Chapter Five
The Fan Is Now Covered in Shit
Maisie
Twenty minutes later, my solar-rigged SUV is fully packed, I’ve contacted Gramps from my portable ham radio bungeed to the dashboard, and I’ve accidentally killed four more neighbors.
Zombies.
Er, neighbor-zombies?
I didn’t want to kill them—I meant to scare them off so they’d quit rushing me as I loaded the car, but they ran at my machete until steel met flesh, and once I extracted it from their glowing, mucky brains, they didn’t move again.
I wince as my back wheel crunches over something that sounds suspiciously like my landlord’s foot. In my defense, he tried to eat mine.
Driving through downtown Durham is surreal.
This early, the predawn streets are always empty, except for the occasional sleepy-eyed dog owner and handful of runners.
Today’s no different, really, except this time the dog owner has glowing white eyeballs, the dog’s running away from him, and the runners don’t have all their body parts.
See? Almost normal.
As I turn down the tree-lined avenue that heads out of town, my nerves crackle like live wires.
My whole life I’ve spent in a fugue of anxiety, always so worried, always preparing, always waiting for catastrophe to strike so I’d be ready to run.
But the doom I’ve feared ever since Mom had her big break with reality and yanked me out of kindergarten to stay home in our fortified house in the country has finally arrived. It’s here.
And I’m ready. Technically.
I know how to forage. I’m a certified EMT. I have a black belt in jujitsu, renewable energy for my rig, and a rechargeable vibrator. I’m going to kick this apocalypse’s ass.
I just wish I could kick it here. In Durham.
At the very least, within the state of North Carolina.
Not out there in the great unknown, where I’ll be operating at a constant disadvantage for sheer lack of familiarity with my surroundings.
For years, Mom told me stories of what happened to little girls who wandered off their properties, who left their mothers, who dared venture out there, where there were people whose sole purpose in life was to hurt you.
And for years, I believed her. Even once I started questioning the ghoulish nightmare version of the world my mother presented to me, quietly, and within my mind, part of me still believed her.
Still shook with terror at the sound of a distant truck rumbling down the closest road to our land.
It took about a week of living on the outside for my brain to realize the world wasn’t out to get me, but about five years for my body to catch up.
I had to build up to leaving my apartment, then my street.
Now I get in my rig and drive all over Durham, but my progress stalled there.
With work and everything, it became too easy to make excuses not to travel.
The plane ticket to New York, even just the purchase of it, was a massive leap forward.
One I was able to make only because it dangled the ultimate carrot in front of me—discovering who Mom was, where we came from, and who I really am.
But now I’m suddenly supposed to just leave home and drive across the zombie-infested United States like it’s nothing?
The thought’s given me literal hives; my arms are covered in itchy red welts.
A small crowd is gathered around a tree up ahead, just visible in the rising sun. Judging by the way they’re flailing—like drunk people swatting at an invisible fly—they’re more of the recently deceased who have ceased ceasing. But what are they trying to eat now? Some poor cat?
My eyes widen. I’ve always wanted a cat.
Maybe that’s what I need. A pet! Some company to get me through this nightmare of a journey ahead. There are probably tons of now-orphaned cats out there that need homes, like this one.
“Sorry, Walter. Your time as an only child ends here.”
I slow down and roll to a stop a few car-lengths away. There are seven zombies, all mewling and grasping with their heads tilted upward, reaching for the same thing lodged in the branches of the winter-bare tree.
Dammit. It’s a man. There’s a man up there.
Alas. I have not always wanted a man.
I unroll my window a few inches. He’s yelling something.
“Leave me alone, you creepy bastards!” he sobs. “You don’t want to eat me—I taste like sadness!”
The sad-tasting man wields a loose branch, sweeping it from side to side below and slapping the zombies’ outreached hands away. One grabs it and nearly pulls him out of the tree. His voice rises an octave. “I said fuck off!”
I sigh. It’s a universal maxim in the prepper community to save your heroics for yourself and your loved ones and leave everyone else to reap the consequences they sowed by not preparing.
But that’s never sat right with me. This is the first live human I’ve seen yet, and maybe he’s just one of the na?ve, unprepared sheeple, but I can’t drive by while he gets pulled from a tree and eaten.
If I hadn’t been so busy trying to bang Everett, I might have been able to save Dana from the old bros.
Guilt puts my SUV into park.
I grab the mace from the front seat and ease out of my car.
