“I do.” I smirked, leaning inside to shut off the engine and the lights. “Besides, I intended for all of us to sleep inside our vehicles. Not exposed outside, under the stars.”
Clare smiled tentatively.
“OK,” George said, “let’s do this. I’m too exhausted to find another spot anyway.”
“Me, too,” Jill agreed as she turned, presumably headed back to her makeshift bed. “But I still think you’re an idiot.”
Leave it to my mother-in-law to keep it real.
Chapter
4
“Just one bite, one scratch from these creatures is sufficient. And then, you become one of them.” – Red Queen, Resident Evil (2002)
All disgruntled kidding aside, Jill didn’t look too healthy. She’d always had a fair complexion, but over the past day, all color had drained from her face. Her skin, even her lips, had turned ashen, and beads of perspiration had appeared on her forehead—despite the fact that it was a chilly autumn night, and with her slender frame, she tended toward coldness, not overheating.
Perhaps her fever had broken—not that it would make much of a difference. Regardless of the trouble Casey and I had endured at the vet clinic in Gloster, I suspected the antibiotics and painkillers we’d swiped were having little to no effect on Jill’s spreading zombie infection. No matter how long she dutifully swallowed them, they’d likely never reverse her current condition—a supernatural illness that most of Earth’s scientists had had no time to study, much less cure, before succumbing to it themselves.
I caught Clare’s worried expression. Obviously, she’d noticed her mother’s worsening situation as well. With a half-hearted smile, she picked up Azazel’s carrier, flipped on an overhead light, and walked toward the back of our home-on-wheels.
Turning to George and Casey, I said, “You’re welcome to sleep in the van with us. We have plenty of room. But it might be safer for you to stay in the wagon… in case we have to speed outta here at some point.”
Their eyes flicked toward my vehicle, a disconcerted expression on their faces.
George recovered quickly, her smile pleasant and sincere. “Thanks, Joe. We appreciate the offer. But I think you’re right… better for us to use both cars. In case, like you said, we have to make a quick getaway.”
The real truth, the one neither George nor Casey wanted to come right out and admit, was that they had no desire to be unconscious only a few feet from a soon-to-be-undead time bomb sleeping in our van.
Honestly, I couldn’t blame them. I wasn’t too thrilled about it either.
All of a sudden, I heard a loud hiss. Concerned that Jill had finally morphed into a monster and was on the attack, I scrambled back into the vehicle.
Luckily, nothing so dramatic had occurred. Clare had simply let a pissed-off Azazel out of her carrier.
The poor kitty had been cooped up for a long time. But though eager to be free, she obviously hadn’t enjoyed emerging from her cage so close to Jill’s feet. Cat-hating nemeses could be unsettling like that.
After performing her typical downward-facing dog stretch, Azazel sniffed a puddle of putrid goo—presumably a drop of pus from Jill’s infected wound.
“Azazel, no!” I shouted, lunging toward her.
“Jesus,” Jill snapped, “you startled me!”
Naturally, I ignored my mother-in-law and focused instead on my beloved cat. “Shoo, kitty! Get away from that.”
But my warning was unnecessary. One sniff, and Azazel recoiled, scrunching her tiny damp nose—just as she usually did whenever she got a whiff of something she found distasteful, like vomit or kumquats.
I sighed with relief, suspecting my feisty cat would no longer be curious about the deadly stuff—and, likewise, would keep her distance from Jill, a woman she hadn’t much liked before the ill-fated zombie scratch occurred. Just in case, though, I wiped up the goo—and spritzed some diluted bleach on the spot.
“Jesus, Joe,” my mother-in-law grumbled, “I’ve never known you to be such a clean freak.”
Apparently, she had no idea that, in a moment of frenzied panic, I’d wiped up evidence of the zombie infection that would ultimately kill her—thereby sparing Azazel from a similarly ghoulish fate. Regardless of our rocky relationship, I inwardly relaxed. Jill was suffering enough—I didn’t want her to realize how unnerved I felt… not only by her impending transformation but also by the possibility of her contaminating the two individuals I loved most.
“If you’re in such a cleaning mood,” she added, “you might want to focus on the exterior. I can smell the stench from in here.”
Although I, too, had gotten more than a few unpleasant whiffs of the blood, guts, brain matter, and zombie goo smeared across the van—and longed for a chance to scour her thoroughly—the odor wasn’t as noticeable to me as it apparently was to her. Perhaps the zombie infection coursing through her veins had heightened her olfactory senses—in preparation for her flesh-seeking afterlife.
Whatever the case, I refrained from responding and chuckled awkwardly instead, trying to distract Jill from my true motives. As I stood up, though, my knees popping from the effort, I caught the forlorn expression on Clare’s face. A mixture of horror and sadness, as if an emotional civil war raged within her soul: one side terrified for her furbaby, the other longing to save her mom… and acknowledging she couldn’t.
As ridiculous as it might sound, I understood exactly how she felt. Even after enduring years of derision from my mother-in-law, I didn’t want to watch her succumb to such a gruesome death. Even she didn’t deserve that.
“I’ll help Casey secure the campsite.” I smiled halfheartedly. “The sooner we can all get some rest, the better.”
Clare stared at me numbly, and Jill merely nodded, perhaps too tired and weak to say anything snarky.
As I stepped outside to rejoin George and Casey, I realized they’d shut off their own vehicle, headlights included. But even in
