Bad Taste in Boys

by Carrie Harris

  I freaked out.

  My syringe plunged into its eye. I yelled when I did it too, like I was in a martial arts movie. Or maybe I was screaming and hoped to make myself feel less like an idiot by calling it something else in my head. The clown, thankfully, was a dummy on a pole. It didn’t mind being stabbed in the eye; it just kept shaking and cackling. I should probably have taken the syringe out, but I couldn’t make myself approach the thing. I left it wobbling there to scare the crap out of the next person who walked this stupid maze. I still had a few doses left.

  I moved forward cautiously instead, another syringe at the ready. Mike could have come in the other side, or there might be more clowns. But I managed to push open the door and emerged back into the misty gray yard without being accosted by anything icky-faced or dead.

  I returned to the front of the house. No Mike. I saw the big divot in the ground where he’d fallen off the porch and an uneven line running past the barn door and into the trees, like he had dragged his twisted foot through the grass the whole way there. A big stretch of woods bordered the house. Mike’s trail led inside.

  I ran to the car. If I flashed the lights and honked the horn, it would attract Mike’s attention. I could wait for him in the car and roll the window down to inject him from the safety of the interior.

  It was a great plan. Unfortunately, when I pressed on the gas pedal, the car didn’t go anywhere. I put it in reverse. Then I tried drive. The only result was a furious whir of tires and lots of mud flying around. I reluctantly got out to see what was wrong. The two rear tires were sunk in a mud pit.

  My dad had prepared me for situations like this, because we were that kind of family. I kept a bunch of emergency materials in my trunk. So if this had been my car, I would have wrestled a big bag of sand out of the back. Or, more likely, I would have tried to pick it up, realized I was too big of a wuss, and carted the sand out one plastic cup at a time. But I would have gotten the car out one way or another.

  Rocky, unfortunately, had a very different kind of family. Her trunk was full of unsold Girl Scout cookies.

  I was stuck here. At least I had a year’s supply of Thin Mints.

  * * *

  I considered my options. I couldn’t call Rocky or Jonah for help, because it was smack in the middle of third period. I didn’t really want to call Dad. And I couldn’t drive anywhere.

  I’d just have to go on a zombie hunt.

  I decided to check the house first, just in case. The front door still stood wide open; I nudged it with my foot. Mike might have snuck back inside while I wasn’t looking.

  There were no zombies behind the door, or anywhere else in the living room, for that matter. But the place was a mess. A moldy plate of half-eaten food sat on the coffee table, bugs swarming over it. The floor was strewn with clothes, smelly shoes, and random bits of paper; the cushions hung half off the sofa. The TV blasted some random cooking show. Some chef was chopping carrots at the speed of light. I stabbed the power button and the screen went dark.

  I didn’t see the body slumped in the hallway until I tripped over it. I jumped back and held my hands up like I knew karate. I didn’t, but the zombies didn’t know that. The lump on the floor remained motionless, though. I edged forward, turning the light on to get a better look. I instantly regretted that.

  I couldn’t remember what Mike’s mom looked like, but I assumed this was her. She looked really young. Maybe it was the dreadlocks.

  She was slumped facedown in the corner, the dreads spread out around her head like rays of the sun in a preschooler’s drawing. I was a little nervous about touching her, because maybe this was all a trap and she was going to try to bite off the part of my lip her son had missed. So I flipped her over and jumped back before I even got a good look at her.

  The jump? Completely unnecessary. She was very dead. Her eyes bulged from their sockets, and her face was riddled with bite marks. I clamped my hands over my mouth and backed away. I couldn’t bear to look at her again. There was nothing I could do for her now, and I was going to have nightmares as it was.

  If Mike was going all cannibalistic, there was an awfully good chance the rest of the defensive line was doing the same or would be soon.

  This did not bode well.

  No way was I going to chase Mike through the woods now, not if he was a murderer. I needed another test subject. I still wasn’t thrilled about the idea of using Jonah to test the cure, but it was a better choice than playing hide-and-seek in the woods with a killer.