The mob is just ahead, but I’m using the line of parallel-parked cars to shield me.
The hysterical man’s doing a great job of keeping the zombies’ attention on himself, what with all the screeching.
I heave the mace down like an axe on the closest one behind the knee.
The zombie falls down like the lifeless corpse it’s supposed to be, and I bash its head in before it can prove me wrong.
Two more drop before the man notices his crowd of admirers dwindling.
I’m gunning for number four when the man in the tree ducks his head below his branch and spots me.
“Oh my god! Maisie?”
The zombies turn around, setting those glowing orbs on me.
Everett
“Thanks a lot!” Maisie yells as the mob turns on her.
“Oh, shit! I’m sorry!”
The flash of platinum-blond hair is almost too fast to track as Maisie slams her mace like the scariest baseball bat of all time into one of the zombies’ heads. It drops with a clump, glowing brains leaking onto the concrete, but she’s completely outnumbered.
I have to help her.
I aim for one of the zombies toddling for Maisie with my weaponized branch, but my weight pitches unexpectedly.
I lose my balance and tumble sideways from the tree.
Something horrifically squelchy breaks my fall, like a nineties waterbed, but the impact still knocks the breath out of me.
My mouth’s flapping open and closed like I’m a fish dying on land, until I roll over and face the bald man in a black leather bomber jacket who tried to eat my calf like a triple with cheese earlier.
The scream barrels out of my mouth easily after that.
I scramble off the unmoving zombie waterbed, his head already caved in, scooting backward until my back meets something hard. I scream again, but it’s just the tree.
A last phhhlump hits the concrete. My chest heaves as I stare up at Maisie where she stands surrounded by downed bodies on the sidewalk, her mace dripping with gleaming gore.
She looks pissed.
“Um, hi,” I squeeze out. “You’re still human. That’s—great.”
Maisie’s eyes have a hard, glinting set to them, like Clint Eastwood’s when the outlaw’s gone and really ticked him off. But they’re rimmed in red, too, her lids pink and puffy and tired. All the telltale signs of a night spent crying and too little sleep.
I should know. I looked like that every morning for a solid year after Louise died.
I probably look that way right now. I sat and bawled on Sandeep’s bottom step until Leather Jacket Waterbed showed up on the sidewalk, the stub of a cigarette dangling from his mouth, eyes beaming like headlights.
Then I did what any respectable pacifist with zero fighting skills would do.
I climbed a goddamn tree.
“You just saved my life.” I stare at her, awestruck.
Maisie sniffs. Her maroon sweatshirt reads Thrivin’ & Survivin’. “I thought you were a cat.”
“Oh.” I’m not sure how to respond to that. “Sorry?”
After a second, she spins on her heel and starts walking back to the SUV parked a few yards away. It’s covered in solar panels and looks straight out of a cartoon. She’s probably headed to the bunker.
“Gnnnnennnnggghhh. Gnnnnennngh!” A throaty rumble behind me makes my heart jump.
A zombie mom, followed by three of her grade-school zombie cubs, lurches slowly my way.
The zombies have been getting progressively slower as the morning sun climbs into the sky, but those undead children still look like they could take me out.
“Um, Maisie?”
The ten-year-old in Taylor Swift pajamas stares at me, hisses.
“Can I have that ride now?”
Maisie pauses outside the driver’s side and sighs, her shoulders falling. When she speaks, it’s with the annoyed resignation of a thousand ghosted women. “Come on.”
I run all the way to the SUV.
When I slide into the front seat, Maisie’s hands stiffen around the steering wheel, her eyes straight ahead. “Didn’t make it to your friend’s house?”
“I did. He’s just…not my friend anymore.” I point a finger at the condo where a man with brown skin and a rumpled Bob’s Burgers T-shirt stands at the window, watching us with unseeing white eyes. He showed up in the window frame sometime before dawn.
Maisie looks at Sandeep, or what’s left of him anyway, her face softening. “I’m sorry.”
“Me, too,” I say quietly through my tight throat.
Her car beeps alive and silently rolls through the streets of our undead town.
I nod at the map with a route highlighted in yellow taped to her steering wheel.
“Headed to your, um, bunker?” I squint at it.
“All the way up in rural Pennsylvania, huh? I’ve been through there. ”
Maisie rips the map down and stuffs it into her hoodie. “No! That’s not—that’s not anywhere!”
I arch an eyebrow. She is a terrible liar.