Ten Simple Tips for Surviving the Apocalypse Page 2

  It actually seemed like it was, as crazy as this guy sounded. I also knew that I was probably just as bad at being alone as he claimed to be. First Phin, then Gina… if I was just a little more honest, I’d probably have shot myself in the head already because there was still so far to go, and so many things that could go wrong. Including this, but fuck it. I needed the muscle and he needed a mission. “Fine. We’ll go on together for a while and see if we can stand each other.”

  “Great.” Conrad stood up, then offered me a hand. I let him pull me carefully to my feet. “Let’s head back up, and as soon as I get whatever’s useful off of those guys, we can leave.” He then helped me up the hill, pushed my canteen at me and encouraged me to have a few sips, then looted the corpses while I watched.

  How did I go from being a mild-mannered geek to standing by and watching this kind of fuckery with detached aplomb? If you’re reading this, you know how. We adapt to survive. Whether we catch Porphuraviridae or not, we all adapt to survive. I’m not proud of myself, but I am still alive, which is way more important to me.

  ****

  That was one week and seventy-five painstaking, blood-soaked miles ago. Conrad and I were rather more casual with each other at this point— a side effect of watching him kill two guys who had wasted good booze making Molotov cocktails to throw at us— and way more blatant about being a pair of lying liars. We even played the one truth, two lies game on a regular basis. It was a decent way to pass the time when I didn’t feel like reading.

  “I was the class valedictorian. When I was five I had a pet bunny named Bunnicula. Before the apocalypse began, I’d never shot a gun before.”

  “I’m so tempted to say it’s the last one,” Conrad said from where he was cleaning his Glock, “given how bad you still are at shooting things. But you actually had a bunny named Bunnicula, didn’t you?”

  “Yeah, I did.” But I thought the first one had been really convincing too; I mean, I’d been salutatorian— it was close enough. “What gave me away? Some twitch? A hesitation in my breathing?”

  “Your heartbeat,” he said, and oh, that was just cheating.

  “No using viral mutations to break the rules, you jackass.”

  “It’s not like I can turn them off,” he replied with a shrug. “You just need to get better at the art of diplomacy.”

  I snorted. “Lying is diplomatic?”

  “Oh, hell yes. I did it every day in my job.”

  “Which was… what exactly?” Because a week was a week, but there was still a lot of personal ground we hadn’t gone over with each other.

  “My turn, then?” He continued before I could reply. “I was the baby of the family. I did one tour each in Afghanistan and Iraq. I was married once, and it was a complete disaster.”

  “Ooh, tough.” And he delivered them all like he was reading them off a teleprompter, with reporter-type inflection. Conrad had done some major public speaking at some point. “I know you were in the service, but I’m betting you did more than two tours because you’re way too in love with guns to give up using them on a regular basis. I can totally see you being married and it being a disaster, but I’m not so sure you’d leave her— him— whoever it was even if it sucked. You seem to have a thing for suffering.”

  “As evidenced by my sticking it out with you,” he agreed.

  “Asshole. So, I’m thinking… you’re the baby of the family.”

  He gave me a little smile and nodded. The virus’s telltale purple color had started to permeate his skin’s thinner membranes, tinting his lips and making it look like he had two black eyes. Well, from what I could see of his eyes beneath the sunglasses he persisted in wearing, even though I knew they were the color of honey now. “Youngest by twelve years.”

  “A surprise baby.”

  “Surprise hell, my father negotiated hard for me. I cost him a private jet and a month-long vacation in Mallorca for my mother.”

  “I can see the silver spoon shining out of your ass from here.”

  Conrad clucked his tongue disparagingly. “Spoken like a true plebeian, Javi.”

  “Augh, the silvery glare!” I shielded my eyes. “It grows stronger when you haul out ten-cent words that you think will impress me, stop it! Clench your cheeks, I beg of you.”

  “This from the man who uses Shakespeare like it’s colloquial.”

  “Shakespeare is colloquial,” I argued, reaching in my pack for my favorite book. “Look, I can prove it to you—”

  “No!” He held up a hand. “No, not tonight, it’s too late, and it’s getting dark, no. Nope. Thanks but no thanks.”

