Eat, Brains, Love (17 page)

“I have cured the undead.”

At that point, the camera shook and an inhuman bellow sounded from off-screen. It was totally a noise I was unlucky enough to recognize. That was a zombie scream; the feral noise that signified dinnertime.

The video cut off there.

“Iowa,” I whispered, feeling an odd mixture of hope and fear.

“That kind of freaked me out,” said Amanda, eyes still locked on the screen.

“It makes sense, though,” I explained, suddenly inspired. “This is how it always goes in video games. All the NPCs keep telling you about a seriously scary screwed-up dungeon that no one's ever come back from, and you just know the one item you need to complete your quest is going to be down there. So you finally go down into that dungeon—and boom—not only do you make it, you come out with, like, a glowing sword.”

Amanda slowly turned to me. “That has to be the nerdiest pep talk I've ever heard.”

 

We drove out of the wealthy college part of Ann Arbor and into the part where the motels weren't in the habit of checking IDs.

The leering innkeeper at the All Nighter Lodge was surprised we wanted the room for the night and not just for a couple hours. I asked sarcastically about the continental breakfast, and he let loose a wheezing laugh that smelled like wood varnish. On our way in, we'd covered the pet carrier full of rats with an extra T-shirt to hide its contents, but I doubt our esteemed bellhop would've even raised an eyebrow if we hadn't.

Our day ended in a room that probably had a stain-to-square-inch ratio of 1:5. It was about an hour until sunrise.

I went to hit the room's light switch, but Amanda slapped my hand away.

“Better not to know,” she said.

I went over to the bed and shoved my hands under the sheets, reaching around the bed carefully. Amanda watched me, an eyebrow raised.

“I saw this thing on the news,” I told her, “where this lady got stuck with a syringe when she got into a hotel bed. Freaked me out.”

“My zombie companion has OCD,” announced Amanda. “Great.”

When I was done inspecting the bed, the two of us stood on opposite sides, staring at each other. I was waiting for her to make the first move, but was it possible she was waiting to take her cue from
me
? It'd been a hellaciously long day, we were both way beyond worn out, and yet the awkwardness of
us
kept us from crashing. I didn't want to just climb into bed and presume that'd be cool, and Amanda—well, she was probably nervously waiting for me to barf again.

Finally, I sighed, pulled a pillow and a blanket off the bed, and started to lie down on the floor.

“Are you nuts?” Amanda practically shouted. “You don't know what's down there. There's probably herpes all over that floor!”

“So . . .” I nodded toward the bed. “We're going to . . . ?”

“Sleep in the same bed, yeah,” she said, and resolutely climbed in, as if to demonstrate. Then her face softened. “Don't make it weird, Jake.”

“Sorry,” I said. “I was just worried this might be too
real
for you.”

I climbed into bed next to her and we lay there in the dark, shoulder to shoulder.

“We can make a blanket wall if you can't control yourself,” suggested Amanda. “Or if you feel like you're going to hurl.”

“I think I'll be okay,” I said.

I stared at the ceiling. A cockroach skittered across the cracked plaster, disappearing into the rickety wooden ceiling fan.

Amanda saw it too but she didn't scream or anything, the way I would have expected her to. “Did you see that?” she asked, pointing. “It's like a shooting star.”

“Uh,” I said.

“I mean, kind of. If you think about it in a certain way. It's like the equivalent. Given our situation.”

“Should we make a wish?” I asked.

Instead of answering, Amanda reached over and tentatively grabbed my hand.

I wasn't expecting that at all.
Be cool,
I told myself, even as I felt my heart beginning to race. I tried to think of something really suave to say, but nothing was coming immediately to mind. So we just lay there for a few minutes until I finally remembered how to speak English.

“What's the first thing you're going to do when you get cured?” I asked. Maybe not exactly the definition of suave, but it was something.

“I don't know,” she answered. “I'm not sure I want to think about it. I don't want to get my hopes up.”

“That's boring,” I replied.

“Fine. What're you going to do?”

“I'm going to find the best vegetarian restaurant in the world,” I told her. “And then I'm going to take you out to dinner there.”

Amanda laughed. She rolled over onto her side, facing me.

“You think we're still going to hang out, post-zombie?”

“I hope so,” I said.

“Me too,” she whispered. “It's a date.”

 

That night, I had this totally random dream about Vintage Vinyl, the used-record store in New Jersey I used to stop by on afternoons when I was skipping class. It was me and Henry Robinson and we were just rambling up and down the aisles, browsing, looking for bands we could go home and torrent.

