The Zombie Playground

by Brian Rowe

  As she made her way home, Brin couldn’t help but wonder what had happened to the poor girl.

  She’s obviously turning into something, but what? Is she transforming into one of them, into a vampire?

  But as Brin exited the neighborhood and made a sharp left on Sharp Knife Way to take her back to Diablo Shadows, she concentrated only on that horrible noise that Lavender had been making. It was a noise that hadn’t emanated from Paul, from Droz, from any of the vampires. It had only come out of one other person.

  “That little girl by the RV,” Brin said. “The girl who bit Lavender.”

  What if that girl hadn’t been a vampire?

  What if she had been something else entirely?

  ---

  While suspicion only increased with Brin and Ash and the rest of the gang over the mysterious deaths of Sawyer and Chace, life went relatively back to normal during the following week. Brin didn’t tell anyone about her father’s empty grave, and she was surprised to discover that there had been no reports of tampering with a grave at Grisly Cemetery. Brin stopped by the cemetery again on Wednesday to see if her damage had still been done, but to her astonishment, there was no dug hole in front of her dad’s gravestone. It was like she had never stepped foot in the cemetery. She didn’t know who would’ve cleaned up her mess, or if it had been her own deceased dad who covered her tracks, but she was grateful. And for the near future, as much as she wanted to see her dad again, she knew it was a good idea to stay away from Grisly Cemetery.

  Her mom spent most of the weekend at home, but Brin needed to get out of the house. She took Paul on a hike up near Lake Tahoe—one that was mostly clouded in trees—and enjoyed her first conversation with the vampire in which she didn’t have to worry about getting hunted or killed. They talked a lot about both their futures but very little about Paul’s past, and while Brin wanted to know more about the time period he grew up in, when it was that he died, and how he came to be a vampire, she knew he would tell her in time. He was still trying to acquaint himself with a new city, with a new life, and she didn’t want to lose the trust she had earned. Plus he could snap her in two and use her blood for a beachside Cosmo if he wanted, so she decided to wait until he felt comfortable in sharing his deep, dark secrets. On Sunday they went to the movies, where Paul thankfully voted against seeing the newest Twilight installment. He wanted to see something comical, so they decided on the new Jim Carrey comedy. “His movies haven’t been good since the 90’s,” Brin said, and when Paul responded by saying, “What about Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind? That came out in 2004,” she knew that she had stumbled upon the only vampire in the world with a strong knowledge of modern cinema.

  Brin’s classes that week went by without incident. She was able to finally commit to doing homework again, studying for her tests again; by Friday she felt like she would bounce back with some good grades for the second semester after all. While she still hated most of her teachers, Brin kept having to remind herself, that, in the end, she was alive. She hadn’t been turned into a vampire, or a troll, or the Loch Ness Monster. She hadn’t been sucked dry before a roomful of schizophrenic freakazoids. Her bones hadn’t ended up on the side of the road like Chace and Sawyer. And she didn’t have a chunk of skin missing from the back of her neck. She was still in pain over her father’s will-he-or-won’t-he resurrection, but she was finally starting to get past it. She had friends, she had promise, and she had life. As long as she kept moving forward, Brin knew she was going to be OK.

  It was difficult going to Film class that week, with Mr. Barker having vanished without a trace. She was sad by his sudden departure, and she was even more grievous about not giving the man a proper good-bye. It didn’t feel like it could be so, but when everyone entered sixth period on Monday to find a substitute teacher, the reality hit: Mr. Barker was gone for good. The administration hadn’t yet decided on a permanent teacher for Intro to Film—every teacher qualified already had a sixth period class—so instead they got a series of substitute teachers all week. One young man, tall and goofy, actually had some knowledge about movies, but the others didn’t know Jimmy Stewart from Jimmy Kimmel. Instead of playing another horror film, the teachers played Citizen Kane and the first half of Casablanca—apparently Brin’s wish for a more widespread overview of the film genres that first day of class had been answered. The goofy sub on Wednesday opened his lecture before Citizen Kane by saying, “It’s a sled… Rosebud’s a sled,” but nobody seemed to care. There was a more relaxed nature about the class, but the students weren’t as invested as they were before Mr. Barker’s abrupt exit. A lot of the students were absent that week, and Lavender, expectedly, was nowhere to be found.

