The Zombie Playground

by Brian Rowe

  Nearly everyone let out a long, angry groan.

  The teacher tried to ignore the tepid reaction. “As I was saying, an essay you’re going to write, about how the director transcends the genre and makes the film an allegory for civil rights issues in 1960’s America. This essay, four to six pages in length, will be due on—”

  A loud knock on the door stopped Mr. Barker’s lecture. He walked over to the door, just as the curmudgeonly vice principal Mrs. Hallow poked her head in. She whispered to Mr. Barker for what felt like five minutes. Brin sat up straight and tried to act normal.

  Uh oh. This can’t be good.

  Mr. Barker turned back to the class, and Mrs. Hallow took a step inside. She motioned with her index finger. “Brin, Dylan, Anaya, and Ashley. Can you come with me?”

  Nobody moved, until Ash stood up and kicked his chair to the side. “It’s Ash.”

  “I’m sorry?” the vice principal said.

  “Nothing.”

  Brin, Anaya, and Dylan reluctantly pushed in their chairs and followed Ash to the door. Their teacher hadn’t formed an opinion about the matter yet; he was already continuing his lecture on the origin of zombie movies.

  “All right, before we start playing the film, which we’ll be watching through Wednesday, we’re going to look at a scene from the sequel to Night of the Living Dead. This movie, Dawn of the Dead, set mostly in a shopping mall, will give you an even stronger idea about how Romero used horror to unveil a wider problem in society.”

  Brin noticed Mrs. Hallow shaking her head in disbelief at the classroom content as she closed the door behind her and led the quartet down the hall toward the Principal’s office.

  “This isn’t good,” Ash whispered to Brin.

  “No shit,” Brin whispered back. “Keep your mouth shut. Let me do the talking.”

  Brin tried to remain calm, but when she saw another woman, this one appearing more stern than Mrs. Hollow, holding open the Principal’s office door, she knew it was going to be difficult to find a way out of this mess.

  She led the group inside the office, finding the Principal, a security officer, and the parents of Sawyer and Chace, standing inside. Both of the moms had tears in their eyes.

  Brin turned back to Anaya, Ash, and Dylan. She couldn’t believe it, but at this moment, she would have preferred a room full of vampires.

  Chapter Eight

  Brin didn’t wait for the principal Mr. Stine to tell her to sit down; she had already planted her butt in a chair before a single person said a word. Brin, Anaya, Ash, and Dylan sat at one end of a large table, while all the adults took seats on the opposite side. The tension is the air was so thick if Brin had a chainsaw she wouldn’t be able to cut through it.

  “What’s going on?” Brin said. She knew she and the rest of the group needed to start acting ignorant. If they let on that they knew something bad had happened to Sawyer and Chace, they wouldn’t just be suspended from school; they would be thrown behind bars with no questions asked.

  “It’s Sawyer and Chace,” Principal Stine said, his gargantuan bald head glistening under the florescent lights. “They’re missing.”

  Brin looked at the other three. Nobody said a word. She figured, while Anaya had been the director of their movie, that she needed to be the director of this current improvised situation.

  “They’re missing?” Brin said, after she couldn’t wait any longer for Anaya to say something. “What do you mean? They didn’t come home last night?”

  “No. And Chace’s father drove to Bodie this morning to see if something had happened to their vehicle. There was no one there. No trace of Sawyer or Chace. It’s like they vanished.”

  “What? But that’s impossible. They were there! When we left, I mean.”

  Brin looked at Anaya. She hoped the girl would chip in with a few words. But Brin could tell she was scared, as was Ash and Dylan. She knew the other three didn’t want to say the wrong thing and give all their secrets away.

  “Now it is my understanding,” Stine continued, “that you all traveled to Bodie Ghost Town to film a movie for Mr. Barker’s class. Is that right?”

  They all nodded.

  “And Chace and Sawyer were with you when you departed?”

  “Yes,” Brin said. “They were with us the entire time.”

