14

ZOMBIE

IT TAKES LESS than an hour to reach the city limits sign. Urbana, dead ahead. Literally. I pull Dumbo off the road before we go in. I’ve been debating with myself whether to tell him, but there’s really no choice. He needs to know.

“You know what Walker is,” I whisper.

He nods. His eyes dart left, right, then back to my face. “He’s a freaking alien.”

“That’s right, it was downloaded into Walker’s body when he was a kid. You’ve got some, like Vosch, running the camps, and then you’ve got others, like Walker, lone operatives who patrol assigned territories, picking off survivors.”

Dumbo’s eyes leave my face to confront the dark again. “Snipers?”

“We’re gonna be passing through two of those territories. One that runs between Urbana and the caverns. And one that begins on the other side of this sign.”

He wipes the back of his hand across his mouth. He tugs on an earlobe. “Okay.”

“And they’re loaded for bear. I don’t know, some kind of technology that jacks them up. Gives them super strength, speed, senses, that kind of thing. We go quick and we go quiet.” I lean toward him. Important he understands. “If something happens to me, you abort this mission. Get back to the safe house.”

He’s shaking his head. “I won’t leave you, Sarge.”

“Yes, you will. And that’s an order, Private, in case you’re wondering.”

“Would you leave me?”

“You bet your ass I would.” I pat him on the shoulder. He watches silently as I dig the eyepiece out of my rucksack and slip it on. His head lights up through the lens, a bright ball of green fire. I survey our surroundings for any other telltale green blobs while he puts on his own eyepiece.

“One last thing, Bo,” I whisper. “There are no friendlies.”

“Sarge?”

I swallow. My mouth is dry. I wish there were another way. It makes me sick, but I didn’t invent this game. I’m just trying to stay alive long enough to play.

“Unclean glows green. Anything that lights up, we take out. No hesitation. No exceptions. Understand?”

“That won’t work, Zombie. What if it’s Ringer or Teacup?”

Damn. Hadn’t thought of that. I also hadn’t thought through Ringer’s options, which were identical to mine. Shoot first and ask questions later? Or fire only if fired upon? I think I know which she’d choose. She’s Ringer.

A little voice in my head whispers: Two of you double the risk. Send Dumbo back. The cool, quiet voice of reason, which has sounded a lot like Ringer’s ever since I met her. Points you just can’t argue with, like somebody telling you that granite is hard and water is wet.

Dumbo is shaking his head. We’ve been through the shit together; he knows me. “Two sets of eyes are better than one, Sarge. We go like you said, quick and quiet, and hopefully we see them before they see us.”

He gives me what I guess is supposed to be a reassuring smile. I return what I hope passes for a confident nod. Then we go.

Double-timing straight up Main into the burned-out, debris-strewn, rat-infested, boarded-up, graffiti-decorated, sewage-stained guts of Urbana. Overturned cars and downed power lines and trash piled against foundations by wind and water, trash blanketing yards and parking lots, trash hanging from the winter-bare tree limbs. Plastic bags and newspapers, clothing, shoes, toys, broken chairs and mattresses, TVs. It’s like a cosmic giant grabbed the planet with both hands and shook it as hard as he could. Maybe if I were some evil alien overlord, I’d blow up all the cities, too, just to get rid of the mess.

We probably should have swung around this hellscape, used the back roads and open country—I’m certain Ringer would have—but if she and Cup are gonna be anywhere, it’s the caverns, and this is the shortest route.

Quick and quiet, I’m thinking as we trot down the sidewalk, our eyes cutting left to right and back again, quick and quiet.

Four blocks in, we come to a six-foot-high barricade blocking off the street, a jumble of cars and tree branches and smashed furniture festooned in faded American flags, I’m guessing thrown together as the 2nd Wave bled into the 3rd, when it dawned on people that our fellow humans were a bigger threat than the alien spaceship that soared two hundred miles overhead. It blows your mind, how quickly we slid into anarchy after they pulled the plug. How easy it was to sow confusion and fear and distrust. And how goddamned fast we fell. You’d think a common enemy would have forced us to set aside our differences and band together against the escalating threat. Instead, we built barricades. We hoarded food and supplies and weapons. We turned away the stranger, the outsider, the unrecognized face. Two weeks into the invasion and civilization had already cracked at its foundation. Two months, and it collapsed like an imploded building, falling down as the bodies piled up.

