Undead (9780545473460)

by McKay, Kirsty

  I slip out of the seat, and Pete jumps in and turns the keys on the dashboard.

  “Brakes are a no-no in these conditions,” he shouts, as if this is just another day in driver’s ed. He pushes a lever and presses down on the accelerator, carefully. The bus’s slide downhill slows. “Trick is to get into a low gear initially” — he forces the gear stick and the bus stops — “then shift up into a high one as quickly as possible. The less traction the better.” The bus starts to move forward uphill. “Nobody move!” he shrieks. “Cross your fingers we make it up, and don’t move an inch!”

  Subdued as much by Pete’s all-out personality flip-flop as our impending doom, we all hold our breath. The bus creeps up toward the brow of the hill, slowly, slowly, every now and then giving a little judder and making the panic rise in my throat again. Eventually, un-frickin’-believably, we make it.

  To the right, overlooking the café below the hill, there’s a small parking lot marked OVERFLOW. It’s carpeted with pristine snow. Pete expertly steers the bus into it, turns the key in the ignition, and the engine shudders and dies. He sits back in the chair and lets out a deep breath. Hunkered down on the top step and clinging to the barrier rail, I do the same.

  “Keep going, White Bread!” Smitty says. “Why are we stopping?”

  Pete reaches into his pocket and brings out his inhaler. He takes a long hit. “Go where, exactly?” he says, spookily calm. “The road continues up the hill.” He points with the inhaler. “And there is no way this thing is making it up there.” He takes another long drag.

  “Um, well, I was thinking . . .” Smitty is feigning dumb. “How about the exit?” He grabs Pete and shoves him up against the window.

  “Hey!” I protest, but Smitty’s not listening.

  “See that road down there?” He points to the turn we didn’t take, the turn leading away from the gas station, back past the Cheery Chomper and out onto the main road, which is hidden by a line of trees. “Remember the way we came in? Now would be a really good time to go back out again.”

  Pete shrugs him off and sits down again. “Wasn’t my call, remember? I wasn’t driving at the time.”

  “So let’s go now!” Alice steps into the aisle. “You can drive! Drive us out of here!”

  “Great idea,” Pete says. He taps the dashboard. “Except we’re running on empty.”

  Alice’s face drops. “We’re out of fuel?”

  Smitty swears. Gareth adds his own choice of word.

  Pete sighs. “And it’s safe to say Smitty may have taken away our chance to fill ’er up.” He gestures to the gas station inferno, his hand as graceful as a ballerina’s.

  Gareth turns to Smitty with crazy eyes.

  “Stupid kid —”

  “Yeah?”

  Gareth and Smitty puff their chests and muscle up to each other like a pair of over-excitable roosters.

  “So we stay!” I shout. “For now.” I get between them. Always the peacemaker. “Make the bus safe, wait for someone to come!”

  They glare at each other for a few seconds, neither wanting to back down, then Smitty punches the back of a seat and flings himself onto the top of the dashboard, where he crouches, gargoyle-like and shaking his head. Gareth flounces to the back of the bus.

  Pete winces. “I think I hurt my head.” He flutters a hand around his halo-wafer.

  “Uh, yes.” It’s probably best not to let him know he has shelving stuck in his skull.

  “Here.” Smitty leans over from his perch on the dashboard, grabs the halo-wafer, and yanks it out of Pete’s head. “That better?”

  Pete stares at the bloodied triangle of aluminum in Smitty’s hand. “That was in me?”

  “Only for a minute.” I’m quick to retrieve a clean handkerchief that my mother thoughtfully placed in my jacket pocket for just such an occasion. (One of her token gestures to make up for never actually being there, I guess.) I hover over Pete’s head. There’s a perfect triangular mark in his skull, with a flap of skin sticking up like a tufted carpet. It’s bleeding, but not too badly, and I can’t see any brains leaking out. “Hey, it obviously didn’t impair your driving.” I give him the handkerchief and press his hand to his head. “But maybe sit down for a while?”

  I crouch down beside the unconscious bus driver, feeling for a pulse. My own hand is shaking so much I can barely locate a vein. Eventually I find the beat, irregular and weak but present.

