The Dead Saga (Book 3): Odium III (11 page)

Nova climbed in next to me, glancing at me once with a look of appreciation before starting the truck. We pulled out of the compound and headed home, four people and one dead zombie baby, and a truckload of gear heavier. Yet the greatest weight would always be inside us.

“Ninety-six bottles of beer on the wall, ninety-six bottles of beer. Take one down, pass it around, ninety-five bottles of beer on the wall! Ninety-five bottles of beer on the wall,” Joan hollered loudly in the back of the truck, singing at the top of her voice.

If you could call it singing. It was more a deep, throaty screech that set my teeth on edge and made my stomach clench with the very urgent need to yell and scream at her to stop. She had been doing this off and on for the past couple of hours, and not for the first time that day, I was hugely grateful that she was in the back and not sitting next to me, where she would have been close enough to strangle. I didn’t want her death on my conscience—not along with everything else. Yet as she reached ninety-three bottles of beer, I wondered if my conscience would be okay with her death. Because I was getting seriously close to losing it.

We had hoped that she would get bored and fall asleep, or at least run out of beer bottles, but when she had reached zero bottles and we had breathed a deep sigh of relief—even Deacon looked grateful—she had started from the top again. This was her fifth go-round, and I was feeling fidgety with the need to yell, or stab something. Or yell
and
stab something. Hell, I wanted to yell and stab and maim something, I was feeling so irritated with her out-of-tune singing.

“I’m going to stop the truck and kill her,” Nova bit out, her nostrils flaring angrily. “I’m serious, Nina. I’m going to slit that wrinkly old throat of hers if she doesn’t stop in a minute.”

“You joined in before. She got to three bottles and you joined in! This time around is your damn fault!” I snapped back angrily.

“I thought it would help her shut the hell up if she realized that it was truly the end of the song,” she grumbled back. “I even yelled the fuckin’ end at the fuckin’ end!”

“You encouraged her. She thought we were all having fun, asshole!”

“I did no such thing.”

“Yes you did. You sang with her. Now she knows we can hear her and is doing it all the more. She thinks she’s entertaining us when really she’s signing her own death warrant!” My voice raised into an angry yell and I felt Deacon flinch next to me.

I ignored him, knowing that if I said anything at all to him about that it would be along the lines of something horrible. Between Joan’s God-awful screeching and his zombie baby’s stench and weird noises, I was officially finished with this trip. I wanted out. I needed a new truck. In fact, I was ready to line up Deacon, the zombie baby, and crazy Joan and execute every last one of them. Nice Nina had officially vanished, at least for the day.

Nova grumbled something under her breath and slammed on the brakes. The truck skidded to an abrupt stop, and she dragged the handbrake on and jumped out of the truck. I followed her out, both of us marching to the rear of the truck, where the warbling was coming from.

Nova opened the door and glared in. “SHUT UP! You shut up right now or I’ll leave you here. Do you understand you, crazy fuckin’ woman?”

I raised an eyebrow at her back. I think Nova needed to take a good long look in the mirror at who was actually the crazy one here, since she was the one screeching like a banshee.

Joan came further forward, her face leaving the shadows. She smiled down at us pleasantly. “Are we here?”

“No, we are not, and you will not be making it back to our base if you don’t shut the hell up!” Nova continued to yell, her shoulders rising and falling with each panting heavy breathe.

“I’m sorry,” Joan mumbled apologetically. “I didn’t mean to.”

Both Nova and I exhaled loudly, the anger leaving us in one great big gust. She was just a lonely, crazy old bat who needed a friend, not us yelling at her. I felt pity for her, because who knew? Maybe I’d be just like her one day soon.

“I’m glad that you’re sorry,” Nova said, and began to turn away.

“I pooped,” Joan replied with a blink.

“You what?” Nova and I replied together.

“I pooped in the corner. Are we here?” Joan smiled at us again.

Nova turned back to look at me in disbelief. “She shit in the truck.”

