Dead City

by James Ponti

  Contents

  Acknowledgments

  Prologue: You’re Probably Wondering Why There’s a Dead Body in the Bathroom . . .

  Chapter 1: That Weird Bigelow Girl

  Chapter 2: Popsicles and Vanilla

  Chapter 3: The Reason I Hate Swans

  Chapter 4: Why I Floss on a Daily Basis

  Chapter 5: I’d Better Get Used to Creepy Guys Who Want to Kill Me

  Chapter 6: Things You Should Never Touch in a Subway Tunnel and Other Lessons

  Chapter 7: Killing Time

  Chapter 8: If You’ve Ever Wanted to Know a Good Place to Meet Zombies . . .

  Chapter 9: The City That Really Never Sleeps

  Chapter 10: It’s Time to Get My Zeke On

  Chapter 11: I Get Called to the Principal’s Office . . . and It’s a Good Thing

  Chapter 12: How to Set a Trap

  Chapter 13: I Meet the One and Only Cornelius Blackwell

  Chapter 14: Careful What You Wish For

  Chapter 15: Big Zombies, Little Women

  Chapter 16: Geek Mythology

  Chapter 17: Book of Secrets

  Chapter 18: Party Crasher

  Chapter 19: The Wildest Ride in Manhattan

  Chapter 20: I Create a Fake Identity

  Chapter 21: The Mayor of Dead City

  Chapter 22: Consequences

  Chapter 23: You’re Probably (Still) Wondering Why There’s a Dead Body in the Bathroom

  Chapter 24: Reckoning

  About James Ponti

  For Denise:

  wife, muse, and all-around cool chick

  Acknowledgments

  Only one name goes on the title page, but so many people go into bringing a book to life. I am beyond grateful for the entire Aladdin team, who did everything from undangling my modifiers to designing the look of the book. Triple thanks to my guardian angels, Fiona Simpson and Bethany Buck. If I had an Omega Team of my own, you’d be the first two I’d pick.

  I leaned heavily on a small circle of dedicated readers who offered encouragement and suggestions along the way. This was especially true of Kim, Kim, Wyatt, and Adam. I’m leaving off your last names because I don’t want any other writers to steal you. And I leaned even more heavily on my amazing literary agent, Rosemary Stimola. In addition to being accomplished in three separate careers, you’re quite the amateur psychologist, strategic planner, and friend.

  And finally, while all of the undead characters in this book are fictional, there were many sleep-deprived nights when I began to exhibit the traits of the worst Level 3 zombies. I cannot say enough about my wife and kids for putting up with it all. You amaze me every day.

  You’re Probably Wondering Why There’s a Dead Body in the Bathroom . . .

  I hate zombies.

  I know that sounds prejudiced. I’m sure some zombies are really nice to kittens and love their parents. But it’s been my experience that most are not the kind of people you want sending you friend requests.

  Consider my current situation. Instead of eating pizza with my teammates as they celebrate my surprise victory at the St. Andrew’s Prep fencing tournament, I’m trapped in a locker-room toilet stall.

  With a dead body.

  It’s not exactly the Saturday I had planned. I wasn’t even supposed to compete in the tournament. Since most of the girls on the team are juniors and seniors and I’m in seventh grade, I was just going to be an alternate. But Hannah Gilbert didn’t show up, and I filled in for her at the last moment. Five matches later my teammates were jumping up and down and pouring Gatorade on my head.

  And that was the first problem.

  I may not be the girliest girl, but I didn’t really want to ride the subway with sticky orange hair. So I decided to clean up while everyone else headed down to the pizzeria to get a table and order a couple of large pies.

  I had just finished my shower when I heard zombie noises coming my way. (I know, they hate to be called the z-word, but I hate being attacked in the bathroom, so I guess we’re even.)

  At first I thought it was one of my teammates playing a joke on me. But when I saw the reflection of the walking dead guy in the mirror, I realized it was Life playing a joke on me. I mean, is it too much to ask for just a couple hours of normal?

