“But my car isn’t here! I told my driver not to return until two. What am I supposed to do? Take a taxi?” Rodney looked ill at the thought. Eduardo moved discreetly behind him in case he was called upon to catch his employer’s son. As a result, Ernestine was the only one to notice Aurora Borealis snatching up the twin’s shoes and trying them on her feet. She seemed pleased with the results, though one of the swans nipped at her disapprovingly. Lyndon should have noticed, too, as he was standing right next to her, but he seemed to be in a state of shock that he hadn’t been able to make any money off the evening. He still clutched a couple of limp bills in his hands.
“You can take my limo. It’s, er, parked out front.” Waving her hand airily, Mrs. MacGillicuddie turned her attention to removing the Swanson twins from where they were decorating her balcony. Meanwhile, Mr. Sangfroid jabbed at one of the photo albums that had fallen down from the attic above as though trying to prod it into getting up and going back upstairs.
“Ernestine!” Ernestine’s mother, Maya, swept her into a paint-spattered hug. Her skin was a richer brown than her daughter’s, with deeper golden undertones. Freckles speckled her cheeks, and she had lovely hazel eyes. Unlike Ernestine’s indecisive hair, Maya’s hair was wonderfully thick and springy, cut short and worn naturally around her face.
Ernestine hadn’t felt afraid until she felt her mother’s arms around her. It wasn’t until she snuggled against her warm skin and smelled the faint turpentine scent of her mother’s fingers in her hair that she realized she could have died before she’d ever had the chance to witness the apocalypse.
“My baby! I’m so proud of you! You saved Mrs. MacGillicuddie’s life!” Maya exclaimed.
Ernestine immediately stiffened at the mention of her mother’s pride. Her mother shouldn’t be proud. She should be terrified. Absolutely sick with worry.
“I almost died, Mom.” Ernestine wriggled out of her mother’s grasp and crossed her arms. “You’re proud that I almost died?”
“I’m proud of the way you can take care of yourself in any situation, Nestea.” Her mother smiled and laid her hand on Ernestine’s shoulder. “It makes me glad to know that you can take care of yourself even when I can’t be there. Just like you did before.”
“Before when?” Charleston asked as his father, Frank, released him from a hug.
The smile slid from Maya’s face. It was like a cloud had passed across the sun that normally lit up her personality. She glanced at Ernestine and began, “Back when Ernestine was five—”
“Nothing happened.” Ernestine snatched her backpack up from the ground, her gaze daring anyone to contradict her. No one did.
Together, they all trouped up the stairs to the attic loft where they lived. Though MacGillicuddie House was a retired artist colony, it needed some less-retired people to take care of it. Technically, those people were Ernestine’s mom and stepdad, though they spent most of their time painting and making weird sculptures instead of repairing things. Still, as they were—again, technically—the building’s maintenance people, they got to live in the half of the attic that wasn’t full of junk. Fortunately, it was also the half of the attic that hadn’t been attached to the now-fallen chandelier.
As they reached the balcony, Ernestine looked at the gaping hole in the ceiling above. Wires dangled uselessly in the air. Through the cracked plaster, she could see into the rafters above. The wheel of an ancient baby carriage jutted out through this new opening, threatening to take a wild ride down into the foyer below.
“You need to check all of the light fixtures tomorrow,” Ernestine warned her mother and stepfather severely as they pushed open the door to their home. “I know you have a gallery opening this Saturday, but there are more important things than a gallery opening. People could have died, you know.”
“Not with you here to save them.” Maya’s voice wavered a bit as she said it, but she gave Ernestine another squeeze. “And besides, we could hardly have known that chandelier was loose. It looked fine.”
“I hope the vibrations from my metal cutter didn’t jiggle those bolts loose.” Frank looked worriedly towards the work space where he created his sculptures. It was separated from the living room and kitchen by curtains made out of old bedspreads and quilts. “I had it running for most of the day. Mr. Talmadge asked me to make a sculpture out of old refrigerators and ovens for the new restaurant he’s opening after he overheard Mora say that Dill was planning something similar for his new place.”
