“Just one more.”
The mirror in that attic was dead too. Mina wanted to scream but she had to keep strong for the boy.
Back down they went. Mina was nearly breathless. Reed’s sweaty hair was stuck to his forehead. They jumped over another puddle of ooze. Mina rounded the corner ahead of Reed and slammed into someone standing there. She stumbled to her feet, afraid to look up at the hideous face of the monster. But she did, and it wasn’t the monster. It was M1. Crusted blood covered half her hair and ran down her forehead and cheek. Her eyes were dazed and she had to steady herself against the wall.
“I’ve been looking everywhere for you.”
Mina pushed herself up. “Oh my God, I can’t believe you’re alive.”
M1 swayed on her feet. She let loose a gleeful laugh. “You tried to kill me.”
“I tried to hide you.”
Just then the monster groaned so loud that Mina had to cover her ears. Reed tugged at her shirt. “It’s coming.”
Behind M1 stood a staircase. M1 saw where Mina glanced. She barricaded Mina’s way. “You’re not going anywhere.”
Mina grabbed M1’s shoulders but she wouldn’t budge. Mina thrust her body against M1’s blocking arm, again and again until M1 gave way.
“Hurry, Reed.”
He dashed up the staircase. Mina was about to follow but M1 reached out and clawed a hand on her throat. Mina flailed her arms and caught M1 on the side of the head, smacking her bloody wound. M1 gasped, her hold slacked. Mina wiggled past and climbed the stairs on her knees. M1 recovered. She followed Mina up the stairs and grabbed her ankle. Mina wiggled and kicked. With her free leg she nailed M1 square in the head. M1 tumbled down the stairs and lay sprawled in the hallway.
Dazed, M1 stared up at Mina. “Should have been you.”
The monster came upon M1’s body lightning quick. It hovered above her and descended, covering the screaming girl.
Mina couldn’t watch. She wheeled around and prayed this mirror was alive. If not, then she and Reed were as good as dead. Reed stood by the mirror, his frown deeper than ever. Mina ran over, desperate to the point of tears. She thought of the monster at the bottom of the stairs, devouring, waiting. She was halfway across the room when she heard the clatter of the monster on the steps behind her. She wouldn’t turn back.
“Hurry,” Reed said.
When she reached the mirror Mina held up her hand. She prayed harder than she ever did in her life. The monster growled a scream of twisted pain. She poked the glass and felt an electric surge. It was alive!
“Go, Reed.” She grabbed him by the shoulders and shoved him forward.
“What if it’s worse?”
“It can’t be.”
He slipped through the shining film. Mina stepped in after him. She was halfway through when she felt the monster’s hand grab her foot. Caught between two worlds, Mina kicked her foot hard.
Reed stood in the other attic–a laboratory mess. “Pull me!” Mina said.
He took her hands and tugged hard, but the monster was too strong. She felt herself slipping back to the dead mutated world, back to a thing that wanted nothing more than to devour her. I am going to die, she thought, and she almost succumbed. But then she remembered her mother. Mina wiggled and kicked her trapped foot as hard as she could. She grabbed onto the edges of the mirror and thrust herself forward. Then she broke free and tumbled into the new attic.
She lay on the floor for just a moment and caught her breath. Then she saw the hand poking through the mirror. It was a gnarled claw with a mess of tumors and sores that oozed a glowing green puss. The hand moved slowly, as if it had to fight its way between worlds.
“Quick, give me something hard,” she called out.
Reed grabbed a hammer from the workbench. He tossed it to her and she caught it in midair. She smashed the hammer against the mirror. It shattered into a thousand crystal shards as the hand vanished back into that other world.
“Are we safe now?”
“Yes,” Mina said, though she had no idea what this final world would hold for them. What if this world was wrong, and even worse than the monster’s world?
Among the jagged glass Mina spied a sprinkle of blue. She brushed the broken glass aside. It was the silver and blue bracelet, the one from her mother, the one she’d been missing her whole time in that other world. She slipped it back on her wrist.
“What’s that?” Reed asked.