  “He’s alive,” I say. “He probably saved all of us. We should make him comfortable.”

  Smitty hops off the dashboard and helps me drag him carefully down the aisle. We lever him onto the backseat and put him on his side: the recovery position. His face is slack and gray. It doesn’t look like he’ll be doing any recovering real soon.

  “Are the doors secure?” Smitty bounds to the front of the bus.

  “It’s OK,” Alice shouts from the window, holding the binoculars to her eyes. “No one’s following. I think you got them all, Smitty. Burnt to a crisp.”

  “Yeah, that was a dangerous stunt to pull, you psycho,” Gareth sneers. “You could have incinerated the lot of us.”

  “But he didn’t,” I say. My leg is beginning to pound. I’d almost forgotten I’d hurt it.

  “I didn’t,” Smitty repeats, pushing past me and squaring up to Gareth again. “And if it wasn’t for us, you’d have been munched by her BFFs” — he jabs a finger at Alice — “a fate worse than death. Shortly to be followed by actual death. So try a little gratitude for size.”

  “You little —” Gareth snarls.

  “Hey!” Pete shouts from the driver’s seat. “We have a signal!”

  That gets our attention. Pete’s hunched over the square, black object that he brought onto the bus with him — a laptop. “This was by the register.”

  “It’s the boss’s,” Gareth says. “Uses it for stock. It’s a pretty crap machine. Can’t even go online.”

  “I beg to differ.” Pete holds it in front of him and stands up gingerly, eyes fixed on the screen. “It has wireless, but it was disabled. Presumably to stop the employees from downloading boobies —”

  “Shut it, kid!” Gareth roars.

  “Luckily for us, I enabled the disabled.” Pete smirks. “We’re web-worthy.”

  “Internet?” Smitty rushes up the aisle toward Pete. “First he’s Speed Racer, then he’s the geek that saves us all. Aren’t you just racing from zero to hero?” He makes a grab for the laptop.

  “Back off!” Pete moves the laptop out of Smitty’s reach. “Low battery, teeny-weeny signal. Not so much a signal, just the name of the provider, but it proves there must be Wi-Fi somewhere. I just need to find it.” He moves through the bus like a water diviner, tilting the laptop at various angles, holding it above his head. After two lengths of the bus, he sits back down in the driver’s seat.

  “Well?” I say.

  Pete hits some keys and shuts the lid.

  “Nothing.”

  Gareth stands up. “What do you mean, nothing? You just said there was a signal.”

  “Too weak.”

  “Give it to me.” Gareth moves toward Pete.

  “You can take it if you want.” Pete looks up at him with his pale green eyes. “And spend the next ten minutes wearing out the battery. Or we can wait till the dust settles down there” — he points through the trees at the café — “and go to the source. If you weren’t online at the garage, the Cheery Chomper is the only place the Wi-Fi could be coming from. But with so little juice, we only get one shot.”

  “Let’s vote,” I say. “All those who want to wait.” I raise my hand.

  Pete smiles wanly and raises his.

  “Yeah.” Alice is reluctant, but with us.

  “All hail democracy. You’re outvoted, mister,” Smitty says. “We watch
” — he snatches the binoculars from Alice — “we wait till the smoke clears, then we’re down there.”

  Gareth laughs. “You stupid kids know nothing. That fire will be burning bright all night. It’s petroleum, not some garden bonfire.”

  I look at the flames glowing orange at the bottom of the hill.

  “Then that’s as good a signal as any. Someone will come.”

  It takes us until the last of the dying light to shore up the glassless back window.

  Pete produces duct tape he carries in his backpack. (I know. It’s probably a geek thing, like ironed jeans and a Comic Con tee.) Smitty braves the outside to open the main luggage hold. He cuts the tops off the suitcases with an evil-looking penknife and Frisbees them out into the snow, where I run around collecting them like some demented Mario character. Then there is the tricky part of attaching them to the back window. Not to mention the fact that the driver is still unconscious on the backseat. It’s easier to work around him than move him again, but the downside is he gets the occasional thing dropped on him. He doesn’t seem to notice. We find some cord in an overhead locker and there are curtain hooks on either side of the window, but really the suitcase tops are held up by tape. It’s more of a windbreak than a barricade, but it’s the best we can do.

