a building housing the most Stiffs gathered in one place in all the world. It was insane. She was dead.
I turned from the gate. I didn’t know what to do. I should probably go back to the bus stop and return to zone A and tell my mentor in the morning what had happened. Maybe Trevor would be waiting for me.
The groaning of the Stiffs drew me back to the Stockade. I turned and watched as the Stiffs ambled around the compound. Then a Stiff rammed the gate. I jarred back with surprise. It clenched its fingers around the mesh and growled at me. Stiffs began to surround the gate all around. I gazed at my bite wound, still slowly bleeding, though not as much as before. It was dense, having only oxygen and no heartbeat to circulate it.
I couldn’t go in after her, even if I wanted to. The Stiffs would devour me in a second. I couldn’t avoid them in the condition I was in. I gazed ahead at the looming figure of the Stockade. The girl was lost. The Stiffs would find her and kill her and eat her brain, and there was nothing I could do about it. I stepped away from the gate. She was lost and I was tired and bleeding all over myself.
I was ready to go home.
17. BACK TO SQUARE 1
I made my way back to the bus stop. I no longer had any reason to try to make the long trek back to zone A on foot. Trevor wasn’t there. I started feeling dejected. What if Trevor really had been killed by those Stiffs? What would I tell his mentor? What would I tell mine? Putting another Wake or yourself in jeopardy was cause for expulsion. Expulsion meant you didn’t graduate. And if you didn’t graduate and get your Advanced license, you weren’t a fully accredited Wake. That meant you weren’t Wake material, and you were sentenced to the Stockade. I’d rather be dead than to be left in that prison to rot as a Stiff. I couldn’t let that happen, even if I had to lie my way out of it. I still didn’t know how to explain my damaged arm, and I didn’t have the energy to think about it at the moment. I just wanted to rest my exhausted brain.
My wound had stopped bleeding, but the blood was covering the sleeve of my gear down to the glove. I tried to wipe it away, but it was useless. It really made me wish that my mentor had bought me some hum tracking gear. The safety gear Trevor and I had was only designed to protect humans from breaking our skin and getting infected, and not from protecting Wakes against Stiffs.
While I waited for the bus, I changed out of my safety gear, shoving it into my backpack and returning the letter opener to my belt, just in case I needed it. I didn’t look so suspicious, since all the blood from my confrontations with the Stiffs had mostly stained my suit. Only my bicep was really bloody, and I could mostly cover that with the torn sleeve of my shirt.
The bus didn’t come for about twenty-five minutes. I was exhausted and my brain was screaming to be fed. I felt like I was going to die again. As the bus pulled in front of me, the breaks squealing as if in pain, I forced myself to rise, the effort excruciatingly enormous. I staggered to the bus as the doors drew open with a gasp. I pulled myself gingerly up the steps, holding my injured arm so that my hand covered my wound. The bus driver eyed me with suspicion as I shuffled past him, but didn’t say anything. It was a different driver than had dropped me and Trevor off.
I made my way to the rear of the bus, sitting in the farthest seat in the back. If the driver could smell the blood on me (and I didn’t see how he couldn’t) he didn’t say anything. Maybe he was used to picking up Wakes in all sorts of various conditions. There were plenty of fights that took place at the Hub. Maybe he thought I was just at the worst end of a typical Wake altercation.
He shut the bus doors and we drove off through the empty streets. After a few minutes we rolled down a street past the Stockade, just a block away from us. I gazed out toward it. Things seemed calm. I couldn’t make out any Stiffs near the gate. They had probably returned to their veg state once I was gone and the smell of my blood had abated.
I rested my head against the window and closed my eyes, allowing myself to rest. I didn’t have the energy to do anything else.
I stepped out onto the streets of A3 about an hour later. There weren’t many stops and no Wakes had gotten on since we left F4. I was thankful for that. I wasn’t exactly in the mood to socialize or explain myself. The bus roared away from me, leaving me standing alone at the bus stop.
I began walking down the street, back to A1. I needed some brain food in the worst way. I could barely think straight. My head ached as if my brain had been squeezed dry like an orange and left to rot in my empty bowl of a skull. I couldn’t return to my mentor’s. Not without getting cleaned up first. The blood from my wound had coated my upper arm, giving it a pasty red tint. I needed to get it cleaned and bandaged, and once I had rested, I could figure out what to tell my mentor in the morning. I only had one place to go.
