The cold hit me like a hammer, stinging my eyes and robbing the breath from my lungs. The front yard lay under a sheet of white, bits of the broken picket fence buried under mounds of heavy wet snow. The driveway was a pristine carpet.
Dad’s truck was nowhere in sight. The entire neighborhood dozed under its cold, thick blanket.
I think that’s when I knew. I shut the door, locked both deadbolts, and went up the stairs at a stumbling run, my head pounding and my entire body jolted by each footstep. I banged down the hall and into the bathroom, where I slammed the door and started heaving over the toilet. I didn’t produce anything but bile, even though I retched so hard tears squirted hot out of my burning eyes. I stopped long enough to cry, my forehead against the cool white porcelain of the toilet, and then I had to pee so bad I nearly wet myself. While I was sitting on the toilet I had to retch again, so I bent over and tried my best to swallow whatever came up.
I don’t know how long it lasted. By the time it was over I could only think about one thing at a time.
He might come back, I told myself. What if he got stuck in the snow? It happens. He got stuck somewhere. Or something.
Except there wasn’t enough snow for him to get stuck in. The truck was heavy, and it had chains in a box under the passenger’s seat. Dad was too cautious to let something like weather get in the way of an operation. Or in the way of coming back to get me.
Then he called and you missed it because you were passed out.
That couldn’t be it either. He wouldn’t call; he would just come home. If he got fatigued or the mission went sideways, he would come and collect me and we’d blow town. It had happened before. Since he’d picked me up from the hospital when Gran died, he’d always come back for me. It was like sunrise, or the tide.
So something’s happened to him.
I rested my forehead on my knees, staring at my jeans rucked around my ankles. My underwear was white cotton, startling against the dark blue denim.
The practical part of me that got the laundry done and kept track of the boxes spoke up, in its calm, cool whisper. Did you hear me, Dru? Something’s happened to him.
“I know,” I whispered. It was the only sound other than the heater’s sighing. My heartbeat and my whisper were loud as thunder. My mouth tasted foul.
So something’s happened to him. Maybe he’ll come home.
Maybe he would. The best thing to do was wait. I was supposed to wait for him. If it had gone sideways, he would come get me and we’d pack and leave town ASAP. It was standard operating procedure. The old SOP, to be done ASAP, all CYA and BYOB. All the little paramilitary letters lined up in a row, a private language none of the kids at school had to know.
What if he doesn’t? Answer me that, Dru. What if he doesn’t?
That was what I was trying not to think. He’d always come home before, sometimes at dawn. He’d never been completely gone overnight, or left in the morning without leaving me a note. He called to check in. It was just what he did.
My forehead was fever-hot. So were my cheeks. My hair hung down in curling strings, dark brown with threads of gold, darker and stringier than Mom’s. I felt greasy all over, and the zit on my temple hurt along with the rest of me. My stomach rumbled. I was hungry.
I decided to get up. I couldn’t crouch on the toilet forever. Dad would come home; he would. I’d wait for him.
In the meantime, I’d take a shower. I’d clean up the house so I had something to do, and so when he came home he wouldn’t have to look at a mess. That would make everything all right. He might be wounded or tired when he came home, so I’d get out the first aid kit and make sure everything was ready for whatever had happened to him.
Yeah. Do that, Dru. That’ll make everything just about okay. Just ducky.
I wiped and stood up, stepped out of my jeans and panties, and dragged Mom’s quilt back into my bedroom. I grabbed fresh clothes and went back to the bathroom to clean myself up.
First a shower, then I’d clean up the kitchen. After that, the living room. I’d get out the first aid kit and restock it.
Yeah. That was what I’d do.
So I did it.
CHAPTER 4
It started snowing again late in the afternoon, big wet spinning flakes from a sky like smooth-beaten iron. I went outside to look at the driveway, shivering in Dad’s green Army sweater. I didn’t have much in the way of winter clothes; pretty much all my wardrobe was summer stuff since we’d spent so much time below the Mason-Dixon. We’d been down south for at least two years, between the Carolinas, Baton Rouge, Chattanooga, Atlanta, and Florida. If I tanned at all instead of burning, I might have looked even weirder up here with the goddamn polar bears.