  “They were,” Anaya added, finally saying something.

  “Did you take one car to the filming, or two?”

  “Just one,” Anaya said, clearing her throat. “Sawyer’s van.”

  “Yeah,” Brin added. “But then Ash came to watch some of the filming on Sunday morning, and when Chace and Sawyer wanted to keep filming, Ash brought the rest of us back.”

  Principal Stine sighed and clamped his hands together. Brin could tell he was perplexed with the situation and trying to make sense of it all. “I’m going to try to look past the fact that you traveled to another state and filmed without permits, without documentation, without telling any administrator at this school. I’m going to try to look past the fact that you ignored bad weather and illegally trespassed onto Route 270, which is closed for the winter. And I’m going to try to understand why you went through all this trouble to make a movie for a class, when the backdrop of our own city would have suited you just fine. This is high school, guys. You’re not making Ben-Hur. You’re sixteen years old! This is inappropriate behavior, and I’m extremely disappointed in all of you.”

  Brin didn’t know what to say. She looked at the others, who were simply staring at the ground.

  “We’re really sorry,” Brin said. “We didn’t mean for anything bad to happen.”

  Chace’s mom Jeanie finally turned around, revealing a face red with tears. She sat down in an empty chair next to the Principal and brought her hands down flat on the table.

  “Please,” she said, “I beg of you. This is my son. This is my little boy. If there’s anything… anything at all… good or bad… that any of you know about what could have happened to my Chace, I want to know. I need to know.”

  Brin shook her head. “I’m sorry. We don’t know what—”

  “That’s bullshit!” Jeanie shouted, changing her attitude from vulnerable to demonic in a millisecond. “You’re hiding something, I know it. The only time I talked to Chace about this stupid movie project, he said he’d rather be doing anything else. Why would he have stayed longer? With some guy he didn’t even know? It makes no sense!”

  “We’re sorry—”

  “You don’t get to be sorry! You’re not the ones missing today! My son is!”

  Principal Stine patted the woman’s back and said, “Calm down, Jeanie. Please.”

  “I will not calm down! I want the police in on this! I want the FBI! And I want these kids investigated until someone tells me the truth!”

  Chace’s mom stormed out of the office in such a rage that Brin had to hold her breath for a moment, in fear that the woman would try to lop her head off with the Principal’s scissors. The woman had been so calm last night chatting with her mom. She knew if Jeanie’s attitude had changed so drastically in these last few hours, soon she would go completely insane.

  Your son’s not coming back, Brin thought. I know exactly what happened to him, but I’m never going to tell you. I’m sorry.

  After the Principal asked a few more general questions, the students were allowed to return to Mr. Barker’s class, with the knowing that any one of them could be called back in for more questioning. Brin knew the rising suspicion was only going to intensify with each passing day, so she tried her best to remain calm.

  By the time Brin, Dylan, Ash, and Anaya had taken their seats, Mr. Barker had started Night of the Living Dead on the big pull-down screen. A minute after arriving back in class, Mrs. Hallow asked Mr. Barker to accompany her to Principal Stine’s office—apparently their teacher was wanted for questioning, too.

  As soon as he left, everyone in the class started whispering to each other. Most of the students had their attention focu
sed on the infamous quartet, and then the questions started pouring forward.

  “What was that about?”

  “Are you guys suspended?”

  “Did Mr. Barker molest one of you?”

  Ash prided himself by responding with, “No comment,” but after a few minutes, Brin knew she needed to get out of that room for her own sanity. She looked up at the clock to see that another twenty-five minutes of class remained. She almost raised her hand to ask to go to the bathroom, but then she remembered Mr. Barker was gone.

  She stood up and raced out the door to the sounds of creepy dialogue: “They’re coming to get you, Barbara! They’re coming for you, Barbara!”

  He was coming for her all right; Brin was almost to the girl’s bathroom when she heard the footsteps closing in on her.