“It’s home.”
Becca’s life changed dramatically when she became infected with the Z virus and turned part-zombie. Now she must put her fear of dogs aside to rescue one little puppy and find the other dogs that went missing. She’d do almost anything, she realizes, to do that…even break a few laws if necessary.
PUPPY LOVE AND ZOMBIES
C.A. Verstraete
Most of us had been too busy surviving, and trying to avoid the roaming hordes of ravenous undead, to notice something else was going on.
Yeah, like the rest wasn’t bad enough? It was, but this new thing nearly did what the mutated Z virus didn’t already do–kill me.
The morning started great when my Uncle Franco brought this beautiful, year-old white German Shepherd puppy over for us to meet. Unlike my first dog experience (more on that later), the puppy bounced around, played, barked, and most important, didn’t make me afraid.
Call it love at first lick.
For once, I forgot all the zombie stuff that had plagued me for the past year. I threw a ball and laughed at how she ran and brought it right back. “Ooh, she’s so cute and smart! I’m going to call her Fluffy! Is she mine? Can I keep her, can I?”
I begged and begged, though I knew my Tia (Spanish for Auntie) Imelda already loved her as much as I did. Then we heard the yells outside. My uncle’s cries of “look out!” came too late. My cousin Carm opened the door and jumped back at sight of the chaos in front of our house. Our neighbor Mr. Thompson screamed, “go back in, shut the door!” as two of the zombies came at him.
In the last few months, most of the full Zs had been rounded up and exterminated, but a few wanderers like these kept us on our toes–at least they should’ve. My uncle grabbed his gun and fired at the monsters. The excitement was too much–the puppy panicked and pulled out of her collar. I screamed as she darted out the door and ran off in the opposite direction.
“NO-NO!” I yelled and tried to catch her, but she was gone. I would’ve followed if not for the strong arms of my cousin and aunt holding me back.
“No, Becca honey, let her go,” Tia implored. “She’ll come back or someone will find her.”
“No, she won’t,” I cried. “She won’t!”
And she didn’t.
My aunt’s friend Amelia from down the street stopped by later and let us know my suspicions had some truth to them. As a nurse, she had a way of hearing what was going on in the community.
“Sure glad they got those creatures.” She gave a mock shiver. “The National Guard’s been doin’ a fine job of watching out for stragglers, so I can’t imagine how those two made it into town.”
I shrugged and tried to be polite, but my heart wasn’t in it.
Amelia reached out and patted my chin. “Oh sweetie, I wanted to see how you’re doing. I saw that cute little dog of yours run by my house. I tried to stop her, but couldn’t catch her.”
She paused for a minute. The concerned look on her face did make me pay attention. Amelia was a sweet, caring lady, who also told us when she heard something we should know about. What made her even more special to me was that of all the people in our neighborhood, she’d been the only one who welcomed me back home after I’d been infected. She treated me the same as always, like she was my aunt.
“Amelia? Is something wrong?”
The older woman paused a second, then leaned in, and looked me straight in the eye. “At first I didn’t think much of it, but now, well, I’m not so sure. Two of my other neighbors’ dogs are missing, too. One ran off and never
came back. He told me his dog never went further than the house next door before this zombie thing hit. My other neighbor said her dog was in the yard and when she went to call her in, the dog was gone, and the gates were still locked.”
The uneasy feeling I’d had earlier came back with a vengeance. I tried to ignore it. No way did I want to think that those monsters had found the dogs and attacked them, too. I couldn’t bear the thought.
“Maybe the dogs snuck out and got lost?”
Amelia shrugged, her face questioning. “Maybe, maybe, but a couple people I work with at the hospital said their dogs also disappeared. I think something’s going on and the police aren’t bothering with it, not with all the other things going on. My co-workers called and both were told, real sarcastic-like, to file a report and it would be looked into when things let up. No one at city hall took their complaints seriously, either.”
She continued, her voice lower. “It’s simply been too chaotic to worry about the smaller things happening, not that it’s small to any of us, of course. Now, you didn’t hear it from me, but the rumor is somebody’s taking those dogs. And no, it’s not those things.”
