The Zombie Playground

by Brian Rowe

  “Who could that be?” Tessa said, setting the cake down and making her way to the front door.

  Brin’s eyes widened, and she put her hand out. She needed Paul to grip her hand again, just to keep her safe.

  That’s a good question, Mom, she thought. That’s a very good question.

  Brin and Paul turned around. They couldn’t see the front door from the kitchen table; they could only listen as Tessa opened it.

  “Oh, hi Jeanie,” Brin’s mom said, a sense of surprise in her voice. “Can I help you with something?”

  “Yes,” the unfamiliar voice said. “I was hoping you could help me. My son’s missing.”

  Chapter Three

  Was it Droz?

  Was it Ash?

  Was it the mailman?

  “No, it’s Sunday,” Brin said.

  Paul had his mouth partway open, mostly in confusion at Brin’s words.

  “Did I say that out loud?” she said.

  “You did.”

  Paul tried to swallow a tiny sliver of the chicken, while Brin shifted her body around and bent her head toward the entrance hallway. She could only hear whispering; she could make out hardly any of the conversation.

  “Yes, sure, come in,” Tessa said.

  Brin heard the door slam. She turned back toward the table just in time to see her mom, and Chace’s mom Jeanie, enter the kitchen.

  Now it was Brin’s turn to start choking, even though she didn’t have any food in her mouth.

  “Hi Brin,” the woman said.

  “Mrs. Anderson.” Brin scooted back in her chair. “Hello.”

  She knew why Chace’s mom was here—she hadn’t heard from her boy yet. And, barring a miracle (or some kind of vampire resurrection), she would never hear from her boy again. The last time Brin saw Chace he had ten vampires or more chomping on his neck, chest, legs, and feet. She had seen his terrified demeanor, that horrified look of defeat. Chace was gone.

  “So Brin, Jeanie here says Chace still hasn’t come home. He was at your movie shoot, right?”

  “That’s right.”

  Tessa crossed her arms and stared at her daughter with suspicion. “So… where is he?”

  Brin paused, but she knew she couldn’t stay silent for long. On the way back from Bodie, the group had decided on a story to tell the parents, the students, the teachers, the authority figures. They knew how much trouble they could get into if they said Chace and Sawyer had been killed, and they knew they certainly would be first in line for the nearest insane asylum if they told everybody Chace and Sawyer had been murdered by vampires. They had to come up with a lie that would keep them all out of harm’s way.

  “Well, he was still in Bodie the last time I saw him,” Brin said. That part was true. “We finished filming this morning, but Sawyer wanted to stay and do a few more shots with Chace. They said they wanted to film a few more scary scenes. The rest of us wanted to leave, and since we had two cars, the ones who wanted to come back early did so.”

  “He wanted to stay and film another scene?” Jeanie said in bewilderment. “What was this project for again?”

  “It’s for our Film class,” Brin said. “It’s worth a huge chunk of our grade. We all worked really hard on it, Chace and Sawyer included.”

  “But doing more work than what was needed? That’s so unlike my son.”

  Brin shrugged and took a moment in the awkward silence to analyze the woman’s appearance. A bit on the hefty side, with a bowl cut, pink sweater, baggy jeans, and a rear end twice as big as her own head, she didn’t look like she could be the mother of a boy as dashingly handsome as Chace. “He’s probably back in Grisly by now. Maybe he hasn’t come home yet.”

  “Yeah,” his mom said. “Yeah, you’re probably right. Does anyone know who this Sawyer kid’s parents are, or how I might be able to reach them?”

  Brin and Tessa shook their heads. Paul didn’t move a muscle.

  “Who’s this?” Jeanie said, pointing at the white-faced beanpole.

  “This is Paul, Brin’s foreign exchange student friend,” Tessa said. “He’s from Germany.”

  “Oh,” Jeanie said. “Nice to meet you.”

  “Same to you.” Paul didn’t even make eye contact with her.

  Chace’s mom leaned in toward Tessa. “He’s rather pale, isn’t he?”