  We form a human chain to retrieve anything from the hold that might be suitable for the night, for survival, for whatever may come next. I say “we” — Alice is on lookout with the binoculars, since she refuses to get off the bus, while Gareth has found a first-aid kit and is sitting in the driver’s seat, fiddling with various imagined wounds. Regardless, rows 20 and 21 are soon crammed with skis, poles, and clothing, and Smitty has replaced his precious snowboard — the one that was locking the door — with an alternative belonging to one of our unfortunate ex-classmates.

  As darkness falls, the gas station alarm is still screeching, the fire is still burning, and a new argument is a-brewing. About lighting. Alice wants it on, Pete and Smitty think not. I agree that it could make us an easy target, but I have to grudgingly concede with Alice that it will also make us easier to rescue. Because the rescuing part is absolutely going to happen. But if it doesn’t . . . what if we have to drive the bus down the hill again and the battery is dead because we kept the lights on? And we might need to turn the heat on. The work and adrenaline has made us hot, but now that night has come, it’s going to get cold — maybe unbearably cold. We’re going be creating our own version of one of those TV shock docs that are called cuddly things like I Shouldn’t Have Survived the Night or I Ate My Best Friend to Live.

  Speaking of which . . .

  “Do we have any food?” Gareth finally stops playing with himself long enough to stalk the aisle.

  “No,” Smitty says. “Pity you didn’t think to grab something from the shop while you were swinging that bat around, Gareth.”

  “I have a sandwich I can share,” I interject before they can beat each other up. “And if you look in the locker where Ms. Fawcett was sitting, there are some chips — er, crisps — and sodas. I think she was planning on handing them out later anyway.”

  “Oh, well, if she was planning on doing that, it must be OK to take them.” Smitty shoots me a look.

  I feel myself redden. What a dumb thing to say. Like any of that matters anymore.

  Alice clambers up onto Ms. Fawcett’s seat and tosses bags of chips crisps and cans of soda around the bus. But not at me. “Guess you’ll be OK with your PB and J,” she smirks.

  Wot-ever. I’ll save the sandwich for later, preferably when Alice is at the leg-gnawing stage, then I’ll eat it in front of her, slowly and deliberately and with sound effects.

  They eat all of the chips. Alice finds a packet of Scotch eggs in someone’s bag — hard-boiled eggs cased in sausage meat and then deep-fried: now that’s a snack you don’t find in the average American lunch box. And then there’s nothing more to do except put on as many clothes as we can fit into, and wait: for the troops, sleep, or asphyxiation from Pete’s toxic egg farts, whichever comes first.

  Time to change from my ripped-up jeans into comfortable leggings, and I finally get to tackle my leg. Armed with the first-aid kit and some antibacterial wipes from Ms. Fawcett’s bottomless backpack, I peel back the denim on my right leg tentatively. Blood has already clotted through the material, which is stuck to my skin. I grit my teeth but keep peeling, and the blood runs anew. I feel chunks rising in my throat with the pain . . . and I take a look. There’s a big scrape, and a gash that’s small but kind of deep. I can see something startlingly white in there. It takes me a moment to realize it’s bone. Gah.

  “That needs stitches,” Smitty says matter-of-factly as he appears over my shoulder, making me jump. I stop myself from pulling the bloody jeans back up again. It’s not like I have anything to be ashamed of.

  “Don’t get any ideas,” I say. “There are some butterfly bandages in this box.” I rifle in the first-aid kit. “They’ll do the trick.”

  “Shame.” Smitty sits on the dashboard and slurps on a soda. “I’m a dab hand at needlework.”

  Yeah, like I’d let that happen. “So, you OK?” I casually switch the focus to him as I take out some antibacterial ointment and put a big glob of it on the hole in my leg.

  “Is this the part where we do competitive injuries?” He laughs, and the sound warms me up a little. “You win. I’ve got nothing except a sugar high.”

  “I think Pete beats us all with his busted head.” I glance down the aisle in his direction.

