Pete has managed to find a ruler and points it at the various screens
to alert us to the action. It’s kind of annoying, but I suppose it’s his little reward for Being Right.
The TV screens show black-and-white footage, no sound.
“Not exactly full of customers, is it?” Smitty chews on his thumbnail.
“No one would come to this place unless they had to,” Alice says.
The timestamp on the screens reads 1:43 p.m. About ten minutes
before we arrived in the bus, by my estimate. There’s a young couple
paying their bill at a table by the door, a mother and toddler sitting with a teenage girl eating chips-not-fries, and two men wearing checkered shirts and jeans — builders or road workers, maybe. A couple of cooks are
visible behind the kitchen counter, there’s a waiter and waitress, and a
woman behind the register in the shop.
I spot a random guy arriving with a cart, struggling with the
main door.
“Bet that’s Carrot Man before he costumed up,” I say.
As one, we lean in to check him out. He seems average enough. He
walks through the café, pushing the cart and dragging a large trash bag.
“What’s in the bag?” Smitty says.
The Man Who Would Be Carrot disappears into the bathroom.
“Must be going to change clothes,” I mutter.
“Thank god there are no cameras in there.” Alice says.
“Oh, don’t be coy, Malice.” Smitty leans over me to her. “Bet you love
it. Giant vegetable costumes do it for you, don’t they?” He twinkles at
her and laughs, and she squeals in protest — just the correct amount of
righteous indignation, but I can tell she’s not entirely hating it. I feel a stab of . . . what is that? Jealousy? I’m hit by a wave of nausea and self-loathing. What, I’m jealous of Smitty flirting pathetically with Malice?
Really? Please.
Carrot Man emerges from the bathroom, fully carrotted up, with
skinny legs sticking out of his furry orange costume.
“Be still your beating heart, Malice.” Smitty’s leaning over me to Alice
again. She pushes him away before I can.
Carrot Man wheels his cart down the corridor through the café. As
he passes the woman behind the register in the little shop, he offers her
a sample. She laughs at him and takes a little cup.
“Who’s that?” Alice points at a chubby, middle-aged man wearing a
shirt and tie, entering the café as Carrot Man clumsily exits. He opens
the door for him and makes a shivering motion, telling Carrot Man — if
he didn’t already know — that it’s cold outside.
Carrot Man gives him a sample. He drinks it.
“That’s a dead man walking, that’s who,” says Smitty.
“It’s got to be Gareth’s boss,” I say. “He’s wearing the same sort of
name tag on his shirt.”
The man walks into the shop and talks to the woman at the counter,
leaning over, his shirt straining out of his pants in the back. She hasn’t drunk her juice yet; it’s sitting by the register. He’s gesticulating toward the phone. She picks it up and listens, then shakes her head.
“The phone lines are down already!” Pete taps his ruler on the screen
excitedly.
Meanwhile, the young couple finishes paying for their meal and
leaves. Carrot Man gives them both a sample as they walk past. The
woman knocks hers back in one gulp; the guy sips and makes a face,
then throws the rest into the snow on the steps as he descends. Guess he
didn’t like it much; I can’t blame him. They walk out into the parking lot, picking their way carefully across the icy pavement and into an awesome Mini Cooper with a British flag painted on the roof. Shazaam . . . That’s the car that crashed into the back of our bus!
I shake my head as we watch them start up the car. “They nearly
escaped. If they had left two minutes earlier, they would have totally
missed out on the juice.”
Back in the Cheery Chomper, Gareth’s boss is heading out. He feels
his back pocket and pulls out a phone.
“Won’t work,” predicts Smitty.
It clearly doesn’t. But the man doesn’t seem too surprised. He pulls
out a pack of cigarettes, lights one, and hurries back toward the gas
station, skidding in the snow. Before he gets to the pumps, he turns and
disappears behind the trees.
“Where’d he go?” Smitty cranes his neck as if he can see around corners on the TV. “Oh, come on, at least show us when he turned!”
We watch, glued, but Gareth’s boss has gone.
Back at the Cheery Chomper, Carrot Man is bobbing up and down in
the cold. The little boy is wandering around the café; he can see Carrot
Man in the entranceway. Too wary to go right up to him, he never—
theless is too interested to sit down with his mother and sister. He
wanders a few feet closer. Carrot Man spots him and bends over and
waves through the glass door. The little boy waves back. Carrot Man
holds out a small offering of poison in a plastic cup. Please don’t, I think.
Leave now, leave while you still can. Carrot Man opens the door and takes a step toward him. The boy runs back to the table with his mother and sister. I breathe again.
“Hold up!” Pete shouts. “Here we come!”
In the far right of the first screen, our bus appears, passing the couple
in the Mini Cooper with the painted roof as they make their way toward
the exit. Our bus draws in to the curb at the bottom end of the parking
lot. The doors fly open and my recently deceased class begins to unload,
buoyant and happy and shivering in the cold air.