  She tried to whisper it, but not even the soft rock music playing from above could mask her statement. But Paul didn’t care; he just smiled.

  “OK,” Jeanie said. “Well if you hear—”

  She stopped talking when her cell phone started blasting an annoying Justin Bieber ringtone.

  Justin Bieber? Really?

  “Hello? Chace?” The woman took a step forward, leaned her right hip against the kitchen table, and leaned her left hip against Paul’s side. “Oh. Hi honey, no. I haven’t heard from him yet. But it’s still early. His phone’s probably off. I bet he’s out with a friend.” She moved away from the table and returned to the entrance hallway. “No, I tried Kris and Russell. They haven’t heard from him. But his friend Colin isn’t picking up his phone. He might know where he is.” She paused. “Yes, exactly. Colin Cleaver.”

  Brin pursed her lips and leaned back in her chair. The name Colin Cleaver sounded familiar. She thought he might even be in their Film class.

  “Do you think she suspected anything?” Paul whispered to Brin, as Tessa departed the room and headed back toward the front door.

  “I don’t think so,” Brin whispered back.

  Paul opened his mouth to say something else, but Brin opened her eyes wide and shook her head. It was too risky to discuss this now, with the two women standing so close by. All it took was for someone to find out the group’s secret in order for everything to be unraveled. If Brin said something, if Anaya said something. There was Ash and Dylan, and Paul of course. And then there was Lavender, who seemed the mostly likely member of the group to start gabbing to her friends about what took place over the weekend in spooky old Bodie Ghost Town. She was also the only one with a physical ailment to conceal; Brin hadn’t a clue how Lavender was going to explain that nasty neck wound.

  “We’ll let you know if we hear anything,” Tessa said in the hallway.

  “Thank you so much,” Jeanie said.

  “I’m sure it’s nothing. I’m sure he’s arriving home as we speak.”

  “I hope so.”

  Brin smashed her hands against her face. She felt like she was in a Shakespearean play with all this dramatic irony. She was going to have to pretend like she didn’t know anything when Chace didn’t show up tonight, or tomorrow, or next week, or next year. It was going to be heartbreaking.

  The front door slammed.

  “I don’t know how we’re gonna be able to do this,” Brin said.

  “How you’re gonna do what?” Tessa said, entering the kitchen and immediately taking the dirty frying pan over to the sink.

  “Nothing,” Brin said, bringing her hands down to the table. “Just… uhh… all the homework I have to get done for tomorrow.”

  “Oh.” She cleaned the pan and smiled at Paul. “You sure you don’t want me to make you something else?”

  “I’m fine, thank you.”

  “OK, well, Brin, maybe you can show Paul to the basement, and make up his bed? You should probably do it now, so you can start focusing on your homework.”

  “Good idea,” Brin said, even though she didn’t have plans to work on any of her homework tonight. She knew she wouldn’t be able to focus.

  Brin scooted out from behind the table and set her and Paul’s plate next to the sink. She and her mom shared brief, awkward glances, before Brin and Paul walked across the hallway.

  She turned a corner, passed the living room, then made a right turn toward the laundry room. A tall door faced the garage, and a small door faced the basement steps. Brin realized, as she touched the doorknob, that it had been months since she’d stepped foot in the basement.

  Ever since…


  She stopped, and dropped her hand from the doorknob.

  “What is it?” Paul said.

  “Nothing. It’s nothing.”

  She opened the door and took a step forward. The basement, and the stairwell that led to it, was pitch black. In most circumstances, she would’ve been frightened to walk down the dusty staircase into total darkness. But after the events in Bodie, Brin realized she had formed a tough outer shell that would keep her safe from just about anything.

  “Here, follow me,” she said.

  Paul walked behind her, his hand on the bannister coming close to hers, but not quite touching it. They descended the stairwell in a slow, overprotective manner, as if they both assumed Paul’s scary father could leap out of the shadows at any moment.

