Zombies Vs. Unicorns

Tahmina searched Steve’s face and tried to determine whether this was payback or something more. Finally she said, “All right. We’ll go talk to him after we check the perimeter.”

“You should lock him up,” Steve said.

“We’re all locked up,” she mumbled, and tossed the notepad aside.

Tahmina and Jeff followed Diné Road to the cutoff at Bald Eagle, a street of pickups and muscle cars and small, worn 1970s ranch-style houses. There used to be block parties here. Javier’s dad played in Los Muchachos, a popular Tejano band, and the street would thrum with the bright, happy sound of horns and guitar.

After his mom had died, Javier’s family had tried to outrun the infection. His dad and two sisters had set out for Tucson and the home of some cousins, while Javier had stayed behind to get their call if they made it. The call never came.

“I’ll poke around in the garage,” Jeff said, and walked around the side of the house.

The doorbell was broken, so Tahmina knocked. A few minutes later Javier opened the door. His hair was slicked back into a ponytail. He wore cutoffs and had a towel draped across his bare shoulders. “Hey. Sorry. Just got out of the shower. What’s up?”

“Can I come in?” Tahmina asked, even though they both knew it wasn’t really a request.

Javier let her pass. He smelled of soap and spicy men’s deodorant. Freshman year Tahmina had had a thing for Javier, but he’d gone out with Marcy Foster instead. Five weeks into the infection, Marcy’s mom started feeling sick. That night she shot all three kids in their beds and then turned the gun on herself.

“So, what’s up?” Javier asked, crossing his arms. The house glowed with candlelight. A tablecloth barely concealed three cardboard boxes stacked by a stereo cabinet in the corner.

“What’s in the boxes?” Tahmina asked.

Javier held his ground. “Just some old shit. Been doing some housecleaning.”

He smiled. He’d always had great teeth. For a second Tahmina imagined herself in an ice blue gown, slow-dancing with Javier under the chandeliers of the Sheraton while a DJ spun songs into the early morning hours.

She cleared her throat, nodded. “Can you open one, please?”

Javier laughed and stroked her arm. “Come on, Mina. Give me a break.”

Tahmina’s eyes burned. “Excuse me,” she said, and ripped open the top one.

Inside were about two dozen bottle rockets. “What’re you planning to do with these?”

Javier shoved his hands into his back pockets and rocked back on his heels. “I told you—housecleaning. Those are left over from last Fourth of July. Me and my uncles used to sell ’em by the side of the road out on I-10.”

“You know you can’t have these, Javier. Too dangerous.”

“Come on, man. They’re just firecrackers. You remember? Firecrackers?

Summer? Good times?”

“Firecrackers attract attention. We don’t want to attract attention. And if there’s an accidental fire, we’re screwed.”

Javier’s face fell. “Yeah, I know,” he said softly. “I just … miss that shit. You know?”

They stood uncomfortably for a minute. Tahmina nodded at the Western suit hanging on the back of the door. “Yours?”

“It was my dad’s. He used to wear it with his band. Prom’s tonight.”

“So they tell me.”

“Not going?” He slipped an arm around her waist and tried to pull her into a twirl.

She pushed him away. “I’m on duty.”

“Any undead tonight?”

“One. Connor Jakes.”

He whistled, low. “Sucks.”

“Yeah.”

“Anybody tell Robin?”

“She knows.”

He winced. “Damn. And on prom, too. Still. That’s the only one in two days. Last week we only had, what, three? Maybe it’s stopping.”

“Maybe.” Tahmina smoothed the dry-cleaning bag over the suit. “Did you really eat an armadillo?”

“What? Oh, wait. Now I get it.” The candle flickered with Javier’s laugh. “Should have known douche of the year would call it in.”

Tahmina was smiling in spite of herself. Steve Konig was, most definitely, a douche. It was a constant, and therefore a comfort. “Whatever. Do me a favor, okay? Try not to aggravate him?”

Javier spread his arms wide in affronted innocence. “Me?”

