The End: Surviving the Apocalypse (19 page)

The animal leaped across Q’s back and clawed its way across the back of her neck. She tossed her head, but that made it dig its claws into her skin. It crawled through her hair and in front of her to stand between her face and her hands. It was a gray possum. Cute, furry, insolent little vermin.

“I’m warning you,” Q said. “One step further and you are an ex-marsupial.”

The possum reached out a tiny paw and placed it on Q’s pinkie, wrapped tight around the rope.

“That’s it!” Q said. She summoned up all her years of repressed and expressed violence and churned it around in the back of her throat, then let go in a guttural hiss.

Apparently she said something vile. The possum hissed back and bit her finger.

Q swore, helpless. The animal continued picking its way over her hands and paused, tail high and proud like a cat’s, bottom aimed at her face.

“You better not be thinking of doing what I think you’re thinking of doing,” she said, then closed her mouth, just in case.

It considered its options, then trotted toward the house, as if to say that anyone who needed a safety system to cross a rope wasn’t worth the effort.

Q breathed out. “If I turn into an undead possum,” she said, “I swear by Linda’s grave I will hunt you down, skin you, eat you, turn you into fur gloves, kill someone while they’re wearing you and then eat you again.”

“Q!” Angela called. “You okay?”

“I don’t want to talk about it.”

She heard Angela coo something that sounded like, “Ooh, look at da furry fing, did the nasty big Q scare oo?” Then she heard a dull crack and a shriek.

Good work. Dave had caught dinner. She took a few breaths to settle her temper and then continued her climb. She stopped when she was a few feet away from the bark of Pious Kate’s tree. She couldn’t see much except the ghost-white glow of the trunk, upside down because of her angle. She wished she’d brought a head torch.

“Kate!” Q said. “Are you there? Speak!” Why wasn’t the woman answering? Was it because she couldn’t? If she had turned in the last few minutes, wouldn’t she have fallen out of the tree? Or would the dead flesh curl into a rigor mortis clasp?

There was a rustle behind her. It could be Pious Kate, ready to launch an attack. It could be more sarcastic possums. Q tensed. Whatever the challenge, she was ready.

She released the rope from her right hand and reached down to the sheath strapped to her thigh, pulling out the bush knife. Careful to keep it away from the rope that supported her, Q put it between her teeth, snarling her lips away from the blade. Everything would be fine. She was good at this. Two swift kicks with her boot followed by a neat beheading. It might not kill Zombie Kate, but the creature couldn’t bite if it didn’t have a head.

She rolled herself off the top of the rope to dangle beneath it, then shuffled the last foot, hand to hand, legs swinging free. The rope dipped, but held. She swung her legs up over the branch and paused, her body taut between the tree and the rope, her belly stretched out like a banquet.

A pair of shimmering eyes appeared inches from Q’s face in the sheen of the pre-dawn light. Q gurgled and reached for her machete with her right hand, holding the rope with her left. It was time to end this.

“Q!” Rabbit called from the attic. He had recovered, which was good, and he was on Team Q again, which was great. “Is Kate okay?” he asked.

Nope. Still Team Psycho Ex. Oh well.

Pious Kate was ashen, black-eyed and filthy. She gazed at Rabbit, and Q recognized the expression, because she had felt it often enough on her own face. It wasn’t hunger. Well, it was, but not that kind. The woman wanted Rabbit in a non-carnivore way. She hadn’t turned.

“She’s fine,” Q said. “I’m bringing her in.” Q considered Pious Kate’s scrawny arms and her trousers, hanging loose on bony thighs. Even if she hadn't been through an ordeal, her rival would find a simple rope climb challenging. Q unwound the cordage she kept looped through her belt buckles and tied a makeshift Swiss seat harness around Pious Kate’s thighs and waist.

“Stop squirming!” Q said. “I’m trying to rescue you.”

“You're cutting off my circulation,” Pious Kate said. “If this is rescue, I’d hate to see attack.”

Q finished the knots around Pious Kate’s irritatingly tiny waist. No wonder the woman was narrow-minded and full of bile – her liver was all squished up and her outlook compressed.

She’d used all her cordage and hadn’t thought to bring anything else with her. How would she attach Pious Kate to the rope?

Q looked at her belt and sighed. She’d have to sacrifice it to her rival. She’d rather sacrifice her rival direct, but Rabbit might not approve. She gave the rope a good tug to check it was secure, and threaded the belt through Pious Kate’s harness. “You ready?”

“I don’t want to fall,” Pious Kate said. “I don’t want to become one of them.”

