Big bodies, little bodies, medium-sized bodies. Clothed bodies, half-clothed bodies, naked bodies. Freshly dead bodies and bodies not-so-freshly dead. Whole bodies and body parts and parts that used to be inside bodies but no longer were.
I went down to my hips into the slimy, reeking mass, and my feet found no bottom—I just kept . . . sinking. Nothing to grab hold of except bodies, which slid down with me. I came face-to-face with a fresh one as I sank—like a really fresh one, a woman in her thirties, her blond hair caked in dirt and blood, two black eyes, one cheek swollen to the size of my fist, her skin still pink, her lips plump. She couldn’t have been more than a few hours dead.
I twist away. I’d rather face a dozen rotted faces than one that looks that alive.
I’m shoulder-deep by this point and still being sucked under. I’m going to be suffocated by human remains. I’m going to drown in death. It’s so ridiculously metaphorical, I nearly bust out laughing.
That’s when the fingers lock around my neck.
Then her definitely-not-corpse-cold lips against my ear: “Don’t make a sound, Ben. Play dead.”
Ben? I try to turn my head. No way. Her grip is too strong.
“We’ve got one shot,” the voice whispers. “So don’t move. It knows where we are now and it’s coming.”
27
A SHADOW RISES at the pit’s edge, silhouetted against the blaze of stars overhead, a small figure, its head cocked to one side, listening. I don’t even think about it: I hold my breath and go limp, watching him through slitted lids. He’s holding a familiar-looking object in his right hand. A KA-BAR combat knife, standard issue to all recruits.
The woman’s fingers loosen on my throat. She’s gone limp, too. Who do I trust? Her, him, neither?
Thirty seconds pass, a minute, pushing two. I don’t move. She doesn’t move. He doesn’t move. I won’t be able to hold my breath—or put off the decision—much longer. I’ll have to take either a breath or a shot—at somebody. But my arms are entangled with dead ones, and anyway, I lost the rifle when I fell. I don’t even know where it landed.
He does, though, the priest who traded his crucifix for a knife. “I see your rifle, son,” he says. “Come on up. There’s nothing to fear. They’re all dead and I’m completely harmless.” He kneels at the edge of the ossuary and holds out his empty hand. “Don’t worry, you can have your rifle back. I don’t like guns. I never have.”
He smiles. Then the not-dead lady’s got him by the wrist. Then he’s flying into the pit with us and then there’s Dumbo’s sidearm against his temple and her voice saying, “Then you’re gonna hate this,” and then the priest’s head explodes.
Not sure, but I think that’s my cue to get the hell out of that hole.
28
I’VE LOST MY RIFLE. And somehow the not-dead lady ended up with the pistol. I have no idea if she saved my life or just started with the priest and I’m next.
Pushing and clawing your way out of a mass grave wasn’t something they covered in camp. Because under normal circumstances, if you find yourself neck-deep in dead people, the odds are you’re probably one yourself.
“I’m not going to hurt you,” she says. She smiles broadly, and that’s gotta hurt with a broken cheek.
“Then drop the gun.”
She does, immediately. She holds up her empty hands.
“How do you know my name?” I ask. More of a shout, really.
“Marika told me.”
“Who the hell is Marika?” I scoop up the pistol. She makes no move to stop me.
“The girl standing behind you.”
I pivot quickly to the left, keeping her in my peripheral vision. There’s nobody behind me.
“Look, lady, I’m having a really bad day. Who are you and who was that little guy you just killed and where is Teacup? Where’s Ringer?”
“I told you, Zombie.” With a trilling little laugh. “She’s behind you.”
I raise the gun to the level of her eyes. I’m not scared or confused anymore. I’m just pissed. I don’t know if she’s the Silencer of the caverns and I really don’t care. I’m killing every stranger in my path until I find somebody who isn’t one.