  Brin reached the bottom step and clicked on the overhead light. She smiled; the room was perfect for Paul. It had been used for storage recently, so over a dozen brown boxes were shoved against the left side of the room. The TV had been removed after Brin’s dad died, so the only entertainment value still left was a pile of board games that rose all the way up to the ceiling. But she figured Paul wasn’t in need of much in the way of fun, anyway; he had been living in a dirt hole in the middle of nowhere, after all.

  “Well, this is it,” she said. “Oh, and I’ve got something for you.” She dug deep inside her jeans pockets and pulled out an unopened toothbrush she had swiped from her second story bathroom. “I don’t know what your dental habits were like back in Bodie, but…”

  He smiled and took the toothbrush from her. “Thanks.”

  “You’re welcome.”

  The two gazed into each other’s eyes. They didn’t say a word to each other. Brin focused on Paul. She still didn’t know the role he was going to play in her life. She didn’t know if having him stay at her own house was the right thing to do. But she knew she had gotten in too deep with this guy now, and that there was no turning back.

  Paul inched his way closer to her. She thought he might try to kiss her. Again.

  She turned away, toward the couch, and started removing the cushions.

  “Is it going to make you uncomfortable, Brin? Me being here?”

  She pulled the creaky bed out from under the cushions and removed the sheets and the yellow bedspread.

  “Of course not,” she said, forming in her hands a large ball of linens. “Here, I’ll go clean these for you. The last person who slept on these sheets was—”

  She stopped herself. She nodded at Paul and started marching up the staircase.

  “Do you need any help with that?” Paul said.

  “No, no. You can stay down here and get acquainted.”

  “With what? The walls?”

  “Uhh, yeah.” She was halfway up the stairs when she turned back around. “Did you know this basement was built entirely underneath the ground?”

  “Nice,” he said. “Seems an appropriate place for me to stay, doesn’t it?”

  “Definitely.” Brin turned back toward the top of the staircase. She could barely see with all the linens covering her face. She kept her right hand gripped on all the bed sheets and her left hand comfortably on the bannister.

  As she took the last few steps to the top, Brin thought about the question Paul had asked her. Is it going to make me uncomfortable, Paul? If every time I look at you, you try to kiss me, then yeah, maybe. If we can just be friends, then things should be dandy.

  But would they always just be friends? Brin hoped so.

  He’ll be like what Ash is to me—a really good friend, she thought. The only differences will be that he’s not as into movies, and he’s a vampire.

  “Plus he’s old enough to be my great-great-grandfather,” Brin said out loud as she reached the top step.

  “What was that?” Paul shouted from below.

  “Nothing,” she said. “I’ll be right back.”

  She turned to her left, awkwardly, and searched, in the darkness, for the door handle. She tried to find it, but her hand only slammed up against the door itself.

  “Damn it,” she said.

  She shifted to her left a little and finally found the handle.

  But before her hand could grab it, Brin’s mom pushed it open from the other side.

  “Mom!” Brin said, losing her balance. “What—”

  The weight in her hand was too much to handle, and Brin fell backward, back down the staircase. She didn’t have time to shout for help, or scream for her life. Worse, she knew Paul didn’t stand a chance to save her.

  Brin slammed the back of her head against the middle step. The last thing she saw before blacking out was the flickering light bulb on the ceiling above her.

  Chapter Four

  “Brin! Oh my God! Are you all right?”

  She came to just as she felt a slap across her face.

  Brin sat up and coughed a few times. Her mom was on her knees, hovering over her. Paul was standing behind her.

  “Oh thank God,” Tessa said. “Jesus, honey, you gave me a heart attack.”

  “Are you OK?” Paul said.

  “I’m… I think I’m all right…”

  “I’m so sorry, honey,” she said. “I didn’t hear you coming up the stairs.”

  “Did I black out?”

  “Yes,” her mom said. “Are you hurt? Do I need to take you to the hospital?”

  “How long was I out?”

  Tessa looked at Paul, then back to her daughter. “I don’t know. Thirty seconds, maybe? Not very long. The important question is, does anything hurt?”

  Brin rubbed the back of her neck. “My neck is… tender, I guess. But no, I don’t feel that different.”

