He nods and chews steadily, a drop of cheap cow blood on his pale, stubbly chin. His eyes are dark, almost gray, where once they were such a vivid, striking blue. Of all the changes he’s been through, it’s his eyes I miss the most. Well, that and his soul, his friendship, his laughter, but…it’s best not to dwell on all that.
His hair is stubbly, too, black bristles against his cold, pale skin.
While he’s busy chewing, I touch the side of his head lightly. He pauses, wary, almost feral, nostrils widening, but the power of the meat, the hunger for constant blood nourishment deep in his cells, is too much. He abides my touch and returns to his steady, almost rhythmic chewing.
It’s the only time he’s soft, when he’s eating. Really, it’s the only time it’s safe to go near his face. I spot a trace of blood by his ear and wipe it off with a towel I keep handy for feeding times.
He finishes with a not-quite-satisfied grunt, but he finishes just the same. I look at the empty container, at the puddle of blood that’s collected in the corner, half-congealed from the heat of our long pilgrimage to the last Checkpoint.
I’m tempted to try it, to get a taste of what life will be like on the other side of the Checkpoint, in the Z-Zone. I raise the plastic to my face, all prepared to do it, then I take a whiff. Big mistake.
It smells like raw hamburger, ugly and moist and almost…hot with an acrid, belching steam that hits my face like a wet rag. I retch, wondering if I’ll ever be able to adapt as Sam has to his world. To their world.
He snorts, almost laughing, or maybe he’s just still hungry. His eyes are so vacant and gray, it’s hard to tell. I offer him the plastic container and he takes it greedily, roughly, making my stomach hurt at the thought that he was never smiling at all.
At least, not smiling at me.
“Walk,” I say. Command number three. He stands abruptly, dropping the plastic container to the ground, dried now of every drop of blood. I wipe the last of it off his chin. His gray eyes are soft now.
I look down at the container, tempted to pick it up, clean it off, save it. Then I frown and turn on one heel. That’s human thinking, and I’m minutes away from no longer being human. I leave it behind, like the house a few miles back, my frilly pink room, the fridge stocked with raw meat Sam will never eat and the chain in the wall next to his bed.
I start walking. He follows dutifully. You may have to tell him what to do, and often, but once he gets started, Sam’s pretty good about following. It’s been like that for nearly three months now, ever since the virus came and sank its teeth into my brother.
The pavement is smooth under our feet, the streetlamps dull and just now buzzing to life every few feet or so. Not many people use old Ranger Road anymore, not since they set up the last Checkpoint into the Z-Zone.
Sam walks quietly by my side. I’d reach over to take his hand but I’ve tried that a few times before and, well, it never ends well. Either he squeezes too hard and threatens to snap a pinky bone or he jerks away like we’re total, random, complete strangers.
I’m never quite sure which of his reactions hurts the most.
His new sneakers scrape the pavement beneath his feet, creating odd sounds that are still somewhat less disconcerting than his usual flat-footed shuffle. To think he was All-State in cross country less than four months ago breaks my heart.
Or would, if I had a heart left to break.
I don’t know why I bought those shoes. Old habits, I guess. Mom used to give me money to take Sam shopping every summer, you know, for back-to-school clothes.
Even though he was older, he could never be trusted to pick out sensible things. If he had his way, mom knew and I soon realized, he’d blow the whole two-hundred-fifty dollars on a new pair of shoes and a trucker cap and just wear those until she gave me another two-hundred-fifty dollars to take him winter shopping.
I guess, waking up today, I felt like this was kind of a back-to-school shopping day for us both. Or, at least, a starting-something-new day.
The guard stand comes into view, tall, pointed, and bathed in the last of the day’s setting sun. It’s narrow and pointy, just like the last few we’ve had to pass by on our way out of town.
They used to be bigger, and better manned, with air units and port-a-potties and Klieg lights, the whole ball of wax. But after the first rush of the virus, after family members came by the dozens, shoving off unwanted zombie family members into the Z-Zone, the crowds dried up. Then funding dried up, until now there are just a few of the old guard posts left. This one is the last before the human-free, zombie-only area—the Z-Zone—at the edge of town.
I hear music playing, something rowdy and techno, like you’d hear at somebody’s house party just before the cops showed up to send everyone home.
