He looks everywhere but at me. “This is weird, Cassie. My ex-girlfriend trying to set me up with her little sister. Who is also too young, by the way.”
“She’s not my sister! So we dated, now it’s done.” I put my hands on my hips. “I think you like her, Peter.”
He looks a little pinker under his tan, but it’s hard to tell. I’ve always liked teasing Peter. I can’t help it. He’s so self-assured that I have to make sure he’s a fallible human like the rest of us.
“She’s young. And what am I going to do, ask her out to dinner?”
He hasn’t denied he likes her. Now we’re getting somewhere. I make a face dismissing his argument.
“She’s twenty-five, not fourteen. I know you’re an old, old man of thirty, but I think somehow the chasm between your ages can be bridged. Plus, what might have been a big age difference three months ago doesn’t mean anything now. And a lack of restaurants hasn’t stopped people from getting together over the last gazillion years.”
He shrugs, but his eyes are thoughtful.
“And that’s the last thing I’ll say about it,” I say, and turn to go.
“Cassandra,” I hear, as I get through the door. “If that’s true, I’ll sign over every dime I have to you, if and when this is all over.”
He sounds serious, but I know when he’s amused, so I wave a hand and skip away. This is a bad idea, as my hamstrings are half their usual length. I yelp and stagger as Peter chuckles. I give him the one finger salute and limp to the house to the sound of his full-blown laughter.
CHAPTER 96
The parking lot of the Radio Shack’s strip mall is strewn with vehicles. It looks like someone attempted to build a barricade using metal drums in front of the nail salon; they’re lined up three deep in a semicircle under the overhang. The lot is empty, though, and anyone who used it is long gone. We haven’t traveled this far from the house yet, but Radio Shack’s our best bet for the electrical stuff we need.
James points out the window. “Hey, there’s an automotive parts store. We can get the marine batteries there, I bet. Then we won’t have to stop again.”
The store is a big square island that sits catty-corner to the strip mall in the same parking lot. Nelly wedges a crowbar between the doors until they bend open. Everything is in place; I guess no one desired auto parts before the world ended. Rows of car and boat batteries line the shelves in the back.
“Dude, this is perfect,” James says.
We relax. There’s nothing in here, and we only saw one Lexer on the way. It would lull me into thinking they’ve died or rotted away, except that Matt in Whitefield has reported sightings of large groups of infected, walking and walking. Zeke must have made it there, because Matt’s been calling them pods, too.
“Do some of you want to bring the list to Radio Shack? You can take the truck and come back to pick me up. I’ll drag all this to the front. Peter, you know what we’re looking for as well as I do,” James says.
“Someone should stay with you,” Ana says. She turns to me. “Cass, you want to?”
I shrug. “Sure.”
I walk to the front to grab a cart and watch them drive to Radio Shack. James wanders the aisles like a kid in a candy store, throwing things on top of the batteries. He’s muttering something about some kind of controller when I see a flash of movement in the parking lot.
“James, I just saw something.”
We scuttle to the front windows. Ana throws boxes and bags into the back of the pickup while Nelly watches the lot. My breath is shaky.
“Sorry,” I say. “I saw one of the bags and didn’t know what it was.”
He pats my arm. “Better safe than sorry.”
The second cart is soon overflowing, and James is dreamy-eyed as he looks it over. “I used to build radios when I was a kid. Maybe we should go to Radio Shack, see if there’s anything else I could use.”
I wouldn’t mind going over there. I’m getting uncomfortable with having split up. My hands are sweaty in my leather gloves, and I want to load the truck and leave.
I hear the shout at the same time I see the mass of ragged forms. Nelly, Peter and Ana stand with their backs against the nail salon’s broken window, inside the ring of metal drums. The gunfire starts and the infected fall, but dozens more press forward.
Those metal drums are the only thing keeping the three of them from being overwhelmed. There’s an opening on both sides of the semicircle where the barrels don’t meet the wall, and the infected feed through them like cars in a bottleneck. Nelly attempts to move one, but they must be full; it doesn’t even budge.
