Zombies vs. Unicorns

by Holly Black

  And it was a land of absolutely no weed, which is probably why Franklin took off after two weeks—two utterly miserable weeks. Because a non-stoned Franklin was actually a grouchy, extremely lazy Franklin who made other people pick his berries while he sought out other ways of getting high. Then, one very wet day in the middle of the second week, he just dropped his plastic berry basket and said “I’m going to London. You can come if you want, but I’m not paying for you.”

  Franklin had cash. I, however, did not. I had blown everything I had on the stupid ticket to England. I tried to explain this to Franklin, and he just said “Sorry” without sounding sorry at all. He put on his backpack and walked to town.

  I was alone. My days were filled with watery organic vegetable soup and tasteless organic curry and mysterious organic mash. (What I would have given for solid food.) And then, of course, there was the death match for the berries themselves—the berries that came out of the hedgerows along the road. I’m not even sure that the farmers owned these bushes. I suspect the bushes were wild and on public land, and the farmers were having us steal berries from the English government to fuel their fascist jam-making empire. Those who brought the most berries got the best rooms, the warmest blankets, the occasional cup of extra tea or ride to town to do laundry.

  Every night, I thought about giving up and going home. I could fall on my parents’ mercy and beg them to pay the difference to get my ticket changed. But that would mean that every single thing I tried to do for the rest of my life would only bring trouble. “Remember that time you thought it was a good idea to run off to that stupid organic farm with that guy … What was his name?” they would ask. “And then he left and you were stuck there and we had to bail you out?” Oh, my parents had guessed that something like this would happen. They always thought my ideas would turn out badly. They had seen Franklin, and they knew.

  No. It was unthinkable to run home. Sometimes it is worth any amount of suffering just to prevent giving your parents the opportunity to be right.

  What I needed was some money, that was all. Then I could go to London too, and get a room with some people and a job somewhere. I could survive on just a little for a few weeks. Fuck Franklin. I could do this myself.

  This is all I thought about, day and night, for a week after Franklin’s vanishing act. I walked to town every day, risking life and limb on the non-road, as English people in nice, warm cars, went to their homes. “Town” was about as depressing a place as you could ever hope for—a booze shop, a betting shop, a pub full of old dudes, a knockoff “American Fried Chicken!” place, and a place to make copies.

  Of all the places in town, the Laundromat was actually the best. Even though it was just cracked linoleum and a bunch of industrial washers and driers, it was warm and snug. The owner was an older man named George with a flushed red face who wore the same navy blue fleece every day. He kept a bowl of hard candies on the counter and was kind to all of the students on the farm. He knew the farm scam well, and he knew what the owners were up to. So he would let me come in every evening and use the rickety old computer in the corner, the one that was supposed to be for customers only. I used this to research my escape.

  The one thing that was immediately clear was that it was going to be very hard to get a job in London. I wasn’t very qualified for anything that required a résumé, and for all the other jobs, you had to turn up in person to apply. Which was all part of the problem. Every night, I played this game with myself before walking home down the road with no shoulder, praying that I wouldn’t be hit. Or sometimes, that I would be.

  One miserable, murky afternoon, as I worked my little blackberry patch, George’s rusty little car pulled up behind me.

  “Hello!” he called cheerfully. “You making out all right there?”

  “Not really,” I said.

  “I’ve got something for you,” he said. “You know the big house up on the hill?”

  I didn’t.

  “Well, there’s a big house on the hill. There’s an American up there who needs someone to take care of her children. Pays very decent. Generous lady. She don’t want a local, because locals around here talk too much. Everything gets around the village. American college student, that’s just what she wants. My wife does some of the cleaning for her, and they got to talking. I’d imagine it’s a lot nicer up there than where you are. If you’re interested, you just let me know. I can drive you up there tomorrow, or whenever …”

  “Give me fifteen minutes to get my bag,” I said.

