And now this morning came the sun-shaped pancake. Mom was teary over the first day of senior year and at the same time daring Zaley to complain about the childish breakfast. She could not eat it. She sat there unable to touch a single one of those stupid sliced strawberries. If Mom said one word about the bunny shirt, about how sad it must be to go back to class, Zaley was going to smash something. And then Mom offered to drive her to school, and her fury reached its head.
She yanked the chains and flipped the latches, she undid everything blocking her from the world and did not check through the peephole as Dad ordered before flinging herself outside. There weren’t any goddamned zombies on the doorstep!
Freedom. Leaving the door ajar, she fled across the lawn with its Zeller-Shane signs and remembered too late her lunch on the counter. But Zaley didn’t care, it wouldn’t kill her to not have anything and she was not going back to that house! Since school didn’t start for another hour, she’d select a locker, watch for her friends to arrive and hang up Welcome Mat posters.
It was over a mile from her house to the campus, and she ran the whole way except for when she got caught at red lights. Her heart soared to see those pale yellow metal walls that blocked off the classrooms from the parking lots. When she passed under the overhang at the bus drop-off, the buildings stretching out in neat lines to both sides, she almost screamed from joy. She wanted to pee just because no one would stand outside the stall door asking if she needed help. In her head, she threw out her arms and spun like a child until she was dizzy. Thank you, God, thank you for Cloudy Valley High.
The thirtieth of October promised to be a beautiful day. She wished that she could have worn the amethyst and red bead bracelet that Corbin made for her last Christmas, but she was conscious of how that looked clingy when he’d moved on. The bracelet was hidden in her room so Mom wouldn’t ask where it came from, and Dad wouldn’t accuse Zaley of sleeping with guys for jewelry. While they were dating, she hid it in her backpack while leaving the house and only put it on at school. Then she pulled it off at the last bell. She loved that bracelet. Every time she looked at it, she thought of the hours Corbin must have spent at his mom’s craft table, bent over the strands and slipping beads down to see how they looked. Like his texts, he’d want it to be perfect. And it was.
Home Ec! Zaley raced to the office for a transfer slip, apologizing profusely to the secretary for making a mistake on her schedule. She must have looked distraught because the secretary leaned back in her chair and shouted, “Hey, Jana? Are you ready for students yet? We have a quick class transfer.”
“Send her in,” the counselor said, her head poking around a door. It took less than a minute to make the switch. Zaley thanked her just as profusely as she had apologized to the secretary, and went out to the hallway still feeling dizzy from her mental spinning. Mom was going to be crushed about choir and Zaley was going to miss having a class with ever-on-the-ball Quinn, but independence was so much more important.
It was the best hour she had had since the Cool Spoon over the summer. She picked a locker in the one row of classrooms that got some sun and directed a lost freshman to the office. Old Mrs. Bellwether was struggling to get boxes of history books to her classroom and Zaley helped to carry them. The teacher said, “Thank you, sweetheart!” and Zaley went happily on her way with that gratitude playing on repeat in her brain. Thank you, sweetheart! Not these are too heavy for you, baby.
The school looked so pretty, the walkways swept, the trees and bushes trimmed. One of the proctors tootled by on the campus golf cart. Making sure they hung straight, Zaley taped Welcome Mat signs to the walls. The club always had a nice turnout, a lot of regulars split pretty evenly between the movie/discussion side and the tutoring/activities side of Mr. Tran’s classroom. Others floated in and out of their thrice-weekly meetings.
Mr. Tran had a little office connected to the room to work in during lunch. With a teacher always in proximity, it cut down on problems. He came to the doorway when Dale and Austin had their big argument. When Dale balked about leaving, Mr. Tran just stared until he left. Zaley had been mad clean through to have her club constantly disrupted. Dale pissed off people everywhere, and someone had retaliated by gluing dildos to his locker almost once a week in the spring. Zaley had never seen a dildo until then, nor ever imagined there were so many kinds. She was sorry that her locker was only three down from his last year. The dildos jutting out defiantly from his door in the mornings were disturbing. Some were of massive size, and she twitched to think of someone wanting to use them. She hadn’t seen Corbin’s penis, but she had run her hand over his underwear and thought it was enormous. The dildos taught her differently, and she had conducted a discreet Internet search to confirm that no real penis had purple swirls.
