“I know it’s annoying,” he said. “I’ve been told that a lot.”
“Well,” I said, “it’s twelve thirty now. I’m going to try her.”
I punched in her number and pressed send.
They picked up on the third ring. “Beals residence,” a man’s voice said.
“Good afternoon, sir,” I said. “I was wondering if I might be able to talk to Crystal.” There, Phil wasn’t the only one who was able to turn on the politeness.
“May I ask who’s calling?” he asked.
“Please tell her it’s Courtney,” I said.
There was a pause.
“Courtney Hart?” the man asked. I said yes. “Courtney, I remember you. This is Rob, Crystal’s dad. Gosh, it used to seem like you lived here with us. We haven’t seen much of you lately.”
“No, sir,” I said. “I haven’t been around much.” Like, for the last four or five years.
“Well,” he said, “let me go get her. It was nice to talk with you, Courtney. I hope we can see you soon.” He set the phone down and called for Crystal.
Phil gave me a look, wondering what was going on.
“I used to hang out over there a lot,” I said to him. “He remembered me.”
Over the phone, I heard Crystal come into the room and ask what was up. Her dad told her I was on the line for her.
“Courtney!” she said. “How are you?” She pitched her voice lower. “You were smart to leave Safeway when you did. Me and Gabe barely made it out of there when the police showed up.”
“I’m glad you got away,” I said. “Listen, the reason I called, Crystal . . . It’s about the senior kegger. Are you somewhere you can talk?”
“I can’t tell you anything about that,” she said. “You know that.” Her tone was scolding, like I was a little kid she’d caught being naughty.
“Okay,” I said. “Just let me ask you a question. Not about the location.”
“I guess that’d be okay,” she said, dubious.
“When he was still alive,” I said, “was Brandon helping to plan the thing?”
Silence on the other end of the phone.
“I mean, he was friends with those guys, right? With Mike and Tyler and Dillon?”
“It’s Michael,” she said.
“Right,” I said. “He was friends with them, though, right?”
“Yeah.”
“And was he helping to plan the kegger?” I asked.
“I think so,” she said. “What’s this about, Courtney?”
“One more question, Crystal,” I said. “I’m just going to ask a yes or no question. All you have to do is answer it, okay?”
“Maybe,” she said.
“The kegger is going to be out at Brandon’s cabin, isn’t it?” I asked.
She gasped. Then she said, “I still can’t tell you, Courtney. I don’t even know why it’s so important for you to know.”
“Okay,” I said. “I’ll stop pressing you. Sorry. I was just trying to figure out if a hunch I had was correct. You know how much I love to be right.”
Phil cocked an eyebrow at me over that. I waved away his look.
“Yeah, I guess I’ve noticed that,” Crystal said.
“We should get together this week,” I said. “We can grab something to eat, or coffee. My treat. And I won’t bring up the kegger, I promise.”
“I’d like that,” Crystal said. “Yeah, let’s keep in touch and do that.”
We exchanged a few more pleasantries and then we hung up.
“The kegger is definitely at the cabin,” I said.
“And Brandon was planning it when he was alive,” Phil said, “so we can guess that he’ll remember that now that he’s a zombie.”
“I think so,” I said. “If we can call what he does ‘remembering. ’ ”
“How many seniors will be there?” Phil asked.
“I don’t know,” I said. “A lot. Like ninety percent of the seniors show up, right? What’s ninety percent of a lot?”
He sat back in the chair, arms crossed over his chest, and stared at the ceiling.
“What do we do now?” he asked finally.
“I’m not sure,” I said. “Well, that’s not true. I know what we have to do, I’m just not sure how to do it.”
He stopped staring at the ceiling. “What do we have to do?”
“We have to convince everyone that there’s going to be a zombie attack at the senior kegger. And then . . .” I trailed off because the next part seemed crazy even to me.
“And then what?” Phil asked.