  It took ten. Never in my life had I packed so quickly, shoving my mud-soaked clothes into my bag. I didn’t even tell the farm owners that I was leaving. I walked away from the farm without looking back once, and got into George’s car, where he was listening to a football match on the radio.

  “So fast?” he asked with a chuckle. “Funny, they always leave that way. Come on, then. Let me take you somewhere nicer.”

  Even riding around in a run-down car with an old man on a bleak afternoon was a massive improvement. My summer had tanked so terribly. We drove past some grim collections of houses that looked all the same, and a Little Chef restaurant, and a mile or two of nothing. Finally we turned down an unpaved road of dirt and small stone, cut between a solid bank of trees. It wound up and up, through more and more dense nothing. I was just thinking that this was the least-promising vista I’d ever seen, and then … it came into view, the wide expanse of gray stone with the ivy-covered facade. A massive building, with long, high windows, and little turrety bits.

  “That’s … a house?” I asked.

  “Well, I suppose you’d call it a manor,” George said pleasantly as the car popped and bumped its way up the long stone-filled drive. “Sometimes they go vacant, and people buy them up. She’s done quite a nice job with this one.”

  We had pulled up to the front door now. Just like that—a big black door with a black lion’s head knocker.

  “She’s expecting you,” George said. “I’ve had a word. Just knock. You’ll be quite all right here. She’s lovely.”

  I was reluctant to get out of the car and shut the door. If there were no one home, if it didn’t work out, I was stuck. Stuck in the middle of nowhere, up on this hill, in the rain, in the middle of England. But this was clearly where he was leaving me. I grabbed my bag, thanked him, and got out. The knocker was heavy and slick, and it squeaked terribly when I lifted it and brought it down on the door with a heavy clank.

  Then I stepped back and waited. It took a few moments, but the door opened. A woman stood there—maybe in her early thirties, long brown hair tied back, glowing cheeks, friendly face.

  “Hi!” she said. “I was just feeding the kids! Are you from the farm? Sofie, right?”

  It was the tattoos that I picked up on first—the signature eight-pointed star on the inside of her wrist. The Sanskrit running down her arm. My eyes followed the muscled arm in the form-fitting black T-shirt up to the face. The face had been ingrained in my mind, through hundreds of posters and articles and websites. My brain struggled for a moment, trying to connect the physical reality in front of me with the confluence of images surging through my memory. I didn’t even realize how much I knew about this woman. I had never consciously studied her. She was simply so famous that everyone knew all about her. She was a concept, not a person.

  “Yeah,” the famous actress said, with a smile and a shrug. “Sorry. I’m who you think I am. I didn’t mean to startle you. Come on in. Want a cup of tea?”

  I nodded dumbly. I found myself staring at one of the world’s most frequently photographed asses, now wearing a pair of yoga pants, as it lead the way into the house. The actress was really tiny—maybe two inches taller than me, but absurdly small in frame, like a child who’d had an awkward growth spurt.

  According to all the papers, the actress had just jetted around the world on an adoption spree, and was now the mother of five. The papers also claimed that the children lived in a huge house on Malta, in t
he middle of the Mediterranean. Or maybe in Aruba. Possibly in Spain. Perhaps a ranch in Colorado. A compound in California. The actress and her partner, the equally famous actor, were vigilant about their children’s privacy—aside from long-distance shots taken at the time of the adoptions, no one ever scored a picture of them.

  “Your children are here?” I asked.

  “My publicist plants stories so no one ever knows where they really are,” she said with a smile. “Come on. Let’s go to the kitchen and talk.”

  We passed through an airy entrance hall with a fireplace, yellow walls, several portrait paintings, and a fine carved wood fainting couch covered in black damask woven through with images of Chinese dragons. There were many doors, many nooks. A tiny reading space under the stairs. A long hallway that wound back, deep into the house. And then, a kitchen.