  “Philistine. You know that one, right?”

  “Oh shut up, Javi.” And I did, for the time it took for the sun to set and the night to start to get cold. Then Conrad put down his gun, and I put aside my book, and we settled onto our sides on a gray tarp covered by my grandmother’s hand-knitted woolen throw. Conrad pulled me into the little-spoon position, and I went, gratefully, because one of the best things about having a travel buddy was nighttime snuggling. Goddamn, it could get cold out here at night even though it was July, and Conrad put out enough heat to make a dragon want to retire, no joke.

  We lay quiet for a while, but I was too antsy to fall asleep immediately, even though I was tired. “I have a twin brother,” I murmured into the darkness. “I miss my parents. My favorite dessert is coconut flan.”

  “Hmm, it’s trickier when you’re sleepy,” Conrad mused. “You don’t miss your parents, though.”

  “No.”

  “You… no one can like coconut enough for it to be a favorite, can they? Because that’s just weird.”

  I smiled. “It actually is my favorite dessert.” Rich and creamy and delicious, what wasn’t to love about it?

  “Your heartbeat didn’t change at all when you talked about a brother.”

  I didn’t have to explain, that wasn’t part of the game. I decided to anyway. “I had a brother. I don’t anymore— he died when we were two. Accidentally drowned in a swimming pool.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  I shrugged. “I barely remember him.” I stared out into the darkness waiting for Conrad to say something, to continue the game.

  I fell asleep to the sound of his silence.

  ****

  Chapter Two

  The Three Fs: Family, Friends, And Frenemies

  Okay, on to apocalypse survival tip number two: Count on the three Fs to get you through.

  This one is an evolving tip, so you know. At first I thought family would be enough, but then I remembered who I’m related to. When Porphuraviridae first hit L.A., there were still a lot of basic services available even though more people were afflicted every day. My phone worked. The Internet worked. The roads hadn’t completely jammed yet. I called my folks back in Rochester and told them what was going on.

  “Are you sick?” my mother had asked me first thing.

  “No, I’m fine.” Which was astonishing but true, given all the people I’d come into contact with since the virus first expressed.

  “Are you absolutely positive?” She went on before I could reassure her, “Because I heard that it doesn’t kill everyone who catches it right away. It lies dormant in some people, then gets them after they’ve already traveled and spread it to a whole new place.”

  Well okay, that was true. If you caught the virus, odds were you’d die of a grotesque hemorrhagic fever before you had much of a chance to pass anything along. The Purple Plague worked superfast for the most part. In some people, though— and this was just getting into the news— it didn’t kill them. They still got some of the symptoms: the breaking capillaries that turned their bodies into one big bruise, the jaundice in their eyes that somehow affected the iris as well as the sclera, the loss of body hair. But these people didn’t go on to die. Reports were mixed, but the claims ranged from verifiably sharper night vision and sense of hearing to hysterical tales of people growing claws and drinking blood. To which my first reaction was, Ha, bullshit.

  In retrospect, it’s funny that everything I thought was reasonable turned out to be wrong, and everything I thought was ridiculous turned out to be right.

  “Mom, I just got tested this morning at the clinic down the street, and I’m fine,” I assured her. “Listen, how’s everything where you are? Are you staying in Rochester?”

  “For now,” my mother affirmed. “Although we’re thinking of going to your grandpa’s cabin if things get much worse. It’s got all the basics, you know, and the generator works and it’s nice and rural. We’d probably be safer there until things die down.”

  “Yeah? Is Rommie bringing the girls there too?” My aunt Romelia was my mother’s only sibling, and she had two little daughters who I loved.

  “Yes. So you see why you can’t go there, Javi.”

  I… huh? “Why’s that, Mom?”

  “Because you wouldn’t want to infect the girls if you’re carrying the plague!”

  “Mom, I just told you that I’m not carrying it.”

  “For now. That could change in an instant; it’s so big and filthy in L.A. Honestly, I don’t know how you stand it there.”

