Chapter 58
Remy
Half-a-dozen of the decaying, infected bodies shambled out from between the trees.
None of them were particularly fast, and they had survived enough seasons out here that most of their flesh had been rotten or frozen off.
They were little more than skeletons with flakes of bluish-green skin and filthy scraps of old clothing.
A good chunk of them didn’t even have eyes anymore. Likely because so much of the tissue had been lost around the faces. Maybe the eyes froze and burst or were eaten by a particularly brave crow.
I half-expected them to erupt into a cloud of dust when I hit them with my axe, but that wasn’t what happened.
Their bones had deteriorated to the typical zombie-gelatin, but the cold left them semi-frozen.
A slushy mixture of green blood and yellowish bone splattered all over the ground and all over me.
By then, Ripley set aside her deer leg and went to work tackling the boney remnants of the zombies that clambered up the hillside toward us. The mules were braying and kicking out, but the ghoulish predators never made it anywhere near the tied down equines.
Ripley, Jordy, and I made quick work of the zombies, and then we were left with bones and flesh littering the ground around us.
“That’ll get your blood pumping in the morning.” Jordy grinned down at the carnage, and he wiped a spot a blood off his brow.
“These zombies look old as hell. I wonder how long they’ve been up here?” I asked.
He shrugged. “Maybe they’ve been wandering for a long time. They started out way down in the desert and slowly stumbled their way north for a decade.”
“Why would they do that?”
“Why do they do anything?” Jordy countered. “Zombies motivations have never made much sense to me.”
My hands were sticky with cold, drying zombie blood, and it would rust my axe blade if I didn’t take care of it properly.
“I’m going to get cleaned up,” I told Jordy, using my maul axe to point to a meltwater stream down the trail half-a-kilometer.
“I’ll be behind you in a few minutes. I want to check on Buck and take care of some things around the camp,” Jordy replied.
“Okay,” I said, even if I didn’t fully understand. I didn’t want to touch anything with hands covered in congealing zombie blood. It would get matted in the mules’ fur, contaminate our food and water, and stain our clothing.
But Jordy had his own way of doing things, so I left him to it. Ripley followed me down to the rapidly flowing stream, and she immediately stuck her face in the cold, clear water.
I rinsed off my weapon, and then I scrubbed at my hands until they were red and raw. Lyssavirus infection wasn’t a threat to me, but I hated how their blood felt on my skin.
Once I was done, I headed up the hill. As I returned to the campsite, I saw Jordy crouched over the zombie corpses. His back was to me, so I couldn’t tell what he was doing at first.
Then he stood up, and I saw the zombie brain in his hand. It was unmistakable. A fleshy mound of pale green marred by dozens of little holes, so it resembled a cross between Swiss cheese and pistachio pudding.
In his other hand, he held a strip of cheesecloth and wrapped the infected organ inside it. But I’d seen that before. At Jordy’s house, where bound pouches leaked green fluid into mason jars.
He had claimed that the cloth was filled with various herbs, giving the grinleaf its green hue. I had naively assumed that by herbs, he meant things like mushrooms, marijuana, or psychotropic flowers.
The rest of the process I understood, because he’d even walked me through it, and none of it had seemed strange or horrific. Of course that was before I understood that the very first “natural” ingredient was actually a freshly squeezed zombie brain.
“What the hell are you doing?” I shouted at Jordy, even though the situation was more than apparent to me.
When he saw me, his eyes widened, and he stammered out, “I-I… It’s not… This isn’t how it looks.”
“Really?” I asked skeptically. “Because it looks like you are using the infected brains of dead people to make drugs!”
“It looks bad, but it’s really not. People lick frogs to get high. People eat mushrooms grown in actual bat shit. Hell, even the tomatoes and potatoes back in Xwechtáal are fertilized with the compost made from literal human shit,” Jordy argued.
“Oh, fuck you for pretending any of that is even the same!” I yelled back at him. “I’m not upset because it’s repulsive, although I am very repulsed. I’m upset because it’s utterly depraved and a huge violation of human dignity!”
“Where was your concern for their human dignity when you were gleefully slicing them down with your axe?” Jordy shot back. “Or did you think that I didn’t notice that you only seem to come alive when you’re fighting something?”
“First of all, I have never done anything gleefully! And don’t try to pretend that I am the bad guy here!” I shouted. “You are making drugs from the brains of infected humans! It’s like cannibalism with extra steps!”
His face curled up in disgust. “It is nothing like cannibalism! And you know they’re not people anymore or you wouldn’t have killed them.”
“I kill them because I know they are people!” I disagreed. “I kill them because if I were a mindless monster destroying everything, I would want someone to put me down as quickly as possible. And that’s exactly what I do for the zombies.”
“Really? That’s your argument? That you’re doing it for the zombies like you’re some kind of Patron Saint of the Undead?” Jordy asked with a dubious eyebrow.
“No!” I groaned and threw my hands up in the air.
“I know everything is complicated and messed up right now. But one of my hardlines is that I don’t want to consume any part of a human at any point for any reason, whether they were infected or not.
And I think if you’re going to be handing out a drug, no matter how clever you are for discovering it – ”
“You think I’m offended that you don’t appreciate my genius?” he cut me off indignantly. “This is about helping people! How much would you have suffered if I hadn’t given you the grinleaf?”
“I would rather have suffered than taken a zombie drug!”
He gave a sardonic laugh. “I’m sorry that I didn’t realize you were such a martyr when I met you, but most people would rather not suffer needlessly.”
“You should’ve given me a choice. You should’ve told me what it was made of,” I insisted.
“You needed the pain relief, and I knew I could help you.” He stepped closer to me, his anger slowly fading. “I swear that I only wanted to help you, and to help other people like you. And no one living was hurt. I mean, the zombies were killed in self-defense, and I only extract from the dead.”
“You shouldn’t be giving this to people. At least not recreationally,” I persisted. “And you have to tell them what it’s really made from. They need to decide for themselves.”
“You make a valid point.” Jordy closed the distance between us, and when I didn’t move back, he put a tentative hand on my waist. “I never meant to mislead you or hurt you, Remy. You know that I care about you.”
“That’s not the only thing that matters.”
“But it still matters, a little, doesn’t it?” he pressed.
“It does,” I admitted softly.
“Do you forgive me then?” His voice was low and husky, and he touched my face, leaving a cold, congealing smudge of zombie blood on my cheek from his thumb.
“Just don’t lie to me or keep things from me.”
“I promise.” His eyes studied me, and when I leaned into him, his mouth found mine.
It wasn’t until he wrapped his arms around me, pressing me to him as we shared fervent kisses, that I was reminded of how thin the lines between rage and passion could be.