James and I run into the lot and take shots from behind a car. We take out the stragglers, but not the ones closest to our friends for fear of shooting one of them. They’ve dropped their empty guns, and now they slash into the oncoming bodies one by one.
Ana screams. Her body slams against the cracked glass of the nail salon window, and she fights to right herself. I get a glimpse of hands just inside the salon, tangled and twisted in her ponytail. Nelly jabs his machete at them but has to turn and fight off the next Lexer that’s been funneled to him. Peter’s got his hands full, too. He slashes a neck and shoves the body to the side, but there’s only seconds before the next.
The cords in Ana’s neck stand out as she twists and fights. Her face is desperate, and, even worse, it’s tired. Someone has to take out the Lexers in the nail salon.
I turn to James. “I’ll get the one who has Ana.”
He nods. I reload my pistol and hand him my nine millimeter. I don’t take the time to hide; I sprint as fast as I can around the side of the building. The glass back door of the nail salon is locked. I crash my cleaver into it and bust out the jagged edges.
I step over scattered bottles of polish in the storeroom and into the front. Pedicure chairs run along the left wall, and manicure tables fill the right. There are two Lexers at the window. They’re getting in each other’s way, which may be the only reason Ana is still on the other side. There’s a spike of glass under her back, and every time she hits it she yanks up, but she won’t be able to do that forever.
I move the cleaver to my left hand and take out my revolver. I don’t see the Lexer coming at me until a second before he knocks me to the linoleum and follows me down. The air whooshes out of my lungs, and the pistol skitters across the floor.
I can’t get up. He must weigh two hundred pounds, but I manage to get the cleaver shaft under his chin. He bites the air inches above me. Clotted black strings drop off his bottom lip and pool on my chest. My biceps shake with the effort of pushing against every lunge. I can do two, maybe three, more lunges. And then that rotten, disgusting mouth will find its mark on my face or neck. It won’t matter where; I’ll be as good as dead. Pure panicky terror gives me another burst of strength. I scream with the effort as I buck under him and roll free.
I scramble back and my head slams into a footbath. For a moment it all goes black, until I feel hands grab my boot and I begin to slide. I grasp the edge of the footbath and kick as hard as I can. There’s a crack as my foot breaks his cheekbone. It knocks him down, but he immediately rises to his knees. It’s not fair, the way they feel no pain. The way they don’t stop. The way they don’t get tired, or scared, or out of breath. He hisses and reaches for me.
“No you don’t, fucker. Not today,” I hiss back.
I grip the cleaver like a battering ram and send the flat end under his chin. It slices cleanly through the vertebrae, and he crashes to the floor. My feet slip in the viscous fluid from his decapitated head, and I slide to the window where Ana blindly punches behind her. The two Lexers bite her leather-clad arms, but her armor does its job. The broken glass protects her head, and with each attempted attack they cut deep, bloodless gashes in their faces.
They haven’t noticed me. I turn my cleaver to the spike side, level it with the brain stem of the first and slam it home. I yank it out. The other lets go of Ana and starts for me. I hardly nee
d the force I use to get it through his eye socket. Ana spins around, her face terrified and relieved, and leaps onto the barrels. A litany of curses fly from her mouth.
She stabs the spike into the top of a Lexer skull. “Mother!” She grunts and stabs into the next. “Fucker!” She flips around her blade and decapitates one.
She dances down the barrels, slamming her cleaver spike into their heads or eye sockets and ripping it out again. She reaches the end of the line on Peter’s side and then turns to Nelly’s. He holds his machete by the hilt, with the last of the infected skewered on the end. Its hair is torn out fuzz and its face is half gone, teeth exposed. Its hands struggle and flail. It’s mindless, or it’s mindful only of us, which is just as terrifying.
James, who’s been slowly advancing and killing Lexers from behind, comes up and sinks his knife into its neck with a crunch. It slides off Nelly’s machete to the ground. When I step out of the salon, Ana races into my arms. We don’t hug so much as hold each other up.
