Jenny Undead (The Thirteen: Book One) (8 page)

The water was room temperature and cloudy, but
Jenny emerged feeling far better than she had going in. The clothes
Trix left in a pile outside the door. were a little skimpy for her
taste, and at least a size smaller, but after being stuck in a wool
dress in high summer in Chicago, Jenny wasn't about to complain.
She didn't have a towel, so she air dried and then pulled the
clothes on. Trix left boots, too: Tall and shiny black leather and
actually the right size, Jenny thought as she stepped into them.
But most important, Trix had also left the bowie knife, long,
clean, and freshly-sharpened. Jenny strapped the sheath to her
thigh and slipped the blade into the leather. She felt more like
herself.

Jenny wasn't sure how much Trix actually knew
about her mother. True, Dr. Anna Hawkins became an obsessive
monster at the end, but Jenny had always blamed that on her
grandfather. She couldn't have been responsible for the deaths of
all those kids. Not after what had happened. She wouldn't make
things worse.

Jenny started walking back down the hall, towards
the waiting room where she'd left the others. She could hear their
voices carrying as she came closer.

“...shouldn't have told her that,”
Casey was saying. “She's already scared enough right now. You
didn't need to add to it.”

“Who died and made you king of the
freaks?” Jenny heard Trix say. “You left, remember? We
didn't know where you were for two weeks. Two fucking weeks, Casey.
We all thought you were dead. For real dead. You can't come back
with some bitch and start telling everyone to walk on eggshells
around her.”

“Trix, don't call Casey's sister a
bitch,” said a dry male voice.

“I call everyone a bitch,” said
Trix. “I call you a bitch all the time, Grayson.”

“Yeah,” he said. “And I really
don't enjoy it.”

“Oh, God,” she said. “Stop
being such a bitch.”

“What does she know?” said a
soft-spoken male voice. There was silence.

“Let's ask her,” said Casey.
“What do you know, Jen?”

Jenny stepped out of the hall.
All four faces stared at her again. “About what?” she
said. Her voice was harsher than she meant it to be. Still hoarse and
cracking, but angry. She was angry. She didn't know exactly why.
She was the one eavesdropping. She could smell animal blood nearby
(
Oh, Jesus. How did she know it was animal
blood?
) and had to close her eyes for a
moment. She felt a hand on her arm. Casey was looking at
her.

“Jen, sit down.”

“I'm fine,” Jenny said.

“Please,” he said. There was a
gentleness in his voice that reminded her of how he used to be,
before he was an undead freak. Before Jenny was an undead freak,
too. She sat down on a chair in the circle. Casey sat next to her.
Trix had her feet planted in the seat of the chair across from them
and was sitting high up on the back. She was staring at Jenny with
her creepy eyes. Jenny stared right back.

“It'll pass,” Casey said.

“What?” Jenny snapped, then pursed
her lips. “Sorry. What will pass?”

“What you're feeling,” said Fisher.
He raised his eyes to her. He was leaning against a pillar nearby.
His quiet voice didn't match his appearance at all. He looked like
a football player, a jock who had gained weight over hard-earned
muscle. But there was sharp intelligence there. “The pent-up
rage. The hunger that feels like it's going to swallow you whole.
It doesn't last.”

“Speak for yourself,” said Grayson.
“I'm always hungry.”

“I'm always angry,” said Trix.

“You were angry before you changed,”
said Casey. “It's just your personality.”

“Part of my charm,” Trix
scowled.

Grayson smiled at that, but it faded when he
looked at Jenny again. “It's not easy at first,” he
said. “But you can manage it.”

“Why do this?” Jenny said, looking
at each of them. “Why go on living this way?”

“You mean why don't we all just kill
ourselves?” said Grayson, putting his finger to his head like
it was a gun. He made a noise like an explosion with his mouth.
“Just turn out the lights?”