About twenty minutes later I was dragging myself up the grassy hill that led to Trevor’s mentor’s farm. I couldn’t wake her up and ask her for help cleaning and bandaging my wound. I was in no condition to deal with those hysterics. And I had no false hope that Trevor was somehow still undead. If he hadn’t made it out of the field and back to Revenant, then he was Stiff-food. As much as I hated to believe it, my friend Trevor was dead. I had no idea what I would tell his mentor. Somehow “it wasn’t my idea” didn’t seem like it would do me any favors.
I came toward the driveway leading to Mrs. Kushner’s farmhouse. I couldn’t think anymore. I just had to get my wound cleaned, dressed, and get home and deal with everything in the morning.
Something reached out and grabbed my shoulder from behind. I gasped and spun around, breaking away and getting ready to attack whatever had lashed out at me in the darkness.
“Hey, chill, man, it’s me,” a voice whispered harshly.
I narrowed my eyes at the figure. Trevor. He wasn’t dead. The Stiffs hadn’t gotten him.
“For the love of brains,” I muttered. “I thought you were a Stiff!”
“What the hell happened to you?” Trevor asked, gawking at my sleeve, soaked with dark blood and clinging to my arm.
“I had a bad night,” I replied. “What about you? I thought you were dead!”
“So did I. You weren’t there when the bus came. I thought the Stiffs had gotten you. Most of them had taken off in your direction. I wanted to go after you, but I thought if you hadn’t made it out, you were probably already Stiff bait.”
“Don’t worry. I thought the same thing about you.”
“Did the Stiffs get you?”
“It’s a long story. I need to get cleaned up. And I need some skull candy in the worst way. Help me.”
Trevor nodded. I moved toward the farmhouse. He grabbed my wrist. “Not in there. We might wake up my mentor. The barn.”
I nodded wearily and Trevor led me back to the barn. We went to the rear, near the humans’ stalls and I sat on a wooden stool that rested in the corner. Trevor had a little bit of medical training since looking after humans required you to tend to their health.
“You really screwed yourself up, Zell. It’s gonna cost your mentor a good amount of creds to get you patched up.”
“If I don’t end up in the Stockade,” I rejoined.
“Let me see your arm.”
I extended my left arm to him and he peeled back the blood-dried sleeve to look at the wound.
“That Stiff really dug in. They’re gonna have to suture it. You’re gonna have to go with the Frankenstein look for this arm.”
Since zombies’ skin cells no longer grew, any damage done was permanent and could not heal. I would have to get the wound stitched and leave it that way. It was a pretty badass look, but also kind of annoying.
“Can we at least wrap it?” I asked.
Trevor nodded. “I’ll get some gauze. Sit tight.”
I leaned forward on the stool, resting my elbows on my legs. I felt horrible. Somehow knowing Trevor had survived without a scratch made me feel worse. I was the only Wake stupid enough to get himself this messed up on a routine human tracking drill. Still, I
was the only one who had actually seen a human. Not even the Advanced kids had done that. Of course, I was also the only one who let a human trick him into almost getting killed by a horde of Stiffs and then proceeded to let her escape. It was better if I focused on the success of finding a stray human.
“You look dead,” a raspy voice said.
I gazed up toward the humans’ stall. The woman, her blanket wrapped around her and falling over her shoulders, stood with her face pressed against the bars. The man was sleeping in a corner of their cell behind her, snoring under her words. She was looking down at me, her eyes fixed and her face stone. I looked away from her. I wasn’t supposed to talk to the humans. That was the first rule of human breeding, and Mrs. Kushner had drilled it into my head a thousand times. At the moment, though, I didn’t care. “I am dead.”
I didn’t know why I chose to respond, to have a conversation with the confined human. My mind was empty, and all I could think of was the girl, and how she had thrown herself into a building full of Stiffs to get away from me. Just as the woman refused to eat, both humans were committing willful suicide before me. Maybe I was just trying to understand how they could so easily devalue life.
“It’s karma,” she said. “You monsters are going to get your comeuppance.”
I chortled in my throat. “I don’t believe in that.”
“I’m sure not. If I was a