  Aside from the fact that it could have housed a small airplane, it was sort of a normal kitchen. The long marble counter was loaded down with bottles of vitamins and glass jars stuffed with herbs. There were piles of reusable grocery bags, and a stainless steel compost pot sitting in the corner. The huge silver two-door refrigerator was covered in schedules and children’s drawings. A set of shelves was filled with vegetarian cookbooks, books on nutrition, and at least a dozen books with titles such as The Lazarus Kitchen, Cooking for Life, The Eternal Diet, Eating Toward Forever, Lazarus Healing, The Never-Ending Meal, and Lazarus Kids.

  A lot had been made of the actress’s strange religion—Lazarology, which had something to do with living forever by taking vitamins and doing a lot of exercise. Some people said it was a cult, that she and her boyfriend collected blood, that they went through all kinds of weird rituals and treatments based on the teachings of their crackpot guru, some insane scientist guy who had died about twenty years before. All the Lazarines were waiting for him to wake up. Some claimed he already had. They were all nuts, every last one of them. Lazarology had been banned in at least a dozen different countries.

  Mostly, though, it seemed to be about eating a lot of uncooked vegetables, doing yoga, and purifying yourself in New Agey ways. Harmless, friendly stuff. No one ever claimed the actress wasn’t nice. A little dumb, maybe. But nice. Here she was pouring filtered water into some kind of clay kettle and making me a cup of tea.

  “George says he likes you,” the actress said, getting out a mug. “He said the farm isn’t so nice.”

  “He’s right,” I said.

  “Well, George says you’re okay, and that works for me. I need a little help around here.”

  “You don’t have anyone?” I asked. The actress was supposed to have a whole harem of nannies.

  “Nope,” she said. “I have to keep it small. People talk. Sometimes my life can be really complicated. What I really need is just one normal babysitter.”

  There was a goofy earth mother quality to the actress, and I got the distinct impression that she didn’t think things all the way through. She got so busy talking that she forgot that she was boiling water until it started hissing and spitting in the kettle.

  “I just need a hand, that’s all. I have to be away tonight, so I just need you to keep an eye on them. The most important part of the job—the only thing you really have to do is feed them. But it’s really easy. All their meals have been prepared.”

  She opened one door of the fridge. There were stacks of colorful plastic containers, perfectly organized by color and design. There was a pile of pink ones, a pile of ones with dinosaurs, another with Elmo, a Disney princess stack, and one with Harry Potter. Under each stack was a name card: Melissa, Lily, Ben, Maxine, and Alex.

  “Meal times,” she said, tapping a piece of paper held to the side of the refrigerator with a magnet. “Breakfast, lunch, snack time, and dinner. Everything is prepared and measured out. You just give them the containers.”

  “I don’t have to cook the food?”

  “Nope,” she said. “We follow a raw diet.”

  Somehow, I already knew this. I must have read it somewhere.

  “So, I just take the lids off …”

  “You don’t even have to do that,” the actress said. “The lids keep it all fresh, and the kids love ripping the tops off things. Just give them the containers. Actually, it’s kind of fun. I’ll show you. It’s snack time, anyway. Come meet everyone.”

  We headed back to the main entrance hall and she opened one of the doors. This is when I saw the room for the first time, and the five blank, stumbling children that lived in it.

  “They have everything they need in there,” the actress went on. “Beds, toys … and this is how they get their snacks.”

  There was a small glass hatch in the wall, just under the window. She opened this, placed the containers inside, shut it, and hit a switch. Tinkling music started to play “The Farmer in the Dell.” The children got very excited and drifted over to the wall. A small conveyer belt, also encased in plastic, started to move, carrying the containers along it. As the containers moved along, little colored lights came on along their path, marking their progress. Then the song stopped, there was a ding, and another small hatch opened. The children crushed into each other to each get a container.

  It was both one of the most adorable and one of the most disturbing things I had ever seen. Truly, the rich and famous were not like normal people. They didn’t just take their kids into the kitchen and feed them chicken nuggets. They fed them raw food through a musical conveyer belt.

