Who moved my cheese? And my shotgun?

When we pulled back up to Jimmy’s barbershop a short while later, things were almost back to normal. Or… whatever the closest thing was in the zombieverse. I won’t say I was totally convinced that the bionics didn’t exist, but I was well on my way to putting them out of my mind.

“Want to wait here?” Dave asked as he put the pistol he’d rested on the dashboard back into his waistband and reached in the back for the burlap sack of heads.

I shrugged. “I guess I can start thinking about food while you make the drop.”

Now normally we didn’t split up, but David was armed and this was merely a swap job with Jimmy. In and out.

Still, I put my own 9mm in reach on the dash as David exited the vehicle. As he walked up to the shop door, the bag of heads swung at his side in rhythm to his step and dripped sludge behind him like a surreal telling of Hansel and Gretel (I guess that would make Jimmy the witch and would explain why he was dressing the part).

When Dave disappeared into the shop, I reached behind me and grabbed an old tin box we’d taken from a military surplus store we’d found a while back. When I opened it, I groaned.

Within lay the food of champions. And that wasn’t saying much. Some old PowerBars (and not even in the good flavors) stared back at me. There was a bit of beef jerky and a couple of MRE rations.

God damn, I missed food. Real food.

Not fast food, really. I’d stopped craving pizza and burgers and fries within the first few weeks and my body had thanked me for it by leaning out. No, now I missed weird stuff. Like cereal with skim milk. Or yogurt.

I know, I know, here I was in the middle of the desert and I was longing for bacteria-laden dairy. Whatever. I still wanted it. That’s just how the brain works, I guess.

After much consideration, I chose to pull out the bag of jerky and tossed it on the driver’s seat while I put the rest of the tin back in place behind us. We couldn’t eat much from our meager collection, not until we scrounged up some more stock to replace it, which meant either making a few store runs for trade items or taking a job from one of our better-paying customers.

When I glanced toward the barber shop, I saw Dave coming back out. He no longer carried the burlap sack of heads, but he had another curiously small paper bag in his hand, a remnant of the fast food I no longer craved.

He threw open the driver’s side door and got in. His lips pursed and he yanked the jerky bag from under his ass and tossed it and the take-out sack into my lap.

“What?” I asked as he roared the engine almost to the point of flooding it and gunned it back toward the highway.

He didn’t answer, but his white knuckles told a pretty fucking clear story.

“What?” I repeated. “What did Jimmy say?”

“Wasn’t there,” David’s teeth never unclenched as he spoke. “Left a note saying to leave the heads by the door.”

“Ah.” I looked down at the bag in my lap. “I assume this is what he left for payment?”

Dave blinked. “Oh yes. Please, open it!”

I sighed as I unrolled the greasy bag and reached inside. I pulled out one small box decorated with cartoon characters.

“Bandages,” I said as I stared at the colorful artwork.

“Oh no,” Dave said, enunciating very carefully now. “Not just bandages. Sponge-Fucking-Bob-Square-Damn-Pants bandages.”

“He lives in a pineapple under the…” I trailed off as Dave’s eye twitched. “Sorry.” I shook the box. “Half-full.”

David jolted his head toward me. “You’re kidding.”

“Nope.” I put the box back in its bag and tossed it in the back for storage later.

There was no response from my husband for probably about five miles.

“Fucking cheapskate,” Dave finally muttered, his knuckles white on the steering wheel as he stared at the expanse of highway.

I didn’t answer, mostly because there was nothing to say. I mean, we’d have cheerfully dressed wounds for a little bit, but I doubted Dave wanted to hear that.

I stared out my window. We hardly even noticed the burned and bloody cars that had been cleared to either side of the road anymore. They were just part of the landscape now, like the desert or the mountains.

There was only barren wasteland to our left and right. Once it had been part of a city, but now… nothing. Well, almost nothing. Off in the distance, I saw movement down on the streets and in the flattened parks. Zombies lurching around, looking to feed.

“Hey, slow down,” I said as I reached in the back for one of the rifles with a scope. “I think some target practice might do me good.”

