Waking Up Dead

The clothes smelled good, like lavender, and were soft to the touch. Jackson ran a finger across the bright green socks, marveling at the prospect of wearing clean material next to her skin.

“There are sweaters too if you want one.”

“No, these are fine for the moment. It’s really warm in here, and I have my jacket. Do you mind?” Jackson twirled her finger and Luke looked puzzled before he got her meaning and swiftly turned his back to her.

“Sorry.”

She stood up, her muscles aching, and grimaced as a whiff of something that smelled suspiciously like old sweat hit her. Hardly a surprise. The small amount of room in her backpack was tightly rationed and deodorant was not high on her list of priorities. Still, Jackson suddenly wished that she was properly clean, especially in light of the fact that Luke didn’t smell bad at all. As she’d sat next to him in the pool room her nose had tickled with the smell of what she thought was Old Spice. In fact the whole place reeked of the stuff—not in a bad way though. It was oddly comforting.

She shifted and took another surreptitious sniff. Why do you care if Luke thinks you smell bad? Haven’t you got more important things to think about? She scowled, unable or maybe just plain unwilling, to answer those questions.

“If you want to wash up first, I have hot water. Not that you need to,” Luke added hastily. “But you know…”

He trailed off and excitement shot through Jackson. She paused at the waistband of her panties. “Hot water? Are you serious?”

“Yeah, there’s probably some girlie shower gel too,” he added. “I collected a load from Wal-Mmart a few months ago, and I grabbed whatever was left. I’ve been sticking to the man-gel so there should be a load of the feminine shit left.”

“You realize you just became my hero?”

Luke turned back around and gave an over-exaggerated sigh. “Women tell me that all the time.”

“Uh-huh, the many, many that are left.”

He shrugged again and shot her a teasing grin. This time the weird little heart thud was completely expected.

“You got me there,” he said. “Come on. I’ll show you where the shower is.”

Jackson followed him across the room, the prospect of removing the zombie gore, not to mention the stench of weeks-old sweat, dispelling some of the weird feeling. Because she was still a little weirded out. She could admit that. Maybe it was because of the exhaustion that was licking at the edges of her brain, the fact that she still had to find Tye, or maybe, that same sly voice whispered, because of the look in Luke’s eyes when he looks at you. She couldn’t quite put her finger on what it was but it made her edgy. Not in a bad way. Luke seemed to be on the up-and-up and a genuinely nice guy. But in a woman-meets-smoking-hot-man-eeek-eeek sort of way. Ridiculous really—they’d just fought for their lives. Hell, she was always fighting for her life. It had gotten to the point where she barely remembered not having to do so. Things like super fit men and what she’d like to do with them ranked lower on the priority list than keeping clean.

Luke led her out to the hall, oblivious to her racing thoughts. It was a long corridor with several other doors shooting off it. Jackson held the lavender clothes away from her body, reluctant to stink them up, as she looked around with interest.

“Food, weapons, extra bedroom, bathroom.”

He pointed to each shut door as they passed and Jackson nodded, beyond impressed. She’d heard about such places, of course. Bunkers set up by people who had a touch of the paranoids, but she’d never been able to find one. “How did you find this place?”

“I was making a run for it about a year and a half ago,” Luke replied. “Had a pack after me. Five of them, all female. Anyway, I headed for the park, thinking I could reach the condos there. I was exhausted and about one stumble away from being eaten.”

“Been there.”

He nodded. “Exactly, so you know how it goes.”

“What’s the food situation like here?” Jackson asked.

“Nothing much. Same as everywhere else, I guess. In the first few weeks the remaining survivors, including me, cleaned out the stores. I was shocked to see soda still in that vending machine—I should go back and grab the rest.” He pushed open the bathroom door. “So yeah, I think the last bits and pieces disappeared completely by the six-month mark. It’s not like the country you know, where food can be grown. We’re in the Chicago suburbs. Not only is the zombie population huge, plenty of people lived here, but the food situation is shit. There is what there is, and it’s nearly all gone.”

“There’s always rats,” Jackson quipped.

“Sweetheart, I’d rather eat a zombie.”

“Hey, don’t knock ’em. Tye cooked me up rats on a regular basis. He tried to pass them off as dog or cat at first. I only realized when I saw one of the traps he’d set up. I suspect he used other things as well. Bugs and such—whatever. Protein is protein, right?”

Tye. Her chest tightened and she shivered. She’d need to head back out there soon. As soon as she was clean, and rested for just a few minutes, she would have to go looking for him. Just as he would for her if the situation was reversed.

Luke looked her up and down, nodding slowly as he did so. “Must be why you’re so tiny.”

Her chest tightened some more, in an entirely different way, because Luke’s words in no way suggested her skinny bod was a bad thing. “Yep. I’ve lost a fair bit of weight since the zombies arrived,” she said. “Silly to think it was something I used to worry about.”

“What did you do,” Luke asked. “Before all this started?”

Jackson frowned. She didn’t really like to talk about that sort of thing, but Luke might think it odd if she didn’t answer him, and there was no need for him to know how just strange she was—not yet at least. “I waited tables in a New York bar, my hometown, and studied at Macy’s for a month or so before it hit.”

“What the hell did you study at a department store?”

“Cooking courses. They offered special courses there, so I thought, why the hell not? I was never any great shakes at school and couldn’t afford college, anyway. I had planned to get a job in a restaurant or something instead of waiting tables.” An image of roast lamb with all the trimmings filled her mind and Jackson sighed. Roast lamb had been pre-waking dead. It was roast rat now, at best. “Such things aren’t important now and I interrupted,” she continued, “you were making a run for it and…”

Luke grinned and leaned against the door. “I spotted this place. The gates were locked tight but I noticed the gap in the hedge. You can only see it from a certain angle, so I headed straight in. I’m not sure what made me follow it around instead of heading for the house.” He shrugged. “The shed was right there, and I thought I could hide inside for a little bit. It was less obvious than the house. Then I noticed the trapdoor and it didn’t take me long to find the keys. You saw the locks when we came in?”

Jackson nodded.

“I opened it up and went down. It was a risk. It might have just been a cellar and then I’d have been well and truly trapped, but I didn’t have much choice.”

“Sometimes we have to do that,” Jackson said, remembering all the crazy risks she had taken over the past two years.

He nodded. “That we do, and it worked. Whoever built this place was paranoid in the extreme. I don’t know if you noticed but it’s not a direct path from the trapdoor to the bunker. Some of the forks go nowhere, and one doubles back in a loop. It baffles me how they managed to build it without anyone noticing.”

Jackson thought about the long, steeply inclined pathway and tried to visualize above ground. “Maybe it was part of the original structure and they just improved it? It’s a house up there right? A big one?”

“Practically a mansion. God knows how much it would have cost back in the day. This much land in this spot?” He pointed to the final door in the corridor. “That one goes straight into a small tunnel. There’s another trapdoor at the top of the ladder. It leads to part of the basement area in the house. The zombies don’t know about either exits, but they know I’m down here. They must have smelled me in the building—I went to check it out about a month ago. Stupid curiosity. So once they get tired of chasing other people, or whatever else it is they