“Yeah. You.”

He put his hands to his mouth and shouted in the direction of Steve’s house, “Douche! You are the Douche-Man!”

Tahmina laughed out loud, and Javier joined her.

“You always did have the best laugh, girl.” Javier slipped an arm around Tahmina’s waist and drew her close, and for a second all she could smell was Javier and not the smoke from the constant fire for the dead. He sang one of his dad’s songs, exaggerating the sexy parts to make her laugh, but then he sang it for real, soft and low in Spanish. He swayed his hips slowly from side to side, pulling her around gently in a slow dance. His mouth was warm and tasted slightly of peppermint.

“You sure you don’t want to be my date tonight?” he whispered.

Tahmina thought about her mother’s closet, the beautiful beaded gown hanging there. She wondered if she would ever see her mother again. “Sorry,” she said, breaking away. “I’m on duty.”

“Officer Hassani, keeping the world safe from the undead.”

“Something like that. I’ll be taking these.” Tahmina confiscated the boxes of firecrackers.

“Harsh, Hassani.”

“Just doing my job, Ramirez,” she said, heading for the door. “Have fun at the prom.”

Javier laughed bitterly. “Yeah. Fuck you, too.”

Around midnight they checked the east side of town to make sure the fences hadn’t sustained any damage. Tahmina slipped the night-vision goggles over her eyes, and the desert came into view in black and green.

“Anything?” Jeff asked after a few minutes.

“No. It’s pretty quiet tonight.”

“Nice of them to let us have prom without too much hassle. It’s kind of funny. If they were here, there’d be chaperones checking for booze and breaking up the booty dancing.”

“Yeah. Silver linings and all that.”

“See? Now, that was some good cop talk right there. We have to remember that when we get our show, dude.”

“Noted.”

Tahmina took one last long look east in the direction of the Tower of Silence, following the trail that had been worn by the Hummer.

“Everything okay?” Jeff asked.

She watched the landscape for another minute, debating whether or not to tell him what she knew. He was her partner. Partners were not supposed to keep secrets.

“Tahmina? What’s up?”

“Nothing,” she said, tearing off the goggles. She hoped Jeff couldn’t hear the worry in her voice. The breeze brought a fresh whiff of smoke till it was all she could smell. “I need some coffee.”

The one diner that stayed open this late was the Denny’s over by the high school. Roxie Swann’s parents had owned it, and she kept it going. At the first sign of infection—a cluster of sores down her neck and a fever accompanied by the shakes—Roxie’s mom had walked into the restaurant’s giant freezer and asked Roxie to lock the door, hoping the cold would either kill or cure her. It did neither.

When Roxie opened the door three days later, her mom lunged, and Roxie emptied her gun as she had been told. But Roxie swore that just before her mother attacked, she paused as if she’d recognized her. As if she’d been trying to stop.

“Crazy night for you guys,” Roxie said with a grin. She poured them weak coffee and cut two slivers of pie. The slices had gotten smaller. They were running out of flour. They were low on everything—medicine, gasoline, food. They still had water, which they boiled first just in case. But there was no telling how long that would last.

They hadn’t received a radio signal in ages. No planes flew overhead. There were no traffic noises. That’s why they’d started sending volunteers outside, two a month in the past three months, south toward Tucson, east to New Mexico, west to California, north to Flagstaff. No one had come back until Connor Jakes tonight.

A group of prom goers sat in the corner booth, sharing some chips and salsa and arguing over which songs they would request once they made it to the Pima Panthers stadium. Somebody started singing “Rehab,” and everybody joined in on the “No, no, no.”

“Give it a rest,” Tahmina muttered, playing with the pink plastic carnation stuck into a Coke bottle beside the empty napkin dispenser.

“Okay. Seriously. What’s up with you? You’re in, like, a fun-sucking mood tonight.” Jeff took a bite of her untouched pie. “Did you want to go to prom? Is that it? ’Cause I’ll totally take you, if you want. You can be my hag.”