  To make matters worse, this zombie and I had something of a history. During an earlier encounter, I sort of chopped off his left hand. I won’t go into the details, but trust me when I say it was a “have to” situation. Anyway, now he was looking to settle a grudge, and all my gear was in a bag on the other side of the locker room. Too bad, because moments like these were the reason I took up fencing in the first place.

  He looked at me with his cold dead eyes and waved his stump in my face to remind me why he was in such a bad mood. All I had to protect myself with was the towel I was wearing and my flat iron. Since I was not about to let Mr. Evil Dead see me naked, I went with the flat iron.

  My first move was to slash him across the face, which was a total waste of time. Yes, it burned a lot of flesh. But since zombies feel no pain, it didn’t slow him down one bit. Plus, no way was I ever going to let that flat iron touch my hair again, so I was down thirty bucks and I still had a zombie problem.

  Next, he slammed me against the wall. That hurt unbelievably bad and turned my shoulder purple. (A color I like in clothes, but not so much when it comes to skin tone.) On the bright side, when I got back up I was in the perfect position for a ballestra, my favorite fencing move. It combines a jump forward with a lunge, and it worked like a charm.

  The flat iron punctured his rib cage and went deep into his chest. It got stuck when I tried to yank it out, so I just started flicking it open and shut inside his body. This distracted him long enough for me to grab him at the base of the skull and slam his head into the marble countertop.

  I don’t know how much tuition runs at St. Andrew’s, but their bathrooms have some high-quality marble. He went from undead to just plain dead on the spot.

  All told, it took about forty seconds. But that’s the problem with killing zombies. It’s like when my dad and I make spaghetti sauce together. The hard part’s not so much the doing as it is the cleanup afterward.

  If this had been a public-school locker room, there would have been some gray jumbo-sized garbage cans nearby, and I probably could’ve taken care of cleanup by myself. But apparently the girls of St. Andrew’s don’t throw anything away, because all they had was a tiny wastebasket and some recycling bins. There were bins for paper, plastic, and glass, but none for rotting corpses. Go figure.

  That meant I had to drag the body into a stall, text my friends for help, and call my coach with an excuse about how I had to go straight home. Now I’m stuck here sitting on a toilet, my hair’s a total mess, and after two bottles of hand sanitizer, I still feel like I’ve got dead guy all over me. And don’t even get me started about how hungry I am!

  If you had told me any of this a few months ago, I would have said you needed to visit the school nurse. That’s because before I was Molly Bigelow, superhero zombie terminator, I was just an invisible girl in the back of the classroom who you’d probably never notice.

  I’m sure none of this makes any sense. I mean, it’s still hard for me to understand, and I’m the one who just did it. So while I wait for help to arrive, I’ll try to explain. I understand if you don’t believe it, but trust me when I say that every word is true.

  It all started more than a hundred years ago, when an explosion killed thirteen men digging one of New York’s first subway tunnels. But my part didn’t begin until one day last summer, when I was hanging out at the morgue. . . .

  That Weird Bigelow Girl

  It was the last Friday of summer vacation, and I was running late. I’d made it halfway out the front
door when I heard my dad call out from the kitchen.

  “Molly, you forgot something.”

  “I took the trash out last night,” I answered.

  “Not the trash.”

  I started to run through a quick mental list of my chores. “I’ve got my lunch right here,” I said, holding up my brown bag.

  “Not your lunch.”

  I rolled my eyes and walked back to the kitchen doorway to look at him. He’d worked the late shift and was still wearing his navy blue paramedic’s uniform as he hunched over a bowl of cereal.

  “You want to give me a hint?”

  He smiled that goofy dad smile and raised his cheek up to be kissed.

  “Seriously?”

  “What?” he answered. “You’re worried someone might see you in our apartment? Worried that it could ruin your reputation?”

  “It’s not that. It’s just that I’m not a little kid,” I explained. “I don’t need a kiss every time I go outside.”

