I was scrabbling around for another hymn book. “Take this!” said my mom. “Throw it good!”
I don’t understand parents. I was In Trouble for that just a minute ago.
But as I hauled back my arm to throw, Francine stepped up onto the pew behind Mr. Phalen and thwacked him over the head with the stool.
Knocked him flat.
Stretched out on the carpet.
Francine did a little victory dance, which I guess wasn’t right, being in church and all.
My mom fainted. Pastor Linda fainted. About half the people there fainted.
I’m not sure what happened next.
19
The car ride home was real quiet, I can tell you that. Mom turned the radio to a station that plays Top Forty stuff, the kind she never listens to. Turned it up real loud. Some girl from a Disney show was complaining about her boyfriend. Dad gripped the wheel like it was gonna come off in his hands.
Honor smiled at me and squeezed my hand.
When we drove past the Midas Muffler, the homeless guy wasn’t eating out of the donut store dumpster. He was biting the man from Midas. I think that was what his overalls said, but there was too much blood on them to tell. Serious biting. Guess the homeless guy was a zombie all along. My bad first time round.
I was surprised too. I didn’t think Midas Muffler was open on a Sunday.
I didn’t mention it to Mom and Dad. I figured if they didn’t see it, they didn’t need me to tell them about it. I know when to shut up.
Sometimes I do, anyway.
We pulled into our driveway. Dad said something about pulling up weeds this afternoon. Mom said he should because it was supposed to rain later.
Nobody said anything about Mr. Phalen going all “BRAIIIINNNNSSSS!!!!!” in church, or Francine using the piano stool like she was chopping firewood.
“You did good,” whispered Honor. “He was a zombie, right?”
KYLE: So, that was it from your folks? Nothing else?
LARRY: Nuh-uh. Like it never happened.
KYLE: That’s weird.
LARRY: Adults. Go figure.
I called Jermaine from the phone in the hallway—Mom and Dad weren’t around—and told him what had happened. His family stays in bed late on Sundays and goes out for something they call brunch, whatever that means. It sounds way better than church to me. There are pancakes.
“Dang!” said Jermaine. “Double dang!”
“Have you seen any zombies?” I asked.
“Nuh-uh. Although the waitress at Denny’s was pretty slow.”
See, that’s the thing with Jermaine. I wish he’d take things more seriously sometimes.
“Hold on, Larry. I’ve got another call. Later, okay?”
I hung up and the phone rang again about two minutes later. I answered it.
“Hey, is this Larry? I need to talk to Larry!”
“Who is this?” I said. All the calls we get are for Mom or Honor. Not for me. Okay, Jermaine calls me. Nobody else calls me. And this wasn’t Jermaine.
“Duh, it’s Francine! I need you to come outside and help me. Bring your bat!”
“Uh, okay. Where are you?”
“Outside, like I said!”
I looked out the window.
Francine was looking back at me over the neighbor’s fence. I guessed she was hiding, ’cause she was hunched down between an old shed and a tree. She had a cell phone and a lacrosse stick.
“Quit staring and come out!” she said again. “And bring that gosh-darn bat!”
ZOMBIE TIP
The bossiest people are often the best zombie hunters. They don’t care if they hurt someone’s feelings, and smashing someone over the head with a lacrosse stick is just the kind of thoughtless thing a bossy person might do without worrying about it.
20
Francine explained it to me while we cut through old Mrs. Jackson’s yard and out to a side street.
“I snuck out while my mom and dad were arguing about what to do with me. I mean, after what happened in church.”
“Huh,” I replied. “My folks are acting like nothing happened in church.”
“Yeah, well mine were fighting over whether I just brained a longtime church member or saved us from some sort of horrible death!”
Well, at least the Brabanskys talked about what had happened. My parents acted like everything was just normal.
“Come on!” said Francine. “We gotta get over to Oak Street. Jermaine’s meeting us there with his BB gun.”
“Jermaine Holden? You know Jermaine?”