Tahmina rubbed at her eyes, but it was no use. They would just keep stinging.

“Just thinking about something my mom said once about how she’d never leave me. I don’t know. I was just wondering, what if there’s some part of the human heart that can’t be corrupted? There might be a cure in that.”

Jeff snorted. “Reality check: I saw parents rip their kids the fuck apart and eat their fucking insides before we pushed them out. Parental love was no match for the power of that infection. Those things roaming the desert only see us as prey.”

“What if you’re wrong?”

“I’m not.”

“But what if that part of them is still alive down deep and it can still be reached?

My mom used to say that nothing, not my worst behavior, not even death, could stop a parent’s love—”

Jeff brought his fist down on the table, rattling the grungy silverware. “Stop it, okay? Just stop.” The diner got quiet, and Jeff took a shaky breath, waited for the prom kids to go back to singing and laughing. Finally he said, “Look. When I was little and we’d go to the store, my mom would tell me that if we got separated, just wait for her. That she’d always come back for me. Always. Well, guess what? She did—and it wasn’t because she loved me. It was because she’d become some fucking animal who would have eaten my brain if I hadn’t wasted her. There was nothing human left. I had to kill her before she killed me. So, you know, whatever concept you have of an unconditional love or God or law or humanity or meaning, you can fucking forget it.” Jeff’s eyes were red, and Tahmina knew it wasn’t the soot or the desert dust. “You know what? I don’t want to talk about this shit anymore. This is too much reality for our reality show. I gotta take a leak,” he said, and walked away.

Tahmina stared at her reflection on the black surface of her coffee. It was her mother who had taught her to love coffee. In the mornings she would drink hers dark and strong from delicate cups that she had managed to smuggle out of the old country, escaping through a secret tunnel that stretched for miles under the city.

“Hmmm, I see your future,” her mother would say playfully as she examined the coffee’s remains like an ancient Persian fortune-teller.

“What is it?” Tahmina would ask, full of belief.

Her mother would tip the coffee-stained cup toward her. “Soon, very soon, you will be washing dishes.”

Tahmina’s mother used to teach at the university three days a week, commuting an hour each way. When the roads had become more dangerous, Tahmina had begged her mother to stay home. But her mother had said that it was important to keep the centers of learning open. To close the schools was to admit to hopelessness. She’d seen that happen in her homeland, and she would not see it happen here in the country of her choosing.

“But what if something happens to you?” Tahmina had asked tearfully as her mother had backed the car out of the driveway.

“I will never leave you,” she’d promised, and Tahmina had watched her car growing smaller as she’d driven away. That night, her mother did not return. There were reports that the campus had been overrun with the undead. Infection was everywhere. Panicked, Tahmina had called her mother’s phone, and it had gone to voice mail. She’d called through the night and the next day, but her mother never picked up.

“Accept the truth,” her father had said, and he’d held her while she’d screamed and cried. But Tahmina couldn’t accept it. If she had seen her mother die, that would have been one thing. What bothered Tahmina was the not knowing. Was her mother out there still, uninfected but maybe hurt or holed up in a safe house, unable to get home? At times these thoughts came down like a sudden hard rain, flooding her with such anxiety that she had to go to the firing range and discharge until her handgun spun with clicks. Some nights she still rang her mother’s phone just to hear her voice.

Jeff plopped down in the booth again, an apologetic smile in place. “Sorry that took so long. But you know what they say—the longer it is, the longer it takes.” He sipped his coffee. “You okay?”

“Yeah. Sure.”

“Sure sure?”

“Sure sure.” Tahmina worked up a fake smile. “Hey, how about that butt-ugly dress Tansey had on?”

“O-M-G,” Jeff said, and laughed. “Did you see that shit? Like the unholy union of Hot Topic and mother-of-the-bride.”

Tahmina had thought the dress was pretty, but she knew Jeff would go off on it.

“Too bad the infection couldn’t have done something useful like wiping out her craptastic taste,” Jeff said.

