Waking Up Dead

fairly certain he’d have felt the same way if he’d seen her before the world went to shit.

“But it’s time for me to get going.”

He started, completely surprised by her words, and had to take a moment to process them. What the fuck? “Going?” he said quickly. “Going where?”

“To find Tye.”

Tye. Luke felt an undeniable anger build at the sound of the other man’s name. No, not anger, he realized, as his stomach clenched. Jealousy. It was obvious. Maybe it should have clicked immediately? Jackson and Tye were together. She wanted to go looking for her boyfriend. While he applauded her loyalty, a large part of him rallied against it. If she did, by some miracle, find him she’d probably leave, and he’d be alone again. And what else was fucking new.

“Sooo…” She paused and Luke leaned forward, trying to bank down the anger.

“What?”

“I’d appreciate any information you can give me on the shop. Entrances, exits. I don’t think he’ll be there now. It’s been what over two hours maybe since we split up, but I need to be sure.”

“But if he’s not there,” Luke said slowly, “how will you find him? I’m assuming you don’t have a walkie in your pack.”

“I wish.”

“Then how?” he said, aware that his voice sounded a little demanding but unable to stop it.

“We’ll find each other on the interstate,” she said. “We’re planning to follow it—well as roughly as we can —down to where it finishes in Texas.”

“You’re driving to Texas?”

She laughed. “You know the cars don’t work anymore.”

Luke shook his head as her meaning hit. “You’re planning to walk to Texas?”

“Um yeah, of course that might be harder than I thought now.” She paused and Luke opened his mouth to speak, to ask what the fuck could possibly be in Texas that would make her crazy plan of walking there make any kind of sense, but she spoke before he did, and when she did his heart gave a nasty little thud. “Something’s going on with the zombies. Something weird.”

“Everything about them is weird.”

“Apart from the obvious I mean.” She paused for just a moment. “I don’t know if you picked up on it, but they’re banding together, almost like they’re working together. Oh, I know the packs do,” she said, waving a hand. “We’ve all seen that, four or five of them buddying up. They’re like animals, right, so why wouldn’t they do that? But today when Tye and I had to split up there were way more than five.”

Luke nodded slowly, putting the Texas issue aside for the moment, because this was not news to him, and for a brief second there he’d been expecting something else, something unknown. But then…how could Jackson not have seen this before? The packs had been joining up for months.

“How many were there, altogether?” he asked.

She shrugged. “Fifteen maybe? There could have been more that I didn’t see. They tried to cut off our escape, waiting on the roofs. And that makes absolutely no sense. They’re not supposed to be able to think.”

“They’re not supposed to exist at all.”

“Neither is tofu.”

“Huh?”

She rolled her eyes. “Something my…just something someone used to say. Point is something’s changing with them. I saw it today with my own eyes and I don’t know what it means.”

“Something meaning what?”

She shrugged and wiped away a few of the water spots on the table. “They seemed almost like they were…plotting and planning…I know that sounds ridiculous but…”

Luke frowned because again this was not news to him. He’d seen more than one zombie acting that way, and he’d thought about it a fair bit. It horrified him—the cunning behavior, the gleam of a burgeoning intelligence —but in a weird way it made a nasty kind of sense.

Zombies should not exist.

Only they did.

Zombies should be dumb and stupid.

But they weren’t.

Jackson was oddly out of the zombie news loop. It was time to bring her in.

Chapter Ten

“It’s a whole lot worse than you think,” Luke said, lifting his sweater. “Take a look at this.”

Jackson’s stomach gave a funny little flip. Damn, even sitting down, Luke had some ab muscles going on, like really going on, and she was weirdly tempted to run a hand over the hard planes. She clenched her fist to shake the feeling off but relaxed them the moment she spotted the wound. It was located just below his rib cage and was about the width of a chunky human finger. Clearly he’d sewn himself up—not very well. The edges were still shiny pink and he wasn’t completely healed. On the plus, side she couldn’t see any sign of infection.

“Whiskey,” he said, as if reading her thoughts. “Johnny Walker Black.”

“Huh?”

“I pour it over me anytime one of them bites me. It seems to do the trick.”

Surprise hit and Jackson tilted her head, considering. “How many times have you been bitten?”

“Five or six in all. You?”

“Never.”

“Are you serious?”

“Yep. I came close one time.” Jackson closed her eyes as she remembered the incident. “It was at the very beginning, right before everything went completely to shit,” she said slowly. “She, well, it, I guess, grabbed my ankle and sent me flying. She was crawling along the floor, I think maybe there was something wrong with her legs, and went straight for my thigh.”

“What did you do?”

“I almost died of shock! It was just instinct that I kneed her in the face. Hard. She went down and I ran for it. I ran for so long…” She shook herself. “Like I said, those were the early days. I didn’t even think to behead her or chop her up. How could I? I had no idea what was happening.” The image of the dead zombie’s snarling face and bloodcurdling howl, were so vivid Jackson swallowed unsteadily. Some memories just stayed with you more than others. “So why the alcohol?” she asked. “You think it counters the zombie infection in some way?”

“I’m not sure,” Luke replied. “It’s just alcohol. But then it’s not like in the movies is it? When one bite equals death followed by waking? I’ve seen people bitten over and over and they’ve died a few weeks later of blood loss or normal infection or something, and don’t come back. But others are bitten, die, then get up zombiefied.”

“What about the pus?” Jackson asked, intrigued to have another viewpoint on the situation. Sure, theories and speculation had flown thick and fast in the first few weeks of the end, and Tye had been full of information, some more vital than others, but Luke had clearly seen other things. After all he didn’t seem in the least bit surprised by the idea of smart zombies. Plus he’d been in one place for a long time, while she, and Tye, had been traveling for the past two years. It was bound to give him an entirely different perspective.

“I’ve been covered in the stuff and I’m fine,” he said. “Even with open wounds. I really think it’s all about the bite. The pus seems to be an internal response or something. Like snot when you get a cold.”

“You might be immune to it,” she suggested. “The virus I mean, not the snot-pus.”

He frowned. “I doubt it. Besides I know of other people who’ve been sprayed too and they’re fine, or at least they were, but that was in the beginning. They’re probably dead now. Properly, I mean. Anyway, my point is that it just seems totally random to me. No one knows how it started. No one knows how the infection gets passed around. In the beginning, pretty much everyone I saw who turned did so because they got bit. The zombies were so fast and people were so shocked. No one ever expected this, did they?”

Jackson wiped up another droplet of water and frowned. “No, it was completely unexpected.” She paused