“Not really—I mean, he goes to our school and everything. But I heard he saved you from that zombie boy at the baseball game, and who else am I gonna ask? So I looked up his number in the phone book and wrote it down. I called him right before I got you.”
Jermaine was waiting at the corner of Oak and Third. He had his BB gun wrapped up inside a coat, so nobody would give him trouble. You know how adults are. You could take somebody’s eye out with that thing!
Francine’s phone rang. “Uh-huh. Right. No, we’re on our way. No, you can kick her in the head as much as you like. It doesn’t matter if she’s head cheerleader. She’s a zombie now. What’s she gonna do, cut you from the squad? Five minutes, okay?”
She looked up at us. Maybe we had weird expressions on our faces.
“Cheerleading squad sleepover last night. Everyone’s gone zombie except me and Celeste Laroche. She says she’s up in a tree house fighting off the other cheerleaders. I took off in the other direction and made it home. I didn’t know Celeste was still, uh, still with us until she texted me during Sunday School.
You aren’t supposed to text in Sunday School, but I guessed that wasn’t so important at a time like this.
“Where are we going?” asked Jermaine, rattling his box of BB ammo.
“Lisa Phalen’s house,” said Francine. “It was her dad who … you know.”
Right. Her dad, who drives an ambulance.
Drove an ambulance.
“Yeah, he came home last night with that kid who chased you. We were all baking cookies. They had blood all over themselves and were moaning and groaning—well, you know how. Lisa’s not real bright, so she asked if they wanted cookies.”
“And did they?” asked Jermaine. He’s always interested in what zombies get up to. It’s research for him.
“Nah, they were already munching on some guy’s leg when they came in.”
“The other ambulance man,” muttered Jermaine.
“Yeah, I guess. But then they started munching on cheerleaders, instead,” said Francine.
“Ew,” I said. I felt sick.
“Oh, quit whining,” she told me. “In fact, shut up and get your bat ready. It’s over this next fence.”
21
“What do you see?” demanded Francine.
I was tallest, but it was a pretty high fence. Jermaine had boosted me up so I could look into the Phalens’ yard. I told them what I could see. “It’s pretty normal. Flower beds and a bench and some of those—what do you call ’em, those little stone people like Christmas elves?”
“Is that all?” demanded Francine.
I looked around a bit more. Then I spotted the thing that was unusual.
“Oh, cheerleaders. Zombie cheerleaders. They have their uniforms on, and pom-poms.”
The cheerleaders were lurching around under a big tree, looking up with their arms raised. They were making a real low moan, not the full “BRAAAAAIIIIINNNNNSS!!!!!” but more like “bwainsss!” The kind of noise you might expect zombie cheerleaders to make if you thought about it.
Then I heard a voice that sounded in charge. Peppy. Perky. A bit pushy.
“Two! Four! Six! Eight!
Come on, girls, it’s time we ate …
CELESTE!”
Other voices chimed in, but real slow and draggy.
“Celeste.”
“Come on down! We’ll eat your brains!” sang the perky voice.
“Huh,” muttered Francine. “That girl Whitney is peppy even when she’s dead.”
ZOMBIE TIP
Zombies talk a lot about eating brains, but mostly they just bite people and turn them into zombies. Getting at someone’s brain is actually pretty hard when you think about it. Zombies have terrible coordination skills. Maybe calling out “BRAIIINNNSSSSS” is like a Christmas wish list.
I peered across the yard and saw that the girl leading the chant was blond and princessy. She was doing some motions—I don’t know the names for all those routines—and the others were trying to follow. One of them fell over into a rosebush. A tall girl with a ponytail stood on one long leg. Her other leg fell off.
It was gross.
“That’s just sad,” said Francine. “She was pretty good at that yesterday.”
She dialed a number on her cell. I could hear a phone ringing across the yard. All the zombies looked up.
“Celeste, we’re here,” whispered Francine. “Get their attention, okay?”
“You should text her,” said Jermaine. “Quieter.”