  “No kidding.” Smitty grins at me. “Petey-poo! Come and see the naughty nurse!”

  Pete takes some persuading, but he eventually sits on the top step, and Smitty and I look at his head. White-blond is the best hair color if you’re aiming for maximum horror effect with a head wound. The blood has pinkened thick sections of his hair, and there’s angry-looking swelling around the place where the metal was sticking into his skull, although the wound is already scabbing. I leave it alone, and clean the surrounding scalp as best as I can with a wipe. He’s uncomplaining, stoical even. A far cry from the wobbling mess I found in the toilet stall. He’s probably still pumping adrenaline right now. Or maybe it’s all the chemicals in his inhaler. Hope I’m not around when he crashes and burns.

  “So, before . . . how did you end up in the bathroom?” I say conversationally as I fasten a pad of cotton around his head with a polka-dot bandanna that I think used to belong to one of Alice’s cronies. It’s mint-green and white, and it makes him look like a Lost Boy. The Peter Pan ones, not the fugly eighties vamps.

  “I ran.” He breathes in deeply and his chest rattles. He delves into a pocket and takes a hit off his inhaler.

  “You were in the Cheery Chomper when it all . . . went down?”

  There’s a brief smile, wry and sharp and beyond his years. “Yes. In the gift shop, out of sight. Browsing the magazines.”

  I smile back encouragingly and he continues.

  “Yes, I suppose you could say I was in a world of my own.” His eyes glaze over. “Intellikit has just brought out a new computer chip — it’s beyond clever. I was reading an article in PCWorld —”

  “Get out of town, that’s intense,” Smitty mocks. “Why didn’t you tell us this before?”

  “Don’t worry, I’m not going to bore you with it.” Pete raises an eyebrow. “But suffice to say, absorbed as I was in the magazine, I wasn’t entirely present.”

  “Everybody else was eating in the café?” I ask.

  “Just a few feet away.” He nods slowly. “Baying like dogs for their burgers. I shut them out; I always do.”

  “Yeah, me too.” I try to bond, but he gives me a strange look, and so does Smitty. “So what happened?” I ask.

  “Mr. Taylor came in.” Pete frowns. “Asked me if Smitty was allergic to nuts. Why he wanted to know, I couldn
’t tell you.”

  Smitty chuckles.

  “Then what?” I urge.

  “That’s when he collapsed.”

  “What?” I say. “Mr. Taylor?”

  “Yup. One minute he’s dithering by the cold drinks, next he’s keeled over on the floor.”

  “What did you do?”

  Pete looks at me, surprised. “Nothing. I waited for someone to notice, but the woman behind the register was gone and nobody else appeared. It was only then that I realized the baying had stopped.” He cracks his knuckles. “It was quiet. Apart from a hissing noise: the deep fryers, I think, or maybe water running in the kitchen.” His face gets a dreamy look. “It was rather lovely, actually.”

  “Oh, idyllic.” Smitty swoons.

  “Then what?” I lean forward.

  “Then I walked out into the café.” He blinks. “And there they all were, lying across the tables. Completely still. Like Mr. Taylor.” He swallows, and I watch the white lump in his throat move up and down, barely covered by his weird, translucent skin. “Like everyone had fallen asleep.”

  “It must have been terrifying,” I say.

  “No!” His eyes flash and the corners of his mouth turn up in a slow smile. “It was wonderful! They were lying there, helpless. Imagine it . . .” He leans close. “I could do anything! They couldn’t stop me!”

  “You are a real head case, Petey,” Smitty sighs.

  “Um, right,” I say to Pete. “So what did you do?”

  “Nothing. It was only wonderful for a moment, then it was horrible.” He shudders. “They started waking up. Mr. Taylor first — I was standing there, watching the others, and he appeared behind me. He grabbed my shoulder. I turned around, and there he was. His face was grotesque, distorted — he was making the most unearthly sound. He caught me and pulled me toward him. His mouth was open — he was trying to bite me!”

  “Hardcore.” I shake my head. “What did you do?”

  “I still had PCWorld in my hand. I rolled it up and shoved it in his mouth, then I ran.”