The custodian sawed the dildos off, leaving the round circles of the bases behind. Dale changed lockers in May, but a new dildo found him only days later. If he selected a locker for the fall semester by Zaley’s, she was going to move or just carry her books around if no more lockers were available.
Other signs had been hung up on the walls. They were on orange paper for Halloween, and decorated with spiders and ghosts. The print was small in order to inform everyone that costumes were allowed for Halloween tomorrow as long as they did not interfere with a learning environment. Fake weaponry was prohibited, as was anything too sexy, too gory, or gang-affiliated. And no zombies! The last was underlined three times for emphasis.
Good. Sombra C had given her a nightmare of a summer, and the last thing she wanted to see were students lurching around the halls pretending to be zombies. The rule must have been because of Squay, and she was overcome with shame that her father was a Shepherd. She knew there were good ones; they were in the news often for rescuing people being chased by those gone wild from Sombra C. Zaley had liked the look of one Colorado squad in a special feature on the news. Their uniforms vaguely military, the head of their group said sternly to the camera that they were not the police force, and they did not act like it.
They were the eyes on the streets for odd behavior. They were the ears that passed along rumors to the cops about Sombra C sufferers squirreled away in attics and treated with faith healing. The police did further investigation. Shepherds intervened only in cases of emergency. One in their company had heard screaming from a house while doing his paces and burst inside to find a zombie attacking a family. The crazed figure was the family’s grandfather, put in his room and read the Bible to cure him of the virus. Now he was maddened and raging. Already he had infected his wife and daughter through bites and scratches, his son-in-law was dead, but the Shepherd shot the grandfather five times in the head and saved the grandson in his crib. This was a Shepherd! Because of him, that little boy was alive and unharmed. Another rescue had played in the news a lot, a maid sobbing and saying thank you thank you. A zombie had chased her all over the office she was cleaning, and then a Shepherd rose from the dark and shot it dead.
But Squay, dear God, but Squay. But for the schizophrenic men and women all over the country, the autistic teenager having a meltdown on a street in Topeka. But for the Shepherd who unloaded his gun on a zombie and killed three innocent bystanders. But for Madison, but for Burlington . . . people with Sombra C under total control with Zyllevir had been run out of Fort Sacks! Literally run out of their community and their homes torched by Shepherds!
They were not what Shepherds were supposed to be, not this huge underbelly of angry, mentally unbalanced men and women around the country looking for something to do. Zaley’s father had watched the reports out of Squay and said it served them right for playing zombie.
Served them right. Zaley put up another poster and was relieved that Dad never asked about the club. He wouldn’t like the rainbow across the bottom, the mention that everyone was welcome. Any race, religion, sexual orientation or political persuasion, Welcome Mat didn’t care. It was for everyone, as long as you understood that meant everyone, not just whom you liked.
The free activity side ran without a hitch. She never even went over to check on it. People brought in old board games and decks of cards, jigsaw puzzles and books, and left them there for others to enjoy. Stephen and Henry worked on models and robotic kits; DeAngelo and Quinn ran the tutoring table. A quiet boy named Davey from special ed came in with a beanbag, and for forty minutes he sat in the corner listening to music, reading comics, and eating his lunch. His mother sent a note on the last day of school in June, saying thank you since Davey loved Welcome Mat. That was bewildering, since Davey never said a word to anyone in the club the entire time. But it meant something to him all the same. Maybe because no one jostled the beanbag he dragged around all day or tried to sit in it, no one teased about the childish Super Robo-Man comics. That was just Davey’s corner where he did his thing, and the rest of them had their own space in the room to do what they wanted.
The hallway was filling with people as she hung signs in the highest building. Locker doors slammed and the air was bright with calls and shouts. Mr. Tran stopped by to say hello on the way to his classroom. He was a slight man, always impeccably dressed in a suit while the other male teachers came in wearing jeans and T-shirts, sometimes sweatpants. She was going to miss having him as her science teacher this year. “Is it still okay to use your room at lunch? I guess I should have asked before hanging these.”