Ernestine knew from many weekends spent trying to find a quiet place to study just how noisy that metal cutter could be. You could hear it all the way down on the second floor. Everyone else just took out their hearing aids, but Ernestine didn’t have the luxury of just yanking her ears off. Well, at least not yet. That might be one upside to the apocalypse that hadn’t occurred to her before.
Still, she didn’t think it was powerful enough to shake the chandelier loose. Unless it had flung itself off the ceiling in protest, sick of listening to all of that noise.
“You guys have to do your job. You can’t always rely on me to take care of things,” Ernestine pointed out. “When the zombie apocalypse comes, you’re going to have to fight to keep me from getting eaten.”
“The zombie apocalypse is going to be righteous, man.” Frank raised his clenched fist in a salute and beamed at her.
With a sigh, Ernestine gave up and went to bed. Charleston tagged along behind her. They shared a bedroom inside the cavernous attic at the very top of MacGillicuddie House. The rest of their home was mostly taken up by their parents’ art studio, with a small space left over for boring things like a kitchen, a bathroom, and a couch, coffee table, and TV that served as a living room. Colorful quilts and blankets marked off the various spaces, including Frank and Maya’s bedroom on the other side of the attic, leaving Ernestine and Charleston with the one room separated off by actual walls (well, the bathroom also had walls).
Charleston peeled off his boots, plunked his glasses onto the nightstand, and was snoring in the bottom bunk before Ernestine had even finished climbing the ladder up to the top bunk. Typical. He’d probably sleep right through the apocalypse when it finally happened and wake up in the morning to wonder where all of the bones had come from.
The night hadn’t exactly gone the way Ernestine had planned. She tried not to feel too down about it as she plumped her pillow and pulled the blankets up to her chin. If she had raised a zombie, she’d raised the wrong one and then lost it. Humiliating. On the other hand, if she hadn’t raised a zombie, she was still incompetent and plus she’d have to figure out who had been trying to break in. Humiliating and tiresome.
Either way, she’d have to beef up security around here, and push back ending the world.
Oh, well. Tomorrow was another day, Ernestine supposed, her optimism returning as she drifted off to sleep. There’d always be time to start the apocalypse after school.
In the morning, she went through her usual before-school routine. After brushing her teeth, shoving her hair up into a messy bun, and putting on her uniform in the bathroom, Ernestine went back to the room she shared with Charleston and yanked him out of bed. It seemed mean, but he slept like the dead so there was just no nice way to wake him up. Charleston’s face flopped onto the floor, his cheek smeared against the wooden boards, his legs still propped up on the mattress. He snorted, drooled a bit, and went on sleeping.
“Get up.” Ernestine nudged his cheek with her toe. More drool slid out of his mouth and onto her shoe. Ernestine sighed. “If you don’t get up, I’m putting rats down your pajamas.”
“You don’t have any rats,” Charleston muttered, squishing his face into the floor.
“Oh, I’ll find some,” Ernestine said darkly and then went off to make them both scrambled eggs and toast for breakfast. Eventually, Charleston stumbled into the kitchen, more or less dressed. Well, mostly less. His pants were inside out, his shirt untucked, and he kept trying to tie his sock around his
neck. Meanwhile he’d used the tie for a belt. It was anyone’s guess where the belt had ended up. Charleston slumped into a chair, drooped his chin onto the table, and opened his mouth to push his eggs directly into it from the plate. Ernestine sat down next to him and flipped open her notebook to go through her Morning Checklist.
“Do you have everything you need for school?” she asked Charleston, who mumbled some sort of indistinct response. Ernestine narrowed her eyes at him and decided to be more specific. “Homework?”
“Yup.”
“Textbooks?”
“Uh-huh.”
“Student ID?”
“Yeah.”
“Zombie survival guide?”
“Of course.”
