Unfed (13 page)

My mother has gifted me a gun.

We moved to America, and I thought that guns would be everywhere.

That’s what the movies and stuff have you believe. There are serial killers. Cowboys. Gangs. Wacko teens who shoot the kids who laugh at them in the hallway or, even worse, don’t know that they exist.

The reality is, living in a leafy, liberal college town like we did, it all seemed very tame, and nobody appeared to be carrying lethal weapons. What’s more, folks smiled. People said “Have a Great Day,” and some of them meant it.

And yet the guns were there, somewhere.

One day when I was about twelve, my mum announced something to me over breakfast. This was unusual on several levels. First, it was a weekend, and she was home. Second, she wasn’t exactly speaking to me at the time. I’d developed a great line in sulking whenever it looked like she might be thinking about talking to me, and it had worked great. Most of our necessary communications were conducted either through Dad or by one of us writing stuff on the whiteboard in the kitchen. But that Saturday morning she had cornered me on a cereal run from my bedroom, where I’d been peacefully watching really old episodes of
Doctor Who
I’d found on the Internet.

“So I thought we’d have a little trip out, if you’re game.” She kind of trilled, and I knew right then that something was amiss. We weren’t exactly always going off on Mother-Daughter Happy Days.

“Where.”

If I could get away with it, I always chose to be monosyllabic. And I probably had a mouthful of Cap’n Crunch at the time. And, crucially, I couldn’t respond with a question — a question would have sounded like I was curious, interested, enthusiastic even.

“Well, I thought it was about time we tested your eye.” She was grinning at me. Most discombobulating.

I remember I rubbed my eye at this point. I guess I figured she was talking about taking me to the optician’s or something.

“No! Not like that!” She laughed, way too much. “I thought I could take you to the shooting range.”

Well, you coulda knocked me on my ass. Didn’t see that coming.

“Like, guns.”

Again, no question. I was totally intrigued by this point, but there was no way I was letting on.

“Exactly like guns. Like this gun.” She pulled this tiny, shiny
piece
out from behind her back and, honestly, my first instinct was to hit the floor. I almost lost bladder control. I thought she’d probably reached menopause and was going to take us down in a fit of hormonal rage. But she was still smiling, so I tried to smile back. Which isn’t that easy when there’s a gun in the mix.

“I think you’d be a great shot,” she said quickly, as if she sensed that I was in total shock. “It’s not like we’re going to be out hunting or anything, but it’s a useful skill to have, and I think you’ll be good at it. Who
knows, if you have a flair as I suspect, you could shoot competitively. You know it’s an Olympic sport?”

By this time I was convinced she had flipped. I was just hoping that thing wasn’t loaded and I could throw the bowl of milky cereal in her face to buy myself enough time to run upstairs and call the cops.

However, as if on cue, Dad appeared. He’d been on night shift at the hospital and was wearing his scrubs. There might have even been a little blood on them, but then again, that might be my memory embellishing. Anyway, he took one look at my mother holding a gun to me (well, kinda) and turned as pale as a peeled potato.

“What’s going on here?”

“Just what we talked about.” My mother doesn’t really do Flustered — except when she’s trying to be normal — so she tried Spiky and Irritable instead.

“But we decided no,” my dad answered. His expression was already one of tired defeat.

“You decided no. I maintained it would be a great outlet for her.” My mother had her mouth on. She only gets that mouth on when things are nonnegotiable. Which is most of the time.

“So not karate or horse riding or chess club, but guns?” My dad was incredulous. “I didn’t even think you were all serious.”

“Chess club?” I looked at Dad. “Do you, like,
know
me?”

“Chess is about strategy,” Dad said. “Keeping a cool head.
Consequences
. It would be great for you.” He pulled a face. “And maybe for your mother, too.”

My mother shook her head, because she’s above all this teen banter, and looked at me. “I’ll be in the car,” she said as if Dad were the kid, and placed the gun on the counter, and left.

Dad sighed. I sighed. I shrugged. He looked me up and down for a second, then walked up to me and put his hands on my shoulders.

“Want to do it?”

“I guess.” I really
did
want to do it. It’s kind of shocking how much blowing the crap out of something appealed to me.

He nodded. “Fine. I’d say knock ’em dead, but really
don’t
knock ’em dead.” He leaned forward and kissed me on the forehead. “Take extreme care. And don’t let your mother get her hands on an Uzi.”

“What’s an Uzi?” I mumbled, but he’d left already. Left me alone with the gun on the counter.

(Except I don’t think he said the stuff about the Uzi. I think I just made that up for my own amusement. But you get the gist.)