“Yeah,” Jenny said defiantly. She
hated the way she sounded. There was an ache in her chest that was
growing more insistent. It wasn't the claw on her insides she'd
felt while dying, but a cold hurt of emptiness. “This isn't
any way to live.”

“None of it is any way to live,”
said Fisher. “What makes us so different? Did you live any
differently before you died?”

She raised her eyes to him. She felt cold.

“Oh, I see,” said Fisher. “You
had someone. That makes it different, doesn't it?”

Jenny shook her head and looked away. “It
doesn't matter any more. I can't go back.”

“Why?” said Trix.

“Why what?” Jenny said. She was
getting angry again at all the questions. They were useless.
“Why can't I go back to being alive?”

“No,” she said, not catching Jenny's
edginess. “Why can't you just tell him what happened? If he
loves you, he'll get it.”

“He won't,” said Casey.

“What do you know about love?” said
Trix, glowering at him.

Casey looked at Jenny. “It's Munro,”
he said. “She's in love with Munro.”

“You're lying,” said Trix.

“What the hell is this thing you've got
with Declan?” Jenny said, glowering at Casey. “Just
shut the fuck up about it.”

“He's a killer,” said Grayson.

“We're all fucking
killers,” Jenny said, the anger flaring up. “We
are
all
killers. There isn't anyone
in the world who lives Above and isn't a fucking killer. What
makes you people so special? You think just because you eat goats
instead of people that you're somehow better? Bullshit. You've all
hurt people. I'd bet anything that most of you have killed people.
Even if it was before you became...whatever the hell this
is.” Her mouth tasted bitter. She stood up. None of them
looked shocked or offended. Fisher stared off into space. Grayson
and Trix watched her without expression, like they were watching a
TV show in the old days. The only one who looked like he felt
anything was Casey, who had folded his arms across his chest and
was working his jaw.

“Why are we here, anyway? Why was it so
fucking important to find me?”

“I told you,” Casey said through
gritted teeth, “you might be the link.” He wasn't
meeting her eyes. Jenny saw the same anger rising in him that had
risen in her.

“The link to what, Casey?
To the most fucked-up family in the universe? To the past? Because
I'll tell you right now, that we're never going to have the world
the way it was. That life is gone. The world is never going to
recover from this joyless clusterfuck of disease and evil and
decay. So go ahead and tell me,
little brother
. Just what the hell do you think I'm a link
to?”

Casey stood up explosively and
so quickly that it seemed that one moment he was in his chair and
the next he was a centimeter from Jenny's face. “
To
the cure, goddammit!
” he spat. “You are the link to the fucking cure, Jenny. So stop being
such a pretentious asshole and just listen for two
seconds.”

Jenny stared at him. She realized her mouth was
hanging open and she closed it with a snap. She sat down slowly,
not knowing how to respond. “Okay,” she said after a
while, her voice quiet. “Tell me.”

“We don't know how it works,” said
Fisher, looking at her. “We don't even know if it's
true.”

“What
do
you know?” Jenny said. Casey sat
down next to her again, watching her.

“We figured,” said Grayson,
“that to understand what we are, we should figure out what
they are first. The rotters. So we've been doing research. Every
time we go somewhere new, we seek out the museums, the
universities, places that might still have books, research,
equipment that wasn't ruined in the riots.”

“I thought the thumpers took all the
scientific equipment,” Jenny said. “I heard they
smashed them all before they went Underground. Microscopes, labs,
everything. They blew shit to kingdom come.”

“Not everything,” said Casey, his
voice low and tired. “They didn't get to everything before
they went Underground. This place, for example. A lot of labs are
in basements, and they didn't make it to a lot of those. And the
rotters were so bad in Chicago in the beginning that they didn't
have time to destroy everything they wanted to. They were afraid
for their lives, just like everyone else.”

“So you guys have just been traveling
around and reading?” Jenny said. The anger was becoming
overwhelming. She wanted to eat. It was starting to hurt. She could
feel her skin growing tight and a pain in her guts.

