There are a few Lexers roaming around, but the 157th killed a lot of them off this winter. So many charred bodies are piled in the center of the village green that the air still smells vaguely burnt and fatty when we pass. Cars are parked haphazardly along the two lane road, many pushed out of the way to create the center lane along which we follow Zeke’s van. The houses and businesses become more dispersed until we finally enter Consumer Heaven. The hotels that boasted park-like grounds are overgrown with weeds and decorated with broken windows. Maybe people tried to take refuge in the rooms, or maybe they were escaping.
When we near the turn for the outlet village, Ana’s shoulders tense and her mouth opens. John keeps his eyes trained on the road and says, “No.”
Ana turns with a grin when Peter and I snicker. “You win some, you lose some, right?” She rests her chin on the back of her seat, brushes Peter’s hair behind his ear and whispers, “Be careful, okay?”
“You be careful,” Peter says.
He cups her face in his hands and leans in for a kiss. I feel the ghost of Adrian’s hands on my cheeks. The wave of longing is so intense that I dig my nails into my palms to distract myself. The gloves make it more ineffective than usual, so I pinch my thigh until it hurts. Adrian’s everywhere on the farm, but he rarely follows me past the gates, which is how I like it.
“Here we are,” John says, and turns onto a side road.
“We should hit EMS and L.L. Bean sometime.” Kyle points out the two stores that sit behind a Starbucks on the main road. “And I wouldn’t mind a coffee.”
“I’d kill for a latte,” I say. “There’s even a drive-thru, so we wouldn’t have to worry about being eaten alive.” Everyone but Christine laughs.
“I’ll take a cappuccino,” Tony says with an Italian accent. “And a cannoli. My mother made the best cannoli.”
He kisses his fingers and raises them to the sky. Last year he’d had a round belly to match his round face, but the work and lack of extra food has left him only with the spiky, dark hair and cherubic cheeks that make him look younger than his forty-some years.
“We could make cannoli,” Peter offers. “We already make ricotta cheese. The rest is easy.”
“You could? I’m gonna hold you to that,” Tony says. “You Italian, Pete?”
Peter grins. “No, just your run-of-the-mill whiteboy.”
Tony slaps the seat in front of him, his cheeks puffed out with laughter. The bus slows to a stop next to the van, and Zeke points to the Hannaford on our right. It’s at the closest end of the shopping center, which is good in terms of a quick getaway. I can just make out the village-type buildings of the outlets through the trees to our left, but Ana doesn’t glance that way now that she has a new mission.
Zeke rolls down the road. He radios that the rear is quiet and continues on to Shaw’s. Splitting up isn’t always smart, but since we have two patrols’ worth of people, we should be okay. The parking lot holds cars and two kinds of bodies—ones that were stripped of their meat and the ones who ate them and then froze to death.
Whitefield killed off the Lexers in the store, and they were waiting for the roads to clear to pick up what they didn’t bring back on snowmobiles, but they hadn’t gotten around to it before they were attacked. The plywood they’d nailed over the shattered doorway has either been pried off or fallen, so there’s no telling what’s in there now.
“Let’s get them up here first, then we’ll worry about opening the back,” John says. We push the wood out of the way, and John shows Christine, Tony and Margaret how we make noise at the front of a store. “It’s better to call the Lexers to you and finish them off.”
After a few minutes of quiet calling, footsteps sound from inside the store and ten Lexers appear from out of the gloom.
“This is easy,” John says. “Back into the lot, and get them as they feed out.”
All three hold a spike or blade of some kind, as well as wear a gun. Margaret’s spike hits a Lexer through the missing lens of his glasses. She takes a couple more and lets Tony do the next few. Christine watches with a pale face.
“Do you want to try?” I ask. She shakes her head like she’s in a dream.
“Perfect,” John says, once they’re all down. “You never want to be surprised. Take them one at a time, if you can.”
Peter and Ana keep watch while we go shopping. The sky has been growing darker by the minute and now it starts to drizzle, although it was a beautiful day when we set out. This might be good for hiding our scent, but rain doesn’t help when you need to hear what’s going on around you.
