Eat, Brains, Love (2 page)

I looked down at my plastic tray full of questionable cafeteria food.
Was
I hungry? That was the weird thing. I felt like I could puke at any second but I also felt like I could eat my own hand. In fact, I felt like I could eat anything except the meat loaf and fruit cup that were sitting right in front of me, both of which looked about as appetizing as the piece of week-old bologna I once found under my bed.

“Man,” I said, shaking my head. “I think this
House of Mirth
presentation is stressing me out.”

Our friend Henry Robinson dropped his tray on the table and slid onto the bench next to Adam. He looked me over and made a face, then turned to Adam.

“What's wrong with him?”

“Stressed out about some hilarious house presentation,” replied Adam, shrugging. “That or possibly Ebola.”

“Oh, cool,” said Henry, and immediately moved on. “You guys want to help me hang these up after school?”

Henry opened a folder filled with
MISSING
flyers for his golden retriever, Falafel.

“What is with this town and missing dogs lately?” asked Adam, picking up one of the flyers. “It's like some voodoo cult is abducting them.”

“Please, only positive thoughts for Falafel, guys,” replied Henry, staring sadly at the photocopied picture of his panting dog.

“I'll help,” said Adam. “Don't know about Jake, here. He looks like he might be keeled over by then.”

“Falafel,” was all I could manage. I put my head down on the cool surface of the cafeteria table.

Adam and Henry quickly lost interest in me and started a discussion about things you can eat to make your pee smell really bad. It's a topic I normally would have been interested in, but I tuned them out and tried to make myself focus on
The House of Mirth
.

Instead of suddenly coming up with a brilliant presentation topic, I was distracted by my aching stomach. And I don't know why, but it somehow reminded me of this girl Janine. I saw her face in my mind and then I was remembering the night a month ago that I'd met her at the Black Bolt.

 

My parents had been out of town that night and Kelly had gone to some seventh-grade kegger at her friend Annika Golden's house, and after sitting around for an hour drinking 40s, listening to old Captain Beefheart LPs, and feeling like real losers, Adam and I had decided it was time to actually do something fun for once.

So we'd taken the bus to this dive bar in Princeton called the Black Bolt, where Adam had heard they never carded. We just figured we'd have a couple of beers, see what kind of trouble we could get into.

The place was more crowded than we'd been expecting. There was some dumb-ass band playing, and there were all these chicks with tattoos and little black glasses hopping up and down and rocking out like it was GWAR, even though the band sounded more like the kind of music my dad listened to while doing his crossword puzzles.

Adam was in heaven; he loves those alternative librarian types. Give him a girl with bangs, glasses, and a tight little cardigan and he goes nuts. I lost him within minutes of stepping into the place.

So I had a beer by myself, just hanging out at the bar, and then another, and after that I decided I was bored with warm Bud, so I ordered a piña colada. The bartender gave me a funny look but what's wrong with wanting a tasty frozen drink every now and then? I had nothing to apologize for.

Anyway, after I was done with that, I was feeling a little loopy, like I needed some air, and Adam was nowhere to be found. So I went outside and leaned against the brick wall next to the alley, just getting my bearings. I'd been standing there for about a minute when a girl slid right up next to me and lit a cigarette.

She was tall and curvy, in black jeans with a studded belt and a tank top. Both of her arms were covered in tattoo sleeves. Her hair was Kool-Aid red. She was actually kind of hot. I looked away; I didn't want her to think I was some creep.

“Hey,” she said.

“Hey,” I said.

“I'm Janine,” she said.

“I'm Jake,” I said.

“It's too much in there,” she said. “I don't know what that band is but they need to grow a pair. It sounds like
Sesame Street
or something.”

“Tell me about it.” I paused, not sure what to say next. “Have you ever heard of The Puppy Bladders?”

“Nah,” she said. “Cool name, though. You go to Princeton?”

“Uh, no,” I mumbled.

