Chapter 21 #3
Next to him, Zoey made a sputtering noise.
‘We’ll catch up tomorrow,’ he promised hastily. ‘We’ll do brunch at Jam.’
Nick wrapped an arm around Zoey’s waist and guided her down the B&B’s steps and towards his truck, which was parked beneath an enormous oak tree with tiny hand-painted doors set into its roots. A toy horse was chained to a rusted ring by the kerb, because why not?
Alice padded along behind them, which was odd for her – usually she walked with her nose jammed right against Zoey’s ankle. Zoey was always giggling about it.
‘Hop up, girl.’ Nick patted the truck’s bench seat.
Alice loved riding between the two of them, tail wagging and ears twitching as she turned her nose to each of the open windows in turn.
But tonight, as before, she whined, her ears pinned back like the first and only time Nick had attempted to dress her up for Halloween.
‘It’s okay, Alice,’ he said, coaxing her up onto her seat. In the end he had to lift her – she wasn’t having it.
Then he had to do the same with poor Zoey as well. He’d never seen her in such a state. Even when they’d enjoyed a few too many rum-infused smoothies that first night out together, she’d remained in control.
Heading back to Zoey’s place seemed like the smart decision: it was only a few minutes away, as opposed to his place, which was a solid forty-five minutes without traffic.
He drove slowly, although he had no choice really, because a bunch of clowns (literal clowns) on skateboards were weaving back and forth ahead of him.
Each was playing a different brass instrument.
He crawled down Zoey’s street, noting that the collection of scooters that Zoey had been monitoring had grown.
The cat-mayor campaign, for which voting had now closed, but the winner of which hadn’t yet been announced, was similarly well represented.
Placards for various kitties and their political platforms bristled from just about every house – except the one that was proudly promoting a ferret as a write-in candidate instead.
As much as he was a Romero supporter, Nick secretly hoped the ferret won.
A vote for a ferret was a vote for chaos, and chaos in a residential neighbourhood was always fun.
Zoey’s house was quiet: only the blinking light in the kitchen was on, as evidenced from the strobing through the front window. And the ghost-shaped string lights in Ainsley’s room, if those counted.
Thankfully, before he’d disappeared, Winslow had made good on his promise to replace the lock with a smart keypad, which meant they could at least avoid fiddling with keys.
Even better, Winslow had left the lock on its default code setting, so a quick 1, 2, 3, 4 later and they were in.
Well, Nick and Zoey were. Alice sat outside on the porch, huddled between the dozens of planters and brightly painted sculptures.
She whined mournfully, the way she had a few years back during a road trip where they’d toured a famously haunted house.
It took a chunk of jerky from one of Peta’s stashes to get her inside. Even then, she sat with her back to the front door, and her doggie eyebrows had a lot to say.
He patted her soft head. ‘Let me get Zoey sorted out, and then I’ll come and check on you, girl.’
Zoey was standing in the hallway with the weirdly staggered pose of the guy at the end of The Blair Witch Project, and Nick feared that something was actually, seriously wrong. That Reba had been right.
But if so, what then? Should they go to urgent care? The ER? That holistic-medicine girl with the post-nasal drip who was always handing out business cards claiming to cure cancer via resonant frequencies?
But any of that would involve getting poor Zoey back in the truck, and she didn’t seem up for another ride. No, for now he’d try to get her comfortable in her room. Perhaps rustle up something hearty and warm.
Hearty, he thought, or … brainy?
The things he was willing to do for love.
‘C’mon, Zo.’ He put a hand to the small of Zoey’s back and guided her towards her bedroom, smiling at the Frog and Toad banner that matched his new tattoo.
She moved slowly, as though through the quicksand she’d admitted to being terrified of as a kid.
The hardwoods creaked beneath her unlaced boots, and the house crackled like gristle over bone as it settled.
Nick had the faint sense that he was walking into a horror movie.
But how could that be, in a house as cosy as this one?
How could anything scary ever happen when you were surrounded by fuzzy throw pillows and freshly cut flowers and the work-in-progress sunflower stained-glass window that was being assembled in the living room?
Zoey had stepped over the threshold into her room now. It was dark in there, and Nick had to scrabble around for the switch that toggled her complicated nest of string lights and lamps. (Zoey remained hostile to the concept of the ‘big light’.)
As the room lit up, she hid her eyes, groaning.
