Zomburbia

by Adam Gallardo

  “Drugs? What sort of drugs?”

  “Vitamin Z,” I whispered.

  And then he did the very worst thing I could have imagined. He just sort of crumpled into a dad-shaped ball on the couch. He wouldn’t even look at me. His disappointment hung in the air like a fart in church. I would have taken him screaming at me any day.

  He was silent and still for a long time, minutes, before I built up the courage to say anything.

  “Dad?”

  “Are the drugs in the house now?”

  I told him they were.

  “Show me.”

  He stood up and led me to my room. I knelt down and pulled out the drawer with the false bottom and showed him my stash. He held the brick of Z in one hand and a gallon-size Ziploc stuffed with cash in the other.

  “What were you planning to do with this?” he asked. “Why would you ever need this much money?”

  “I was going to use it to get out of town and pay for college.”

  I guess that you could technically describe the sound he made as a laugh, but it sounded more like a bark or a rough cough.

  “Can you get a college degree in jail?” he asked. My heart sank. Was my dad really going to turn me into the cops? “Maybe they have correspondence courses . . .”

  “Dad?”

  He muttered to himself, I didn’t catch all of it, but I’m pretty sure he wondered where he’d gone wrong.

  “We have to get rid of this,” he finally said loud enough for me to hear it.

  We flushed it all down the toilet. It was only afterward that it occurred to me that we probably killed every fish in the Willamette River. I didn’t mention that to Dad.

  He made it clear that I’d be spending the summer under close supervision. “House arrest” may have been the term he used. And it was a given that I no longer worked at Bully Burger. Which, really, was fine with me.

  Dad took the brick of money into his room saying we’d figure out what to do with it later. We went to bed that night with a lot of stuff unresolved—how would I work things out with Buddha? How would Dad keep an eye on me while he was at work? But I knew that we’d talk it all out—talk and talk and talk—over the coming days and weeks.

  I turned off my lamp and settled down to a long night of not sleeping when there was a knock at my door.

  “Come in,” I said, and Dad opened the door. He stood in the doorway, lit from behind by the hall light and casting a long shadow into my room.

  “Courtney,” he said, “even when I’m angry at you, I still love you very much.” That was something he’d been telling me forever. It was easier to believe when he was mad at me because of a broken window or a missed curfew. I had a hard time accepting that he loved me now that I was a proven menace to society.

  I wanted to diffuse the tension in the room. I struggled to think of something funny to say.

  “Do you?” I asked.

  “Yes,” he said. “I think that when we make mistakes, when we lose our way, that’s when we need the love of others the most.”

  “Thank you, Dad. I love you, too.”

  “Okay,” he said, “get some sleep.”

  He left, shutting the door behind him.

  I cried myself to sleep that night, but it felt like a release, it felt like something I’d earned.

  There was a minor sensation in the local news about the attack. Apparently a lot of people had suspected that zombie attacks were on the rise, and that the zombies themselves were different now—that they were working together in groups, for a very deadly example—this was the first concrete evidence anyone had that it was so. And what was up with some of them being faster and more aggressive?

  Even though Professor Keller was still in a coma, I sent him the articles. I’m sure he’d have a science boner over it when he woke up. Hell, he might even come here to study what happened. Maybe he’d be able to come up with a way to help the Army clear the shufflers out of New York. I was still clinging to my hope that I’d get out of Dodge someday.

  My dad didn’t have to worry about Mr. Ikaros getting his. The parent of every kid at the party, and a lot of people besides, were calling for his head on a stick. Especially since some kids died during the attack. People were making it out like Mr. Ikaros practically invited every shuffler in the county to come to a teenage smorgasbord. One of the national networks came down and ambushed him outside of his work, shoved a mic in his face, and asked him how he felt being as evil as Hitler and Lord Voldemort combined. Mr. Ikaros turned beet red and could barely catch his breath. I seriously worried he might have a heart attack right there.