“And then we have to convince them all to go anyway,” I said.
Having such a monumental task ahead of us, we did what any other people in our situation might do. We waited for it to get dark, then we sneaked out of the house to go hunt zombies.
I mean, sometimes there’s just nothing like ripping into a bunch of the undead to clear your head. If we were able to find any, anyway. So we treated it like a Sunday drive—windows down, music on. Pleasant. We’d just happened to bring some deadly weapons along just in case.
I asked Phil to lay off the punk music, so we listened to this British guy named Billy Bragg. Phil said he was a punk folk singer. I was dubious until he popped in the CD, and then I was won over pretty quickly.
We headed right for the outskirts of town since that was the last place we’d run into any Zs. We were in Phil’s car with him behind the wheel. I was seriously thinking I needed to sell the Subaru that Dad left me since I didn’t really drive it. Or maybe I’d give it to Phil to make up for how often he’d had to taxi me around to different places. As we drove, I did my best to peer into every shadow as we drove slowly down the rural roads. I was seriously thinking about paying for one of those super-bright lights that can be controlled from inside the car. The kind the police have. I would definitely be able to afford it. It wasn’t like I was spending my money on much else.
I sat up a little straighter when a thought popped into my head.
“We didn’t call Cody,” I said. “We’ve never gone out hunting without him.”
Phil grimaced. “We can’t tell him about this,” he said. “Especially if we find something.”
“I can’t believe we forgot.”
We drove on for a while, stopping from time to time to study a yard where maybe we’d seen movement. The moon was only half full, but it seemed like it was bright enough for what we were doing. There didn’t seem to be any shufflers around.
“Did he tell you he took that girl out?” Phil asked. “Hannah?”
“No,” I said. “What did he tell you?”
He got a sort of pained look. “Maybe I shouldn’t have said anything. If he’d wanted you to know . . .”
“Too late now, mister,” I said. “You brought it up. Besides boyfriends and girlfriends don’t keep things from one another.”
As soon as it was out of my mouth, I realized what I’d said.
“Not that we’re, you know,” I said. “I wasn’t trying to imply . . .” I didn’t know how to finish.
“You’re funny,” Phil said. “One minute, you’re like Wonder Woman—kicking ass, taking no prisoners. Then sometimes I almost swear you stepped out of some sort of, I don’t know, Victorian novel where none of the characters are allowed to actually talk about what they’re feeling.”
“You and I both know that I can talk about my feelings,” I said.
“Sometimes,” he said. “Sure, but sometimes, the most obvious times, it’s like you try to pretend you don’t have feelings at all.”
“The most obvious?” I asked.
“Yes.”
I didn’t believe it. My superpower used to be the ability to hide any emotion—that and Reed Richards–level intelligence, of course—and now the boy who couldn’t comprehend human interactions was able to read me like an insecure book. Fantastic.
“Can other people see these feelings?” I asked. “Or is it just you?”
“What’s tha
t?” he asked, pointing up the road.
From where we were, it looked like a house up the road was having a party. The front door was open, light spilled out into the yard, and a bunch of people were crowded around the front door.
“Get closer,” I said.
Phil gunned the gas, the acceleration pushing me back into my seat.
When we got up to the house, I saw it wasn’t a party at all.
A one-level farmhouse was under attack by zombies. They were crowding into the front door, creating a bottleneck. I counted at least a dozen of the creeps.
There was a sturdy metal rail fence all around the place, its gate twisted and open with the effort the zombies used to push it in until the chain keeping it closed snapped. A zombie lay on the ground just past the gate—it must have been semi-crushed by the crowd that charged the gate. It was down, but still trying to crawl to meet up with its buddies.
Phil pulled the car into the drive and made sure to park the car’s front tire right on the prone zombie.
“Phil,” I said. “There are too many of them for us to handle. We need to call the cops.”
He killed the engine, and we heard a scream coming from inside the house. High-pitched, it was either a woman or a kid.