Did Pious Kate know she was ill? She had lost her bluster, as if she’d forgotten she’d been cast as Q’s arch-nemesis and had decided to become a human being instead. Like Linda toward the end, when their roles reversed and Q became the one to push Linda to be better than her best, to push out more tomorrows. “You’re not done yet,” Q said. “You wouldn’t have called me if you were. Why did you call me? Why not Rabbit?”

Below, zombies clamored around the tree. The first light of day glinted from teeth and bone. “You’re weird,” Pious Kate said, “but you always know what to do.”

“That’s me,” Q said. “Weird but competent. Guys love that.” She boosted Pious Kate on top of the rope and buckled the belt around it. The woman squealed and clung.

“Keep your body on top of the rope and your legs and arms wrapped around it,” Q said. “Hold on with your hands, knees and feet, and keep moving.”

Pious Kate was doing all right for a skinny half-ghoul who’d been stuck up a tree for a day without food or water. She kept her eyes closed and her arms and legs moving. She was clumsy, but she wasn’t freezing up, and the harness would keep her safe.

Damn
. Q turned her mind to the short, unharnessed climb ahead of her. Why hadn’t she brought a second set of cordage?

Because I was in a hurry, and I didn’t expect to find a survivor.

It didn’t matter. Q could do this in her sleep. It was a short, simple climb. She’d done far harder a hundred times before without incident. You only needed a harness if you made a mistake. Q would be perfect.

The trembling rope between her fingers yanked her attention back. Pious Kate had the muscle shakes. She’d stopped.

“Go!” Q said, so loud that her voice bounced off the mountain range. “Keep moving!”

The woman only shuddered. Damn skinny, acid-mouthed, ginger-haired, psycho ex.

Then Pious Kate moved. She fell.

She rolled off the top of the rope and hung beneath it, her legs dangling loose, gripping only with weak hands that couldn’t support her weight. The harness held, but it would not hold forever, and Q didn’t trust this rope with their combined weight. Pious Kate was on her own. “Move!” Q said. “Swing your legs up and over that rope and move!”

“Kate!” Rabbit leaned out the window as far as he could, but his outstretched arms were still a good fifteen feet from Pious Kate. No help there. Pious Kate began to weep silently, as if she didn’t have the strength to sob.

“Kate, keep going!” Rabbit said.

“See?” Q said to no one but herself. “Push ups and pull ups, people. They’re not just for vanity.”

Pious Kate’s fingers dropped from the rope. She hung from the makeshift harness like a marionette whose strings had been cut. Rabbit reached further. The guy might leap out at any second and try to stand on air. Q swore.

She clambered out onto the rope, hoping it would hold. There was a constant shudder in the rope between her fingers. Was Pious Kate sobbing or shaking? Was the rope fraying?

No good being delicate now. It was all about speed.

She sprinted, hand over hand, like she did when she climbed the monkeys bars with Hannah. She heard a sound far worse than that of Rabbit’s cries or Pious Kate’s whimpers. It was the sound of metal twisting, and fabric breaking stitches. The belt connecting the harness to the rope was giving way.

“
Kate!
”

Would Rabbit ever call for Q like that?

Q reached Pious Kate and swung her legs under the woman. She looped her calves over the rope and clenched it between her feet, bracing for the weight.

Pious Kate dropped. Q became her harness.

She swore. The climbing gloves helped but the skin on her fingertips tore away and her shoulders burned. While the other woman was light, a dead weight is a dead weight no matter how you carry it.

She grunted and eased her way along the rope, keeping it twisted around her legs. Her pants rode up past her knees. Rope ripped her flesh. Her hands filled with fire.

She wriggled along, no longer sparing the strength to look ahead and gauge the rest of the distance. She concentrated on one hand, then the other, then feet, her core tense to bear the weight. A warm drip fell onto her face. She shook it from her eyes, confused. Blood from her shredded fingers.

Her legs felt strong but she had cramps in her feet and she could feel the shakes coming on. She couldn’t afford them. They’d both go down.

Then her feet were touching a solid surface. The weight pushing down on her eased and was gone. Pious Kate had been pulled inside. Hands reached for Q.

Q was back in the attic, leaning against a wall. Pious Kate slumped on the floor. Someone gave Q chocolate. She bit into it and her mouth flooded with heat. Arms wrapped around her and her body flooded with heat too.

Rabbit pulled back. “I thought we were gonna lose you both,” he said. “You’re amazing.”

Q glowed.

“You’re stupid,” Dave said.

She deflated.

“You swung out and caught Kate and then carried her all the way back!” Rabbit said. “You were her safety net, ready to catch her if she fell.”

“If you write a song about us, I’ll vomit,” Q said.

“And that would be a great line for the chorus,” Rabbit said. “Way better than what I had in mind.”

Q gaped. “Are you teasing me?” she said.

Rabbit grinned. “I am.”

