Undead Ultra (A Zombie Novel) (35 page)

His anguish pierces me. “Alvarez and I buried her behind the bar.”

“Thank you.” He closes his eyes, a few tears leaking down his cheeks. “I . . .” He stops, swallows. “I couldn’t bear to look at her. To see what I’d done to her—”

“You did right by her,” I interrupt. “I know it was awful, but you did right.”

He says nothing. I try to think of something comforting to say, but come up empty. What words of comfort are there for a parent who’s lost a child?

“I hope Brandon is safe,” he says, speaking of his son on military deployment. “I hope I die so I never have to look him in the eye and tell him how I failed his sister.” He makes eye contact again. “I feel dead. I lost Aleisha and lost my sobriety.”

At a loss for words, I reach out and take his hand. There’s nothing I can say to patch up the hole in his heart.

That’s when I noticed the long shadows and the chill rising from the ground. I lift my wrist, thinking the alarm must be about ready to go off—and see that it’s 7:45.

“Oh, shit!” I jump to my feet, wondering why it didn’t go off. Another look shows me the alarm
did
go off—almost forty minutes ago. I slept right through the beeping.

“What’s wrong?” Frederico asks.

“It’s almost eight,” I say. “We need to get back on the road and get in more miles before dark. Without our headlamps, we won’t be able to go very fast once the sun goes down.”

I see the skepticism in his face and raise my hand to forestall him. “I got ahold of Carter. He’s alive with a few friends. They’re holed up in the dorm lounge.”

Emotions churn over his countenance. I see surprise, relief, resentment, and then sadness. I understand it all.

“Help me find him,” I say. “Please? I can’t make this run without you.”

He nods and awkwardly gets to his feet. There is soreness and stiffness in every movement.

“Inventory?” I say to him.

“My IT band is being an asshole. Always is on anything over fifty miles. And I’m hungover. You?”

“Knee hurts like a son of a bitch. I could use a clean pair of socks.” Though I don’t say it, my arms feel like lead, my shoulders ache from the pack straps, and my legs feel like jelly. The chafing from my sports bra is a bright throb. The poison oak patches have spread in the past hour. And of course the gunshot wound hurts like a son-of-bitch.

I don’t bother listing the complaints, just as I know he’s holding back from me. You can’t run as far as we have without hurting like hell. Part of ultras is running through pain and running despite pain.

“I got a little food.” I gesture to the garbage bag I brought from Rod’s Roadhouse.

“No time,” Frederico replies. “We can’t burn daylight eating. Besides, I don’t feel like eating.”

I nod in understanding, relieved he’s agreed to get moving again. We’ve already lost enough time.

I hurry to the car, grimacing at the stiffness of my body from the short rest. I swing my good arm and rotate my torso as I walk, trying to loosen things up.

For all that I was too afraid to sleep exposed in the jeep, we’re alone on the road. I spot a stream of iridescent liquid running out from beneath the car. It’s made a small pool next to the front passenger tire.

A lightbulb goes off in my head. I didn’t take a car with an empty gas tank. I took a car with a leaky gas tank. We’re lucky the damn thing didn’t explode.

I step up to the car and rummage through the glove compartment, hoping to find a flashlight. Some good rifling doesn’t produce a much-needed flashlight, but I do find a handful of condoms, a wad of McDonald’s napkins, and a melted Snickers bar.

“Carter loves Snickers,” I say as Frederico comes out of the forest to stand beside me. “I used to buy him a Snickers bar for every A he got on his report cards. He insisted I keep up the tradition through his senior year.”

“You should save that for Carter,” Frederico says.

“Save what?”

“The Snickers bar.”

“It’s so . . .” I turn the bar over in my hands. “Melted.”

He shrugs. “It’s still a Snickers bar.”

He has a point. I tuck the lumpy chocolate bar into my pack, imagining Carter’s face when I deliver it to him in Arcata.

“I gotta take a leak.” Frederico moves stiffly to the far side of the car.

I resist the urge to ask him if he’s okay. It’s a stupid question, and besides, it doesn’t matter how he feels. It doesn’t matter how either of us feels. We have to move. Staying stationary is not an option.

