Jenny Undead (The Thirteen: Book One) (7 page)

Red. For the longest time all Jenny could see
was red. The sensations were far off, as though memories of a rage
she had once felt. And hunger. Such hunger. She could feel
herself moving through the red abyss, yet she seemed to have no
control. A passenger. She was watching it all from far away, from a
place where she could feel no pain. But in the distance, past this
red place, she could hear herself screaming.

Occasionally she would swim almost to the
surface. When she did, she felt cold and pain and a rawness that
made her sink back down into the red, like a womb. Through the
anger, deep under the anger, she felt fear. It wasn't far away like
the other emotions, but very close; on top of her, smothering her.
Over time, Jenny began to forget to be afraid. And then she forgot
what the fear tasted like. She felt just the cold echoes of fury
followed by the hunger.

Sometimes she recognized a voice, soothing, but
she couldn't make out the words. She listened closely, as if she
were underwater. The red was thinner now, easier to break through.
She forced her way closer to the voice, out of the red.

A man's voice. Casey? Was that right? She knew
him, but didn't know how. He smelled like something dead. She could
feel things now. Not from far away, but inside. Her chest hurt, a
deep, dull ache. She was dizzy and her eyes wouldn't focus. For a
moment she thought she was still stuck in the red abyss, but as she
adjusted and her vision returned to normal, Jenny saw that the red
was splashed everywhere. Her skin was cold and wet and sticky and
as she tried to back away from the red all over the floor, her foot
slipped.

Jenny looked down and saw it was all over her.
Blood. She could taste the tang of it still in her mouth.

“Oh my God,” she said, barely able
to speak the words. Something was wrong with her. She touched her
face and her cheeks and chin were slick. There were hairs stuck to
the blood on her arms. “Oh my God,” she croaked again.
“What is this?” She looked at the dead figure crouched
in front of her.

“Try to stay calm,” Casey said.
“It's okay.”

“It is
not
okay. It is far from fucking okay.”
Her voice was a hoarse whisper. There was light streaming in
through a hole in the ceiling, bright, warm light filling the room.
Jenny could see objects glistening red in the sun. Her eyes widened
as she realized they were bones. “Fuck,” she said. She
looked at Casey and shook her head. “This is a dream. A bad
dream.” The words came out as a hiss.

“No, it's real,” he said.
“Jenny, look at me.”

She jumped at her name. She'd forgotten it. How
could she forget her name? “This was me,” she said
after a moment. “I did this.”

“Yeah,” he said. “But calm
down. It's not human.”

Jenny froze. “Are you sure?”

He picked something off her arm and held it up
to the strange, dim light. It was the hair she'd seen. It was short
and bristly. Casey shrugged. “Goat.”

Jenny blinked at him. “There are no
goats,” she said, remembering. “There's no anything.
Just humans.”

“Why?” he said. “Because the
government told you?”

“Everyone knows that,” she said.

“Well, we have goats. So not everything is
gone.”

“You're my brother.”

“Yep.”

“What is this place?”

Casey swung over and sat down next to her, his
back resting against the cold metal wall. All the walls were metal.
“It's the Field Museum,” he said. “What's left of
it. This was some kind of storage vault. They preserved animal
skins and shit in here.”

“Why am I here?” Jenny said.

“We needed to put you somewhere
safe,” he said.

“I can take care of myself.”

“Not really what I meant,” he said.
“You're not the one I was worried about
protecting.”

She touched her hair. It was still in braids in
the Righteous style, though most of them had come free and were
standing at odd angles all over her head. They were stiff with
liquid drying on them.

“What's wrong with me?” she
said.

“I think you know the answer to
that.”

“No,” Jenny said. “I don't.
Why can't I talk normally?”

“Dead people don't breathe,” he
said. “You have to relearn how to do it.”

“I'm not dead,” she said. She could
hear the panic in her own voice. “That's not
possible.”

“What's the last thing you
remember?” Casey said. His voice was gentle.

“I was in a bed,”
Jenny said. “Declan was there. He was crying. Why was Declan
crying? He doesn't cry.” She looked at Casey, who was staring
at his hands resting on his knees. He was quiet. “I was
sick,” she said. Even if she'd been able to speak normally,
the words would probably have come out as a whisper. She'd been
sick, wounded. Her neck had hurt so badly. Jenny reached up and
felt the chunk missing from the back of her neck.
Oh,
Jesus. What the fuck is happening?

She tried to stand, to get away, but she was
weak and the floor was covered in blood.

“Jenny...” Casey said.

“No!” she said.
“You were a hallucination.
You weren't
there.
”

“I was there,” he said.