  “You sure?” Tessa said. “Because I’d like to take you to urgent care just to be safe—”

  Brin shook her head and stood up. She felt dizzy, but she tried to mask it. She licked her lips and smiled. “Mom, I’m fine.”

  “OK. Well, here. Let me make the bed for Paul. You go upstairs and relax. I’ll make you some hot tea and give you a warm cloth for your neck.”

  “Jeez, you don’t have to do all that, Mom,” she said.

  “I want to.”

  Tessa grabbed the linens and exited the basement. A few seconds later, Paul and Brin heard the washing machine ignite upstairs.

  “I love having friends of mine stay at the house,” Brin said with a laugh. “My mom hasn’t been this nice to me in months.”

  “Well, she did almost break your neck.”

  “I’m fine,” she said, moving her head in a circular motion. “I like to think of that fall as a nice little epilogue to the Hell I’ve been through these last few days. I don’t know about you but I’m excited to start a new week.” She stretched out her arms and yawned. “But first I’m excited to get some sleep.”

  “You did just get some sleep,” Paul said. “A few seconds of it at least.”

  She punched him playfully in the shoulder. “Shut up.”

  “For such the strong, independent woman you are, you can be quite the klutz.”

  “I said, shut your mouth!” This time she pushed him, still playfully, but a bit harder. He nicked his leg against the couch armrest and fell on top of the mattress.

  “Nice,” he said.

  Brin laughed. Then Paul couldn’t stop himself. They both started howling with laughter, partly because they found his little tumble funny, but mostly because so much fear had been bottled up in them all weekend that they needed a proper release.

  “What’s going on down there?” Tessa shouted from the stairwell.

  “Nothing,” Brin said, wiping the tears from her eyes. “Paul just had a little fall of his own is all.”

  “Oh. Well tell him his sheets will be cleaned in about forty-five minutes.”

  “OK!” Brin shouted, before they started laughing again.

  He sat up and brought his elbows to his knees.

  “You want a quick tour of the house?” Brin said. “While we wait for your bed to be made?”
/>   “Yeah, sure. That sounds nice.”

  “OK. Follow me.”

  Brin showed him his bathroom at the top of the stairs, to the right of the laundry room. The room hadn’t been used in a long time and looked brand new, with the brown paint above the sink and shower stall looking like it had just been freshly applied.

  She showed him another storage area, as well as the living room and family room, which he had only briefly stepped in.

  Then she took him upstairs.

  “The bedrooms are up here?” he said.

  “Yeah.”

  They walked up the staircase to the second floor with the same speed they had taken when they glided down to the basement. Brin watched her steps even closer this time, with the hope that she wouldn’t take a tumble twice in the same night.

  As she reached the top step, she looked down the hall, all the way to her bedroom door. The only teenage boy to have ever been in her bedroom had been Ash. Paul would make two.

  Paul followed her down the hallway and crossed his arms as she opened her bedroom door. She had hoped it wouldn’t be too messy inside, but it most definitely was. Brin slammed the door shut a mere second after opening it.

  “What are you doing?” Paul said. “Open it. Let me see.”

  “No. I think I need to spend about a day in there, or ten, to clean it up, to make it presentable.”

  “Brin, I’ve lived in a shack for the last three months. I’ve slept on dirt. You don’t have to feel embarrassed.”

  “I know but I’ll show it to you another time—”

  As soon as Brin took a step forward, the meowing from her cat stopped both her and Paul in their tracks.

  “Is that a cat?” Paul said. He opened the door, without Brin’s permission, and stared down at Brin’s gray tabby. “Oh, how cute.” He tried to pick her up, but she hissed and ran the other way.

  “Sorry,” Brin said. “She’s a little shy.”

  “You didn’t tell me you had a cat.”

  Brin crossed her arms. “I didn’t realize we were supposed to be so acquainted with each other. There’s a lot about me you don’t know, Paul.”

  “Such as?”

  Brin walked across the hall and opened the door on the other side. Paul looked in to see another bedroom, this one with David Lynch movie posters sprinkled all over the walls, a closet jam-packed with mostly winter clothes, and a large queen bed that looked like it had never been slept in.