I decide I’d better go, too. I squat on the side of the road. I try to gauge the color of my urine; the darker it is, the more dehydrated I am. Though it’s hard to discern the exact color in the shadows, it’s darker than I’d like.

“I could use a few electrolyte tablets,” Frederico calls to me from the other side of the car. “They’d help with the hangover. My head feels like it’s splitting in half.”

“I think I could eat electrolyte powder straight out of the bottle,” I call back. “Though not for a hangover.”

I straighten gingerly, every muscle in my body screaming.

“What would you rather have right now?” I ask Frederico, pulling my pants up. “A hot tub or electrolytes?”

“Ibuprofen,” he replies. “A whole fucking bottle.”

“Yeah. I hear you there.”

I move toward the front of the car. There’s a slight dip between the asphalt and the dirt. As I scan the highway, my foot hits it at an awkward angle.

I stumble. My ankle rolls, and I go down.

Chapter 46

Suffer Better

As I fall, something pops in my ankle.

“Kate!” Frederico darts around the car to me.

Pain shoots up my ankle. I stagger, catching myself. I take long, gulping breaths, nostrils flaring as I fight back the pain.

Frederico grasps my shoulder, the two of us looking down at the ankle. No doubt it will begin to swell in the next few minutes.

“I think I twisted it.” God, please don’t let it be a sprain. I lean over my good knee. “Goddamn rookie mistake. I know better than to take my eyes off the road. Dammit.”

Frederico touches the side of my face, forcing me to look up at him. “This isn’t the end. Your ankle will swell up. That will act as a natural splint. You can run through this.”

This time I do laugh, though it’s a pained noise. As crazy as it sounds, what he says is true. There are ultrarunners who
have
finished races with fucked-up ankles. Just not very many of them.

“That’s the sort of thing badass elites do,” I say. “Not normal, middle-of-the-pack runners like me.” This wouldn’t have happened if I wasn’t so tired. It’s too easy to make mistakes when exhaustion sets in. “Carter doesn’t even need me. Not really.” I rub tiredly at my face. God, my ankle is on fire. “He’s a grown man. I need
him
, Frederico.” This is the naked, humiliating truth. “I lost Kyle and he’s all I have left. I’m out here running to Arcata because my son is the only reason I have to live.” Tears well in my eyes.

“Fuck your twisted ankle,” Frederico says ruthlessly. “I lost my daughter. My baby. All I want to do is lie down on the side of the road and die. But I’m going to keep running. You’re going to do the same. Now, move. We’re finishing this run if it kills us.”

I nod, pushing myself upright. He’s right. Despair and self-pity are demons that nearly devoured me when Kyle died. I can’t let that happen again.

“Remember what Kyle used to say when he crewed races for us?” I ask.

“What? The bit about suffering better?”

“Yeah.” I swing my arms, pushing the agony of my ankle into a small part of my brain. “
‘Suffer better, babe.’
”

Ultrarunners suffer better than most people. That’s what Kyle meant. You can’t take up a sport like ultrarunning if you aren’t good at suffering. It doesn’t matter how much you train; racing long distances hurts. Sometimes, it hurts a little. Usually, it hurts a lot. That’s what happens when you pound the hell out of your body.

Which raises the question: why do something that hurts? On purpose?

It’s a question all long-distance runners get asked. The answers are as varied as the people.

*

“Hey, Mom.” Carter greeted me with a chipper smile at the forty-mile aid station on the Cactus Rose one-hundred-miler. He passed me a baggie of electrolyte tablets. “Guess what?”

“What?” I dug around in my gear bag, looking for some disinfectant wipes. The desert plants had sliced the shit out of my arms and legs, and I wanted to clean the wounds before heading back out.

“You’ve never been any closer to the finish line.”

I pause, raising one eyebrow at my son. “I’ve got another sixty miles to go.”

“Yes, but you’ve still never been closer to the finish line.” He made a goofy face, crossing his eyes and touching his tongue to his nose.

It was impossible for me not to laugh. I leaned back in the collapsible chair he’d set up for me, letting the humor ripple through me.

“Is this what you’re looking for?” He passed me a Ziploc filled with single-wrapped disinfectant wipes.

“Yeah, thanks.” I rip open one of the packages, wiping the disposable cloth up and down my arm. My skin stung in response.