“Oh my god, that’s me!” Alice cannot contain her glee. “Ugh, I look so
fat!” Glee turns to disgust. “This screen is way out of proportion.”
“No, that’s what you actually look like, Malice,” Smitty says.
Alice swears at him; he chuckles.
Meanwhile, the mother, daughter, and little boy prepare to leave.
There’s an awkwardness about the mother and daughter, as if they’ve
had a disagreement. Yeah, been there, done that. I hope they’re too miffed and distracted to chug some juice as they leave.
At the entrance, Carrot Man is swamped by our classmates, and
although the little boy clearly wants to linger, I breathe a sigh of relief as his sister and mother ignore offers of juice and pull him firmly though the crowd and into an old-looking car in the corner of the parking lot.
But after a second, the mother is out again and heading back to the
Cheery Chomper, looking more pissed off than ever. Maybe she forgot something? I will her to hurry up and get it, and get the hell out again, but I lose her in the scrum of my classmates.
Most of them are in the café now, all holding little cups from Carrot
Man, some in line for snacks, some sitting at tables. We see Pete hiding
in the shop, and Mr. Taylor leaving us on the bus and persuading Carrot
Man to give him a whole carton of juice as he enters the Cheery Chomper.
Carrot Man follows him inside — clearly the cold has won out — and
proceeds to shimmy around the tables and give juice to anyone who was
lucky enough to miss out the first time. The waiters get their share, the
cooks, everyone. Just like Pete said. We watch Alice head toward
the bathrooms, just like she said. So far, their stories check out.
Outside, a car comes into view on the road. It’s the Mini again.
“Look!” I point to it. “Why have they come back?”
We watch as the Mini gets closer and closer to our bus. And then
it jerks to a stop a few feet behind us. The driver’s door opens, a figure gets out. It’s the guy. It’s difficult to see his face from this far away, but it’s clear he’s panicked; he looks desperately from the bus to the Cheery Chomper, trying to make a decision. His girlfriend makes it for
him; she’s getting out of the passenger seat and she looks really pissed.
Like staggering and dribbling kind of pissed. The man stumbles through
the snow toward the bus, dragging his leg like he’s injured, and she
comes zombie-ing after. Just as he reaches the door, he pauses and she’s
on him, wrestling him to the ground. She bites.
“Augh!” the four of us yell in unison, like we couldn’t see that was coming.
Smitty and I share a look, remembering the pool of red in the snow
outside the door. Then the man springs up and rounds the front of the
bus, pursued by his beloved.
“The hand on the windshield,” I whisper. Smitty nods, silent. We
watch the bus shudder as one or both of them get thrown into the side of
it. Not kids messing around as we had guessed at the time, but an attack.
An attack we could have prevented, had we known what was going on
outside? But, of course, how could we?
The man has made it back to the car now. He flings himself into the
driver’s seat just as his girlfriend reaches the front . . . and just as our driver descends the steps of the bus.
“Monkeyfunster,” Smitty says. “I think this is where our driver
gets it.”
Suddenly the screens go blank and the light above us flickers.
Alice squeals.
“What the — ?” Smitty doesn’t finish his sentence. The power cuts out,
plunging us into darkness. Alice gives another yelp, there’s a thud, and Pete cries out, too. I grab at Smitty, and he at me, and for one horrible, desperately embarrassing second we fly into each other’s arms like Shaggy and Scooby Don’t. I immediately propel myself backward, fall
over the box that I was sitting on, and land on something soft, fragrant,
and screamy.
The lights come back on. I’m lying on top of Alice. Smitty is standing above us, with an expression on his face like he’s just had his teeth
punched out. Pete has managed to shimmy up the side of the cabinet and
is sitting on top of it, shaking like a leaf. We all keep absolutely still, and wait to see what happens. Nothing does.
“Nobody panic,” Smitty breathes. “The power goes out all the time in
the country. Doesn’t mean anything.”
“You sure?” I ask.
“Yeah.” Smitty smiles down at us. “Whoa, twosome. Seeing you both
like that reminds me of the dream I had last night.” He winks at me.
“Get the hell off me!” Alice pushes me with a strength that belies her
skinny frame.
“With pleasure!” I shout, none too brilliantly, scrambling to my feet
and avoiding Smitty’s gaze. I turn to Pete, cheeks blazing. “So, a power
cut, you think?”
“Clearly.” He smiles at me and climbs down from his perch. Like he
has a right to enjoy my embarrassment; he’s the one who leapt onto a
file cabinet when the lights went out. I guess when you are used to being
picked on daily, being discovered crouched and shivering on top of a
cabinet — or a toilet — is nothing special.
He looks at the screens. “We’re back on, but that’s not what we were
watching before. The recording has reset.”
We all peer, and see ourselves peering. We’re in real time again.
“Get it back,” Smitty says to Pete. “We were just getting to the
good part.”
“Aw, shall I get you some popcorn?” Alice is brushing herself down
with a vengeance, ready to spit bile at anyone who crosses her.