  “Notice the cheek,” he said, tapping it for emphasis. “I get the kiss, not you.”

  It was pointless to argue, so I walked over and gave him a peck on the cheek. As I did, he turned his head and gave me one too.

  “Gotcha,” he said with a movie villain’s laugh. “By the way, last night I used those same lips to give mouth-to-mouth resuscitation to this really old woman. She was scary looking and had bad breath. She even had a little mustache thing going on.” He added a couple of hacking coughs. “I hope I didn’t catch something.”

  “You see what I mean?” I said with exasperation. “Nothing in my life can be normal.”

  “Normal?” He laughed. “Aren’t you the girl on her way to hang out . . . at the morgue?”

  I tried to give him my scrunched-up angry face, but I couldn’t help laughing. He kind of had a point, so I rewarded him with an unsolicited good-bye hug.

  He smiled. “Was that so hard?”

  “Can I go now?”

  “You can go. Say hi to Dr. H for me.”

  “I will,” I answered as I hurried out the door and down the hall.

  I do realize that it’s not normal for a girl my age to hang out at the morgue. (Okay, I realize that it’s not normal for a girl of any age to hang out at the morgue.) But I guess the first thing you should know about me is that I’m not exactly a cookie-cutter kind of girl. Even if I wanted to be, I think my mother had other plans.

  When I begged her to put me in ballet class, she somehow convinced me that Jeet Kune Do was a better fit. So after school on Tuesdays and Thursdays, when the rest of the girls were learning pirouettes and grand jetés, I was down the hall mastering the martial art of the intercepting fist.

  And when I wanted to join the Brownies, she signed me up for the New York City Audubon Society’s Junior Birder program instead. As a result, I don’t know a thing about cookies or camping but can identify sixty-eight different varieties of birds known to inhabit the five boroughs.

  She even led me to the morgue.

  My mom was a forensic pathologist for the New York City Office of Chief Medical Examiner. When the police needed help figuring out precisely how somebody died, they called her. She was really good at her job. The best. Sometimes she was even on TV or in the newspaper when she had to testify at a murder trial.

  I know it sounds gory and gross, but she loved it. She liked to say that “even after someone dies, they still have a story to tell.”

  One Friday when I was seven years old, my grandma was supposed to watch me. At the last minute she couldn’t make it, and Mom had no choice but to take me to work with her.

  I can still remember how terrified I was as we rode the subway into the city. I’d always pictured her office looking like something out of a horror movie, with dead bodies scattered all over the place. But it wasn’t like that at all. It turned out to be the most amazing science lab I could have ever imagined. I liked everything about it, except for the dead bodies. But they were mostly kept out of the way.

  Going to the morgue became our thing to do. During the summers I went to work with her every Friday. She was careful not to let me see anything too gross, because she didn’t want to give me nightmares. But she taught me all kinds of experiments and showed me how to use the cool equipment. Eventually, I even got less and less freaked out by the dead people.

  “Death is part of the natural order of life,” she would explain. “You shouldn’t be scared of it. You should be respectful of it.”

  A couple of years later, when they diagnosed her cancer and she started going to chemotherapy, she used the morgue to help prepare me, in case she died. She explained that while the human body was amazing, it had limitations. She wanted me to know that when her body gave out, her spirit and soul would still live on in me and my sister.

  Mom died two summers ago. It was a Sunday morning, and I remember every single thing about that day. I remember the smell of the pretzels for sale outside the hospital and the mechanical sounds of the monitors in her room. I remember that everything about her looked pale and weak and unrecognizable—except her eyes.

  My mom had mismatched eyes. It’s called “heterochromia,” and I have it too. My left eye is blue and my right is green, just like hers. She said it was our special genetic bond.

  That day, I looked deep into her eyes. Everything else was failing, but they still looked as sharp and bright as ever.

  “Even after someone dies . . . ,” she whispered.

  “They still have a story to tell,” I finished.