“I was there for three semesters but it was, like, enough with the dead, white heterosexual men already. So boring. Now I have my own Etsy store selling crocheted pot holders with portraits of feminist heroes. I'm actually doing pretty well. The Tura Satana is my best seller. So where do you go?”

“Oh,” I said. It dawned on me that I probably shouldn't tell her I was seventeen and in high school. “Um, Rutgers.”

“Cool,” she said. “That's, like, so much
realer
anyway.”

I shrugged and smiled. Janine gave me a cocky pout and exhaled a cloud of smoke right in my face.

“So,” she said. “Wanna come back to my place? It's just a couple of blocks from here.”

“Um,” I replied. I was about to come up with an excuse when I realized I had no reason not to go. My parents were gone; Kelly was probably passed out in Annika's rec room until at least the next afternoon. There was Adam, yeah, but he could fend for himself. And the truth was, it had been a while since my ex-girlfriend, Sasha Tremens, had dumped me. Let's just say a little female company was long overdue.

“Sure,” I said. “Let's go.”

It was actually a good night. Janine was kooky, and her apartment was kind of scuzzy, but she wasn't all hung up and formal over the sex stuff, and we had fun. I was like,
So this is what being a grown-up is like
. For the first time, it seemed pretty cool.

There was only one thing. One stupid, fucking thing.

I hadn't worn a condom.

Ever since then, I'd been off-and-on paranoid that maybe I'd picked up an STD. There had been no dripping, no weird sores, but you never know. And now I had this crazy stomachache. But who's ever heard of a sex disease that gives you a stomachache?

Whatever it was, something was definitely wrong. I sat up straight, leaving a forehead-sweat imprint on the tabletop. I looked back over to Adam and Henry and realized I had no idea what they were saying anymore. They sounded like they were talking backward.

I was dizzy; my vision was a little fuzzy; the world had suddenly taken on a pinkish tinge. I made a mental note to look up the symptoms of syphilis when I got home.

And then a bunch of things happened all at once. There was an ear-piercing scream from across the room and when I looked up, a bunch of Amanda Blake's bobblehead friends had all stood up from their usual lunch table and were staring at something. Then there was another scream, but this time it was low and rumbly.

No. It wasn't a scream. It was a roar.

“Holy fucking shit,” Adam said. His voice sounded garbled and far away and I couldn't tell what he was talking about. Everything was moving in slow motion and then the bobbleheads weren't staring anymore, they were running for the door, pushing one another out of the way, jumping over empty chairs.

That's when I saw it too. Amanda Blake was hunched like an animal on the floor next to the table. She was eating something, devouring it really, snarling and spitting. The something looked an awful lot like Amanda's best friend, Cindy St. Clair. I could tell from the twitching red soles of the designer heels she was always bragging about.

Or at least, I think that's why they were red.

Blood was squirting everywhere, and now everyone was screaming and racing for the exit, and the thing eating Cindy stood up and it looked like Amanda Blake gone totally rancid.

She was standing there, swaying on her feet, seeming unsure of what to do next. Her face was gray and dried out, like it was covered in one of those mud masks Kelly's always doing, except where the mask cracked, thick, dark blood oozed out.

She roared again, then dove for another girl who was cowering a few feet away, and plunged her fingers right into the girl's stomach, ripping out a big chunk of flesh that she began to chow down on.

“Dude,” Adam said, grabbing my arm. “Come on! We have to get the hell out of here.”

My stomach growled yet again, and then Adam's eyes widened in shock. He dropped my arm and began to back slowly away from me.

“There's another one!” someone shouted, pointing at me. I didn't know what that meant and I didn't care. My head was throbbing, and my vision had completely clouded with red. I felt a weird emptiness in my chest and realized that my heart had stopped beating. When I looked back up at Adam, who was a few feet from me now, still steadily backing away, all I could think about was how tasty he looked. How satisfying it would be to rip into one of his fleshy biceps and finally have a decent meal.

Apparently, that's exactly what I did.