Ernestine had put Charleston’s zombie survival guide together herself. It was a duplicate of one she always kept on hand for the day she’d need it. On the front cover, in thick black permanent marker, she’d written, “PANIC!!!” Usually, those sorts of guides told you not to panic, but Ernestine figured that in the case of the zombie apocalypse, if you weren’t panicking then you probably hadn’t grasped the full scope of the situation.
Inside, she’d written all sorts of helpful hints, starting with “Barricade all doors and windows,” followed by, “But first make sure there aren’t any zombies inside.” Maybe that second one should have gone first, but honestly, if you couldn’t figure that out on your own, it was probably your destiny to be snack food.
Maya wandered into the kitchen, a paintbrush tucked behind either ear, and paint drying in her curls.
“Morning, guys.” She kissed Ernestine on the head and ruffled Charleston’s hair. “Oooh, did you make me coffee, Nestea? Thank you.”
“Don’t call me Nestea. I hate nicknames. Future presidents don’t have nicknames. Well, except for maybe ‘Future President.’” Ernestine paused, thinking that one over. She’d be quite pleased if everyone got into the habit of calling her “Future President.” Or better still, just “President.” “I’ve also made you a list of things that need to be done today. Including checking all the light fixtures in the house.”
As Maya yawned and poured herself a cup of coffee, Ernestine pushed a neatly written list across the table. She’d even drawn little boxes next to the items so her mom could X them out as she completed each one, something Ernestine personally found very satisfying. “In addition to cleaning up the mess in the foyer, there’s a leak in one of the pipes in the basement, which is interfering with Mr. Sangfroid’s water pressure. Mr. and Mrs. Talmadge need their kitchen sink unclogged, there’s litter in the front lawn, graffiti spray-painted on the garden wall, and Mrs. MacGillicuddie has a loose floorboard that sent her cat flying yesterday. Oh, and the lock on the window in the laundry room is broken, which I’d swear it wasn’t two days ago when I cleaned out the dryer filters.”
“Mm-hmm,” her mom agreed vaguely, clearly not ready to start the day just yet. Ernestine always sprang right to work as soon as she got up in the morning, and therefore didn’t understand why so many people seemed to need to ease their way into the day.
Heaving a sigh, Ernestine laid the list on top of her mom’s coffee cup so she couldn’t possibly miss it. Maya was an amazing artist and all, but she wasn’t very practical. She spent all her time thinking about things like contours and contrast and pigments and the meaninglessness of modern existence. Which was fine, but it didn’t pay the bills very well. If modern existence had any meaning at all, it was probably that you had to pay the bills until the zombies came and ate you. Mrs. MacGillicuddie was a big fan of Maya’s paintings and Frank’s sculptures, so she’d hired them to be the maintenance people for her apartment building/elderly artist colony. But if they didn’t do the work, she’d fire them eventually. Possibly. Maybe.
Honestly, probably not, but Ernestine still didn’t want to risk it.
She liked it here. The people were nice and weird and it was a great place to spend their last days on earth before zombies ate almost everyone, leaving behind only a plucky band of humans to fight them off. With Ernestine as their leader, of course.
“Mom, you’ve got responsibilities,” Ernestine pressed.
“And you sound just like my mother.” Maya took an irritable sip of her coffee. Ernestine’s grandmother was a civil rights activist and college professor. She never, ever forgot to fix anything in her house and spent most of their time on FaceTime chastising Maya for being lackadaisical and disorganized. “Stop worrying about things around here, Nestea! We’ll take care of everything while you’re at school. Though I wish they didn’t make you wear those dreary uniforms. It’s fascist.”
“Right on, man,” Frank agreed as the smell of coffee drew him to the kitchen from the other side of the attic. He was incredibly tall, incredibly skinny, and like Charleston, had rumpled blond hair and glasses. Unlike Charleston, he also had a rather scraggly beard. “Like, who are they to tell you how to dress? How you look should be an expression of your inner spirit, you know?”
“Uh-huh,” Charleston agreed, and then started snoring into his eggs.
