Zombies Don't Cry

by Rusty Fischer

  After I answer all the questions and hit enter on the final page, the screen goes blank. At first I figure, Great, no heartbeat, no breathing …now no electricity. What next? A sinkhole’s going to swallow up the entire house? But every light in my bedroom is still on, the air-conditioning is still blowing, and my computer is still humming, so that’s not it.

  Then red spills across the monitor and the following message pops up:

  7

  Brains on Aisle 9

  YOU KNOW, SURPRISINGLY, they don’t sell a lot of brains in the local 24-hour grocery store around the corner from my house. And, believe it or not, they don’t really like it when you ask about them. At least, not the sleepy college kid working the only open cash register the night I become a zombie.

  Standing at the counter in my high ponytail, freshly laundered yoga pants, hoodie, and flip-flops, I try to look him in the eye. “Hi, yeah, listen, uh …Tad? Tad, I’m looking for, well, see, my, uhhm …grandfather …is coming into town this weekend, and he really likes, well, believe it or not, he loves brains. Don’t look at me like that. I guess they ate them on the farm when he was growing up or something, but …do you know where I could find any?”

  “Tad,” or so says the name tag on his chest, looks past me, around me, out into the parking lot, and everywhere but at me before finally saying, “Very funny.” Then he stares at me, as if to say, without words, “I’m too smart to be punk’d. Even if it is two in the morning and there’s not another soul around for miles.”

  “It’s not a prank, Tad. Seriously. I looked all over the meat department, found tubs of chicken livers, something called ‘chitterlings’—not sure I want to go there—even a big, gray cow’s tongue, but …no brains. So …do you know where I could find them? I mean, I’m asking as a customer”—here I hold up the insanely fat roll of $20 bills Dad keeps in a cookie jar in the kitchen in case of an emergency (which, I think you’ll agree, this is)—”so I’m really not trying to prank you.”

  He sighs, reaches for a curvy microphone next to his cash register, pushes a button at the base, and says, “Harvey, I’m sending a live one back to the butcher for a few pounds of, get this …brains. Try to meet her there? We don’t want her wandering around the store scaring off all the other customers.” He snickers, but I don’t care.

  Visions of conking out halfway up the grocery store aisle make me brave enough to storm back to the butcher’s section and demand. My. Brains.

  Harvey is waiting for me, a quizzical look on his sleepy face and a hairy wrist extended, his big silver watch showing past his bloody butcher’s coat. “You know what time it is, missy?”

  “It’s 2:27 a.m.,” I say, eyeing the old-school black-and-white clock above his head.

  Harvey looks up and scratches at his hairnet. “Oh yeah, well, I shouldn’t be on shift yet, but we’ve got a big shipment of rump roasts coming in a few hours, and who’s gonna turn down a little overtime these days, right?”

  “Sure,” I say uneasily, having never worked a day in my life, let alone qualified for overtime. “Why not?”

  He looks me up and down, frowning. “Brains? You sure? Lot of fat in brains.”

  Right when I’m about to tell him I’m a size 2, thank you very much, he holds up his hands and explains.

  “Not that I’m saying you need to count calories or anything. Far from it. I know how you girls are these days. Well, here’s the thing: I can’t give you brains.” Harvey must see my face fall to the dirty linoleum floor because he promptly adds, “Not cow’s brains, anyway, on account of mad cow disease and all. And I can’t give you pork brains, on account of swine flu. But …it just so happens the lamb hasn’t been moving much lately so I can do lamb’s brains, fresh as of two days ago. How many pounds?”

  “Pounds?” I hesitate. The website didn’t say how much brains—or even how many—I should eat, only that I should eat them in 48 hours OR ELSE. Why doesn’t anyone pay attention to details anymore? Would it be so hard to add a simple line like, BTW, Maddy, 3 pounds of brains per week is plenty?

  Seriously, am I the first new zombie ever to ask?

  “Yeah, honey,” Harvey is saying as I fume at the www.youmightbeazombieif.blogspot.com webmaster. “This is a deli right here; we weigh things by the pound.”

  “Well, how many pounds of lamb’s brains can I get?” (Introducing item number one on the list of things I never thought I’d hear myself ask a grown man at 2:27 a.m.)

  He rolls his eyes. “As many pounds as you need, darlin’, but I gotta hear a number before I can start filling the order.”