>

Tahmina searched Steve’s face and tried to determine whether this was payback or something more. Finally she said, “All right. We’ll go talk to him after we check the perimeter.”

“You should lock him up,” Steve said.

“We’re all locked up,” she mumbled, and tossed the notepad aside.

Tahmina and Jeff followed Diné Road to the cutoff at Bald Eagle, a street of pickups and muscle cars and small, worn 1970s ranch-style houses. There used to be block parties here. Javier’s dad played in Los Muchachos, a popular Tejano band, and the street would thrum with the bright, happy sound of horns and guitar.

After his mom had died, Javier’s family had tried to outrun the infection. His dad and two sisters had set out for Tucson and the home of some cousins, while Javier had stayed behind to get their call if they made it. The call never came.

“I’ll poke around in the garage,” Jeff said, and walked around the side of the house.

The doorbell was broken, so Tahmina knocked. A few minutes later Javier opened the door. His hair was slicked back into a ponytail. He wore cutoffs and had a towel draped across his bare shoulders. “Hey. Sorry. Just got out of the shower. What’s up?”

“Can I come in?” Tahmina asked, even though they both knew it wasn’t really a request.

Javier let her pass. He smelled of soap and spicy men’s deodorant. Freshman year Tahmina had had a thing for Javier, but he’d gone out with Marcy Foster instead. Five weeks into the infection, Marcy’s mom started feeling sick. That night she shot all three kids in their beds and then turned the gun on herself.

“So, what’s up?” Javier asked, crossing his arms. The house glowed with candlelight. A tablecloth barely concealed three cardboard boxes stacked by a stereo cabinet in the corner.

“What’s in the boxes?” Tahmina asked.

Javier held his ground. “Just some old shit. Been doing some housecleaning.”

He smiled. He’d always had great teeth. For a second Tahmina imagined herself in an ice blue gown, slow-dancing with Javier under the chandeliers of the Sheraton while a DJ spun songs into the early morning hours.

She cleared her throat, nodded. “Can you open one, please?”

Javier laughed and stroked her arm. “Come on, Mina. Give me a break.”

Tahmina’s eyes burned. “Excuse me,” she said, and ripped open the top one.

Inside were about two dozen bottle rockets. “What’re you planning to do with these?”

Javier shoved his hands into his back pockets and rocked back on his heels. “I told you—housecleaning. Those are left over from last Fourth of July. Me and my uncles used to sell ’em by the side of the road out on I-10.”

“You know you can’t have these, Javier. Too dangerous.”

“Come on, man. They’re just firecrackers. You remember? Firecrackers?

Summer? Good times?”

“Firecrackers attract attention. We don’t want to attract attention. And if there’s an accidental fire, we’re screwed.”

Javier’s face fell. “Yeah, I know,” he said softly. “I just … miss that shit. You know?”

They stood uncomfortably for a minute. Tahmina nodded at the Western suit hanging on the back of the door. “Yours?”

“It was my dad’s. He used to wear it with his band. Prom’s tonight.”

“So they tell me.”

“Not going?” He slipped an arm around her waist and tried to pull her into a twirl.

She pushed him away. “I’m on duty.”

“Any undead tonight?”

“One. Connor Jakes.”

He whistled, low. “Sucks.”

“Yeah.”

“Anybody tell Robin?”

“She knows.”

He winced. “Damn. And on prom, too. Still. That’s the only one in two days. Last week we only had, what, three? Maybe it’s stopping.”

“Maybe.” Tahmina smoothed the dry-cleaning bag over the suit. “Did you really eat an armadillo?”

“What? Oh, wait. Now I get it.” The candle flickered with Javier’s laugh. “Should have known douche of the year would call it in.”

Tahmina was smiling in spite of herself. Steve Konig was, most definitely, a douche. It was a constant, and therefore a comfort. “Whatever. Do me a favor, okay? Try not to aggravate him?”

Javier spread his arms wide in affronted innocence. “Me?”

