Donna of the Dead

by Alison Kemper

  I stare straight ahead. The adrenaline that’s been building for the last few hours evaporates in a heartbeat. I pray I don’t cry. I want to say something funny, something sarcastic, but the lump in my throat makes speaking impossible.

  Deke studies me and his face softens. “Look, Donna, I know you don’t want to leave the port, but please don’t flip out. There’s no reason to think something bad’s happened to your dad and Gran. Let’s just get out of here. Get away from the infected. Maybe the situation won’t be so severe once we go inland. We can catch our breath. And keep trying to call Gran and your dad on the phone. Figure out what to do next.”

  I nod numbly. I know Deke is being smart. Logical. And the voices seem to like his plan. They stay quiet as I head away from the ocean.

  I try to keep my face blank. “Which road?”

  “I dunno. Take 595 and head toward home, I guess. We can try to avoid this mess until we hear from them.”

  Of course, we both know there’s no escaping “this mess.” We’ve seen the news reports. We know this is epic. A pandemic. A worldwide zombie apocalypse.

  In spite of all that, I would like to go home. The situation probably won’t be any better in our neighborhood, but at least we’ll be on familiar turf.

  We don’t live far from the port. Maybe six miles, tops. Deke turns on the radio and scans through the stations, trying to find news. Nothing. Zilch. Then he calls my dad on the phone again. No answer.

  “Wait, wait. One new text message,” Deke says in an excited voice as he punches some buttons. “Came in a few minutes ago. Guess we missed it while we were trying to peel the zombie off our car.”

  “What’s it say? Is it from them?”

  “All OK,” Deke reads.

  “That’s it?”

  “Yup.” He sees the frustration on my face. “Donna, you know they both suck at texting. It probably took them ten minutes to type that much.”

  Deke’s right. I’ve got to relax. Dad and Muriel are okay. I need to be patient until they call and explain their plan to rescue us.

  We stay silent as I drive extra cautiously along the familiar highway. It takes all my concentration to keep the car in my lane. So much for being a stunt driver. Good thing the stretch of open interstate is deserted except for our Toyota. Twice, I have to veer onto the shoulder of the road to pass clumps of abandoned cars.

  Endless rows of houses stretch below the highway overpass. The sun is back to full strength, reflecting off swimming pools and empty vehicles. But again, no people. Fort Lauderdale is a ghost town.

  “If the entire South Florida population changed into zombies,” I say, “you’d think we’d see a few of them.”

  “We might still. Don’t let down your guard.”

  “I’m not. It’s just…well, we watched CNN yesterday. Things were bad, but not—” I gesture outside, unable to describe the desolate landscape around us. “Where’d everybody go? Did millions of people turn overnight? And now they’re all hiding?”

  “I doubt that.”

  “So what happened to them?”

  “Maybe they all tasted delicious?”

  I squint sideways at Deke. “Noooo, you cannot be serious.”

  He fixes his eyes on the road ahead, doesn’t answer.

  “Zombies only eat brains,” I remind him, hoping to quell the nausea in my stomach. “You know, ‘braaaaaains.’ Shouldn’t we be seeing pieces? Body parts? Ummm…leftovers?”

  “Not necessarily.”

  “Hmmm. Tidy eaters, these zombies.”

  “Look, Donna. I’m just guessing. That might account for some of the missing people, but I figure the rest are hiding. Staying out of the sun. Like you said. And there have to be other survivors. At least, I hope there are.”

  Phoebe. Please let Phoebe be one of the survivors.

  “Do me a solid,” I tell Deke. “Call Phoebe again for me. Speed Dial Two.”

  For a sec, I think he’s going to protest, but then he punches the button.

  “Busy signal.” He forces his face into an encouraging half-smile. “But that doesn’t mean anything. Everyone’s trying to call friends, family members. All the circuits are probably busy. When was the last time you talked to her?”

  “Three days ago.”

  My mind jumps back to the muffled sounds on the phone. When did that happen? Day before yesterday? Would Phoebe have been in danger then? Was the zombie flu already burning through our suburb?

  “What if the virus started earlier here, Deke?”