Dave did as I’d asked, dropping our speed gradually until we were only going about ten miles an hour. I rolled down the window and balanced my gun on the ledge. Carefully I took aim at a zombie dressed in filthy doctor’s scrubs who was standing on a street corner by what was left of a bus stop. Just standing there, like he was waiting for the 5:30 to… hell, I guess.

I gently squeezed the trigger and was rewarded by the plume of blood that burst from the back of his head. He collapsed in a heap on the sidewalk. I kept my eye focused through the sight of the rifle and watched as, sure enough, the explosive sound of the gunfire echoing in the desert air brought zombies racing from the rubble in a wave of snarling, drooling, sludge-vomiting unison.

“They’re coming for the on-ramp,” I said mildly as I pulled off another shot and dropped not one, but two when the bullet pierced rotting flesh so easily that it maintained its velocity and killing power.

“Ten points for two,” Dave said without acknowledging my first statement. He was starting to sound less pissed now, as he always did when the killing started. We were a bloodthirsty little pair. What can I say? That MTV Generation thing might have had some validity.

David kept the car barely rolling even as the mob of zombies panted and weaved their way up the off-ramp. On- and off-ramps, especially ones with steeper grades, always trip zombies up, sometimes literally. They just don’t have the mind power to figure them out, so it’s hilarious. Like watching really stupid chickens peck around in a fucked-up coop.

Eventually, though, a hefty portion of the zombies I’d stirred up managed to make it up the hill and rolled toward us in an undead wave of arms (and lack of arms) and unkempt insanity.

I fired off a couple more shots, this time faster since the zombie horde was closer than ever.

“Any time now, sweetheart,” I said as I reloaded and fired a few more rounds.

“Oh.” Dave said, as if he’d been distracted and forgotten he had the power to save our asses. “Sure.”

He geared the van into reverse and backed up, spinning the wheel and slicing our back bumper through the mob in one clean motion. Zombies flew backward, smashing against each other only to pop back up, oblivious to the injuries to their dead bodies. They weaved toward us again like a limping collection of drunks to an overturned beer truck.

We were facing the wrong way on the highway now… not that it mattered. You could flip donuts on the I-5 in L.A. now and not hit another car (not that we would be so reckless… oh no, not us). Dave geared us forward and slammed a few more zombies across our hood before he swerved around and sped off toward the camp.

I heard dragging behind us, but after a while it faded. That happens a lot, actually. Zombie grabs your bumper, you speed off, find a dead broken zombie arm still clinging to the vehicle the next day. But it’s not like zombies have insurance, so why stop for the accident, right?

“That was satisfying,” I said with a sigh as we angled off the highway toward Tempe. “And you can add more to your steering wheel killing count.”

“Not as satisfying as it will be when I find Jimmy,” Dave said with a snarling sneer.

“There, there,” I said with a light pat to his arm. “Next time we’ll just let old No-Toes fend for himself. That’s the only way he’s ever going to learn.”

“That or a massive ass-kicking.”

“Well, if you do that, you’ll get to practice your new karate moves, so it’s a win-win, right?”

He chuckled. “Jujitsu, Sarah, not karate. Karate is like Trix. It’s for kids.”

“Wow, that was a particularly bad pun,” I said with a shake of my head and a smile.

As the sun slowly set, he stared at nothing in particular until we left the highway. Since we’d come to Phoenix, this route had become second nature to us. Even if I closed my eyes, I knew the turns to get down the extra-wide streets to what was once the ASU campus and more specifically Sun Devil Stadium.

Of course, the zombies, the government, and the survivors had made a few alterations to the campus (and all without having a bond vote… who says the system doesn’t work?).

With over seventy thousand students, professors, and other faculty at work and studying on the campus at the time of the outbreak, the zombies had ripped through the school like a black, drooling plague when the outbreak reached the city, about five days after its initial burst in Seattle. So while David and I were fleeing our city, this city had encountered its own version of hell just like so many others in the West.

So, the government had come with its planes and bombs and destroyed everything. Did it curb the zombies? Sort of. But I hated to think about how many survivors were taken out along with the living dead.

But those of us who were left were making our mark on the landscape now, too. As we turned down one of the more narrow streets that had once taken football fans to the parking lots near the stadium, we saw the wall.