CASS

ABOUT A MONTH AGO, I STARTED DEVELOPING THIS theory that the zombies were evolving. The gore-drenched scenes my unit of the Necrotic Control Division responded to didn't seem as messy as they once had. The dismembered limbs, the arterial blood spray, the chewed-up faces—they started seeming neater somehow, like the zombies were taking greater care with their eating habits. Not exactly tying bibs on and putting down tablecloths, but not totally savage either.

Eventually, I realized it wasn't the zombies that were evolving. It was
me
. I was getting used to the job. The gore was starting to look normal.

I work for the government, hunting down zombies, keeping the public safe and unaware. Most people my age work after school at the Gap or at Cinnabon, and I can't say that doesn't sometimes appeal to me.

Then again, I already know what that's like. Before all this started, I was a hostess at an Italian chain restaurant on Carmel Mountain Road, which is not as appetizing as it sounds, and it was basically the worst. They had rats in the kitchen, everyone was always slobbering for refills on their endless salad, and one time my manager grabbed my butt. So maybe this job isn't actually so bad, even if I'm a little worried it's turning me into the poster girl for desensitized teenagers.

At least I'm helping out with this whole zombie thing that's happening—even if most people don't know about it. There's a big map of the country in the Washington command center covered in little red lights that blink on whenever there's a known zombie attack. I take way more pride in snuffing out those lights with my team than I ever took in slinging garlic bread sticks. And besides, our team leader, Harlene, keeps promising me that we'll kill them all soon and I'll get to go home . . . at which point I better not have to go back to the land of endless breadsticks.

My team got to New Jersey about an hour after the zombie attack happened. Harlene went to the high school first, along with our combat specialist, Jamison, to make sure the scene was clear of any undead threats. In most cases, especially if it's a first-time necrotization, the zombie just hangs around the scene afterward, wondering what the hell happened and what they have stuck in their teeth. That is, if they ate enough to get their heart beating again. Either way, that's when our guys show up with guns and pick them off.

No such luck at Ronald Reagan—our zombie had peaced out. In cases like that, we send in the quarantine team. They round up witnesses, talk to the local cops, and basically make sure nothing slips through the cracks. We don't want to start a nationwide panic, right?

And then, finally, there's me and Tom, the investigation side of our unit. We aren't even combat trained and weren't going to be blowing any heads off, so we had a little more room to dawdle on the way.

This time we stopped at the Wawa for magazines, and then got cheesesteaks at this place Tom had read about on some foodie website. But then we were running
really
late, so Tom said we could turn on the siren, which I always love, and we made it to the zombie site before anyone noticed we were slacking.

Tom was busy checking out the rest of the school while I tried to get a read on the cafeteria. It was a disaster, really. I had to step over a girl with her face chewed off and skip around a puddle of entrails just to get to the Pepsi machine. Yuck. But I was really thirsty after that cheesesteak.

Gore aside, it was weird being back in a high school again. Minus the blood and the corpses it could have been my old school back in San Diego: same long, folding tables with the fake wood veneer, same weird gray light reflecting off the tiles. That chicken-nugget-and-milk smell that even the stink of fresh guts couldn't totally cover up.

I popped a couple dollars in the Pepsi machine and pressed a button. The machine beeped and blinked:
INSERT .50.
Seriously? Two fifty for a Diet Dr Pepper?

The last time I'd been inside a high school, I was just a regular student. I had friends; I got okay grades; I dated this guy named Jason Roth for two weeks before he dumped me for some annoying girl with a nose ring.

Then one day, these people in suits came and everyone had to take these weird aptitude tests where you had to guess what pictures were drawn on the back of cards. It seemed like a complete joke except for the fact that I got every one right. Every single one, and I wasn't even trying.

They hadn't told us what the tests were about or why they were doing them. But the next week, a bunch of people from the military—big shots, in uniforms with medals and stuff—were at my house making my mom sign all these forms releasing me to their care.

They started throwing around the word
telepath
a lot.