  “Ten pounds,” I blurt, half expecting the Butcher Police to come out from behind the gurgling lobster tank and bust me for brain abuse.

  But no, old Harvey merely scratches his hairnet again like I haven’t just asked for 10 pounds of mushy cerebrum meat and whistles softly around a soggy toothpick. “Ten pounds it is.” He says it without judgment, disappearing into the back room through a series of five dingy plastic straps that hang from the top of the metal doorframe to the red-tiled floor.

  I pace nervously in front of the steaks and cold cuts, chicken thighs, and pork loins while Harvey fills my order. Something by The Beatles is playing over the sound system; something instrumental and lame, but I can’t quite figure out what it is. For a song that was most likely written (on rock tablets) the year my dad was born, it’s surprisingly catchy. Lame, but still pretty catchy just the same.

  I’m still trying to figure it out when someone says from behind me, “‘The Fool on the Hill.’“

  “Huh?” I turn around to find none other than Chloe Kildare staring back at me, black hair, black eye shadow, black eyeliner, black lipstick, black mole, black eyes, and all. She smiles, her pierced gray tongue flickering behind yellowish teeth.

  “‘The Fool on the Hill,’“ she says. “That’s The Beatles song you’re trying to figure out.”

  “That’s it!” I say it a little too loudly for the graveyard-in-aisle-9 setting.

  Chloe frowns, looks down the empty aisles to our left and right, and says, “What are you doing here?”

  “What are you doing here?” I reply.

  In case you haven’t connected the dots by now, Chloe is Barracuda Bay High School’s resident Goth Princess, so I guess it’s really no stretch at all to find her lurking the aisles of an all-night grocery store at this hour.

  I think of the last time I saw her, back in the graveyard after school, standing beside me and backing down Bones and Dahlia with little more than a finger point. Was she following me then? Is she following me now? And where is her boyfriend, lover, and/or constant companion, Dane? (Even waiting for 10 pounds of brains at 2:27 a.m., you hardly ever see one without the other.)

  I surreptitiously peer into her little green plastic Greenbriers Grocers basket and see about what you’d expect a gaudy Goth poser like Chloe to be buying: cheap white makeup, cheap black lipstick, cheap black nail polish.

  Suddenly Chloe looks down a side aisle, rolls her eyes, and sighs. “Hey, Dane, did you find them yet?”

  Dane Fields, resident Goth Prince to Chloe’s Goth Princess, tosses some cheap black candles and a box of old-school wooden matches into her basket. “Yeah, just like you said, in aisle 6. Hey, Maddy, what are you doing here?”

  “Funny,” Chloe says as I shuffle my feet and smile up at Dane, “I just asked her the same thing. Still waiting on an answer, in fact.”

  I peer over my shoulder, hoping Harvey will take his time with that 10-pounds-of-brains order of mine. I inch slowly …very slowly …away from the deli and reach for the first thing on the nearest shelf. “Oh, nothing, you guys; you know, I just looked in my pantry and realized that I needed some”—only now do I look at what I’ve grabbed: a fresh can of athlete’s foot spray (seriously?)—”of this here, and so I ran right out to …get …some?”

  “How …domestic …of you,” Chloe says, obviously not buying it for a second.

  I’ll give her this much: Chloe gi
ves good sneer. She’s tall to start with, but in her grubby black army boots and fishnet stockings, she’s nearly as tall as Dane and pretty much towers over me. I try to read her face to gauge whether she’s still mad after having to save my butt in the cemetery.

  Chloe always looks mad, but she doesn’t really look any madder than usual, and from the way Dane is kind of puppy dog eyeballing me whenever Chloe isn’t looking (or am I imagining things?), it doesn’t look like he’s all that bothered to see me, either.

  Dane nudges her with a bony elbow and grabs a can of antifungal itch spray for himself, tossing it in the basket and looking at me. “I get that all the time, Maddy. You must have good taste; this stuff works really great.”

  If there is a polar opposite to Stamp Crosby’s macho, rugged, handsome, frat-boy, varsity-stud, house-party, black-haired, brown-eyed look, then Dane Fields, with his pale skin, bony hips, long fingers, short blond hair, black jeans, white T-shirts, and ever present black hoodie is definitely it.