I had no words.

“Dude, she shit in my truck!” Nova pulled out her gun, flipping the safety off. “I’m shooting her.”

I grabbed at her arm. “Do not shoot her!”

Clearly Crazy Pants was back and Joan had checked out for the night. This wasn’t her fault—not that I wasn’t seriously pissed that she had crapped in the corner of the truck and possibly defiled everything, because I was.

“Let’s set up camp for the night. We could all do with the break.” The smell from inside the truck wafted out to me and made me retch, and Nova glared at me even more.

“Fine, I won’t kill her, but you’re cleaning the damn truck out,” Nova snapped and stomped away.

I looked back at Joan. She was like a naughty puppy, playful and mischievous and with no idea of the damage she had created or the havoc that she was wreaking around her. She smiled and blinked, and then her nose scrunched up and she hastily climbed out of the back of the truck.

“Something smells back there,” she said as she passed me.

I ground my teeth together to stop myself from yelling at her. At the moment, the old me and the new me were fighting for supremacy. It would be easy to give in to the old me, but I really didn’t want to be that asshole anymore. Besides, Crazy Pants wouldn’t give a shit what I said anyway. So instead of cursing at her and saying all the horrible things I wanted to say, I took a deep breath, climbed into the back of the truck, and began searching for her crap.

And it was, just as she had said, in the corner.

*

The baby made all sorts of noises that I couldn’t put words to. They weren’t exactly growls or hissing, or gurgling, but a combination of all of them. It didn’t seem to be rotting—not like a typical deader did—but by God, it stank. Between the demon baby and Crazy Pants, our little camp smelled bad and so did the truck, which was why we had all decided to sleep in the open. We had strung cans up around our camp to alert us of any deaders stumbling upon us, but in all honesty, the stench coming from the baby would automatically dismiss our location to deaders. They wouldn’t smell our humanness above the smell of death that clung to that thing.

Still, first thing in the morning I was making at least Joan wash up in the small creek I could see on the map. I could and would get rid of her stench, even though I couldn’t get rid of the baby’s.

Earlier we had tucked into another meal of ration packs and the rest of the deer I had killed back at the scrapyard. The meat of the deer was dry and chewy but it was better than slurping all of our food down from a packet. We needed more meat now, though—fresh meat—and Nova had promised that when daylight hit she’d do some hunting.

She was great at it. She knew how to track and skin any animal, how to get the very most from every kill so that nothing went to waste. We hadn’t starved so far on this trip, mainly thanks to her, because other than my deer kill, I couldn’t see that I had done much to help with anything. Between me catching the flu and my newfound conscience, I had been pretty useless so far. My cold had abated a little with the help of the medicine Nova had found, but it was still there nonetheless. My head and muscles ached, my eyes stung, and my sinuses felt painfully swollen. I tried to ignore it and not mention how sick I felt after Nova’s nasty comments at the compound about how weak I was, but now that we were settling in for the night and the day’s adrenalin had worn off, I had to recognize how truly awful I felt.

I was on first watch while everyone but the zombie baby slept—because of course that thing wasn’t sleeping. I stared at it for hours, its weird growls and stench getting in my head and making me feel haunted. The poor thing never stood a chance, and I think that was one of the things that I was struggling with the most. It was a monster, an abomination, but it should have been a sweet, chubby-cheeked baby. It was heartbreaking.

I sneezed again, and my brain felt like it was clanging around inside my head. I needed to get back to base so I could rest properly, and I needed to keep rehydrating if I was going to flush out this nasty flu anytime soon. Which meant I needed to pee more often because I was drinking so much. It wasn’t just exhausting, it was hugely inconvenient.

I rested my head back on the tree I was leaning against and listened carefully to the noises of the forest. It was pretty quiet, with just the wind in the trees. No owls hooted; clearly they had learned long ago that noise drew the deaders to them. Nova snored—loudly, I might add. Joan was surprisingly quiet, a welcome respite after today’s singing.
Perhaps she wore herself out with all the singing,
I thought, smirked to myself.

