Eat, Brains, Love (4 page)

So I floored it straight past the warehouses, slamming through stop signs. There were no cars on the streets anyway; whatever part of town we'd found ourselves in was all but abandoned.

The
chop-chop-chop
sound was basically overhead now. I heard a screech of tires and glanced in the rearview mirror. A black SUV was bearing down on us. Shit! Where did that come from? I pumped the gas and shifted up. Were we seriously in a
car chase
? I looked over at Amanda and her face was expressionless. She was just staring straight ahead, gripping the side of her seat, white-knuckled.

The helicopter was screaming, and the SUV was gaining on us fast, way better suited to high-speed chases than this clunker Amanda had picked out. All its windows were tinted so I couldn't see inside, but whoever was driving was real serious about running us down. If I let them catch us, I had a feeling what happened next would be a lot worse than red-faced judges in powdered wigs.

“Fuck, fuck, fuck!” I said, slamming on the brakes to bang a left down an alley.

Amanda turned to me.

Her face had gone pale. “Um,” she said. “I'm, like, kind of
hungry
.”

CASS

TOM SNAPPED HIS FINGERS IN MY FACE. “HEY. WHERE are you?”

The literal answer was that I was strapped into the backseat of our tricked-out NCD SUV as Jamison swore to himself and bore down on our targets. But that's not what Tom wanted to know. He was really asking,
Whose head are you in?

Tom knows me well enough by now to recognize when I've checked out of my body to take a spin around the astral plane.

Let me describe it this way: every mind has a unique sort of signature that I can pick up on. The thoughts can definitely be ugly, but the minds themselves have a homey glow. They're beautiful and inviting. Even a letter-jacket douche that you'd swear would be completely brainless has a singular essence that calls out to me like a warm house after a day spent playing in the snow. Except once you're inside sipping hot chocolate, it's all boobs and beer pong.

It's not like that with zombies, though. Imagine tearing that warm house down and replacing it with a kitten graveyard. Their minds are cold, empty places. They don't have thoughts, just instincts, and usually only one of those: eat. It makes picking zombies out of the psychic crowd pretty easy, especially if I have a trail to follow.

The zombies I'm used to tracking tended to be of the rampaging and starving variety. We learned in training that the first necrotization lasts the longest, the zombie needing to eat early and often to feed the virus burning inside him. Usually, we were able to catch up with the zombies while they were still shambling around, hunting their second batch of victims.

Except it wasn't that way in Jake's mind. His mind was warm. Panicked, sure. But still a place where I wouldn't mind kicking my psychic feet up for a while.

“He's not like the other ones,” I told Tom.

Jamison glanced at Tom. “What's she saying?”

“He feels alive,” I explained.

Tom mopped at his forehead with an argyle pocket square. “You saw how much they ate back there. He's probably through the first stage already. Probably got his heart beating again. Until he turns again, he would seem almost human.”

“Fuck that,” growled Jamison. “They're far from human.”

“He's thinking of the stars,” I said, and slipped out of my skin and onto the astral plane.

Stop chasing us. Stop chasing us. Amanda doesn't look so good. I hope this car doesn't stall. I can't believe there's a fucking helicopter after us. This would be like four stars. I'm in a four-star chase!

“Oh, not
the
stars . . . stars! From
Grand Theft Auto
.” I couldn't help but laugh. “Only a boy would be thinking about video games at a time like this.”

Jamison stepped on the gas. “He isn't a boy.”

Jake
. His name was Jake.

Tom was giving me a funny look. “Maybe you should stay out of that zombie's brain for a while.”

“Why? I'm trying to help.”

“It feels, uh, inappropriate.”

I realized that I'd just broken one of the unspoken rules of NCD: don't humanize the targets. Normally, it was easy. The zombies we encountered were more animal than human. All biting teeth and clawing fingers. Totally gross.

But Jake was the first one who was kind of cute. In that skuzzy James Franco sort of way. At least, that's how it felt like he should look based on the inside of his mind. I hadn't actually seen him in person.

Oh man. Get it together, Cass
.
He's a zombie. Don't check out the zombies.

Outside, we whipped past abandoned row houses.

I was used to speed; even when we weren't chasing zombies, Jamison liked to take advantage of his military credentials by going at least thirty miles over the speed limit.

Now he had us riding the back bumper of Amanda and Jake's stolen pickup truck. In a few seconds, we'd plow right through them.