I tilted my head back and looked up into infinity. Snow whirled out of the half-darkness, each flake bigger than a quarter and very wet. They stuck to my hair, still damp from the shower. Dad’s sweater was way too big for me, and I had the cuffs turned down so they covered my fists, clenching and releasing. I had to take a deep breath to uncurl my hands before I trudged back inside.
I’d already done three loads of laundry and cleaned up the kitchen. The heater was going; it was nice and warm. I was organizing the boxes in the living room, unpacking some and arranging things. I’d already gone through some of the ammo cache and organized the clips according to the guns they were for. Dad would be oiling the rifles soon—it was about that time of the month. Taking care of your gear is essential, especially when you’re after things that may or may not be able to mess with complex machinery and electronics. That’s why Dad didn’t carry a cell phone, they were like magnets for poltergeists and other things.
I tried not to think about it.
My stomach growled and I felt weird, like my head was full of rushing noise. I drank four glasses of tap water through the afternoon, sucking them down in between whatever I was doing, and that helped with everything except the roaring tornado between my ears.
Snowy light came through the windows; the blinds were pulled up. I could see a stretch of the front yard and the clogged street. Some cars had struggled by during the afternoon, none of them fishtailing, all of them wearing snow chains and rattling into their own driveways down the street.
None of them was Dad. I checked every time I heard the clattercrunch of chains or the sound of an engine. They all trundled past to their warm garages, ignoring our lonely house out at the end of the lane. Dad had picked this house because it was solid, but also because it stood apart from the others—which is more of a rarity than you’d think in the Midwest, since they have all that prairie space to shut out.
I was on my knees putting the last clips in the box when I heard something tapping in the kitchen.
Tip-tap. Tip-tap. Taptaptap.
My skin chilled, gooseflesh rising hard and fast on my arms. My head jerked up, hair falling in my eyes. It wasn’t frizzing today, for once. Go figure—the day I stay home from school I have good hair.
What the hell is that? It wasn’t the screen door on the enclosed porch back there rattling; I already knew that sound.
The gooseflesh didn’t go away, little nuggets of ice under my skin.
Tap. Tap. Like little rubber-covered sticks drumming hard against a windowpane. My mouth had gone dry and my fingers were numb. Then I got the taste of oranges and salt in my mouth, and I knew something bad was about to happen. Gran called it an “arrah”; it was only later I found out she meant “aura.” Like before a migraine, or the envelope of light Gran always said you could see around people if you had enough of the touch.
With me it was always oranges, and salt. Not real oranges, either. I can’t explain it better—it’s like wax oranges, maybe.
Oh shit. Shit.
The strangest thing of all was how calm I was. The light was failing—even if snow bounced back streetlight shine, it was getting darker. I always expect creepiness around dusk, and I had the howlin’ heebie-jeebies anyway.
I got up, my legs turning to wo
od and shaking like an earthquake had hit. Then I scooped Dad’s spare bowie knife off the top of a half-unpacked box. The living room looked like a bomb had hit it; I realized I’d just been unpacking half a box and wandering on to the next. The taste of oranges got stronger, and the tapping came again, a creaking, scratching sound, like small nails against a window.
I held the knife the way Dad taught me, flat along the forearm with the hilt clasped in my hand. That way you can hit someone in the face with the pommel and you can get your triceps and lats—some of the stronger muscles in your body, especially if you do triceps dips or lat pulldowns—into the action. And if you slash up you have your biceps getting busy too, plus you can keep better control of the knife.
Go quiet, Dru. It was Dad’s voice in my head, now. A soft whisper, like he was teaching me how to concentrate on a target. Go quiet and take cover on that side of the hall. It’s coming from the kitchen. Do it like I taught you.
I edged down the hall, cursing the boxes set along the side I should have been taking cover against. The kitchen light was on, sending a rectangle of golden glow into the hall and covering the foot of the stairs. The heater clicked off, and the tapping sped up.