  Brin eventually apologized to Ash for her behavior last Friday night. She knew he had just been trying to be helpful by coming over and suggesting romantic comedies to watch. She had been so pent up with anger—about the deaths of Sawyer and Chace, about the extrication of Mr. Barker, about the mysterious Droz sightings, about her possibly not-so-dead father, about the high probability she might be whisked away to jail at any moment—that she couldn’t handle his being so nice to her. He had brought over one of her all-time favorite movies Breakfast at Tiffany’s; why she felt she had to skip out on watching the glorious Audrey Hepburn to spend the night cold and wet in a muddy cemetery was beyond her mental reach. She wanted to see her dad again, but her father was dead, and always would be. She had to come to the simple and sane conclusion: she would never see her father again.

  ---

  Friday movie night arrived, and this time Brin couldn’t have been more excited for it. And as a bonus, Paul was invited to join without even the slightest snicker from Ash. Once again, as always, Ash begged for Brin to watch an Alfred Hitchcock movie, even one of his lesser classics. But, as always, she deferred his request.

  “Why are you so obsessed with me watching a Hitchcock movie?”

  “Because he’s the best,” Ash said. “He’s the best that ever was.”

  “Says you.”

  “Says movie lovers everywhere! I can’t believe you, Brin. You love classic movies. You don’t mind black and white. You’ll watch an old Ingmar Bergman movie for God’s sake, but you won’t give anything by Hitchcock a chance. What the hell’s wrong with you?”

  “They’re scary. I don’t like to be scared. You know that.”

  “We watched Nosferatu and Night of the Living Dead in class! Any five minutes of those movies are scarier than anything in a Hitchcock movie! They’re more fun than scary.”

  “I’ll watch anything else,” Brin said.

  “But why?”

  Brin didn’t answer him, and Paul didn’t appear to want to get caught up in the heated conversation. Even though it turned out Paul knew more about movies than he had ever let on, he probably figured it was best not to further ignite Ash’s increasing film rage.

  “Brin, you want to be a movie director, right?”

  “Or writer,” she said. “One of the two.”

  “I’ve learned so much from Hitchcock movies over the years, I can’t even tell you. His pacing, his framing, his editing, his music. He’s the master at his craft, a genius of storytelling. Let me just show you Rear Window. It’ll be fun—”

  “Ash! I said, no!”

  He rubbed his fingers against his cheeks and let out a long, painful sigh. Then he smiled. “Wait, there’s three of us here now. We can have a democracy.” He looked at Paul and nodded, like he hoped the guy would go along with his plan. “Everyone in favor of watching Rear Window, raise your hand!”

  Ash raised his hand up high, but Paul didn’t budge.

  Brin grinned. “Everyone in favor of watching Breakfast at Tiffany’s, raise your hand!“

  Brin and Paul put their hands up.

  Ash shook his head and flicked a finger against the wall. “Damn it.”

  “That settles it,” Brin said. “It’s time for Ms. Hepburn!”

  They ended up watching two Hepburn
movies that night—one with Audrey, and one with Katharine. Brin had never seen Adam’s Rib, and she found it absolutely enchanting. While she loved Breakfast at Tiffany’s—she had seen it more than fifteen times—she fell in love with the sparring of Katharine Hepburn and Spencer Tracy in the marvelous Adam’s Rib.

  Both movies put the trio in the best of spirits, like the best movies could always do. They forgot all their troubles and laughed their angers and tensions away. Even Paul got in a giggling fit toward the end of Adam’s Rib, and Brin was happy to hear that his laugh didn’t sound any darker than a normal human being’s—it was high-pitched and infectious, and even included the occasional snort.

  They smiled and laughed so much that night that the trio almost forgot about the funerals taking place bright and early the following morning.

  Yes, the time had finally come to say goodbye to Chace and Sawyer.