‘Sorry, babe.’ Nick hit the dimmer. ‘Here, let’s get you tucked in so that you can rest up. I’ll grab some medicine and snacks to tide you over. Maybe even one of your smoothies, since they do cure everything.’
He tried to keep his tone light, but the trepidation was real.
But then, as he helped her settle in, tucking the blankets and throw pillows around her until she was but a dazed-looking head among a Michelin Man mountain of duvets …
‘Ow! Jeez!’
She’d bitten him! And not even in a sexy way! (Nick wasn’t the biggest fan of biting, but he could see the appeal of a little nip. However, breaking the skin was just not on. He’d gone through a whole rabies-shot thing after a fly-by situation with a bat as a teen, and it had been less than fun.)
Zoey gazed at him with lowered, bedroom eyes. No, not gazed. Stared. And not with bedroom eyes. With … undead eyes.
Oh shit, thought Nick. Oh shit, oh shit.
He’d been right. Reba had been right. Joaquin had been right (when they’d veered off the topic of cryptids).
Oh shit, oh shit, oh shit.
Nick scuttled backwards like a crab.
‘Brains,’ Zoey whispered through cracked lips.
She held her arms out to him as though seeking a hug.
The bandage around her wrist had loosened, revealing an angry red welt on her arm.
Well, not red so much. It was green-tinged around its edges, and a series of angry dark lines raced up through her veins.
There was no denying it now, was there? There was no arguing that brains were just fashionable, the way oxtails had been last year, and bone broth the year before that.
That green undertones were the hot new makeup trend.
That the frontal- cortex-obsessed slam poets and the popularity of the Ramones’ ‘My Brain is Hanging Upside Down’ were merely a product of the zeitgeist. That everyone was shuffling about because they just refused to listen to their grandmas’ demands to Pick up your feet, you ruffians!
Nick could make jokes about the parallels between modernity and Shaun of the Dead no longer.
His rational, science-minded self, which had guffawed when Bozo had earnestly tried to tell him about a Bigfoot sighting, and which had mentally put Reba on a watchlist after she’d made those strange comments about murderous coffee shops and funeral home switcheroos, began to sweat.
Because as bizarre as it was, it was clear what was going on.
Zombies. They were dealing with zombies.
But how? What was causing all of this?
Nick clenched and unclenched his throbbing hand. Well, that was a problem for tomorrow’s Nick, assuming he still had his faculties by dawn. If he was running about demanding some brains to chomp on, well, that was someone else’s issue. He really hoped he’d turned the stove off, though.
Exhaling slowly, Nick gently took Zoey by the wrists.
‘All right, babe,’ he said, keeping his tone warm and non-threatening. ‘You rest up while I fetch you some brains. I’ll cook them up the way you like. Or I suppose we could do raw. What’s a prion or two between lovers?’
He closed the bedroom door, sinking down on the kitchen floor. Alice came over to him, licking his hand.
‘Now what, girl?’ If a bite had turned Zoey into a zombie, then wouldn’t the gnash mark she’d just added to his own flesh do the same to him?
Were they fated to become zombie lovers, slowly lurching across Portland in search of organic grey matter until they collapsed into a pile of bones and tendons at a silent disco at Laurelhurst Park?
Would they shamble through the rose gardens or Saint John’s Waterfront holding hands until their remaining flesh could take it no longer?
Would they whisper brains at an underground slam-poetry reading until an audience member who’d had enough sloughed off their heads and handed them in to OMSI in the name of science?
None of Zoey’s roommates were home – actually, Winslow could have climbed back in through his bedroom window, but who knew, really – so Nick spent a sleepless night on a giant beanbag in Ainsley’s empty room, waiting for the symptoms to overtake him the way they had his beloved Zoey.
His heart thrummed at a rate it hadn’t since the Beep Test during high- school PE, and his blood pressure performed a percussion solo in his ears.
Alice curled up next to him, one eye half-open as she tried to figure out this strange sleeping situation.
Her nose twitched the way it did when she scented a bunny, and Nick fretted that perhaps his scent was changing.
Was he turning? How much longer did he have until he was the intellectual equivalent of an internet comments section?
Outside, an endless train of shopping carts rattled past, giving Nick flashbacks of joking around with Zoey in his truck as the Spite Train of Milwaukie and 12th held up traffic for a solid fifteen minutes at a time.
They were so good together. It couldn’t end like this.