I'm not supposed to reveal this, but my mom also received a phone call from the
actual
president of the United States, telling her how patriotic she was and how special I am, and how much good I'm going to do for the country. And I'm
really
not supposed to reveal this part, but there's a special, secret Executive Order just for me. Because normally you're not allowed to join the military if you're under eighteen.

Next thing you know, I'm waving good-bye to my mom and my big sister and getting my official NCD field uniform and going to this training camp with a bunch of grown-ups who weren't nearly as good at the whole mind-reading thing as me. And now here I am: seventeen, the youngest official high-clearance US military operative of all time. I've been doing it for about a year and a half, but it feels like a lot longer. I don't even remember the name of the girl with the nose ring.

Sometimes I do miss my mom and my sister, though.

Anyway, you can't think about that stuff. I was thirsty. I sighed and dug through the pocket of my contamination suit for a couple quarters and popped them into the machine. When Tom stumbled in, I was sitting at a cafeteria table—one of the ones that wasn't all gross—drinking my Diet Dr Pepper. I couldn't help but laugh when he burst through the door and nearly tripped over a corpse, steadying himself just in time to avoid flying face-first into a puddle of blood.

Tom refuses to wear the contamination jumpsuit, and today was sporting a skinny black tie and a designer suit that was cropped a little at the ankles to show off his hot-pink paisley socks. I'm always telling him to just wear the stupid containment suit or at least dress down; one drop of blood on those socks and they'll be ruined. They're probably cashmere. But he never listens to me.

I can see why he hates the jumpsuit, I guess, but I think I look good in it. It's that Ellen Ripley,
Alien
look. Sexy but tough.

“Whoa,” Tom said, taking a digital camera out from inside his jacket as he surveyed the carnage. “This is pretty bad.”

“Yeah,” I replied. “Harlene said she thinks it's the highest body count she's ever seen.”

Tom shrugged, snapping a pic of the nearest body. “I don't know. There was that football game back in Cleveland last year. That one was bad too.”

“Not this bad,” I said. “Nothing like this.” I chugged my soda. “There's got to be twenty dead. Thirty? It's hard to even tell.”

“Yeah, it's a doozy. Considering how many exits there are in here I'm surprised so many of 'em got chomped.”

“Harlene and Jamison are out on the football field,” I said. “I guess our zombie dropped leftovers all the way out there.”

“Dropped leftovers,” repeated Tom, shaking his head and giving me a reproachful look. “Who are you? Quit sitting around being morbid and get a handle on this thing, will ya?”

I'd been putting off my work with my Diet Dr Pepper, but with Tom here, it was time to get down to it. It'd be easier while the corpses were fresh anyway.

I bit my lip and scanned the room.

It's not that the bodies and blood don't bother me. All the death. You get used to it, but it never gets cute. And there was something about this scene that was particularly rough. Maybe it was just the fact that the victims were my age. They were like me. Could've been me. But the only way to do a job like mine is to put all that stuff aside.

A few feet away from me, a girl was dead on the floor. She was relatively unmaimed—just a few bites taken out of her here and there—but one of them caught the carotid artery and that was it for her.

I looked at her face, studying it. It feels more respectful to the dead not to let yourself get too grossed out by the way they look, so I try to think of them the way they were before. I can usually see it pretty clearly if I focus a little, even when they're totally torn up. This one wasn't so hard to imagine alive. She had a few splotches of acne around her chin and forehead, but she was pretty, with dark hair and big blue eyes. She looked like someone I could have been friends with. You know, in our past lives.

I reached into her pocket and pulled out her phone. It was a crappy old flip phone. I wrapped my fingers tight around it and closed my eyes.

Then the real details started coming. Even dead, the girl's psychic residue was still here. Her name was Sarah. She'd just gotten her driver's license. (Lucky her—I still don't have one.) She had two younger brothers and she loved pizza.

That part was a little depressing. Who loves pizza so much that they leave a mental imprint about it when they die?