  I stepped over the body and walked into the linen closet by accident before I figured out which door led to the garage. And there was exactly what I needed.

  Mike’s 4×4, keys in the ignition.

  orty minutes later, I swung into my driveway. I smacked the vials into the syringes with the practiced motion of a gunslinger in a bad Western and slipped them into my belt, one on either side. Then I stepped out of the SUV, squared my shoulders, and marched through my front door.

  Or at least, I tried to.

  It was locked, and I ended up fumbling around in the depths of my backpack. I couldn’t find my keys. It completely ruined the mental picture I had of myself as an action heroine.

  When I finally managed to get inside, the house was silent. I snuck down to the basement. The lights were off, but I wasn’t willing to take it for granted that Jonah wasn’t there. I crept down the stairs and swung around the corner at the bottom, a syringe held high. But there were no zombified little brothers in the basement. Normally, I would have been relieved by this, but under the circumstances I was disappointed.

  I methodically worked my way through the first floor. No Jonah in the kitchen, living room, study, or dining room. He wasn’t hiding in the downstairs bathroom. (No big surprise; that bathroom was tiny, but I checked it anyway to be thorough.) I went upstairs and crept down the hall to Jonah’s bedroom door. It was barely cracked; I kicked it open with the heel of my foot and leapt inside, a syringe in each hand. The room was empty, except for about fifty dollars’ worth of empty soda cans and enough dirty laundry to clothe our high school for a month.

  “If I was Jonah, where would I go?” I mumbled, walking outside. I’d have to try to track him, although you could write what I knew about outdoorsy stuff on the back of a postage stamp and still have room left over. I started at the side of the house where we’d been waiting for the bus, followed the path of mass destruction through the garden, and emerged in the backyard.

  Bang!

  The loud noise scared me so badly that I tripped over one of the lawn chairs.

  Bang!

  I ducked behind the table. We didn’t have a privacy fence, so our neighbors had a clear line of sight to our backyard. Maybe someone had seen Jonah; maybe he had attacked someone and now they were shooting at him. If that was the case, I couldn’t afford to wait. I stood up and waved my arms.

  “Stop!” I yelled. “Stop shooting. He’s just sick. I can cure him!”

  Bang! Bang!

  This time, I caught movement out of the corner of my eye; I whirled in that direction. The shed door hung loose. As I watched, a burst of wind slammed it against the frame.

  I sprinted for the shed. That door always stayed locked, because some idiot had taken our riding mower for a joyride one year and driven it into the lake down the street. There was only one person who could have unlocked it, and I was searching for him so I could stab him with a syringe.

  I flung the door open. I was prepared for a lot of things: Jonah injured, Jonah aggressive, Jonah grunting in monosyllables. I was not prepared to find him duct-taped to a lawn chair.

  Thick bands of silver wrapped around his torso, fastening it to the sturdy metal back. His hands were bound in his lap, his ankles to the legs of the chair. Strips of tape crisscrossed his mouth. He was whipping his body back and forth, but there was too much tape and it was stuck tight. The only way he was breaking out of this was if the ghost of Harry Houdini materialized out of the ether and posses
sed him.

  When he saw me, his eyes bugged out.

  “Uuuungh!” he grunted through the mouthful of tape.

  “Jonah!” I exclaimed, ripping the tape from his mouth.

  He lurched in my direction, straining against the tape. The chair tilted, slamming him to the floor. “Hungry!” he snarled, closing his jaws on my foot.

  I should have been expecting this, but it still took me by surprise. I fell backward, nearly impaling my head on a rake. The fall put me face to face with him, an arrangement I immediately regretted. His eyes were empty of both reason and recognition. It frightened me more than anything else had so far; Jonah and I might have made each other’s lives miserable, but we still had each other’s backs and always would. Or at least, we always had before he’d gotten zombified.