  “Mom…”

  “Javi, just don’t. Stay where you are, and if it gets better, and you stay healthy then you can join us at the cabin later, okay? I have to go now; I have to help your father with Grandmama.” That referred to my father’s mother, my only grandparent who was still alive at the time. “Her home health aide didn’t show up today, and she’s been feeling under the weather. We’ll talk later, all right?”

  “Yeah. Sure.”

  “Good.” Then she hung up. That was the last time I spoke with my mother; two days later the first tactical nuclear weapon hit Los Angeles, fired from an Air
Force base in Arizona. Over half a million people died in a single day, and that was the real beginning of the end.

  I had no clue if any of my family had made it to the Cochetopa Hills cabin. At this point I didn’t care. It was a goal to shoot for, the same way Gina’s family ranch had been a goal before they’d refused to take all of us in. Gina was all right, but her fiancé Phin wasn’t, and me, the stray they’d picked up on the outskirts of L.A., certainly wasn’t. We’d arrived, we’d bargained, and we’d left, but not before one of her uncles had managed to wing Phin with a bullet. Gina’s answering shot had been far more accurate.

  But that was all Phase One, and Phase One was in the past. Phase One had been what happened after relying on family had failed. I’d moved on to trying to rely on friends instead, and it totally would have worked if Gina’s family hadn’t been so douchey. Now I was well into Phase Two, which wasn’t about family or friends: it was about having a frenemy. And I didn’t like to brag, but my frenemy was the best.

  What was so good about a frenemy? Well for starters, there were no illusions here. Our relationship was based on the concept of mutual use. Conrad, being the badass mutating train wreck that he was, kept us alive. I, in turn, kept us focused on the end goal, which I hadn’t shared with him yet. Astonishingly, he hadn’t been kidding about needing a mission. I honestly don’t think he cared where we were going as long as a plan was in place, and he had a job to do. And apparently keeping my ass alive was a big enough job for him.

  “Check the rock before you sit down.”

  “It’s fine.”

  “You said that three days ago and ended up getting stung by a scorpion.”

  Yeah, that had been a bit of a shock. “I recovered in less than a day. I’m fine now.”

  “That’s no reason to let it happen again.”

  “Shouldn’t you be more worried about mice biting me or something?” I asked after dutifully checking the rock. “A mouse bite could give me the plague.” Mammals and birds were both susceptible to the Purple Plague, but that was it as far as animals went. Shit, that was enough, too. After experiencing a massive die-off, a lot of those critters who remained had also mutated, becoming stronger and faster, and way deadlier. Remember that funny story about packs of feral Chihuahuas terrorizing kids in Tucson from a few years ago? Yeah, now imagine those Chihuahuas on steroids, with absolutely no fear and a desperate hunger driving them. That’s some frightening shit.

  “If you were going to get the plague, you would have by now. The incubation period can take up to twelve months, but we’re going on fourteen.”

  Yeah, I was intimately acquainted with the plague’s sense of timing. “Well then, I could get rabies. What happens if I get rabies, huh? I doubt I’m immune to that.”

  “If you get bitten by a rabid mouse, I guess we’ll just have to cauterize the wound and hope for the best.” Conrad hoisted the cooking gear out of the trailer and set it down, then started looking through our dehydrated food options. I went into my solo trip with a lot of supplies left over from Phase One, but that surplus was rapidly diminishing thanks to Conrad’s ravenous appetite. He tried to hide it, but I knew that every night he went to bed still hungry.

  “Hah, no. There will be no burning of my too, too solid flesh.”

  “I heard that reference, smartass. Rein it in.”

  “I don’t understand your weird hang-ups regarding classic literature, man. I’m going to wear you down eventually on this, you know that, right?”

  “I doubt it,” Conrad said, throwing me a package of Noodle Surprise. No milk to cook it with, no butter, but there were carbohydrates and protein and maybe vitamins if you squinted just right. It was better than starving, at any rate.

  “No, really,” I said as I set up the biggest pot on the little fire that had been Conrad’s first move when we settled into our campsite for the night. It had trees (but not too many trees— that was important), water in a nearby creek that I did my damndest to purify before using, and a spot for the bikes.

