Chapter Six
Maisie
Gramps always says to listen to your gut, especially if it’s hungry.
He usually cackles after that and uses it as an excuse to get his beloved double cheeseburger, extra pickles, from the drive-through, but the words have stayed with me anyway.
One wild thing I’ve learned about the real world is that women are told over and over to be careful, then have our fears and concerns dismissed just as quickly.
He didn’t mean it. You misunderstood. It was a joke.
You’re just paranoid. But there’s something so powerful about listening to your feelings.
Mom knew it. Hell, she pulled us out of society over it, and while that seems like overkill most of the time, on humanity’s darker days, when I read about human trafficking and religious hate crimes and mass shootings?
It doesn’t.
Mom raised me to put just as much faith in my own intuition. Maybe that’s why I decide to pull back into Everett’s driveway as he tentatively walks across his front porch. With his rake gripped in his hands, broad shoulders tense, he looks terrified, and my gut is telling me to stay.
Or maybe I’m just hungry.
I sigh and let my head fall back against the headrest. So Everett apologized. He still saw the real me last night and ran away. Just because he’s hot and grateful I saved his life doesn’t mean he suddenly accepts me for who I am, ham radios and all.
He might be the last man you meet alive…a little voice says in my head, decidedly not my mother’s. An idea pulses beneath the thought and twists in my belly, back and forth, trying to wriggle free.
“Unlikely,” I say aloud, because why not? I have no one left to perform sanity for. “This apocalypse just began.”
What if he’s the last hot one? What if he’s the last one you want to bone? the little voice argues right back as I watch Everett push open the front door and step inside. You’re letting him go into that house all alone! With a stupid rake!
“So what? He can—shit!”
Something dark beyond the door strikes Everett, and he collapses on the floor. I grab blindly at the weapons stash in the back seat, pulling out the machete once more.
I slither out of my car, sticking close to the house’s perimeter, then run for the door and launch up the steps. He’s still lying on the floor. No zombies are feasting on his limbs yet.
Then what the hell knocked him out? And why is he covered in—I lean farther into the shadowy house, squinting in the darkness—coats? A metal coat stand lies crashed over on its side, the apparent culprit. I stare at it in bewilderment.
Everett just got taken out by a coat stand.
“Everett?” I nudge his unresponsive body with my foot, my machete held high as I quickly scan the house.
It doesn’t take long to see the horror in the hallway.
An old woman in a pink velour sweat suit staggers slowly forward, clutching a yowling cat like a giant furry hot dog.
Her milky headlamp eyes, dimmer than the ones of the night mobs, seem just as surprised by Everett’s fall as I was.
In her hesitation, the cat leaps free and bounds up the stairs.
I step over Everett’s body, grimacing at the blood leaking from his temple, and stand between him and the old woman. A harsh, rasping sound rattles from her throat, an exhale followed by nothing. No breath inward. No life left. Just hunger and impulse and reaching hands.
She stumbles toward me, slow and stiff.
I’ve never been fond of blood. Unlike Everett, I don’t watch horror movies, and the virtual EMT training I forced myself through left me nauseated and unsettled. And that was nice, healthy, red blood. The blood of the living.
What explodes out of the old woman’s neck is dark and sticky like syrup, filling the room with the sickly-sweet stench of rotting fruit.
I gag into my hand as the head lands first, rolling somewhere near the stairs, followed by the slow, slumping tumble of the zombie’s body.
Her mouth still emits that terrible rasping sound, but after a second, she stills completely.
There’s an old plaid comforter draped over the couch, which I haul off and throw over the zombie’s remains.
The cat hair settles over the scene a second later, like dust motes in the air.
A low groan rises up behind me, and I whirl around.
Everett. He’s still passed out, his body lying half inside the house. I check my watch and sigh. This road trip just started, and I’m already behind schedule.
After I slide Everett’s heavy body fully into the entry hall, I close the front door and begin a sweep of the house. I have a hunch Velour Granny was on her own—no more emerged after the scuffle—but I’m not taking any chances.
What I find is worse.
Pictures everywhere, the house one big gallery of them.
It fills me with a bone-deep jealousy. This house is full of memories, full of the kind of living that I’ve never done.