I see movement inside the guard stand, which is roughly the same size as those phone booths you only see in old movies nowadays. It’s a burly guy. I can see that much through the single window. Big shoulders, thick neck, thick arms, and he’s moving, dancing maybe, in front of the single bulb that illuminates the tiny structure.
Something about him looks familiar, and even more so as we get closer and I see the spiky flat-top above his Neanderthal-thick brow and the kind of flat, pug nose pushed against his wide, angry face.
“Spike?” I ask, as he finally turns the music down and emerges from the guard shack. Though it’s more like a guard shed.
“Emma?” His voice is deep, but soft, though far from kind. His hulking shoulders fill the trademark tan shirt of his uniform as his giant, beefy hands rush to button his top button. “W-w-what’s up?”
“I didn’t know you worked for the Corps.” I say it with a questioning tone, even though it’s more of a statement because, really, I didn’t. I figured he’d be too busy bench-pressing freshmen in the school gym to take on some crummy position with the local militia.
He shrugs his massive shoulders, the tin badge on his left pocket rustling against the scratchy-looking polyester material of his cheap shirt.
“Only part-time,” he says, like he’s too good for a full-time job. “Nights and weekends, mostly. Pays more than Pizza Parlor, at least.”
He stops ogling my chest long enough to look up and squint at Sam.
Sam lowers his head, like he does with most strangers. Unless he’s hungry, then all bets are off. But he’s not hungry right now, so he’s docile, even a little shy.
“So, who’s the meat-head?”
I cock my head and clench my fists at my sides. Meat-heads. It’s what the locals call zombies, or have ever since they kicked most of them out of town. Just try saying it to their faces, though.
I watch Sam’s nose wrinkle as he tugs on his ear. He does that sometimes when he’s mad, or sad, or lonely, or restless or confused, which is actually a lot.
“That’s my brother, Spike. Don’t you remember him?”
He shrugs. “They all look so different after they’re gone, you know?”
I tap Sam’s hand, the one tugging on his ear, and he dutifully puts it down at his side.
I turn back to Spike and lower my voice, biting off each word. “He’s. Not. Gone. Spike.”
Spike snorts, beady eyes squinting back at me from his wide, fleshy face. “Really, Em? He sure looks that way to me.” He stares at Sam, nostrils flaring in disgust.
This time, Sam stares back. It’s not a pretty thing. Trust me, I’ve been on the receiving end of that stare and…no…not good. His gray eyes have this way of morphing to black, maybe not really, but that’s what it feels like as the last light of day casts half his face in shadow.
With his thin lips, gaunt cheeks, and dark eyes, he’s pretty scary when he’s smiling. When he’s scowling, about three steps from eating your face off, it’s no walk in the park.
Spike blinks twice as a bead of sweat drips from his forehead and stings his eyes. Turning back to me he grunts, “ID and handling fee, Emma. You know the drill.”
I dig my brother’s driver’s license from my backpack, plus the three-hundred-dollar “handling fee” the government charges to allow “reanimated individuals,” as they call kids like Sam on the paperwork, into the “human-free” zone.
Spike cocks one beady eye at the money, silently wondering where a high school junior coughs up that kind of cash.
“My parents.” I suddenly feel the need to explain. “The Corps gave me access to their bank account after they were…killed…in the infestation.”
Spike stops, pen in hand over Sam’s paperwork, zeroing in on that stupid pause as I swallow.
He glances up at me from where he’s hunched over the tiny guard house desk, then to Sam. “But didn’t he kill the—”
“We don’t talk about it,” I blurt out, as Sam shifts from one foot to the other, his hand creeping up desperately to his ear.
He hasn’t talked since that day, hasn’t done more than grunt or point but whenever someone brings it up, in passing, a neighbor who survived that day or the postman at the gate or some random asshat like Spike who just can’t keep their mouth shut, Sam gets all glum and tight-lipped.
It’s like he knows what he did, but doesn’t quite know. Like he remembers the taste of his own parents’ flesh buried deep between his gnashing, gnawing teeth, but won’t let himself remember.
Spike stands, pen still poised above the paperwork to get Sam into the Z-Zone. He just stands there, arm still, hand still, not even shaking, as the pen hovers four inches above the form.
It’s like he’s waiting, like he won’t go on, until I explain.
“I mean, we don’t talk about that day in front of…Sam.”
“Sam?” Spike asks, looking more closely at the driver’s license I’ve just handed him. “It says here his name is Reginald Saxton Graham the Third.”
