Zombified

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Zombified Page 21

by Adam Gallardo


  The Army actually started reclaiming New York City. This basically meant they had to go building by building and door to door in a city that used to hold eight million or so people. I followed the news a lot in those days, and I took every bit of it personally. If the Army had a good day, I’d think it was a sign that things in my own life were getting better. If they experienced a setback of some sort, like when they lost a whole company of soldiers to a nest of zombies, then I believed that meant I’d never be able to make amends for all the things I’d done. It was crazy, but that was where I was.

  The school insisted that if I didn’t go to a support group, I’d have to at least visit with the school counselor. Ms. Bjorn and I had a history. When I was caught smoking Vitamin Z at the end of the previous year, I’d been ordered to visit with her about it. She was nice enough and I got that she meant well, but she’d told me right up front that she was required by law to disclose any criminal activities I might talk about. That made it difficult to talk at all, since criminal activities were the only kind I’d been involved in back then.

  But after my dad died, it was different. I still had to avoid talking about selling drugs, but since I wasn’t doing it on a daily basis, it was easier to talk. Boy, did I talk. I told her everything I could. Once a week, I found myself in her cramped little office, sitting across from her, a desk piled high with student files between us. She was really interested in my zombie-hunting exploits and why I felt compelled to do it.

  “Well,” I said, “zombies are pretty evil. I mean, look, they killed my dad.” Also, I felt responsible because I had gotten a lot of people hooked on a drug that created new zombies. That part I didn’t say.

  “I know they killed your father, Courtney,” she said. “But they hadn’t killed him when you started hunting them. There must have been some motivator before that. How about if you journal about what that might have been?”

  I actually took the journaling seriously—given that there were certain subjects I didn’t dare write about—and it did help me figure some things out. Whenever I found myself reluctant to sit down and write, I’d hear my dad’s voice telling me that someone who wanted to get better had to trust in the process of healing, and then I’d get to work. Even in my imagination, Dad was full of psychobabble.

  Something else that helped ease the pressure—really, two something elses—were that Crystal Beals and Elsa Roberts each approached me at different times to tell me how sorry they were that my dad had died. It was nice to have her talking to me again. She even told me she was sorry for getting so mad at me about Brandon and Vitamin Z.

  The whole time she talked, I remembered Brandon talking about her, and I wondered if they were a thing. Somehow, I just couldn’t bring myself to believe it.

  “It was terrible of you to sell it,” she said, bringing us back to the subject of my moral shortcomings, “but it was his stupid decision to smoke it and get hooked, you know?”

  Gee, thanks, I thought.

  “Anyway, he was the one making decisions,” she said. “It was wrong of me to take it out on you.”

  And Elsa was a friend of a more recent vintage. She’d stopped talking to me when I experienced a temporary bump in social status as a result of dating Brandon last year. But both of them suggested we should get together sometime, and that made me feel good. Or at least it made me feel better. Good was probably a long way off.

  It took the police about a month to wrap up their investigation. They decided that Dad had died by misadventure. I thought that was an interesting term for being ripped apart in a coordinated zombie attack.

  The day after the case was closed, I got a call from a lawyer. Dad had left everything to me, and this lawyer, Rudy Alvarez, would handle all of it until I turned eighteen. I had to go to his office downtown and sign a bunch of papers. Alvarez had a slick smile and equally slicked-back hair. He looked like he’d just gotten back from his bus-stop-bench photo shoot. Gene went with me, which I really appreciated. Signing everything, I felt like I was pretending to be a grown-up. I expected someone to pull off my mask any moment, like on an episode of Scooby-Doo. Gene and the lawyer talked a lot about finance stuff. The lawyer was going to take care of getting the house cleaned, and he recommended hiring a management company to take care of it and to rent it out. He figured that there were always college kids looking for housing.