“This isn't
possible,” Jenny said. “I can't be a rotter. Rotters
don't think. Rotters don't do anything. They just
exist
.”

“And then there's us,” Casey
said.

“This is insane,” she hissed.

“Jen,” Casey said. “You're
sitting in a lake of goat blood.”

“That is a valid point.” There was
an edge of hysteria in her words.

Casey took her hand gently.
“Breathe,” he said.

“I can't.”

“It doesn't come naturally, but you have
to learn to do it to talk. Just pretend you need the air. Suck it
down deep into your lungs. Trust me, you'll feel better.”

Jenny tried to breathe in air, but it felt as
though she was sucking in water, drowning. Casey held her hands
tight, which calmed her a bit. After a few tries, she managed to
breathe in a puff of air. There was pain low in her chest, on
either side.

“It's okay,” Casey said. “It's
just your lungs.”

Jenny forced herself to inhale several more
times, and the pain subsided. She looked at Casey. “I can't
do this,” she said, the words coming easier. “I can't
be this way.”

“We're not like the others, Jen,” he
said. “We think and talk. We feel emotion, and sleep, and do
the things everyone else does.” He gave a shrug and the
corner of his mouth turned up in a half-smile. “We're just
not exactly alive.”

“We?” she said.

“Yeah,” He said. He stood up,
pushing his back against the wall. He held a hand out to her.
“Let me show you.”

“Show me what?”

“The others,” he said, pulling her
to her feet. Jenny's knees were weak, but she managed not to fall
over. “Come meet The Thirteen.”

The light hurt her eyes as they walked out of
the blood-spattered metal room. The door resembled a walk-in cooler
in a restaurant or a butcher shop.

“What is that place?” she said.

“Apparently the museum used it to keep old
pelts from rotting,” said Casey. “Least that's what
Fisher says.”

“Fisher?”

“Yeah, you'll see in a minute. Anyway, we
took all the fur stuff down right away and used them for
beds.”

“Don't we need to clean up the
blood?” she said, as Casey pulled the door shut tight.

“What for? We're only here because we were
looking for you.”

“Me?” she said. Her brain wasn't
functioning properly. It felt muddy. Her nerves felt as if they
were on the outside of her skin and she hunched as she walked. All
she could think about was her hunger. “Why were you looking
for me?”

“You're the key,” said Casey,
holding her arm and walking her toward a bright light. “It'll
get easier. You'll stop feeling everything after a
while.”

“The key to what?”
she said, trying to distract herself from wanting to rip something
apart. She felt edgy and angry and sick. Like death warmed over.
She almost laughed. Maybe not warmed over, but she
had
died. Jenny stopped and Casey looked back
at her.

“I'm dead,” she said.

“We've been over this.”

“I'm fucking dead, Casey.”

He nodded. “Congratulations. You're part
of the club.”

She narrowed her eyes. “Sarcasm is not
fucking necessary right now.”

“Sorry.”

“I died. Can I have a minute to wrap my
head around that?”

Casey softened a little. “You'll have lots
of time,” he said. “Time's all we got.”

“You should have let me pull the
trigger,” she said. “Will I turn into a
rotter?”

“No.”

“How do you know?”

“Because I didn't. Because none of us did.
Trix was the first, right after the Collapse, when the Army
disappeared. So five years ago, give or take a few months. And
she's no rotter. You won't be either.”

“Why were you looking for me?” she
said.

“You're my sister.”

“I abandoned you. You should hate
me.”

“You were sixteen,” he said.
“And it was worse for you.”

She nodded. “Yeah. But that's no
excuse.”

“I've never blamed you, Jen. If you think
I've been mad at you all these years, you're wrong. I was happy you
got away.”

“That's stupid,” she said. “I
left you there.”

“With good reason,” he said.
“Come on. You have to meet them sooner or later. You have to
admit what you are. This will help, I promise.”

She shook her head. “What was that you
said about me being a link? A link to what?”

He looked at her patiently. “You're the
one who's going to help us find the others.”

“What others?”

“The other Thirteen.”

“There aren't thirteen of you
now?”

“No,” he said, starting to sound
irritated. “There were thirteen in the beginning. From the
experiments.”

Jenny stared. For a moment she forgot about the
hunger gnawing at her insides. “Experiments. You have got to
be fucking kidding me.”

“I will explain everything,” he
said. “But you have to stop stalling and come with
me.”

“Mom's experiments?”

“Jesus, Jenny. Will you just come with
me?”

She shook her head.

“What the fuck is the matter with
you?”