The inside of the store has no skylights, and everything not in the direct beam of a light takes on a menacing shape. Overturned carts and exploded bags and boxes of food litter the linoleum. We skirt around bodies to the carts. Our feet crunch over the debris when we head to the center aisles that hold dry goods. We ignore the unprocessed, perishable foods of the outer aisles. Now that they’ve had plenty of time to perish, there’s a faint, not-fully-composted odor mixed with the scent of the Lexers that have spent the winter in here.
John takes Margaret to the back while we hit the baking aisle. Kyle loads his cart with bags of sugar that have turned to bricks from moisture. The flashlight that rests in the seat of his cart illuminates Tony a few feet away, taking what’s left of the flour. I point to the remaining oil and cans of shortening, and Christine places them in her cart after inspecting each label.
“Anything’s fine,” I say, and place four bottles in my cart, then four more. “Just load it up. Pretend you’re on Supermarket Sweep.”
Her headlamp blinds me when she looks up from her can of Crisco. I can’t see her face, but the light moves up and down, so I guess she’s nodding.
“Okay. Good job,” I say, like she’s a toddler.
John and Margaret walk down our aisle. “There are some pallets in the back,” he says. “Let’s get the loading doors open for some light and have Peter and Ana pull around. The canned food aisle is almost empty, save for a few cans.”
When people came looking for food, before the store was overrun, I would imagine they took the things that didn’t require cooking: the cereals and canned foods, chips and crackers.
I lean in to John. “Christine isn’t doing too well. How about I take her back with me to open the doors?”
Once he has radio confirmation that the rear lot is still clear, he points the way. I lead Christine through the butcher department and into the storeroom. All the meat has rotted, frozen, thawed and rotted again. The smell of old decay is thick, almost as bad as Lexers, and flies are everywhere. Christine gags, and I hear her vomit hit the floor with a splat. I’ve smelled worse, though, and I pat her back and move her to where pallets of dry goods sit.
“I’ll get the doors,” I say. “You just keep watch.”
“It’s so empty,” she says in a small voice. “Everything’s gone.”
Peter and Ana help raise the loading bay door and waste no time hauling the boxes of pasta and rice mix through the bus’s rear exit. The daylight is bright enough to make out Christine’s dazed expression. I don’t know what she expected to find, but this isn’t it, obviously.
“I have to get outside,” she says breathlessly. “I’m going to throw up.”
I nod and stack boxes by the door. Normally, I’d help her, but there’s no time out here for babysitting. The first carts arrive, and they wheel them to the exit and leave for fresh ones to fill. I open a smaller door and roll the carts down a ramp. Christine has climbed onto the concrete loading pad of the adjacent store. She seems safe enough, and she’s dry under the overhang.
“What’s with Christine?” Ana asks me.
“I don’t know.” But I do know, a little. She was looking for something to fill her time and her thoughts, but this seems to have made it worse. Large, cold drops of rain spatter on the ground. I wipe my arm across my face and hand boxes to Peter in the bus. The space where they’ve removed the back seats is loaded t
op to bottom; this must be a couple of weeks of food for Whitefield.
John leans out of the doorway. “We have the last of the food here. Just going to check on batteries and such. Don’t want to press our luck.”
We’re emptying the final cart when a yelp echoes through the rain. Christine stands on the loading pad and watches five Lexers move toward her from a door I don’t remember being open. All she has to do is drop off the platform to the ground, but she doesn’t move.
“Christine!” I call. “Jump!”
“Chris!” Tony yells.
We run. We have a hundred feet to close, and the Lexers have ten. They may move slow, but not that slow, especially when they have prey in sight. Christine looks at her feet.
“Jump!” I scream.
She closes her eyes as a tall, thin Lexer sinks his teeth into her neck. Her face turns to the sky, mouth open in a silent scream. A fleshy woman takes the other side, and then Christine’s on the ground. With five of us here, the Lexers are dead before they know what’s hit them. Christine lies in a pool of blood and chunks of flesh, mouth in an O. I’m used to the smell of death, but this smell is fresh—fresh blood, ripped intestines. I manage to keep down my food, but Tony isn’t so lucky.