  Which is why, I suppose, I’ve been secretly crushing on him (sssshhhhh) for months now; ever since he showed up for the first day of our junior year (with Chloe, unfortunately), all tall and moody and gray and mysterious and never once giving me the time of day. (Except, you know, when two creeps threaten me with bodily harm in creepy graveyards after dark.)

  As the conversation, or lack thereof, grows awkward, I take one step farther away from the butcher’s counter, kind of hide my can of athlete’s foot spray behind my back, and say, “Listen, you guys, about earlier, you know, back in the graveyard—”

  “You need to be more careful,” Chloe snaps, cutting me off, as if she’s been waiting to lecture me ever since. “Who sits in a graveyard rubbing headstones after dark, anyway?”

  “I like it,” I say, a tad defensively. “It relaxes me and, besides, I’ve never had trouble before.”

  Chloe taps her left army boot against her right.

  Dane explains, “What Chloe means is that, well, Bones and Dahlia are creeps, is all. So you should probably stay away from them.”

  I chuckle, but neither Goth is amused. “That’s kind of hard, you guys. I mean, there are only, like, 600 kids going to Barracuda Bay High in the first place. What am I supposed to do? Get home-schooled until I graduate?”

  Neither Goth answers. At least, not right away. We kind of shuffle our feet until Dane clears his throat and says, “Aren’t you afraid of the Curse of Third Period Home Ec?”

  I snort, out loud, all over them. “Not you guys, too?”

  “I’m serious, Maddy. You’re in that class; you know what’s going on. I don’t know how you can think three girls dying in one class—in three months—isn’t enough to keep you out of a graveyard after dark.”

  “For starters, Dane, the Curse is BS. For another thing, all three girls died accidentally, separately, and nowhere near a graveyard. That’s like me asking, ‘Aren’t you guys afraid of shopping in the grocery store after midnight?’ Seriously.”

  “He’s just saying, Maddy, there’s a time to be reckless and a time to be careful,” Chloe says. “With so many of our classmates dying, I think, well, now is the time to be careful.”

  I snort again. “Okay, well, I’ll start being careful when you do.”

  Chloe opens her mouth to say something, but Dane stops her. They stand like that, lecture over, the sound of the flickering lights overhead punctuating the awkward silence.

  Finally, I shrug. It’s 2:27 a.m., I have no heartbeat, I can’t breathe, and this is all getting a little too surreal for me. I figure I can ditch out on the brains—this was a stupid idea anyway—go home, fall asleep, wake up, and this will all be a bad dream.

  And if not? Well, according to the zombie website (which, let’s face it, could be run by a 5-year-old in Timbuktu using his mommy’s computer and a stack of 20-year-old comic books as source material), I’d still have another 24 hours to come back to the store and pick up my order.

  Inching away, I hold up my athlete’s foot spray and wave it in the air so they can both see it, when out of nowhere a voice booms from behind me: “Here’s your 10 pounds of brains, miss.” In the very same breath, Harvey the butcher calls out, “Chloe! Dane! Back again?”

  I turn to Harvey and say, “You know her?” just as Chloe turns to Harvey and says, “You know her?”

  He carelessly hands me over three packages of heavily taped butcher paper that feel, well, exactly how you think 10 pounds of fresh lamb brains might feel. “Sure, I know her,” Harvey says to me first. “She’s the only other person in this town who puts in an order of brains that big before sunrise.”

  Chloe and I look at each other and, amazingly, she does not look sarcastic, rude, snide, crude, mean, salty, sassy, or even snarky, for that matter. “Hmmm.” She eventually nudges Dane as she eyes my three bags of brains suspiciously. “Athlete’s foot, huh?”

  8

  “Maddy, Do You Know?”

  I’M HALFWAY ACROSS the parking lot when I hear footsteps behind me. Next to the pay phone, I look over my shoulder and see Dane and Chloe walking my way. I turn around, my Greenbriers Grocers bag held up defensively, but they just laugh and hold their hands up.

  Dane says, “Maddy, do you know?” “Know what?”

  “Know what you are?” Chloe asks. “A …high school junior? A …Capricorn? A …Geico safe driver? I’m all those things.”