“You stay and call the cops,” he said.
He climbed out, slammed his door, then went to the back of the car, where he keyed open the trunk. He came back into view a second later carrying the shotgun Buddha had given him. He racked a shell into the chamber as he walked to the house.
Dammit. I climbed out and ran to the trunk, which he’d left open. I grabbed my wrecking tool. Then I checked to make sure I had my pistol and speed loaders.
As I ran to the house, I saw Phil approach the group of zombies who were re-creating a Three Stooges routine in the front door. They never even saw him as he walked right up, stopped, and raised the shotgun to his shoulder.
His first shot took out two of the things. He racked another round and fired. Then he ran a little ways back toward me, turned, and waited.
I caught up with him and drew my revolver.
The runners figured out that something new was happening outside. A group of them peeled away from the house and ran right for us. Phil took the time to load a few more shells into the shotgun’s magazine. His face was completely blank. I could take lessons from him on how to hide my emotions.
As the first runners got to us, Phil raised his gun and fired, and kept firing. He didn’t need to tell me to do the same.
I pulled the trigger six times pretty quickly. I wasn’t sure how many I got, but more were coming. There wasn’t time to reload, not even with the speed loaders. I holstered the pistol and raised the wrecking tool. Phil got off a couple of shots, then he was empty. He raised the shotgun like a club.
They were on us in seconds. A guy with a mangled eye and a JUST DO IT shirt ran at me, and I buried the blade of the tool in his skull. He kept going for a few steps before falling. I used his momentum to wrench the tool out of his noggin. I heard Phil crack open a zombie’s head next to me, but didn’t check on him. By the time I stood up, another runner was right on top of me. I fell backward and swung at the thing’s legs as it ran past. It went sprawling into the grass, its right leg a few feet behind it. I’d have to deal with that one later; more were coming.
A shotgun blast came from the house, then I heard yelling in some language I didn’t recognize.
I barely had time to react as the next zombie, a girl in a miniskirt and UGGs—very fashionable—came at me. The best I was able to manage was to club her on the shoulder and knock her down. I jumped down on her chest, raised the wrecking tool, and brought the spike down right on the center of her forehead.
“Courtney!” Phil called. He struggled with a huge biker-looking dude with no lower jaw, using the shotgun to keep the guy at bay. At least biting seemed like less of a danger. The biker must have been the last zombie—I didn’t see any others.
I tried to pull the wrecking tool out of the skull of the chick, but it didn’t budge. How deep had I sunk it in? Did it go all the way into the ground? Screw it, I thought. I stood and drew my pistol. I popped the cylinder and ejected the empty shells. As quick as I was able, I got out one of the speed loaders and fumbled with it. I watched it tumble into the grass.
“Shit,” I said.
“Courtney!” Phil and the biker zombie went down.
I couldn’t see the loader I’d dropped. I went to get the one that was still in its pouch on my belt.
A shotgun roared right next to us, and the biker zombie flew off of Phil.
A guy who looked like he’d just stepped out of a high school production of Fiddler on the Roof stood there with a double-barrel shotgun. He had a huge, bushy beard and wore something that looked like a peasant’s shirt. He cracked the thing open and ejected the spent shells. He then reloaded it and snapped the barrels back into place. The whole time he did that, he kept up a steady stream of muttering in what I thought was Russian. I wasn’t able to understand any of it, but I’d know a steady stream of cursing in any language.
The biker zombie lay on his back and was trying to right himself like a turtle. The Russian dude walked up to him, put the barrel of the shotgun right up to his face, and pulled the trigger.
The Russian then noticed the zombie whose leg I’d chopped off. He walked over to it and gave it the same treatment he’d given its biker friend.
Phil and I hadn’t moved since the shotgun-toting Russian had come out and made his presence known. I think we were too shocked to do anything, but now we’d recovered. Phil slowly stood, and I found the speed loader I’d dropped.