  I felt so bad that I thought about calling Brandon to see how he was doing. I stopped myself. It sucks when simple kindness seems like a bad idea.

  I started spending every day at my dad’s office. Which answered how he planned to keep an eye on me while he was at work. I read and worked on my laptop. My dad gave me the task of researching drug-prevention charities. And that answered what we’d be doing with the money I’d earned over the last year. Maybe “earned” isn’t the right word.

  After he was done at work, he drove me over to the Bully Burger. He sat in the parking lot while I went inside to hand in my uniform and tell Mr. Washington he’d have to find a new drive-thru register monkey.

  Chacho was in a chair reading his newspaper, so that meant that Mr. Washington wasn’t around. I guess I could resign to Chacho as well as I could to anyone. I set the bag with my stuff on the table in front of him.

  “What’s this?” he asked. He pawed through the bag.

  I motioned with my head out to the parking lot where my dad sat glaring into the store.

  “I’m not going to be working here anymore,” I said. “My dad decided it’d be for the best.”

  “Uh-huh,” Chacho said. He looked me over. “You okay? You seem different.

  “I’ve just been through a few things this last little bit.”

  “I heard,” he said. “You’re like the Terminator for zombies is what I heard.”

  I laughed. “When you say I seem different, how do you mean that?”

  He studied me. He frowned really deeply, too deeply to be real, and he stroked his chin.

  “Relaxed,” he said. “You look relaxed, maybe on your way toward being happy. I’m not used to it. You took my advice and you’re getting squared away.”

  I laughed again and he smiled at me.

  “Well, I think you better get used to it,” I said. “Me being happy, and all.”

  He nodded, smiling. “If you say so, chica.”

  I thought about the hard and shitty stuff ahead of me. Telling Buddha I wouldn’t be selling for him anymore. Oh, right, and I needed to pay him for the drugs currently swirling around in the river. And I still needed to settle things with Dad. That was just for starters. I knew I’d be miserable while I was going through all of it. Then I thought about when I had all these awful tasks behind me.

  I bet that I’d feel free.

  “Hell, yeah, Chacho,” I said. “Get used to it for sure.”

  “Okay, Courtney,” he said. “Listen, you need anything, you give me a call. You’re one of the good ones.”

  Rather than tell him how wrong he was about me, I asked him if Phil was working tonight.

  “Naw,” Chacho said, “he quit, too. I thought it might have had something to do with you.”

  “Not me,” I said. “It must have been his own bonehead idea. Well, I’ll see you around, Chacho.”

  “I hope so,” he said.

  I didn’t bother to say good-bye to anyone else.

  Later that night, or early the next morning if you want to be technical, I woke to the sound of pebbles hitting my window. My first thought was that it was zombies and I grabbed my pistol. Then I got my head together and realized I was in the middle of a teen romance cliché instead.

  I opened the window and Phil stood out there in his combat gear. He held some papers in his hand.

  “Hey,” he whispere
d.

  “Hey.”

  “I heard you quit the Bully Burger.”

  “Wow,” I said, “news travels fast.”

  He shrugged.

  “Chacho told me the same thing about you,” I said.

  “Yeah, I got a better deal at the Cinema.”

  “Nice,” I said. “You’ll look good in the corporate-mandated vest.”

  “The pay is better and I won’t be running a deep fat fryer,” he said.

  “There is that,” I said. I realized he was still just standing there. “Want to come in?”

  “I better not,” he said. “Cody’s waiting to go on patrol.” He pointed off toward some bushes by the chain-link. Sure enough, there was Cody, all done up in camo, too.

  “Hey, Cody,” I whisper-shouted. “You feeling better?”

  He gave me a thumbs-up.

  “How come you quit?” Phil asked.

  The question caught me off guard a little.

  “What?” I stammered. “Oh, I’ll tell you later. Okay?”

  “Sure,” he said. “Hey, I have something for you,” he said. He handed the sheet of paper to me.

