Now that I look back on it, I reckon Dad was just too lazy and made all that stuff up. Unless he and Granddad were the unluckiest campers in the entire history of the world.
But I should fill you in on everything.
The day started at five in the morning.
I’ll just pause here and let you absorb that. Five in the morning. I didn’t even know such a time existed.
I moaned and groaned when the alarm went off, partly because I had only fallen asleep about an hour previously. I pretended to be unconscious, but my dad eventually stumbled into the room, pulled my duvet off, grabbed my foot, and dragged me onto the floor.
“Your mom says to get up,” he mumbled, and then he picked the duvet up and collapsed onto my bed, curling up and going right back to sleep.
I don’t think Mom is used to being up so early, either, because she gave me a mug of coffee. I drank it down, thinking she had done it on purpose to give me a boost. It tasted horrible. At least, it did to start with. But my mom likes a lot of sugar in her drinks, so the sweetness soon got rid of the taste, and it actually wasn’t that bad.
A few minutes later my teeth were chattering. And not from the cold. My heart was thumping heavily in my chest. I was convinced I was having a heart attack. I couldn’t keep still. My arms were twitching slightly, and my head felt like it was doing somersaults.
The school bus arrived a few minutes later. Mom gave me a long hug and told me to stay with Dallas at all times, and at the first sign of trouble I was to climb up a tree and wait. I reminded her that the whole thing was a pointless sham anyway, but she still told me to be careful.
I was the last pickup, so I had to sit at the front of the bus, right behind the driver. Aren, Charlie, and Calvin all sat a couple of rows behind me.
The driver smelled of garlic. He always smelled of garlic. I think he keeps it in his pocket or something. The word around school is that he’s afraid of vampires. (I hesitate to put this in the journal, but here it is: there have been a few news reports lately about sightings of vampires and werewolves.)
Seriously.
Not here, but farther north, and over in Europe, which is, like, pretty far away. Aren also told me his family had heard rumors of these weird vampires in North Africa. His parents seemed to think they were real, but come on. What are the chances of us having zombies and vampires and werewolves existing in the real world?
The bus soon arrived at the town gates. We filed out to find Dallas already waiting for us, along with three men and two women, all of them dressed in camouflage gear. They were driving those open-top jeeps you always see in movies, the kind that usually have machine guns attached to the back. (And this despite the freezing weather. Looking cool is hard work.)
These didn’t have machine guns, although Calvin swore he saw one hidden in the back under some tarp. But Calvin sees a lot of things. Hears a lot of things as well. So we never know when to believe him. We’ve all just decided it’s best to disbelieve everything. It’s easier that way.
Dallas was standing by the wall. He typed a combination into an electronic keypad, and the huge gates shuddered and started opening outward, drifts of snow falling to the ground.
“Right!” he shouted. “You kids awake?”
There were a few mumbles.
“I said, are you kids awake!?” he shouted.
“Yes!”
“I’m not,” muttered Charlie. “I think this could be considered cruel and unusual punishment in most states.”
“Good,” said Dallas. “Now, what we’re going to do is extremely dangerous. You understand? Extremely dangerous. The only thing stopping you kids from being the main course on a deadbeat buffet is me and my team. Say hello, team.”
The team didn’t say hello. They did chew gum at us, though. I wished I had some gum.
“I need you all to listen to me very carefully. You are to stay close to us at all times. Don’t ever stray away from the group. You’ll all be given one of these.” He held up some kind of portable siren. “If you get lost, you climb a tree and you turn this on. You can all climb trees, can’t you? You’re kids. That’s what kids do.”
Everyone turned to stare at Calvin. He wasn’t exactly the best of athletes. None of us were, actually, except for Brad Johnson. And he wasn’t even here. But I was sure Calvin would manage to climb a tree if he was being chased by a horde of zombies.
He looked quite worried, so I patted him on the shoulder.
“Don’t worry, Calvin. Just stick with us.”