On the other hand, I shudder to think about what my own deathprint would look like, so I guess I shouldn't be so judgey. Considering that these days I have no life of my own, the inside of my head probably just looks like a bunch of clips from movies.

I pushed past Sarah's love of pizza, looking for something more relevant to the situation. It took a little digging but then I saw the whole scene through Sarah's eyes. Right before she died. It was like watching a horror movie with someone else's annoying play-by-play narration dubbed over the action.

Everyone's running. I should be running. Is that the fire alarm? Is there a fire too? What if I run into a fire? I just have to get to the door and—

Oh god. There she is.

Just turn and run. Do it now! No. Him too? Oh my god. Oh my god!

I looked up at Tom. “There were two.”

Tom stopped photographing corpses and looked over at me. “Two?”

“Two zombies
.
”

He let out a whistle and his eyes widened. “Now
that's
interesting. Two zombies don't usually necrotize at the exact same moment. Quite a coincidence
.
”

“Yeah, I know,” I said. “I've been doing this as long as you have, remember?”

Tom rolled his eyes. “Simmer down, Psychic Friend. I'm just saying.”

Tom's nickname for me is Psychic Friend, which supposedly has something to do with some old TV commercial. I never really got it. But Tom
is
pretty much my only friend.

It's a little weird: one, because he's about fifteen years older than I am. Two, because taking care of me is basically his job. Tom's a smarty-pants; he was a medical examiner in some small town when the CIA recruited him, his double major in forensics and behavioral psychology making him ideal for work with psychics. He spent a couple years doing research in psychometrics before the NCD came along and assigned him to be my official military liaison, which is partly how they got away with drafting me when I was sixteen. Sure, he's supposed to document the carnage for further study of zombie-eating habits or whatever, but his main job seems to be making sure that I'm not losing it.

Sometimes I wonder if he just pretends to be my friend because it's his job, and he feels sorry for me. But then I remember that time we watched
Terms of Endearment
together and both cried at the same parts. That has to count for something, right?

I stood, left Sarah, and walked across the room to a green backpack that lay soaking in a puddle of blood. Sometimes objects almost seem like they have a personality—at least to me—and I could feel the backpack trying to talk to me somehow. I know that makes me sound completely crazy, but if you ever develop psychometric powers you'll understand.

I knelt by it, touched my palm to the JanSport logo, then unzipped it.

“Anything good in there?” Tom asked. “In suburbs like these I bet all the kids do their homework on iPads.”

“Sorry, dude. Just this,” I said, pulling out an old copy of
The House of Mirth
.

Tom made a face. “No thank you.”

“No, it's good,” I said. “I read it for summer reading once. It'll make you think twice before you ever go work in a hat shop.”

“Damn. There goes my secret life's ambition. After killing zombies, of course.”

Before I could say anything else, things started spinning. The book was linking me to someone else.

Stupid Edith Whoreton. I'm never going to finish this presentation. Janine, man, she was hot. Why am I so hungry? Brains. Delicious brains. Wait. What?

Oh shit. Are my hands turning blue? No . . . gray. Weird. Why is Adam yelling? What's his problem? Oh shit, Adam looks so tasty.

Hungry.

Eat.

 

When I came back to my own mind, Harlene had joined Tom, and Jamison stood a few feet off, watching the containment team as they started zipping kids into body bags. He was in his special battle armor that covered him from chin to toe in lightweight plates of superdurable metal and pierce-resistant fiber. He was scowling as usual, probably disappointed he didn't get a chance to use the shotgun slung over his shoulder. Even for a guy that ordinarily communicates in grunts, Jamison was being especially quiet.

Harlene and Tom stood over me, watching me expectantly.

“Hey, Sweet Pea. What'd ya see?” Harlene asked in her sugary drawl. Like Jamison, she was dressed for a fight: a handgun hanging from one hip and a sheathed machete from the other. She's probably the world's only former Miss Georgia Peach with flawless marksmanship and a penchant for really big knives.