Zombies Vs. Unicorns

You become whatever they fear the most. Now that’s evolution.

Holly: Wait, you mean they become unicorns?

Justine: Holly, you’re delusional. So. Very. Delusional.

1 Justine Larbalestier and Scott Westerfeld are married. To each other.

Inoculata

By Scott Westerfeld

1.

“Flat tire drill!” Dr. Bill shouts through the busted front window.

Sammy’s next to me in the driver’s seat, pretending to drive. He makes a noise, “Rrrrrrr … kupuch!” and spins the wheel, bouncing around the front seat spraying spittle and explosion sounds. He winds up with his head in my lap, his eyes rolled back and tongue sticking out.

“Um, dork?” I say. “This is a flat tire. Not a car wreck.”

His answer: “I call shotgun!”

“Fine.” I shove him off me. “Then I’m doing the jump and roll.”

He scrambles into the backseat of the rusted-out Ford, pulling the shotgun from the floorboard. I unstick my sweaty T-shirt from the seat back, check my empty pistol one more time, then open the door.

“Call out the steps, Allison!” yells Dr. Bill. Back in the before, he was a medic in the U.S. Marine Corps. He thinks that lots of shouting equals lots of learning.

So I shout, “Step one: three-sixty check!”

Sammy and I make a show of looking in all directions. Kalyn and Jun are waiting in the insect-buzzing trees with their arms folded, which means we aren’t supposed to see them. Kalyn winks at me as I pretend she isn’t there.

“Step two: jump and roll!” I throw myself hard—farther than arm’s length—and roll sideways in the soft dirt with my pistol pointed back beneath the car.

For a moment I imagine cold eyes staring at me, something waiting in the darkness, hungry for an unwary ankle to grab. A tingle awakens on my skin, and my eyes start twitching. I can almost remember how it felt outside the wire. It’s like this in my running dreams, the whole world shiny like metal.

But there’s nothing underneath the car. Just dirt and fern leaves. The nearest zee is two hundred yards away on the other side of the main gate.

“Clear!” I shout, and Sammy bounces out, whirling around the old Ford, waltzing with the shotgun, also unloaded.

“Dial it back, Sammy,” Dr. Bill says, and Sammy mostly does. He’s still bouncing from foot to foot, as dialed back as he ever gets with a shotgun in his hands, even the crappy, rusted Remington we use for drills.

I stand up. “Step three: post a guard.”

“That’s me, Ally!” Sammy says, like I’ve forgotten. He climbs up onto the car roof, the tired metal sagging under his weight. He turns in place, maintaining our threesixty, but I can tell he’s cheating, keeping a close eye on Kalyn and Jun.

“Step four,” I say, slapping a mosquito on my arm. “Change the tire.”

Also known as “the pretending part.” The Ford barely made it through the gates four years ago, and it squats like a dead thing in the middle of the clearing, all four tires reduced to rubber puddles.

I can barely remember when the Ford still ran and we were still outside the wire and going places. These days the paint is peeling, the windows are broken, the upholstery is fried to crackling by the Mississippi sun.

As I holster my pistol, the world gets less shiny. It’s pathetic that the only car I’ve sat in for the last four years is this hunk of rust, except for a couple of driving lessons in the Benz with Alma. Back in the before I’d have a driver’s license by now, but inside the wire there’s nowhere to drive, and outside, the roads are falling to pieces.

But still we drill.

“Which tire is flat again?”

“Right rear,” Dr. Bill says with great assurance. Behold the power of running the drill.

The Ford’s trunk doesn’t really open anymore, so the jack’s just sitting on the ground. I kneel and set it under the rear bumper.

“For real?” I ask.

“Why not, Allison?” Dr. Bill smiles. “Nothing wrong with working up a good sweat.”

Yes, he actually said “a good sweat.” Because I wasn’t planting potatoes all day yesterday in hundred-degree heat.

Oh, wait. I was.

But I start pumping, or jacking, or whatever it is you do with jacks. The car lifts in slow increments, the ancient tires drooping from their rims like rolled down socks.

