I crouch there watching Kalyn for a while, the darkness falling around us, the bugs in the swamp starting to buzz, and I tell myself a story. I imagine her long black skirt caught by some withered stick-thin hand. Kalyn looks down in horror, but it’s too late to pull away. She stumbles and her arms wave around, and so her billowy sleeves are snagged by all those bony fingers. I run to her rescue, appearing out of nowhere to slash her clothes right off her.
And she falls into my arms.
“Allison?” she says back here in the real world.
I am busted.
I stand up, wondering how she spotted me. She hasn’t even turned around.
“Oh, hey.” I’m all casual. Yeah, just passing by. Not spying on you in some nonworld- repopulating girl-crush way.
“Thought that was you,” she says.
Thought what was me? I wasn’t making a sound, and even if we don’t bathe much anymore, it’s not like she can smell me over the zees.
“Yeah, it’s me. What are you … doing?”
She turns around, her smile catching moonlight. “Waiting for you.”
Okay. The world is definitely getting shiny again.
As I walk into Kalyn’s pie-slice corner of fence, the zees all shuffle to face me, like they’ve gotten bored with her. The metal flexes with their shifting weight, the chain-links grinding. Except for the insect buzz, the night is quiet.
I can still remember right after the before, when the zees made a gargling noise whenever they saw us. Now they’re too dried out, Dr. Bill says.
It’s nicer this way.
Kalyn’s looking at me, her pupils huge in the dark.
“Anyone you know?” I ask. It’s an old joke, but it gives me an excuse to glance away into the crowd, arm’s length from the intensity of her stare.
“No, never,” Kalyn says, and turns back to the faces pressed against the fence.
Her ash-smudge makeup is more careful tonight, like she’s made an effort for the zees. I know how weird that is, but it’s not like there’s much else to get fancy for. No one celebrates birthdays since the shed with the calendar marks burned down, and the parties weren’t much fun anyway. The liquor’s been gone for ages (and I never got any of it), the precious Ping-Pong balls are all broken, and the dartboard’s green with mold.
Movie nights are a big deal, I suppose, since we only run the generator once a month these days. But Kalyn dressed up for … this.
Is it to perfect her zee impersonation? To desensitize?
I don’t care which, as long as I get to stand here, closer to her than the zees pressed in around us. She’s so close that her hair moves when I breathe.
Breath’s length, and my heart’s beating like I’m on the other side of the wire.
“Do you think Alma’s right?” she asks.
“That Sammy’s a waste of gravity?”
“No,” Kalyn says. “About the other thing.”
“Oh … us all dying.”
Last year when Dr. Bill had the squirts from a dented can of beans, Alma Nazr was in charge of us for a whole week, the epicenter of my crush on her. She showed us how to crack skulls with police batons, how to reload a shotgun with one hand, and explained why we were doomed.
More zees come to the wire every day. We don’t know why. In the early days we thought sound drew them to the living. But there’s no way they can hear us from the other side of the swamp, and yet they come. They just know we’re here.
Alma says it’s only a matter of time before there are too many. Enough to crush the fence. Or to stack themselves higher than its uppermost coil of barbed wire, like rain forest ants using their own bodies to cross a river.
So we should leave soon, before the crush gets too thick to drive through.
Before the roads get any worse, especially here on the rainy kudzu-choked Gulf Coast. You can already see the asphalt breaking down outside the front gate. If we wait too much longer, we’ll have to walk out shooting.
And bullets aren’t forever.
Dr. Bill came back to teaching early, still sickly and squeezing crap-farts into his pants. Alma wasn’t supposed to say that stuff to us kids, I guess. She probably wouldn’t have, except that the other grown-ups had stopped listening to her. They can’t imagine ever going outside again.
Even Dr. Bill, for all his drills and shouting, never talks about leaving.
And the thing is, the grown-ups are right. If we roll out of those gates now, the zees will eat us in five minutes.
