Eat, Brains, Love (9 page)

“I'm going to check it out,” she said. “You stay here.”

“Check it out for
what
?”

“I don't know,” she said, sounding panicked. “Maybe they sell raw hamburger?”

“You think that will work?” I exclaimed.

She didn't answer. I heard her own stomach growl as she got out of the car and jogged toward the gas station, and as soon as she was gone, I forgot what she'd told me. Couldn't hold on to the thought. It wasn't about eating, so it didn't matter. The world around me was going red again.

I'm pretty sure that's when my heart stopped.

I sat up and tried to open the door but she'd locked it and though I fumbled with the power locks I suddenly couldn't figure out how they were supposed to work. So I just slammed my head through the window. I spit out a piece of glass along with a rotten brown tooth, climbed through the window, and moved toward the gas station.

I made a real effort to keep my arms at my sides, not wanting to alarm anyone by doing the grasping zombie-arm thing. I was more conscious this time than back at school. More aware. But I
really
wanted to charge, to dive through the gas station window and bite the kid I could see checking out Amanda from behind the cash register. Even though my limbs felt cold in the places where I could feel them at all, I felt like I could run, could hunt, could kill.

Everything went red.

Next thing I remember, Amanda had her arms around my waist and was dragging me back toward the car. She was surprisingly strong.

“No, Jake,” she was saying. “No. He's just a kid.”

I screamed. Or howled. Dark phlegm spilled down my chin.

So hungry.

I broke Amanda's grip easily enough and sent her falling to the pavement. The gas station attendant came outside then—probably trying to play knight in shining armor. When he got a look at me, though, he ran back inside.

I sprinted after him. I could smell him. It was delicious.

And that's when the headlights washed over me, and the Prius with the devil-horns hood ornament ran me over.

CASS

I WOKE UP FEELING LIKE MY BRAIN HAD GAINED FIVE pounds overnight. Not five pounds of intelligence . . . It felt as if my brain had literally swollen up to the point where my skull was no longer big enough to contain it. A few months ago, Tom had shown me part of this nutso '80s sci-fi movie called
Scanners
without thinking about the fact that the sight of telepaths exploding one another's heads with watermelon-style special effects was maybe not the most comforting viewing material for a teenage telepath. He'd turned it off after he'd come to his senses, but I'd seen enough of it to know that, right now, I felt like the Scanners probably felt right before, you know,
splat
.

Tom was standing in the middle of our dingy New Jersey motel room, ironing a pair of pleated gray slacks. I'd gotten used to waking up in places like this; our tracking missions sometimes kept us away from Washington for a few days, and the government wasn't exactly known for splurging on four-star hotels.

Tom was keeping an eye on me. When I leaned up on my elbows and groaned, he grinned in relief.

“There you are,” he said. “Did you have a nice nap?”

I tried to reply, but a weak ugh was all I could manage. My mouth tasted like it'd been dusted with sock-flavored flour. Tom nodded to the bedside table, and I greedily grabbed the bottle of OJ and bag of donuts he'd picked up for me. My head immediately cleared when I started to eat—ah, vitamin C and whatever magical ingredients create strawberry jelly filling.

“So, I don't want to alarm you,” began Tom, “but you've been asleep for sixteen hours.”

“Jeez,” I replied. “How much of that time did you spend ironing?”

Tom guiltily looked down at his aggressively flattened pair of pants. “About four hours.”

I've never been a late sleeper, even back when the government wasn't making my schedule. In fact, the summer when my big sister, Carrie, came home from college a victim of the “freshman fifteen,” she made me promise to wake her up every day and force her to go running. I didn't even need to set an alarm; I woke every day an hour after sunrise and dragged Carrie down to the track behind the school. So it was kind of worrisome that I'd been passed out for more than half a day.

“What happened?” I asked Tom. “Am I okay?”

“They said you knocked that zombie out with your mind,” Tom answered. “What's okay after that?”

“I don't know
what
I did, really.”

“Well, whatever it was, you probably saved Harlene's life. You deserved a good sleep.” He said it casually, but I could tell Tom was a little freaked out too. Whether by my Sleeping Beauty routine or by my telepathic knockout punch, I couldn't tell.

“I screwed up,” I replied quietly, studying my half-eaten donut. “I read that scene and only saw two zombies, not three.”

Tom shook his head. “Slade didn't change at the school with the other two. We sent a team to his house last night. Found his parents eaten along with a bunch of dogs from the neighborhood. The prevailing theory is that he necrotized weeks back and had been hiding out.”

I thought of the big map in Washington with its little red lights for zombie incidents. There hadn't been any other blinking alerts in the area. “How is that possible?”