  She smiled and then added, “That’s right, and my story is going to be told by you.”

  I was amazed by how many people came to her funeral. The policemen who worked with her on cases and the paramedics and firemen from my dad’s station house were all there wearing their dress uniforms. They looked so big and strong. And every one of them cried.

  Everyone cried that day . . . but me.

  The following Friday, I rode the subway into the city and went to her office like I always had. I don’t really know what I was thinking or expecting. It was just a habit. But nobody said anything about it or asked me why I was there. They just acted like I belonged.

  That day I hung out with Dr. Hidalgo, my mom’s best friend. I’ve been going back and hanging out in his office on summer Fridays ever since. And because this was the last Friday of summer vacation, I didn’t want to be late.

  “Waiiiit!” I yelled as I raced down the hall.

  I sprinted the last few strides and managed to jam my hand inside the elevator just as the door was closing. When it sprang back open to reveal who was riding it, I wished that I had just slowed down and waited for the next one.

  There was Mrs. Papadakis, whose two favorite hobbies are gossiping and tanning. Judging by her bathing suit, which was inappropriate by at least thirty years and sixty pounds, she was on her way to the courtyard to do both with a group of old ladies I call the Leather Bags. You always have to be careful about what you say or do around her, because anything slightly embarrassing is bound to be the talk of the building by the end of the day.

  Next to her were Dena and Dana Salinger, twin sisters from down the hall who like to do everything together—especially torment me. One time they pinned me in the elevator and forced me to ride all the way to the fifteenth floor. They pushed me out into the hallway, even though they knew I was terrified of heights and never went above the third floor.

  Today they wore leopard-print bikini tops and matching short shorts and were headed to Astoria Park, a huge public pool just down the street from our apartment building.

  But the person I dreaded most was the girl with the Salingers. The one who was giving me the stink eye.

  It was my sister, Beth.

  Normally, Beth and I have an “ignorance is bliss” policy when we cross paths away from home. She ignores me and I’m blissful about it. It’s not that we don’t love each other. It’s just I’m in middle school, and she’s in high school. I’m brainy and nerdy, and she’
s cool and popular. But as I stepped into the elevator, I was pretty sure she was going to say something.

  “What do you think you’re doing with that jacket?” she demanded.

  Did I forget to mention that while everyone else looked like they stepped out of the swimsuit edition of Queens Apartment Living, I was wearing jeans, a long-sleeved T-shirt, and, most important to Beth, carrying a bright pink ski parka.

  “You know,” she continued, “the jacket that belongs in my closet.”

  Bank vaults had nothing on my sister when it came to protecting her clothes. That’s the reason I was running late. I’d waited inside the apartment for nearly forty minutes after she’d left, just to avoid the possibility of bumping into her. Now I was stuck with her on the world’s slowest elevator. Apparently, it had taken the Salingers longer than usual to spray on their fake tans.

  “It’s Friday,” I explained. “You know how cold it gets in the morgue.”

  “The morgue?” Mrs. Papadakis screeched, her Queens accent exaggerating the word. “Did somebody die?”

  “No,” I answered sheepishly.

  “Then why are you going to the morgue?”

  I didn’t know what to say, so I just told the truth. “I like to hang out there.”

  Beth cringed. It was bad enough that her little sister was “that weird Bigelow girl from the third floor.” She didn’t need everyone to know how weird I really was.

  “You hang out at a morgue?” Dana said.

  “Your sister is a total freak, Beth,” Dena added.

  Beth shot them a look that seemed almost protective of me. But then she gave me one that was even angrier. “What’s wrong with your jacket?”

  “I got cadaver juice on it last week,” I said as though that was a normal conversation topic. “I’ve washed it seven times, but it still stinks.”

  Mrs. Papadakis almost threw up at the mention of “cadaver juice.”

  “So your brilliant idea was to get some on mine?”

  “No. I won’t. I promise. Dr. H isn’t even doing an autopsy today. I called and checked.”