So I picked up the gun and I looked at it like I’m looking at the one in my hand now. And as surreal goes, looking down at a gun in your hands while you’re sitting on top of a cowshed in zombie-infested, waterlogged Scotland is really not that much more bizarre than staring at a gun held in your hand in your kitchen at home when you’re twelve. My decision then was easy, though. Go with Mum. Shoot the targets. Feel a reluctant and kind of guilty swell of pride when she praises you, because she was right — you do have a good eye, and you’re a pretty hot shot, baby. And she never normally praises you, so you’ve got to take it when it’s offered.

We went to the range a bunch of times that summer. Then Mum got busy again, and we stopped. Dad took me once, and he was mega-impressed at how much of a killing machine his only daughter had become. But I could tell he hated it there, and to be honest, after the initial excitement wore off, so did I. I liked the satisfaction of hitting something dead center, I liked that
badly
, but guns scared me, and they still do.

So I’m leaving this gun right here. I can’t take it with me.

You know, if someone had said to me, “Yo, you’re going to be balls to the wall with a full-on zombie apocalypse, and you’re gonna get your hands on a gun,” I would have never thought I’d leave it behind. It seems the dumbest of the dumb things to do. But now I’m here, I know I have to leave it behind. Because the one lesson that I learned on that range, like any sad cop in a bad TV movie, is that if you have a gun, you have to be prepared to use it. And I’m kind of frightened I might like using it too much. There will be accidents and recriminations, tears before bedtime. There will be shooting. There will be death.

So I climb down from the roof, and I bury the stupid thing in the corner of the shed beside the green cow pie, which is beginning to crust over again. When I’m done, I shoulder the backpack and emerge from the shed into the foggy half-light.

A moo. Another moo. And some kind of bleat.

Huge black-and-white shapes lumber out of the mist.

Oh, crapola. The cows have come home. And it sounds like they’re Undead — and unfed.

I run back into the shed, dig the damn gun back up, load it, and pocket it in my jacket with the safety on. I’m about to leave when something skitters into view around the door of the shed.

The bleating sound. It’s a goat. A small, white, bouncing goat with teeny little daggerlike horns and cute gnashing teeth. Blood is dripping from its mouth and butt, as if its body can barely contain the rancid fluids within. One eye is hanging out on a stalk and dangles around on the goat’s hairy cheek as the sad thing bleats at me. I feel the bile rise in my stomach.

The goat paws the ground with a leg that buckles the wrong way, and gives a nifty leap into the air.

Oh god, no
.

Cows are big and slow and I can outmaneuver them. But this is a horse of a different color.

It bleats again, lowers its head, and charges for me — it’s unsteady but quick on its feet. I dodge out of the way like a matador, but it turns on its little pointy cloven hooves and runs again. This time it catches my sleeve in its teeth, its remaining eyelid peeled right back, showing the pink around the good eyeball, ripping part of the cloth away from the jacket. I shove it away.

“Jeez! This jacket is Kevlar, dude!”

The goat laughs in the face of stab jackets. It rushes me again, I step back, slip on the green cow pie, and fall backward onto my butt. The goat clashes against my chest, I lift it up by its scrawny front legs, and as the teeth snap at my face, I hurl it across the floor as far as I can, which is about five feet.

It scrambles. I scramble. The gun is out, safety off.

Aim. Breathe. Squeeze.

The force of the kickback and the shock of the noise fling me back onto the floor again. I dare to look up. The goat is lying on its side, half of its face blown off. And dead. Absolutely, positively dead.

I cry. Allow myself a huge old sob. Get it all out — Grace, nearly drowning, the hopelessness of my task, and the poor little kid on the floor.

As I dry my tears and emerge carefully out of the shed, the cows look at me warily, too fat and stupid to climb the slope to the shed. I spot a gap and go for it, and as I’m moving as quickly as I dare down the mushy hill, I see lights moving in the distance.

A car?

The lights move in a straight line, then they extinguish.

I have to chance it, have to gamble that that’s my crew out there, looking for me. I shove the gun back in my pocket and pick up the pace, mud squishing through my pulverized toes, barely able to see a few feet in front of me in the mists, which are thickening again, helpfully.

“Night soon, Bob.”
Smitty’s there. My familiar. My guardian angel. The monkey on my back.
“Ever feel like things are going to get worse before they get better?”

The sun has long since slipped behind the clouds again, and there’s the odd splat of rain on my face. The darkness is descending, and it’s going to pour. But above all that, the fog has thickened, and spread. For a while I could see it like a wall in the distance, first ahead of me, then to the sides. Now it is all around, and it won’t be long before it consumes me entirely. Where did the car go? Fear of being abandoned alone rises in my chest.