  You’d think that there would be more actual vehicles available if most of the people in the US were dead or infected, but most of the major urban centers were gone, and their cars were gone with them. A lot of the rest had been set on fire because who doesn’t enjoy some good ol’ mindless rioting, and of those that remained, the best had been skimmed from the top while the rest had their fuel siphoned off. It was surprisingly Mad Max-ian, all things considered, which gratified the nerdy fanboy in me but irritated the reluctant cyclist I’d become.

  “You’ll learn to love it if you don’t already. I promise.”

  “Or I’ll learn to hate the sound of your voice and have to restrain myself from slitting your throat in order to keep you quiet,” Conrad offered.

  “So grumpy. Sooo mean. And you won’t do that.” I was pretty well assured of that by this point. If Conrad hadn’t killed me while I’d whined like a puppy who’d been locked out of the master bedroom when that scorpion stung me, he wasn’t going to murder me for indulging my happy place.

  “No, I won’t.” He sat down and pulled off his boots, which he’d exchanged for the incongruous dress shoes I’d found him in on that first day after he discovered that one of his five attackers was also a size eleven. “Now get to work, Betty Crocker.”

  “There are plenty of good male chefs, you know. You could compare me to one of them,” I said, watching the pot for bubbles in the water. “Like, Gordon Ramsay. Every night is another Michelin experience with me.”

  Conrad smiled, and I mentally gave myself a point. I was totally winning the war. “I’ll be happy if you just don’t poison me.”

  “Do you think I could, at this point?” I gestured at his face, where the purple was edging down his cheeks and across his forehead now. Conrad assured me it didn’t hurt, but it looked painful. He always kept the damn sunglasses on, too. “I mean… the media didn’t have too long to report on it before everything went to shit, but I remember something about increased immunity and resistance to disease. Maybe Montezuma’s Revenge is a thing of the past for you.”

  “Well.” Conrad’s voice was flat. “That would certainly make me feel better about the whole mutation thing. Clearly this is all a blessing in disguise, and I should just be grateful for it, huh?”

  Oh boy, this conversation had gone south fast. “I didn’t say that.”

  “You didn’t have to, it was implied,” he snapped at me, “and if you smear me with any more of your bright-side bullshit I really will slit your throat.”

  Ah, no. That wasn’t the sort of thing I could take lying down, or even sitting. I stood and swung a hand in Conrad’s direction. “See now, this! This is what I was talking about when I said I was worried you were going to go crazy and kill me— when you actually go and threaten to kill me! And not as a joke! I can tell the difference, you asshole, and that’s not you being funny, that’s you trying to scare the fuck out of me.”

  “Javi.” Conrad deflated as quickly as he’d puffed up. “I’m sorry.”

  “Good for you.”

  “No, I am. Look, I’m hungry and I’m tired and my whole body feels like it’s been scrubbed with a Brillo pad. I’m not… fuck.” And now he looked away from me, straight up at the darkening sky, and pulled off his sunglasses. His irises glittered yellow in the light of the sunset. “I’m not supposed to still be here,” he murmured. “I didn’t think I’d still be here.”

  “Where did you think you’d be?” I asked because he sounded… lost, when he said that. Hopeless, and weirdly young. Conrad was a decade older than I was— he wasn’t supposed to sound like a scared kid.

  “Not in the middle of nowhere,” he quipped readily enough, but I knew that wasn’t what he meant to say. “I’m sorry. I’m not going to hurt you, but I’ll stop with the threats.”

  “Well, don’t stop completely. Otherwise I’ll worry you’ve got brain damage or something.”

  He gave me a cautious half smile. “Got it.”

  “Okay… good.” I crouched down again and got back to fixing dinner, but the mood was weird now. I was never very good when it came to dealing with silence. The best way to get me to confess to something when I was a kid was for my mother just to stare at me. I’d squirm like a worm impaled on a hook and then confess everything and anything she might be mad at me for, just so she’d speak to me again.