Remember the big wall around the town in the second Mad Max movie? Well, it was kind of like that. Except without the faux-punk influences and the special kind of crazy that was Mel Gibson (who, by the way, I’d heard was turned into a zombie on like day four, though that might just be a rumor).

Constructed of debris, fencing, cars, anything that could be moved and stacked, really, had been placed around the caved-in walls of the camp to keep the zombies out and the people safe.

It worked most of the time, too. There had only been a few instances where zombies had either figured out how to scale the wall or someone infected had made it past inspection.

Dave shot me a look as the big gate (made of some kind of sheet metal siding as far as I could tell, with “New Phoenix” painted on it in bright yellow spray paint) slid open and allowed us into quarantine.

“Be nice,” he said softly as he followed the gatekeeper’s instruction to park to the left. “You pissed these guys off last time.”

“One of those fuckers grabbed my boob to pose for a picture,” I snapped as I glared at the small group of guys with their weapons ready outside my door.

David rolled his eyes. “He was just excited to meet the famous Zombiebusters. It’s your fault with all your brand building and shit. You’re Fucking Paris Hilton to these people.”

I grimaced. “No, c’mon. Make me someone cool. Let me be… Anne Hathaway or Maggie Gyllenhaal.”

“Okay, Indie Princess,” he said with a shake of his head. “Whoever you are, be good.”

I folded my arms. “I’ll try, but the last guy is just lucky I didn’t take off his hand.”

Dave shook his head, but I’m pretty sure he smothered a smile even as we got out of the van. The gatekeeper, a guy name Smith, tilted his head in greeting as we moved around to the front of the vehicle. We’d left the lights on—that was standard procedure so that we could be checked. Or molested. Whichever was the case for the night.

“Hello David, Sarah,” Smith said with another nod. “You know the drill.”

We did, of course. Without much discussion we showed the checkers our arms, our legs, necks, anything that was a common target for zombies. They checked out clothes, too, and if there were rips or tears, you had to lift them up to verify you hadn’t been bitten, but not yet turned. No one touched my chest, probably because I was using my mean glare. At least, that’s my assumption. It might have also been because I kneed the last guy who did it in the balls.

Once they were satisfied with our status, Smith motioned the others away. I heard them whispering about Zombiebusters as they did so and I couldn’t help but smile.

“You can park over there,” Smith said, motioning to the line of cars in the white zone past the next gate, which was just a chain-link fence. “And lock your weapons in the car.”

“Yeah, yeah,” Dave said as he moved to the vehicle. “We know the drill.”

He pulled the van through to parking but I stayed behind with Smith. He was a middle-aged guy with an air of ex-military about him. Maybe first Gulf War, though we never talked about it. The fact was, we were all soldiers now. There was no need to compare war wounds.

“Any news?” I asked.

Smith had the dusk-to-dawn shift at the gate and he always heard the first whiff of anything from the badlands as the survivors rolled into camp for the night.

He shrugged. “Just the usual. People yapping about the Midwest Wall, a few new pods here and there, that sort of thing.”

He chuckled as he grabbed for a cigarette from his pocket. I noted he didn’t light it, but just sucked on the filter. Not that I blamed him. Cigarettes were valuable in trade (which I have to admit, David had thought they would be when this all started and I’d given him shit about it). You couldn’t just light up anymore.

Still, it was a shitty way to reduce the lung cancer rate.

“Oh, yeah,” he said with a laugh. “Some loons are talking about special zombies.”

I had been looking off past the second gate to see where David had parked, but now I snapped my head around to look at Smith. “What do you mean ‘special’?”

“Dunno,” he said. My tone must have revealed something because he looked closer at me. “Just said they were different. Why?”

“Jimmy No-Toes said something similar about a pod in the Basilica,” I said with a frown. “But all we found were regular droolers.”

“Told you it was the kooks talking about it,” Smith said with a shrug. “You can’t exactly trust No-Toes.”

“That’s what David said, too,” I said softly.

In the distance I saw Dave loading up a pack for our nightly supplies. As he locked up the van, he looked in my direction with an expression of confusion. Usually I only talked to Smith for a second or two.

