Page 79 of Doomsdate

“Maisie, baby, I hear what you’re saying, but now’s not the time to explore and live. Now’s the time to survive!”

“Well, sucks to be me, then, because I’ve been surviving my whole life, and I’m tired of it. I want to live now. These last few days are all the time I have left before I have to waste the rest of my life living in an underground bunker with you, and I’m going to spend them doing whatever I want! Do you hear me? I get to choose how I live—not you!”

“Maisie.” His sad voice cracks my chest open, and regret fills all the spaces inside. “I’m so sorry that I’m all you have.”

Yeah. Me, too.

I punch the cushion of my seat, then exhale. “I’ll check in with you tonight. Seventy-three, Gramps.”

I turn the radio off before he can respond and, after a minute of deep breathing, unroll my window. “Hey, you.”

Everett looks up at me from the bench, concern painting his features. He probably heard a lot of that. He gives me a tentative smile, his eyes worried behind his glasses. A spiderweb of cracks shimmers down the right lens. “You okay?”

“Mm-hmm.” I force a bright smile onto my face in response. “You found your glasses!”

Everett

Errands shouldn’t be this fun, but tell that to my stupid, grinning face as I push this shopping cart with a whooping Maisie perched between my arms, her feet on the bottom rack and fingers gripping the handlebars. I pick up speed in the empty grocery store parking lot to make her laugh louder, to feel her strong shoulders quake against my chest. Even Chicken is having a good time, lording over the cart’s front like the furry feline figurehead at our ship’s prow. The blue skies above us in the small New Jersey town where we stopped to restore our fresh food supplies are idyllic and clear, the warm afternoon a preview of the spring that’s coming whether anyone’s around to see it or not. It’s surreal. Buttery daffodils line the parking lot’s impeccably gardened beds, and baskets of hardy vining plants hang from hooks on the quaint green streetlamps. We’re five days into this apocalypse, and except for the occasional decomposing human staring at us, you’d never know it in Sparrow Nook, New Jersey.

“Okay, okay, slow down!” Maisie manages between laughs as we near the store’s entrance, then hops down one foot at a time.

“What, you don’t enjoy my extremely inexperienced driving?” I curb the cart’s tha-rupping wheels and let go of the handlebar and the shelter I’d created around her, ceding control of the cart back to her, to reach for the Fun & Stun holstered in my belt loop. I force myself to smile against the loss of her warmth, like a spell summoned to ward off the hollow feeling blooming where she’d been seconds ago. It shouldn’t feel disappointing to let go of her.

But with my chin still tingling from the whisper of her hair, it does.

After the sun rose this morning and the zombies’ moon-eyes set, we left our demented playground make-out fort and found Maisie’s car in the attached parking garage behind Connor’s gym. The culties had raided our fresh food despite what they said, notably rejecting anything not Whole30 approved, and took most of Maisie’s armory, too.

“Those gym rats stole my mace,” she’d said as she rooted around her trunk, looking so pissed at losing that gory medieval killing stick that I thought she might break back in and kill them all a second time. Luckily, they left the rest of our gear and our growing Taser stash alone, not recognizing the genius zombie-management devices for what they were. They also didn’t find the documents, thank god. I’d hidden them in the wheel well.

Tsk-tsk, Connor, I silently gloat for the hundredth time today. I can’t help it—seeing him drooling over Maisie’s ass like it was a French patisserie on cheat day brought out some sacred ancestral impulse to make his head go boom-boom on rock, then dance around his broken body. Now Connor and his gym rats are three hours behind us, where, once night falls, they’ll happily hit all their most ambitious protein goals on the feral streets of Washington, D.Z., and we’re here, safely on our own again, a team of two plus cat.

Grocery shopping.

After Maisie’s very loud argument with Gramps this morning, it took a while for her to cool off, but now she seems lighter than she has in days. Determined to have fun, happy for the detour I’ve created, vibrant and curious and appreciative of all the little towns we’ve seen, the many fingers of the Chesapeake Bay, the thick, fluffy clouds dotting the endless blue bowl of the sky.

The automatic glass doors sigh open to Gatherers Grocery, the only chain grocery store Maisie frequents and, coincidentally, the one I always used back in Durham, too.

“They have really high standards for the produce they source, in terms of pesticides and fertilizers used,” Maisie’d explained as she pulled into this lot instead of the bigger grocery stores we passed first, then promptly parked in one of their many free electric-vehicle charging stations for customers.

And here I used them because of all the free tap kombucha they’d hand out. That stuff is like fizzy vinegar dirt, I love it.

Maisie’s Taser hums to life as we enter. “I drive, you zombie?”

I take it in my free hand and wave it and the Fun & Stun like one of those orange-vested people who signal in the airplanes. “You got it.”

Gatherers Grocery is boutique-sized as far as grocery stores go, its brightly lit aisles spacious in that way that screams this is going to be expensive. Over the speakers, the music still plays, giving the impression that the blank-eyed zombies gently swaying in place to this Prince song are enjoying it as much as I am. Maisie veers far out of the way to avoid the restrooms and the pharmacy area, where clusters of zombies still haunt where they died, shopping for probiotics and elderberry tonics and whatever else they must’ve hoped would cure GI-27. A woman in dirty pajamas and hiking boots wearing a lumpy baby sling stares at us from the bee-propolis display. The lump moves, and Chicken hisses from our cart.

“O-kay, we are getting the hell away from that.” I steer Maisie by the shoulders quickly out of their sight.

The produce area is blissfully empty, except for the tiny flies blanketing the rotting greens and soft, out-of-season fruits already going bad. We fill the cart with the hardier stuff—big butternut squashes, bagged kale and collards, beets, carrots, potatoes, apples, and a whole array of citrus.

“Nothing we didn’t eat regularly before the virus,” Maisie says as she catches me eyeing a box of protein bars.

“Still think our immunity has something to do with the food supply?” It’d seemed so clear-cut when everyone alive seems to be on some kind of restricted diet, but seeing how a zombie bite took Connor’s whole healthy cult down anyway has shaken up everything I thought I knew like a cup full of Yahtzee dice spilled across the table.

“I don’t know what to think,” Maisie replies simply as she hoists a mega-bag of cashews into her arms, “except that we’re still alive, and I’d like to keep it that way. And also, these are amazing.” She chucks at least five bags of dried mango into the cart and tucks one inside her shirt, then blushes when she sees me looking. “For the ride home.”

Home. Where will home be tonight? The word alone causes a bittersweet twang in my heart that reverberates through my whole body, no real image to accompany it. It’s some nebulous place, a hope now more than anything concrete, that there’s still somewhere out there that I could belong. Walking beside Maisie now as she inspects cartons of eggs, the one animal-protein source she occasionally trusts, feels almost…right. Protecting her, watching her back as we casually debate the merits of extra virgin olive oil versus unrefined coconut. I pick up a million cans of Chicken’s organic kitty food and even a new wearable harness in the pet aisle. She mews at it dubiously, but I can’t wait to wear her like a little kitty book bag.