  “Yeah, I wondered the same thing. The news reports were sort of jumbled yesterday. And the government may have been downplaying everything to keep people from panicking.”

  “Yeah, a news report about millions of people being eaten—or turned into brainless cannibals—that might cause a little civil unrest.”

  My words are light, but once again, I’m fighting the urge to cry.

  Deke turns to grip my shoulder reassuringly. “But that doesn’t mean they got Phoebe. She’s tough.”

  I nod and focus on the road, glad for the sudden warmth radiating from my shoulder.

  “She might’ve had to run,” he continues. “With her family. Maybe she had to evacuate so fast, she couldn’t take her phone.”

  I nod again, forcing myself to sound calm. “I’m sure that’s the case with a lot of people we know. I bet a lot of them are on the run. That they’ve managed to escape.”

  Deke lets his hand—and the subject—fall away, leaving us both alone with our thoughts. All our friends, all our neighbors, all our teachers… Which ones have been eaten? And which ones have changed into violent, snarling cannibals? Has anyone survived besides us?

  I let my gaze drift from the road and back to the neighborhoods rolling past the window. Deke’s people-eating revelation bumped up my fear level a notch or two. The dark windows of the deserted houses appear sinister, even in the bright daylight. All these quiet houses have nice, dark closets. I would bet money (if I still had my purse) that every closet is now slap-full of zombies, lurking in the shadows, waiting for nightfall so they can come out and eat people.

  Something else is bugging me. “Deke, why do you think that one meathead guy was on our car, out in the sun, when the others weren’t?”

  Deke’s forehead creases. “He must have crawled on the roof while we were in the parking garage. When we were out in the sunlight, he was screeching. Did you see him? Do you think maybe the light hurt him?”

  “But he didn’t loosen his grip.”

  Deke launches into one of his typical sci-fi-babble speeches about mythical creatures who are sensitive to light, and rabid dogs avoiding bright lights, but becoming aggressive when provoked, and how there may be a correlation. He spouts off a bunch of other stuff I don’t catch—partly because it’s all so science-y and partly because I’m too concentrated on driving to make sense of his tirade.

  But one thing’s for sure: it sounds like Deke has totally bought into my zombie theory.

  About three miles inland, I take my usual exit for Broward Boulevard. Our neighborhood sits just off the highway.

  “Be on your guard,” Deke says. “You know, where the road narrows up here, infected people might try to ambush us at the overpass.”

  A quick burst of adrenaline shoots through me.

  Deke’s right, except only one zombie attacks. The lone man crawls from the shade of the overpass, where he’s been hiding in the semi-darkness. He staggers toward us, lifting his arms and going “Argh!” like an extra in a B-list horror film. I’m so relieved, and the whole thing is so cliché that I actually start to giggle. I toot my horn and wave as I drive away, leaving him wailing and waving his arms like a windmill.

  “Buh-bye!” I call out, snickering as I watch him in the rearview mirror.

  “Are you okay?” Deke gives me a worried stare.

  “Yeah, sorry. Guess the stress is getting to me. Really, I’ll try to keep it together. That dude was so…did you see him? He was all…arg
h!” I do my best zombie impression and snicker some more. Deke grumbles something about needing to slap me.

  Just then, something very strange happens. My voices give me a direct command. They almost never do that. Usually, they mumble cryptic stuff, and it takes me an entire afternoon to decode their messages. But for once, they keep it simple.

  Stop, they say. And so I stop. In the middle of the street. Good thing the road’s abandoned or another car would have plowed into me by now.

  “Uh, what are we doing?” Deke asks.

  “I don’t know.” I can’t exactly tell him we’re stopping because the voices told me to. I have no idea what they want—maybe we should go a different direction? Maybe there’s a zombie roadblock ahead?

  The car idles in front of our high school, which sits on the main street of town, near the community college and the library. My heart aches at the sight of the familiar buildings, now vacant. My hometown has obviously been slammed by the zompocalypse.

  “Come on, let’s get going,” Deke urges, becoming frustrated.

  But the voices are always right. It’s a good idea to stay put—figure out what they want me to do next.

