Absolute silence.
I knew how this must have looked, how I must have looked, drenched in blood with bodies spread like petals at my feet.
My heartbeat slowed. I followed Elliot’s gaze—steady, intense—from my chest to my stomach, my stomach to my arms. There was a hole in my side, bits and pieces missing from the fleshy parts of my arms and legs. My jeans were tattered, my body bruised. Bite marks dotted the surface of my skin, like bloody flowers just beginning to bloom.
Swish. Swish. Swish.
The sound of my heart was deafening. The sound of their silence was louder. Pressure built inside my head. The room closed in around me.
I stumbled and started to go down, but Elliot moved forward to catch me. He held me up, his gaze guarded, his eyes on Bethany’s across the room.
Vaguely aware of the fact that one bite from a zombie was enough to drive a human mad, I looked down at my own body, at Elliot’s hand on my arm.
At the gaping hole in my shoulder and the muscles just starting to knit themselves back together.
Bethany took a step toward us, her green eyes every bit as glassy and far away as her mother’s. “You went through the windshield,” she said shrilly. “You broke your neck. The chupacabra didn’t kill you. And those things, they tore you to pieces….”
This wasn’t the way I’d imagined telling them my secret—and I hadn’t imagined telling Elliot at all. But all of a sudden, I couldn’t hold the words back, couldn’t deny the obvious for a second more. My brain was muddled from poison, my body numb, my eyes dry. Every safeguard that had once stood between me and the outside world crumpled and fell—useless, dead, gone. There was no hiding it, no denial, nowhere else to run.
“I’m not like other girls,” I said, the words coming out in a whisper. “I’m not normal. I don’t feel things, I don’t fear things.” I held out my bloodied hands, palms up. “I don’t die.”
Sometimes, the biggest truths were the simple ones—inescapable, undeniable, pure. I’d worn my secrets like a robe, and now I was naked. I was bleeding and visibly healing and utterly exposed.
Heat spread out from my torso. My head felt fuzzy, light. I blinked and my eyes wouldn’t open. Elliot let go of me, and I went down.
I’d been bitten so many times. There was so much poison in my system.
“I don’t die. I don’t die. I don’t die.”
I heard the words, heard someone saying them over and over again. I didn’t recognize my own voice, didn’t realize until later that it was me.
I blinked and my eyes didn’t open. I’d finally told someone the truth, and fate was conspiring to make me a liar.
I don’t die, I’d said. I don’t die. I don’t die. I don’t die.
But people like me? Sometimes, we did.
21
I’m in the room again—the room where it hurts. Sometimes it’s loud and sometimes it’s bright and sometimes I have to sit still. Mommy swabs my cheek. Daddy gets out the polka dots—dot, dot, dot all over my head. I make a face at him.
“EKG is clean,” he says.
I know those letters. E! K! G! I know lots of letters. So does Mommy.
“DNA.” She says other things, too, but they aren’t letters, so I don’t listen much.
EKG. DNA.
I don’t think those are good letters. I want to go home.
“Almost done, baby.” Mommy smiles, tickles my chin. I reach up to tickle hers.
And that’s when it’s time for my shot.
I blinked, but the world around me didn’t settle into focus. Everything was bright and blurry and warped around the edges.
“I think she’s awake. Kali? Can you hear me?”
I tried to separate the sounds into words, but couldn’t do it. My body felt … heavy.
Without the Nibbler, you’d be dead.
Zev’s voice was low and serious, and I wanted to tell him that he was wrong, that I’d lived through attack after attack, that I could have survived anything—but one bite from a zombie was enough to kill a regular person, and I’d been bitten, scratched, and clawed dozens of times.
Even my body had its limits.
“Dead,” I repeated out loud. The word came out sounding garbled.
“Dead? Dead? Oh, no. You don’t get to tell us something like that and then die.” Bethany put her face right next to mine, and it came into focus.
More or less.
“That’s not how this works, Super Girl. You don’t get to go to sleep. You don’t get to pass out. You don’t get to die. The only thing you get to do is wake up and tell us what the hell is going on.” Beth’s words were harsh, but her touch was gentle as she pressed something warm to my skin—a warm washcloth, damp and soft. “And then,” she added, working the cloth across the surface of my body, “we’re going to have a nice, long chat about lying to the Bethany. Surface wounds, my ass.”
My last thought before I drifted back into darkness was that Bethany appeared to be referring to herself in the third person.
This could not possibly be good.
“Do you know what this is, Kali-Kay?”
Mommy is in a good mood. I think. I look at the object in her hand and then shake my head.
“Nuh-uh,” I say. I stick my fingers in my mouth and give them a light chew. “What?”
Mommy gently takes my hand out of my mouth. “This is a gun. Can you say gun?”
“Gun,” I repeat dutifully.
Mommy takes my still-damp hand, brushes it over the surface of the barrel. It is cold and hard. It feels like a doorknob. It looks funny, too.
“Do you want to play a game, Kali?”
Mommy and I play lots of games. Secret games. I am her secret girl.
“Close your eyes and count to ten,” Mommy says. I close my eyes and count to four. I like four.
“Okay, now open your eyes.” Mommy smiles, but it does not reach her eyes. It makes my tummy hurt. “Where’s the gun, Kali?”
I can’t see the gun anymore. She hid it, and I don’t know where it is. I wish I did. I wish I could tell her. I wish I could be good.
“Find the gun, baby.”
I’m not good at this game, the secret game. I put my fingers back in my mouth. We have lots of secrets, Mommy, Mama, and me.
This time, when I woke up, the world was the right color and the right shape, and I recognized the person looking down at me instantly.
Vaughn.
It figured—the almost invincible girl gets hurt, and they call a vet. Given that the others had seen me tearing through a zombie horde like a wild animal, it seemed highly appropriate—if a bit insulting.
You’re not an animal. They’re human. You’re more.
Maybe I was just in a bit of a mood after being zombie chow, but instead of warming me from the inside out, Zev’s words made me want to roll my eyes. I’d never asked to share my brain with a two-bit motivational speaker.
I hadn’t asked for any of this.
“Your vitals are good. Your wounds are healing, and based on your body temperature, I’d guess your system is burning through the mortis bacteria instead of allowing it to shred your brain.” Vaughn paused, his brown eyes searching mine. “How do you feel?”
I felt fine, naked, and thirsty—in that order. I remembered the looks on my friends’ faces when I’d made my confession all too well. Physically, I was doing okay, but I couldn’t remember the last time I felt so open to attack.
So vulnerable.
So much for keeping my back to the wall.
“I’m fine,” I said, not meeting Vaughn’s eyes. “Thirsty.”
I very purposefully did not specify what, exactly, I was thirsting for.
Hunting without feeding is ill-advised, Zev told me, undeterred by my response to his last comment. Healing you makes the Nibbler that much hungrier. You’ll have to feed it soon.
Well, forgive me for having been too busy being eaten by zombies and trying to kill them dead to stop and think about drinking their blood to keep the parasite inside me plump and well fed.
Anyone ever tell you you’re cranky when you almost die?
There was a retort on the tip of my mental tongue, but I realized that Vaughn was giving me a very odd look, and I wondered if a bevy of emotions had passed over my face with Zev’s words.