. He'd been observing this class from the start, making everyone including the instructor uneasy. Now, he lowered his paper, neatly folded it, and smiled indulgently at the question asker.

“Where did you hear that nonsense?” asked Mr. Bow Tie.

“There are rumors floating around campus,” replied the guy nervously. “People, um, talk.”

“Of course they do,” said Mr. Bow Tie, motioning for the instructor to resume his lecture.

“Part of your job will be to make sure the public remains safe, comfortable, and unaware,” the instructor said, ignoring the question. But I was paying more attention to Mr. Bow Tie now. He was still eyeing my too-curious classmate, typing something into his cell phone without looking down at the keys.

Come to think of it, after that day, I don't remember seeing the question asker again.

 

I'd done my fair share of Incident Management since joining the NCD, but never one as big as Ronald Reagan High School. There was that football game in Cleveland where a fan had transformed and eaten a couple of his pals before being subdued. We'd played that one like a couple of rival fans had got out of control and started a vicious brawl. Most other times, the attacks were isolated and the zombies easily tracked down. In those cases, there wasn't as much cover-up needed. We leaked stories to the papers about domestic violence, or home invasion, or grizzly bear attacks, or weird new drugs that made people go crazy. As for the people who weren't so easily convinced—for them, we had “special techniques.” And just like that, our version of events became the truth.

But this time, there were so many bodies and killers still on the loose. Plus, the attack had taken place at a posh suburban high school. There were a lot of eyeballs on this one.

We were going to be here all night.

So, Tom and I sat on the RRHS lawn, waiting for our orders. We shared a Ziploc bag of mandarin oranges Tom had packed that morning, and I kept bothering him about my earworm.

It was past ten that night when another telepath named Linda came to find me. Tom was dozing in the grass and I was watching the stricken parents milling about the police barricade. There were a lot of kids still sequestered in the school, awaiting NCD questioning.

“Cass, they want you inside,” said Linda, dabbing at her bloody nose with a crusty paper towel.

Linda and I had similar jobs, except she was in her thirties and nowhere near as good a telepath. Let's just say I'd never gotten any bloody noses from overexertion. If they'd flown Linda out from DC, they must've really needed all hands on deck.

“Me too?” asked Tom.

“Actually, Harlene wants you to go grab some coffees.”

“At last, a job I am uniquely suited for,” declared Tom before squeezing my arm. “Don't work too hard, Psychic Friend.”

Linda led me into the school. We walked down a hallway where a line of students waited, some of them blood-spattered and wrapped in blankets, all of them exhausted. They leaned or sat against the lockers, under the guard of a Jumpsuit holding a submachine gun. I was picking up serious anxiety vibes. How could we make a traumatic day even more traumatic? Just like this.

I felt like maybe I should say something comforting because I was their age. Like, It's cool, you guys, we don't mean you any harm, sorry your friends are dead. But I doubted it would do any good. The kids not huddled together crying were fixing me with suspicious looks. I wasn't one of them; I was one of the Jumpsuits.

Harlene had set up shop in one of the classrooms. She sat behind the teacher's desk, attendance sheets and permanent records piled up before her. We needed to go through every student before they'd be allowed to leave.

I glanced around the room—there was a big antismoking poster on one wall, all yellowed teeth and cancer-speckled gum lines. Next to that was one of a couple kids in torn jeans and flannels—a total relic of the '90s—that explained why it was “boss” to wait to have sex.

“Health class,” I observed. “Ironic choice.”

Harlene gave me a tired smile. “You up for this, hon?”

I nodded and plopped down into a chair next to her. Jamison showed in the first kid. She looked like a freshman. She was shaking like a leaf as she slid into the mustard-colored desk-chair combo pulled closest to Harlene.

“Everything's okay now,” said Harlene, her voice soothing.

“When can I go home?” asked the girl.

“Soon,” replied Harlene.

The girl's name was Victoria. She hadn't been in the cafeteria when the incident took place; she'd been in math class, struggling with sine and cosine. She'd heard rumors, though, that Amanda Blake, the most popular girl in the school, had eaten a bunch of kids. Some other guy had been involved too. Some stoner dork whose name she didn't know.

Of course, Victoria didn't actually tell us any of that. I picked it up off the surface of her mind.

Every mind might be like a house, but that doesn't mean I can just go barging in. Well—I
could
, except it's unpleasant for me and even worse for the mind on the receiving end. You have to be subtle: peek in the windows, press your ear up to the door, and pick up whatever stray thoughts you can. It was a lot easier when a person was scared or tired, like Victoria. When you're that way—unfocused—thoughts have a way of just shooting off your brain like sparks.

It was just like the psychometric test they gave me back in school. I didn't know what shapes were printed on the military recruiters' cards, but the recruiters did, and they were thinking about them. Thoughts close to the surface like that are easy to pick up on.

Going deeper than that top layer of thoughts, or staying linked to someone like I was with Jake, that was harder. Physical contact helped, or an object like
The House of Mirth
. Something to focus on. And I couldn't keep up that contact for long. I could still feel Jake out there, in the back of my mind, but that link would grow fainter soon. It's why we tried to track down the zombies as quickly as possible.

But for now, we had to deal with Victoria and the rest. Incident Management was tonight's top priority.

“I'm sorry to keep you here so late on such a horrible day,” Harlene said to Victoria, her voice gently authoritative. “We've just got to talk to every student about the shooting.”

“Shooting?” asked Victoria, her eyes widening.

Harlene laid out the story. Frustrated popular girl and her secret, unpopular boy-toy hatch a plan to get revenge on a school that never took them seriously. Guns purchased on the internet, a cold-blooded killing spree, a cowardly escape. Honestly, it's not something that would pass the smell test. It sounded like the plot from a bad after-school special.

That's why I was there.

I closed my eyes and slipped up against Victoria's mind, being as gentle as possible. It was sort of like playing Operation on the astral plane. Don't push too hard or the alarm buzzes and everyone gets a migraine.

As Harlene laid out the details, I nudged Victoria toward believing them.

Imagine every piece of information you hear entering the labyrinth of your mind via one of two doors: “truth” and “bullshit.” (It's actually a lot more complicated than that; there are doors for “things I want to believe” and “things I believe to make myself feel better”—hundreds of doors, really.) Anyway, my job was to make sure our cover story entered Victoria's mind the
right
way.

When I was satisfied that Victoria had accepted Harlene's version of events, I opened my eyes and gave Harlene a subtle nod. She smiled and dismissed Victoria.

I rubbed my temples. Even though I liked to think of myself as some kind of telepathic prodigy, massaging Victoria's psyche was harder than I expected after such a nutso day. Tracking Jake and now this . . . I was definitely going to need a fistful of Advil in the morning.

Harlene watched me. “You let me know when you're tired, hon. Linda's here and we've got the rest of the telepaths in from Washington too—you'll work in shifts.”

“I'm cool,” I said, not wanting to get shown up by any B-teamers. “Getting tired of telling that shooting story yet?”