She grinned back. He must like her again, even though she’d KO’d him. All it took was a feat of strength, courage and agility that saved his ex-girlfriend from an ugly death. It was way easier than an apology. Q was glad the world was finally playing to her strengths.

“Why did you hit me?” Rabbit asked, hesitant, as if feeling petty for bringing it up.

“Cos you were determined to save Kate, but ill-equipped to do so,” Q said.

“You could have volunteered to go yourself,” he said.

“Wouldn’t you have insisted on going alone, all hero-like, squared jaw and steady gaze over the horizon?” Q said.

“We’re very different, you and I.”

“Yup,” Q said. “We’re like a romantic comedy meets zombie action. Think of the possibilities.”

“I was thinking more yin and yang,” Rabbit said. “But yours is cool too.”

Pious Kate claimed she was disturbed after her night alone in the dark and that was why she was not eating. Q had her own views, but she had to agree that Pious Kate was in bad shape. The woman had deteriorated in the day since they’d last seen her; she was no longer the harbinger of doom – she was the message.

Q and Dave had a private conversation downstairs on the pretext of checking security. It morphed into an argument, but a quiet one, so the others wouldn’t hear.

“Get rid of her,” Dave said.

“No.” Q pictured trying to explain to Rabbit that she had to shoot his ex-girlfriend, half an hour after saving her life. She wasn’t sure how this whole courtship game was played, but she was fairly certain murder didn’t feature in the second act. “You were happy for her to come back,” she said

He grunted. “If she could climb on her own.”

“Coward’s way out, Dave.”

“Get rid of her,” he said again.

“What would I tell them?”

Dave picked his teeth with a jagged thumbnail. “An accident?”

“What, accidentally shoot Pious Kate through the spleen in front of four witnesses in an attic? Even I’m not that good.”

Dave shook his head. He wasn’t listening. He didn’t care. “Rule Two,” he said.

“I know,” Q said. It was a ridiculous argument. Pious Kate had admitted to being bitten but she refused to let anyone examine her to see if the wound was necrotic or normal. The woman was gray-skinned and ate nothing. She drank copious amounts of water and slept. She was turning. It was just taking a long time.

If Q had had any doubts, seeing Pious Kate with that dead possum three days ago confirmed it. The woman was a zombie-in-waiting. She was trouble.

“She’s not eating anything,” Q said. “She won’t be a drain on supplies.”

How could she explain it to Dave in a way that would make him agree? Had he ever been in love? Didn’t he understand that Rabbit might be the last gorgeous, available man on the planet who wasn’t intimidated or repulsed by her? Even before the outbreak, there had only been a handful.

Pious Kate was his best friend and proof that beautiful people have terrible taste. Q couldn’t kill her and she couldn’t let someone else. She’d lose him forever.

There was another tiny thought at work, small and fierce and so unlike Q’s other thoughts that she barely recognized it as her own.

What if
Apocalypse Z
was wrong? What if Pious Kate got better?

Princess Starla had taken a day. Tinkabella took hours. Maybe there were different strains of the virus, or it was mutating. Maybe death wasn’t inevitable.

“The head shots don’t work,” Q said, unsure how to articulate such a subversive idea. “Pious Kate’s been sick for ages but nothing’s happened. Maybe
Apocalypse Z
is wrong, Dave. Maybe she was bitten but she won’t turn.”

Dave spat onto the dirt floor. “If you won’t, I will.” He unslung his rifle and walked to the foot of the ladder.

“Wait,” Q said. She had to think fast. “We can study her.”

Dave grunted.

“This is a chance we can’t pass up,” Q said. “Pious Kate got bit first but she’s the last to turn. Don’t you want to know why? Don’t we need to know why?”

Dave’s foot was on the bottom rung of the ladder. Q hissed at him, torn between a shout and a whisper that would not be overheard: “You take the day shift, I’ll take the night shift. We have to keep watch anyway. What’s it matter if we have one more thing to check?”

He rumbled in the back of his throat. Was Q winning an argument with words? Who would have thought she had it in her?

“She’s scrawny,” Q said. “We can take her down whenever we need to.” Her gut clenched. What if he refused?

Q had already decided she couldn’t stand back and watch him shoot the woman treasured by the man she loved. She’d have to fight Dave. She knew she’d win, but what then? What could you do with a beaten adversary in a world the size of an attic? She couldn’t keep him restrained, not safely, for days or weeks or months. Not while she slept. If they fought, the outcome would be final. He must know it, too.

She put a hand on Dave’s arm as he stood on the ladder, one foot hovering above the next step, a moment not yet made. Two lives rested on this decision, not one. His face showed the curves and creases of years but nothing of his mind. He never showed what was inside.

“She does anything weird or aggressive, I’ll shoot her,” Dave said.

