Dead End

by Howard Odentz

  While we inched our way along, Sanjay kept saying that prayer over and over again, until it started running through my head. Somehow, it made me feel better just knowing that I wasn’t quite as cold and callous as I thought I had become.

  Each poxer we killed was a person. They all deserved our prayers— every single one of them.

  Niki cried through most of it. I know it’s because somewhere in the middle of all those poxers was her family. There was literally no hope that they were still alive, and she knew it. Manny tried to comfort her as best as he could, but it didn’t stop the tears from flowing.

  Hey, we all get a chance to curl into a ball. This was her time, even though she was still burning poxers right along with the rest of us. I’m sure this night, however it ended up, would haunt her for the rest of her life—just like torching Uncle Don would always be with me.

  Those kinds of memories are like flies on fly paper. We struggle to be free of them, but in the end, we’re stuck with them until we die.

  After crossing over a wide road that divided the main part of campus in two, we started to roll into an area that was filled with buildings. There weren’t as many poxers around. By not many, I mean that there weren’t hundreds, but there were still dozens of them. Some had backpacks strapped to their shoulders. Others were wearing bike helmets. I even saw a few dressed in football gear, which probably meant that the stadium was mobbed with poxers from a Friday night game.

  They were all attracted to the bus, but they were also attracted to the trail of burning chunks we were leaving behind. That was good, I guess. Most of them caught on fire by their own hands.

  Trina drove the bus slowly with a hard look on her face. My sister had a lot riding on her shoulders right now. It was up to her to get us to the campus library while making sure we didn’t get overrun by the dead.

  A few times she swerved and swore. Not one of the adults commented on her smart mouth or the fact that she even knew such foul language.

  As for me, I knew she was stressing out something fierce, so I took a quick break from all the burning, rummaged around at my feet and found a bag of jalapeño-flavored corn bugles. Gross right? I crawled over Prianka, ripped open the bag and shoved it in my sister’s face.

  “Oh my God, I love you,” she said as she shoved one of her fists into the bag.

  “That stuff is going to burn going down,” I said.

  “No, it won’t” she answered as she shoved a handful into her mouth then kept on driving.

  A minute later we came across another huge crowd of poxers. They all lined a large pond that was in the center of the campus. Tents were set up along the water. Banners and posters hung everywhere.

  “Greek Week,” said Manny as he pointed at a few signs with strange lettering on them. “Everyone here was probably campaigning to get into a fraternity or a sorority.”

  All I saw was a lot of very ugly, but once pretty, poxers. There was an overabundance of blond hair and loads of smeared makeup, along with jacked-up dudes with tight t-shirts and muscles way bigger than Jimmy’s. Trina rolled the bus up to the crowds, and they surrounded us like we were an ice cream truck on the hottest day of the year.

  I guess for them we were. Our windows opened, and we sprayed hairspray at our lighters, dumped burning paper on top of them, or jabbed the dead with our tiki torches.

  “Fire,” chirped Andrew more than once.

  He wasn’t kidding.

  Our burning started a crazy chain reaction, and poxers by the dozens began squealing and bursting all over the place.

  The whole scene was nuts. I felt like I was inside a really bizarre horror movie and this was the huge special effects moment. You know, the one you tell all your friends about or re-watch on the computer, over and over again.

  The squeals were almost deafening. More than once I glanced back, almost hoping that Prianka’s brother had covered his ears and his eyes to what was going on outside, but something had changed in Sanjay. He stood with both hands against his window, watching the horror in front of him, murmuring away.

  Hey. Whatever works, right? At least he found a way to cope.

  Finally, what seemed like hours later but was more like minutes, Trina guided us through all the smoke and the burning dead.

  In front of us a huge building rose out of the gloom, even bigger than I remembered. The library looked higher than Sugarloaf Mountain. We were going to have to go inside that place, burn the dead, find the generator, turn it on, and get Trudy and Sanjay to the computer lab.