  She turned around. “Paul? What are you—”

  “What’s going on? Was that about what I think it’s about?”

  Brin glanced past him. She didn’t see Mrs. Hallow or Principal Stine or Chace’s unstable mother, but she did see a few miscellaneous bodies roaming the hallways. She pulled Paul inside the nearest bathroom.

  “Brin, what the hell’s going on?”

  “We can’t talk about it. Not here. Not at school.”

  “Are you in trouble? Did you guys tell them about… you know…”

  “What?”

  “Me?”

  “What?” Brin crossed her arms, a little upset. “You think we would do that?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Paul, whatever happens to us, whatever they find out, you are going to be fine. All people have to know about you is that you’re not from around here. Nobody has to know you’re a bloodsucking vampire.”

  He sighed and smashed his hands to his side. “How many times do I have to tell you? You can call me a vampire if you must, but I’m not a bloodsucker—”

  A toilet flushed. Brin turned to her left, astonished, to see, one, that she was in the boy’s bathroom, and, two, that someone besides her and Paul was in the vicinity. Paul brought his hand to his mouth and Brin’s eyes grew to the size of oranges. A boy stepped out of the farthest stall on the right and pulled up his pants.

  Brin let out a sigh of relief. She didn’t recognize him, but he looked like a dumb freshman who no one could ever take seriously. He was awkwardly tall and skinny and looked to be more concerned with his bowl cut than with her out-of-this-world conversation with Paul.

  But then, as he moseyed over to the sink to wash his hands, he glanced at them in a manner that suggested he had been listening.

  “We should go,” Brin said. “We can’t talk about this here.”

  “Yeah, you’re right. You wanna go back to class?”

  “That’s probably a good idea.”

  They turned around to leave the bathroom, when the freshman’s voice stopped them both in their tracks.

  “Did you guys say you saw a vampire?”

  Brin turned around. The nonchalant way in which the boy asked the question made Brin’s head start to throb. She took a step forward, even though Paul was pulling her back toward the door.

  “What?” Brin said, trying to act dumb. “Did you say you believe in vampires?”

  “I didn’t before,” the boy said, strapping on his backpack and looking like he might cry. “I think I do now, though.”

  “Really? Why?”

  Paul stopped pulling on her. They stared at the boy like he had something important to get off his chest.

  “Because I think… recently… I might have seen…” He stopped.

  Brin waited. Paul couldn’t even look at the boy.

  He swallowed loudly. “A zombie.”

  Brin looked at Paul, and Paul looked at Brin. Then they turned back to the freshman.

  “A zombie?” Brin said. “You mean, like a dead person?”

  He shook his head. “Not just a dead person. A living dead person. Its skin was rotting. It made these strange growl noises, like an animal. It took my friend.”

  Brin stumbled forward. She wanted to take the boy’s hand in hers. But she didn’t.

  Instead, she said, “What’s your name?”

  “Tristan. Tristan Poe.”

  “Nice to meet you, Tristan. I’m Brin. And this is Paul.”

  “Nice to meet you,” Tristan said, bringing his hands down to his pockets. Brin could see that he had perspiration forming down the center of his t-shirt.

  They all stared at each other for a moment. Nobody said a word.

  Finally: “So,” Brin said, “you think you saw a zombie, huh?”

  Tristan nodded. But he didn’t respond to her question with words. Instead, he stared at Brin, confused, and said, “Is there a reason why you’re in the boy’s bathroom?”

  It didn’t take Brin long to step back into the hall.

  Chapter Nine

  The unthinkable happened on Friday.

  Brin thought she could get through the week. She thought she could get up, go to her classes, hang out with Paul, and try to be a normal teenage girl. She had only been questioned once more on Tuesday, and by Thursday, Chace and Sawyer had simply been reported missing—not dead. Lavender had finally reported back to school, even though she still appeared rather sickly, with a high fever and a tendency to slur her words, but back nonetheless, with a large bandage covering her neck wound.