The thing is, Henry and I weren't alone. There was this brown-haired girl with us and even though I didn't really recognize her, in the dream I felt like I knew her. I was sure she'd come with us for some reason, riding along in Henry's hand-me-down station wagon. She followed us up and down the aisles, not saying anything, but laughing and smiling at most of our stupid jokes.

Eventually, we had enough of Vintage Vinyl, so we moseyed out to the parking lot. When we reached Henry's car, the girl kept walking. She glanced over her shoulder at me and I thought about following her, but then I noticed she was headed for a black SUV parked in the next row over.

That's where I recognized her from! She was that teenage storm trooper that'd been riding around with the shotgun-toting maniac. This was one of those dreams where you're, like, aware that it's a dream, but are just going along with the flow. So I thought:
Wow, brain, what an obscure choice for a dream cameo.
I'd totally forgotten about her.

Secret-agent girl got into the back of the SUV, looking almost sad about it. The driver-side window rolled down and some middle-aged dude wearing glasses and a bow tie peered out at me. I didn't recognize him, but he looked like the mild-mannered type that secretly spends his weekends stabbing homeless people for the thrill of it. His bow tie started to spin, like a clown's would, and that made me laugh because I'm an easy mark for physical comedy. Inappropriate things spinning? Usually funny.

When I looked away from the bow tie, I noticed the man had pulled a big chrome-plated gun. He aimed it right at my face.

Whoa, wait a second.

The gun fired with one of those jagged flame-colored bursts you see in comics. It was a thunderous gunshot, and I had time to think about the ringing in my ears as the huge silver bullet spun toward me.

I woke up when the bullet hit me right between the eyes.

CASS

WHEN I TOLD TOM THAT I WANTED TO GO HOME, I hadn't meant back to Washington and the cold NCD barracks, though that's where I ended up. I'd meant
real
home, with my mom and sister. I wanted to be in my old room with the retro movie posters on the walls and the stacks of secondhand books I still hadn't read. It used to seem like a small and boring place to me, but now I felt like I could just hide there forever.

Instead, we'd been ordered back to DC while the NCD higher-ups figured out our next move. Our team had never allowed any zombies to stay on the loose this long; I guess that was sort of my fault. Now that we were back at base, I let myself hope that we'd just chalk up Jake and Amanda as lost and move on to the next case.

Here in DC, I shared a room with another telepath named Tara. She was in her twenties, and kept to herself, or at least it seemed that way because I hardly ever saw her. If I wasn't out on a mission, then she was.

Our room looked pretty much like a dorm, so at least I was sort of getting a college experience. Who knew if real college would be in the cards for me, though after my NCD service was over I'd end up with a government-issued high school equivalency diploma to go with what was shaping up to be a serious case of post-traumatic stress. Other than the bunk beds, there were a pair of writing desks with laptops, two closets containing more than enough NCD jumpsuits, and a single window that was too high to really see out of but let in the gray light from early morning DC.

I opened up my laptop and logged on to Facebook. Surprisingly, we're allowed to keep profiles, we're just not allowed to post anything to them. I bet there's some android in a dimly lit office in a subbasement of the Pentagon monitoring our every click. I browsed my newsfeed, filled with news and posts from kids I'd known in my old life: photographs of a hideous aquamarine prom dress, complaints about an unfair teacher, multiple invites to some stupid game where you build a farm. I wondered if any of these people ever wondered what had happened to me. Even if they did wonder, it's not like we could reconnect. There wasn't any common ground. They had school dances and term papers; I had corpses and nosebleeds.

If I was going to hang out with someone my own age, it'd have to be someone that could understand what I'd been through.

Casually, I typed
JAKE STEPHENS
into the search window. Just out of curiosity. About a thousand results popped up and scrolling through them just made me feel awkward and lonely, so I closed the window.

There was a rec room down the hall with a TV, a lame selection of DVDs, and a Ping-Pong table. I could go there if I wanted to kill some time, maybe make friends with some of the other telepaths, share stories about the horrible zombie massacres we'd seen over a frosty glass of Coke. No thanks. I'd always kept my distance from that place and that wouldn't change now, even if I was in a funk. This is going to sound supremely hypocritical, but the idea of hobnobbing with other telepaths gave me the willies. I didn't want anyone poking around in the sacred space of my brain.

I curled up on the bottom bunk, thinking about taking a nap even though it wasn't even noon. Isolation was one of the things they warned us about in our Coping with Telepathy orientation; it was why most of us had handlers like Tom.