Harlene's voice drawled from our dashboard communicator. “Jamison, honey, stand down now.”

“Are you kidding?” he replied. “I've got them.”

“Need I remind you that you've got noncombat personnel on board? Your orders are to pursue but not engage. Plenty of time for that later. Containment's already got a mess to clean up at the school. We don't need another big public brouhaha.”

Jamison slowed the SUV. Tom glanced over at me, looking relieved. I smiled back—I can't say I was really looking forward to running these two kids off the road and watching Jamison blow their brains out, zombies or no. I mean, it had to happen eventually, obviously, but I didn't want to watch. Hello? Noncombat personnel here.

Jamison turned off the communicator.

“What're you doing?” asked Tom.

In answer, Jamison raised a middle finger toward the sky, where Harlene floated in the safety of her helicopter.

He floored it.

“Jamison?” asked Tom, his voice a little shaky. “What the hell?”

“You saw what they did back there,” said Jamison, his voice cold and determined. “You want to leave them on the loose so they can do it again?”

Our SUV rumbled forward, closing in fast on the pickup once again. It didn't take psychometric powers to know what Jamison had planned.

“He's going to ram them,” I said.

Tom looked stricken. “You heard Harlene! We're not combat authorized!”

“Then stay in the fucking car,” growled Jamison.

Jamison nudged the back of the pickup just enough to send it spinning out of control, careening to a stop wrapped around a telephone pole. Amazingly, he kept the SUV steady, like he'd run cars off the road at high speed a million times. We pulled up just a few yards from the wreck.

Jamison grabbed his shotgun and stepped into the street.

“Oh Christ,” whispered Tom.

I watched as Jake staggered out of the pickup's cab, blinking and disoriented. He was checking on the girl when he saw Jamison striding toward him.
Run, you idiot,
I thought, then grimaced as I realized I was rooting for a zombie. What was wrong with me?

Instead of running, Jake put his hands up.

“Whoa, dude,” I heard him say. “Read me my rights.”

Jamison shot him in the stomach.

Oh, Jamison. Always go for the head shot. It's the first lesson in NCD training, even for personnel like Tom and me. But Jamison had a reputation. He never made it easy.

Tom turned the communicator back on. “Harlene? We're, um, engaging.”

“I see that,” came her icy reply.

Jamison stood over Jake, pumping his shotgun. I wanted to look away, but I couldn't—a small part of me was curious. As much time as I'd spent around their handiwork, I'd never actually seen a zombie killed before.

Then, the girl was on Jamison, grabbing him around the neck from behind. She was in what my instructors called the “transitional” phase of her zombie transformation, which is actually when they're at their most dangerous, with the heightened abilities of zombies but with traces of human intelligence. Jamison's armor was the only thing that saved him from Amanda plunging her painted fingernails right through his throat.

They spun in circles, her hands still around his neck—once, twice—until Jamison's feet were off the ground. With his armor on, Jamison had to outweigh her by at least two hundred pounds.

She let go and Jamison soared across the street, shattering a graffiti-covered phone booth. I wondered if we were responsible for destroying a historic landmark.

Tom frantically tapped my arm.

Beautiful Corpse Girl was looking in our direction.

 

The zombies are stronger and faster than us.
After the necessity of head shots, that's the next thing they teach you at NCD training.

At the end of our first week of top-secret Washington zombie camp, our instructor hustled us dozen trainees into an elevator and brought us down to one of the building's classified subbasements.

The levels of the facility we'd been restricted to until then—where we sat in classrooms and listened to instructors drone on about zombie physiognomy and precognitive theory—were totally Dunder Mifflin, all cubicles and conference rooms and flickering fluorescent lighting.

But the subbasement? That was full-on
X-Files
.

Our instructor turned us over to a man in a bow tie and wire-rimmed glasses. I'd never seen him before, but by the way our instructor deferred to him and avoided direct eye contact, I could tell he was some kind of boss. He was tall and thin, probably middle-aged but with one of those baby faces that made his age hard to peg, his jet-black hair combed into a severe side part. Mr. Bow Tie led us down a long, brightly lit corridor, through steel-reinforced doors accessible only by retinal scanners. He looked excited, like a little kid coming home to show Mom what he made in art class.

At the end of the hall, he ushered us into a dark little room. We crowded around in front of a wall of one-way glass that looked into a brightly lit padded cell.