I know what’s what. Jesus Christ, of course I know. I knew it before I left the safe house. It’s all been for nothing, nothing. Dumbo’s going to die for nothing, because Ringer is nothing. She’s lying in that tangle of bodies, a raven-haired, smile-less nothing, along with Teacup, both of them nothing, like the seven billion other nothings busy breaking down into random molecules of nothing. And I’m going to help. I’m going to do my part. I’m going to murder every dumbass stupid bastard who’s unlucky enough to cross my path.
They wanted a mindless, stone-cold killer to let loose on the world. They wanted a zombie. Now they’ve got one.
I take aim at that silly, smiling, busted-up face and squeeze the trigger.
29
RINGER
I’M PROBABLY going to regret this.
Keeping Constance around is like finding a viper in bed with your kids. Going after it risks hurting the kids more than the snake.
So I almost let Zombie do it. It was tempting. But a millisecond before the bullet exits the barrel, I ram my open palm into his elbow, throwing off the shot. His gun is in my hand by the time the report sounds.
He whirls around, his hand balled into a fist, which is aimed at my head. I catch it.
Zombie’s shoulder jerks on impact—as if he’s punched a brick wall—and then his mouth drops open and his eyes grow wide with astonishment and disbelief, a reaction so clichéd and predictable, he almost does it: He almost gets me to smile.
Almost.
“Ringer?” he says.
I nod. “Sergeant.”
His knees wobble. He falls into me and presses his face against my neck, and over his shoulder I can see Constance smiling at us. I’m not sure who’s holding up whom at this point.
Using the 12th System, I pour myself into him. Where there is pain, I give comfort. Where there is fear, hope. Where there is rage, peace.
“It’s all right,” I tell him, looking at Constance. “She’s with me. You’re safe now, Zombie. We’re all perfectly safe.”
My first lie to him. It won’t be the last.
30
HE PULLS OUT of my arms. His eyes wander over the starlit fields, the road beyond, the bare, uplifted arms of the trees. He wants to ask but doesn’t want to, either. I tense, waiting for the question. Is it cruel to make him say it aloud?
“Teacup?”
I shake my head.
He nods. Lets out the deep breath he’s holding. Finding me was a kind of miracle, and when one miracle happens, you expect another.
“The little shit,” he mutters. Looking away. Fields, road, trees. “She snuck off on me, Ringer.” He gives me a hard look. “How?”
I say the first thing that pops into my head. “One of them.” I nod toward the pit. The second lie. “We’ve been dodging them all winter.” The third. It’s like I’ve jumped off a cliff—or pushed Zombie off. With each lie, he recedes from me, accelerating as we fall.
“But not Cup.” He steps over to the pit and stares into the mass of decomposing remains. “Is she in here?”
Constance jumps into the conversation; I’m not sure why. “No. We gave her a proper burial, Ben.”
Zombie looks at her. Glowering. “Who. The fuck. Are you?”
Her smile expands. “My name is Constance. Constance Pierce. I’m sorry. I know we’ve never met, but it feels like I know you. You’re practically all Marika talks about.”
He stares at her for a second. “Marika,” he echoes.
“That would be me,” I tell him.
Now staring at me. “You never told me your name was Marika.”
“You never asked.”
“I never . . . ??
?? He hiccups a humorless laugh and shakes his head. Then, without another word, he drops into the pit. I rush to the edge, thinking he’s lost his mind, gone Dorothy, that Teacup’s death was the final, tiny straw that broke his back. Why else would he jump in there? Then I see him grab his rifle, sling it over his shoulder, and crawl back to the edge. We lock our fingers around each other’s wrists and I pull him out.
“Where’re the others?” he demands.
“Others?” That loaded word.
“Survivors. Are they in the caves?”
I shake my head. “There are no other survivors, Zombie.”
“Just Marika and me,” Constance chirps. Why does she have to be so goddamned cheerful?
Zombie ignores her. “Dumbo’s been shot,” he informs me. “I left him in Urbana. Let’s go.”
He brushes past me and strides toward the road without looking back. Constance is watching me.