  A fluttering motion catches my eye.

  “Look.” I point at our school’s arts building. “On the roof!”

  As we watch, someone fastens the flapping object to the school’s brick wall. A large paper banner, the same kind the cheerleaders put up before every football game, now hangs under the roofline. Usually, these say “Go Owls” or “Hoot for our team!” or something stupid like that. This one reads, “Unsick people inside.”

  “Unsick?” Deke asks. “Is that a word?”

  “No, it should say ‘Well people inside.’” Vocab is kind of my thing.

  “Park by the doors,” Deke instructs. “I’ll go see what kind of unsick, ungrammatical people are hiding inside.”

  “It might not be safe to get out of the car,” I protest. “It might be a trap…”

  “I’ll be fine,” Deke says, waving away my objections. “I’ll take my bat. Did you see how many goons I cold-cocked on the ship?” A proud smile brightens his dark eyes.

  For a split second, I get the strange impression Deke is enjoying the zombie apocalypse. He acts positively chipper as he exits the car and saunters up the brick stairs. Nothing attacks him as he stands before the glass doors, but no one lets him inside, either.

  As soon as I’m alone, I panic. What if we can’t get inside? What if Dad never answers the phone? What if we have to keep driving?

  My house, Deke’s house, and all the other houses in our ’burb, are probably infested with the walking dead. I picture corpses hiding in my closet, lurking behind my school clothes, my raincoat, my dress for the dance. What if one of them tries on my red semi-formal gown? I shake my head.

  Yikes. I gotta get my act together. I’m obviously losing my mind.

  Deke pauses in front of the building’s door, still waiting. He’s a sitting duck out there in the open. What if a zombie jumps out of the shrubbery and bites him? I wish for the zillionth time that my voices would give me warnings about other people.

  I crack my window an inch. “Don’t just stand there like an idiot, Deke! Do something!” I sound half-hysterical. Swallowing hard, I force myself to ask in a more polite tone, “Why aren’t you knocking on the door?”

  Deke points at a sign taped to the glass. “It says the door’s electrified.”

  The door’s electrified? Wowza.

  Deke shades his eyes with his hand and peeks through the tiny reinforced windows. Something inside catches his attention. He waves at it. Then he holds his arms out in a what? stance. After a few seconds, he points upward and nods in an exaggerated way. He walks back toward the car, but doesn’t look my way. Instead, he checks his surroundings to make sure he’s not about to be ambushed, then gazes upward, almost like he’s trying to see on the top of the building. Sure enough, after a few seconds, a face leans over the edge of the roof. Deke waves.

  I guess the face shouts a question because Deke yells, “Two!”

  Maybe the person asked how many of us are in the car. Deke yells some more. I can’t hear what the other person says, but I can follow the conversation through Deke’s answers.

  “It’s me, Deke Greenberg!” Pause. “On a cruise ship! We were attacked this morning when we got off the boat!” Another pause. “No bites!” Pause. “About an hour, maybe more!” A very long pause… “Okay!”

  Deke glances back at me and gives me a thumbs up. Then he checks his surroundings again (jeez, he’s good at this), and motions for me to get out of the car. I search the Toyota frantically, wishing for something useful to bring with me. I grab a tube of lip gloss and a travel pack of tissues. And my mini-golf club. These are my sole possessions in the world.

  Lovely.

  I lock the car and pause for a second, listening for voices. They’re quiet, but that doesn’t keep me from sprinting toward school. It’d be awesome if someone was timing me right now, you know, for the President’s Physical Fitness Test or whatever—this might be the fastest I’ve run in my entire life. The electric hum from the door fades as I mount the outside stairs.

  “You’re not gonna like this,” Deke says out of the corner of his mouth.

  Behind the mesh-fortified glass, a girl bends forward, unwinding chains wrapped around the door handles. Her perfect blond curls hide her face, but I still recognize her—Gretchen Moore, our class president and the biggest brown-noser at school.

  “Oh, just kill me now,” I groan, burying my face in Deke’s shoulder.