  Gene told me that was a good idea—it would be a good monthly income. Not that I’d need it. Apparently, Dad had a rider on his insurance that paid out a crapload of money if he was killed in a zombie attack. I guess lots of people had that in those days.

  The two of them decided to set up a bank account for me. They’d put a certain amount into it every month, and if I needed more than that, I had to contact the lawyer. I didn’t know what to say for a minute—it wasn’t every day you figured out you’re a trust-fund baby profiting off your dad’s untimely death.

  “Is there anything else I can do for you?” Alvarez asked.

  “Yeah,” I said, “help me convince this guy to take money from me every month for rent.” I hooked my thumb at Gene. “Because I know he’ll say no.”

  Which he did. The lawyer finally brought him around by telling him that I could more than afford to help with household expenses. “Especially because she’s asking to,” Alvarez said. “She wants to contribute, it seems to me.”

  Gene agreed and I walked out of the office feeling better than when I’d walked in. At least now I knew I wasn’t freeloading.

  One night, about a month later, as I helped Gene clean up after dinner, the phone rang. Diane came into the kitchen and answered it.

  “Hello,” she said. She listened for a while without speaking. At one point she turned and looked at me and I got a chill. Finally, she said, “Just a moment, please.” And she held the phone out.

  “It’s for you, Courtney,” she said. “It’s your mother.”

  I swallowed hard. I hadn’t really expected her to call for some reason.

  I took the phone and stood there staring at the receiver as Diane hustled Gene out of the kitchen.

  Finally, I took a deep breath and put the phone to my ear. “Hello?” I said.

  “Oh, baby,” said a woman on the other end. She sounded like she’d been crying. “Courtney, I just heard about your dad. I’m so sorry, sweetie!” I didn’t bother to point out that nearly two months had gone by since Dad’s death.

  “Thanks,” I said. That felt sort of lame, so I added, “Thanks for calling.”

  “Of course, baby,” she said. “I’d have called sooner, but I just found out. You know your dad and I weren’t really close anymore.”

  You hadn’t called in five years and you’re reminding me that you weren’t close with Dad? You don’t say?

  “Is there anything you need?” she asked.

  I honestly couldn’t think of anything I wanted from her.

  “No,” I said. “I’m fine. I’m staying with the family of a friend.”

  “Oh,” she said, “that’s great! I would have offered to have you come up here, but it’s not a good time right now.”

  “No, that’s fine,” I said.

  “You know, Bill and I are moving into the bigger house,” she pressed on, talking to me like I knew all of this garbage she was spewing. “And then we need to get the nursery ready.”

  “The nursery?” I asked, and I immediately regretted it.

  “Oh, you haven’t heard,” she said, breathless with excitement. “You’re going to be a sister, Courtney! Isn’t that exciting? I’m due in June.”

  I wondered if she remembered that my birthday was in June.

  She blathered on for a while longer, but I had stopped talking. I don’t think she noticed. I kept coming back to the fact that she was relieved when I told her I wouldn’t be moving up to Seattle with her. Probably glad I wasn’t going to be spoiling her nice new family.

  I managed to hold it together while I was on the phone with her, but the moment I grunted
good-bye and hung up, the tears welled up and spilled down my cheeks. I sat on the floor and just wept. For years I’d imagined finally talking to my mom, telling her very calmly how upset I was with her, cataloging her sins against me, Dad, and the world. Instead, I’d sat there and let her tell me all about her perfect little life. She probably thought I was excited for her!

  I felt so dumb and small and useless.

  At some point I heard someone walk into the kitchen and stand over me. After a second, he got down on the floor with me and wrapped an arm around my shoulder. Phil. He didn’t try to comfort me by telling me it was going to be okay. That would have been a lie anyway. Instead, he just let me know he was there. He waited to hear what I needed from him.

  “She didn’t even want me,” I finally choked out.

  “We want you,” he said. We. Not I want you, but “we.” I’d take it for the time being.