She’s dead, but not for long, since her head is intact. We’ve had varying reports of how long it takes someone to turn. Some people have seen it happen in minutes, while others say it took hours or days. It seems to depend on where you’re bitten and whether or not you’re dead or have to first die of the virus. I’ve never seen it happen, and I watch, stomach churning, for movement. It takes only half a minute, but it happens slowly, like she’s waking. Her lips move, and then her eyes blink open. The blue has gone gray. Ana’s cleaver hits just as mine does.
“Shit,” Tony says, and wipes his mouth on his sleeve. “Holy Mary, mother of God.”
Kyle looks to me. “The fuck happened? Why couldn’t she run?”
“She could,” I say, and turn away. “She just didn’t want to.”
CHAPTER 43
The mood in the main hangar is anything but celebratory, even though the trip was a success in terms of food. Once word got out, Whitefield was eerily quiet. Most people retired to their rooms early, and we’ve spent much of the night gloomily sipping at the beer Zeke’s patrol crammed into the van’s trailer.
Zeke stares into space while he works on what must be his sixth beer. “Danielle said Christine gave her a bunch of her things yesterday. She never thought that it might mean…I never should’ve let her come.”
“Zeke, she would have found another way,” I say. “She could’ve slipped out the gates, used a gun. I think she chose this way because she didn’t have to make a decision.”
“Suicide by zombie,” Tony says. His bloodshot eyes roam around the group. “Like suicide by cop.”
“She said she had nightmares and couldn’t sleep without Brett,” I say.
Nelly glances at me with a frown, and I peel the label off my bottle and squish it into a ball. I shouldn’t have said anything. I can’t stop replaying the way Christine’s eyes closed, the way she let go. That I understand the feeling, at least partly, makes me uneasy, like it might be contagious.
Zeke’s eyes are at half mast; maybe that was beer number ten. John lifts him by the armpit. “C’mon buddy, let’s get you to bed.”
Zeke kneads his eyes with a hand and allows John to lead him out of the hangar, followed by Tony and the rest. I’m drunk and in no mood to play fifth wheel to Peter, Ana, Nelly and Adam. “I’m going to bed,” I say.
I unroll my sleeping bag and mat on the floor of Command. Now that they’ve repaired the damage, there are enough beds that I could sleep in the barracks, but I like the noise of the people on night duty.
Nelly enters the dim room and lowers himself next to me. “Are you okay?”
“I’m peachy,” I say. “How ‘bout you?”
He runs a hand through his hair and sighs. “I’m worried about you, Half-pint. You’re always out on patrol and guard. You don’t sleep. You gave Penny your room.”
“I gave her my room because I didn’t want it, not because I’m going to feed myself to zombies. And, no, I don’t sleep a lot, so I do guard at night.”
I keep my voice calm and measured. It’s dim in here, so he may not pick up on how I skip over the truth in a few places.
“Relax. I’m not going to lecture you. Just promise me you don’t have some sort of gory goodbye planned.”
My laugh is short. “No gory goodbyes, promise. Only killing Lexers.”
“Good,” he says, and nudges my side. “Scooch over.”
He lies under the sleeping bag and puts an arm beneath my head. I wish I could make Nelly sleep with me every night. My eyelids are lowering from the mixture of his warmth and the beer.
“This is just like old times,” Nelly says after a few minutes. “Except we’re not zipped in like sardines.”
“You like being sardines with me,” I rouse myself enough to say. “Admit it.”
“Fine. And I’d be very sad if my favorite sardine got eaten. Promise you’ll be careful?”
I nestle into him and murmur, “Don’t worry, I won’t get eaten. Ana and I have killed tons of them, and we’re always careful.”
He asks something, but I’m too exhausted to answer.
***
I come to with Nelly’s arm still under my head and poke him in the side.
“What the hell?” he groans, eyes closed. “Why are you poking me?”
