It’s just the flu. It’s a flu bug, silly. You’ll be fine in a few days.
She wouldn’t be fine. I knew it. She knew it. The zombie we had just put down knew it. Even Lattimore knew it, if she didn’t require me to shower up before treating these people I leaned toward her. “Alyssa…I want to try to get help. For Hastings.”
She blinked up at me.
“That backup radio you talked about. In a library or something. Do you know where it is?”
She nodded.
“Could…could you teach me how to use it?”
After a moment of silence—shit, what if I misjudged this and she turns me in?—she started smiling. It was a pained smile, but a smile nonetheless.
“I thought you’d never ask,” she said. “Do you have a piece of paper?”
Chapter Fourteen
“This is stupid,” Tony said, his limp more pronounced than I remembered.
He’d been repeating that mantra for the last half-hour, from the moment Dax clipped on Evie’s leash up to the point where we left the populated section of the city and headed for the boonies. Dax and I had requested the following morning off, and Lattimore, in a bizarre turn of events had approved both requests. Maybe she figured we’d finally earned a break.
Of course, that meant it was time to go traipsing into zombie territory to find the backup radio.
“Do you have better ideas?” I asked. “Because if you do, I’m open to them. And I don’t believe going through official channels works when the place is run by a fucking dictator.”
“He’s not a dictator. People just…listen to him.” Tony scratched the back of his head. “Though I’ll be damned if I know why. Fucker is loonier than all the inmates at Arkham Asylum.”
No one paid us much attention as we walked. I guess the grinning golden retriever at our sides kept suspicions to a minimum. Think about it, how many evildoers walk around with golden retrievers? Zero. The way I figured it, we were almost guaranteed safe passage as long as we managed not too look too terrified of being caught.
“We just need to act like we belong,” I said. “I used to do it all the time at rock concerts.”
“Rock concert and infiltrating a zombie-infested city. Totally see the similarity,” Dax said.
“I mean for getting backstage. They have bouncers and security guards and stuff.”
Tony let out a short, sharp bark of laughter. “Vibby, you never interviewed a band that had fucking security guards.”
“I did too!”
Evie yipped gleefully and trotted along beside us, her tail a constant blur. She seemed relieved that everyone was getting along again.
I plunged on ahead with my reasoning: “Maybe it’s not a huge similarity, but it’s the same concept. If we don’t look like we’re worried, then people won’t worry about us.”
“I understand the concept just fine, Vibby. I’m just pointing out all your trouble with, uh, the various rock bands in your vast repertoire don’t quite compare to us sneaking past men with big guns and into a city full of flesh-eaters.”
Tony usually wasn’t nearly this sensible. I found it troubling.
He added, “We don’t even know how to use a military radio. That chicken scratch you got from your friend isn’t going to help.”
That chicken scratch was presently the most valuable thing I owned. I had folded it into a small square and tucked it into the interior pocket of my leather jacket, and even now I had to stop myself from reaching into that pocket to check on it. “Well, she couldn’t exactly draw us a diagram. And Dax knows how to do it, right?”
Dax looked at me in surprise. “Why the hell would I know how to work a military radio?”
“Boy Scouts.”
Dax, to his credit, kept walking while staring at me. “I don’t exactly know what you think they teach us in Boy Scouts. It wasn’t the freaking Nazi Youth.”
Well, there went all my warm feelings about the Boy Scouts. What, exactly, were we doing with our young men if not grooming them to look after us during a possible apocalypse?
We eventually put the well-maintained buildings and frequent pedestrians behind us. Now we had come to the real show: the no man’s land filled with buildings that might be structurally OK but had been abandoned to the elements as a buffer for the Quarantine Zone.
I had seen it all before, of course. Parts of Muldoon looked like this. Hell, so did much of Elderwood. It felt a bit like being at a wake; just because the living dead hadn’t overrun this part of the city didn’t mean it was still alive.
Alyssa had told us to slip through the eastern gate—which was not so much a gate as it was a waist-high fence that even I could hop over. Tony picked up Evie and handed her to Dax over the fence, and her tail thumped against both of their faces before they set her back down on the asphalt.
Just like that, we entered the Quarantine Zone.
“They aren’t guarding this very hard,” Dax said.