Dane shakes his head. “I don’t like it.” He cranes his neck to look for a sign—any sign—of Bones or Hazel. “It just feels too …easy.”
“It is what it is,” Chloe says before departing. Even though she passes within inches of Dahlia, the Zerker never even looks her way.
“Hey,” Dane calls after her. “You forgot your purse!” To me he says, “She always does that.”
“Where do you think they are?” I ask Dane, inching closer to him so I won’t have to shout over the spastic DJ (or so I tell myself).
He shrugs, his shoulders big and broad in his flattering tuxedo. “Maybe they’re waiting till the crowd thins, too.”
I’m looking at him under the twinkling stars, the strobe lights, the alternating spots. In school, he never changes his ever present hoodie, never wears anything but jeans and scuffed shoes. I’ve always pictured him as slight and frail, at least skinny and tall, but all the while he’s been hiding a fairly hot zombie bod under all those protective layers.
He catches me looking, waves a large, pale, dismissive hand, and says, as if zombies are mind readers, too, “Relax. It’s just the muscles; they harden over time, the fat melts away, the muscle takes its place, they get bigger is all. It has nothing to do with me. I mean, it’s not like I work out or anything.”
I smile. “Will that happen to me?”
He looks into my eyes and says, “You don’t need any help to look beautiful.”
Then he abruptly looks away, as if something has caught his eye.
It has. Dahlia is gone.
We leave the table as a pair, him grabbing my hand to tug me through the still healthy crowd. Finally, we get within eight paces of Dahlia and see her heading straight for the ladies’ room.
“Go,” Dane says as I hurry to follow. He clicks on his phone and says, “She’s coming. Chloe? Can you hear me? Chloe?”
He calls after me, but the music is too loud for me to respond and, anyway, I’m totally focused on Dahlia and couldn’t—wouldn’t—pull back even if I wanted to. Instead, I follow her straight into the bathroom.
And, of course, straight into the trap.
30
Zombies in the Girl’s Room
BY THE TIME I get there, Chloe is already hog-tied with jump ropes; they must have brought them in their purses. She is facedown on the bathroom floor, her chin up defiantly, her mouth moving violently behind a gym sock gag.
Meanwhile, all the sinks are overflowing, gushing over their sides and into a veritable lake on the girls’ room floor. I’m already three feet in, with water halfway up my shoes, when I notice Dahlia at my back. She shoves me forward so hard, so fast, I almost fall face-first in the running water. (These stupid heels don’t help matters any.) Then I see her.
In the same slinky evening gown I helped her pick out weeks ago, Hazel stands triumphantly over Chloe, who writhes and struggles against the tight, polyester ropes.
“Don’t even try it,” Hazel says to me, holding a portable radio high above Chloe’s head.
At first I laugh. Were these Zerkers that stupid that they didn’t even know electricity brought zombies back to life—not put them out of their misery?
Then Chloe wriggles free from her gag. “Get out of here, Maddy. One shock to bring us back to life, remember? And one shock to kill us. If you get zapped twice, that’s that.”
Just as quickly, my amusement turns to fear—not for me so much; I never expected to make it through this night in the first place, not really—but for Chloe, who’s only in trouble because of me.
If I’d never bumped into Stamp that day, if he’d never invited me to that stupid party, if I’d never snuck out that night, none of this would be happening right now. Chloe would be Chloe and Dane would be Dane and Hazel would be Hazel and I’d just be the girl in the background, watching it all from the very last row.
Dahlia has the door, so there’s no way out (even if I were chicken enough to leave Chloe lying there alone).
Hazel has the radio, and at any second she could put us all out of our misery. She leaves it teetering carelessly on the hand dryer as the sinks continue overflowing, cascading sheets of water onto the already deluged floor.
Hazel walks over to me, a sneer on her pale, dead face, not even trying to hide the puncture marks above the spaghetti strap of her little black formal dress. “I thought all zombies knew that.”
“What would you know, Hazel?” I ask, my voice a shade deeper since the last time we talked, a shade tougher as well. “You’re not a real zombie anyway. You’re a watered-down version of these half zombies you call friends.”