Except I wasn't really isolated, was I? I could do something about this feeling.

I told myself that I was just going to take a quick peek into Jake's mind. I'd kept my mental distance since the night before, after I'd accidentally transmitted a psychic panic attack into his brain. I hoped I hadn't hurt him, although part of me wouldn't have minded if my psychic episode had disrupted his make-out session.

I found Jake sitting cross-legged on the edge of a bed in a motel room that would've caused even the cost-cutting government types I worked with to turn up their noses. He was reading a newspaper, or at least pretending to. Really, he was stealing glances at Amanda through the half-open bathroom door as she brushed black dye through her glamorous blonde hair.

So they were disguising themselves. If they only knew that I'd been hanging out in Jake's brain for the last few days. It would take more than a bad dye job to give me the slip.

Except, maybe it wouldn't. My mental connection to Jake felt more tenuous than it had the day before. It was now five days since I first made contact, and I'm sure the growing distance between us wasn't helping. I'd never been connected to a zombie this long. Usually, they were dead—like, for-real dead—within the first forty-eight hours. It was already getting harder to access Jake's mind, like that feeling you get when a word is stuck on the tip of your tongue. Today I'd found him . . . but tomorrow?

I swept through Jake's surface thoughts. He was anxious, spooked by a night of bad dreams and nervous about some plan he and Amanda were hatching. I know I should've dug a little more—found out what our priority target was up to—but I just wasn't in the mood for NCD business.

As Jake pretended to read the paper, he thought mostly about Amanda. He was doing a breakdown of every conversation they'd had yesterday post-vomit incident. Wait—vomit? Had my psychic shock wave made Jake sick?

Sorry if I screwed up your make-out, Jake. But also . . . not sorry at all.

Jake's mind was überly focused on whether or not he said the right things last night, on deciphering signals he wasn't actually sure Amanda was sending, and on not being too obvious about looking at her boobs. Is this how boys' minds work when they have a crush on a girl? It was kind of pathetic, especially considering Jake's whole flesh-eating situation. More important things to worry about, you know?

But also? Kind of sweet. Because Jake
knew
he had more important things to worry about, and he was still thinking about Amanda. I lingered in those thoughts and feelings, that wonderful, new relationship anxiety. Is it weird that I sort of let myself imagine that he was feeling that icky, gooey, lame crap about me?

As if in answer, Tom sharply cleared his throat. I hadn't heard him come in, and nearly hit my head on the bottom of the overhead bunk as I shot into a sitting position. The room spun; I'd pulled out of Jake's mind too quickly and it was disorienting seeing through my own eyes again.

Tom pulled one of the desk chairs over to the edge of my bed. “Okay,” he said, “we're having a talk.”

I resisted the urge to rub my eyes, not wanting to let on that I was seeing three blurry stern-faced Toms. “Um, about what?”

“Come on,” sighed Tom. “I know you've been in Jake's head.”

“Not really,” I lied. “Just for, like, tactical reasons.”

“Oh, Psychic Friend,” replied Tom as he reached into his pocket to retrieve an argyle-print handkerchief. “Your little fibbing nose is bleeding.”

Crap. I sniffed back a trickle of blood and guiltily took Tom's handkerchief, dabbing at my traitorous nostril. It really was getting harder to track Jake. Plus, I was psychically exhausted from the last few days. So much for keeping nosebleeds to a minimum.

“All right,” I admitted. “So what if I have?”

“For starters, he's a zombie. The enemy. Our job is to hunt them down and, well, make sure they don't eat people.”

“Kill them,” I said, clarifying his NCD lingo. “Or enslave them.”

“Yeah,” he replied firmly. “We kill cannibalistic monsters. You've seen what they do enough times, Cass. You can't start feeling sympathetic for them.”

“It's not like they're doing it on purpose,” I snapped. “They didn't choose to be zombies any more than I chose to be a psychic.”

“Yeah, well, you have a gift that doesn't require brain-eating. It's not the same thing.”

“He
wants
to stop,” I said, trying to keep the justification I'd plucked from Jake's mind from sounding weak. “Or, you know, he's being selective. They're not just eating anyone.”

“That makes it okay?”

“Yes.” I shook my head. “No. I don't know.”

“Are you listening to yourself? You're tied up in knots here, Cass. Do you see why these psychic dates you're going on aren't healthy?”

“They're not dates!” I could feel my face getting red, embarrassed that Tom had so easily made that leap about my connection with Jake. “Anyway,” I added weakly, “dates need two people.”

“Yeah. They do.”

