“I’d rather have angsty zombies than angry ones,” Dax said. “Can we get back to our game?”
I stretched out three squares of toilet paper in front of me and read over the responses etched in the garish pink ink of a pen Gloria had stashed into her pocket before we got tossed locked up. I think she meant to use it to write about our experiences here, but it was quickly requisitioned as a prop for the only game we could all agree on: Cards Against Zombies, better known as our homemade version of Cards Against Humanity. We tossed the pen back and forth between our cells—further irritating Horace—and wrote on TP, which at least was replenished daily. Our jailers must have thought we were on the toilet all the damn time.
I cleared my throat. “My life was complete until blank arrived. You guys said…” I had to squint at the squiggly writing on some of them. “…The living dead…Jay and Silent Bob…and…what does this say?” I held up the last scrap so Gloria could see it.
She cocked her head to the side. “Looks like Orlando Bloom.”
I tossed the scrap aside. “You guys suck at this game. Orlando Bloom is not relevant to my interests.”
The zombie whined.
“See?” I pointed at him. “Horace agrees.”
Vijay sighed and sat back down, tucking his hands around the bars and glaring at me. “I’m deeply sorry, Vibeke. I don’t particularly enjoy playing card games when I’m locked up in some military prison.”
“You guys are reporters,” Dax said. “Didn’t you get detained and stuff?”
“I was a cameraman,” Vijay sniffed.
“And I was an entertainment reporter,” Gloria said. “Handled the red carpet. Interviewed the big stars. Not exactly stuff that would get me thrown in the brig.”
After two weeks in our strange little confinement, no one had come forward to explain to us why we were being held.
Well, that’s not entirely true. We knew why Gloria and Vijay were on lockdown: They’d been transmitting top-secret information about the end of the world to what remained of the masses, and according to Doogie Howser—a.k.a. Captain Keller, the gawky blonde kid in charge of Hastings—that there was a hanging offense. Dax and I, along with our friend Tony, had fallen in with them right before we arrived in Hastings. Tony had somehow convinced Keller that he was a military officer, but the two of us had gotten unceremoniously tossed into the brig along with post-apocalyptic America’s two most wanted fugitives. I liked to think it was because we looked so damn dangerous.
Hey, I can dream, right?
“We should have told him we were military, too,” Dax said.
“Because we look like military people,” I said. Tony could apparently pass as a hardened commander of some force or another. But then again, Tony could probably talk his way out of or into pretty much anything he wanted. Which was why he was hanging out with Commander Keller, pretending to be very, very important, while Dax and I were sitting in the brig with two would-be outlaws and a potentially depressed zombie.
The zombie in question reached down, his gnarled fingers stretching toward something on the tattered jeans that encased his legs. I couldn’t quite figure out when he had died; he reeked, and clumps of his pasty skin had begun to sag off, but not quite as much as the usual free-roaming ghoul.
He shifted around, and the stench wafted over us anew. No, it wasn’t as bad as what we’d encounter outside, but holy shit he was overpowering.
“This must be the new psychological warfare,” Vijay said. “Put people in with a zombie to remind them of what will happen to them if they don’t do what you want.”
Gloria pushed herself to the opposite end of our cell, as far away from Horace as she could get. “You’ll turn into one? Or you’ll get fed to one?”
“Or you’ll smell like one,” Dax suggested.
We all considered the zombie. He bent awkwardly, fingers stretching toward the Spam.
I had seen this once before, months ago, while sneaking around a house in the suburbs. A revenant trapped in the floor had realized she wasn’t about to reach us, and had simply stopped trying, opting to sulk instead. I wasn’t sure whether that suggested some sort of intelligence some possessed that we hadn’t yet figured out, or if they were just learning to conserve their energy.
The door to the brig flew open, and several heavily armed guards marched in. Our previously resigned undead cellmate began flinging himself against the bars in renewed frenzy, his hands stretching uselessly for the big men. Dax and I edged to the other end of our cell, just in case he managed to wedge himself through. Not that it seemed likely, but you know, after an apocalypse you can never count on what kind of luck you’re going to get.