Proof: A Short Tale of the Undead Read online

funny.

  “You’re hunters,” he gushed. “Real hunters. Holy shit, you have no idea... I’ve been working on this stuff, see? I’ve been looking for someone like you.”

  He told us how They were getting sloppy, leaving traces that a savvy observer could pick up in the news. Bill didn’t count the FBI among the savvy observers. He adjusted his chest plate and shoved the last half taco into his mouth, getting cheese and taco shell bits on the seat of my Suburban. I let it slide because the kid was savvy, and he had a sword, which meant he knew what he was doing, even if he knew nothing about swordplay.

  He wasn’t much help in a fight, but he knew his way around computers, and he kept us in the know. We stopped at every other library we passed to give him a chance to check the web for clues, for talk of us and talk of Them. He was good at picking up on patterns, spotting correlations that other people tended to miss. He could look at the numbers and tell the difference between Them and cartel activity, and he could tell where Connor and I had made an impression, enough impression to keep away.

  We lost him in Nashville about a month later. He was the first to go, and it wasn’t even Their fault. Bill charged into a convenience store to take down a gunman, a very human gunman, and the gunman gunned him down. Paintball armor doesn’t do much to stop bullets. There were already police sirens in the distance, so Connor and I loaded into the car and sped away before we could be seriously inconvenienced. We slowed down around Oklahoma City, and Connor made a quick run into a Wal-Mart for Corn Nuts and storm candles. We had a little service on the side of the road, and then we ran again.

  Jody came to us somewhere in Washington, middle of nowhere. We didn’t usually pick up hitchhikers, but this hiker was running from something fast and toothy, and by the time we had run over it with the Suburban, cut it in half and set it on fire, Jody was very interested in coming with. That was a long, strange conversation, but she asked intelligent questions and expressed a preference for a shotgun and a machete.

  “Both at once, if possible,” she said, miming shooting one-handed and then bringing her left hand down in a sweeping motion over her head.

  “I don’t think that would work,” I said. “The recoil. Plus, you’d have to have a killer left arm to do any damage with a machete left-handed.”

  We gave it a go, though, the next chance we got, fully expecting to lose Jody and her questionably ambidextrous fighting skills. We drove straight through the drive-in’s huge screen, adding one more crack to the collection in the windshield, and we swooped out of the car to join the chaos at the concession stand. There were already two moviegoers on the ground, not moving. I made a mental note to burn them if we got the chance. Connor took left and Jody circled in from the right with her shotgun and machete, looking more excited than any sane person had a right to.

  One came at her at a dead sprint and she blew a hole in its gut, stepped into its path, and brought that machete down on its shoulder, slicing clean from neck to liver. It crumbled into ash, and Jodi let out a fiendishly gleeful rebel yell and flung herself into the heart of the fray, surrounding herself with steel and explosions and ash that piled up like snow.

  I holstered my pistol and pulled my bowie knife out of something’s dead chest, and I turned around when I heard a low whistle. Connor was watching her with considerably more than professional admiration. I have to admit, she was a pretty damn fine sight.

  She even emptied her bank account for us, something on the lines of twenty thousand dollars. Not shabby, and it was a long time before we were reduced to siphoning gas again. Of course, I did hear her mother screaming about crazy hippies, that one time Jody called home. It sounded as though there had been past problems with strange strangers whisking her daughter away.

  And sure enough, we hit Tucson, and Jody met some charismatic pastor of some kind. She disappeared into a sweat lodge, and we never saw her again. She didn’t take our shotgun or our machete, and she didn’t seem to have any interest in taking her money back, so we let her go.

  Mort was doing pretty well on his own. We found him standing in the middle of a dozen or so flaming corpses, laughing like an idiot, and I almost put him out of his misery, but then one of Them got up and charged him, still on fire, and he dealt that thing a flying kick to the head just like Bruce Lee. It was gorgeous. Then he cussed Them out in English and German, picked up his homemade flamethrower, and sauntered over to ask whether we needed any help. Connor applauded.