“Do you think that was the weather?” I ask no one in particular. I
really, really want it to have been the weather. Why else would the power
suddenly go down? “Should we take a look around?”
“Sure.” Smitty’s out the door before I can ask twice, and I’m glad that
I can stop avoiding meeting his eyes. I think about his arms around me.
Shame Attack. I think I actually grasped his butt with one of my hands.
I stretch the offending hand out like I’ve touched acid, trying to shed
the memory. I hope he doesn’t think I did it on purpose. On one of the
TV screens I watch him walk normally out the door and then crumple
into a cringe, head in hands, as soon as he is out of sight. Except he’s not.
I think it takes him a second to realize that we can still see him — and he cringes again. What? I can’t help thinking angrily, Was it so very disgusting that I even touched you, Smitty?
“Maybe it was one of those monsters?”
Alice is talking to me again. I look at her blankly before I realize what
she’s saying. “You mean you think one of those things cut the power?”
Pete shakes his head. “That’s improbable, from what we’ve seen of
them so far. They have basic motor skills, and they seem to be attracted
to things that were familiar to them in their former life. But it’s quite a leap to suggest that they have the wherewithal to cut the power to the building.”
“Yeah. What he said.” My head pounds, and I sit carefully on a box.
I’m not feeling too hot. But it’s best not to mention it under the circs,
especially given my previous fainting fit. Don’t want anyone jumping to
any conclusions. I rub my face with my hands. I must look like a wreck.
Yeah, I know I do — I’ve seen myself on TV. “Anyway, we don’t know for
sure that there are any more of them out there.”
Pete sucks in air through his teeth. “Ah, but we do, don’t we? What
about that couple? You didn’t run into them when you rescued the driver,
did you? Where did they go? Where are they now?”
I sigh. “We need to see the rest of the recording.”
Pete nods. “Besides them, we can’t be sure that everyone in the café
followed the bus down to the garage and got vaporized by Smitty.” He
looks at the TV screens. “And for that matter, where has Gareth got to?
I’d say it’s highly probable there are more of them out there.”
The wind rattles the window. I glance at the screens showing the
parking lot. The snow is still whirling, thick and fast.
Alice shivers. “Hopefully they’ll freeze to death.” She turns to look at
us. “Or Undeath. Whatever.” She smiles. It’s not entirely genuine, but it’s a start. I want to return it, but I’m distracted by a movement on one of the TV screens behind her. The entrance of the café. A huge shape moves
past the door. I nearly fall backward off my box again.
“What?” Alice says.
The shape has gone. I lean in close to the screen that shows the
entrance to the Cheery Chomper. There’s nothing there. Besides, Smitty
is in the café now, on the other side of the glass — he’d have noticed
something outside, wouldn’t he?
“What is it?” Alice says.
“I thought I saw something.”
Pete stares at me. “I didn’t see anything. Which screen?”
I shake my head. “I’m spooked. Imagining stuff.” It could have been
anything. A plastic bag or a branch. The banner!
Yes, that must be
it — Carrot Man’s banner that was flapping away over the entrance. It
must have come loose and blown across the door.
“No bogeymen in sight.” Smitty saunters in, coolness restored.
“Barricades in place, perimeter maintained. Let’s play the rest of the
recording before the power cuts off again.”
I look at him without, you know, really looking. “You think it’s gonna?”
“Could, if this storm keeps up.”
I stand. “Then we should prepare. Find some flashlights, or something.” I look at my watch; it’s three o’clock already, less than an hour
before sunset. Time flies when you’re having fun. I pick my backpack
off the floor. “We should charge our phones, so when we do find somewhere with reception, we can make calls. Maybe we should pack
some emergency supplies in case we have to leave here. We’ve got to start
thinking ahead.”
“We’re leaving here?” Alice says. “And going out into that?” She points
to the snowstorm on the TV. “Um, I think not.”
“It may not be safe to stay,” Pete says. “This is Ground Zero. And who
knows what they’ll hit us with next?”
“There isn’t a they!” Smitty yells at him. “It’s all in your head, Snowballs!”
“Whatever we think” — I try to calm things down — “we need to be
prepared. Get some food together, our warmest clothes, a map. Just
in case.”
Smitty grits his teeth. “Fine. But we watch the rest of this recording
first.”
I don’t know how much I actually want to watch the replay, but we’re halfway through and if nothing else, I hate to walk out on a movie before it’s done. I toss my backpack under the desk and sit myself back down
next to Smitty, being ultra careful that no part of my body touches his.
Pete resumes his position by the play button. Alice rolls her eyes and
makes a big deal out of pulling herself off the couch.
“All right,” she says. “We’ll watch. But let’s at least get some daylight in here while we still have it, so if the power goes off again I’m not squashed by Nelly the Elephant fainting in the dark.” She flicks me a look. I return it. She stands with her back to the window, reaches out a hand for the blind, and pulls it. The blind springs up. Daylight floods the room.
I see the dark shape behind her and my face stretches into a scream.
Undead (ARC) Page 11