“Thank you,” she whispers.
All the fear I’ve kept at bay hits, and I swallow hard. “No, thank you. All that horrible running paid off.”
Ana barks out a laugh. We assess the damage. Lexers lie in the parking lot, but most are piled around us. We hop onto the barrels, not wanting to step on, or worse, in, the infected, and practically fly home.
***
We’ve hosed ourselves off and taken showers. Our clothes and armor soak in a cocktail of cleaners no virus could possibly survive. Ana’s waited until last to shower, and when she finally enters the living room, running a hand through her damp hair, we stop dead. Where there used to be the long chestnut colored hair that Ana painstakingly hot-ironed, there’s now chin-length hair that gets even higher in the back. Nothing’s going to get a handful of this hair. She tries to look nonchalant, but she’s nervous.
“I love it,” I say. “I really do.”
It accentuates her cheekbones and her graceful neck. She looks older, more sophisticated. She smiles, but pulls at the ends like she’s trying to lengthen them as everyone murmurs agreement. Peter stares at her, and I catch his eye and tilt my chin up, telling him to say something.
He swallows. “You look gorgeous.”
Ana beams, and I realize it was his reaction she was most worried about. If his face is any indication, she’s got nothing to fear.
Penny’s mouth hangs open. “I can’t believe you cut your hair off. Don’t get me wrong, you look amazing, but I just can’t believe you…” she trails off with a shake of her head.
“I’d rather be alive than have nice hair,” Ana replies.
“Who are you and what did you do with my sister?” Penny asks. She smiles and moves forward to touch her sister’s hair in wonder.
CHAPTER 97
Bits picks basil leaves off the stems under Peter’s tutelage. He’s making some sort of pesto. Tomatoes, sprinkled with goat cheese, sit on a platter. His dinners are always fancy, and before he’s done we’re milling around the kitchen like begging dogs. I set the table and get out a bottle of wine we found. There isn’t much wine, but this dinner should have something special to go with it. And John’s got strawberry wine brewing in his basement.
“Smells good in there,” Nelly says, as he sniffs through the back door screen. He’s been digging, and every inch of him is covered in dirt. “Pete, maybe you’ll teach me how to cook one day.”
Peter leans toward the door and laughs. He doesn’t mind when Nelly calls him Pete now. “You’ll just slather it in barbeque sauce.”
“Damn straight,” Nelly says. “I’m a Texan.”
He leaves his mud-caked boots outside and heads for the bathroom. The table looks nice with the wine glasses, which starts me thinking.
When everyone’s seated I jump up and clap a hand over my mouth. “John, we forgot to check the tomatoes in your garden today! They were ready to burst as of yesterday.”
John looks at me calmly, obviously thinking I’m blowing this out of proportion. “Well, we’ll just leave it to tomorrow.”
“What if tomorrow they’re too far gone? All that wasted food? What if it’s the difference between life and death?”
I think I may have taken the melodrama too far, but no one looks suspicious. I move behind Nelly’s chair and surreptitiously hit him in the back.
He chokes on his tomato. “I’ll help,” he says, and looks longingly at the pesto.
“Pesto is great at room temperature,” I say. He mutters something and I grin. “Penny, James, John? There are lots of tomatoes.”
“I don’t remember that many tomatoes,” John says, his brow creased.
“I saw a lot,” says Bits, who thinks five tomatoes is a lot. But I’m not going to argue.
“Okay.” John heaves himself up. “Food’ll still be here after dark, but we should get the tomatoes if you say so.”
I wave at Ana and Peter to sit back down. Ana’s back was pretty badly wrenched, and we’ve been trying to make her rest.
“No, you guys stay,” I say. “We have enough people. Ana, you shouldn’t bend over! Peter, you cooked it, so you should enjoy it.”
I see the light dawn in his eyes. I smile serenely and pour wine into their glasses. He glowers at me. I hum a little tune and consider lighting a candle, but it’s not dark, so that might be overkill. I wink at him before I slip out the door. He shakes his head and sighs, but there’s a smile playing on his face when he turns back to her. I’m counting it as their first date. We walk the path to John’s, and the memory of my and Adrian’s first kiss makes my insides bump.