“Yo, mo-fo.”
Smitty pokes me in the ribs.
“You’re not alone. I’m here, aren’t I?”

“No, you’re really not,” I say out loud. “If you were, then I wouldn’t have to frickin’ find you, would I? Plus, FYI, they won’t just leave me. We never left anyone behind.”

“We did,”
Smitty says
. “Remember back at the castle? Little boy Cam and sister Lily? We left them, Bobby. They were infected, but we might have had time to save them. We’ll never know now. Cam was only a kid —”

“Shut up!” I yell at him. I walk on, tentatively stretching my hands out into the fog in front of me.

“Very zombie, Roberta.”

I ignore him. The occasional spit of rain is now quickening into something a lot more annoying. The
splat
,
splat
,
splat
on my bare head is like
Chinese water torture. Didn’t people go insane with this? Isn’t it against the Geneva Convention or something? I would pull the hood of my jacket up, but frankly it feels like the equivalent of stuffing cotton in my ears. My senses are on full alert, they ping with every little noise or shadowy movement. The sharp smell of wet pine burns my nose as I force myself forward. My legs
swish
,
swish
,
swish
as the material of the waterproofs rubs together, and suddenly I am hit with the ridiculousness of my situation. I’m heading back into the red zone.

Pine smell. Trees. I must be near the road. I speed up.

A sudden root, or a clump of grass — and I’m falling flat on my face and screeching stupidly loudly, kissing the ground with full force, the wind knocked out of my lungs, a gnarly twist of sopping undergrowth soaking me almost as much as the river did.

Ow
. Least the gun didn’t go off.

It’s comfortable down here. I might give up. I quickly pull myself up to sitting. The thought of surrendering to the earth is scary. Gotta get up.

Turning to see what I tripped on, I’m greeted by a bloody face.

I fall back onto my behind again.

What used to be a man. Empty sockets, eyeballs pecked out by crows. No nose to speak of. A neat hole in his forehead. But his mouth is closed in a firm line, like he’s disappointed in me for kicking him in the ribs as I fell.

I scream.

I immediately feel stupid. Only amateurs scream, and I’m way past that. This is what it’s supposed to do to you, all this mayhem and bodies and gun carrying. You get numbed. Like my feet, exposed to cold and harshness and cruel sharpness of sticks and stones.

Forcing myself to look at him, I take in the camouflage. A soldier, probs? But not Xanthro. He’s not in black, and there’s no little yellow
X
insignia. Bog-standard British army? And shot, once, in the forehead, sniper style. Maybe he wandered too close to St. Gertrude’s, and the Xanthro men took him out? They don’t want any interference from the government while they’re trying to modify their precious
Walking Dead
weapons.

Could there be more army dudes around? My heart jumps. I could do with finding some of the good guys. This one’s been here a while. I know that because he’s starting to smell. He’s past turning; if he was going to go zom I think he would have done it by now. And it could mean his pals are long gone.

A door slams somewhere in the gloom, and my head jerks up. I can just make out a figure moving toward me. I don’t think I have it in me to run away. If it’s not a friend, I’m toast.

Russ stops just before he reaches me, and stands there, chest heaving, eyes on the soldier. I allow myself to breathe again, a huge wash of relief tumbling over me.

“Dead?” he pants.

“Very.”

“And you’re OK?” He searches my face.

I nod. “Good to see you again. I was beginning to think I might not.”

“We thought we heard something. Hoped it was you.” A huge smile of relief spreads across his sunny face and he does a weird kind of double fist pump. “Nice one!”

He rushes at me and picks me up. I kind of lift up my knees and before I know it we’re kind of hugging in a really sappy, barfy kind of way. And I don’t dislike it. It’s so good to feel a live, warm human; especially a big, strong, cuddly, handsome one. He holds me tight and then runs his warm hand over my bald head, which is totally embarrassing for both of us, because I think he’d forgotten my no-hair thing for a second, and I’m mortified that I feel stubbly and gross in the extreme. We break apart.

“The helicopter,” Russ pants. “Back at the bridge. I dropped the rope. And then we had to make a run for it. I’m so, so sorry.”

“Hey, don’t sweat it,” I say, embarrassed.

“We were hoping they hadn’t spotted you under the bridge.”

“Well, they had,” I say. “But I swam away. It was no biggie.”

“You were in the river?” Russ shakes his head, rubs his face with shame, makes a whole deal out of it, then hugs me again. “You’ve still got the backpack, though?” he says as he strokes my back.

“Yeah. Dead soldier guy wanted it, but I told him no.” I sort of pat his
back, not wanting to seem unfriendly, but not wanting to be totally PDA in front of the others.