Alma’s right too, of course. The wire can’t last forever.
Doomed if we do, doomed if we don’t.
But I decide to sound strong. “Don’t worry. The zees won’t break through.”
Kalyn sighs with disappointment. “So we’re stuck in here forever?”
“Well … no. Not that either.” Here at breath’s length, I want to say whatever she wants to hear. “What I mean is, we’ll have to leave way before the zees crush the fence.”
She turns to me, her eyes bright. “Really?”
“Sure.” My mind is scrambling. “Sooner or later, something random has to happen.”
“Um, random how?”
“Like … a tornado.”
Kalyn laughs, opening her hands to the triangle of sky above us. “You mean it’ll scoop up a bunch of zees, then drop them inside? Like a rain of frogs, but zombies?”
“Okay, maybe not a tornado. But what about a major hurricane? They come around every ten years or so. That could pull this fence up. Then we’d have to leave.”
She nods slowly. “Everything random is inevitable. You just need enough time.”
I’m nodding stupidly, because our eyes are locked again. It’s much better than the zee stare she gave me that afternoon, and this time no one’s watching.
I wish there were a drill for this. Step one: take her shoulders?
But I look away again. “We should start having tornado drills. Dr. Bill would love that.”
“Yeah, he would.” Kalyn snorts a laugh. “But he won’t like it when the zees come raining down.”
“Step one … kiss your ass good-bye.”
“Maybe, maybe not.” She reaches for the fence.
My fingers circle her wrist. Her skin is cool in the night air. “Quit that.”
“Does it make you nervous?”
“Um, yes. Because it’s kind of insane.” I squeeze her hand, remembering Mrs.
Zimmer growing paler every hour until they finally put her in the isolation hut. “You could get bitten. Don’t you want to be around for the inevitable rain of zees?”
“Mmmm,” she says softly. “That’s the weird thing. I already did.”
4.
I stand there for a moment, her hand in mine, the insect buzz growing louder in my ears. I’m not sure what she just said.
“Um, you’ve already seen a rain of zombies?”
“No. I already got bitten.”
“Very funny.”
Kalyn drops my hand and stretches out her left arm, rolling up the puffy black sleeve of her shirt. Her forearm gleams with moonlight, darkened by a purple scar in the shape of a nine millimeter shell.
“Right there.”
I shrug. “Looks like you cut yourself on a can of peaches. Dessert points of evil.”
“That’s not from metal. I was standing right where you are, looking straight up at the sky. Remember back in the before, how there were, like, … a few hundred stars? And now there’s so many, like the souls of the six billion all flew up there?”
She runs a finger across the scar. “I sort of got dizzy thinking about them. And I took a step sideways, with my hand out so I wouldn’t fall.”
Kalyn reaches out toward the fence, and I’m frozen, watching her. Her hand is too close to one of the ruined faces—finger’s length—but the zee doesn’t react at all.
It’s looking at me instead.
“Scratched it pretty bad,” she says. “On bone.”
“When was this?” My hand is on my pistol.
“A month ago.”
Relief runs through me in a shiver. “You cut yourself on the wire, then.”
“It wasn’t metal. It was bone.”
Kalyn reaches out to grab my shoulders. I pop the button on my holster, but she’s only steadying me. I’m inches from the fence, dizzy from all this. She pulls me closer to her.
“Be careful.”
“Quit fucking with me, then!”
She shakes her head, hard. “I felt like shit at first, and puked up meals for two days. I was going to tell everyone, I swear. But then I felt better.”
I take a deep breath, reminding myself that this all happened a month ago. Her scar is old and dry; the ones that turn you never have time to heal.
“Then it was psychosomatic. Or you got infected with something else. A bad can of beans, like Dr. Bill.”
“But I feel better now, Allison. Not just well—better.” She does a spin in the narrow space, her skirt flaring out to brush against the fences. “You have to try it.”
“Try it?” My mouth feels as dry as a zee’s. “You want me to stick my hand out there?”