“Maybe so,” says Hazel, her triumphant smile slightly dinged, “but I’m not the one with my friend lying hog-tied on the floor, now, am I?”
“Why are you doing this, Hazel?” I ask, stalling for time, inching forward, tougher than her, a zombie longer than her, my muscles and legs and bones and will stronger than hers could ever be. “You were my friend. You were my best friend. We’ve known each other for 11 years, Hazel. And you turn on me that fast? Like …like you’re a stranger; like you’ve always been a stranger.”
Hazel barely flinches, impatient for my little trip down memory lane to come to a swift and certain end. “And the first day I met you I told you not to lie to me, Maddy. And what did you do?”
“When, Hazel? When did I lie?”
“When you didn’t tell me you got struck by lightning, Maddy. When you didn’t tell me you were a zombie. When you let me believe you were just sick, when all the time you were …dead.”
“But I did tell you, Hazel. I mean, eventually I came clean.”
“Only when you couldn’t hide it from me any longer. Only when I saw it with my very own eyes.”
“Okay, so maybe I omitted a few pertinent facts, Hazel, but I never lied.”
Hazel shakes her head. “It’s the same thing, Maddy. And besides, whatever we had, whatever we thought we had, it’s nothing compared to what Dahlia and Bones have given me.”
I turn to Dahlia, who says triumphantly, “I told you we’d get you all alone, Maddy. All I needed was your friend here to make it happen.”
“They’re using you, Hazel,” I shout, turning back to my former best friend. “Using you to get to me. Can’t you see that? It’s all a big game for them, turning people, making them Zerkers, then leaving them to die. Or killing them themselves. They don’t care about you. They turned Scurvy, too, Hazel. I had to kill him, put him down.”
I pause and shoot a look straight into her evil yellow eyes. “Don’t think I won’t do it to you, too.”
By now she’s inched back to the hand dryer, picked up the radio, and holds it over her head. Her fierce red hair is in an updo, no longer quite so fierce but certainly stylish.
I look down at Chloe, her eyes closed against the coming shock.
Hazel says, “Not if I do it to you first.” With that, she drops the radio.
“Don’t forget, you’re a zombie, too,” I shout before leaping up on the nearest toilet seat.
The floor ignites in a snaking ripple of pure, blue current. It’s like a thin, blue flame branching out over the black-and-white tile floor. From the stall next to me, Dahlia laughs as Chloe goes limp and Hazel crashes to the floor next to her, wilted and lifeless like a giant rag doll; a well-dressed rag doll, but a rag doll just the same. I scramble to crawl up the bathroom stall, up out of Dahlia’s reach, as the electricity boils my friends—old and new.
The bright bathroom lights flicker, then go out altogether. In the darkness I see the Zerker crouching in my way as I race across the tops of the stalls for the bathroom door. The ceiling is right above my head and low so I have to crouch and scuttle, almost like a crab. I stop, barely out of reach.
An emergency light over the sink mirrors flickers on as the generators kick in, casting a hazy red glow over the waterlogged bathroom. (All the better to see you with, my dear.) From beyond the doors, I can already hear screams. The screams of Normals. Th
e power must have shorted everything, everywhere, plunging the dance floor and the rest of the gym into darkness.
There is a knocking at the door, somebody big and strong, and just when I think Dane has come to save us, an adult voice bellows, “Anybody in there? The main power’s been cut and there’s not enough juice in the generator to run your precious disco ball; the dance is over. Report outside immediately for a head count. Everybody’s going home …”
In the glowing red light, Dahlia jumps from the top of the stall, catching the railing above with gymnastlike reflexes. As if lowered by a tether, she slides almost effortlessly to the ground, her muscles obviously much more accustomed to the zombie lifestyle—and the effects of gravity on deadweight—than mine will ever be.
“All according to plan,” she says, stepping on Chloe’s lifeless body to avoid the electric blue current still sizzling along the black-and-white floor.
I crouch on top of the nearest stall.
Dahlia looks up. “Don’t stay too long, dear; you’ll miss all the fun.”
I wait until her back is turned and she’s heading for the bathroom door to make my move. I leap down, down, my heavy zombie body landing with a thud on poor Chloe’s back. I hear a crack but ignore it.