“Yeah. You.”

He put his hands to his mouth and shouted in the direction of Steve’s house, “Douche! You are the Douche-Man!”

Tahmina laughed out loud, and Javier joined her.

“You always did have the best laugh, girl.” Javier slipped an arm around Tahmina’s waist and drew her close, and for a second all she could smell was Javier and not the smoke from the constant fire for the dead. He sang one of his dad’s songs, exaggerating the sexy parts to make her laugh, but then he sang it for real, soft and low in Spanish. He swayed his hips slowly from side to side, pulling her around gently in a slow dance. His mouth was warm and tasted slightly of peppermint.

“You sure you don’t want to be my date tonight?” he whispered.

Tahmina thought about her mother’s closet, the beautiful beaded gown hanging there. She wondered if she would ever see her mother again. “Sorry,” she said, breaking away. “I’m on duty.”

“Officer Hassani, keeping the world safe from the undead.”

“Something like that. I’ll be taking these.” Tahmina confiscated the boxes of firecrackers.

“Harsh, Hassani.”

“Just doing my job, Ramirez,” she said, heading for the door. “Have fun at the prom.”

Javier laughed bitterly. “Yeah. Fuck you, too.”

Around midnight they checked the east side of town to make sure the fences hadn’t sustained any damage. Tahmina slipped the night-vision goggles over her eyes, and the desert came into view in black and green.

“Anything?” Jeff asked after a few minutes.

“No. It’s pretty quiet tonight.”

“Nice of them to let us have prom without too much hassle. It’s kind of funny. If they were here, there’d be chaperones checking for booze and breaking up the booty dancing.”

“Yeah. Silver linings and all that.”

“See? Now, that was some good cop talk right there. We have to remember that when we get our show, dude.”

“Noted.”

Tahmina took one last long look east in the direction of the Tower of Silence, following the trail that had been worn by the Hummer.

“Everything okay?” Jeff asked.

She watched the landscape for another minute, debating whether or not to tell him what she knew. He was her partner. Partners were not supposed to keep secrets.

“Tahmina? What’s up?”

“Nothing,” she said, tearing off the goggles. She hoped Jeff couldn’t hear the worry in her voice. The breeze brought a fresh whiff of smoke till it was all she could smell. “I need some coffee.”

The one diner that stayed open this late was the Denny’s over by the high school. Roxie Swann’s parents had owned it, and she kept it going. At the first sign of infection—a cluster of sores down her neck and a fever accompanied by the shakes—Roxie’s mom had walked into the restaurant’s giant freezer and asked Roxie to lock the door, hoping the cold would either kill or cure her. It did neither.

When Roxie opened the door three days later, her mom lunged, and Roxie emptied her gun as she had been told. But Roxie swore that just before her mother attacked, she paused as if she’d recognized her. As if she’d been trying to stop.

“Crazy night for you guys,” Roxie said with a grin. She poured them weak coffee and cut two slivers of pie. The slices had gotten smaller. They were running out of flour. They were low on everything—medicine, gasoline, food. They still had water, which they boiled first just in case. But there was no telling how long that would last.

They hadn’t received a radio signal in ages. No planes flew overhead. There were no traffic noises. That’s why they’d started sending volunteers outside, two a month in the past three months, south toward Tucson, east to New Mexico, west to California, north to Flagstaff. No one had come back until Connor Jakes tonight.

A group of prom goers sat in the corner booth, sharing some chips and salsa and arguing over which songs they would request once they made it to the Pima Panthers stadium. Somebody started singing “Rehab,” and everybody joined in on the “No, no, no.”

“Give it a rest,” Tahmina muttered, playing with the pink plastic carnation stuck into a Coke bottle beside the empty napkin dispenser.

“Okay. Seriously. What’s up with you? You’re in, like, a fun-sucking mood tonight.” Jeff took a bite of her untouched pie. “Did you want to go to prom? Is that it? ’Cause I’ll totally take you, if you want. You can be my hag.”