“Oh, she’s really milking this one,” I hear Alice snark from the Jeep.

A door opens, and I can just make out Pete.

“Where have you been all this time? Have you been bitten? What was in the backpack?”

“Nice to see you, too, Petey.” I try to walk nonchalantly back to the Jeep, but it’s kind of tricky with wobbly legs and no shoes. “I floated downstream a little, hung out with a few Undead animals, and chowed down on a granola bar.” I delve into the bag and toss him one. “Enjoy.”

Pete catches the bar and frowns at me. “Livestock has been infected?”

“Nothing ‘live’ about it.” I lean on the Jeep to steady myself. I’m so tired I could sleep for another six weeks. “Zombie cows, zombie goats. Somebody call PETA.”

“That’s worrying in the extreme.” Pete shakes his head. “Has Xanthro been experimenting on them, too, or have they been bitten by humans?”

I shrug. “Maybe folks got hungry. All I know is we’re not going to be ordering Angus burgers anytime soon.” I nod at the bar in his hand. “So eat up your granola.”

“Anything more interesting in there?” Russ pats the pack on my back.

“These waterproofs.” I pinch the fabric on my leg. “Water-purifying tablets. And there was a postcard from my mum.”

“No way!” Russ says. “Show it to me.”

I delve and hand it over.

“Wish you were here,” he reads, frowning.

And it sounds even lamer said out loud.

“That’s all?!” Alice exclaims. “Would it have killed her to say where?”

Pete gives her a doleful, pale green eye. “Maybe it could have. Or killed us.”

“Yeah, right,” Alice says.

“There is something a bit weird,” I say. “The postcard. That lighthouse. Look familiar at all?”

They all examine it.

Pete shakes his head. “Should it?”

I grimace. “Martha’s room. The pinboard.”

Everyone looks at me blankly.

“There was a postcard of a lighthouse there, too. In fact, I think it was the same one.”

“Are you sure?” Russ says.

I nod.

“And this is your mum’s handwriting?” Pete taps the card.

“Without doubt,” I say. “She’s a doctor. It would take some talent to forge that scrawl.”

“Oh god!” Alice huffs. “For once, couldn’t your mother do something straightforward?”

I’m about to come back with some witty retort — although I’m kind of agreeing with her — but my ideas are snuffed out by an ominous noise from above.

Russ looks up and swears. “They’re back. The fog will only keep them away for so long.”

“Get in,” Pete says.

“I can’t see them. Can they see us?” I look up as I climb into the backseat beside Russ.

“They may have infrared,” he says. “Go, Pete!” He opens the window
and sticks his head out to listen as Pete takes off as fast as anyone can in thick fog.

“I can’t believe you lost my skirt,” Alice gripes from the front seat.

“Yeah, because that’s what matters, Malice.” I delve into the back and retrieve my longed-for boots.

“Shh!” Russ hisses at us. “I think the helicopter’s losing us.”

Pete grips the steering wheel, and how he’s managing to keep to the road, I don’t know. It’s the weirdest feeling, barreling along in the gray, not able to see where you’re going. I hope we don’t hit another Undead cow.

After a few seconds Russ comes back in. “It’s gone. But we should get as far away from here as quickly as possible.”

“But Grace said Smitty was near,” I say. “We have to find him.” I lean forward to Pete. “Have you got the numbers? We need to work them out. Now.”

He flicks a hand at me. “Check out your window. We’ve been laying low and doing precious little else since you last saw us.”

Somebody has written the numbers in the condensation of the window.

“First one is for Smitty, the second for your mum,” Russ says. “After we got away from the helicopter, we drove into the woods and hid for an hour or so, and tried to work out what they meant. But we drew a blank.”

I stare at the watery digits. I’d love to have a eureka moment, but it’s not going to come easy.

“Both numbers start with five five,” I mutter. “Both numbers are the same length; that has to mean something.”

“Yes. Could be there’s a word in common?” Pete twists round. We are so ending up in a ditch.

“But look at all those fives in the last set — what word has four of the same letter in a row?” I touch the second number lightly and the pressure of my finger on the glass pools a dribble of water.

“There are codes where the same number means different letters,” Pete says. “But you need special algorithms to work them out. So that means a computer, or a really big brain.”

“My mother would never assume I’d have either of those things.”

Russ drills his fingers on the back of the seat in front. “Let’s think about this logically — because your mother is nothing if not logical, right?” He looks across at me.

“And then some.”

“So back to basics.” He rubs his forehead, like he’s trying to warm up his brain. “She tells you to find Smitty. We can only assume that the number after his name tells us where he is.”