“If nothing gets reported, I guess it's possible for a zombie to slip through the cracks,” answered Tom.

I'd never thought of the NCD as anything but this infallible zombie-hunting agency. If a guy like Chazz Slade could go unnoticed, though, I wondered how many other zombies could be out there undetected. The thought made me shudder.

Tom set his ironing aside and sat down next to me on the edge of the bed. “How are you feeling?” he asked. When I sat up to answer him, I noticed a rust-colored stain on my pillow. I picked at it curiously with my thumbnail.

“Your nose bled a little during the night,” he explained.

“Again? I never get nosebleeds.”

He shrugged. “I wouldn't worry about it, Psychic Friend.”

 

My head felt a million times better after a hot shower. Before I'd even finished getting dressed, there was a knock on the motel room door. I padded out of the steamy bathroom in my jellies—I thought they were dorky, but Tom insisted I never let my bare feet touch the floor of a rented bathroom—to find Jamison waiting in the doorway. Tom was giving him a dirty look, yesterday's bad judgment still not forgiven, but Jamison wasn't paying him any attention.

“Boss wants to see you,” Jamison said to me.

“Harlene?” I asked, glad to hear she was up and giving orders. “How's she doing?”

Jamison shook his head. “The
other
boss.”

At first, I didn't know who he meant. Then, I remembered last night's weirdly convenient appearance of the man from Washington.

“Mr. Bow Tie?”

Now Jamison and Tom exchanged a look, their animosity momentarily forgotten.

“I wouldn't call him that,” muttered Jamison.

“His name is Alastaire,” Tom offered helpfully.

“Is that his first name or last name?”

“You know,” said Tom, “I'm not really sure.”

“Just stick with ‘sir,'” said Jamison.

 

It was cold and dark, the sky spitting sporadic bursts of rain. I pulled a thick wool hat on over my wet hair, shivering. I suddenly really wanted to get out of New Jersey. The barracks in Washington where Tom and I lived in between missions may have had terrible food and a seriously limited DVD collection, but right now they seemed like the coziest place in the world.

Tom and I crossed the motel parking lot to where Alastaire was waiting, leaning against the side of a black sedan, furiously typing on his phone. A blank-faced, burly G-man in a drab gray suit was standing next to him, holding an umbrella so not a drop of rain dampened his bow tie. As we approached, Alastaire slipped his phone into one of those lame leather hip holsters.

“Ah, there you are,” he said.

“Good evening, sir,” I replied, sticking to the governmental tone Tom and Jamison recommended.

The guy in the gray suit promptly folded up the umbrella and opened the back door of the car.

“Shall we go for a ride?” Alastaire asked.

I climbed into the car, trying not to show how nervous I felt being around this guy. Tom tried to climb into the car behind me, but Alastaire put a hand gently on his shoulder.

“We'll be okay without you, Thomas,” he said.

“But I'm her guardian,” replied Tom meekly.

“I know that,” said Alastaire, and his patient smile was a tight thing that seemed almost painful for him to use. “I hired you. Don't worry, I'll bring her back safe.”

Alastaire slid into the seat beside me, and the driver slammed the door shut. I watched Tom through the tinted window and had to resist the urge to put my palm up to the glass, like a kid in some movie being taken away from her parents and sent to a sinister orphanage.

The town was quiet as we drove through it. I figured most people were spending their Saturday inside after what had happened yesterday. You know, being close to family, being quietly reflective, all that typical grief stuff. We drove past the school, which was surrounded by yellow police tape. Flowers, candles, and framed photographs had begun to pile up on the sidewalk.

It was a depressing scene. We were usually too busy tracking down the undead to stick around the site of the crime after an incident played out, so this was the first time I'd ever seen the sadness that follows. The mourning. Just like yesterday was the first time I'd ever seen a zombie talk. Right when I thought that I'd gotten used to the NCD lifestyle, or at least gotten accustomed to the grind of reading death imprints and telling my team where to start their hunt. All this—well, it was a lot to think about.

But something told me that now wasn't the time to get reflective. The car was warm and mellow classical music was on the radio. Still, Mr. Bow Tie—Alastaire—made me uneasy. He wasn't staring at me—he was too busy typing into his phone—but somehow I felt like he was
observing
me.

“I'm glad we have this chance to talk,” he said, his voice smooth as silk.

“Um, yeah. Me too,” I replied reflexively.

“What you did last night was rather impressive.”

I didn't even know how I'd managed to knock out Chazz Slade, and I sure didn't want to give Alastaire any inkling that I didn't know what I was doing. I just let the compliment hang there, hoping that would be the end of the discussion.

“Do you think you could do it again?”