  The actress pointed them out. Alex was a little boy from Kenya. Melissa was a brown-haired girl with a slightly pushed-in face from Turkey. Ben was from Vietnam. Lily was a tiny blonde from Ukraine, and Maxine was from Burundi. For such a diverse group of kids, there was a sameness about them, something in their expressions and the way they moved. They had to be between five and seven, but they acted much younger, like toddlers.

  “They’ll be busy for a few minutes,” the actress said. “Let me show you your room. It’s just across the hall.”

  My room—the guest room—was such a welcome sight that I almost cried. There was a four-poster bed covered in filmy white gauze. The rest of the furniture consisted of heavy perfectly refinished antiques. More important, there was a large television mounted on the fireplace mantle, and an en suite marble bathroom with a cavernous tub, and a towel warmer, and a little gold chair to sit on while you got ready for a hot bath.

  “Do I give them their baths here?”

  “Oh, don’t worry about that. They can go a day without a bath. Bath times around here are kind of chaotic. Let them play for a day. It’s incredibly clean in there, anyway.”

  “And when they have to … go to the potty?”

  “Oh, they have one in there. You really don’t have to do anything. Just give them their meals at the right times. That’s it. Just don’t go into the play area, okay? And don’t take them out. They’re fine in there. I have to get going.”

  It was that fast. She strode out of the room, with her bouncy little-kid walk, thigh bones jangling in the hip sockets. She took a tiny purse from the fainting couch and slapped on a pair of sunglasses, despite the grayness of the day. The actress needed no bag. Famous people didn’t lift or carry things. I could imagine it—everything waiting at the hotel. The dress. The makeup artist. The hairstylist. The famous actor would be there, and her every need would be provided for.

  “You’ll be fine,” she said cheerfully. “I’ll see you around noon tomorrow. Oh, and here.”

  She reached into her purse and pressed a folded stack of pound notes into my hand. A moment later she was out the door, and I heard the purr of a motor and the sound of crunching on the drive. When she was gone, the house creaked a bit, and then an unsteady quiet descended. I looked at the money in my hand. She had given me eight hundred pounds for a night’s work.

  Again, you might be thinking that the flags should have gone up, that they must have been waving wildly. But what would you have done? A famous person comes along, asks you to do the easiest job
in the world for one night, and hands you enough cash to fix all your problems. So, okay, the whole situation was a bit freaky. Fine. But it wasn’t unpleasant or illegal or deeply, morally wrong. I was just an overpaid babysitter working for a famous, friendly nutcase.

  When I went back to the playroom, the children couldn’t be bothered with me. SpongeBob had somehow appeared on one of the televisions, and they clustered close underneath it to watch. There was plenty of room for everyone to see, but they were knotted together, and they had no concept of viewing distance. They planted themselves right under it and stared up, craning their necks.

  I felt the heavy plastic of the gate. It was just taller than I was, made of something strong and flexible. I pushed on it, then leaned on it, then dropped all of my weight onto it. The gate could handle it easily.

  It had always been said that the Lazarines did some weird things with their kids, that they kept them pure. They didn’t believe in medication of any kind, some sources said, not even vaccines. I hadn’t believed a lot of that stuff, but here were five kids in a pen, unable to be touched. I pressed my hand against the plastic mesh again. It was so fine that not even a little hand could get through. Clear enough to see through perfectly—dense enough to prevent real contact.

  How could this even be happening? How could someone that rich and famous just leave their children with a stranger?

  The second SpongeBob was over, the television shut itself off. This caught me by surprise, and I jumped. The kids didn’t flinch. They also didn’t move from their spot. They watched the screen even though it was off, at least for a good five minutes. The house settled again. And aside from a very slight, confused mumbling from the kids, there was no noise.

  “All right,” I said. “You guys? I’m Sofie. Sofie.”