Dark Days

by James Ponti

“I have a secret mission for you two,” she said to the boys, using an exaggerated Eastern European accent. “Do everything you can to make sure Molly does not make it all the way around the track.”

  “Hey!” I complained. “That’s not fair.”

  “Let me finish,” she said, turning to me. “If you can complete an entire lap, you can keep the clothes.”

  “That’s a deal,” I said, giddy with excitement. “Challenge accepted.”

  I hopped into the car and strapped on my safety belt nice and tight. The cars sparked to life and the battle began. The three of them chased me in circles, slammed me with their bumpers, and hounded me all around.

  They had me pretty good until I realized that I should stop thinking of it as an amusement park ride and instead consider it a physics experiment. Bumper cars are a perfect demonstration of Newton’s laws of motion. Rather than go head to head, where I was losing out, I decided to change direction ever so slightly, which diverted their energy and let me escape from the pack.

  It was a bold and exciting move but I soon learned that Newton’s laws of motion are nothing compared to Beth’s law’s of fashion. She was not about to let me get those clothes, and somehow she managed to drive backward and trap me in a corner until the time ran out.

  “You put up a good fight,” she said as she reached down to help me out of the car. “You even worked up a sweat.”

  For a second I thought she was going to give me the outfit anyway.

  “Make sure you take the clothes to the dry cleaners before you put them back in my closet.”

  I was so busy having a great time that I didn’t really think much about Natalie being a no-show. At least not until after dinner and cake. (The cake, by the way, was out-of-control amazing. It had cream cheese frosting and a layer of raspberry filling. I thought Alex was going to faint when he took his first taste.) I know she had a good excuse, but it still made me wonder about our friendship. And since I was now a teenager, I decided the mature thing would be to talk to her about it. That’s why I headed over to see her the next morning.

  I spent the entire subway ride trying to come up with the right way to say what I was feeling.

  Natalie, I want to talk to you about our friendship.

  Natalie, I want you to be honest with me.

  Natalie, is there something you want to tell me?

  Each line sounded more and more ridiculous. I didn’t want to be emotional or dramatic, just honest. By the time I stepped into the elevator, I realized I was getting worked up and needed to relax. Luckily, I had all the way to the twelfth floor to take a couple of deep breaths and calm down. Rather than blurt it out, I decided the best approach would be to say that I was in the neighborhood and wanted to stop by to see how she was doing. I’d let the conversation flow from there.

  I knocked on the door and panicked as I realized that it was a terrible excuse. Her neighborhood was nowhere near mine. It didn’t make sense for me to be there. I was still trying to come up with a better reason when the door opened.

  “Can I help you?”

  I went to talk and then I saw that it wasn’t Natalie or her mother. It was some random woman who I’d never seen before. I wondered if she was one of the doctors working with her.

  “I’m sorry,” I said confused. “I’m looking for my friend Natalie Allen.”

  The woman smiled. “The Allens are downstairs in apartment 2B.”

  “Sorry, I totally forgot.”

  In my moment of full diva drama I’d forgotten that Natalie and her family had moved downstairs. Now I had another elevator ride to come up with a better excuse. But as I started down toward the second floor I realized something. Natalie and her family had moved so their apartment could be renovated. But it wasn’t being renovated. An entirely different family was living in it.

  That made no sense.

  Why had a temporary move become permanent? Why would Natalie’s family move ten flights downstairs to a less exclusive apartment? That didn’t seem like them at all. Her parents were so proud of their view of Central Park. They also seemed to have an endless supply of money and loved to show it off.

  When I got to the second floor, I knocked on the door for 2B. And it was then, while I was waiting for someone to answer, that I figured out a possible answer to my question. It was an answer that was totally ridiculous, yet somehow explained everything that had been going on with Natalie lately. It was an answer that took my breath away.

  She had moved from the twelfth floor to the second. She had gone down into Dead City with someone I had never seen before. She’d gone into the Blockhouse where the undead go to recharge. She said she wanted to come to my party when she thought it was going to be dinner and a musical in Manhattan, but canceled when she learned it was Coney Island in Brooklyn.

  What if none of this had anything to do with our friendship or Omega and instead was all about Manhattan schist?

  What if Natalie was undead?

  The Scientific Method as Applied to Potential Zombies

  It would have been nice if I’d had this brainstorm before I knocked on the door. That would have given me a chance to think through my theory and figure out if it was a stroke of genius or just plain crazy. But that’s not what happened. Instead this was the order of events as they unfolded in the hallway outside of Apartment 2B: Knock first. Crazy idea second. Awkward moment when Natalie opens the door and I stand there with my mouth wide open third.

  “Hey, Molls, what’s up?”

  I was pretty sure I was making some sort of “I just figured out you might be a zombie but don’t want you to know” face, so I tried to fake a smile.

  “Nothing much,” I said as casually as I could. “I was just in the neighborhood and wanted to see how you’re doing.”

  “I’m good, thanks,” she said. “Come on in.”

  We walked into the front room, and as we sat down she asked, “What were you doing on the Upper West Side on a Sunday morning?”