“My! Isn’t he a cutie?”
I tell her to fuck off.
31
I FALL IN next to him. Constance trails several yards behind—out of normal human earshot, but Constance isn’t a normal human. Zombie walks with shoulders hunched, head thrust forward, eyes darting up, down, side to side. The road stretches before us, cutting across rolling farmland that will never be farmland again.
“What Teacup did was her choice,” I say. “Not your fault, Zombie.”
A sharp shake of his head, then: “Why didn’t you come back?”
Deep breath. Time to lie again. “Too risky.”
“Yeah. Well. It’s all about the risk, isn’t it?” Then: “Poundcake is dead.”
“Impossible.” I saw the surveillance tape. I counted the people in the safe house. If Poundcake’s dead, who’s the extra person?
“Impossible? Really?” he says. “How do you figure?”
“What happened?”
He waves his hand at me like he’s brushing away a gnat. “Had a little trouble after you left. Long story. Short story: Walker found us. Vosch found us. A Silencer found us. Then Cake blew himself up.” His eyes close briefly, snap open again. “We rode out the rest of the winter in the dead Silencer’s safe house. We have four days left, which is why Bo and I decided to come for you.” He swallows. “Why I decided.”
“Four days left till what?”
He glances at me, and the smile that crawls across his face is frightening. “The end of the world.”
32
THEN HE TELLS ME what happened in Urbana.
“How about that, huh?” he asks. “My first kill of the war, and it’s some random old cat lady.”
“Except she wasn’t random and wasn’t a cat lady.”
“I never saw so many cats.”
“Cat ladies don’t eat their pets.”
“Handy food supply, though. You’d think after a while the cats would get wise.”
He sounds like the old Zombie, the one I left behind in that rat-infested hotel wearing a ridiculous yellow hoodie while he flirted with me. The voice is right but the appearance is wrong: restless, sleep-deprived eyes, downturned, grayish mouth, cheeks camouflaged in dried blood. He glances back at Constance, then ducks his head slightly and lowers his voice. “So what’s her story?”
“The typical one,” I begin. Here comes lie number five. “Rode out the plague in Urbana, then headed north to the caves after her family was gone. She guesses over two hundred people were holed up down there by the first snow of the season. Then the priest showed up. Around Christmas,” I add, a nicely ironic detail. You can’t have a good story without one or two of those.
“Nobody caught on at first. Someone goes missing one night, well, maybe they panicked and hit the road. One day, they wake up and realize over half the population is gone. You know what happened next, Zombie. Paranoia. People forming factions, alliances. Your basic tribal response. This person is accused. That person. Fingers pointing everywhere, and in the middle of it all, this priest trying to keep the peace.”
I rattle on. Adding detail, nuance, a snatch of dialogue here and there. I’m surprised by how effortlessly the bullshit flows from my mouth. Lying is like murder—after the first one, each one that follows is easier.
Eventually, inevitably, the priest is found out for the Silencer he is. Mayhem ensues. By the time the survivors realize they’re no match for him, it’s too late. Constance barely manages to escape, returning to Urbana and skipping from abandoned house to abandoned house, by dumb luck staying in an area between the cat lady’s territory and the priest’s—a place that’s rarely patrolled by either of them.
“That’s where we found each other,” I tell him. “She warned me off the caverns, and ever since then we’ve been—”
“Teacup,” he snaps. He doesn’t give a shit about The Adventures of Constance and Ringer. “Tell me about Teacup.”
“She found me,” I say without thinking. The truth. Now for the next lie. Sixth? Seventh? I’ve lost count. This lie to shift the burden from his hunched shoulders onto the ones to which it belonged. “Just south of Urbana. I didn’t know what to do. Didn’t want to risk bringing her back. Didn’t want to risk taking her with me. Then that choice was taken away.”
“Cat lady,” he breathed.
I nod, relieved. “Just like Dumbo, only Teacup wasn’t so lucky.” See, Zombie, I’m the one who lost her—and you’re the one who avenged her. Not exactly absolution but the nearest I can give him.