  Mr. Barker addressed the class on Tuesday about the status of Chace and Sawyer. He didn’t hold back; he told the students everything. He said that they were missing, and that they and Sawyer’s van had not been found. The teacher allowed Brin and Anaya to elaborate on the story, but Dylan ended up relaying the (false) story, talking about how most of the group departed Bodie early on Sunday, and left Chace and Sawyer behind. No vampires were mentioned.

  The teacher then went on to say that the short film assignments had been canceled, that everyone would get a passing grade on their movies, and that two additional essays would be assigned later in the semester to make up for the hole in the syllabus the canceled projects had left. The majority of the class was pissed off, to say the least, especially since so many had dedicated their previous weekend to making their movies. Brin couldn’t have been more mixed in her feelings. She didn’t want to have to film another movie with the group, and she never wanted to see the footage from their Bodie location shoot. But she did want to see Ash’s musical edited and completed, and, most of all, she felt that if no movie came out of the Bodie debacle, then the deaths of Chace and Sawyer had been for nothing.

  She allowed any negative feelings to slide, however, and by Thursday night, she felt like, despite the fact that the murders of Chace and Sawyer would be hanging over her head for the unforeseeable future, she could put Bodie, and all the baggage that came with it, behind her.

  But then Brin found herself on Friday morning, a spoon in her cereal bowl, her mouth dropped so low it was touching the milk, staring at the television set with her mom, and trying not to scream.

  “The skeletal remains were found in a burned van, ten miles outside of Bridgeport, California,” the reporter was saying on the early morning news. “While the remains have not yet been identified, they are believed to be the bodies of Chace Anderson and Sawyer Neville, two seventeen-year-old teenagers from Grisly, Nevada, who went missing five days ago. No reports have come forward regarding the cause of death, but we will keep you updated as more details come in.”

  Brin grabbed the remote control from her mom and turned off the television set. She knew deep down that this had been coming, but she wasn’t at all prepared. And more surprisingly, even though she had seen Chace and Sawyer killed before her very eyes, this report, nearly a week later, finally confirmed to her that the two young men were literally gone.

  She fell to the ground and started weeping on the carpet.

  “Oh, Brin,” Tessa said, kneeling down and rubbing Brin’s back. “Oh, honey. Don’t cry.”

  “I can’t believe they’re really dead.”


  “We don’t know yet. It might not be them. It might be someone else—”

  “Someone else? They found two skeletons… in a van… near Bodie. What are the odds of that?”

  “I’m just saying. Don’t give up hope until the bodies have been identified.”

  Brin shook her head. She wanted to tell her mom everything. She wanted to start ranting and raving about everything she saw in Bodie Ghost Town. But she knew she never could.

  The weeping intensified. She couldn’t help herself. She could feel herself transported back to the pain of those two separate moments when she saw life draining from Chace and Sawyer’s faces.

  “It’s all my fault,” Brin said.

  “What?”

  “If we hadn’t made the movie in Bodie… if we had never gone there…”

  “I thought you said it was that girl Enya’s idea to film it there.”

  “Anaya.”

  “What?”

  Brin didn’t care to clarify; she took a deep breath and curled up into a ball. Her mom was right. But it still didn’t make her feel better. “I could have stopped her from going there, I tried to. I just wanted to film it here in Grisly. It would’ve been easier, more practical. And nobody would have gotten hurt.”

  “What’s going on?” Paul said, stumbling out from the basement with flattened hair, wearing a pair of her older brother’s pajama bottoms.

  Brin wiped tears from her eyes. She turned around and gave Paul a big hug right in front of her mom. She didn’t care what her mom thought. She needed an embrace from someone who had been there, who knew the pain she was suffering

  “They found them,” Brin said. “They found Chace and Sawyer. They’re just remains, Paul. They’re just skeletal remains!”

  “Oh God,” Paul said, like he too had known this revelation to be coming.