***
It happened on our third real date. We’d been out in a group, too, but Adrian hadn’t tried to kiss me, on a real date or otherwise. I’d begun to think I’d misread the signals. Nelly cornered me at the bar after our second date.
“So?” he demanded, eyebrows raised.
I sighed. “So, nothing. He hasn’t even tried to kiss me. He asked me to go hiking on Saturday, so I think we have a really good time together. Well, I do, anyway. But maybe we’re just friends.”
Nelly looked skeptical. “No way he’s just friends, not with the way he looks at you.”
“What do you mean?” I nudged Nelly’s arm.
Nelly took a long swig while he thought. “It’s like he goes all soft. He smiles like you’re a little kitten or something.”
“Most people don’t want to make out with kittens. Maybe I’m like one of those mangy old kittens you can’t help but feel sorry for. Who’s cute in a ratty sort of way, so you give them extra attention?”
Nelly laughed. “You are blind, girl. Blind, I tell you. But okay, I’ll just go ask Adrian why—” He lifted his beer at Adrian, who sat at the bar and smiled at us while he talked to someone.
I grabbed the back of his shirt and spun him around. “Don’t you dare!”
He grinned. “I won’t. If he kisses you on Saturday. If not, we have to get to the bottom of this.”
On Saturday, Adrian picked me up in his beat-up car. He opened the door for me and walked around. I reached over and unlocked the driver’s side door, just like my dad had taught me, since my dad thought he still lived in 1970, when no one had those little clicker thingies that unlock all the doors. But Adrian’s car had the knobs you pull up, and I smiled as I followed my dad’s date etiquette. Adrian apologized for the car’s general appearance, but since I had no car, I said his was still nicer than mine.
“Plus,” I said, “I have one criterion for cars: they have to not break down, leaving you stranded on lonely dirt roads or desert highways. That’s it. A radio’s nice, too.” I rubbed the door like I was trying to make friends with it.
“Well, this must be your dream car, then.” He smiled and shook his head.
“What?” I asked.
“You’re just different. In a good way.”
I wondered if being different in a good way made me more desirable or more like that ratty kitten.
We walked a few
miles alongside a creek before we stopped to eat. There was frost on the ground every morning that late in the fall, but the sun had come out to warm up the day. My fingers and toes were cold, though, and I wanted some of the hot chocolate I’d packed. A flat boulder that jutted out over the creek made a good picnic spot. The water eddied and pooled around it, and the long-legged bugs that skate across the water were everywhere. There was a splash every time a fish came to the surface to gobble one up.
Adrian reached into his pack. “I have salami and a turkey, too.”
“I love salami,” I said.
He held the neatly-wrapped sandwich in the air and smiled. “I know. You mentioned it once.”
I tried to recall a conversation that would have demanded I list my favorite lunch meats, but I knew there probably wasn’t one. Who knows why I had decided to share that little gem with Adrian. But it gave me hope. You wouldn’t remember someone’s favorite sandwich meat if you didn’t care. I think I saw it on a greeting card once.
I vowed to keep my favorite dog breed and tampon brand to myself, at least for today, and smiled back. “Oh, thanks.”
I watched the crimson and gold leaves drift into the creek for a farewell ride down the gentle rapids. It reminded me of something.
“You know, I once read that there’s really no reason for trees to change their leaf color in the fall,” I said, as I set out the thermos and cups. “They use the sugars and nutrients in their leaves to put out all these colors, instead of bringing it into their trunks and using it. When I read that I wanted to go hug a tree. Or say thank you or something. I’m sure they don’t do it for us, but maybe they do it just because it’s beautiful.”
There was silence. I looked up, already regretting having said something so weird. He was watching me, and now I did see what Nelly meant about that look. It was gentle, but it was also curious, and I squirmed a little under its intensity.
“Hey,” he said softly, “I really like you, Cassie.”
“I like you, too,” I whispered.