  Chapter Sixteen

  Carl Carpenter tossed his bottle of Diet Coke into the newest plot he had made and scratched his balls. He felt a burp coming on, but he suppressed it. He brought his hands to his sides and peered down to see a stomach that seemed to be growing an inch larger with each passing day. He was only thirty-two years old, but looked fifty, with a large bald head and a thick beard that covered most of his double chin. His arms were small, his legs were stumpy, and the only thing people noticed about him from behind was his gigantic rear end, which seemed to stretch all the way to his neck.

  He couldn’t hold it in. He burped. For ten seconds or more. He tried to compose a song out of his musical burp, but nothing more than two high notes came out of his giant mouth. He wiped the drool from his lips, dropped a Snickers mini bar into his mouth, and kept on working.

  When he finished, he tossed his shovel into his bag and let the balls drop to the ground. These balls he had no interest in scratching. These he wanted to hit over the fence into the driving range of the new Macabre Golf Course, which faced Grisly Cemetery. He had stolen thirty range balls in all, from a nine-hole course in Reno, and knew that, since it was so early in the morning and nobody was around, he could goof off all he wanted.

  Carl loved sports. Basketball, football, soccer—he loved them all. As a kid he loved to play them, too, and even though he was always a bit on the corpulent side, he had the ability to make his teams, and his parents, proud. But by the time high school reared its ugly head, he had ballooned to over 300 pounds, and he didn’t have the strength or persistence to continue playing the sports he admired. He tried tennis—too taxing. He tried bowling—not taxing enough. By the time he was sixteen he had settled on golf. He wasn’t a strong player—his typical score for eighteen holes was 90—but he enjoyed the sport and constantly wanted to improve his game.

  Carl surveyed the cemetery, to be certain no one was watching, and then grabbed his seven-iron from his bag. He took a few practice swings. He didn’t have the greatest swing in the world, but he could smash the ball close to 200 yards with his seven-iron if he was having a better-than-average day. He laid out the golf balls and started striking them, one after another, without a lot of waiting in between. There was a green over the fence that he figured was about 180 yards away, so he hit with a bit more power than usual. His third shot landed on the green. So did the fourth and fifth. He already had a handle on his game, and he was chipping from not the fairway or short rough but from the tall, long grass in the back of a cemetery.

  “Take that, suckas,” he said, and he started smashing more and more balls over the fence, past a nestle of trees, and onto the nearby green. Some missed, but even those landed in front or to the side. One ball struck the top of the fence and landed on a tombstone, which frustrated him. He didn’t want to look like a failure to all the rotting bodies that surrounded him.

  He decided with his last quintet of golf balls to hit them as hard as he could, as far as he could. These shots went up over the fence, over the trees, over the green, into a small pond at least 230 yards in the distance. He surprised even himself that he could hit a seven-iron so far.

  “I could be the next Jon Daly,” he said as he tossed the club back in his bag. “I could be the next golf legend.”

  He turned around to see cars appearing in the far distance parking lot. He had forgotten about the two funerals taking place this morning, both for local high school boys who died near some ghost town.

  Carl immediately worked his way to the corner of the fence to retrieve his golf balls. The new course wasn’t finished yet—it was rumored to open in May—and the course designers still hadn’t come up with a way to mask the fact that an eerie, old-fashioned cemetery ran alongside five of the eighteen holes. Carl still found the idea odd: Who in their right mind would design and install a golf course next to a cemetery?

  Even odder to Carl was that there was a small part of the fence to the driving range not completed yet, so he could weasel his way through the small opening and retrieve as many range balls as he could find. He chuckled to himself as he waddled through the opening, realizing he hadn’t yet pulled a dead body over to the golf course, to make the course and the cemetery united.

  “One of these days,” he said.

  He checked his watch. His supervisor would be checking in with him any minute. He had to move fast.

  Carl looked toward the trees and didn’t see any of the balls. Then he looked to the right of the green. Still nothing.