Tahmina rubbed at her eyes, but it was no use. They would just keep stinging.

“Just thinking about something my mom said once about how she’d never leave me. I don’t know. I was just wondering, what if there’s some part of the human heart that can’t be corrupted? There might be a cure in that.”

Jeff snorted. “Reality check: I saw parents rip their kids the fuck apart and eat their fucking insides before we pushed them out. Parental love was no match for the power of that infection. Those things roaming the desert only see us as prey.”

“What if you’re wrong?”

“I’m not.”

“But what if that part of them is still alive down deep and it can still be reached?

My mom used to say that nothing, not my worst behavior, not even death, could stop a parent’s love—”

Jeff brought his fist down on the table, rattling the grungy silverware. “Stop it, okay? Just stop.” The diner got quiet, and Jeff took a shaky breath, waited for the prom kids to go back to singing and laughing. Finally he said, “Look. When I was little and we’d go to the store, my mom would tell me that if we got separated, just wait for her. That she’d always come back for me. Always. Well, guess what? She did—and it wasn’t because she loved me. It was because she’d become some fucking animal who would have eaten my brain if I hadn’t wasted her. There was nothing human left. I had to kill her before she killed me. So, you know, whatever concept you have of an unconditional love or God or law or humanity or meaning, you can fucking forget it.” Jeff’s eyes were red, and Tahmina knew it wasn’t the soot or the desert dust. “You know what? I don’t want to talk about this shit anymore. This is too much reality for our reality show. I gotta take a leak,” he said, and walked away.

Tahmina stared at her reflection on the black surface of her coffee. It was her mother who had taught her to love coffee. In the mornings she would drink hers dark and strong from delicate cups that she had managed to smuggle out of the old country, escaping through a secret tunnel that stretched for miles under the city.

“Hmmm, I see your future,” her mother would say playfully as she examined the coffee’s remains like an ancient Persian fortune-teller.

“What is it?” Tahmina would ask, full of belief.

Her mother would tip the coffee-stained cup toward her. “Soon, very soon, you will be washing dishes.”

Tahmina’s mother used to teach at the university three days a week, commuting an hour each way. When the roads had become more dangerous, Tahmina had begged her mother to stay home. But her mother had said that it was important to keep the centers of learning open. To close the schools was to admit to hopelessness. She’d seen that happen in her homeland, and she would not see it happen here in the country of her choosing.

“But what if something happens to you?” Tahmina had asked tearfully as her mother had backed the car out of the driveway.

“I will never leave you,” she’d promised, and Tahmina had watched her car growing smaller as she’d driven away. That night, her mother did not return. There were reports that the campus had been overrun with the undead. Infection was everywhere. Panicked, Tahmina had called her mother’s phone, and it had gone to voice mail. She’d called through the night and the next day, but her mother never picked up.

“Accept the truth,” her father had said, and he’d held her while she’d screamed and cried. But Tahmina couldn’t accept it. If she had seen her mother die, that would have been one thing. What bothered Tahmina was the not knowing. Was her mother out there still, uninfected but maybe hurt or holed up in a safe house, unable to get home? At times these thoughts came down like a sudden hard rain, flooding her with such anxiety that she had to go to the firing range and discharge until her handgun spun with clicks. Some nights she still rang her mother’s phone just to hear her voice.

Jeff plopped down in the booth again, an apologetic smile in place. “Sorry that took so long. But you know what they say—the longer it is, the longer it takes.” He sipped his coffee. “You okay?”

“Yeah. Sure.”

“Sure sure?”

“Sure sure.” Tahmina worked up a fake smile. “Hey, how about that butt-ugly dress Tansey had on?”

“O-M-G,” Jeff said, and laughed. “Did you see that shit? Like the unholy union of Hot Topic and mother-of-the-bride.”

Tahmina had thought the dress was pretty, but she knew Jeff would go off on it.

“Too bad the infection couldn’t have done something useful like wiping out her craptastic taste,” Jeff said.