  Unfortunately, I’d dropped the syringes when I fell, and Jonah was about to ingest my big toe. I grabbed the only thing within reach: the rake. I flipped it around and used the handle as a prod—I just couldn’t make myself rake my brother across the face. His teeth were sunk deep in my shoe. The situation reminded me uncomfortably of Coach.

  I stretched out on the floor, groping around for the syringes. The door had swung shut, cutting off most of the light, so I was pretty much working blind. I couldn’t feel anything. Jonah was light, but when you added a heavy metal lawn chair and about fifteen pounds of duct tape, it wasn’t so easy to drag him around by one foot. I finally brushed one syringe with my finger and only managed to knock it farther away.

  I swung the rake handle, aiming for my brother’s shoulder. It slammed into the chair instead.

  The good news? His teeth released my foot.

  The bad news? I heard a loud rip as some of the tape gave way. I didn’t even take the time to look; I leapt for the syringe, sprawling across the dirt floor on my stomach. My hands closed on it just as his weight settled on the back of my legs. His mouth clamped down on my calf.

  Pain blazed up my leg. His teeth sank into my gastrocnemius muscle, and he shook his head like a dog with a bone. I had to get him off me. I bucked wildly, but his teeth were in deep and it only made the pain worse. I fumbled with the syringe, dropped it, and picked it up again with panic-clumsy fingers. Finally, I managed to pop the cap off. The needle easily pierced the flesh of his neck. I pushed down on the plunger and hoped the effect would be instantaneous.

  It wasn’t. Nothing happened.

  Jonah started making this wet slurping noise as my blood burbled up and flowed out the sides of his mouth. I felt the flesh of my leg start to give with a wet rip that made my belly heave. The pain was huge. Tears ran down my cheeks.

  Suddenly, Jonah released me. I took the opportunity to scramble backward and ran for the door, leaving the syringe still embedded in his neck. It wobbled as he flailed around, still half attached to the chair. I groped for the rake, holding it out in front of the open door in what was supposed to be a threatening manner.

  Then he puked all over the side of the riding mower.

  That puke was the most wonderful thing I’d ever seen. It was green. And a little red. Technicolor, really, the color puke is supposed to be. It definitely wasn’t black, and it didn’t smell like toasty poop.

  This was a good sign.

  I grabbed the workbench and pulled myself to my feet with the rake in my hand and another syringe at the ready. I didn’t know what dosage level he’d need to be completely cured. And really, I might have been immune to the virus because of my meds, but I wasn’t immune to being mauled, as my calf would attest.

  Eventually he stopped puking.

  “Jonah?” I asked, my voice quavering.

  “Quit pointing that thing at me,” he said irritably.

  Relief swam through me; I could have just about kissed him. “Are you okay?” I was feeling pretty hopeful, but I didn’t lower the rake.

  “My mouth tastes like someone brushed my teeth with a slab of rotten beef,” he muttered.

  Nice metaphor, bro. But I was so happy to have him back that all I said was “I’ll take that as a big no.”

  He said something else then, but I missed it because I was too busy trying to count his breaths. If anything, his respiration was a little elevated. And his skin tone had warmed back up already; he no longer looked like he had a bad case of freezer burn.

  “Kate?” He dragged the chair over to me. It made a horrible nails-on-the-chalkboard kind of sound. “You’re not listening.”

  “Huh?”

  “What happened?”

  “I was hoping you’d tell me, Jonah. How did you get taped to that chair?”

  “I did it myself, right after you left. Everything after that’s a blur.” He tried to wipe his mouth, but he couldn’t quite reach. “Can you get me out of here?”

  I lurched in his direction, trying not to move my injured leg. The pain had settled down to a dull, constant burn punctuated by flares of intense throbbing.

  “What exactly compelled you to fasten yourself to a lawn chair?” I asked, trying to unstick him. I was getting nowhere quick, so I grabbed a pair of garden shears and tried to remove the tape without slicing his shirt to ribbons.

  “I didn’t want to hurt anyone, and I really felt like just … hurting someone. As soon as you left, I snuck in here and taped myself to the chair. It was the only thing I could think of. It worked too, although I probably should have gone to the bathroom first.”

