Zombies vs. Unicorns (6 page)

But no, the door is opening, someone else is in the house. Slowly, too slowly, you turn around.

“Jackson,” says the man who must be the father. He wears khakis the color of his furniture, and a brown polo shirt. “Your target is still clean.”

If Jack was icy, his dad is absolute fucking zero. His eyebrows
are so large and thick they cast his recessed eyes in deep shadow, like a pit. His mouth is pursed, not enough to be called a frown, but damn if you don’t want to run straight out the window and make excuses later. Jack glances at you and then back at his dad. He turns off the CD, and the sudden silence is louder than any high-decibel subwoofer. You can hear his dad’s breathing, as slow and icy as the rest of him. Ex-CIA. He was probably their go-to for those “enhanced” interrogations.

“Sorry,” Jack mumbles, unrecognizable. “I was getting to it.”

“I can see,” says the ice man. “I’ve just heard from Miller again. That creature they’re tracking definitely passed through here. I need you to be ready.”

“Sorry,” Jack says again.

The dad turns to you now, all cool speculation. You know without even trying that there’s nothing your special pheromones can do to thaw this guy. He thinks you’re a cockroach. He wants to stamp you out. Can he tell what you are just by looking? But no, it’s impossible. If he knew, he’d shoot you on the spot and tell Jack to clean the mess.

Ice man leaves, a slight hitch in his step. Jack takes a deep, shuddering breath and slams the door shut.

You whistle. “He like that every day?”

Jack glances at you and then away. His blue eyes dilate for no reason, and blood blossoms in his cheeks like roses. You swallow.

“He’s … you know.”

You try to imagine life with someone like that. Your failure to do so feels like something broken, something sucking and
desperate. Because you
know
the ice man—as only one cracked soul can recognize another.

“‘But my dreams, they aren’t as empty.’” You can’t sing, so you just say it. But you remember the rest of the line: “ ‘As my conscience seems to be.’”

Jack starts, like someone poked him, and then sags against the wall. He laughs, but it doesn’t sound like laughter.

“My dad hates The Who,” he says.

“Your dad’s a dick.”

For a moment you think he might take your hand.

4. Maps

I said I don’t know who I was, but that’s not strictly true. No invading twist of genetic code is that efficient. My hippocampus has been wiped pretty clean, but fragments remain. Hell, for all I know I remember everything, and just suppress it, like Iraq vets who can barely find Baghdad on a map. But here’s what I think I know. I had a sister. She was younger than me and dumb in that dumb little sister way, which means that she’ll probably grow up to be a neurochemist and invent the cure for spongiform encephalopathy. But I remember her loving
Boy Meets World
and
High School Musical
(all three) and the direct-to-DVD Olsen twins movies (in particular
Passport to Paris).
We had a dad, but I don’t know what he did. No mother, as far as I can tell. Dad had a thing for banana plants. He refused to buy regular Chiquita bananas, but he’d bring home any other variety he could find: tiny brown ones, giant green ones, skinny orange ones with flesh as hard as an apple and as sour as a lime.
He had a greenhouse filled with banana plants that fruited about once every two years, and the fruit was never edible. “They’re going extinct, you know,” he would say to me and my sister in the supermarket, tapping the clusters of normal yellow Cavendish bananas he’d never allow in the house. “A few more years and human carelessness will have destroyed every banana plant on earth.” Why? Some sort of cancer that turns them red and as hard as bricks. I know more details, but you don’t want them. Same old story since Noah: Humans are lousy stewards of the earth.

I don’t remember if I ate him. I don’t remember much of anything until I woke up in that lab. Just snatches. Hunger slicing through my muscles like an itch that could only go away if I peeled off my own skin. Blood like steam off a lake, warm and misted in my nostrils. And meat, raw and salty, filled with bones that caught in my throat and brains that slid down like oysters. Everyone is anonymous when I pull them apart. No one has a name when I eat them. Not even my father. Not even my sister.

Not even Jack.

5. Pulling Mussels (from the Shell)

The girl two seats down from you in the bleachers thinks you’re cute. You are cute—probably even before the prion problem, and certainly afterward. She has short brown hair and a nice-ish smile, though you could do without the braces. Those make nasty marks if she decides to fight back. You decide to smile after the second time she glances over her shoulder and giggles.
You have to eat sometime, after all, and the Jack situation has, in practical terms, made you go hungry. Mac-and-cheese himself is running across the field now, yelling at one of his teammates to pass him the ball as he guns for an opening in the opposing team’s lines. His green jersey is drenched in sweat and clings to his muscles in a way you know makes you look as bug-eyed as the girl with braces. You’ve overheard enough to know that she’s a good mark—here from out of town, visiting some friends. If you do this right, you might get to stay in Colorado for a few more weeks, at least. It’s funny—you usually care about finding a new town as much as you used to care about finding a new supermarket. Just another place to buy meat.

On the field Jack violently checks another player. They fall to the churned-up turf while the ball sails into the net. The crowd cheers, even though Jack gets fouled. The goal is good. Jack is a lot more violent on the field than he is off of it. But then you remember that strange, fierce way he looked at you for a moment yesterday afternoon. You remember the scar on his forehead and his ice man dad.

At halftime he comes over to the bleachers, breathing hard and grinning. A few other students give him high fives. You hang back, knowing he sees you and wondering if he’ll say something. It’s Saturday. You’ve never come to a game before. The whole field smells ripe, hundreds of walking, talking, laughing Happy Meals, and even from a few feet away, Jack smells better than all of them. For a moment you contemplate leaping over the bleachers and just eating him in front of the whole crowd. You’d probably get at least a few bites in before
the police come. Maybe they’d even use deadly force, seeing as how you’re clearly a rabid beast, and finally solve all your problems. Saliva pools in your mouth. Jack looks up at you.