Mr. Tran nodded. “The club is always welcome. I am right there in my office anyway.”
“You don’t want to hang out in the teachers’ lounge?”
He patted the computer software for learning Vietnamese under his arm, indicating that it was his time for language lessons. She liked how he did that, spent two years studying for a trip not due to happen until next summer. If ever she went to France or Spain, she wanted to do the same. “I will tell you something, Ms. Mattazollo. A teachers’ lounge can be very much like a high school cafeteria table, full of gossip. I would rather get some work done.” He tipped his head and wended through students to his classroom.
To be spoken to as an adult . . . she was as high as a kite. She would have thought teachers sat around talking about state tests or something dull like that, not gossiping about one another.
Elania appeared and threw out her arms. “Zaley, I did not murder my brothers!”
Zaley cheered while taping down another poster. She wished that she had siblings of her own, to divide her mother’s laser beam attention. “But you thought about it.”
“Almost hourly. Hell is triplet boys yelling he did it, no, he did it, you’re a fart face, no, you’re a fart face all day long and knowing that it is going to be the same tomorrow and the next day and the next . . . by the end, I was screaming that all three of them were fart faces and I have never been so happy to be back in school!” Elania slung a padlock on a locker at random. “I don’t even care that most of my classes won’t be up here. I love you, new locker. You are my oasis. So, how are you doing?”
“Blissful,” Zaley said, and blurted, “My father became a Shepherd.”
Elania’s eyes widened. “No shit! Are you for real?”
“Sombra C is the best thing ever to happen to him.”
“I saw him at Mr. Foods in August. He looked . . . intense.”
Zaley laughed dully, thinking of the hoarded laundry room and the gun taking up residence on the encyclopedias. Intense was a lovely understatement. But she didn’t say any more, not wanting to mar her first day by talking about her family, or any other day for that matter. Elania twisted up the padlock and ripped off the sticker on the underside with the code. “31-10-18. Crap. I couldn’t find my old lock yesterday and had to buy a new one. Okay, for the first number I’ll just think of Halloween. Is October eighteenth anyone’s birthday?”
“No, I’m the twelfth.”
“Halloween, Zaley’s month of birth, and . . . three times one six-year-old equals a nightmarish 18. Okay. Halloween, Zaley, brothers. I can remember that. Halloween, Zaley, brothers. I’ve got a movie for Welcome Mat at the next open slot in the schedule; it’s a doozy of an old Christmas cartoon in which the villain out to ruin the holiday just happens to have a Jewish last name and the stereotypical nose. DeAngelo recommended it. It’s so wickedly subtle.”
“Aw, too bad Dale won’t be there to claim you’ve ruined yet another Christmas classic,” said Micah behind them. They hugged her, the dizzy feeling persisting in Zaley’s head. She had this wealth of time in six classes and a poky walk home. Schedules appeared for comparison, since Micah had somehow wheedled them out of a counselor in the auditorium early. Elania had a lot of the same teachers but not at the same times as Zaley, and Zaley shared Mr. Dayze’s second period government with Micah. Jabbing her finger at his name, Micah said, “You know what a nightmare this teacher is? I know all about him from my sister. Bring earplugs.”
“I’m going to stay positive,” Elania said. She had his class for fifth period.
Zaley didn’t care a whit about how bad Mr. Dayze was. She was here, and here was perfect. Almost like Mom sensed her happiness, the cell phone vibrated with a text. Mom wanted to know if she should bring the sack lunch to the high school. Zaley wrote back that she would buy something at the cafeteria. She didn’t have money, but this was her place, dammit! The response came that it was no trouble, and Zaley typed in NO crossly.
A commotion was going on at the far end of the hall, people calling and running down the slope. Since Elania had her locker, they walked to the end and looked. A queue of students was under the overhang and staring out to the bus loop. A siren blipped. Rather than walk down to see what was going on, Micah opened the door in the yellow wall. It led to the teachers’ parking lot, and students weren’t supposed to use that door. Elania went through it after her, but Zaley hung back, saying, “I’ll meet you down there?”