Francine gave him a dirty look.
“Hey, I’m just sayin’,” said Jermaine. “Zombies have really good hearing.”
Suddenly there was a bunch of noise over at the tree. A girl with cornrows poked her head out of the tree house and started yelling stuff I didn’t understand at the zombie cheerleaders. She was waving her arms around and screaming at them in French. She really put on a show.
It got their attention, and the zombies reacted like I guess she wanted them to. She dissed them good. Seems you can annoy zombies by calling them names. At least some kinds of zombies.
ZOMBIE TIP
Do not be fooled into thinking that the undead can be embarrassed by a well-chosen insult. In this case, however, a living cheerleader is able to taunt her slower-witted zombie sisters using the evil techniques specific to “popular” girls. Most zombies do not care if you criticize their hair, makeup, costumes, or gymnastic moves. That may just apply to zombie cheerleaders.
Now the head cheerleader, Whitney, was telling the others something.
They started to build a human pyramid. They didn’t do it real well. Someone’s arm came off. The whole thing fell down, and they started again. (Determined, I’ll say.)
“Right,” said Francine. “Let’s go!”
She scrambled over the fence. Jermaine pushed me over, then passed me his BB gun so he could climb over himself.
“Come on! We haven’t got all day!” yelled Francine. Then she was running forward with the lacrosse stick, I followed with my bat and Jermaine was aiming at the cheerleader at the bottom of the pyramid.
He got her in the leg. The girl turned around, like you would if you’d been shot in the leg with a BB gun. Which was good, because the girls on top of her all fell onto the lawn.
It took them a moment to get up, and that was good too, because Francine was smashing at them with her lacrosse stick. And I shut my eyes and brought my bat down on something hard. It was someone’s head. She fell over, and then I fell over her because my eyes were shut.
22
“Open your darn eyes!” yelled Francine. “That one almost got you!”
I opened my darn eyes, and she was right. I had to take notice of what was going on. I could always throw up later.
The girl with the ponytail hopped toward me. I took up a slugger’s stance and smacked her good leg. I knew I should smash her over the head, but gee whiz—
While I was thinking about that, she grabbed my ankle.
“Hey! Hey, quit that!” I shouted.
Jermaine was trying to reload his BB gun. Francine turned around and slammed the butt of the lacrosse stick into the back of ponytail’s head. Another cheerleader down.
“Pay attention!” shouted Francine. (Boy, she’s bossy.)
Then she twirled around and swung the stick across Isobel Davenport’s nose. Isobel’s always been real friendly for a cheerleader. And she was real pretty, uh, yesterday. She had big blue eyes and—one of them was hanging out like it was on a stalk. I wanted to push it back into place.
“Behind you!” shouted Jermaine, and I turned around to see Whitney, the head cheerleader, coming toward me. Her eyes were red, and it was like she’d grown fangs. There was blood all down her uniform. She was reaching out to grab my arm.
“BRAAAAIIINNNSSS!!!!!” she called out. “GO-O-O-O-O BRAAAAAIINNNNSSS!!!!!” She was still pretty chipper, which was why they picked her for head cheerleader, I guess. Except now there was no Whitney inside. It was just a zombie in cheerleader costume repeating stuff that Whitney used to do and say. It was real scary. I mean Real Scary.
I couldn’t move.
No, really. I was stuck to the spot, like I was Velcroed to the lawn.
(Yeah, I know Velcro doesn’t work on grass. I’m not stupid.)
And suddenly Celeste jumped out of the tree. I mean, really jumped out of the tree, feet first. She slammed into Whitney from above, knocked her all around, and started kicking. The whole time, Celeste was yelling stuff I didn’t understand, and Whitney’s head was swiveling around trying to bite her. Except she couldn’t, because Celeste had actually kicked her head right off, like a soccer ball.
Boy, those zombies come right apart if you hit ’em right.