“Yes!” Alice slaps the dashboard and makes us all jump. “That’s what I was thinking all along.”

“Er, great.” Russ clearly wasn’t expecting quite this level of enthusiasm for his stating of the obvious. “So will these numbers spell out a street name? A building, perhaps?”

“Oh, no.” Alice isn’t happy at that. “Not a building — a place.”

“What?” I curl my brow in irritation at her.

“Not what, where.” She leans over the back of her seat and dabs a finger on the window. “The numbers are where!”

“Yes, and?” I shout back. “5546 … whatever … that’s not a word.”

“It doesn’t have to be,” Alice says, like she’s talking to a very slow person. “It’s those point thingies. The lines on a whatsit. So many north or whatever.”

“What on earth are you talking about?” I roll my eyes.

“On earth. Right!” She looks at Russ. “Finally she gets it. Only she still doesn’t know she gets it.” She shakes her head.

Pete slams on the breaks.

“Coordinates,” he groans quietly. “Longitude and latitude. Why didn’t I see it before?”

“So obvious, now that I look at it,” Russ says.

“Huh?” I say dumbly, mostly because I’m flabbergasted that everyone seems to think that Alice is right about something that requires brainpower.

“The numbers are, like, degree thingies on the globe. We did it at school, Dumbo,” Alice explains to me.

Pete turns off the ignition and bounces up and down in his seat. “You know — fifty-five degrees north, say, then so many west or east or whatever. It’s how you find stuff when you’re in the field. Basic geography.”

“
Basic
geography, Bobby,” Alice purrs at me.

“The seventh number — six — is text code for
N
, meaning ‘north.’” Pete jumps in because heaven forbid that someone else should get a chance to explain it all. “The six numbers preceding it measure longitude.” He takes a breath, relishing the chance to tutor me. “There are three pairs of numbers.” He reaches over and touches Smitty’s number
on the window, putting commas in to separate the first six digits: 55, 46, 17. “So fifty-five degrees, forty-six minutes, seventeen seconds north. That’s how it’s measured, and it points to a specific spot on the map.” He screws up his brow, thinking for a moment. “It
is
somewhere near. Fifty-five would make total sense; Edinburgh is fifty-five degrees north.”

I look at him. “How do you even know that kind of thing?”

He looks back at me blankly. “How do you not?”

I blink. “OK. So how does
she
know?” I point at Alice.

Pete shakes his head gravely. “These are weird times in which we live, Bobby.” He continues, “So the next six numbers are degrees of latitude, and the final number in the sequence will be indicating ‘east’ or ‘west’ — it’s nine, so that’s text code for
W
…” He begins to do commas again, and the first set of digits now reads:

“There!” He sighs happily. “That’s it. That’s where Smitty is. All we need to do is go to those coordinates on the map and we’ll find him. I bet my life we’ll find him.”

And I believe it. For the first time since I woke up this morning, I feel genuinely chipper.

“So how do we do that?” I ask Pete. “How do we follow the coordinates?”

“Easy!” he positively sings. “We have a GPS.”

He turns on the ignition again and reaches for the button that turns the satellite navigation system on, and for a kind of embarrassing second, he doesn’t realize what we’ve all remembered.

The GPS screen blinks out at us, smashed, unreadable.

“Oh god.” Pete looks like he’s going to cry. “I didn’t know … I didn’t think we’d need it …”

We sit there in silence and watch the screen blink, the only form of light inside the car. The engine hums quietly. Outside, the fog begins to thin, showing the trees to either side of us. I want to cry, too. So near, and yet so far. There we sit, all worked up and nowhere to go.

“Oh, well,” says Alice after a minute, “I suppose we’ll have to use the map thingummy, like in the olden days.” She shifts her pert behind and pulls out a wad of papers marked with curvy lines and numbers. “I’ve been sitting on this all the time,
très
uncomfor-taahble.” She flutters the paper. “It’s what gave me the idea of the numbers in the first place, it’s got them scribbled all over it.” She takes in our open jaws and incredulous stares. “What?”

Russ grabs the map from Alice and pores over it with the flashlight. “This is it,” he breathes. “This is what we need — the longitude and latitude, it’s all marked here.” He points at the map. “This must be the river — and here — the farm buildings, and the bridge.” He nods, a smile breaking over his face. “We can do this!”

I lean over him. “You think this is for real? These numbers, that’s what my mother was trying to tell me?”

He looks up at me. “Well, she’s
your
mother. Do you think it’s something she would do?”

I don’t even really need to think about it; it’s totally something she would do. And now that I do think about it, my cheeks burn as a long-forgotten memory surfaces.