“Well, he’s likely right. Anyway, I see another car coming, gotta concentrate.” Smith turned away. “’Night, Sarah.”

“ ’Night.”

I made my way through Gate 2 and joined David. He gave me the same questioning look I’d seen from a distance.

“What up?”

I shook my head. “Smith said that others were talking about ‘different’ zombies. Maybe bionics?”

David rolled his eyes. “C’mon. We didn’t see anything different today. It’s just freaked-out talk. Hell, I wouldn’t put it past Jimmy and some of the others to even start that shit. It makes his goods more valuable if other people are too afraid to go out and find their own supplies.”

I nodded. That made sense, actually. Jimmy had been a grifter in his past life, why not now when it was so much easier?

“Maybe you’re right,” I said as we walked down a sloping hill past what were once parking garages but now were flattened, twisted hulks of concrete and wire. “And there’s always the fact that it’s been a few months since the initial outbreak and people naturally have to scare themselves all over again.”

“You’d think they’d have enough to be scared about,” Dave said, trailing off as we entered the half-collapsed stadium itself.

We’d been staying here on and off for over a month now, but every time we came in it gave us pause. The makeshift camp held about five hundred survivors. I have to say, it was pretty well organized for being one of the biggest camps we’d seen. Some other camps had become a study in the worst of the Old West, with gunmen running the show, crime out of control, and people too afraid to speak out for fear they’d be left to the zombies as “punishment” for nameless offenses.

But here in New Phoenix they had formed a semblance of a government, a system to distribute supplies, and a trade market where one could haggle with anything from extra rations to grandma’s silver (though rarely one’s own grandma’s silver). I guess that was all thanks to sensible people like Smith and some of the others who were in charge of this place.

We were lucky, but still, the stench of human sweat and waste was overpowering until the nose got used to it. And the people were tired, gaunt, and afraid, even if they tried to hide it. That was why we took our chances at least half the nights of the week and stayed outside the camp. It was just too hard to watch how low humanity had sunk in only a few months.

I blinked to keep sudden, always unexpected tears from falling and forced a smile. Someday this would get easier. It had to.

Didn’t it?

“Come on, let’s get dinner,” Dave said softly as he took my hand. We didn’t really talk about our feelings on the subject of the camps, but I knew him well enough to know it bugged him, too, no matter how jaded he pretended to be.

We weaved into the barracks area and grabbed some mismatched plates and cutlery before we got into line for chow. Swill. Whatever. Fresh food had vanished a long time ago, though you did sometimes scavenge your way into an orange grove or apple tree, which was always a nice surprise (and a valuable one here in camp).

Same thing with meat. Every blue moon you found a random cow or chicken you could actually catch to eat, though I guess that would end soon enough. Some History Channel thing about the end of the world had once said domesticated animals would die off pretty fast without people to make their lives easier (or harder). Stupid History Channel hadn’t said much about how long we humans would live in a similar scenario.

But for sure the convenient little plastic trays with farmed meat wrapped in Saran Wrap were already a thing of the past. In the camps, we had canned goods, dried things, and sometimes not a ton of that. The cook on duty shoveled some beans onto my plate and a stale Pop-Tart (blueberry from the looks of a fake azure icing) and motioned us on our way. I sighed as we took a seat in the cafeteria tent and started to pick at the grub listlessly.

I was pretty fully into my funk when I looked across the way and saw a little girl, probably no more than five, who was eating her Pop-Tart with enough gusto to make me smile. She smiled back and revealed teeth tinted blue from the icing, then dug into her beans.

The woman who was with the child just ran her fork through her food. She looked drawn and tired. She was probably a “camp-y” as we called them, people who had only lucked into survival of the initial outbreak, but hadn’t actually learned to take care of themselves. Once camps were established, they stayed in them full-time and never ventured past the gates into the new outside world.

After such a long time of being penned in, they had a look about them. Actually, it was a lot like those cows the History Channel said were doomed.

The woman glanced down at the girl and her exhaustion seemed to fade as she smiled. They didn’t look much alike—in fact I doubted they were related. It was entirely possible they had just found each other in the camp and formed a makeshift family right here. It happened a lot.