He nodded, but he was starting to get that panicky look that usually sets him off doing something stupid. I leaned in close.
“Remember, none of this is actually real,” I whispered. “It’s a trick. Remember I told you?”
His face collapsed into grateful relief. By now all of us kids knew this was a setup. That we were never going to be in any real danger. But Dallas and his crew had gone to a lot of effort, so we all agreed to go along with it. It would be cruel not to.
Even so, it was slightly creepy to walk between those gates and out into the snow-covered field. The Zee-Zees were switched off at night, and there weren’t any zombies around, so it’s not as if we were in any danger. But still, leaving those walls behind, the walls that had protected us our entire lives—I admit to feeling a tiny flutter of fear. (Just a tiny flutter.)
‘Course, it was worse when we got to the woods. Mom had explained that there was some serious fencing around the area we were being led to. We couldn’t see it, though, so it felt like we were walking straight into the zombies’ home turf.
“Nobody step on a twig,” whispered Dallas.
Just as he said this, Calvin stepped on a huge stick. The crack echoed around the forest like a fart in a church.
He flushed red. “Sorry.”
We walked for about forty minutes. The sky was beginning to lighten when Dallas and his crew finally led us into a clearing about twenty yards wide.
“This is where we’re going to camp,” he said. He nodded to his crew, and they all disappeared into the trees.
“They’ll keep the perimeter clear,” said Dallas. “But there is a chance they’ll all get taken down, so we’re going to set up a secondary perimeter here at the camp.”
For the rest of the morning the forest clearing rang with the tweets and chirps of messages coming and going on everyone’s phones. We were supposed to be surviving in the wild, but I guess no one told the cell phone companies that. Everyone in our group was in touch with their homes, sending worried parents pictures of our camp, of each other, of Calvin falling face-first into the snow. The usual.
Dallas eventually got so fed up with us staring at our phones that he confiscated all of them, sealing them in a plastic case.
“You’ll get them back after you’ve been one with nature,” he said.
The rest of the day was mind-numbingly boring. Chopping wood, lighting fires, cooking bacon and eggs, putting the tents up, that kind of thing. I mean, if this is what it was like in the old days, I have no idea how my parents survived. They’re always telling me they didn’t have the Internet back then. Or cable, or computer games. I mean, what did they actually do with themselves? I enjoy reading as much as my dad, but even I would get bored with that if it was the only entertainment I had.
Most of us were pretty annoyed with Dallas for taking our phones, so we kind of gave him a hard time. Every time we did something we thought might attract zombies (if this was real, which it wasn’t) we would ask Dallas if it was safe. When he said it was, we’d ask him why, and his explanations were becoming more and more exasperated.
“Because they don’t like the smell of bacon!” he shouted.
“Everyone likes the smell of bacon,” I pointed out. “Even vegans like the smell of bacon.”
“No, they don’t. And even if they did, so what? Zombies don’t. Zombies like fresh meat.” That was all we had for amusement, and even that got boring. To be honest, I wasn’t even sure why we were h
ere. Dallas says it’s to teach us about life beyond the wall, but none of us ever goes beyond the wall, so what was the point? And the whole deadbeat attack thing? Another waste of time. It’s not as if we’re going to be given dangerous weapons or anything like that. The whole thing was fake.
We all turned in as soon as night fell, thinking that the quicker we went to sleep, the quicker it would all be over.
SUNDAY, JANUARY 19
9:00 a.m. So. First night slept in the wild.
How was it? I hear you ask. Well, it was pretty uncomfortable, thank you. The ground was lumpy no matter what position I tried to lie in. It was freezing cold despite our portable heaters, and Calvin, we all discovered, talked in his sleep. Really talked. Full-on conversations with someone called Binky.
We asked him the next morning who Binky was, and he looked confused and said the only Binky he knew of was Binky the clown, the mass-murdering children’s entertainer in a horror novel he swiped from his dad’s room.
