“Where’s he getting all these zombies from?” I asked. “You’re popping the ones that die here. Well…most of them. Is he making more?” Holy shit, what if Keller had started dosing soldiers he didn’t like with that serum?
“He has his ways,” Renati muttered. “Logan tells me that some of them are captured when the fence lines are breached. Keller has often ordered them stashed away for research—but I never saw any of them. Of course, I don’t make a habit of conversing with…well…anyone, so we didn’t realize the discrepancy up to now.”
“He’ll make Tony and Dax fight them,” Logan cut in. “Over and over, and they are going to get the shit kicked out of them.”
“It’s been—it hasn’t even been a year,” I said. “It hasn’t been six months! How’s it coming to this? How the fuck are we playing Russell Crowe with goddamn zombies?”
“Will you help us?” Renati asked.
“Help you what? Kill Keller?” There it was again: suggesting killing him. This had all happened too fast; I couldn’t keep up. Maybe the evil stardust really had stopped up my cognitive capacities. That was why I was still here at all, listening to the ramblings of two desperate men. “Aren’t you skipping some steps?” I asked, desperate to right the headlong list this ship of crazy seemed to have adapted. “Don’t you need to—I don’t know—there’s a coup first. Why are we going straight to murder?”
“Because he is going straight to murder,” Renati said. “He is going to murder your friends. Or rather, he’ll have his undead murder them. He will murder Tony, murder Dax, murder that poor reporter and her cameraman he’s kept locked up for so long. He will murder them all.”
Murder. Murder. Murder.
He kept saying it. The word could have slipped off my shoulders, bounced away from me like so many other things. But something inside me stirred. Something…something I couldn’t name.
Tony and Dax had saved me from those men out in the boonies. Gloria and Vijay had saved me once, as well. How could I not try to save them in return?
Renati grasped my hands and stared into my eyes. “Will you help us?”
Save my friends, wipe out Keller, liberate the city? It all sounded great.
And exhausting.
And very unlike me. I’d been fond of my desk job. It practically guaranteed immunity from bloody coupes.
But hell, it wasn’t like I had a long life expectancy in this world. Might as well take out some crazed military douchecanoe when I inevitably went down in flames.
Funny, how easy a decision becomes when you realize you’re probably going to die anyway.
“Sure,” I said. “But can we plot after I’ve walked the dog?”
Chapter Twenty-Four
Evie was waiting for me at the door.
She must have smelled me coming up the walkway. I heard her jumping up and down, yapping away while I fumbled with my keys, and she darted out the instant I swung the door open. She squeezed herself around my knees, wriggled, and then paused, looking behind me.
She looked up at me, ears cocked.
Where are they? her expression asked. Where’s my humans?
How do you tell the family dog that her dads are still in jail?
“Tony and Dax are…ah…they’ll be back later,” I said.
She wagged her tail slowly, then stuck her face into my right hand. I patted her soft fur, a huge lump rising in my throat. I had no idea how smart she was. If she knew I was lying—if she even had any concept of what a lie was. Dogs supposedly picked up on feelings and stuff, right? Maybe she sensed my sadness.
Or smelled it. Whatever she did with that nose of hers, which seemed to be constantly moving.
“I’m sorry, girl,” I whispered. “We fucked all this up pretty good.”
She thumped her tail again, then went past me to the brown front lawn, squatted down, and did her business on the dead earth there.
“Good girl,” I said.
Someone cleared his throat. I looked up. The neighbor I had threatened was standing on his front porch, coffee mug in his hand, his glare fastened on the dog. No doubt he found her unseemly or something.
I stared at him. This was, no doubt, the fucker who got Keller all up in arms over us disturbing the peace. He was the reason Keller had come down to the medical facility—the reason we’d all wound up in jail, possibly due to be executed via the undead quite shortly.
I will fucking kill you, I thought.
He turned and walked quickly back inside. His front door shut hard, echoing across the street.
Evie scampered back into the townhouse. I followed her in and was immediately hit by a pungent odor. Obviously no one had let her out during the night; she’d adopted a corner in the living room, judging by the stains on the floor.
She saw me looking and wagged her tail slowly.
“You look a bit sheepish,” I said. “It’s okay. I’ll clean it later. Do you want to go for a nice long walk?”
She wagged her tail faster.
Maybe I needed to become a dog person.