“She was pulling from a lot of places. Yeah, she caught the Hastings feed a few times, but she also had some East Coast reports that I guess he couldn’t get his hands on. So he wants to find out what she knows.”
I shifted in my chair and forced myself to take another bite of the pastrami, silently cursing whoever had decided to create the stuff. Tony was right: Some things really should not be freeze-dried, and pastrami was definitely one of them.
About halfway through the meal, I realized that eating something this disgusting would no doubt really be a poor decision in the long run, particularly if only one toilet in the house worked properly due to water rationing.
Dax glanced up. “I heard cheering last night. What was that?”
Tony looked hard at him. “Cheering.”
“Yeah, like a sporting event?”
“I heard it, too,” I said.
Tony’s expression went from baffled to resigned—had he intended to hide something from us? “They’ve got a soccer league or something, I think.”
I picked around the edges of the pastrami. “A soccer league?”
“Yeah. You know, some of the guys get together, kick a ball around? Helps blow off steam or something? The civilians get involved, too. I guess it’s Keller’s idea of team bonding. Make everyone get along. I’m sure trust falls are next.”
Dinner ground to a halt after that—the three of us could only choke down so much pastrami—and we stuck the leftover MREs in the fridge alongside our water and a couple of potatoes that may well have been left there by the previous owners. “Sometimes we get lucky,” Tony said. “Sometimes it’s not pastrami. But I guess since we have a lifetime supply, it will just be mostly pastrami.”
I was fairly certain my stomach did not want to live off pastrami, and only pastrami, for the next however many years—or, if we were talking realistically, months—we had left, though I wasn’t sure the canned goods would be much better.
Or last much longer.
Something had to give. There had to be other surviving cities and states out there, people who were looking for us, or who wouldn’t turn us away if we asked for help. Hastings couldn’t be it, could it? There had to be someone else. Somewhere else.
We migrated to the living room and the television set. Tony walked over to a cabinet and opened it up, revealing a modest collection of DVDs. He skimmed them, and then sighed. “I’m gonna go read,” he said. “Ezekiel is waiting for me.”
He had picked up a novel on our way out to Hastings, and had put a great deal of stock in the supernatural fighting style of its protagonist, a Mennonite named Ezekiel. Frankly, I’d assumed he’d plowed through it the night we got here—he was so damned excited about the thing. “You haven’t finished it yet?”
“Haven’t felt like reading. He was about to fight flying undead demons, though.”
With that, he limped up the stairs, presumably to rejoin everyone’s favorite resurrected farmer in Dead Mennonite Walking.
I stopped in front of the DVD cabinet and scanned the titles. A handful of old sci-fi flicks—Star Wars, Spacetanic—accompanied a number of Disney re-releases. I counted at least a dozen princess films, and a handful of the better Pixar movies. I pulled Finding Nemo down and smiled at it.
“Kids lived here,” Dax said. “No self-respecting adult has this many Disney films.”
“I beg your pardon.” I waved Finding Nemo at him. “I fucking love this movie. I had two copies. One that I broke, the other that I bought to replace it.”
He seemed willing to consider that, at least for the moment.
“I hate bedpans,” he said.
“I have an idea for you,” I said. “Get one of those masks. Spray some perfume or cologne into it. It distills things a little bit.”
His frown was visible even in the dim light. “Won’t that just make shit smell like…like perfumed shit?”
“Better than non-perfumed shit, right? And I think if you wear it long enough it screws up your sense of smell, anyway.” I shrugged. “Couldn’t hurt.”
We poked around the rest of the living room, partially to occupy ourselves, and partially because I was curious about who had lived here before. They had some board games, and I spotted a video game console stashed in the back of the entertainment unit—not that we could find any games for it. All for the best, I was sure; the last thing we needed during a zombie invasion was someone too into their game to even look away from the screen.
With that done we sat on the couch, staring at the blank television screen.
“This feels weird,” I said. “Very…secure.”
“I know.” Dax paused. “Vibeke, I don’t like it.”
I folded my hands tightly in my lap, looking at our distorted reflections in the screen. We both looked very thin, and very tired.
Maybe our reflections weren’t as distorted as I thought.
“I don’t like it either,” I whispered.
Chapter Five