  I’m a lousy liar and normally freeze at these moments, but I actually came up with a believable excuse. “I’m going to see the new space show at the Hayden Planetarium,” I explained. “Grayson got me tickets for my birthday.”

  The planetarium is part of the Museum of Natural History and is a short walk from Natalie’s building.

  “My parents went to the grand opening,” she replied. “They said it was amazing.”

  And just as suddenly as it came, my newfound ability to think fast and say clever things disappeared. I couldn’t think of any follow-up. My mind just kept racing as I looked at her, trying to figure out if it was possibly true. Luckily, after a brief but awkward silence, she took over the conversation.

  “Listen, I want to apologize about yesterday.”

  With my mind still scrambling through variations of her potential state of undeadness, I had no idea what she was talking about.

  “What about yesterday?” I asked.

  “Missing your birthday,” she said. “I’m so sorry I didn’t make it to your party. I really wanted to go.”

  Two minutes earlier this subject had been so important I had to rush over to confront her about it. It was the topic I wanted to analyze in minute detail so we could figure out what it said about our friendship. Now it was so insignificant I was able to resolve it in two sentences.

  “I’m sorry you missed it too. We had a lot of fun.”

  One problem was over, but the other was just beginning. The thought that she might be undead may have been a crazy idea, but that didn’t mean it was wrong. I had to figure out the truth.

  “I just remembered something,” she said, getting up. “I’ve got a birthday present for you. I was going to bring it to school tomorrow, but now you don’t have to wait. It’s in my room.”

  I remembered that when we came over before, she said her room was filled with medical equipment. I wondered if seeing it might help me figure things out. I stood up to go with her.

  “Nope, you wait here,” she sa
id. “I’ve got to wrap it.”

  “You don’t need to go to all that trouble,” I said.

  She tapped the couch for me to sit back down. “It will only take a second.”

  The whole thing was surreal. My mouth was having a normal conversation while my brain was spinning wild conspiracy theories about her possible zombie conversion. When she went to her room, it gave me a moment to think things through. Faced with an unproven theory, I did exactly what they taught us to do at MIST. I employed the scientific method:

  Observation

  Hypothesis

  Test

  Analysis

  My observations went back to the fight on New Year’s Eve. First I considered the two ways a person can become undead. One is when the dead flesh of a zombie contaminates an open wound, leading to infection and disease. (This is what happened to my mother.) The other is when someone dies suddenly in an underground area where Manhattan schist is plentiful. (This is what happened to the Unlucky 13 in the subway tunnel explosion that started all of this.)

  Either scenario could have happened to Natalie. Her fight with Edmund was intense, and I remember that she was bleeding when it was over. She could have easily been infected. Also, even though we were in an abandoned pressroom, we were underground and there was schist all around us.

  The more important observations, though, dealt with her behavior after getting hurt. Going underground, visiting Blockhouse #1, and changing apartments from the twelfth to the second floor were all consistent with someone trying to be closer to Manhattan schist.

  I also couldn’t think of a single time she’d left Manhattan since she got hurt. A trip to see her grandparents in New Jersey was canceled, and once when we were going to have lunch at Grayson’s in Brooklyn, Nat had a sudden craving for Shake Shack and we ended up getting burgers in Madison Square Park instead.

  None of this was conclusive, but it was strong enough for me to build my hypothesis, which was that Natalie had been turned into a zombie during or soon after our fight on New Year’s Eve. Since I was not about to poke her and see if purple goo oozed out of her skin, my test would have to be more creative.

  “I hope you like it,” she said when she came back into the room, holding my present. “When I saw it I instantly thought of you.”

  She handed me a small, perfectly wrapped box. I felt guilty taking it, considering what I was thinking about her at the moment. I felt even guiltier because when she handed it to me, I pressed my fingers against her hand, trying to gauge her body temperature.

  “I’m sure I’ll love it,” I said.

  I unwrapped it and opened the lid to reveal a silver bracelet with a charm on it. I held it up to get a good look at it. The charm looked like an old-style New York subway token.

  “Remember the Omega necklace you wore on the first day of school?” she asked.

  “You mean the one that made an evil zombie attack me in the subway station?” (I worried that I shouldn’t have used the Z word, but it didn’t seem to bother her.)

  “That’s the one,” she said. “I thought this might be a good substitute. You can wear it, but the bad guys won’t know that it has anything to do with Omega.”

  I put it on my wrist. “I love it, Natalie. It’s perfect.”

  She smiled and added, “Now we’re twins.”

  She held up her wrist so that I could see she was wearing an identical bracelet. I was truly touched by the sentiment. I reminded myself that Natalie was my friend, and whether or not she was undead shouldn’t matter. After all, my own mother was undead. I thought back to that day when I was attacked. Natalie was the one who saved me.

  I looked at her for a moment and decided that I should at least be straight with her. “Can I ask you something?”

  “Of course,” she said.

  “Are you . . . ?” It just hung there while I tried to think of a way to say it.

  “Am I what?”

  I realized I couldn’t just blurt out Are you a zombie? If I was wrong she’d never forgive me, and if I was right, well, she probably wouldn’t forgive me for that, either.