I thought back to some of those conversations we overheard.
“I can’t do it,” Calvin had said. “Binky, don’t make me. They’re my friends.”
And “What hammer, Binky? You put one in my bag? Why would you do that?”
And, of course, how could I forget, “Who’s annoying you, Binky? Matt?” A pause, while Calvin must have been listening to his dear friend Binky, the murderous clown. “How can you even suggest that, Binky? I couldn’t do that!”
Needless to say, we’ve all been a lot nicer to Calvin today.
He’s been smiling a lot, though, which leads me to suspect some foul play. But I really don’t think it’s worth the risk finding out the truth, do you?
11:00 a.m. We’ve all been wondering when Dallas was going to try to scare us with his “deadbeat attack.” He told us that today we were going to learn about “defensive circles,” “minimizing our footprint,” and other things that sounded like incredibly hard work. But we all assumed this is when his crew (who we hadn’t seen since they left the camp yesterday) would stumble into our midst doing their best zombie impersonations.
In the meantime, Dallas was having a bit of a hard time with our families back in Edenvale. When he confiscated all our phones yesterday, our updates to our families suddenly went silent. All at the same time.
You can imagine what they thought had happened. Dallas’s phone, which he only switched on this morning, has been bombarded with increasingly worried and then panicked calls from our parents.
Dallas gave our phones back in disgust, and ten seconds later all twenty of us were seated in a circle around the fire, heads bowed, updating our social networks and letting our families know we hadn’t been devoured by deadbeats.
Hmm. Devoured by Deadbeats. Cool name for a movie. Must remember that.
Anyway, it was while we all had our heads down that the “attack” came.
None of us noticed at first. I was checking out the movie sites, trying to find news on the latest Star Wars films. Charlie was on my right. She told me she was getting in touch with her comrades in the Undead Liberation Front, but I saw her phone. She was reading up on celebrity gossip. Calvin was playing Tetris, and Aren was actually catching up on his homework. I’m not kidding. That guy is an overachiever of note. If he’s not careful he’s going to overheat his brain. Kids our age aren’t meant to do that amount of work. Scientific fact.
So anyway, I was just about to click on a juicy bit of info about who was going to play the young Han Solo when I heard a low moan behind me.
I glanced over my shoulder and saw that a “deadbeat” had entered the camp and was shuffling directly toward us.
How typical! Dallas launches into his fake lesson just when he gives us our phones back! I wonder if he thought this was symbolic of something.
Well, I for one wasn’t going to be distracted. He was going to take our phones away again in ten minutes. It wasn’t fair of him to try to distract us now.
There was another moan from up ahead. A second deadbeat had entered the camp. I gave this one more than a quick look, because even I had to admit they’d done a good job with the makeup. It looked as if half its face had rotted away. Bone and sinew showed through the skin on its arms.
Not bad. Not bad at all. I swiped my finger across my phone screen, held it up, and took a photo.
None of the others had noticed yet. I nudged Charlie and nodded toward the zombies. She looked up and frowned.
“No,” she said. “No way. He’s only just given us our phones.”
You see? Me and Charlie, we’re on the same wavelength. That’s why we’re best buds.
More of Dallas’s crew, dressed up in zombie makeup, shuffled out of the trees. I remember thinking there were more fake zombies than there should be, but I just figured Dallas had more people hiding out in the forest and roped them in to scare us.
It wasn’t working, though. We were all too engrossed in our phones. Heads bowed, concentrating, while a circle of deadbeats slowly closed in on us, groaning and moaning.
One of the deadbeats got close and grabbed Charlie’s arm. She was yanked backward off her log, crying out in surprise. I whirled around and saw that this guy was really taking this joke thing seriously and was about to clamp his teeth down on Charlie’s hand.
That’s when I noticed a few different things. First, I could see through the guy’s rib cage. Like, actually see right through it. He was between Charlie and me, but I could see her angry face through the yellowing bones. He had no skin, no internal organs.