My gasp prompted her to squeeze my hand and tell me not to worry before she left. It didn’t help. Now I was more worried than ever about where Fluffy had gone and what was happening to her.
The rest of the day I ignored everyone. I didn’t want to talk, or hear their well-meaning attempts to console me. Instead I sat by the window, my eyes on the street (well, one of them when my other eye crossed), my senses ever alert for a streak of white fur and the sound of a playful yip or bark.
Nothing anyone said could stop me from making those weird hiccupping sounds that passed for crying since I’d been infected with the Z virus. It was one of the odd side effects of my new life as a part-Z, which luckily, didn’t include the disgusting things done by the full-zombies, nor their horrible diet. Ick. I let out a big sigh. Chalk it up to the latest bad event in what had been a bad year. I felt a big pity party coming on.
After a couple hours, I rubbed my still-too-dry eyes and wished real tears would appear again. Like hitting replay on my iPod, I heard Tia’s voice in my head saying her favorite, often repeated phrase: “Wishing don’t make it so, honey.”
I knew that. All of it was pointless, so, so, pointless.
My mood dark and growing worse by the minute, I stumbled to my feet and headed for the stairs, my limp more pronounced from my self-confinement. I motioned Carm to come upstairs with me. Once in my still-too-messy room, I shoved over the pile of clothes my cousin, ever the fashionista, had brought over for me from her always overstuffed closet.
I plopped myself on the bed and told her we needed to do something. “We need a plan. We need to find Fluffy and find out why all these dogs are disappearing.”
Carm stopped folding clothes and stared at me. “We? As in me and the person who freezes like a statue when a dog comes near her?”
No way did I want to go over our stupida argument again about my fear of dogs and my, um, “scent” problem since my other cousin, Carm’s brother, Spence, infected me with the Z virus via a scratch. Given the circumstances, I didn’t think it irrational at all.
“No, this is different.”
She raised an eyebrow at me and kept on sorting. “Really?”
I snorted and kneaded one of the shirts she’d handed me into a ball before tossing it back on the bed. “Yeah, Fluffy’s different. She doesn’t scare me. I can deal with the other dogs if it means we find her. Really.”
My cousin flashed a “who-are-you-kidding” look and went back to straightening out the pile of clothes on my bed. Okay, so she had good reason not to believe me after my last experience. Our uncle brought a big black German Shepherd dog named Chico over, Tia thinking it a good idea for protection before me and Carm left to go find our mothers.
Yeah, the dog had scared me–a lot–especially after Carm’s declaration that I had a certain “smell” since becoming a part Z. “Something like going by a landfill and then it’s gone real quick” kind of scent, she’d said. Great.
The whole situation scared me even more since I figured the D-O-G with its big head and even bigger teeth would notice. He didn’t–that time. So, after that incident, I understandably never, ever, hoped to see another canine up so close and personal again. Then my uncle came over this time with Fluffy, the cutest, fluffiest, and friendliest little German Shepherd pup I’d ever seen.
Now she was gone, and even if I couldn’t feel my heartbeat anymore, I knew my heart was broken.
Unable to sit still, I paced across the room, trying to think of what to do when Carm interrupted. “Hey, look at this.” She unfolded a newspaper and pointed at the back page.
“What?” I asked, getting more aggravated. “C’mon, Carm, help me think of something. I have to find Fluffy!”
She gripped my arm and thrust the paper in front of my face. “You better read this.”
I stared at the page, focusing on the small square of black and red print she tapped her finger on. “Great Job! Great Pay. No Experience…So? What’s that have to do with anything? We need to find–”
She cut me off. “Keep reading.”
The last line got me–Must be able to follow step-by-step instructions and work with animals. “That doesn’t sound good. Do you think they’re doing something there with the dogs?”
A shudder hit me at the idea of what that could be. Our eyes met. I didn’t have to say anything else. “Call the number. I can’t go there, you know, because of how I look…but you can.”