You won’t eat him. No matter what.

“Grayson,” he says with a half smile. He climbs the bleachers and sits next to you. “You like the game?”

You breathe very slowly. His arm brushes against yours, slick with his sweat. You have such a raging hard-on you can only hope he doesn’t look down.

“Nice,” you say. “You always that aggressive?”

Jack shrugs, but his grin is pleased. “If I need to be. We’re winning, aren’t we?”

“Guess so.”

Jack looks at you quickly and then away, and once again you’re enthralled by his countervailing waves of awkwardness and ferocity. “Grayson, about yesterday … my dad …”

“He’s not here, is he?” you say, playing at being scared, though actually the ice man does sort of scare you.

Jack laughs. “God, I hope not. Dad barely tolerates extracurriculars. He thinks I should be training… . Hey, you want to go into the city with me tonight? I’ve got an extra ticket to Modest Mouse.”

This would be marginally appealing even without the additional bonus of Jack, but you look back down at the braces girl, now chatting with her friends. Your hunger is starting to feel like that first time, a longing that cuts into your muscles and makes the world turn red. You can’t go much longer without a meal.

“Sorry,” you say. “Can’t.”

You know you ought to offer a better explanation. Homework or community service or a part-time job. But you don’t want to lie to Jack.

So you hurt him instead.

“Okay,” Jack says. He looks away. The game is starting again. He walks back onto the field. Deliberately, knowing he’s still looking, you move so you’re right behind the girl. You smile at her.

“Haven’t seen you here before,” you say.

She goes bug-eyed. She blushes. You can smell her blood like it’s already broken the skin. “Visiting from Boulder,” she says. She says other things. You can’t quite hear her. Jack is staring at you from the edge of the bench. Even from here you can see the ice in those blue eyes. Like he wants to kill you.

You arrange to meet the girl—she has a name, but you try not to remember it, easier that way—in the parking lot in an hour. You tell her about some concert you have tickets to, would she like to come? In a converted farmhouse just outside the town limits. You wonder why you always get away with this routine. Like none of these girls or boys ever actually listened to a thing their guidance counselors told them about date safety. Sometimes you want to shake their shoulders and yell, “Hello? Doesn’t this sound strange to you?”

Whatever. You’re hungry.

The game is almost over when Jack’s dad walks onto the field. His limp is more obvious now, but it doesn’t make him less threatening. The referee stops the play and yells at
the ice man for a few moments before deciding it’s hopeless. Jack doesn’t say anything, just walks off the field with his shoulders stooped. You wonder what’s happened—did he forget target practice again? You wait for him to come back, but instead he grabs his gear and leaves with his father. He glances at you once. You can’t see his face from so far away, but somehow you know he’s afraid.
I need you to be ready
, the ice man said yesterday. Ready to kill a monster?

You’re not as careful as you should be when you meet the girl after the game. You don’t check if anyone sees you leave together. You don’t even bother to have a conversation once she gets in the car. The doors are locked. The prions have done their job—she has entered a permanent bug-eyed state. Her pulse speeds up like old faithful when you look at her. You’re pissed that you have to do this. Angry like you haven’t been since you first woke up in the lab. About the normal life stripped away, at the maniac left behind. You want to be at that Modest Mouse concert with Jack so bad your stomach hurts. But you can smell the food beside you, and the urge to eat it
now
, at the intersection two blocks away from school, is almost overpowering.

It’s dark by the time you get to the woods. By now even braces girl is starting to get a little worried, but you tune her out. You don’t like it when they scream. Really, you don’t like it when they’re alive at all. Best to just knock them out and be done with it. But you hate to mess up the car, so you make up some excuse about the engine breaking down and stop in the middle of the gravel road. You know from experience that no one will find you.

“Hey,” braces girl says, “I think I want to go back home. This is a little—”

“Yeah, hold on, I have to see what’s wrong with the car.”

She nods, nervously. You get out, pretend to look at the engine, walk back around to her side. “Something’s smoking,” you say. “I should probably call for a tow. Could you get out for a second? I think the number’s under the seat.”

She nods, reassured, though you sure as fuck don’t know why. This is the worst part. The last moment they trust you, when some part of them must know they shouldn’t. She opens the door.

She gets out.

6. Dirty Harry

The prudent serial killer’s guide to avoiding the cool, yet bureaucratic, hand of the law.

7. You Know My Name (Look Up the Number)

The girl stares at you. You stare at her. The hunger feels like knives delicately inserted into your stomach and pushed through your spine.

And then she shrugs, takes a step forward, and kisses you. Perfect opportunity. A kiss is like a non-prion version of eating someone. But you just clench your fists and return it. Why not? The braces aren’t so bad. You imagine she’s Jack. That’s better.

“Grayson,” says Jack. “Step away from her.”

The girl breaks it off first, looks over your shoulder, screams. You turn around, a sudden warmth dulling the sharp edges of your hunger. Jack stands in front of the thick row of trees on the side of the gravel road. He has a gun. Despite the prion problem, you haven’t had much interaction with guns in your life. This one looks big and black and shiny. Jack looks like he knows how to use it.

“Funny, I didn’t peg you for the jealous type, Jack.”

He grimaces, but the blush staining his neck and ears probably isn’t caused by anger.

“What the hell are you doing? Are you robbing us?”
The girl’s voice is so high she’s nearly squeaking. She’s reaching out, like she might hold you for support. But you look at Jack, his steady hand and his big black pistol, and think that might not be the best idea.

“I’m saving your life,” he says.

For a moment you can’t hear a thing—not your frantic pulse, not your labored breath, not even Jack as he says something to the girl and gestures with his gun.