“Oh, for fuck’s sake,” Micah exploded from the other side. “You’re not going to get in trouble going through this door!”
A teacher was climbing out of a car. Zaley shook her head and walked down the hallway to the overhang. Her phone vibrated and she turned it off without looking. She wasn’t going to spend the next seven hours writing back and forth with her mother. Growing more cross about it with every step, Zaley thought rudely make a fucking friend, Mom. But she wouldn’t. Zaley’s birthday card had not been addressed to a daughter but a best friend.
Two hundred students were gathered by the bus loop, craning their necks at three police cars parked there. A pair of Shepherds was standing in the loop! One Zaley recognized from Dad’s party, and the other she did not know. The principal was arguing with them, her voice carrying over to the crowd. “They have a legal right to their education! You two need to leave the premises and take up your concerns with the school board!”
“You kids want zombies in your classrooms?” one Shepherd shouted at the crowd. “Link your arms and don’t let them in!” The three continued to argue in lower voices.
Corbin. Oh, it had been so long since Zaley had seen him. He was in the throng and looking out in curiosity. Sally Wang was under his arm and Zaley’s heart broke even as it beat faster to see his thick brownish-black hair and the easy lankiness of his body. She didn’t get why girls liked the barrel-chested football player look; Zaley was more attracted to narrow musculature. Their first kiss had happened just like that, both of them on his floor doing homework and then his lips were pressed to hers. She adored how he always raced across campus when they were dating to stand outside her classroom door on test days, so he could ask when she came out if it went okay. Exams made her nervous. That was love to her, those feet pounding the pavement, his fights with his dyslexia to send her an email or text. Not poems and platitudes, or the necklaces her father gave her mother on birthdays. Thrice he’d given her the same one, and she just laughed it off. Zaley’s feelings would have been hurt to have a guy so out to lunch he couldn’t even remember what presents he gave her before.
A student suddenly bellowed, “We don’t want them here!” The
boom of his voice made her look back to the bus loop. More people had arrived to watch and were blocking her view. Students weren’t supposed to stand on the concrete posts, but Zaley climbed up one to get a better view. On the other side of the police cars were six cops and two students. The girl Zaley knew was a senior, if not her name, and she was wearing a blue turtleneck. Sheila? They had had P.E. together for a semester in sophomore year. The other was a boy she had never seen, and buried in the skin of his neck was a red stamp. The percent could not be ascertained at this distance. Sombra C here at Cloudy Valley High! It was like the news come to life.
A taunt began from a boy near Corbin, and radiated out to the hundreds there. Zombie zombie zombie. Arms lifted and locked teasingly, mouths gaped and a drone emanated from throats. Teachers were in the crowd, yelling to quit it, and the police surged forward in an oval with the two Sombra C students at the center. One Shepherd approached the oval and screamed at the kids, “You get the hell out of here!” Spittle flew from his mouth.
The call of zombie and the droning changed to a chorus. “No! No! No!” Then it changed again. “No freaks! No freaks! No freaks!”
The oval came closer, the boy and girl looking stonily to the ground, and the front of the queue was penetrated. Students caved to it unwillingly, screaming and chanting no freaks no freaks no freaks. They followed as the oval pushed to the office. Someone yelled to block the door and students bolted to stand before it with linked arms. Proctors blew whistles and teachers shouted.
Zaley swallowed hard on a cry of no freaks. The energy was consuming her, pulling her into the pulse of the chant and the frenzy of spirit in the crowd moving around her post. But she didn’t yell it, wouldn’t yell it, refused to let the heat pull her in. It wasn’t like those students had gotten Sombra C on purpose, and she was sick to death of the virus altogether. She didn’t want to pay it any more attention. The Sombra C students should have just been able to walk to class, Zaley willing to mind her own business as long as they minded theirs. The golf cart rumbled by, the proctor yelling through a bullhorn for the students around the office to disperse.
The Zombies: Volumes One to Six Box Set Page 13