  At least once a month, I have to interview Gretchen for the school paper, and the meeting usually ends with us shouting at each other. Anything that benefits the students doesn’t fit into Gretchen’s agenda. She’s only interested in kissing teachers’ butts. Last year, she led an initiative to ban caffeinated drinks from campus vending machines. I can’t fathom how students (namely, me) are supposed to make it through an entire seven hours of high school without coffee or Cokes.

  “Is it too late to hightail it out of here?” I whisper to Deke. “I’d rather face zombies.”

  “Play nice,” he murmurs, throwing me off his shoulder as the door opens.

  “Deeeeeke,” Gretchen purrs, surveying him through fluttering eyelashes. “You didn’t tell me Donna was with you.” Her smile is ultra-fake.

  “Well, I wanted you to open the door.”

  “Ha-ha,” I mutter, as they laugh together and hug. Her hand lingers on his bicep. I notice Deke doesn’t throw her off.

  There’s no time to further acknowledge Gretchen’s presence. The moment we step inside, my phone rings. Caller ID: Dad.

  I whoop in happiness, and shout into the phone, “Why did you abandon me?”

  My dad’s deep baritone booms out of the earpiece. “I’m sorry, sweetie, we had to. From the bridge, we watched you kids scramble across the dock. Someone followed you. I worried he might be infected. And that more of those people might leave the ship to attack you. So we drifted away from the berth. Just for a few minutes. Figured it was safer to hover offshore until we had a plan.”

  Aha. So I had seen someone use the gangplank.

  Beside me, Gretchen laughs at something Deke says.

  “Are you back at the docks now?” I’m totally ready to hop in the car and get away from Gretchen.

  “No, not exactly.” Muffled growls filter through the receiver.

  “Dad, that groaning…was that from the zomb—from the infected people? Are you still trapped on the bridge?”

  “’Fraid so.” Like me, my dad is good at sounding lighthearted when he’s terrified. “We’re not having any luck getting them away from the door. Don’t worry, we’ve only drifted a half mile offshore. I’m not far. But tell me where you are, Donna. Are you waiting in the car?”

  I spend a few minutes relating our adventures. My dad sounds super-relieved to hear we’d escaped the infested parking garage and are now locked inside our
high school.

  “Just stay put until Muriel and I can figure out how to escape. Then we’ll find a way to come back for you and Deke.” Dad sounds surprisingly calm for a man trapped in a room surrounded by zombies. “Just promise you’ll stay inside that school.”

  So much for avoiding Gretchen.

  “I promise, Dad.” The familiar panic churns in my stomach. What if the zombies break down the door? What if this is the last time I ever talk with my father?

  “Maybe this virus thing will wear off in a day or two,” Dad continues in his upbeat voice.

  I really don’t see that happening, but I’ve learned adults tend to avoid reality, and it’s usually best to humor them.

  “You know, neither of us has a phone charger,” my dad reminds me. “Let’s keep this short. I’ll call back in a few hours when we’ve got a plan.”

  I hang up, depressed because my dad’s still trapped in a mega-dangerous situation with only a little old lady and four Taser cartridges. My mood grows even blacker as I realize I’m now stuck in my least favorite place (school), with my least favorite person (Gretchen), while zombies invade my hometown.

  Can my luck get any worse?

  Chapter Six

  Gretchen immediately starts bossing us around—ordering Deke and me to wait upstairs near the auditorium while she rounds up everyone for a student council meeting.

  “A student council meeting?” I ask. “Are you fricking serious?”

  “Come on,” Deke says, dragging me toward the stairs. He exchanges a wink with Gretchen as we leave. Ick. Deke should have better taste.

  Our high school is split into three separate buildings. One’s a pre-fab metal contraption that passes for a gym. Next to it, the main building houses the cafeteria, computer lab, and most of the classrooms. I wouldn’t mind getting stuck there—you know, since it has food and Wi-Fi.

  But we’re trapped in the Arts Complex, an ancient, three-story brick structure with nothing but an auditorium, the teachers’ lounge, and a few classrooms. This was the entire high school back in the olden days—before the new buildings were added. A permanent mustiness hangs in the air, making it feel more like an antique shop than a school.