  I hoped that list of chores was going to be easy, but easy or not, that’s what we had to do.

  “Water,” Trina croaked as she slowly pressed on the gas through the thinning mobs of burning Greek poxers. “Water.”

  “I told you downing a bag of jalapeño bugles was going to be hot,” I said as I unscrewed a bottle that I had brought with me and handed it to her.

  “My tongue is on fire,” she said and grabbed for the water.

  Behind her, Jimmy shook his head “Hey, babe,” he chuckled. “When we’re done with all of this, remind me to talk to you about good eating habits.”

  “Uh huh,” she grumbled as she pressed the gas pedal a little bit harder, and the bus lurched free of the Greek Week crowd.

  I frowned a little as we passed the last of them, all eager to join pretty groups of people who Diana would have deemed appropriate to be part of her new world order.

  Hell, I could have been one of those people in a couple of years. Now, I wasn’t even going to get a chance to apply to college.

  Diana and her people sucked so much. They really did.

  52

  JUST LIKE I remembered, the University library was surrounded by a chain link fence so passers-by wouldn’t be beaned by a brick. Under our current situation, falling bricks wouldn’t help much. A poxer hit in the head would only look like a poxer with a lopsided melon.

  There was a road leading up to the fence with a wide opening in it easy enough for the bus to get through. We saw poxers there, too, but I think they were more interested in our trail of flames than the bus.

  Trina drove slowly through the opening in the fence and pulled up to the front of the massive brick building. From where we sat, it rose into the darkness like a huge, mythological temple in one of my better video games.

  Aunt Ella and Professor Billings were at the front of the bus with their heads together in conversation.

  “What are they talking about?” whispered Prianka as she reached down at our feet to gather some supplies.

  “Knitting,” I shrugged. Prianka gave me a dirty look so I revised my response. “They’re probably figuring out who’s going with who and who’s doing what and where.”

  “Makes sense,” she said as she continued digging around at our feet. Then it dawned on me that Prianka was getting ready along with everyone else.

  “What do you think you’re doing?” I said.

  “What do you mean?”

  “You just got shot. If you think you’re going anywhere inside that building you are sorely mistaken.” I sounded a little too much like my dad.

  Yikes. Prianka got right in my face. “Listen, buddy,” she snarled.

  ‘Buddy?’ Seriously?

  “I . . . uh . . .”

  “Don’t think for one second I’m sending Sanjay in there without me. I got shot. Big deal. I’ll heal.”

  “But . . .”

  “Oh, can it, Tripp,” she snapped. “Just because we’ve swapped spit a couple dozen times doesn’t mean you own me.”

  “It was more than a couple dozen,” I sort of murmured, but it didn’t matter. She stood and simply walked away. I think a trail of ice followed her like slime follows a snail.

  The next thing I knew, Jimmy had crawled over and pulled him
self up into her vacated seat.

  “That went well,” he said.

  “You know me,” I said. “I’m quite the charmer.”

  “You’ll get there,” he said. Oh, brother. The last thing I wanted was opposite gender tips from the guy who couldn’t keep his hands off my sister.

  “What are you, the love guru or something?”

  “Funny you should mention that,” he said. “Not going all ‘guru’ or anything, but I was thinking, when this whole mess is over, the monastery up at the Peace Pagoda would be cool digs. It’s out of the way. It’s almost self-sufficient. I bet Stella Rathbone would be more than happy to lay some of that Urban Green advice on us.”

  “Maybe,” I said, but the last thing I was thinking about was settling down anywhere. I was thinking about the giant library in front of us, and getting done what we needed to get done.

  “Okay,” Aunt Ella barked out to everyone in the bus. “Our first job is finished. We’ve arrived at our destination. Now comes the important part. We have to find the power source for the computer lab then get Trudy and Sanjay inside. Most importantly, we have to make sure nobody gets bitten.”

