“Nothing. It's just my boyfriend...ex-boyfriend got obsessed with them. Towards the end of our relationship.” It stung Jenny's heart to talk about Seth that way, but then she reminded herself of how he'd cheated on her, the first chance he got. Knowing Jenny could never cheat on him, because she would kill any other boy she touched.
A warm, moist wind blew through the trees, and a collective groan went up from the zombie workers as it passed through their rib cages and skulls.
“Do you think they're in pain?” Jenny asked.
“I don't think they feel anything.” Alexander dropped from his horse, then helped Jenny down to the ground.
Among the workers, there were three men with cloth masks over their faces and AK-47s slung over their backs. They each held a long wooden pole. Jenny watched one of them use the pole to herd a zombie woman from one plant to the next. She shuffled sideways, her hands still plucking at the empty air, until she was positioned in front of the next plant and resumed harvesting leaves again.
Alexander walked from row to row, chatting with the three living and masked overseers as he inspected the zombies. Jenny saw a few decaying children among them, tugging the lowest leaves from the plants. She shuddered.
When they reached the highest row of coca plants on the slope, Jenny saw a pair of little monkeys shrieking and chasing each other through the trees overhead.
Alexander put a finger under her chin and turned her head to look back at the zombies. “Pay attention,” he said. “Watch what happens.” His fingers remained on her face, and Jenny felt the pox rush out of her, the way it did on those rare occasions when she intentionally used it against someone.
The zombies accelerated, their hands darting from plant to basket and back again. The overseers had to hustle to keep the zombies moving along the rows, but the zombies were more responsive now—one quick tap from a pole would send a zombie a few steps sideways to work on the next plant, no more need for extensive wrangling and prodding each time.
“You've got them moving,” Alexander said. “They'll finish this patch in a day instead of a week.”
“The Jenny pox,” she said. “It's zombie fuel.”
He grinned and tousled her hair. “Exactly.” His hand moved to the back of her neck, maintaining his contact with her. Jenny felt tingly wherever he touched her.
Jenny reached across the row of plants to touch one of the zombies, who looked like a teenage boy with half his face decayed, leaving only grimy blackened skull. Her finger brushed his arm, and he immediately doubled his speed, stripping the plant in front of him. An overseer reached his pole from two rows away and tapped the boy to the next plant.
“They like me,” Jenny said.
“You're the zombie queen.”
Jenny watched the harvest quietly, feeling her connection to Alexander deepen as he drew the pox from inside her. She found herself reaching an arm across his back, feeling the muscles under his shirt. She leaned against him, her head against his chest, wanting to touch him more, suddenly frustrated by her gloves and her long sleeves. He smelled like sweat and tropical humidity and horse and cotton.
“We have to keep all this a secret,” he said.
“Yeah, I'm sure,” Jenny said. She looked out at the rows and rows of coca. Her father had grown a small patch of bad outdoor pot on some long-foreclosed farmland outside Fallen Oak, but it was nothing on this scale. “This is like the most illegal thing you can do.”
“The Mexican feds are a concern, but not our biggest one. The real danger is the other cartels.”
“Why would they care?”
“The Mexican cartels sell to the United States. They buy from cartels in Colombia, Peru, Bolivia,” Alexander said. “The growers. But Papa Calderon has invested in botany, and his people developed a good strong plant that thrives here, in the extreme south of Mexico. We're not too far from Guatemala. Scattered through these mountains, we have the largest coca crop ever grown in Mexico. We can cut out the South Americans and control our own production and distribution. And that would make everyone angry. The Calderon family would be more profitable than their competitors, and the South Americans would all come down on them for setting a dangerous precedent.”
“And you don't have any problem working for people like that?” Jenny asked. “Drug cartels? Violent gangs?”
“What is a government but a violent gang with a flag?” Alexander asked. “In fact, all of this violence is created by the human governments. They could end it all with a wave of their hands, simply make all the drugs legal. Then the trade would be peaceful, like the buying and selling of any legal product.”