“Oh, Seth!” Allegra said. “You could play golf with my dad at the country club. He’d like that. You’re a good golfer, right?”
“No,” Seth said. “Not even on the Wii.”
“You’ll learn.” She nibbled at his chin. “Sethy-seth. Sethykins.”
“Okay,” Seth said. “I give up. Let’s go back to the room and make out.”
“Really?” she chirped. “Yeah, let’s go!” And then ran back to the room, dropping the rope in the process.
Seth flung the rope out over the railing, out of her reach, and ran down the stairs.
“I’m waiting!” she cooed behind him. Seth put on speed, paused at the bottom of the steps to pull his pants all the way on, and then ran out the front door of the hotel.
He rushed outside and found himself in the middle of a huge riot. People were punching and kicking each other all over the street, parked cars were overturned, shrubbery was on fire.
He struggled to press through the dense crowd, toward Meeting Street, where Jenny must have parked. It was the only direction he knew to go.
Random strangers punched at his face, and one of the old ladies who’d been protesting the music festival bit Seth’s hand.
“What the hell?” Seth backed away from her. The crowd surged like a tidal wave and pushed him back in the opposite direction, past the hotel, and crushed against the side of an empty taxicab. Beside him, a girl of twelve or thirteen got her face slammed against the hood of the taxi’s window by an angry fat man. She came up screaming, with a bloody nose.
“Hey, don’t do that!” Seth shouted at the guy assaulting the girl. Seth put a hand on the screaming girl’s head and quickly healed her face.
The big guy came after Seth, but instead of fighting back, Seth took a chance, seized his arm and pushed his healing power into the guy.
The big guy paused with his fist in midair, looking confused. “Hey, what’s going on?”
“Fuck if I know,” Seth said, and he pushed past him.
Seth pressed forward through the crowd, but every few feet saw somebody with a broken finger or deep cuts across their face, and he had to reach out and touch them briefly to give them a little healing help—without them noticing, hopefully.
He slowly advanced through the dense, terrified, angry mob. Seth began to fear he might never find Jenny again.
The crowd crushed in around Jenny, and they kept slapping at her head, so she knew she was infecting some people. She lay with her eyes closed and waited to die.
She couldn’t understand why everyone had turned on her, but it seemed natural that they would. She was a killer. She didn’t belong among good people.
Then the hands jabbing at her turned icy and cold. And these freezing hands weren’t punching and slapping, either, but just brushing across her face. Fingers that felt like popsicles jabbed under the wrist of her sleeve and the collar of her shirt, as if specifically seeking out her flesh.
Jenny opened her eyes and found herself looking up at woman in a pantsuit with a partially crushed head. Jenny could actually see fragments of the woman’s skull and brain. The young man next to her had a huge red stain on the front of his shirt, and a bullethole.
She was surrounded by cold, gray-skinned people who all looked very dead, and very intent on getting under her clothes and at her flesh.
Jenny screamed.
All of the dead-looking people turned their backs on her, forming a jumbled ring that kept out the attacking mob, though some people could still reach in to give Jenny a poke or a slap.
Each of the walking corpses—Jenny didn’t know how else to think of them, without using the word “zombies,” which seemed too freaky to contemplate—each one of them dragged what looked like a full-size black body bag in one hand, as if they’d all just unzipped and marched out of a morgue somewhere, but held on to their bags just in case. It was surreal.
A young man who looked a couple years older than Jenny passed through the wall of zombies, who shuffled back and forth to let him pass. He had shaggy brown hair and dark eyes that seemed to glow. A smile twitched his lips.
“Poor girl,” he said. “Look what they’ve done to you.” He dropped to a knee beside her, and reached a hand toward her face.
“Don’t touch me,” Jenny whispered. “I’m poisonous.”
“Not to me.” He lay his fingers on her bruised, bleeding cheek.
All around them, the slouching zombies straightened up. Each one reached inside its body bag and withdrew a long, slender object. Some of them had wooden mop or broom handles, some had strips of metal, one or two of which had lamps attached at the end, as if they’d been ripped from some operating room ceiling. Some simply had two by four boards.