“But he's a normal guy,” I said, sounding like I was trying to sell my new delinquent boyfriend to my strict father. “He's funny, and he likes cool music, and he's really sorry that he ate all those kids.”

Tom smiled at me sadly. I hated that look. It was like, Oh, aren't your emotions just so teenage and adorable.

“He can't be a normal guy. He's a zombie. Even if—and this is a monumental if—we forget about his undead status, you still don't
know
this guy, Cass.”

“I do know him.”

“Not really. Not like we know each other. Not like normal people that talk and share and learn things about each other do. You're cheating. I mean, how long have you spent in his mind? How much have you learned about him?”

I looked down at my hands, not wanting to dig myself a deeper hole than I was already in, unless I could crawl inside that hole and hide.

“You don't have to answer. What really matters is what he knows about you. Which is nothing, right? What do you think would happen if you met? Would you be friends?”

I shrugged, not wanting to admit that I'd thought about meeting Jake in real life and that every time I did the two of us hit it off immediately.

“He'd probably eat you,” concluded Tom.

“No, he wouldn't,” I mustered, cringing at how petulant I sounded.

Tom got up from his chair and sat down next to me. He put his arm around me and I leaned against him, sort of hating him right now, but also grateful for the contact.

“Do you understand why you need to stop this?” he asked gently. “It's not good for you.”

I nodded, wiping his handkerchief across my eyes, feeling intensely stupid. That little nod was enough for him, thankfully, because he stopped lecturing me. We sat there like that for a while, not saying anything. Eventually, Tom stood up.

“When you're ready, Harlene wants to talk to you.”

I looked up at Tom, suddenly panicked that this was only the first round of my Jake Stephens intervention. He shook his head, recognizing my terrified look.

“I haven't told her about this Jake stuff,” he said. “It'll be just between us, okay? Just promise me you'll stop.”

“I promise.”

 

The main NCD building where the unit commanders keep their offices was attached to the barracks by an annex. Before I could get to Harlene's office, I had to pass through the training center. Just my luck that today was the start of courses for a new batch of future zombie killers. They cluttered the hallways, checking one another out in their newly issued NCD jumpsuits, chatting about which government agency or branch of the military they'd been recruited from.

I felt like disappearing, not faking a smile for a bunch of newbies eager to network with a veteran. Not that any of them actually approached me. I was just some kid sulking through the hallways. They probably took me for an intern on a coffee errand.

I felt like crap. Everything Tom said had pretty much been true. And it made sense to the logical part of my brain. The rest of my brain, unfortunately, wanted to go check in with Jake as soon as Tom left me alone. I was addicted to some guy that I'd met once, in passing, after he'd survived a shotgun blast to the stomach. That was abnormal. Way, way, way abnormal.

Walking those halls, I suddenly felt silly and exposed. Like everyone could see what a creepy idiot I'd been for the last few days.

I thought back to the hospital in New Jersey, the way Alastaire had manipulated the minds of those around us, convincing them not to see us. Even though it originated with a total scumbag, it was still a pretty cool trick. I decided to try it.

I glided out onto the astral plane. Not exactly an easy thing to do when you're also trying to walk your physical body down a crowded hall. I found myself goofily tiptoeing, like my mind wanted to be invisible, and my body thought it would help out. A passing trainee looked at me like I was crazy. Great. This plan was having the opposite of its intended effect so far.

On the astral plane, I could see the other minds nearby, processing all the information around them—sights, smells, sounds. I just needed to find my presence in all that psychic data and hide it from them. It was easier than it sounded—kind of like lowering your eyes when you pass by someone that you don't want to talk to.

The next recruit to walk by nearly barreled into me. He was looking straight ahead—he should've seen me—but he strolled up like he could just walk right through me. It was working!

Of course, the next recruit smiled right at me. I tried to refocus on the astral plane, but ended up tripping over my physical feet, earning odd looks from everyone nearby.

So far, I'd only managed to hide myself from one guy and I was sweating, the start of a headache coming on. I didn't know how Alastaire was able to keep up the illusion so easily, while still functioning in the physical world.

“Practice,” Alastaire's voice whispered in my ear.

I spun around and found him standing outside a classroom, a newspaper tucked under his arm, getting ready to observe these new recruits and probably unlawfully probe their minds for any naughty thoughts. His bow tie was pale pink, such a gentle and soothing color. Alastaire looked like a bookish and dainty dork, which just made him scarier.

He was looking right at me, a little smile playing at his lips. Wait a minute. There's no way he'd managed to whisper in my ear and then book it down the hall without me noticing.