  Zee was my favorite. I never did find out what her real name was, but she was lean and sleek and dark as a panther, with these huge ‘80s glasses she used to put on whenever she thought people weren’t taking her seriously enough. She was loud, too. We heard her screaming from four or five blocks away, and we just knew that we would get there too late, no matter how fast we ran. But there was only one of Them, and by the time we got to her little shop, she had broken its nose with her forehead and was in the process of stabbing it repeatedly, a No. 2 pencil in each hand. I had never seen one of Them trying to escape before, but Zee apparently scared the crap out of it. That nerd girl kicked ass.

  Mort was in love with her the moment he laid eyes on her, but she thought he was a creeper. To be fair, he really was a creeper of the first order. He made her a necklace out of Their teeth. In the end, we had to choose between Zee and Mort, so we dropped him off in Philly, and Zee got to ride shotgun.

  She lasted more than a year, but we lost her when we came up against four of Them, all under three feet tall. She just couldn’t make herself chop Their little heads off, and They chewed her up and spit her out. We picked up some more storm candles and set what was left of her on fire before we moved on.

  When we pulled off the road for the night, Connor cried and confided in me that he was an idiot. He spent his life looking for Proof because life was boring, and he thought it would be fun. I didn’t cry. I sharpened sticks and reminded him that we had a duty, now, whether we liked it or not. We would never be able to live with ourselves if we tried to go home and settle down and forget the whole thing. Who else was going to stand between Them and everything else?

  We picked up more and lost them all.

  Elle was with us for a while, but she cracked up when They got her kids. We tied her up to keep her from hurting herself and left her on the doorstep of the closest hospital.

  Nathaniel got himself hit by a car. None of Them were even around. It was senseless, and it did no one any good. Sometimes people just die for no reason.

  Clay just got tired of it and went home. He put on clean jeans, bought a bus ticket, and left. We never heard whether he made it or not.

  Don gave up and sat down in the middle of the street in the middle of El Paso in the middle of the summer, and we left him there. He came back about a week later with altered intentions, and I kept shooting until I had destroyed the heart and he crumbled.

  They came and went, and it always ended up being just me and Connor, living out of the back of my Suburban, looking for monsters to kill.

  It’s amazing how much you can grow to hate someone, when you’re stuck in close quarters with them for years. I trusted Connor with my life, of course. I knew he would always have my back. He would always be there to save my skin, and I would always be there to save his. That doesn’t mean I didn’t think about turning around and walking away, every now and then. Not seriously. Not in combat situations. Just, sometimes we would be in the middle of nowhere, speeding down the road three hours from the nearest civilization, and I would imagine what it would be like if I hopped back in the car and left him. I would never have actually done it. Neither of us would have lasted long, separated. It’s just that I was so sick of that goddamn Corn Nuts smell and the way he hummed Pop Goes the Weasel when he was zoned out, and how he would periodically tell me how happy he was that we were best buddies, because he would have been dead long ago if we weren’t friends. As though he ever gave me a choice. As though I could have decided to stay home and be normal, after the
things he forced me to see.

  Once – just once – I broke down and screamed at him. I told him that he was right about being an idiot. I told him he was the stupidest person I had ever met and that I hated his guts and that I would have dropped him in an instant if I thought I could get away with it. I told him that everyone we had lost was his fault. Bill was his fault, and Zee was his fault, and Elle and Nathaniel and Don. I told him that he killed people from the inside out by making them feel like they had to be heroes.

  Connor sat quietly and listened, nodding occasionally as though I was explaining my position rationally.

  “It’s okay,” he told me. Then he pistol-whipped me, and when I came around, we were a hundred miles away, and my head hurt too much for me to be pissed, anymore. We split a six-pack of something cheap and disgusting, fortunately avoiding the notice of any cops, and by the time we both had to pull over and pee, the back of my head had swollen up, and the screaming seemed very far away. He turned on the radio and sang loudly, and we stopped for pizza in the first small town we hit. We never talked about that night again, and I rarely thought about it, though sometimes I remembered and regretted it.

  There wasn’t time for regrets,