Then Francine arrived with the lacrosse stick. She teed up the head like she was Tiger Woods and smacked it right at the wall of the Phalen house. Bounced off a window and everything.
GOAL!!
Celeste and Francine were hugging and crying, like girls do when it’s somebody’s birthday or they got a new puppy or they’ve wiped out the entire zombie cheerleading squad.
I was feeling pretty weird about the whole thing.
“S’okay, bro!” said Jermaine, clapping me on the back. “They were zombies. Nothing you can do with zombies.”
“Mr. O’Hara said he could cure zombies,” I said.
“Even when bits of them are all over the lawn? C’mon, Larry!”
I guessed that was true. I didn’t know what to do when someone’s head was forty feet away from the body, face down against the aluminum siding. I wiped my bat on the grass a real long time.
“Come on, Larry!” said Francine. “Can’t stick around here. We gotta get home.”
KYLE: Gee. That must have been a tough moment for you!
LARRY: What, cleaning my bat?
KYLE: No, I mean—oh, never mind.
LARRY: Oh, I get you now. Right—it’s really not like hitting a baseball.
23
So we all took off as fast as we could. Francine was supposed to be grounded, so we walked her home first. Her room’s in the back of the house, and she was able to scramble over the fence and sneak across the yard without her folks seeing her. Like I said, she’s real athletic so none of that was hard for her to do. “Talk soon,” she whispered.
We watched her clamber through her bedroom window, then headed to Celeste’s house.
Celeste’s family is from Haiti. I guess that’s why she could yell at zombies in French. Plus, being from Haiti, which was where zombies first came from, she knew all about them. (She told us that zombies are, like, the national monster of Haiti.)
“What I know, Larree, is that we must get away from these zombies. We cannot defeat them all. There are more than we could ever fight. I will tell my parents of these events last night, and we will all go to visit family elsewhere until it is safe to return here.”
Huh.
I was hoping she knew all kinds of cool ways to fight the zombies. But it seemed that people who are used to having zombies around mostly want to go some place where there are no zombies around. Go figure.
Besides, I didn’t know what Celeste’s mom and dad would do when she told them she’d been fighting zombie cheerleaders instead of staying up late and braiding their hair. I didn’t think
my mom and dad would go along with “Let’s get out of town until it’s safe to come back.” They’d tell me that Dad had an important meeting on Wednesday, and Mom’s job at the accounting firm was crazy right now, and Honor had a dentist appointment on Thursday. Maybe after that we could run from the undead hordes.
That’s what Jermaine calls ’em. Pretty cool, yeah?
But meanwhile, we had to stick around and fight them off.
“Look,” said Celeste. “You must understand. These creatures are not like les zombies of my homeland. In Haiti it is said that a bad person—a zombie master, I think you translate it—feeds a powder to a victim. The unfortunate then becomes as a slave, only like in a trance. He can be liberated from this situation and return to his consciousness. But this is not the case for these ghouls that eat of brains.”
“What should we do?” asked Jermaine.
“You must leave,” replied Celeste. “Did I not just say so?”
“Yeah, but what if we can’t leave?” I asked.
“Oh. In that case you must destroy them all. Remember, they are no longer your friends and schoolmates. They are monsters. If they bite you, you too will become a monster.”
And then she knocked on the front door. Her mom opened it, and the two of them spoke real fast and real loud in French. Celeste’s mom screamed and hauled her inside. Slammed the door.
Jermaine and I walked toward his house. I guess I was a little down, what with all the eyes on stalks and heads flying off. Nobody likes that. Plus, it’s tiring work.
We were at the corner of Third and Pine when a station wagon screeched right through the stop sign and raced off toward the interstate. It was jam-packed with bags and bedding and pets and kids. Out of the back window, Celeste waved at us.
ZOMBIE TIP
Everything Celeste said about zombies is true. It’s good to have the help of a real authority on the manners and methods of the hungry undead close to hand. Except, of course, if her parents whisk her away in a station wagon and don’t come back. Oh well.
Zombie Elementary Page 5