“There was a letter,” Casey said,
ignoring her sarcasm. “Do you remember how Mom used to bring
us to Chicago?”

“Yeah,” Jenny said slowly.
“Every summer.”

“Well, she had a lab here,” said
Casey. “It took me a while, but I found it a few years ago.
Before I was even bitten. It was ransacked, but they left the books in a pile
on the floor and I found a letter inside one of them. It was
addressed to you, Jen.”

“Where is it?” Jenny said.

He shifted in his chair. “It's
gone.”

“What do you mean it's gone?”

“I had it on me when they took me in the
Underground,” Casey said. “But I read it.
It was from her.”

“From Mom?” Jenny said. “What
the hell did it say? Spit it out.”

“It said she was trying to help us. She
told you to keep me safe, but most of all, to keep yourself
safe.”

“Once again, our mother is a beacon of
fucking hope,” Jenny said.

“I'm not finished,”
said Casey. “She said the words,
You are the
cure. Survive.
”

Casey looked at her, like she was supposed to
react. “That's it?” she said.

“Yeah,” he said.

“So our batshit insane mother, who
experimented on her own children, who tortured all of us, caused
the death of dozens of others and possibly caused the rotter
outbreak, jots down a note for me. A note with no details, no
instructions, and no goddamn apologies for ruining the world. And
I'm just supposed to be satisfied with that?”

“Calm down,” said Fisher.
“You're letting the rage get to you. It's not
real.”

“How the fuck do you know?” Jenny
said. “I just met you. Maybe I'm always like this.”

“We thought that if we
knew how the sickness worked that we could figure out how
we
work,” said Grayson, sounding
irritated. “But none of us has any training, so it's been a
struggle for everyone.”

“We're just like you,” said Trix.
“Except we didn't run away.”

“Trix,” said Casey. “Shut
up.”

“You shut up,” said Trix.
“It's the truth. She left us.”

“I don't even know you,” Jenny said,
her voice a growl.

“And that's our fault?” said Trix.
“You ran away.”

“And us being together,” Jenny spat,
“I suppose that just solves everything? All of you being
there didn't stop all the tests in the middle of the night. It
didn't stop my grandfather from cutting into the meat on my back
without an anesthetic after all the drugs ran out. It didn't stop
them from sticking things into my spine when all of you were
sleeping. It didn't stop me from being restrained on a bed,
screaming and in pain and separated from everyone else so my
screams wouldn't scare you. And it didn't stop the nightmares even
after I'd been away for years. I still wake up screaming.”
Jenny stood up. “Being together doesn't solve
anything.” She stepped out of the circle and started walking
toward the hall where Trix had taken her to wash up.

“Where the hell are you going?” said
Casey.

“I've got some thumpers to visit,”
Jenny said over her shoulder. “I'd like to have a chat with
them about what happened to me.”

Casey was beside her in an instant. “Jen,
you can't do that. Whatever it is you're thinking of doing, please
stop.”

“Who's going to stop me?” she said
without looking at him.

“This isn't you,” he said.

“It is now.”

When Jenny finally found her car, Casey slid
into the passenger seat.

“Fine,” he said. “If you won't
listen to reason, I'm going with you.”

“Just stay out of my way,” she
said.

The keys were in the ignition, and the car
sputtered to life. It didn't sound good, but she didn't care. Jenny
gunned it and sent the car careening forward, tires squealing and
dashboard shaking. She found herself driving on eight empty lanes
along the lake. Rusted cars sat on either side of the road,
overrun with weeds and vines, the windows too dirty to see into any
longer.

They passed a few modified dune buggies. They
flipped Jenny off when she sailed past them, veiling them in dust
and black smoke. The car was shaking like crazy. Casey was yelling
something at her and making panicked gestures, but she could barely
hear him. Her vision was going red around the edges. She was
starting to see the world in two shades: the living and the dead.
The only things that seemed to register with her were the
hotblooded living things. She watched hungrily as a group of nomads
in spiked leather walked in the direction of Expo. Jenny forced
herself not to stop. But she wanted to. Badly.