  He stayed there until I stopped, then he squeezed me one last time and let me go.

  “I’m sorry about your mom,” Phil said. “If she doesn’t want you around, then she’s an idiot. I can’t believe you think she might have saved the world.”

  “I’m sorry,” I said.

  “Sorry for crying?” he asked.

  “No, Phil,” I said. “I’m not sorry for crying in front of you. I’m sure I’ll be doing more of it.” I took a deep breath. “I cannot believe you’re making me say this,” I then said. “I’m sorry about what happened with Warren.”

  He nodded, but didn’t say anything.

  “I was just frustrated and angry and hurt,” I said, “and stupid. Can’t forget that.”

  “Does seem kind of dumb,” Phil said.

  “And I’ve regretted it ever since it happened.” I wiped my nose on the sleeve of my sweatshirt, which I’m guessing wasn’t super attractive. “I know it hurt you, and I didn’t ever want to do that.”

  “I know,” Phil said.

  “Can you forgive me?” I asked. I was so afraid of what his answer might be.

  “Forgiving is easy,” Phil said. “All you had to do was ask.”

  “I hear a ‘but’ coming.”

  “But,” Phil said, “I’m still trying to trust you again. That’s going to take a while longer.”

  “Anything I can do to speed up the process?”

  “Just keep doing what you’re doing,” he said. “And don’t make out with Warren anymore.”

  It took me a second to realize he was joking. I smiled at him and he returned it.

  “I’ll try,” I said, “but sometimes it just happens. Like tripping....

  “Okay,” I finally said when he didn’t rise to my bait. “No more of that.”

  “Good,” he said. He gave me another hug. “Let’s go watch some TV or something. I’m sure my aunt and uncle are wondering what’s going on in here.”

  I said that sounded like a good idea. Phil stood up. I was sort of bummed that he hadn’t just forgiven me outright, but I understood where he was coming from. It was a huge relief to have apologized. I imagined it would have been easy to get addicted to it—apologizing, I mean. I pictured a life where I went around doing terrible crap and then basically got high from saying how sorry I was.

  “What’s so funny?” Phil asked.

  “Just my brain,” I said.

  He held his hand out to me and helped me up.

  “Well,” he said, “it’s nice to see you smile.”

  Seemed like someone else had told me that before. I decided to try to do it more often. Which was probably what I thought the last time I’d heard it.

  Things became nicely uneventful for a few months after that. I hung out with Crystal a few times, and Elsa, too, so that was nice. I hunkered down and got serious about school. My plan was to take a year off after graduation and wait for Columbia to start accepting applications again. I knew that I was setting myself up for a possible disappointment by pinning all my dreams to just one college—a college that might never open again—but there was no way I’d be able to do anything differently. It had been the plan for so long, I couldn’t imagine changing it.

  The biggest thing that happened during that time was that we celebrated Phil’s birthday. Gene and Diane sprang for all of us, including Cody, to go to Phil’s favorite restaurant, a Vietnamese place that looked like it was one health-code violation away from being closed, but which actually had really awesome food. I got Phil some really nice pens and some art board—the guy at the art supply shop said it was the kind of paper that comics professionals use. Phil said he was super-excited to try it out.

  And a couple of weeks later, we got to take Cody out for his birthday. It was just the three of us; I wasn’t sure where his folks were. We went to a pirate-themed pizza place that was filled with really little kids running and screaming all over the place. It was crazy, but that was where he wanted to go. They also had a pretty decent arcade, including black-light laser tag. Phil bought him a collection of X-Men comics and I got him a gift certificate to a local record shop—which was exactly what Phil had told me to get him. Cody was so knocked out by all of it that it was a little sad, but I refused to get bummed out thinking about it and just had fun. This included lots of rounds of laser tag where I let Cody “kill” me.