  Dane chuckles while Chloe fumes. Dane takes a step forward, and I lower my bag. His eyes are gentle as he takes down his ever present black hood. Instantly I see the dark circles under the eyes; then I see the pale skin. He takes off his hoodie and hands it to Chloe, who takes it without comment.

  I stare at the ratty white T-shirt he’s been hiding. “What is this?” I ask, trying to sound brave and flip and, I’m sure, merely coming off as too loud and annoying. “Strip grocery shopping? If it is, I have to tell you, I’ve got on 16 pairs of underwear, so you’re going to lose big-time—”

  He reaches out a hand, and I stop joking. Gently, he touches my bare arm. I don’t know whose arm is colder: his or mine. (And I didn’t think anybody’s arm could get colder than mine.) He opens my stiff fist carefully until it’s fingers out, palm down; then he guides my hand toward the center of his chest. I try to pull back, but for a skinny, pale, Goth boy, Dane is actually pretty strong. My body follows where my hands go, my sneakers squeak-squeaking on the concrete as he guides me toward him with some superpower tractor beam or something.

  Finally he has my hand flat against his rock-hard chest, right over where his heart is. Or, at least, where it should be. “Feel that?”

  “Feel what?”

  He smiles, leaving my hand there even as I try desperately to wrench it away, to avoid hearing what he’s about to tell me, to avoid hearing …the truth.

  “Exactly.” He sighs. “No heartbeat.” Finally he lets my hand down and, before I can slap his away, reaches for the precise spot above my sports bra and shirt where my own heart should be felt beating. I struggle to get away, but he follows me, back, back, his hand square over my dead, lifeless heart.

  After a few minutes, he asks, “So, do you know …what …you are?”

  I finally shove his hand off and stumble back a safe distance.

  Chloe steps up. “You have to know, Maddy. Why else would a preppy girl like you be out so late at night buying brains at Greenbriers Grocers?”

  “I-I-I’ll tell you what I told the cashier.”

  “Yeah, yeah, your grandpa’s coming into town, yadda yadda. That’s bull, Maddy, and you know it. What’s more, Dane and I know it. You’re a zombie, Maddy, just like …us.”

  I open my mouth to protest, to yell, to holler, to deny, to …cry, but don’t do any of those things. Instead I simply say, “How’d you know?”

  Dane puts his hand back over his heart. “You can’t fake a heartbeat, Maddy.” He slips back into his hoodie. “Come on, we’ll give you a ride home.”

  “Really,” I say, backing away, “it
’s not very far and I’ll be just—”

  Chloe steps toward me. “We weren’t asking.”

  I gulp and hold my bag-o-brains closer to my chest as I stumble along between them, Dane in the front, Chloe right behind me.

  Dane leads us to a beat-up truck with primer splatters all over it. With an embarrassed smile, he says, “Your chariot awaits, madam.”

  Chloe slugs him on the arm and shoves me inside before climbing in next to me. Dane swiftly rounds the corner and slides into the driver’s seat so I’m safely wedged between them.

  “First things first,” he says, strapping me in. “We need to get those brains on ice. Secondly, you need a copy of The Guide. Lastly, you need to meet the Elders, stat.”

  “What’s the—?”

  Chloe interrupts me with an elbow jab to the side. “We’ll explain on the way.”

  9

  Zombies 1 and 2

  WE RIDE IN silence the whole way to their place. There is no more talk of zombie this or Guide that, or brains that or Elders this or, for that matter, the Curse of Third Period Home Ec. In fact, the mood in Dane’s pickup grows slowly more somber the closer we get to the wrong side of town. Finally, Dane pulls the truck into the Mangrove Manor trailer park.

  The truck trundles down the rutted road until we pull up in front of Trailer 17, a green-on-green number with a precariously leaning carport.

  “Home sweet home,” Chloe says, getting out and beckoning me to join her.

  I stay put, clinging to my brain bag. “I really need to get home, you guys. My dad will be expecting me, and—”

  Dane shuts the engine off. “Maddy, listen, no one’s going to hurt you. We’re your friends. In fact, right now, in your …situation …we’re the only friends you’ve got. There’s a lot you need to know and not a lot of time to know it in. Frankly, even if we wanted to let you go now, we can’t. There are things that need to be taken care of. Right now. That little zombie website you probably visited? The one that told you to eat brains right away? Well, that’s only the beginning. We have a lot to do and not a lot of time.”