Something dead and gray and still moving was
nailed to a telephone post. She didn't slow down. She was so
hungry. And there was only one person she could imagine ripping
apart with her teeth. The person who had turned her into this
thing. Cora. Jenny would save Joshua for dessert. Her insides ached
in anticipation at the thought. It kept the red at bay. But only
just.

Jenny parked right at the station door and felt
nothing. Either Joshua's trick with the dead cadavers was more
effective than she thought, or the Underground had left the
subway.

“You're just going to walk right in the
front door?” said Casey. “What about the
tunnel?”

“How far did you get when you took the
tunnel?” she said.

“Fuck you.”

Jenny got out of the car and approached the pole
that still held her grandfather's corpse. She stopped in front of
the gray, rotting thing that had been Frank Bierce.

“Do you recognize him?” she said,
without looking at her brother.

“Looks like every rotter,” said
Casey after a moment. The head was badly decayed, the eyes
shriveled and the skin putrid and sloughing off of the bone. Even
the maggots wouldn't touch rotters once they finally died.

“Look closer,” she said. She could
feel Casey's eyes on her.

“Who is he?” said Casey. “Tell
me.”

“It
was
our grandfather,” said Jenny. “Before
he turned rotter. By the time I saw him, he was just a dead guy who
wouldn't shut up. I put a knife through his
skull.”

“Why?”

“He was a rotter,” she said.

“That's not why,” he said. “Is
it?” Jenny was quiet. “Jen, what did he do to
you?”

Jenny looked at him. Casey had his fish-eyes
locked on her, concern on his face. “You don't remember, do
you?” she said.

Casey shrugged. “Not really. I was pretty
young. Most of my childhood's pretty fuzzy, to tell the
truth.”

Jenny nodded curtly. “Probably better that
way.” She pushed down the anger that had risen up as soon as
she took one look at that face, desiccated though it was. Dr.
Franklin Bierce. She was silent for a time, just staring at that
face. Casey shifted, impatient, and Jenny closed her eyes.
“All the other kids were younger,” she said.
“Around your age. He called them subjects. You were subject
17. I was subject 31. He didn't talk to any of the subjects. Made
Mom do all that. She worked with the kids and made them feel safe.
She was the one who did the tests during the day.
Remember?”

“Yeah,” said Casey. “She even
read bedtime stories to us at night. All of us. I forgot about
that.”

Jenny nodded. “The difference was that you
all got to go to sleep at night.”

“You didn't?” said Casey.

“After you were asleep, it got really
bad,” she said. She opened her eyes and looked at Casey.
“At night, Frank would come and get me. Stuck me with wires
and sent electric current through my body. Injected me with stuff
that would make me sick for weeks at a time. He used to strap me
down and cut me and put devices inside of me.”

“Devices?” Casey said.

“He would blindfold me,” she said.
“I couldn't see what he was doing. But sometimes I could feel
something moving under my skin.”

“Fuck, Jen,” said Casey. “I
didn't know.”

“After all the anesthesia was rationed off
to the hospitals, he stopped using it. His last project, he didn't
use any at all.”

Casey looked at his shoes. “What did he
do?” he said, as if he were afraid to know the answer.

“He sliced into my back,” Jenny
said. “I felt him cutting the bone. I felt everything. He
kept pumping blood into me so I wouldn't bleed out. I was strapped
face-down on a gurney. I couldn't even move my head. I don't know
what he did, but I couldn't move for months. I couldn't talk for
days, not even to scream. He kept me in this dark room. I guess it
was soundproof. He didn't want anyone to hear me. When I healed up,
he let Mom take me back to be with everyone else. And when I got my
chance, I ran.”

“I'm sorry,” he said.