Deacon’s breathing was even and calm, though I knew he wasn’t truly asleep. I knew he didn’t dare sleep for fear of what Nova would do to his dead spawn. Me, he somewhat trusted, but not Nova. And I couldn’t blame him. Something had snapped inside her since we arrived at her old compound and seen the destruction there, and of course Deacon and his dead baby hadn’t helped the situation. I understood why she’d changed, how she had adapted because of her warring emotions, but I was also surprised by it—by how broken she had allowed herself to be. Maybe that made me a judgmental asshole, but I was still surprised.

I tried to let my thoughts drift to things of unimportance, but of course everything held importance these days. The simple things that we used to take for granted, the things we used to waste—all of them now meant so much to us. Every little thing from the past meant something. Just like Nova’s photograph of her family. Some things seemed useless, but they weren’t. Not really.

Things could break us and make us in the blink of an eye. I wondered if that photo had broken Nova, if she could come back from this and be like the woman I had first met. I truly hoped so, because none of this was her fault, no matter how much she blamed herself for it. Only Rachael could be accountable for her actions, and that bitch was dead now, so I considered the slate clean.

I thought of Mikey and Emily-Rose, wondering what they would be doing right then. Would Mikey be safely back from their scavenge mission yet? Would they be sleeping, curled up comfortably in their beds, the duvets wrapped tightly around their bodies to shield them from the cold? Or perhaps Mikey was on guard duty. Did he miss me? Did he miss the space I used to occupy in his bed? Because I missed him.

I finally let myself feel the things I had been denying myself. I missed his warmth, and the way that his strong arms wrapped around me would force me closer to him, and the protection that he wanted to give to me regardless of whether I needed it. I loved his smell, the muskiness and sweat that always seemed to be on him. It was both manly and just plain Mikey. But most of all I missed his kisses. The way his full lips had owned me completely, making me forget to be a bitch and just become a woman again—a woman I had forgotten all about somewhere along the line. He made me feel complete. He made me feel feminine, and he took away the loneliness that had devoured me since this nightmare began.

But I had let him go. I had let my own stubbornness get in the way of whatever it was that was developing between us. I had been scared and anxious, and had masked all of that with the pretense of protecting everyone at the base because of Michael’s threats. I had been a coward, to both my own heart and his. I could see that now, and I could finally admit my mistakes. I was an asshole.

For not the first time in twenty-four hours, I found my eyes filling up and I rubbed at them to stop the tears from falling. I wanted to believe that my tears were just because of the flu that continued to lay heavily on me and make me feel even more exhausted and therefore weepy, but I knew that was a lie. I scoffed at myself. I hated this part of the new me—this teary-eyed wreck of a woman. It was pathetic.
I
was pathetic. It’s a good thing Mikey and I had split up, because we were never going to last anyway.

My heart still panged for him, though, and the loss was acutely harder when I didn’t get to see him on a daily basis. It made me feel all the more weak and angry. Especially knowing Mikey had probably moved on to the next woman by now. Perhaps they were sharing his bed tonight, her keeping him warm and giving him the closeness he so desperately wanted—the one thing that I had found so hard. I bit down on my lip, sucking in a breath at that thought. But then I forced my chin up, refusing to be this pitiful sap that I seemed to become whenever I thought about Mikey. He made me weak. He made me believe that things would get better, that possibly I deserved better. But I didn’t, and things would always be like this.

Mikey gave me false hope, and for that I wanted to hate him just as much as I cared for him. With his false hope he had set me free; he’d brought me back out into the world, kicking and screaming and fighting. I needed him to know how much I thought of him. How grateful I was for what he gave me without even realizing it. If I ever saw him again, I hoped I’d remember these things to tell him, because he deserved to know. No matter who he might be sharing his bed with now, he needed to know that he was right. And I was wrong.

Now I just had to pray that both he and I made it back from our separate destinations to see one another again.