  Trina and I knew that last part was our cue. We were immune. So were Randy Stephens, Charlie Buckman, and Felice LeFleur. A fat lot of good Felice was going to do. I was sure she was just going to sit like a lump in the back of the bus with her arms crossed over her scrawny chest and a big, crazy look on her face.

  I was wrong.

  Suddenly, Felice was right behind me. She had slid into an empty seat there. I could feel her hot, nasty breath on the back of my neck.

  “Tripp,” she whispered in my ear. I literally almost jumped out of my seat. Maybe it was because she had never addressed me directly, or maybe it was because she had never been so close to me, breathing her nastiness into the side of my face.

  “Ms. LeFleur?” I managed and turned around to look at her.

  “I know,” she said.

  “Um. You know what?” I didn’t have the vaguest idea what she was talking about.

  “I know all about you and your friends,” she said. I could feel a sick bubbling in my stomach that was a mixture of acid and butterflies.

  “I don’t . . . um . . . I don’t know what you mean.”

  She stared at me in the dim light with people all around us, gathering supplies and readying themselves to take on the most important task that any of us had ever done. “I know what you think of me,” she said. “I know what you and your friends call me.”

  My face started to burn.

  “I’m going back to my seat,” Jimmy said rather quickly then disappeared way faster than anybody who didn’t have use of his legs should be able to disappear. Felice immediately stood up, moved up a row and sat down right next to me.

  There she was, with her hooked nose and her big glasses, and that pinched up, creepy little expression of hers, staring right at me. I almost felt like she was getting ready to peck me to death.

  Instead something else happened. Something that I wasn’t expecting at all.

  “You call me Freaky Big Bird,” she said. “You all do. Even that damn crow that follows you around says it. In all my life, I never even knew crows could talk.”

  Busted. How was I supposed to respond? Should I apologize to her because we said mean things behind her back? Was I supposed to say ‘I’m sorry’ even though she was the biggest and freakiest big bird I had ever met?

  “I . . .” I stammered again, hoping something halfway decent was going to come out of my mouth.

  She stuck up one finger and pointed it right in my face.

  “My mother might be dead. Everyone I’ve ever known might be dead, but I’m not. I’m alive because of you, Tripp Light. You, your friends, Ella, all of you—I wouldn’t be alive if it weren’t for you. So, if in this new world, I’m a freaky big bird, then I am damned if I’m not going to be the freakiest big bird that ever existed.”

  I was stunned. Only then did I notice how she was dressed. Not only was she layered in clothing like everyone else, she also had football knee pads on and was holding a football helmet that she had taken from the sporting goods section of Walmart.

  She was also carrying a hockey stick that was wrapped on one end with rags. I could smell the acrid odor of lighter fluid coming from the soaked cloth.

  Oh my god. Felice LeFleur was actually tricked out for battle.

  “Are we ready, everybody?” Aunt Ella called out, but I barely heard her. I was flabbergasted. Either I had gone completely crazy or Felice had.

  Suddenly she was right in my face again, so close that I got a little scared.

  “CA-CAW,” she shouted like she literally was the freakiest big bird of them all. Then she banged her hockey stick down on the ground over and over again. “CA-CAW. CA-CAW. CA-CAW.”

  53

  CHARLIE BUCKMAN’S mom and dad stayed in the bus with little Krystal. None of us could watch her once we were inside the library.

  The rest of us gathered in three groups. We were totally prepared. Some of us carried the weapons from the bus, like tiki torches, hockey sticks with lighter fluid soaked rags on the end, or hairspray cans and lighters. Others carried fire extinguishers. Although most of the floors in the University library were empty, it was still a place filled with books that could catch fire.

  I had a flashback of Stella’s bookstore in Greenfield. Hopefully this time, we wouldn’t burn down a building.

  As we got off the bus, Andrew flapped his wings and landed on Sanjay’s shoulder. I guess he was coming with us. On the other hand, both Newfie and Whitby hung back with Krystal and the Buckmans.