Dahlia turns at the sound, her hand scrambling for the door handle, but I leapfrog from Chloe’s body to Hazel’s and slam the retreating Zerker hard against the bathroom door. Her nose cracks, again and again. I yank her head around and lift her up and over me, tossing her over my shoulder and through the air.
She lands on a sink; a slippery, flowing sink. Her hands scramble for purchase, her thickly veined muscles holding her aloft as long as possible while her legs scamper and scurry to avoid touching the floor. Her heels fall off, her black stockings drenched, her eyes panicked as finally, at last, her hands slip off the cool, wet porcelain and down she goes.
There is a faint crackle, then a whiff, of electricity before she goes out completely. I groan, the tension inside flowing out through my vocal cords and into the dead red air of the sizzling bathroom.
Like a frog leaping from lily pad to lily pad, I step from body to body until I hear the crunch of Dahlia’s ribs beneath my new heels. Next to her is the radio plug, still live thanks to the school’s stupid generator; I yank it out of the wall right before sliding off of Dahlia’s slick, dead body and onto the flooded floor.
Now the water is just water; now the bathroom is just a bathroom. I stare at the cluster of bodies jumbled on the bathroom floor, Dahlia lying halfway across Hazel, Hazel jammed up gracelessly against Chloe, like a zombie traffic jam.
I check Chloe first, turning her over onto her back and snapping her jump rope bonds with two stiff fingers as her legs intertwine with Hazel’s. Her arms fall limp to the floor, making a sad splashing noise in the three inches of water struggling to bleed through the overworked drain in the middle of the floor.
“Chloe,” I say, but she is already gone.
I feel a stirring beside me and look to see Hazel sitting up and rubbing her head. Only then do I really consider where she’s fallen after she dropped the boom box and electrified the entire room: half on the floor, half on Chloe’s lifeless body. She must have avoided the full shock of the current by being just far enough off of the watery floor.
With my purse drenched and ruined and across the floor, much too far away to get to in time, with Chloe’s purse resting uselessly on some random table out in the gym, I reach slowly for the stake in my dress, carefully avoiding the business end this time.
“Hazel!” I shout as she struggles to her feet, her eyes live and electric yellow, her hair wet and matted, her skin pale as the white floor tiles. “It’s me, remember?”
She cocks her head, smiles. “Who’s the zombie now, Maddy?” She lunges for me, zombie strong and Zerker angry; she moves so swiftly, so stealthily, the stake gets knocked out of my hand and slides into a lonely, wet corner of the bathroom floor. With equal parts regret and anger, I watch it clatter across the tiles, tumbling end over end. I curse, loudly, and fling her off, hearing something snap as her back hits the metal corner of the nearest stall.
She lands with a yelp, sliding down to the still wet floor, but recovers on wobbly knees; one has a hole over it where her stocking’s been torn. Her dress is also ripped and tattered. Her shoulders are crooked and off-kilter as she stands, like maybe I did break something important after all, but her smile remains intact.
She looks hungry, ready for anything—and eager to get it over with.
She circles me, kicking off her high heels for better traction on the slippery bathroom floor. One hits me in the leg and she cackles ruthlessly; the other lands harmlessly a couple of feet away. I stand my ground, watching her waiting, sad and grim and three kinds of pissed off.
“Look!” I say as she circles, endlessly circles. “Look at what you’ve done. I hope you’re happy with yourself.”
“Not yet,” she says, lunging again.
This time I’m ready for her. As she ducks slightly to pick up momentum, I move to one side—kind of like a bullfighter—and elbow her in the back of the neck even as I grab hold of the back of her dress and use it like a luggage handle to propel her, headfirst, into the nearest wall.
While she sits, legs splayed out, rubbing her head, smiling against the wall, I tumble to reach for my stake. She catches me across the floor with a stiff foot to the chin, which knocks me back, back, back. I would stop if the floor were dry, but now it’s like a Slip-N-Slide in this grim, death-filled bathroom. As I slide and glide, my attempts to stop myself with wet hands on wet tile only propel me farther back.