“No one knew,” she said. “Mom
might have suspected something. But there was nothing anyone could
do. She did everything that old man told her to do. She was his
lapdog. If I'd told her, she would either have called me a liar, or
just told me to stop complaining.”

“
This is going to save the
world
,” Casey intoned. “That was
all she ever said.”

“What happened to her?” Jenny
said.

“Your guess is as good as mine,” he
said. “We were living in this bunker out in the middle of
nowhere. She was sort of...going.”

“Going?”

“Yeah. She started talking to herself all
the time, you know? Like mumbling nonstop. And she would cry for no
reason. She was going nuts. After a while, she started drawing
weird shit all over the walls. Like, chemical formulas or
something, only there was this other doctor there who said they
didn't make any sense. Then one morning, she was gone. Wandered
off, I guess. To tell the truth, I was sort of relieved. I felt
like a bad person for feeling that way. But knowing what I know
now, all that pain they put you through...”

Jenny nodded. “The worst part wasn't the
pain.”

“What was it?”

“The silence,” Jenny said.
“All these experiments, all the fear, was nothing.”
She shook her head. “He didn't talk to me. Not ever. He made
Mom ask me questions when it was all over. I was like a lab rat to
him. When I was alone after he did all that stuff to my back, I was
strapped down. I was alone except when he came in and fed me food
through a straw. And he wouldn't say a word. The entire time I was
in there, I didn't talk to anyone. I wasn't a person. I was just
another experiment. That's what was terrifying to me.” Jenny
shrugged. “That's why I had to leave you.”

“I told you I wasn't mad about
that,” he said.

“You should be,”
she said. “You fucking should be mad, Casey. I abandoned
you.
Why
aren't you mad?”

“Yeah, I was mad at you when I was a kid.
Yeah, I felt like you abandoned me,” he said. “But when
I got older, I knew you must have had your reasons. And you did.
You had some big fucking reasons to get out of there. I've felt the
rage that the disease brings, and I don't like it. It's not real.
What is real is that I have my sister back. She's not dead...at
least not really dead. I just have to believe that there's a reason
for all this. That there's a reason for us.”

Jenny snorted. “What are you, Zombie
Buddha?”

Casey almost smiled. “I know you're
pissed, Jen. I know you're new to this and you can't help but be
full of anger. But don't use me to justify it.”

“You are the reason for it,” Jenny
said, the anger rising. She knew she couldn't be mad at Casey. She
knew what he was saying was completely and totally true. But she
couldn't control her emotions. They were out of control. One minute
she was so hungry she wanted to rip someone apart, the next she was
angry because her long-lost brother wouldn't be mad at her. She was
a mess.

“I'm not the reason for anything,”
said Casey, his voice cold. “You chose to come looking for
me. No one asked you to.”

Jenny ground her jaw. “You came
looking for me first,” she said through clenched teeth.

“Yeah,” he said. “I did. You
know why? Because we are fucking family. I'm not some puppy to be
rescued, Jen. If you're in trouble, I'm in trouble. And now that I
know you survived, I'm not going to let anything happen to you if I
can help it. Maybe you've forgotten what it means to have family
that cares about you, I don't know what you've been through over
the last ten years. But we are blood, Jen. And undead or not, we
found each other again. You can't expect me to let you get yourself
killed every five seconds.”

“Fine,” said Jenny. “But you
can't expect me to be able to walk away when you're in trouble
either. It works both ways.” Casey laughed and Jenny glared
at him. “Why are you laughing?”

“Because this is a stupid argument,”
he said, smiling. “We're arguing over who has the right to
rescue the other. We're idiots.”

“Must run in the family,” said
Jenny. “Come on. Let's go in. They must have gone. No living.
If there were I'd be able to tell. I don't know what it is. Smell
or something.”

Casey grabbed her arm. “They're not
gone,” he said. “I've been dead longer than you. My
sense of smell is better.”