  “. . . busy this afternoon? I feel bad about having a party that you couldn’t come to, so I thought you might like to catch the show with me at the planetarium. Grayson gave me two tickets.”

  “Actually,” she said, “I am busy. My parents and I are having lunch at the club.”

  This was fantastic news. Natalie’s family belongs to a country club where they like to go on the weekends so her parents can play golf and she can ride her horse, Copernicus. The reason this was such great news is because the club is on Long Island. If she could go there, it meant that she wasn’t undead after all. I considered this to be a test result that proved my hypothesis wrong.

  “That sounds great,” I said. “Are you going to ride Copernicus when you’re there? Or do your doctors want you to wait longer?”

  “Not that club,” she said. “We’re going to my dad’s university club. There’s some sort of special Sunday brunch thing.”

  I remembered that her dad went to Yale, but I had no idea where the club was located. “Where’s that?”

  “Midtown,” she said. “Right by Grand Central.”

  “Oh,” I said, trying to hide my disappointment. She wasn’t leaving Manhattan, but that didn’t mean she couldn’t. My test was still inconclusive, so I decided to push just a little bit more.

  “When are you going to go visit Copernicus next?” I asked.

  She looked pained by the question and sighed before answering. “Actually, we ended up selling him. It’s expensive to take care of a horse, and with my injuries and all the schoolwork, I’ve had less and less time to ride.”

  Natalie loved Copernicus more than anything. The only way she’d let her parents sell him was if there was no way for her to ride him again. I was heartbroken for her.

  “I’m so sorry to hear that.”

  It took all my concentration to keep from crying. We were quiet for what seemed like a minute, and I wondered if she was going to just break down and tell me on the spot. But she didn’t say anything.

  “I really love the bracelet,” I said as I stood up to leave. “I better get over to the planetarium. The show starts soon.”

  “Thanks for stopping by,” she said.

  “Thanks for the present.”

  Just like I had when I visited her right after she got out of the hospital, I hugged Natalie at the door. Only this time, there was nothing awkward about it. I knew she needed friends now more than ever.

  I was in a daze when I got to the sidewalk. At first I headed for the planetarium. Even though it started out as a phony excuse, I thought the show might cheer me up. But, as I got closer, I realized I wasn’t in the mood. I was too sad.

  Instead I wandered through Central Park and thought about everything Natalie must have been going through. Technically, my test results didn’t prove my hypothesis, but I had no doubt.

  My walk ended up right at the Delacorte Clock and the entrance to the Central Park Zoo. One of the great things about the zoo is that even if you don’t go in, the walkway through the park is close enough for you to see some of the animal exhibits.

  I stopped and watched the sea lions playing in their pool as my mind ran through everything. I wondered if my mother knew about Natalie. I wished that I could talk to her about it. I turned around and stared at the clock.

  My mom and I couldn’t use it anymore as a secret message board. We’d lost that the moment Marek Blackwell discovered it.

  When the clock struck noon, the animal sculptures came to life and started playing “Row, Row, Row Your Boat,” just like they had that last time I saw her.

  I thought back to that day and one question kept going through my mind. How in the world did Marek find out that my mother and I used the clock?

  After all, no one else knew about it.

  That’s when I got a sick feeling in my stomach. I realized there was one other person who knew about it.

/>   Natalie. She had discovered it before Christmas.

  Suddenly I remembered that on the day that Marek surprised my mother and me, Natalie had asked me about the clock and said I should I go check for a message.

  The sick feeling got worse.

  If it was possible that Natalie was a zombie, then it was possible that she was a Level 2. That would mean she’d have no conscience or sense of right and wrong.

  I sat down on a bench and slumped under the weight of it all. I looked at the charm on my bracelet as it glistened in the sunlight.

  Was it possible that the person who gave me one of the sweetest gifts I’d ever received was also the person giving Marek Blackwell inside information about the Omegas?

  My second day as a teenager was nowhere near as good as my first.

  Hogwarts in Harlem

  Molly, is something wrong?”

  Grayson was probably wondering why I was just staring blankly at my open locker.

  “No,” I said as I snapped out of it and shut the door. “Just tired. I didn’t sleep well last night.”

  That was true, I hadn’t slept well. In fact, I hadn’t slept well all week. But that’s not why I was dazed and confused. The lack of sleep hadn’t put me in the funk, but the funk was keeping me up at night. It had been that way ever since I first suspected Natalie might be undead. I’d tossed and turned each night as I tried to figure out what I should do. I thought about telling Alex and Grayson, but decided against it. There’d be no way to undo the damage if I was wrong.

  “Are you sure that’s all it is?” he said.

  I smiled and lied. “I’m sure.”

  Before he could dig any deeper, the warning bell rang, signaling one minute until the next period began. We said our quick see-you-laters and hurried down the hall in opposite directions. I was just about to go into my English class, when I noticed a flyer posted next to the door.

  According to the flyer, a professor at City College was going to give an “in-depth visual presentation about the birds of Central Park.” That’s a nice way of saying he was going to spend two hours showing pictures of mute swans, downy woodpeckers, and who knows how many of the other more than two hundred species that inhabit the park. I couldn’t imagine a single one of my classmates wanting to sit through it.