  “You be good,” Aunt Ella said to the giant black beast.

  “You, too, you little, weird looking, weasel thing,” I told Whitby. She wagged her tail and sat down on her haunches.

  “Someday she’s going to bite you,” growled Prianka as she pushed past me and got off the bus.

  I knew she’d thaw eventually after this latest freeze, or at least I hoped she would.

  Once we were on the ground, my parents, of all people, torched three nerdy looking poxers near the front entrance. Their backpacks and thick glasses made them all look like the kind of college kids who would be hanging out in a library on a Friday night, or finding an empty floor to play some sort of weird role-playing game while dressed as orcs or aliens.

  Mom didn’t flinch when she burned them. Neither did my dad. They just did what they needed to do.

  “All clear,” my mom shouted in an eerily military fashion when there were only burning poxer chunks left. My dad lifted a fire extinguisher to spray the flames but my mom stopped him. “Save it for inside,” she told him as she craned her neck skywards. “It’s a big building.”

  “What’s with her?” Trina whispered in my ear.

  “Just go with it,” I whispered back. “I think all the adults are so freaked out that they’re running on pure adrenaline.”

  “Good,” said Trina. “Let’s hope that adrenaline train keeps chugging along. I don’t think we can do any of this without them.”

  Thankfully, when Aunt Ella tested the front door of the library we found it unlocked.

  Right inside the entrance were maybe six or seven more poxers. This time, Freaky Big Bird and Charlie Buckman were the first ones inside and the first ones to burn them without a moment’s hesitation.

  Every time I saw Felice swing her hockey stick with the burning rags on the end, and watch it connect with another poxer, I heard her weird call in my head.

  ‘CA-CAW. CA-CAW.’

  I really hoped that the sheer lunacy of what we were doing didn’t break her brain. She was acting like the anti-Felice instead of the Felice that we had all grown to sort of despise.

  Maybe she did turn over a new leaf
and decide to own the Freaky Big Bird name in a bad-ass sort of way.

  I still hoped I didn’t have to like her.

  Once the front entrance was cleared, we all gathered around a huge board on the wall that listed what was on each floor. The computer lab was on the twenty-second floor, which totally sucked.

  That meant twenty-two flights of stairs.

  Soccer or no, I hoped my legs were up to it. Even more, I hoped Trudy was going to be able to scale twenty-two flights, even though I knew she would try without a single complaint.

  As far as the power goes, there was no mention of an electrical room, but that just confirmed what we had already suspected.

  It had to be in the basement.

  “We got this,” Randy Stephens said as he, Nedra Stein, Manny, and Niki headed toward the basement staircase. Randy was immune to the bite of a poxer, so he went first.

  “How will we know if you get the power back on?” I asked as they went.

  “It’s not ‘if’ but ‘when’ said Randy. “No worries. Electricity is my specialty. Besides, trust me. You’ll know.”

  Freaky Big Bird, my mom and dad, Aunt Ella, Trina, and Jimmy took the first floor. Freaky Big Bird and Trina were the immune ones in that sextet. The plan was for them to start working through the building floor by floor, clearing out whatever pesky poxers they came across.

  Finally, that left my girlfriend the ice queen with the stubborn streak that wouldn’t quit, me, Sanjay, Trudy and Professor Billings. The professor led the way.

  As we turned to head for the staircase, I caught my father’s eye. He stared at me for a long moment like there was something important that he wanted to say. I knew what it was. Of course, I did. He wanted to tell me that he loved me. He wanted to tell to be careful because he couldn’t afford to lose me.

  Instead, he just nodded his head and turned away.

  This was our new life. We were going to fight for our right to be a part of this world. We were going to stop the bad guys whenever we could and we were going to save the good guys like Charlie Buckman and his parents, or Professor Billings, Niki, and Manny whenever we had the chance.