I touched my nose. “It was kind of painful.”

He smirked. “It gets easier. Trust me. Most telepaths wouldn't be capable of such a feat, much less at your age.”

“Is he dead?” I asked. “Chazz, er, the zombie?”

Alastaire laughed, shaking his head. “Well, dead is relative,” he said. “But he's as alive as his kind ever gets. Your action allowed us to preserve him for study. Thanks to you, we'll be able to better understand what we're up against.”

An image popped into my head of Chazz strapped to a metal gurney, a man in a blood-spattered white lab coat standing over him with an electric bone saw. Chazz looked terrified. I squeezed my eyes shut and pushed the vision away. Was that just my imagination, or something else?

 

I'm not a big hospital person. The pungent antiseptic smell, the harsh lighting: it all just reminded me of my daily after-school visits with my dad as he was dying of pancreatic cancer. He was hooked up to all these machines and tried to joke and smile like he used to, but every day there was less and less of him until he was gone.

Alastaire put a hand on my shoulder as we crossed through the hospital lobby. I got the feeling that he was trying to comfort me, and that just creeped me out more, so I sped up my walk, his hand falling back to his side.

It was weird—as we passed the front desk, the nurse on duty didn't even look at us. I expected Alastaire to check in or something, but he seemed to know right where he was going. Of course, I didn't have a clue.

“What're we doing here?” I finally asked as we continued down a hallway in intensive care.

A doctor filling out paperwork jumped at the sound of my voice. It's like he hadn't noticed us until I'd spoken.

My head was still achy, but I forced my mind to focus. Alastaire was radiating something. . . . It's hard to explain, sort of like when you see a pan on a stove and can tell it's hot without touching it. Whatever he was doing, it caused the people walking by not to notice us. Their eyes just passed right over us, like we were slippery. It reminded me of the way we handled Incident Management—guiding our cover story into the minds of civilians—except now it was as if Alastaire was directing the way people perceived our very presence.

Wait—Alastaire was doing
what
?

My breath caught. Oh my god. He was a telepath too. What kind of nasty things had I been thinking about him?

“We're here to visit a particularly stubborn patient,” he explained, either not noticing that I'd just had a major revelation about his mutant status, or choosing to ignore it. “Up to this point, she's resisted our cover story.”

The patient's room we entered was completely dark except for the glow of the machines she was hooked up to. Alastaire closed the door behind us and I felt like I'd been locked in a room where some kind of séance was about to happen, the ghostly electric greens of the heart monitor floating like evil spirits around the bed of this shriveled, old gypsy woman.

This lady was little. Like, really little. Her feet poked up under the sheet about halfway down the bed. Yet even lying down and barely conscious, she had this air of authority about her. She had a tangled mop of frizzy gray hair, a big gold crucifix around her neck, and a giant bandage on her clavicle where one of our runaway zombies had taken a bite out of her.

“Ms. Hardwick,” Alastaire said softly, “we're here to talk to you about yesterday's shooting.”

“Pah,” the woman spat, and when her eyes snapped open I actually jumped back from the bed. They were bloodshot but laser focused, swinging imperiously between me and Alastaire. “That was no school shooting, young man.”

“Oh no?” Alastaire looked mildly amused. I didn't think there was anything funny about Hardwick. The way she looked at us—at me, in particular—was like she knew our every secret, had judged them, and was totally disgusted. I couldn't imagine what it must have been like to walk the halls of RRHS with that old wackadoo stalking around. It must have been impossible to get away with anything.

“I saw the devil in those children,” said Hardwick with grave certainty. “He has risen.”

Alastaire gave me a subtle nod, telling me that I should get on with bending Hardwick's mind to our version of events. I widened my eyes at him, mouthing,
Me?
He nodded again and turned back to Hardwick.

“My dear,” he said to Ms. Hardwick. “What you're suffering from is post-traumatic stress.”

Why would Alastaire make me do this when he was a perfectly good telepath himself, one obviously more powerful than me and without a psychic hangover? Was this some kind of test? It felt like it—like he'd been evaluating me,
watching
me, from the moment I got into his car.

I reached my mind out toward Hardwick's. It felt like my brain had just run a marathon and now I was asking it to bang out a few more laps. I immediately started sweating, something that had never happened before when I used my psychic powers. I leaned against the railing on the side of Hardwick's hospital bed, feeling dizzy. All I knew was if this was some kind of test, it was probably a good idea to pass.

As Alastaire went through the now familiar school-shooting narrative, I watched the words enter Hardwick's mind. Or try to enter. If all minds have doors where information enters, Hardwick's were locked, barred, and sealed over with bricks. Alastaire's words just bounced off her mind.