This is the boring part—when nothing happens. It’s supposed to teach you that mostly nothing happens, even outside the wire. There are plenty of spots in the world where you can change a tire without any of the six billion shambling along. So sometimes Dr. Bill just leaves everyone waiting in the wings, watching while you fix a flat or clean your gun or count your precious bullets… .

And the zees don’t come. Just mosquitoes.

But you can’t let your guard down. That way lies death, zombification, and lost dessert points.

“Hey, Ally!” shouts Sammy. “Um, I mean—zee alert!”

I stand up and draw my pistol, smiling. Despite the very important lesson they teach, those nothing-happens drills are really annoying.

Kalyn and Jun have unfolded their arms. They’re coming toward me, feet shuffling through the broken safety glass and ferns. Jun looks like he’s about to bust out laughing, but Kalyn’s zee shamble is eerily perfect. Her long black skirt drags in the dirt, the hint of a zee limp rippling down its length.

She hangs out by the wire in her free time, watching the six billion. I hang out there too, watching her.

But right now I’m all business. “Okay. Get a count!”

Sammy keeps his shotgun trained on the zees while I take a quick circuit of the car. There’s only four of us kids, but Dr. Bill can be tricky. Sometimes he makes the grown-ups join in, just to keep things interesting.

But there’s nobody else in sight.

“I got two.”

“Me too,” Sammy says. “I mean, also.”

“Okay, so no guns.” When Sammy makes a whining noise, I holster my pistol and add, “Silence is golden, and bullets are precious.”

This show of restraint will surely win Dr. Bill’s favor.

I pull the tire iron from the base of the jack, spinning it in my hands, and take a step toward Jun. I’m still on my backswing when he falls to the ground, like a damsel fainting. He used to be a pretty good zee, for a ten-year-old. But he’s been a wimp since last summer, when I accidentally whacked him with a shovel in a camping drill.

I don’t know what his problem is. He was barely bruised, and I was the one who lost five dessert points.

“One down!” Sammy calls, bouncing on the car roof.

I wait for Kalyn to come to me, enjoying her shamble. She’s been wearing makeup lately, going for a zee look. Not enough to freak the grown-ups out, just little smudges of ash beneath her eyes. It makes her look wiser, somehow, like she knows what a joke this all is—the drills, Dr. Bill, our whole broken little tribe.

I don’t rush. For the next few seconds I don’t have to hide that I’m looking at Kalyn. I can gaze straight into her dark brown eyes, and the world gets shiny again.

She gazes back at me with a cool zee stare, but there’s a smile playing on her lips. I want to ask her what she’s thinking, even if we’re in front of everyone. I want to stand here and let her bite me.

But Dr. Bill is watching, and a few shambled steps later she must die.

I heft the tire iron, getting a solid grip with both hands, sharp end pointed at her.

With a giant step I thrust it forward like a spear. The point stops two inches from her left eyeball, but Kalyn doesn’t blink. She gives me a little drama as she drops, sputtering like a zee with a tire iron jammed through its brain.

So there we are: Kalyn lying in a crumpled dead-looking heap, Jun with his hands behind his head, like it’s movie night and I’m the star.

I pretend to wipe the tire iron off. “How’s my back?”

“Two down!” Sammy yells, bouncing up and down on the car roof. “Stains for brains!”

I glance at Dr. Bill, whose expression is all about Sammy’s dessert points draining away.

“Yeah, but how’s my back!”

“Oh, right.” Sammy spins around, still bouncing as he checks our three-sixty. And suddenly the rusty metal under his feet is bouncing with him. His zee-killing dance has stumbled on the Ford’s natural frequency …

The next few seconds unroll in slow motion. The jack folds, popping like a match snapped between two fingers. The car’s rear end thumps down in the dirt, and Sammy’s arms are wheeling. The dropped shotgun smacks barrel-first off the hood, the metal boom so loud I flinch, thinking for a second the gun’s gone off.

Sammy spins in place once, then tumbles off the far side… .

The thud of him landing sounds like a punch in the stomach. Everyone runs over, Kalyn and Jun reanimating to scramble across the dirt behind me.

Sammy’s on the ground, his eyes shut, his neck at a weird angle.

