Page 66 of 10 Things I Hate About Zombies

Wish we could be there, but Venice beckons. I’ll send bird pics. Dad had been in full birding mode since his early retirement, and, since downloading a bird-identification app, had become quite the bird-spotting menace. Especially when it came to birds with funny names.

Nick tapped voice-to-text – he was driving to deliver some mushrooms to a gastropub downtown and didn’t abide driving and texting. ‘You can meet her when you’re back from your trip. We’ll come up to Seattle if she can get the weekend off work.’

This resulted in an explosion of lovey-dovey emojis. Alice whined at all the dings and beeps Nick’s phone was emitting.

‘One second, girl.’ Nick parked in a loading zone and started unloading the crates of mushrooms from the tray of his vehicle. A couple of rough-looking people shambled past, and his heart went out to them. Portland had become so expensive these past few years, and he knew that keeping up was a struggle.

He fumbled in his wallet for some small bills, but then …

Hang on. The shambling people were green. Was this a new thing? Too much chlorophyll? One of those weird drugs out of Russia that Dad loved to tell Nick about?

Zombies, said a little voice in the back of his mind. It’s zombies.

Absolutely not. It was not zombies. There were a lot of weird coincidences, sure, but surely not all roads could lead to zombies.

Maybe the green was from the light, he thought, squinting. After all, they were passing beneath a stained-glass installation commissioned, according to the plaque, by TriMet.

Alice yipped from the truck window, catching his attention. As he swung around, the sous chef, Rakheem, emerged from the gastropub, ushering him inside.

‘You all right, man?’ asked Rakheem. ‘You look you’ve seen a … I dunno what.’

‘All good.’ Nick set down the mushrooms on one of the massive stainless-steel counters, talking Rakheem through the order and how to get the most out of it. Which Rakheem knew, of course. But Nick had his ways of doing things, and they worked for him.

‘Before you go,’ said Rakheem, after he’d squared up the account. He pushed his massive glasses up his generous nose. ‘I hear you’re the guy supplying The Smoothie Maven with their viral mushrooms. Can I place an order with you, get in on a good thing?’

Nick bit the inside of his cheek, thinking of the orange mushrooms sprouting in fiendish numbers around the lightning- strike zone. He’d had no luck cultivating them in the greenhouse, so the wild ones were all he had to sell. And Zoey’s orders were growing – no matter how much she purchased, she ran out by mid-morning.

‘What do you say?’ asked Rakheem.

‘Sure, man,’ said Nick, adding, ‘if the stock levels support it.’

Rakheem clapped him on the back. ‘Love it. I know we’ll whip something up that’ll blow their minds.’

Nick was cruising past the Portland Art Museum when Zoey’s voice crackled over the sound system Nick had retrofitted into the truck.

‘Hey, it’s me.’

‘Hey, me,’ said Nick, as he thoughtfully perused the list of exhibits on the sign outside. Hmm, Zoey might like that one. Chatter and giggles came from the multi-block park to his left: joggers were out and about, and a group of kids were taking photos with a giant robot sculpture.

‘We have a lead on Romero!’ She said it at such volume that Alice’s ears went back.

‘He’ll make mayor yet,’ said Nick. ‘Give me a few minutes and I’ll head over the Hawthorne Bridge and over to yours. Alice is dying to help chase a cat.’

‘She might get a claw in her nose if she’s not careful. Apparently he’s extra feisty.’

Zoey was waiting for Nick when he pulled up at the sharehouse, whose porch was finally free of the weird detritus that everyone claimed was an in-progress art project. Damn, she was such a vision, even in her casual jeans and loose-fitting top. Something about her pulled it all together, and it wasn’t the green leather boots she was wearing. It was how … confident she was. How self-possessed.

‘Are we going on foot, or in the truck?’ he called, as she hurried down the walkway.

‘A bit of both,’ she said. ‘We’ll get closer and then do an on-foot sneak attack. He was spotted not far from Joaquin’s studio.’

‘Which is absolutely in walking distance from your house,’ pointed out Nick. ‘And you love to walk.’

She flushed: he’d caught her in a lie. ‘All right, so I thought it would be more fun with you.’

‘Even more fun than with Ainsley?’ Nick was pleased.

‘Yep. And besides, Ainsley is …’ Zoey waved in the general direction of downtown. ‘Studying music theory with Celeste.’