I was about to offer the child some of my Pop-Tart when there was a ruckus on the other side of me. I glanced over to find three big guys sitting down at the bench down the way. They were all talking at once as they slammed warm bottles of beer down beside their trays.

“Bigger than normals,” one of them grunted. “With fangs.”

“Ha!” another one said with a shake of his head. “I hear they can eat a man’s head in two bites. If you think zombies are bad, they say these are worse. They might even be smart enough to storm the camp someday. Like a brainless army. Wipe us all out, that’s what they’ll do.”

I glanced at the little girl and found she had huddled closer to her mother, turning her face into the woman’s chest, though the mother looked no less terrified by the overheard conversation.

“Hey!” I barked to the men. “You’re scaring the kid.”

The three glared at me for my interruption, but then one of them actually looked at the child and saw his foolishness was traumatizing. His expression softened and he shook his head.

“I’m sorry, honey,” he said to the little girl. “We’re just telling stories.”

She didn’t look convinced, nor did her mother as she gathered up their trays and moved off to a quieter corner.

“Smooth,” Dave grunted as he shoveled the last of his beans down his throat.

The guys had the sense to look a little chagrined, but then they slid down the bench across the table to be closer to us.

“You’re David and Sarah, right?” one of the younger men asked with a blush. “The Zombiebusters?”

David arched a brow my way as if to tell me, “I told you so,” and then he nodded. “That’s what the van says.”

The men exchanged glances, apparently impressed. And I admit, my chest puffed out a little at the attention. I guess on some level I was more Paris Hilton than Maggie Gyllenhaal. So sue me!

“What have you heard about the special ones?” the same guy who had apologized to the little girl asked, but this time in a lower tone.

“C’mon.” Dave rolled his eyes. “You guys are too old for fairy tales.”

“They aren’t fairy tales, man!” one of the men insisted. “This shit is real!”

Dave shook his head. “So I guess one of you has actually seen something out there beyond the normal, average zombies? Yourself, I mean.”

That stopped them. They exchanged looks between their group and then the biggest one shrugged. “Uh, no.”

“Let me guess. The people who told you this shit are the same ones who talk about the Midwest Wall and the government operatives who are coming to save us all just any old day now?”

I blinked at his harsh, sarcastic tone. These guys deserved his censure, don’t get me wrong, but Dave had become pretty cynical since the outbreak. He’d gone from happy-go-lucky gamer to a hardened fighter.

He no longer believed anything anyone said about a place that was still safe or that anyone was eventually coming to fix this plague. And he didn’t just dismiss pumped-up assholes like the ones sitting across from us now. Even if I mentioned the possibility of such stuff, he cut me off with a wave of his hand and a brusque change of subject.

But I have to tell you, even though I’d seen the same things he’d seen, been through the same shit he’d been through… I still held on to the slender reed of hope he’d managed to kill in himself.

I mean, it was possible They (whoever They were) had built a wall to separate the West from the East, a way to protect half the population from the outbreak, and if They had made the virus, or whatever it was that had started this nightmare, that They could fix it someday.

Right?

“Or maybe the ones who told you about ‘different’ zombies were the same ones who go on and on about cures and scientists?” Dave continued with a humorless laugh.

“I heard there really are some scientists working on the cure,” the medium build of the three guys said, though he sounded less certain than he had when they all sat down. “Maybe even in protected labs right here in the West.”

Dave let his fork hit his plate with a clatter. “Pipe dreams, boys. You should know better by now. What we can trust are the things we can see. Weapons, the camps, a vehicle that still has half a tank of fuel. That shit is real. Everything else…” He waved his hand in the air. “Illusion. Like Santa and the Tooth Fairy.”

The men shifted uncomfortably and Dave returned his attention to my plate.

“Done?” he asked.

I ate the last few bites and nodded. “Yeah.”

“I’m beat. Let’s find a tent and call it good.” He grabbed my plate and my hand, gave the now silent and sullen men a quick nod, and we took off toward the exit.

As he set our dishes into an overflowing tray, I gave him a side look. “You know, there may still be some good in the world. I wish you wouldn’t give up on that idea entirely.”