The director of the Cactus Rose was famous for saying that everything on the course stung, scratched, or bit. There was no way to run this course without getting bloody. In fact, there was a demented pride that went along with getting beat up by the trail.

“Where’s your dad?” I ask as I finished cleaning my arms. I leaned down to start working on my legs, which had twice as many cuts as my arms.

“Napping in the car,” Carter replied. He watched in silence as I wiped up a long streak of dried blood. “Hey, Mom?”

“Yeah, honey?”

“Why do you do this?”

“Do what?”

“This.”
Carter gestured emphatically to the surrounding desert. “Ultrarunning. I mean, you could run half marathons or things like that. Easier races. Why do you always pick the hard ones?”

I took a long drink of water, considering my answer. Carter’s question was one I’d asked myself periodically over the years. Sometimes I ran to burn off stress; sometimes I ran to work off a particularly large bowl of ice cream; other times I ran for the sheer joy of the sport. But underneath all that was another, more profound reason.

“There are a lot of reasons,” I said at last. “If I had to boil it down, I’d say I run ultramarathons to learn about myself. To find myself. You can’t run one hundred miles without learning something. Crossing the finish line of an ultra . . .” I shrugged, struggling to find the right words. “There’s nothing like it. I find new places inside myself on every race.”

Carter took that in introspective silence, passing me a clean pair of socks. “You should put these on. Dad says you don’t blister as badly if you change your socks halfway through.”

I passed the socks back. “I’ll get them at the next aid station.”

*

Today, right now, I am running with a new reason. I run to find my son. I’m running toward Carter, toward my family. If ever I had a reason to suffer better, today is it.

Perhaps the last twenty years have been nothing but a series of training runs for this, the ultimate run—the run to find my son.

“I don’t think I really understood the meaning of suffering until today,” Frederico says. His voice is brittle, his face lined with grief and sorrow.

I fumble with a front pocket in my pack and pull out a small paper towel filled with espresso beans. “Here,” I say, holding a few out to him. “I took them from the espresso machine in Rod’s Roadhouse. They’ll help us stay awake.”

The corners of his mouth turn up, but the smile doesn’t touch his eyes. He plucks a few out of my hand and tosses them back like they’re pills. Then he starts to run.

I fall in beside him. My body shrieks in protest. It’s a good ten minutes before things loosen up and I find myself slipping into a rhythm. The ankle, already swelling, tells me to sit the fuck down, but I ignore it. I push the pain to my periphery, focusing instead on putting one foot in front of the other. I hear Kyle’s voice in my head saying,
Suffer better, babe. Suffer better.

The road climbs away from Laytonville. Though it undulates, there’s a steady rise in elevation. We lean into the hills, pumping our arms to help propel us upward. The downhills bring some relief as we let gravity pull us forward.

My calves burn. My lungs rasp. My arms ache.

My ankle tells me I’m the biggest fucking idiot on the planet. I tell my ankle to shut the hell up.

The sun sinks lower and lower. It becomes harder and harder to see. I lament the loss of our headlamps.

“I think we’ve crossed into the part of the race where we can’t be wimps,” I say.

“Are you kidding? I hit that point fifty miles ago. I’m just faking it till we make it to Arcata.”’

Mile one hundred thirty-two.

Pain is a state of mind. Running is a state of mind. I am the runner, not the pain.

The road is dotted with big yellow and red signs advertising Confusion Hill. It’s one of the many tourist traps dotting the 101.

Carter and I didn’t stop at Confusion Hill when I helped move him north to college. I’d battled a storm of emotions that day. Pride because I was sending a kind, responsible, hard-working young man out in the world. Joy because Carter was getting an opportunity I never had. Fear because I was afraid of how I would cope with being alone. Sadness because experiencing this day without Kyle felt fundamentally wrong.

I dragged out the drive as much as I could. I forced him to stop at several goofy tourist traps, like the Drive-Thru Tree and the Chimney Tree. We hadn’t stopped at Confusion Hill, though.

Tears well in my eyes. Why didn’t we stop? Why didn’t I insist on one more goofy memory before sending him off into the world? Why am I crying over some stupid tourist trap I’ve never been to? I don’t even know what Confusion Hill is.

Mile one hundred thirty-four.