She licked her lips with a dry
tongue. She wished for something thick and salty. Jenny was
nauseated by the thought. “What the fuck is the matter with
me?” she said. “I'm fucking dead. I'm a zombie rotter
who has no business walking around talking to people. I want to eat
people. I want to slurp their blood. How is that natural, Casey? I
don't want to meet your zombie friends, I don't want to be your
zombie big sis to pal around with. I don't want this. I never did.
I wanted to die, but you stopped me. So what the fuck is wrong
with
you
? Maybe that's the better
question.”

Casey stared at her for a moment, his jaw moving
but no words coming out. Speechless. “Shit,” he said
after a while.

“So,” a voice wafted around the
corner. A female voice. “You guys know we can hear you out
here, right?”

Casey looked like he might laugh. Jenny glared
at him. She took a step and poked her head around the corner. Three
faces were staring at her: The pretty Asian girl with short hair; a
skinny, tall guy with glasses over white eyes and light brown skin,
and the big guy who climbed in her window.,.

The Asian girl, who Jenny guessed must be Trix,
arched an eyebrow. “Zombies have feelings, too,
bitch.”

Casey offered introductions. “Jenny, this
is Trix.” He pointed to the big white guy with the crooked
nose. “And that's Fisher.” He moved his finger to point
at the skinny guy with glasses. “And Grayson.” The
skinny guy gave a sarcastic salute. “Everyone, this is
Jenny.”

Jenny stepped out and stood there awkwardly.
Everyone was staring at her.

“Jesus Christ, Casey,” said
Trix.

“What?”

She got up out of her chair. Jenny noticed for
the first time that they were in a conference room. There were no
tables, but a dozen mismatched chairs lined the walls, and a few
had been pulled into a circle in the middle of the room.

Trix grabbed Jenny's arm, making her flinch. She
shrugged. “Come with me. I'll help you get cleaned up.”
She shot a look at Casey.

Jenny looked down at herself
and remembered she was covered in blood. It was drying now, flaking
off her skin and what was left of her clothes. It was caked in her
hair and crackled on her face. She could even feel it drying in her
nose. The clothes Jenny was wearing had been shredded in her
apparent frenzy. The thumper dress
she'd put on back at Sully's tent a lifetime ago was
unrecognizable. It hung in tatters around her legs and one arm hung
by a thread. The collar was completely gone for some reason and it
hung loose and stiff with blood around her chest.

She followed Trix out of the room, feeling dead
eyes burning into her back as she went. Trix led her down a hall
that was completely missing a roof. It looked as though it had been
blown off with a bomb. Thumpers had bombed every scientific
facility they could, before all the explosives were used up. Not
long after that, bullets became pretty scarce, too. Jenny looked at
the floor. Vines were crawling in from outside and in a few places
the tile floor was cracked and what looked like the soft tendrils
of tree saplings were growing through. Trix deftly stepped around
them, her spiked black boots not making a sound, making Jenny's
barefoot, stumbling steps all the more obvious.

“You'll get used to it,” Trix said
over her shoulder, her voice steely. “It's worse for us. They
don't get it.”

“Us?” Jenny said.

“Women. It's harder on us. Blood-lust
comes naturally to them. We have to learn to live with
it.”

“That seems a little sexist,” Jenny
mumbled.

“Fuck your sexist,” she said.
“I'm a realist.” She wasn't angry, her voice stayed
flat. “You don't remember me, do you?”

Jenny blinked, watching Trix's back as they
walked. Trix walked around a branch that had fallen in.

“Sorry,” Jenny said. “I
don't.”

“It's okay,” Trix said. “I was
a kid. Casey's age.”

“There were so many,” Jenny said.
“In the end. Why are there only thirteen?”

“There are
thirteen
left
,” Trix
said.

“What do you mean?”

“Jesus,” she said. “The rest
are all dead.”

Trix stopped outside a door and turned the
handle. She motioned Jenny inside without making eye contact. The
room was dark, but she flipped a switch and a lamp glowed,
revealing a bathroom, though the toilet had been torn out and half
the wall was gone. A tube fed in from outside rested inside a large
plastic tub that looked like a horse trough. It was filled with
cloudy water.

“Rainwater,” said Trix. “We'll
have to start over after you clean up. Probably haul some of that
nasty water from the lake.”

“I'm sorry,” said Jenny.

“Why?” said Trix, no note of sarcasm
in her voice. Trix shrugged. “You can get cleaned up
here,” Trix said. “I'll bring you some clean
clothes.”

“Wait,” Jenny said. She stopped, her
hand on the doorknob. “Why are the others dead? Did the
rotters kill them?”

“No,” Trix said, finally meeting her
eyes. Jenny got a shiver looking into those translucent-white eyes
in such a pretty face. She could almost make out her darker,
original eye color underneath. “Your bitch mother
did.”