My brain did a few rapid recalculations of the situation just as Kilgore Dallas entered the clearing, returning from his angry walk. He froze, a look of utter astonishment on his face.
That’s when I realized this wasn’t a joke. This was a real deadbeat attack.
I shouted a warning to everyone and lunged forward, shoving the deadbeat who was about to bite down on Charlie. Its grip was so tight, and my shove so hard, its arm ripped right out of the socket. I looked at Charlie in horror. The zombie arm was still attached to her wrist. She shook her hand, but the thing wouldn’t let go.
She got to her feet just as another deadbeat arrived.
Charlie then used the arm that was clamped around her wrist as a makeshift club, smacking it against the deadbeat who was stumbling toward her. It was one of the coolest things I’ve ever seen.
The zombie spun in a circle and fell to the ground. Charlie yanked the arm off and threw it away.
Dallas was now running through the camp with a baseball bat.
“Up the trees!” he shouted. “Remember the drill!”
The others had finally twigged that this wasn’t a joke. That it was the real thing. They were scrambling for the trees, dodging around the slow-moving deadbeats, and pulling each other up through the branches to safety.
Except for Calvin.
He was engrossed in his game and taking no notice of all the commotion. Charlie, Aren, and I were already climbing an old, twisted oak tree, but we saw him sitting there and shared a look. Then we sighed, dropped back to the snow, and sprinted toward him.
Aren grabbed his phone, Charlie slapped him on the head, and I pulled him to his feet.
“Hey!” he shouted. “What’s the big idea …”
He trailed off as the situation finally sank into his brain.
By this time, Dallas’s crew had arrived. They and Dallas were running around the clearing dealing with the deadbeats in violent and fascinating ways. Our classmates were peering down from the branches, those who still had their phones using them to record the events. Deadbeats were still stumbling around, searching for anything with a pulse.
That included us.
Three were heading in our direction. We ran back to our tree and helped Calvin up into the branches. He finally made it to safety, and Charlie, Aren, and I hauled ourselves up after him. Then we turned around to watch the battle below us.
It was over in a matter of minutes.
Dallas’s crew sto
od in the clearing, looking around at the deadbeats lying on the forest floor. None of his crew had been injured. Not a surprise. They were pretty good at what they did.
“You kids stay where you are,” called Dallas. “We’re going to scout around.”
So we had to stay up in the trees for the next hour. Luckily for us, Aren was still holding Calvin’s phone, so we all took turns playing games until Dallas came back and told us we were going home early.
So, not a totally terrible day.
MONDAY, JANUARY 20
Everyone who was on the trip is now considered something of a hero. When word got out about what happened things went a bit crazy. I thought actual steam was going to bust out of Mom’s ears, she was so angry. Even Dad, who is a pretty laid-back guy, was furious. He looked at me strangely and then had to go for a walk to calm down.
I found out later that he marched to city hall and gave the mayor and Kilgore Dallas a piece of his mind. Apparently, he shouted at them. My dad never shouts.
I feel a bit bad for Dallas, though. It wasn’t really his fault. It turns out that the contractors the mayor paid to put up the fence were the cheapest he could find. Plus, he didn’t tell them the fence was supposed to keep deadbeats out, so they just stuck anything up, thinking it was for squirrels or something.
But nobody called out the mayor on this. Well, a few people tried, but then his offices said they didn’t have time to deal with that because there were more important things to worry about. The pet crisis was getting worse, they said, and more than two hundred pets were missing. I had no idea it was so many. The mayor issued a proclamation saying that all pets were to be kept indoors until they could figure out what was going on.
I knew what was going on.
Anti-Snuffles, that’s what. He had a lot to answer for.
TUESDAY, JANUARY 21
Still doing my detention at school. Mom was going to cut it back to a few days, considering what happened, but I told her not to. It made her look even tougher, and I got more sympathy from my classmates.
My Zombie Hamster Page 6