Kalyn bends over him—much too close. “Are you okay?”

He doesn’t say anything. He looks twisted and broken and very wrong.

Dr. Bill pulls Kalyn away, practically throwing her across the dirt. I taste panic and vomit in the back of my throat, but my hands do the right thing and draw my pistol.

And I’m thinking, Fuck, fuck, fuck—it isn’t even loaded.

But I aim at his head anyway.

Sammy opens his eyes and makes a gurgling noise.

“Rrrrrrr … kupuch!” he says, then busts up laughing.

We’re all staring down at him, Dr. Bill and me with pistols drawn, and Sammy’s laughing like an idiot. Like a moron, like a pathetic fourteen-year-old waste of gravity.

But not like a zee.

“Got you, dorks,” he finally says.

Dr. Bill holsters his gun. “Yeah, you got us. And you, my friend, have lost all your dessert points!”

The words come out quietly, but are as serious as teeth marks. This shuts Sammy up for a moment, but then he’s laughing again.

Why shouldn’t he? Sammy hasn’t been outside the wire since he was ten. He’s never pointed a gun at a real zee. He’s never seen anyone turn in front of his eyes.

So this clearing in the swamp, this rusted-out Ford, these drills—what are they supposed to mean to him? What are they supposed to mean to any of us?

It’s not worth pretending, even for the promise of canned chocolate pudding or pears in syrup. Maybe Sammy has finally realized what Jun and Kalyn and I have known for ages, except he’s brave enough to say it out loud.

Or maybe he’s just totally high.

2.

The thing is, we live on a pot farm.

Not that we’re drug addicts or anything; we plowed under most of the original crop when we got here. We weren’t looking for pot, just safety and sustenance.

The safety part was easy. We’d traveled past plenty of places with thick zeeproof walls: prisons, army bases, airports, gated communities. But those all had people in them in the before, so they were swarming with zees. On top of that we needed to plant our own crops. Aircraft runways and prison yards make for pretty crappy farmland, and we had only one season’s worth of precious cans to learn how to grow food.

So that was our problem: most high-security establishments don’t have farms in them, and most farms don’t have big-ass fences around them.

That’s when the beautiful Alma Nazr, our most awesome zee slayer and my previous crush, had her brainstorm. Back in the before, she was a federal marshal, wasting bad guys instead of dead guys. She’d been assigned once to a secret farm in Mississippi where the government grew pot for research purposes. In the last few years of the before, the states were legalizing medical marijuana. So the feds were making the farm bigger and the fences around it taller, just in case one day they wanted to sell the stuff.

So the wise grown-ups of our tribe led us southward, saying unto themselves, “Primo farmland, primo barbed wire, and maybe even some primo weed!”

Dr. Bill claims that last part didn’t come into it, of course. It was all about safety and sustenance. But he also says that the wire will last forever, that chocolate can grow in Mississippi, and that one day we’ll learn to inoculate for zee bites, or maybe even cure the six billion.

Dr. Bill is generally full of shit. Just like the rest of them.

3.

That night I’m spying on Kalyn again.

She always goes to the same place along the wire, where two fences meet at an acute angle, a pie slice jutting out into the swampland around the farm. Alma says it’s because the wire follows the old property lines exactly. It’s weird how the whole planet was divided up into little pieces back in the before, every square inch owned by one of the six billion.

These days there’s just two kinds of real estate: ours and theirs, human and zee.

Kalyn’s standing almost where the fences meet, so close to the wire that Dr. Bill would crap his pants if he could see her. He makes us use the words “arm’s length”

in practice sentences a lot, and yells if we don’t put the apostrophe in, like bad punctuation will get us bitten.

Kalyn is definitely within arm’s length of the wire, maybe elbow’s length. But the chain-link is woven pretty tight, so it’s only fingers sticking through, along with a few tongues and broken jaws and loose bones. She’s not even wearing a pistol.

Some of the grown-ups stood like that in early days—right by the wire or close to a limbless zee—to “desensitize” themselves. But then one day a very pregnant Mrs. Zimmer reached out by accident (or committed suicide by zee), and the grown-ups made the arm’s length rule.