“They're still there?” said
Jenny.

“Yeah, don't you smell the blood?”
he said.

He looked at her. “Jen,
I don't think they left. I think they're all
dead.”

She could smell it when they came down the
broken escalator, heading down into the subway. Casey was right. It
was blood. The smell of it was so thick that if Jenny needed to
breathe it would have choked her.

The first body she saw was a fat, middle-aged
woman she thought was called Ruth. Her chest had been blown apart.
Jenny entered the living area where Ruth was sprawled on the floor,
between two cots. Jenny crouched down and looked at the wound.

“Real bullets,” she said.

“What?” said Casey from the
doorway.

“Hard to find real bullets any
more,” Jenny said. “Declan's crew hoards them, but
they've been collecting them for years. Odd to see someone using
guns for a bunch of religious people.”

Jenny walked out of the living
quarters and headed toward the common area. Several people had gone
the way of Ruth, blasted with bullets. A man had his face blown
off. Jenny thought it was the same man who moved Joshua along on
that last night:
Enough is enough, Joshua.
Jenny had respected him for that. He must have come back
here to hide, though. These people had been many things, but brave
was not one of them. Most had just wanted to survive and live the
way they thought was right.

Jenny couldn't make herself feel much for the
dead, even though she knew she should. She couldn't feel anger or
outrage, or even pity. Just a black sense of apathy. That scared
her a little. It wasn't like her. Not the old Jenny. The old Jenny
would have cried. Then she would have hunted down whoever did this.
All the new Jenny could do was to look around at it all.

The violence should have been shocking. Jenny
stepped over a petite woman whose name had been Marta. She was
lying in a puddle of her own blood, black and dried on the cement.
The closer she got to the open area of the compound, the thicker
the smell of dead blood was. As Jenny passed the last living
cubicle, she surveyed the carnage. It looked like everyone who had
lived here had been brutally killed. Without mercy. Maggots
squirmed in bullet holes and eye sockets.

“Jen?” Casey said. Jenny looked
behind her. Casey was staring at something. When Jenny turned to
see what it was, she stared, too. She had been zoned in on the
bodies, but there was something else to look at. Something on the
walls. Jenny walked across the room, sidestepping bodies.

Across the cement, seemingly
scrawled with blood was one word. It was everywhere, repeated over
and over all across the subway, on every surface she could see. It
looked like someone had dipped their hand in the blood and scrawled
it in a hurry. Jenny counted thirty before she gave up. The word
was
Jenny
.

“What the fuck is
this?” she said. Her eyes took in the room. It was
everywhere.
Jenny. Jenny. Jenny.
Like a schizo dream.

“I think you probably know the answer to
that,” Casey said.

Jenny shook her head. “No. This isn't
Declan. It can't be. He doesn't do shit like this. This is...this
is fucking crazy.”

“His girlfriend just died,” said
Casey. “And he wasn't exactly the picture of sanity before.
Maybe he snapped.”

“No,” said Jenny. “Not
Declan.” There was a fluttering in her belly. It felt weird
and alien and she touched her abdomen. She stared at the bodies on
the floor. The women had been defenseless here. They had no skills,
no experience anywhere but below the surface, away from the world.
The men weren't much better. “Not Declan,” she
whispered. Her head ached.

“Jen?” said Casey.

“I think I'm going to be sick,” said
Jenny.

“Calm down,” said Casey. He put his
arm around her and led her to the shortest exit. The flutter in
Jenny's stomach had become a sharp pain as she bent over, holding
onto the cooking table for support. And then she saw him.

Joshua had been beaten. Rich, purple bruises
were all over him, making his corpse look like a cheerful Easter
egg. His head had been chopped off, but probably not before his
hands and legs had been broken. Jenny stood up, forgetting the
pain. She walked over and looked down at Joshua. The pain had
turned to a cold, empty feeling deep inside her guts. The apathy
was gone. This was grief.