And that's where I saw my first real, live zombie.

He was naked. That's what I noticed first, which I know is stupid, but I hadn't been expecting to see a nude middle-aged man that afternoon. He was hairy and dumpy and looked like he could've been a mechanic or, like, a really lazy construction worker.

“This,” announced Mr. Bow Tie, “is Subject Number Eleven.”

Number Eleven didn't look like a zombie. He looked like a nude guy huddled in the corner of an empty room. Of course, he
was
absently chewing on the twitching body of a live chicken, so that was kind of a giveaway. But other than the brown feathers stuck to the chicken blood in his chest hair, Number Eleven just looked like a regular guy.

Mr. Bow Tie began lecturing. “Similar to rabies, although it acts much faster, the zombie virus has an incubation period of about one month. After that, the infected will necrotize for the first time. The body shuts down—it dies—except for the functions that the virus needs to feed. Once enough living flesh has been consumed—human flesh is best, although as you can see Number Eleven here has been subsisting on chickens—the heart restarts and the subject will appear human. Until it needs to feed again.”

One of the trainees raised his hand. Mr. Bow Tie glanced in his direction.

“What's it called?” the trainee asked. “The virus?”

Mr. Bow Tie cocked his head at the trainee.

“We don't name things that don't officially exist,” he replied as if this was obvious. “Any other questions?”

“Is there a cure?” asked one of the others.

“If there was,” answered Mr. Bow Tie, “we wouldn't be down here, would we?”

The group went silent, all of us just staring at Number Eleven. He'd finished off the chicken, tossed it aside, and was curling up in a ball to sleep.

Mr. Bow Tie yawned. “We'll come back tomorrow, when things get interesting.”

As promised, Mr. Bow Tie brought us back to the subbasement late the next day. Number Eleven had changed. And he had company.

This time, Number Eleven was definitely dead. Or, undead, I guess. His skin was the color and texture of oatmeal left out to cool. A chunk of flesh had fallen off his chest, revealing a piece of his yellowed rib cage.

A pair of scientists stood in the room with him. They had Number Eleven shackled to a treadmill that had to be running at its highest speed, but Number Eleven sprinted along, no problem. He moved faster than a corpse had any right to.

They had his arms tethered to resistance bands and from time to time he'd reach forward, causing the bands to snap taut.

He was reaching for a severed human hand they'd hung at the end of the treadmill. It was still dripping.

“We stopped feeding him yesterday,” explained Mr. Bow Tie. “He's been in this undead state for just under three hours.”

He turned to us.

“It's adrenaline that makes them turn,” he explained. “When they get hungry, a survival instinct kicks in, not unlike when we humans find ourselves in mortal danger. That, combined with their paradoxical rate of cell degeneration and reconstruction, makes them far stronger and faster than us.”

Mr. Bow Tie clasped his hands behind his back and watched Number Eleven with an almost wistful look. “Eventually, he'll tire if he isn't fed. In the meantime, he's quite the formidable opponent. . . .”

The zombie was a bit of a mindblower, sure, but what really weirded me out was the severed hand.

Where had NCD gotten a freshly severed hand?

Mr. Bow Tie was looking right at me. He fixed me with a thin and unpleasant smile, like a teacher that had caught a student texting in class.

“Any questions?” he asked, still staring at me.

I shook my head in unison with all the other trainees.

They took us down to the subbasement every day after that to check in on Number Eleven. By the second day of starving and nonstop sprinting, he had gone from Danny Boyle Olympic athlete zombie to full-on George Romero shambler.

On the fifth day, Number Eleven was gone.

 

The point is that at first, when they start getting hungry, the zombies are scary strong. Which is why the cheerleader was able to pitch our refrigerator-size Special Forces–trained badass across the street, no problem.

“Harlene?” Tom was trying to keep his voice steady, likely for my benefit, and doing an altogether crappy job. “We're in some trouble here.”

Above us, the
whip-whip-whip
of the helicopter had grown fainter.

“We're looking for a place to put down,” replied Harlene. “Just get out of there, you hear? Don't look back.”

“But—Jamison—”

“He's a big boy, Tom.” Harlene's voice was stern. “Jamison can take care of himself. You need to keep my Sweet Pea safe.”

Tom started to clamber into the driver's seat, but recoiled with a yelp.