He didn’t answer as we entered the tent city area of the camp. A few hundred tents, scavenged and traded by survivors, were set up in long rows that repeated and repeated out in front of us. There were everything from small child-sized ones with Dora the Explorer’s tattered, stained face on the outside, to orange ones a family probably once took out into the mountains for a weekend, to military-grade outfits that slept ten or twelve people.

Dave paused as he scanned a sign-up sheet by the sleeping area for a tent that had two cots available. Once he had found one and had marked it as taken, he began steering me in that direction.

I figured he wasn’t going to respond to what I’d said, but as we ducked into the tent he’d signed us up for (a four-man sleeper), he turned toward me.

“Look, it’s not that I have no hope. I believe there’s plenty of ‘good’ right here. And we’re doing okay, right? The infected are a lot less active toward us now, and we’ve got a pretty fucking good system for killing them. We’re together and that’s what matters to me.”

He hesitated and here came the but.

“But I have no illusions that all that bullshit about a future without these monsters is going to happen. They wiped out the entire West in about two weeks, Sarah. There’s no way they could be stopped. Not by a wall or a scientist toiling in some borderline cartoon lab. I just can’t waste too much energy praying and looking for it.”

I stared at him, uncertain how to respond when he laid out a future for us that held nothing but faint reassurance that we’d survive, but never get back to any kind of normal life.

Luckily, I didn’t have to answer, because at that moment another couple entered the tent to claim the other two cots in the room. I forced a smile because we knew the two of them a little and liked them even more.

Josh and Drea, who had found each other a few weeks after the outbreak (though they were so perfect together that you’d never know they hadn’t been together for ten years). They were about our age and shared a similar and rather snarky sense of humor with us. We had exchanged some zombie-killing stories that had left us sobbing with laughter.

“Hi guys,” Josh said with a broad smile you hardly ever saw on a survivor. But his good humor was somehow still intact even after the hell of infection and death. “We saw your names on the sheet and figured we’d share a tent tonight.”

Dave forced a quick smile, but I thought I saw a little relief in his eyes. Like he didn’t really want to talk to me about the unknown future anymore.

“So you guys hear anything new?” Dave asked as he took off the backpack he’d grabbed from our van and started laying out our blankets and inflatable pillows for the night.

Drea shrugged as she smoothed pieces of her pixie-cut blond hair out of her pretty face. “Naw. Just the usual. Death, maiming, destruction, killing the walking dead. You know. Same old, same old.”

“Well, TGIF, right?” I laughed.

“Is it Friday?” Josh asked.

I shrugged. “I don’t know. I lost track months ago.”

We all grinned, even Dave, and then Drea asked, “Did you see you have a message on the board?”

I looked at Dave. Normally we checked the big tack board in the center of the camp as soon as we got in, but tonight we’d both been distracted.

“A call for an exterminator?” Dave asked as he flopped down on his cot with an exhausted sigh.

Drea shrugged. “I don’t know. It didn’t say specifically.”

I tilted my head in surpise. Normally messages for us were pretty fucking clear. Like, “get the fuck over here, there are zombies” kind of clear.

“Do you want to go look?” I asked Dave.

He shook his head. “Not now. We’ll do it tomorrow.”

We talked for a little while. These two had the best stories… and not just zombie ones. I mean ones that made us all forget zombies even for a little bit. I don’t know what Josh did before the outbreak, but Drea had owned a restaurant in L.A. that had attracted all kinds of celebrities. She had stories about famous people… well, they were pretty entertaining.

But eventually exhaustion took over and we blew out the Coleman lantern.

With the end of electricity, people had quickly returned to the schedules of the farm days, rising at dawn, working during the light, and returning “home” at dusk to turn in. Within minutes of the light going out, the other three exhaled deep, heavy breaths.

But I couldn’t sleep. I kept thinking about bionic zombies and the Midwest Wall and a thousand other thoughts Dave wanted me to forget so I could live in the now. But the now sucked big time. I couldn’t just forget that and go to sleep like he could.

With a sigh, I pushed out of the sleeping bag and put on my boots. I grabbed a flashlight and finally slipped out of the tent into the night air.