“Excellent,” Q said. “I’ve won her an hour at least.”

*

As the light faded that evening, Pious Kate rose from her corner like a puppet jerked by invisible hands. She stumbled toward Q, Dave, Rabbit and Angela, who had instinctively stayed together and in the corner farthest from the sick woman.

“Katie-G?” Rabbit said, stepping forward. “You okay?”

Dave, who always kept his rifle on him, aimed it at Pious Kate. The others did not notice. Q envied them.

She willed Pious Kate to say something normal, or to show the monster inside – nothing in between. They needed clarity in this cramped space they called safety.

“I need to change,” Pious Kate said. She took another step toward the group.

“Change?” Q said. “Like New Year’s resolution change? Or more fundamental, like a whole body/mind/soul change into something different that mightn’t be the kind of thing we want to share an attic with?”

The woman put her hand over her mouth and shuddered, as if about to throw up a live snake. The window was at her back. The evening wind blew her scent toward them. Aniseed. Earth. Decaying leaves. Something sour and unidentifiable. It was a little like death and a little like childhood and it nearly brought Q to tears.

“I need to change,” Pious Kate said again. She put her hand in her pocket and pulled her gray skin into one of its usual expressions of rigid distaste. “This top stinks.”

Rabbit’s face shone. “You can borrow my sweater, Katie-G,” he said.

Great. Now she got to wear boyfriend clothes. Q watched the wind in the trees and wished she were one of them.

*

“The hundred and three nicknames,” Q said. “Wriggly wiggly, Mr Saunders, silly sausage, the Worm …”

*

“You freaks, you fucking freaks, fucking eat each other and get away from my fucking attic!”

“You okay, Dave?” Angela said.

Dave was at the window, puffing. The ghouls stared back. It was a contest he wouldn’t win. For a moment, Dave scared Q more than Pious Kate did.

“We’re all on edge,” Q said. “Stuck up here with everything the same, day after day after day.”

“It’s only been three days,” said Angela.

“That’s what I said.” She got Dave’s favorite gun off the wall and handed it to him. “Maybe you need some recreational violence?” Q said. “I can’t relax without two hours of virtual slaughter each day.”

“Violence never pays,” Rabbit said from his corner. He had spent most of the day meditating with Pious Kate and studying
Apocalypse Z
, especially Chapter Seven, The Turn. Q had the unpleasant feeling that he was trying to heal her in some hippy way. Worse, it might work.

“That’s crime,” Angela said. “Crime never pays.”

“No, crime pays well, unless it’s stupid crime,” Q said. “But stupid work doesn’t pay much either, so if those are your only options, why not give crime a go?”

“That would make a great bumper sticker,” Rabbit said.

Q leaned her elbows on the wooden windowsill. The crowd below were still and quiet and vigilant. They never changed, except to increase in number each day. They would never die, never rot. They were perfect.

She jumped as Dave fired out the window. “Boom!” he said. “Spleen shot.”

Q grabbed a gun and joined him. Why shouldn’t they take out a few? “Let’s play gingers,” she said. “I call the blue wifebeater. Damn!”

Dave lined up his rifle. “Skinny at two o’clock,” he said.

Q put a hand on the barrel and pushed it down. “Isn’t that the Scarlet Terror?”

Angela and Rabbit came to the window. “Oh my God!” said Angela. “It’s Michelle! She made it!”

Angela waved. The Scarlet Terror did not wave back.

The hippy stood on the edge of the crowd of ghouls. She looked good, for a dead woman. She had all her parts and no visible wounds. Her clothes were intact and her skin had the palest of gray sheens. But she was even thinner than she had been. Bones nuzzled at her skin.

“Zombies don’t lose weight,” Q said. “I wonder how long she was infected before she turned?”

She regretted saying it. Angela blanched and moved away from the window, no doubt thinking of her children roaming the streets, tainted and untouched, waiting for one of two ends.

Dave grunted and shot. The Scarlet Terror folded up like a reverse jack-in-the-box. “Slow turn,” he said.

“Why doesn’t Chapter Seven talk about that?” Q said. She was onto something important, she knew it. Why the different rates? Maybe it depended on where you got bitten, or how much infection came through the wound. “It’s like mnemonic plague.”

“When a bunch of people infect one another with clever rhymes to help them remember things?” Angela said. “You mean bubonic plague.”

Q waved this away. “Everyone blamed the rats.”

Angela returned with a rifle. “Black flanny,” she said, lining up an old male redhead in the middle of the crowd.

“But it wasn’t the rats,” Q continued. “It was the fleas.”

“First to twenty spleens, wins,” Angela said. She fired.

Q abandoned her musings and joined it. Harmony was important when the world was an attic shared with four other people.