I had my apartment for almost ten years, and all I have is Walter the Pothos to show for it.
But it’s the picture on the mantel that makes my stomach drop.
Everett’s profile picture, from the dating app.
But in this larger, uncropped version, he’s holding a beautiful red-haired woman by his side.
Who is she?
There she is again. Everett and the redhead by a Christmas tree, howling with laughter as a cat dressed as Santa launches from her arms. A picture of the happy couple staring lovingly at each other in front of a wedding arch. My heart begins to race.
Suddenly the house looks too nice, too put together.
The soft green pattern on the curtains accentuates the creamy down couch, the mustard-yellow chairs facing them in perfect conversational setup.
Not all huddled around the TV like the old bros had.
There’s not a gaming computer or Joker poster in sight.
Everett’s married.
My jaw snaps closed. I grab his left hand off the floor. Sure enough, there’s a white band of untanned skin where a wedding ring should be. I fling his hand down. “You asshole!”
In a stunningly bad choice, Everett picks this moment to rouse. “Hrmph? Maisie?” He pulls his mask off and winces as he presses a hand to his temple. “What…happened?”
“Your coat stand tried to kill you, then I had to save you, again, from some old lady I had to behead, all so I can find out you’re married? You’re an asshole, that’s what happened!”
“You—beheaded—a lady?”
“An undead one, but yes!” I press my palm to my forehead. “So stupid! I should’ve known!”
Everett tries to rise to all fours, wobbly as a newborn giraffe, stumbling and shoving coats off all the while. Small periwinkle-blue wool sleeves mix with larger charcoal-gray ones, then a rich camel bouclé number slides off, which can only belong to his very fashionable, very normal wife.
I feel sick.
“Maisie, I’m not married.” Everett manages to get to his feet, then slumps into the wall. “Or I was, but I guess I’m—I’m not anymore.” He sounds so dejected, my heart goes ahead and pities him without my brain’s consent, which just makes me angrier.
“You guess?” I stare at him incredulously.
“What does that mean—you’re in a fight? Separated?
Divorced?” I jab a finger at him before he can respond.
“You do realize that if you’re divorced, this is just as bad, right?
” I gesture to the framed display of wedding photos, the fashionable coats strewn across the floor, the everyday clutter of living with a woman on every surface.
He’s either cheating on her or isn’t over her, and while one explanation makes him less of a scumbag, both make me want to walk out the door and never see him again.
I decide to do just that.
“Maisie, wait—” He pushes off the wall to follow me, then sees the slick of red coating his palm and trickling down his arm. “Oh…blood.”
And then, he faints, landing on top of the coats this time.
A groan exits me with gale force. I march over, staring down at him. “Did you just faint? Really?”
He doesn’t answer. Telling.
I should leave him here. He’ll probably come to in a minute or so with nothing more than a bad headache and a dry mouth, which is the least he deserves for having a secret hot wife.
Besides, she could come back any minute.
Let her take care of him—this sprawling, long-legged, absolutely useless professor.
Maybe she’ll chew him out for bleeding all over her fancy coats and beheading the neighbor.
I swallow, then squat down beside his still frame. He is still bleeding. The gash at his temple doesn’t look too serious, but what if the smell of his blood summons a horde of zombies like chum in the water? What if they beat down the door while he’s still unconscious?
I squeeze my eyes shut.
I told you not to trust him! Mom says. People exist only to hurt you. Give ’em an inch, and that’s what they do. Now leave his sorry ass and start worrying about saving your own!
I breathe in and out, halting the loop of Mom-chatter in my head by sheer will. Maybe it’s not foolproof, but when in doubt, I try to do the opposite of what her voice tells me. And asshole or not, staying until he’s at least awake feels like the right thing to do.
But man, sometimes doing the right thing is incredibly annoying.
After a quick sweep of his house, I find, in no particular order: an impressive first aid kit ( points for that one, philanderer), a browning bunch of bananas in an otherwise depleted kitchen, and the cat, whose collar reads Chicken. Cruel people.
Chicken is friendly, though. She immediately twines herself around my legs, reowwing up at me, then follows me back downstairs, hopping nimbly over the decapitated-zombie/comforter situation.