“You okay?” the Russian asked us. He walked over to me and gave me a once-over. “You hurt? Scratched?”
“I’m okay,” I said.
“And you?” he asked Phil.
Phil kind of patted himself down. “I’m all right,” he said.
Instead of saying anything else, the dude rushed up and took Phil in a huge hug. He actually lifted Phil’s feet off the ground. When he set Phil down, he turned and smiled at me.
“Thank you so much,” he said. I thought he’d be happy with that, but then he charged me and gave me the same kind of hug he’d given Phil. All the air rushed out of my lungs. Jesus, he might have just hugged the zombies to death.
A woman called something in Russian from inside the house, and the guy answered back in the same language. Right in my ear.
He set me down as a woman wearing a long peasant dress and white head covering came out into the yard. She carried a baby, maybe a year old, and two little girls stood tentatively in the doorway looking out at us.
“I don’t know where you come from,” the Russian said to us, “but I thought my family was dead. Thank you.”
“You’re all okay?” Phil asked.
“Yes, all,” the guy said. “All of us. I got us into cellar when the zombies attack.” When he said it, it sounded like “zumbias.” “They were breaking down cellar door when you come.”
“Well,” I said, “we’re glad everyone is fine.”
“You come in,” he said to us. “You come in and clean up.” He yelled at his wife in Russian again. “We have food, drink. Please.”
“We can’t,” Phil said. “We were just passing by when we . . . when we saw. We need to be going.”
The guy’s face fell, sad we’d rejected his offer. Then a look of wonder came over him.
“You just passing by?” he asked. “And you stop to help? You are sent by God.”
We really weren’t, I almost said.
“Maybe we were,” Phil said. “I’ve heard he works in mysterious ways.”
The Russian laughed at that, then hugged Phil again. Then hugged me. He had tears coming down his face by then, and they fell into his beard and made it glisten like dew in a thick, shaggy bush.
He finally let us go, following us to the car, singing our praises and telling us God smiled on us. He kept shaking Phil’s hand
as Phil tried to get in the car. The moaning of the zombie underneath the car’s wheels finally tore his attention away from us.
“You go now,” he said to us. “I clean up here.” He reloaded his shotgun.
Phil started the car and backed up onto the road. He waved one last time at the Russian and then at the guy’s little family back up at the house. The two girls in the doorway waved back shy little waves.
We heard the pop pop of two shotgun blasts as we drove away.
“I knew there were a lot of Russian Orthodox who lived out here,” Phil said, “but I’ve never met any of them. They mostly homeschool their kids.”
“That’s very interesting,” I said. “You know what else is interesting?”
“What’s that?” Phil asked.
“You running into a huge crowd of zombies and not waiting for any kind of help whatsoever!” I yelled at him. “That was super-interesting.”
I was so angry, I pounded on the dashboard and yelled. It felt dramatic and petty, but I also needed that right then.
“You came and helped out eventually,” Phil said. “I knew you would.”
“Not the point,” I shouted. My heart pounded, and I heard my blood rushing in my ears.
“The point is, you could have been hurt or killed and . . . and what the hell would I do then?” I asked.
He didn’t answer. What answer was there to give? He just continued driving on for a few minutes.
Then, very abruptly, he pulled the car off the road and threw it into park. I was jerked back and forth by all the sudden movements.
“What the hell, Phil?” I asked.
“I was seven years old,” he said. He turned in his seat to face me, his left arm draped over the steering wheel.
“What are you talking about?”
“I was seven years old,” he repeated and something about the flat way he said it, a flatness masking anger or something scarier, made me shut up. “This was a couple of months after the dead came back. Do you remember what it was like back then?”
I nodded.
“People either thought it was the end of the world,” he said, “or they thought it was all going to blow over any day. That was before everyone had fences and gates. Hell, some people, like my family, hadn’t even gone out to buy guns yet.
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