“No, silly. You’d turn. Whatever got inside me must be pretty scarce, or we’d have seen it before.”
“Seen what before?”
“Cowpox. Think about it, Allison. Out of all the mutations churning inside the six billion, there must be one that’s cowpox.”
“Cowpox?” I remember the word from Dr. Bill’s vaccine fantasies, but I’m too shaky to put it together.
She explains slowly. “In the old days people who milked cows never got smallpox, because they’d already been infected with cowpox. It’s close enough to make you immune, but it doesn’t kill you. It’s a natural vaccine.”
“Bullshit,” I say. “I mean, yeah, I remember all that. But why would it happen now?
After everyone’s already dead?”
“Anything random is inevitable,” she says, as serene as a prayer. “You just need enough time, and billions of zees carrying trillions of variations, until that lucky mutation pops up.”
I shake my head. “But why would you get it?”
“By accident, Allison.” She shrugs. “Accidents happen. I almost fell over, and something bit my hand. So I can leave here if I want. Want to come?”
I turn and walk away from the wire, from the zees straining to get us, from Kalyn’s madness.
But five seconds later I drift to a halt, processing what I’ve been seeing while staring into her eyes—she’s not wearing makeup. That’s not ash; it’s something underneath her skin.
And something else … She said it’s been a month since she was bitten. And how long since I started noticing her? Suddenly started seeing her, like a switch flipped, and I forgot all about Alma and the girls in the dirty pictures on the rec room walls.
Like something lucky came along and made Kalyn better.
A cool hand settles on my shoulder.
“They’ll kill me if they find out,” she says simply. “But I know you won’t freak out and tell them.”
“Trust me, I’m freaking out.”
Kalyn turns me around. “I do trust you, Allison, because you saw it in me. From that very first day, you noticed. That’s why I chose you to join me.”
“Join you?” I force out a dry laugh. “How’s that supposed to work?”
“It’s inside me now.” Kalyn reaches down and pulls a precious sewing needle from the hem of her dress. She holds it between her thumb and middle finger, the pointy end resting against her fingertip, not breaking the skin yet. “One drop, to start.”
I stare at my own fingers, then at her. I’m about to explain that noticing her was something completely different. But she leans in and kisses me, like it’s not two different things. Like it’s all wrapped up at tongue’s length—my obsession and her mutation and a way to leave the wire behind.
Kissing her isn’t wet and slippery, like I’ve always imagined it. Her mouth is feverhot and dry. Her breath draws me in and spins me dizzy. I cling to her so I don’t fall over.
When we pull apart, the needle has broken her skin.
Kalyn smiles and squeezes her finger so a drop wells up, black and shiny in the moonlight. She hands the needle to me.
I still don’t believe any of this, I tell myself. Her illness was psychosomatic, so her betterness has to be too. She scratched herself a month ago and didn’t die from it, and in this piece-of-shit postapocalyptic pot farm, that much luck is enough to make anyone ecstatic. It was enough to make her beautiful.
So why not play along? Maybe she’ll kiss me again.
I take the needle, lick it, and stick it home. I watch the blood well up from my middle finger, as shiny as hers in the moonlight.
We press our wounds together for a while—blood’s length.
And then we kiss some more.
That night I throw up my chocolate pudding.
5.
It feels like the flu at first, my whole body responding to an invasion. My joints ache and buzz, like the swamp bugs are eating the insides of my kneecaps. My skin is on fire. Nothing stays in my stomach, not even water. I puke up every trickle of saliva I swallow, becoming dry and silent, like the zees.
My brain is buzzing too, wondering if Kalyn has it wrong. Maybe it’s not the virus inside her that’s lucky. Maybe it’s her. What if she’s immune, a carrier like Typhoid Mary? I’m blood sisters with Zombie-fucking-Mary.
Which means I’ll turn, and they’ll put a precious bullet in my head like they did with Mrs. Zimmer.