“Tell me it was quick.”
“It was quick.”
“Tell me she didn’t suffer.”
“She didn’t suffer.”
He turns his head and spits on the side of the road. A bad taste in his mouth. “A couple of days, you said. ‘I’ll scope them out and be back in a couple of days.’”
“I don’t make the rules, Zombie. The odds—”
“Oh, take the odds and stuff them up your ass. You should have come back. Your place is with us, Ringer. We’re all you’ve got and you left us.”
“That’s not what happened and you know it.”
He stops suddenly. Beneath the rust-colored mask, his face is a deeper red. “You don’t run from the people who need you. You fight for them. You fight beside them. No matter the cost. No matter the risk.” He spits out the word. “I thought you understood that. You told me in Dayton that you did. You said you were an expert on what matters, and I guess you are, if what matters is saving yourself while the rest of the world burns.”
I don’t say anything because he isn’t talking to me. I am the mirror.
“You shouldn’t have left,” he goes on. “We needed you. If you hadn’t left, Teacup would still be alive. And if you’d come back, Poundcake might be alive. Instead, you decided to hang out with a total stranger, to hell with us, and now Dumbo’s blood is on your hands, too.” He jabs a finger at my face. “If he dies, it’s your fault. Dumbo came looking for you.”
“Hey, kids, is everything all right?” Constance, her smile withered to a concerned grin.
“Oh, sure,” Zombie says. “We were just discussing where we should go for dinner. Chinese sound good to you?”
“Well, it’s closer to breakfast,” Constance answers brightly. “I could really go for some pancakes.”
Zombie looks at me. “She’s fun. What a blast you must have had this winter.”
Constance’s worried grin disappears. Her bottom lip quivers. Then she bursts into tears and flops down on the asphalt, resting her elbows on her knees and burying her broken face in her hands. Zombie takes in the act for a long, uncomfortable moment.
I know what she’s doing: The best hammer to break the bonds of distrust is natural human sympathy. Pity has killed more people than hate.
When the last day comes for Zombie, it won’t be another person who betrays him; it will be his heart.
He glances at me. Wh
at’s with this woman?
I shrug. Who knows? My apathy fuels his pity, and he gives in to it, squatting beside her.
“Hey, look, I was being an asshole, I’m sorry.”
Constance mutters something that sounds like pancakes. Zombie touches her shoulder gently. “Hey, Connie . . . It’s Connie, right?”
“Con-stan-stan . . .”
“Constance, right. I have a friend, Constance. He’s hurt pretty bad and I need to get back to him. Now.” Rubbing her shoulder. “Like, right now.”
It makes me sick to my stomach. I turn away. Across the eastern horizon a slash of garish pink glows. Another day closer to the end.
“I just—I just don’t know—how much more—I can take . . .” Constance is moaning, on her feet now and leaning her whole body into Zombie’s, a hand on his shoulder, a not-so-young-and-fair damsel in distress. If I had to give Constance a nom de guerre, I would pick Cougar.
Zombie gives me a look: A little help here?
“Of course you can take more,” I say to her, my stomach still churning. I wish the hub would get a grip on my gut. “And then you’re gonna take a little more, then a little more, and after that a little more.” I pull her off him, not gently. She snuffles loudly, pouring it on.
“Please don’t be mean to me, Marika,” she whimpers. “You’re always so mean.”
Oh dear God.
“Here,” Zombie says, taking her arm. “She can walk with me. You should be covering the rear anyway, Ringer.”
“Oh yes,” Constance purrs. “Cover the rear, Marika!”
The world spins. The ground heaves. I stumble a couple feet off the road and double over, at which point everything in my stomach comes out in a violent gush.
A hand on my back: Zombie’s. “Hey, Ringer—what the hell?”
“I’m okay,” I gasp, shrugging off his hand. “Must be the undercooked rabbit.” Another lie and not even a necessary one.
33