  “How do you feel now?”

  “Exhausted. And sick to my stomach. Not that I’m complaining,” he added hastily. “I don’t know what you gave me, but I feel a lot better now. Just exhausted. After a while, I started having problems thinking clearly. I don’t really remember what happened after that.”

  I pulled the last bit of tape free. But when he tried to stand, his knees wobbled underneath him and he crumpled to the floor.

  “I’m sorry.” He hung his head. “I’m just so tired.”

  “It doesn’t matter. Let’s get you to bed.”

  We went to the house and lurched up the stairs together, and I deposited him in his room. After a brief stop to bandage my leg and pick up every last vial of seizure meds in the house, I was ready for action. Time to take my evidence to the health department. I didn’t expect them to believe me, but I had to try. My only other choice was to take on the zombies all by myself.

  And I really didn’t want to do that.

  he waiting area at the health department was packed with children running around and screaming at the top of their lungs. Apparently they were holding a free flu clinic today, so I had to wait in a really long line before I could talk to anybody. In my tote bag were the seizure meds I had left. I’d only found twenty vials, which certainly wasn’t enough to cure all the infected, but I figured the health department would be able to get more.

  When I finally got up to the desk, I quickly and carefully unpacked my evidence: the cell cultures, the paperwork, and a vial of my medication.

  The woman behind the desk pushed her glasses up on her nose. “Okay, what’s all this?”

  “There’s a virus spreading through the population of Bayview High. I ran the cell culture from—”

  “Put it all in this, please. I’ll have someone take a look at it and get back to you.” She smacked a manila envelope down on the table, followed by a Sharpie.

  “But … this is urgent.”

  “I’m sure it is.” She didn’t sound unkind, just tired, and that actually made me feel worse. If she’d been rude, at least I could have blamed my failure on her. “I’ve also got water samples from a woman who is convinced that pesticides in her well gave her cancer. Yesterday, I got a deer we’re supposed to test for chronic wasting disease, and earlier this morning, someone dropped off a bunch of tuna to test for salmonella. My whole office smells like fish. All these things are urgent. We will get to your materials, but we just can’t drop everything and do it right now. As you can see, we’re a little swamped.”

  I almost told her about Mrs. Luzier, bu
t I decided against it. She’d have to call the police, and if things worked the way they did on TV, I’d be stuck in an interrogation room while Mike and the rest of the zombies ran rampant through town. I needed to stay free until I knew they had been cured.

  “I’m sorry. I didn’t think that through before I asked.” I uncapped the Sharpie and quickly scribbled my name and cell number on the envelope. Then she tried to take it from me, but I held on tight and caught her eyes before she got away. “Listen, I realize it’s a lot to ask, and I know you’re incredibly busy, but do you think you could get someone to look at this today? A lot of my friends are sick, and … I’m scared. Can you help me?”

  She gently tugged the package away. “You seem like a nice girl, so I’ll do my best. But I can’t make any promises.”

  When I got back to school, I slipped a note into Rocky’s locker asking her to meet me before the pep rally, and then I headed for the locker room. Going to class now was only going to invite questions, and I wasn’t entirely sure my goody-goody geek-girl reputation was enough to shield me from accusations of skipping class, breaking and entering, and truck theft. I was willing to face up to those things, but I had to cure the zombie virus first. It would be hard to fault someone for skipping AP Bio and committing a few misdemeanors when she had just identified a new disease, right? At least, that was what I hoped.

  I expected the locker room to be deserted since it was the middle of sixth period. But when I pushed the door open, I heard a high-pitched yelp. “She bit me!” I wasted no time; I dashed around the corner and nearly took out Mindi Skibinski.

  “Ohmygod,” she gushed breathlessly. “Kate, you are just the person we need. There is something wrong with Kiki, and I do not know what to do.” She jiggled her head at me to emphasize her words.

  I eased the door closed behind me. “What happened? Someone bit you?” The thought of something happening to Kiki made my heart race.