  Actually, it was two sheets, one on top of another with a hinge made out of masking tape, like a cover. I switched on the lamp and opened it. It was a drawing of me. The style was somewhere between the realistic drawing of Sherri that he’d done and his usual cartoony stuff. It was me holding a shotgun in one hand, the barrel resting against my shoulder. Smoke came out of the barrel. I had one foot planted on the head of a fully dead zombie. I had on the outfit I’d been wearing on Saturday night. There was some decorative stuff behind the main image and it sort of made me think of old Norman Rockwell paintings. The thing that totally got me was my expression. I had a sneer/smile that didn’t make me look too mean. I looked like a complete badass, like I could take anything that came my way.

  I set the drawing down on the table.

  “Come here,” I said. He got close and I leaned out the window and threw my arms around his neck. I felt his body go stiff and he never relaxed. He must have hated it, so I let him go after a minute.

  “Thanks, Phil. I really like it. If, you know, you couldn’t tell.”

  “I’m glad. It was fun to draw.”

  “You said you had another one of me, didn’t you?”

  “Yeah.”

  “I’d like to see it,” I said. “Maybe I could see all your drawings?”

  A smile, unsure at first and then bigger, spread across his face. I could have been mistaken, but I think he blushed a little. I had been right the other night. He was cute when he smiled.

  “Are you serious?” he asked.

  “Of course.”

  “Yeah, that’d be great.”

  “You know what else?” I asked. Phil recognized it for a rhetorical ploy and didn’t answer. “I think some night I’d like to go out with you and Cody. On patrol.”

  “Yeah?” he asked again.

  “Yeah.”

  “That’d be great,” he said. “You’ll be a badass zombie slayer.”

  “I’ll do my best,” I said. “It might be a while, though. I’m sort of in hot water with my dad.”

  “Why’s that?” he asked.

  “I’ll tell you another time.”

  Great. Another thing to add to my ever-growing list of things to do.

  “Okay,” Phil said. “Well, we’d better get to it.”

  “Kick some zombie butt,” I said. “Don’t die.”

  “Never,” he said.

  He hopped over the fence and the two of them took off into the night. How weird was my life that I accepted that as normal? And that I knew I’d be joining them sometime soon? Would I really be as badass as Phil thought? I hoped so because I’d spent a good part of my life avoiding being eaten by shufflers.

  It was true that I’d been through a lousy few days, and that there was more lousy ahead of me, too, but I knew that things would get better. Hell, even though they looked bad on paper, I knew I was still better off than I’d been. I wasn’t selling drugs, I wasn’t lying to my dad anymore, and my dad didn’t hate me because of it.

  No matter how rotten things got in the next little while, I knew they’d pass. I knew that they’d get better. I knew that I’d make them better.

  So, score one for me, I guess.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  It feels like the biggest cliché in the world to say that no one writes a book in a vacuum, but it’s true. My friends Michael Lane and Julian Cautherley first gave me advice about the story back when I thought it would be a comic book, and I bet they don’t even remember it. Scott Wolven was the first person besides me to read the finished manuscript. He then gave me the courage to wrestle the damned thing into submission via rewrites. Kate Erickson and my wife, Melissa Kreutz Gallardo, helped me to polish it further.

  I’d be a jerk if I didn’t mention a few people who read early chapters and gave me encouragement to carry on. So, thanks to Nancy Holder, David Anthony Durham, and Michael Kimball—all had advice for me at the early stages of this book’s life. All of them are also, not coincidentally, faculty members at the Stonecoast MFA program. Further, they are all working writers (as is Scott Wolven) whose works you should hunt down and shove in your eyeballs.

  Huge, Grand Canyon–sized thanks to my agent, Ann Collette, who saw potential in the manuscript when I wasn’t too sure about it myself. I’ll never forget her first words to me. We were in a cramped room full of soon-to-be MFA graduates waiting to speak to a real live agent for the first time. After I introduced myself and told her which sample I’d submitted to her, she spread her arms and said, “Come to Momma!” I knew right then she was the agent for me.