When Carm got nervous, she sounded like a mouse. Like now. “You-you want me to call them?” She took a breath and squeaked out another answer. “I don’t think it’ll work. We shouldn’t get involved in something like this. Maybe we better tell someone else like Tia or Uncle Franco.”
I rolled my eyes. Well, one of them, since the other one had a way of not cooperating. “Carm, you know what’ll happen. They’ll call the police. The police will tell her they’ll look into it, and they won’t. That’s what Amelia said. They’re too busy with all the zombie mess and chasing down vigilantes.”
The moment the V word left my mouth, I knew I’d made a mistake. A big one. I cursed under my breath as Carm’s eyes went wide.
“Vi-vigilantes,” she murmured. “Did you forget how they attacked our car? How they broke into the house? It’s still not totally safe for you out there yet. I saw it on TV. It isn’t. People still don’t trust people like you.”
The best way to deal with my cousin’s paranoia was to divert her attention. My thoughts whirled as I figured out the best way to do it. I had to get back to the dogs–in a hurry.
“Most people are used to part-Zs like me now. Never mind the few troublemakers. We have to see what’s going on with those dogs. Who else is going to do it? You can get Jesse to help if it makes you feel better.”
I intentionally left out Jesse’s brother Gabe and hoped she didn’t bring him up. I couldn’t think about him. Not right now. Her face grew thoughtful. I could see the wheels turning, a good sign. My determination grew.
“C’mon, cuz, I know you can do it. Just call and say you’re interested in the job, ask what it’s about. Arrange an interview in a couple days. Once you get the address, we go check it out and see what’s going on. “
Carm’s eyes went wide. “I don’t know…”
Time to pour on the guilt, I decided. “All right, what if Fluffy’s there–and they have other dogs, too? I know you don’t want to leave all those dogs there, alone, scared, waiting for who knows what to happen, who knows what someone is doing to them…”
I gave her my best puppy dog look.
“Okay, okay, I give.”
“Now, don’t talk a lot. Only ask what the job’s about and what you’d be doing. Most important, get the address. Keep your voice low so you sound older.”
She nodded, grabbed her phone, then stopped, her face worried. “Wait, what if th
ey have Caller ID? They’ll know who I am.”
I almost hit my forehead with my palm, but stopped myself. With my easy-to-erode skin condition, it wasn’t a good idea doing anything that could make my skin crack again, especially when it had been clearing up so nice lately.
“Ugh, you’re right, stupida me. I didn’t think of that. I think there’s a Caller ID blocking thing on our phones. You can use mine.”
Grabbing my cell phone, I checked the settings, and after several minutes of fumbling and going to the website, set up the temporary Caller ID blocking system. “Hmm, looks like it’ll work. Let me call your phone first to make sure.”
I pulled up her name, hit send, and waited for her distinctive ring. The Beatles’ Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds rang out. We both were big Beatles fans thanks to our mothers constantly playing the CDs and albums since we were little.
“Good song,” I remarked. Last week it had been Lady Gaga and Taylor Swift. By Christmas, she’d be through the top hundred hits at the rate she changed ringtones.
Carm looked at her phone and nodded. “Okay, it works. It says number unavailable.”
“Good, now remember what I said.”
Perched on the end of the bed, she quickly punched in the numbers. “It’s ringing,” she whispered. “Oh, hello, um, yes, I’m calling about the ad, about working with animals. My experience? I’ve worked at a dog groomer’s. I’m taking classes now to be a vet technician.”
I gave her a thumbs-up. Both of us had hoped to begin checking out colleges soon, especially since my condition finally seemed stable. She’d talked about going to veterinary school since we were kids so her little white lie wasn’t totally false.
“Uh-huh, so you’re hiring people to care for animals? Medications?” Her face grew worried. “Sure, I can give them medicine. I’ve done that. My name? Alicia, Alicia Simmons.”
I gave her the okay sign.
She continued, her voice more confident. “You’re at the Tallman Business Park, Sheridan Road. Number one, two, one. Day after tomorrow? Yes, I can be there. Four p.m. is perfect. Thank you.”
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