Taptaptaptap. Pause. Taptaptap. Taptap.
My heart lodged in my throat, a chunk of beating meat. The big muscles in my thighs trembled like I’d just finished running a hard mile and a half. I slid slow and easy down the hall, little bits of the kitchen coming into view.
The thing they don’t tell you about in situations like these—and by “they” I mean horror movies, which are generally better training for this sort of thing than you’d think—is how your field of vision constricts, everything getting narrower and narrower. You can’t see enough, and peripheral vision plays tricks on you. The eyes flick around frantically, trying to take everything in and failing miserably. I stepped in front of the stairs and saw the sink, the stove, a slice of the kitchen table.
The window over the sink was empty, full of snowlight. I let out a soft breath through my mouth, as quiet as possible. My heart pounded in my ears like a drum solo in a pair of headphones. The taste of wax oranges got stronger, turned thick and cloying. Rotting in my mouth.
Tap. Taptaptaptaptap. The tattoo of skritching sounds grew stronger, almost frantic.
I stepped into the kitchen.
The back door was set to one side of the counters, Dad’s chair at the table with its back to the wall holding the pantry. When he sat down he could see the back door and the entry to the hall, keeping his back to the safest quadrant. The door itself was a prosaic little number, a latticed glass window on top and a flimsy wooden panel with a deadbolt and a chain probably stronger than the door itself on bottom.
My gorge rose hot and thick, fighting with my heart for control of my throat. I choked and almost dropped the knife. I could see it clearly through the squares of double-paned glass, darkening because the enclosed porch was getting dim and dark, light bleeding out of the sky as the snow whirled down.
There was a zombie at my back door. Its eyes swung up, and they were blue, the whites already clouding with the egg rot of death. Its jaw was a mess of meat and frozen blood; something had eaten half its face. Its fingertips, already worn down to bony nubs, scraped against the window. Flesh hung in strips from its hand, and my stomach turned over hard. Black mist rose at the corners of my vision, and the funny rushing sound in my head sounded like a jet plane taking off.
I’d know that zombie anywhere. Even if he was dead and mangled, his eyes were the same. Blue as winter ice, fringed with pale lashes.
The zombie’s gaze locked with mine. It cocked its head like it had just heard a faraway noise.
I let out a dry barking sound and my back hit the wall next to the hallway, smacking my hip against a stack of boxes.
Dad bunched up his rotting fist, the meat chewed away from fingerbones by something I didn’t want to imagine or even think about, and punched his way through the window.
CHAPTER 5
I would have stood there forever, staring in dreamy terror at the thing that used to be my father as it battered itself against the back door—if it hadn’t been for the phone. It rang shrilly under the sound of snapping wood, and something about that garbled screech jolted me into action. I screamed, a high, girly cry of fear, and dropped the knife. The chime of it hitting linoleum was lost in the groaning noise of breakage as the zombie forced its way through the back door, staring at me. Zombies do that—if something catches their attention they turn blindly toward it and don’t stop until they’ve torn it to bits.
Unless, of course, whoever made the zombie had given it a target. Then they don’t pay much attention to anything except shambling around in the darkest corners they can find, instinctively avoiding notice as they work their way toward their objective. Not too smart, zombies—but they’re determined. Way determined.
I should know, I’d watched Dad kill more than a few. Zombies are like cockroaches—you never see them until there’s too many of them, and they hang on hard to whatever semblance of life bad contamination or dark magic’s given them.
I scrambled back into the hall and bolted for the living room. Each step took a lifetime. My boots slipped on the carpet; I banged into a box and screamed again, diving around the corner and into the living room as the zombie let out a weird bellow. They don’t talk, the reanimated. Instead, they let out a whistling groaning noise like a cow in terrible pain, air forced through dead frozen vocal cords. Usually when someone hears that sound, it’s the last thing they hear, because zombies are eerily quick when they have their next snack in sight.
That’s another thing about them. You can bring something resembling life back to a dead body once the soul’s gone, sure. But whatever you stick in there always ends up hungry.
