Undead with Benefits Read Online Free Page A

me puking in the backseat or anywhere in her field of vision, so we cut the day’s drive short. They bought two rooms for us at a seedy motel just off the highway in western Wisconsin. I didn’t want to know where they’d gotten the money for the food and the rooms; I just wanted to get someplace dark and with better air circulation than a trunk so I could get rid of this throbbing headache and maybe, if my brain pains allowed it, come up with a plan.
    I drew the blinds in my room and stretched out on the lumpy motel bed. It felt amazing; my bones and muscles seemed to gradually uncrinkle, like how a dried sponge expands when you pour water on it.
    I must have dozed off. I woke up when someone knocked on my door. Still half-asleep, I expected to find Tom standing outside with orange juice and donuts. Instead, it was Amanda with a bag of clothes from a nearby outlet mall. My heart sank—those days of NCD-managed TLC were over—but I kept my face stony for Amanda.
    â€œHere,” she said, handing me the bag. She didn’t wait for a thank-you, immediately breezing off to the room next door, where Jake waited for her. I was actually glad she kept it short and bitchy; she’d eaten Harlene, and a pile of clothes that ranged purposefully from boring-as-heck to straight-up dorky wasn’t going to make up for that.
    At least they were clean. I did appreciate that.
    I spent the rest of the day poring over Jake’s road atlas. It looked to me like the highways in western Iowa terminated before Iowa City and Cedar Rapids. I made a line in the road atlas, connecting the roadblocks, estimating where this mythical zombie barricade would be. It encompassed most of the state’s eastern area. There were fewer towns in northern Iowa along the Minnesota border, and more hardly trafficked rural routes. That seemed like a good place to try slipping through. They couldn’t have locked down every road into the state, right?
    â€œGotta start somewhere,” I said to myself. My headache had started to clear and I could feel that familiar tickle of the astral plane out there, beckoning to me.
    I wondered what Jake might be thinking.
    No. None of that. No spying at all, in fact.
    I tried not to listen to Jake and Amanda’s muffled conversations through the wall. I think they were getting drunk. I also tried not to overthink my decision to stick with the zombies. I owed Jake and had nowhere else to go. Simple as that.
    It was a long, lonely night.
    And by midafternoon the next day, we were going nowhere fast.
    â€œWell?” Amanda asked, catching my eyes in the rearview. She drove while Jake napped in the passenger seat.
    â€œKeep going until you see the exit for route fifteen,” I answered, studying the road atlas that was open in my lap. “We’ll try that one.”
    â€œTry,” repeated Amanda dryly.
    â€œWell, at least we’re in Iowa,” I said defensively.
    â€œIowa wasn’t the deal,” she replied. “ Infected Iowa: that’s what we want. And anyway, I think we crossed the border back into Minnesota.”
    We’d spent all day hopscotching across the Minnesota-Iowa border. I had made a lot of fresh X s in the road atlas and was steadily running out of northern routes to try. At least we knew that the NCD quarantine didn’t extend across the Iowa border in a perfectly straight line, although that seemed like a pretty trivial detail. More important was the frightening scope of the NCD’s operation.
    Some of the highways led into detours that just kept on in a circle, always more phantom roadwork to keep you doubling back toward Minnesota. Others ended in roadblocks formed by government standard-issue black SUVs. We were always too cautious to approach those, but I didn’t need binoculars to recognize the NCD jumpsuits turning away cars. We hadn’t seen anyone get through.
    It was the biggest Containment job I’d ever seen. How