  Phil, Cody, and I kept going out on patrol, but we never saw any zombies. Phil thought that maybe a lot of them had been killed in the assault on Buddha’s place. He forgot that they were still able to muster enough forces to attack my house and kill my dad. I didn’t bring that up, because there was nowhere good it might have led.

  “I think they’re lying low,” I said. “You know, biding their time, waiting for us to put down our guard. Saving their strength until just the right time.”

  It was early May by this time, and we had the windows rolled down as we drove. The sky was cloudless and I thought that the city looked nice right then. In darkness. No way would I ever think that in the full light of day.

  “Jeez, Courtney,” Cody said. “They’re the undead, not a division of Nazi tanks or something.”

  “I don’t know,” Phil chimed in. “She’s been right about most everything else zombie-related.”

  “Thank you,” I said to Phil. Then I flipped Cody the bird and blew him a raspberry.

  “I love you, too, Courtney,” he said.

  “What do you think they might be planning?” Phil asked.

  That was the question, and I had no idea what the answer was. I’d applied all of my power to channel Nancy Drew, but I wasn’t able to think of a single damn thing. We’d all noticed that kids at our school had stopped disappearing—something I attributed to the explosion at Buddha’s and the fact that Vitamin Z had dried up overnight. Drug dealers in other towns hadn’t rushed in to fill the vacuum, either. I think the fact that the Army patrolled the highway made that pretty difficult. At least until these theoretical drug dealers figured out who to bribe, anyway.

  I threw up my hands. “I have no idea what they’re thinking. But we need to figure it out—they’re not going to stay quiet forever.”

  And I had a really bad feeling that whatever they did, at least part of it would be aimed at me personally. Brandon apparently held a grudge. Even in the afterlife, he didn’t accept that I’d dumped him. He was like the undead version of Billy Zane in Titanic.

  “We’re not going to see any shufflers tonight,” I said. “Let’s go to the Safeway and get a soda. The one on Center has one of those magic fountains where you can combine all the flavors.”

  No one had any objections, so a few minutes later, we pulled into the parking lot. Off in the far corner of the lot, four or five cars were grouped together, and a bunch of kids stood in the beams of their headlights, just talking and laughing. I never really understood hanging out in parking lots, but I know it was a major pastime for a lot of my classmates. We heard kids laughing as we pulled to a stop.

  “Have you noticed people seem happier or something at school?” Phil asked.

  “Everyone�
��s getting squirrelly for the end of the year,” Cody said. “Finals are in three weeks, graduation is a week after that. We’re almost done!”

  “If we survive that long,” I said.

  “You are always such a ray of sunshine,” Cody said.

  We climbed out of the car and headed toward the store.

  “Courtney?” someone, a girl, called out. “Is that you?”

  This same someone waved at me from the group at the far end of the lot. I had to squint against the brightness of the headlights.

  “Courtney, come on over,” she called.

  “Crystal?” I yelled.

  “Yeah,” she said. “Come say hi!”

  “We’re going inside to get sodas,” I said. “We’ll be right back.”

  “Bring a bag of Doritos!” she yelled at me as we went into the store. We all got our drinks—lime Vanilla Coke for me, thanks!—and I grabbed a bag of Doritos. The boys went off in search of Twinkies and I loitered near the front of the store as they completed their quest. As I studied the covers of the magazines at the checkout stand—I’d never lower myself to actually touching one of them—I heard a man call my name.

  I turned and saw a middle-aged Latino guy standing there in shorts, flip-flops, and a Western Oregon University sweatshirt. He had a cart piled high with food, and a little boy in the kid’s seat. I sort of smiled, not sure if I knew the guy.

  I took in his Fu Manchu mustache. Then my mouth fell open. “Chacho?”

  “Took you long enough,” he said. “Do I look that different out of my uniform?”

  “Yes!” I said. You look like a human dad, not a killing machine.

  I walked over to where he was, and his little boy—a beautiful little kid with huge brown eyes and an unruly mop of brown hair—tracked my every move.

 

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