“I’m waking you up. Adam’s going to think you cheated on him.”
“He told me to stay with you so you’d get some sleep.”
“Well, thanks. Although it makes me feel like I’ve become a freak.”
He opens his eyes. “Darlin’, you were always a freak.”
“I don’t miss you at all,” I say, and poke his side, hard this time. He yells and grabs my hand in his fist.
“Likewise. Now let’s go get some breakfast before you leave. I can tell you what else is wrong with you while we eat.”
“Great. But I might need to stay through lunch if we’re going to do all that.”
CHAPTER 44
There have been no repeats of a group as large as the one that scared Bits, but smaller groups numbering at least twenty come to the fence each day, and they make her just as upset. There’s no way to keep it from her. If she doesn’t hear the commotion, then the kids are talking about it the next day. The only recourse is to kill any Lexers before they get here. Ana and I try, but there are just too damn many of them.
It takes me an hour to get her to sleep and then another hour to put her back to sleep when she inevitably wakes again. Peter usually takes over when I’m on guard, but for the past week she won’t settle for anyone else. I’ve had to leave the fence almost every night, and I’ve learned it’s possible to love someone more than life itself and want to strangle them at the same time.
She lies in my bed, sweaty and tangled in the sheet. I’ve barely made it to the door when she calls, “Cassie! Where are you?”
I close my eyes. I could have sworn she was back asleep. “Bits, I have to go back to the fence.”
“I want you to stay with me,” she whines. “Don’t leave me alone. Why can’t you stay? You’re so mean.”
I sit on the edge of the bed and put my hand on her shoulder. “Bits, I’m not trying to be mean. I just—”
She responds with a wail; she won’t reason at all these days, like a two year-old. I leave her wailing and knock on the wood frame of Peter and Ana’s curtained doorway. “Peter?”
The wailing becomes a screech. Peter stumbles out, and we sigh at each other the way my parents used to when Eric and I were being pains in the ass. It makes me feel better that even Peter’s a tiny bit frustrated.
“Go,” he says. “I got her.”
He moves into my room, and the wailing lessens at the sound of his quiet voice. She wants me there all night long. I tried it a coup
le of times, but there are only so many hours you can stare into the dark before you begin to lose your mind. By the middle of the night I was seething in frustration and angry that I never get a single moment to myself. Every morning I tell myself that the next night I’ll be patient and understanding, and every night I lose my patience in record time. I hate myself for it.
I make my escape before I’m roped back in, although guilt for saddling Peter with the job colors my relief. Dan, Liz and Caleb sit at the table at the first gate, wearing t-shirts and shorts. The nights in July are warmer than January, but it’s still sweatshirt weather, if you ask me.
“Did you get her back to sleep?” Dan asks.
“Yes, then no, and now Peter’s trying.”
“I had nightmares all the time when I was a kid,” Liz says. “I could hardly sleep by myself. I was afraid of everything.”
“Really?” I ask. Liz isn’t afraid of anything. I can barely imagine her as a kid. Maybe there’s hope for Bits; right now I’m afraid she’ll never make it.
“Yeah. I still have nightmares sometimes, but I think that’s just how I work things out, you know? I’m not so scared when I’m awake, but I must be inside, so it comes out at night. Cheaper than a shrink, anyway.”
She dips her head at having expressed so much emotion. Caleb licks his lips and tentatively places a hand on her knee. “You know, you can wake me if you ever need company in the middle of the night.”
Caleb likes Liz. He like likes her. I turn to Dan in amazement, and he runs a hand over his scruff. We watch as Caleb’s hand massages her knee.
“Cabe, what the hell are you doing?” Liz asks.
“I was just saying—”
Liz stands. “Time to walk the fence. I’ll go west.” She puts on her gloves and grabs a spike and flashlight before beating a hasty retreat.
Caleb looks at me and Dan, who sit with our mouths agape. The almost invisible blond lashes that frame his eyes make him look like a baby. “What? I like Liz.”
“Cabe,” Dan says. “You’re more than ten years younger than her.”