Page 24 of Doomsdate

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.

She glances at me. “You…have, though? Been there before?”

“Yep. When my sister still lived in New York.”

“Is the drive easy?”

“Pretty much a straight shot.” This statement seems to visibly affect her, her grip loosening on the wheel. Can’t say that I blame her. I’d be pretty nervous to go on a road trip solo through Zombie America right now, too. “You’ve never been to your own bunker?”

“It’s not mine.”

“Ah. You’re going to live with that man, then? The one radioing you when we…um. Almost, ah. Before?” I strive for nonchalance, for casual, polite conversation.

I fail.

“I’m going to check on Gramps. That’s it.”

Gramps. The man asking her whether I’d put out is her grandfather?

Maisie turns up the volume on the boxy radio she has strapped to the dash, probably to keep me from making this even more awkward, and her too-crazy-for-AM-radio news spills through the car.

“We are facing a Mass Reanimation Event. I repeat, a Mass Reanimation Event. It’s time to bug out and hunker down. If you have to move, avoid hospitals, morgues, and cemeteries at all costs.”

“Cemeteries?” My voice pitches upward, panic rising like a wave. Does that mean that somewhere out there…Louise…I feel woozy, like my head might roll right off my shoulders.

Maisie’s eyes dart to mine, then back to the road. “There have been no reports of buried bodies reanimating. It seems to affect only those who die from the virus, or…” Her voice trails off as we wait for a pack of zombies to stumble across the road.

“Or what?”

“Or those who get bitten, of course.” She gives me a searching glance edged in alarm at my sickly shade. “You weren’t bitten, were you?”

I shake my head quickly. Waterbed tried, but even zombie teeth can’t rip through winter-weight denim.

“Virus symptoms?” she asks, her voice a sharp demand.

I hesitate for a second, then shake my head again. My stomach hurt half the night, but once I acknowledged that the people trying to eat me were real zombies, the panic attack I’d been fighting finally razed through my system and burned me down to ashes. After it ran its course, the muscles finally unclenched in my abdomen, and I began to feel, if not better, at least not sick.

Her nostrils flare as she stares at me, but whatever she sees must convince her that, at least for the time being, I’m okay. I don’t tell her about the failed mouth-to-mouth resuscitation, but I do put on my mask, just in case.

I give her directions to my house, and our talking stops altogether, drowned out by tinny, feverish voices from the radio and the crushing weight of this new, terrifying reality.

I prefer conversation, honestly.

“So…you’re a prepper.” I nod thoughtfully around at the stacks of weapons, food, jugs of water, pausing slightly over what appears to be a defibrillator charging in the USB port. The back seat’s packed with supplies. I’m lucky there’s room for me in the front at all.

“Yep,” she responds, tight-lipped. “But I wasn’t going to Misery you. And I needed zip ties for normal, non-kidnapping purposes. I just wanted to go on a damn date.”

Shame washes over me again. I may be a sad, reclusive bastard, but I’m not a mean one. And I’d liked Maisie. Before I stumbled into her doom-room, I’d felt more for her than anyone I’d met in years. I spent the year after Louise died consumed by a deep, heartbreaking grief. But when that finally passed, a numbness set in that affected all of my functions. My ability to laugh. To plan for the future. To care about anything but Chicken and Gemma and Sandeep. It felt like I’d never want anything again.