  Thanks, too, to my editor, Michaela Hamilton. Never underestimate how much a good editor can help you shape a novel.

  This may seem strange, but I need to give a shout out to Salem Cinema in Salem, Oregon, and its owner, Loretta Miles. During most of the book’s writing, I was a stay-at-home dad who worked part-time at the Cinema. I’m guessing that more than half of the first draft was written in the down time after movies started up. An aspiring writer might do worse than a part-time job at a cool, indie movie theater owned by an equally cool, indie lady.

  Finally, thanks to my parents, neither of whom lived to see this book’s publication. They seemed to not really understand my compulsion to write, but they never actually discouraged me, and even seemed hopeful that I’d succeed.

  The zombie wars continue . . . and Courtney continues to fight!

  Don’t miss

  ZOMBIFIED

  Coming from K-Teen in 2015.

  Keep reading to enjoy a preview chapter . . .

  CHAPTER ONE

  Do Me a Favor in Return?

  From the top of some hill I didn’t know the name of, the whole of Salem spread out before me. I thought I might puke.

  The day before my senior year starts and here it is my first time out of the freaking house all summer without my dad in my back pocket—except for some late-night vigilante shenanigans that Dad didn’t know about—and where does my buddy Phil decide to bring me? To gaze upon the town I can’t wait to escape. Needless to say, Phil is not Casanova. On the plus side, he could probably have told me who Casanova was. I think.

  I closed my eyes and drew a deep breath. Jesus, I was acting like a grade-A bitch, even if it was only in my head. I opened my eyes and tried to see our hometown in a more positive way. Obviously Phil liked staring down at it, so I wanted to get in sync with him.

  The Willamette River glittered in the sun, cutting Salem off from West Salem. The one surviving bridge was covered in traffic—the other bridge had been blown up years ago in the first days after the dead came back. Downtown was dominated by the capitol building, the Gold Man shining on top. There was the courthouse, a few churches, a big bank or two, all of it dotted with parks and clumps of trees.

  Nope, it didn’t do it for me. The smell of old cigarettes didn’t help much. Whoever
owned this car before Phil had been a heavy smoker and we couldn’t get rid of the stench. If Phil noticed my deep dislike of this little excursion, he didn’t let on. But then Phil seems not to catch too many social cues. It’s simultaneously cute and infuriating.

  “Why did you bring me out here?” I asked.

  Phil slowly blinked his eyes. A tic of his. He has brown hair that’s too long and gets in his face. A sharp chin. Good lips and nose, too. I used to think he was plain looking. When I caught myself remembering that, I blushed and mentally backed away from the thought the same way I would back away from a dog that might be dangerous. Again, he didn’t seem to notice.

  “I thought you’d like it,” he said. He shrugged. “I like it.”

  I decided to change the subject.

  “How’s the movie theater?” I asked.

  “Good,” he said. “I like running the projector. It’s old and needs constant repair. It’s fun.” He smiled and I wondered again how I’d ever thought he was plain.

  “Have you been by the Bully Burger lately?” he asked. We used to work there together until we both left for different reasons.

  “Nope,” I said. “I haven’t been back since I quit. What’s up?”

  “I was in there a few days ago,” he said. “Chacho said someone was looking for you.”

  “Oh, hell,” I said. “It wasn’t Brandon, was it?” Brandon had been a boy I was falling for at the end of last school year. Before everything went to hell, that is.

  “I don’t think so. No one knew this guy’s name.”

  “Did one of the Olsen twins see him?” The twins weren’t really named Olsen, but they were for-real named Mary Kate and Ashley. No, seriously. “Did they at least describe him?”

  “No,” said Phil. “And I didn’t ask Chacho what the guy looked like.”

  “How is Chacho?” I asked. He was the security guard at the Bully Burger, and the only cool adult I knew.