The nine-millimeter was under the arm of Dad’s camp chair in a Velcro holster. I hit the ground hard and scrabbled for it, moving too fast to bother scrambling upright, my feet tangling over each other as I heard light shuffling footsteps and the crunch of broken glass. The zombie blundered into the hall and I heard a god-awful racket—it must have tripped over a box.
My fingers were the size of sausages and clumsy, too. I ripped the cold metal of the gun out of the holster, Velcro tearing free and the chair spinning as I shoved it away. I rolled over onto my back, hearing Dad’s voice in my head again.
Easy there, sweetheart. Don’t point that thing at anything you don’t intend to kill. Always treat a gun like it’s loaded.
I hoped it was loaded. I knew it probably was—Dad wouldn’t have a piece on his camp chair if it wasn’t. I’ve been shooting since I was nine and even Gran had a gun in her house and I knew gun safety, didn’t I? It was why I was Dad’s helper. I knew the right way to handle a firearm and the wrong way, too, and the thing blundered around the corner, fixing me with its terrible rotting eyes that were now unholy, glowing blue. A spark of red revolved far back in the pupils, and I smelled it.
Zombies smell worse than anything you can imagine if you haven’t been hunting things on the dark side of the world. It’s a ripe, gassy odor, like rotting eggs and meat gone bad, crawling blind with maggots. It’s roadkill and decayed food and body odor all rolled into one package and tied up with puke.
I screamed again, but all that came out was a whistling sound, because my throat had locked up. I pointed the gun and pulled the trigger.
Click.
Oh shit.
The safety was on. The thing lunged for me, its atonal bellow rolling free of its throat again—
—and it fell.
Take the goddamn safety off. I scrabbled with the gun as the zombie splatted onto the carpet. It was covered in snow, wet and running with rot, and it wore Dad’s favorite green Army-surplus coat. It had tripped over a box partly blocking the entrance to the living room.
My breath sounded harsh as a crow’s caw as the safety clicked off. I lay on my back and pointed the gun.
Dad’s eyes met mine. The
zombie scrambled to its bare, rotting feet—his shoes were gone, where were his boots?—and stretched out its hands, bits of flesh falling and plopping on the carpet. The stink roiled through my nose, filled my head, and I retched as I pulled the trigger.
The first bullet went wide, blowing out part of the living-room wall. I was still screaming and dry-sobbing as the zombie ratcheted forward, falling toward me, its teeth snicking together as its ruined jaw ground shut again and again, practicing the chewing motion that would eat its prey alive. I kept pulling the trigger.
I didn’t even hear the shots, though they must have been deafening. All I heard was my own sobs.
It fell on me. Slime splashed and black blood splatted on my face. It burned like acid. It was cold like the snow outside, and it stank. Its jaws clicked twice, it shuddered, and a gout of something black and disgusting smashed out of its mouth.
I was still screaming. Couldn’t get enough breath, so I was making a high, whining sound. The gun clicked. I was pulling the trigger, but I’d emptied the clip.
The zombie was truly dead. There was a hole in its chest, nicely grouped shots. You have to damage the heart or the thing keeps coming. It’s something about the process of making a zombie, the meaning of the heart keeping the whole body going—or so the books say. But I hadn’t been thinking about the books. I’d been blindly following training, aiming for the bodyshot like he had taught me.
Don’t aim for the head if you’ve got a choice. Don’t pull. Squeeze the trigger, sweetheart. Dad’s voice, in my head. With the never-ending refrain repeated so many times, I could have said it in my sleep: Don’t point that thing at something you don’t intend to kill.
I thrashed wildly, smashing the thing on the head with the gun, hammering on it and struggling free of deadweight. Still making that high, whining sound, I crawled fast as I could across the living room until I reached the corner farthest away from the zombie. My left hand got rug burn. My right was full of the empty gun.
I put my back in the corner and heard myself babbling. Weak, incoherent sounds bounced off the empty white walls. I was cold and covered in stinking, burning goo.