  “Looks like I made a hole in one with every shot!” He did a goofy little jig and ran up to the green. His grin turned into a worried frown. There were no golf balls in sight. “Wait… I was kidding.”

  He raced up to the hole and looked down. Again, nothing.

  “What in God’s name—” He had hit thirty balls on the green yet now couldn’t find a single one. He turned around. “Is this the wrong green?”

  He glanced to his left to see at least twenty-five range balls nestled together on the fairway, a small red flag sticking out of the ground.

  Carl shook his head. “You idiot.” He had mistaken a flag to be part of the green.

  He approached the range balls and grabbed the first one with his right hand to throw in his bag.

  But another hand pulled him back down.

  “What the—” The yellow hand had a firm grip on him. He tried to wiggle himself away, but he couldn’t. He smashed his left hand against the yellow hand, hitting it hard over a dozen times, until the hand finally let him go. “Oh my God oh my God oh my—”

  Carl fell to the ground and crawled forward, trying to get back up on his feet. He couldn’t find the strength. He could feel every breath escaping his mouth before he could register even taking it. He crawled through the golf balls, one after another. They all started blending together, all thirty of them making a giant ghostly image in front of his eyes.

  A hand shot up through one golf ball and grabbed his left hand. Another hand popped up past a golf ball and grabbed his right hand. He screamed big and loud, more so than he had ever screamed before, not knowing what was happening, or if this was all some kind of scary nightmare he was about to wake up from.

  “Get away from me!” he shouted, but the hands didn’t let him go. He felt a hand grasp his foot, then his ankle, then his leg. A giant hand grabbed the crease in his ass, and he turned his head around to see thirty yellow hands bust through the ground and find a chunk of his massive body to grab hold of.

  Carl had always wanted to be thinner, but such a wish spoke no truer than in this moment.

  “Let me go! For Heaven’s sake, let me—” he shouted, but his voice was cut off when one last hand burst through the ground, through his back, through his stomach, through his entire body, and grabbed hold of his ultra-shocked face. He didn’t black out. He felt the horrific pain, every lasting second of it.

  Carl tried to scream one last time, but nothing came out.

  The last thing he saw was all the yellow hands dragging him down into blackness.

  The last thing he heard was a group of limousines pu
lling up to the cemetery behind him.

  The last thing he felt was a hundred mouths biting into his flesh like his body had transformed into a succulent Thanksgiving feast.

  Chapter Seventeen

  On the drive to the cemetery at 9:30 A.M. on Saturday morning, Brin peered out the window to see a most marvelous sunny day in Grisly, Nevada. The clouds from the last two weeks had vanished, and the sun, which had been so shy throughout most of January, was finally presenting its happy face for all to see. She wasn’t feeling well—a knot in her stomach that woke her up in the middle of the night had come back to haunt her—and part of her had almost been hoping for a gloomy day, the kind of overcast weather that would put today’s mournful scenario into perspective.

  “Are they doing them together?” Ash said from the passenger seat. “Sawyer and Chace’s funerals I mean?”

  “I don’t know,” Brin said. “I just know Chace’s starts at ten.”

  “There’s gonna be so many people there. We’re not gonna find anywhere to park.”

  “It’ll be fine. If we have to walk, we’ll walk.”

  “I don’t feel like walking,” Ash said. “I hate exercise. That’s why I love movies. You just sit and watch.”

  “Ahh, so the truth comes out. You like movies because you’re lazy.”

  “Well, horror movies give me a work-out sometimes. If it’s really scary I might jump a little in my seat. I might scream. Screaming is hard work. You have to use, like, thousands of your facial muscles.”

  “I don’t think that’s true.”

  “I think it is.”

  “Oh my God,” Brin said.

  Ash shook his head in frustration. “What? I’m telling you, there have been scientific studies—”

  “No,” she said, pointing forward. “Look.”

  The cemetery parking lot was not only completely full, but cars were cluttering up the dirt that connected the cemetery to Macabre Golf Course. Hundreds of students, parents, and teachers, many dressed in their finest black suits and dresses, sauntered forward toward the cemetery with glazed looks of melancholy and disbelief.