I shrug. “After everything happened, and the virus left him like…this…the only name he’d respond to is Sam.”
Even now, he looks up when I say it. Spike sees it, frowns, and chews his lower lip.
“Whatever,” he huffs, returning to his paperwork. “I mean, I love my brother to death, but if he chomped on my folks’ brains, killed ’em right in front of my eyes like this one here, I wouldn’t be treating him all warm and fuzzy like you are, that’s for sure—”
I feel something brush against my side and turn to Sam. “Stop!” I shout, more at Spike than at Sam.
Just the same, it’s command number four. Sam growls and Spike backs up, holding the entry form into the Z-Zone up in front of his chest.
“I. Told. You,” I say through gritted teeth, biting down harder on each word as I wedge myself between the two boys. “We. Don’t. Talk. About. That. Night.”
“Got it, got it,” Spike squeaks, hastily handing over the paperwork.
I cut a glance at Sam, who stands firm, rigid, inches from the front of the guard shack and one lunge from sinking his teeth into Spike’s skull.
“Back,” I say, gently, resisting the urge to touch him. Do that now, when he’s a tight wire like this, and he could go off: absolutely, irretrievably, epically off. Better to pry him away, using the fifth—and next-to-last—command.
“Back,” I urge him, showing him as well as telling him. “Back.”
At last Sam flicks me a glance, buried in the depths of his deep gray eyes, and takes one, then two steps back, to follow me as I step softly away from the guard shack.
“Amazing.” Spike’s beef-jerky breath is hot on my neck. “I’ve never seen one obey like that before.”
I flinch, because it sounds like he’s talking about a dog. Then I look up into his big, blue eyes and see he’s smiling, tentatively, or even…approvingly. “How’d you get him to do all that?”
I’ve got my paperwork in hand. Our work here is done and I really should be going, but as clueless, as dumb and vapid and vain and thuggish as he is, Spike might be the last person I ever see. So I answer him, as if he really cares.
As if I really care.
“It just takes time,” I say, watching Sam stand stock-still there by the guard rail. It’s yellow, with black stripes, and Spike leans on the business end. It’s the end he’ll have to lift up for us when it’s time to let Sam walk into the Z-Zone, never to return.
“Yeah, well.” He chuckles. “Zombies have a lot of that. Time, I mean.”
I watch Sam’s face as it gently perceives the Z-word, crinkles like he’s just smelled raw meat, then quickly fizzles out.
Even so, the exercise leaves his eyes a tad grayer, a tad…sadder.
“Are we good?” I ask, hoping for a few minutes alone with Sam before, well, just…before.
“What?” Spike looks momentarily muzzled, as if maybe he thinks the “we” I’m talking about is him and me. A wry smile curls at the corner of his thick, liver-colored lips. Then it dawns on him: Sam. Are Sam and I good?
“Oh yeah, s-s-sure, let me just—” He begins to push down on the guard rail. I flick a glance at Sam, who peers past it, senses his kind—off in the distance—and takes a hesitant step forward.
I reach out to touch Spike’s arm through his cheap polyester uniform sleeve. It
is
scratchy! Even after three straight months of caring for Sam, of fretting about him night and day, of ignoring my wardrobe, my hairstyles, my makeup, sometimes even my hygiene, I’m not entirely without my charms.
He blushes at the touch. He pauses as I use the insides of my bicep to push my chest forward. Even I can see it strain against the black tank top beneath my gray hoodie.
“I thought,” I purr, leaning in just a smidge more, “before you let him in, Sam and I could…talk.”
Spike nods, glancing down predictably, but the school jock buried deep inside forces him to smirk.
He looks up, at my eyes, then into my eyes. His are cold again, and cruel. “He won’t understand you, Emma. They
can’t
understand you.”
“He will and he does.” I strain to keep my voice under control.
He starts to say something snappy and off-the-cuff, but my hand is still there on his arm, soft yet insistent. A girl, at sunset, chest pushed out, eyes willing and smile come-hithery and a zombie for a brother and whatever smart, salty thing he was going to say dies on his thick, slobbery lips.
“Suit yourself.” He winks and steps just inside the guard shack.
“Sam,” I say, loudly, to get his attention. He lolls his head like he does, soft eyes warm and gray, smile so thin it could be a smile, or just two lips randomly pressing together. I can see what he’s thinking, if he’s thinking anything at all: he’s full, I’m here, what’s to worry?