Hazel, always smart, always quick, now spies the stake I’ve been trying to get to and inches toward it, one bruised hand at a time. She is stiff and pale, hard and crooked and wild-eyed, but inching forward with every ounce of Zerker energy in her dead body. Her dress is ragged, the back of her red hair dotted with plaster from the wall, her stockings worn to shreds, her feet bare.
“You don’t want to do that, Hazel,” I say as I crawl slowly back to her on the slippery tiles. Still too far away to do any good, I try to reason with my old friend.
“Reverse psychology.” She scoffs. “You were reaching for it, so it must be some kind of weapon.”
“Not the kind you want, Hazel.”
She is almost there, smiling gleefully now, so eager to find something to hurt me with, to stab me with, to kill me with, that she can’t hear the reason, the fear, the concern in my voice. With real relish, with eyes wide open, with something like a victory smile already playing at the corners of her lips, she reaches for the stake.
“Hazel!” I shout, but it’s already too late. Maybe it’s always been too late.
She grabs the business end first, assuming wrongly that the sharp wooden end is designed to kill me. (And how wickedly eager she is to kill me.) I thought she’d go down, out for the count and lie there like I did when I grabbed the copper end in Dane’s trailer earlier.
Then I remember: she’s a Zerker, not a zombie.
Instead she springs to life, sizzling like a frankfurter on the end of a stick as it roasts over a summertime campfire. Now that she’s headed that way anyway, I race to help her cross back to the other side. I slip once on the wet tiles but use the bottom of the nearest stall to propel myself forward, jamming her bare chest against my stake as her back meets the bathroom wall.
It goes halfway in, and she screams, whimpering, “But I’m your friend, Maddy! I’m your friend.”
“She was my friend,” I say, jerking my head toward a fallen Chloe before I shove the stake the rest of the way in, copper end first. “You were just my …neighbor.”
Suddenly, as if they’ve been waiting for our little dance of death to be over, someone is pounding frantically on the bathroom door. I rush to open it and see that Dahlia locked it from the inside. I turn the lock and throw it open, and Dane is there, still pounding thin air as the door opens.
When he sees
me, he grabs me, clings to me, squeezes me tight. Then he pulls away and asks, immediately, “Chloe?”
I try to shove him out of the doorway before he can see her lifeless body on the bathroom floor, but he is far too strong. He brushes past me and kneels next to Chloe, his lips moving silently, like mine next to Scurvy’s grave earlier that afternoon.
He stands and says grimly, “I should have known they’d be expecting us. I should have planned this more carefully.”
He looks around, spots Hazel’s body still buzzing with the copper stick wedged in her chest, and says, “Hazel?”
“I had to do it.” I sigh.
“So the copper works then, huh?”
I nod, my lips curling into a sad, scary smile. Then I see Chloe’s still army boots and frown all over again.
“What happened?” I ask, turning to the dance floor. Last time I saw it, the place was hopping with kids, swirling lights, blaring music, life, and laughter. Now it’s deserted, emergency lights illuminating an empty dance floor, plastic punch cups turned over and lying on the floor, streamers and glittery stars hanging haphazardly over rows and rows of empty tables. Without the music blasting, it’s like watching TV with the sound off.
“When the power cut out,” Dane explains, “everybody scrammed.”
I gently guide him away from the bathroom toward the dance floor and ask, “What now?”
Just then the back doors of the gym open and three figures plow through; two willingly, one being dragged along reluctantly like a man doomed to the gallows.
“Now,” says Dane, turning to meet them with clenched fists, “we find out how this story ends.”
31
A Pimp Called Death
BONES HAS TURNED his track suit into a tuxedo. How, I have no idea, but there it is just the same: shiny and white, with a crisp white fedora on top of his skeletal head instead of his trademark skullcap. The topper? A cheesy red carnation sticking out of his shiny white lapel.
He looks like a pimp called Death, and if things weren’t currently going to hell in a handbasket, I would laugh out loud in his face. Preferably while shoving said face into a big, fat mirror so he could see how ridiculous he looks. (Not that he would. I mean, you leave the house in a track suit tuxedo thinking it’s stylish and you’ve obviously got a fashion blind spot; am I right?)
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