We’ve seen a few of those, too, on our way into Urbana. From piles of blackened bones to corpses wrapped head to toe in tattered sheets and old blankets, just lying there in the open like they’d dropped from the sky, alone or in groups of ten or more. So many bodies that they faded into the background, just another part of the mess, another piece of the urban vomit.

Dumbo’s eyes swing back and forth restlessly, searching the dark for green fireballs. “Messed up,” he breathes. Despite the cold, sweat shines on his forehead. He shivers as if gripped by a fever. On the other side of the barricade, I call a break. Water. A power bar. I’ve developed this thing about power bars. Found a whole case of them in the safe house and now I can’t get enough of them. We find a small gap in the makeshift wall and nestle inside, facing north down Main Street. There’s no wind. The sky is clear, stuffed with stars. You can feel it deep in your bones because it’s older than your senses: the end of winter, the Earth sliding toward spring. Before I became Zombie, that meant prom and cramming for finals and the nervous chatter in the hallways between classes because graduation was coming, a different kind of apocalyptic event after which nothing would ever be the same.

“You ever been to Urbana, Dumbo?” I ask.

He shakes his head. “I’m from Pittsburgh.”

“Really?” I’d never asked. It was the unwritten rule in camp: Talking about our past was like handling hot coals. “Well. Go, Steelers.”

“Naw.” He bites off a hunk of power bar and chews slowly. “I was a Packers fan.”

“I played some, you know.”

“Quarterback?”

“Wide receiver.”

“My brother played baseball. Shortstop.”

“Not you?”

“I quit Little League when I was ten.”

“How come?”

“I sucked. But I kill at e-sports.”

“E-sports?”

“You know, like COD.”

“Competitive fishing?”

He shakes his head with a smile. “No. Call of Duty, Zombie.”

“Oh! You’re a gamer.”

“I was borderline MLG.”

“Oh, MLG, right.” I don’t have the first clue what he’s talking about.

“Max Level, Prestige Twelve.”

“Wow, really?” I shake my head, thoroughly impressed. Except I’m totally lost.

“You have no idea what I’m talking about.” He crumples the wrapper in his fist. He glances around at the garbage littering every square inch of Urbana, then slips the wrapper into his pocket. “There’s something that’s been bugging me, Sarge.”

He turns to me. His exposed eye is wide with anxiety. “So, way before their ship showed up, they downloaded themselves into babies and didn’t ‘wake up’ inside them until they were teenagers.”

I nod. “That’s what Walker said.”

“My birthday was last week. I’m thirteen.”

“For real? Damn it, Dumbo, why didn’t you tell me? I would’ve baked you a cake.”

He doesn’t smile. “What if I got one inside me, Sarge? What if one of them is about to wake up in my brain and take over?”

“You’re not serious, right? Come on, Private, that’s crazy talk.”

“How do you know? I mean, how do you know, Zombie? And then it happens and I waste you and I go back to the house and waste all of them . . .”

He’s losing it. I grab his arm and make him look at me.

“Listen to me, you big-eared son of a bitch, you go Dorothy on me now and I’m gonna kick your ass from here to Dubuque.”

“Please,” he whines. “Please stop bringing up Dubuque.”

“There’s no alien asleep inside you, Dumbo.”

“Okay, but if you’re wrong, you’ll take care of it, right?”

I know what he means, but I go, “Huh?”

“Take care of it, Zombie.” Pleading with me. “Kill the mother-fucker.”

Well, happy frigging birthday, Dumbo. This conversation has given me the heebie-jeebies.

“It’s a deal,” I tell him. “An alien wakes up inside you, I’ll blow your brains out.”

Relieved, he sighs. “Thanks, Sarge.”

I stand up, hold out my hand, and help him to his feet. His arm swings around and shoves me to one side. His rifle comes up. He’s aiming at the car dealership half a block down. I lift my weapon, close my right eye, and squint through the eyepiece. Nothing.

Dumbo shakes his head. “Thought I saw something,” he whispers. “Guess not.”

We hold for a minute. It’s so damn quiet. You’d think the town would be overrun with packs of wild dogs barking and feral cats howling or even a damn owl hooting, but there’s nothing. Is it all in my head, this feeling of being watched? That there’s something out there I can’t see but can sure as hell see me? I glance at Dumbo, who’s clearly just as spooked.

We move out, not on the quick now but sidestepping to the opposite side of the street, where we slide along the wall of the consignment store facing the dealership (SPRING INTO SAVINGS THIS MEMORIAL DAY!). We don’t stop until we reach the next intersection. Check right, check left, then straight ahead toward downtown, three blocks away, the buildings’ big boxy shadows silhouetted against the starry sky.

We trot across the intersection, then stop again on the other side, pressing our backs against the wall and waiting—for what, I’m not sure. We scoot past busted-out doors and shattered windows, the sound of glass crunching under our boots louder than sonic booms, another block, then repeating the drill, left around the corner, right across Main, then zipping to the relative safety of the next building on the opposite corner.

We make it another fifty yards and then Dumbo tugs on my sleeve, leading me through a broken glass door and into the near dark of a shop. Brown pebbles crunch underfoot. No, not pebbles. The smell is faint, barely discernible beneath the familiar rot of sewage and the spoiled-milk odor of plague, but we both pick it up, and there’s a little ache of nostalgia when we do. Coffee.

Dumbo eases down in front of the counter, facing the doorway, and I give him a look: What’s up?

“I loved Starbucks,” he sighs. Like that makes everything perfectly clear.

I sit beside him. I don’t know, maybe he needs a break. We don’t talk. The minutes drag out. Finally, I say, “We gotta be the hell out of this town by sunrise.”

Dumbo nods. He doesn’t move. “There’s someone out there,” he says.

“You saw them?”

He shakes his head. “But I feel them. You know? I feel them.”

I think about it. Paranoia. Has to be. “We could try to draw their fire,” I suggest, humoring him.

“Or distract them,” he says, glancing around the store. “Blow something up.”

He rummages through his sack and pulls out a grenade.

“No, Dumbo. Not a good idea.” I ease the grenade from his hand. His fingers are colder than the metal.

“They’re gonna slide in behind us,” he argues. “We won’t even see it coming.”

“Well, I’d rather not see it coming.” I smile at him. He doesn’t smile back. Dumbo’s always been the coolest player on the team, probably why they picked him to be the medic. Nothing fazed the kid. At least, nothing till now.

“Sarge, I got an idea,” he says, leaning so close, I can smell the chocolate from the power bar on his breath. “You stay here. I go on ahead—but in a different direction. Once I draw them off, you can haul ass due north and—”

I stop him. “That’s a terrible idea, Private. A really, really terrible idea.”

He isn’t listening. “That way, at least one of us makes it.”

“Stow that shit. We’re both gonna make it.”

Shaking his head. His voice breaks. “I don’t think so, Sarge.”

He rips off his eyepiece and stares at me for one very long, very uncomfortable moment. He looks startled, as if he’s seen a ghost. Then Dumbo lunges at me, rising to his feet and coming straight at me with hands outstretched like he’s going to grab me by the throat and choke the life out of me.

I raise my own hands instinctively to block the attack. Oh Christ, oh Christ, the big-eared sonofabitch was right, it woke up, the thing woke up in him.

My fingers catch hold of his jacket. Dumbo’s head snaps back. His body stiffens, then goes limp.

I hear the report of the sniper rifle a second later, the kind of rifle with a laser-guided scope, which fired the bullet that a second before was coming straight at my head.

The bullet that Dumbo took for me, accepted without hesitation, because I’m the man, the CO, the thick-headed moron that the enemy in all his infinite wisdom put in charge of keeping our asses alive.