“It’s a very good school, and we’re lucky to go there.” Ernestine gritted her teeth as her mom started to doodle a sketch of Ernestine’s profile on her neat list of chores. When the zombie apocalypse came, she was totally going to have to lock her mom and Frank in a closet to keep them from getting eaten.
Personally, she quite liked her uniform because it looked an awful lot like a suit. Which made it very unlike Maya’s flowy dresses and very much like the suits her grandmother always wore, even on Saturdays and Sundays. That was exactly how Ernestine would dress once she was President of the United Post-Apocalyptic States.
If Ernestine liked her uniform, she liked the school even more. A friend of Mrs. MacGillicuddie ran a top-notch private school and had agreed to let Ernestine and Charleston go there as charity cases so long as they passed the entrance exam. Ernestine had received perfect marks, of course, but Charleston had flunked miserably. Fortunately, Mrs. MacGillicuddie really liked Maya and Frank’s artwork and had more money than she knew what to do with. So she gave an amazingly generous donation to the school to build a new auditorium. After that, the friend didn’t mind what a terrible student Charleston was and let him go there, anyhow.
Oh, well. Fighting an army of the undead would instill some discipline in him. Nothing like almost getting torn apart by a mob of ravenous zombies to teach you to pay attention to things.
That was why Ernestine always paid very close attention to everything in school. You never knew when you might pick up something that could come in handy in the apocalypse. For example, in science class she’d learned about the importance of purified water, which could be crucial when fighting zombies. You didn’t want to get your intestines torn out because you drank bacteria-filled river water and got so distracted with running to the bathroom that you didn’t notice the zombie horde hiding in the next stall. And all because you hadn’t paid attention in science class. You’d never forgive yourself.
Grabbing her backpack and a still-snoring Charleston, Ernestine dragged them both downstairs to catch the city bus. They had to edge their way around all the broken crystal in the foyer to get to the exit.
While they did so, Mr. Theda stood at Mrs. MacGillicuddie’s door, trying to get in. Their landlady wore an elegant silk nightgown, furry stiletto heels, a diamond necklace big enough to qualify as a medieval knight’s breastplate, and sunglasses. She kept one hand pressed against her forehead and winced each time Mr. Theda raised his voice, but she still kept her other arm stretched out to block him from getting in.
“By rights, they should be mine!” Mr. Theda insisted, pulling his Dracula cape around his shoulders with a flourish. Why he was still wearing it, Ernestine didn’t know, but combined with the way he had styled his hair into two horn-like peaks, he looked like he had arrived in a puff of brimstone. “You know they should be!”
“They’re mine, they’ve been mine for years, and they’ll stay mi
ne!” Mrs. MacGillicuddie responded tartly.
Lowering his voice, he cocked one eyebrow into the signature V all his villains used right before they unleashed evil mayhem on the world. “You’ll regret this.”
“Not as much as you will if you keep this up, Frankie Nelson.”
Mr. Theda gasped, and if he didn’t quite vanish in a cloud of smoke, he did at least manage to make his cloak swirl about him as he fled back upstairs.
“What do you think that was all about?” Charleston muttered as they stepped outside. Ernestine was surprised to discover that he’d been awake enough to hear any of it.
“That Mr. Theda doesn’t like to be called Frankie Nelson, I guess.”
“I thought Mr. Theda’s first name was Theodore, not Frankie.”
Ernestine shrugged. Whatever his first name was, it didn’t seem to concern either zombies or world domination, so she wasn’t very interested.
In spite of their near-deadly fall the night before, the Swanson twins were out in the front garden, practicing their routine.
Their act would have been pretty impressive even if the twins weren’t sixty years old. They stood facing each other, each movement a mirror image of the other’s. As one lifted her left foot up with toes pointing to the sky, the other did the same with her right foot. Then they both spread their arms out like the wings of a swan and turned carefully around on one foot. Each gesture occurred so exactly in time with the other that Ernestine would swear they had computer chips implanted in their brains to control them.
“Wow!” Charleston clapped furiously, now fully awake. “That was amazing!”
“Thank you.” Bringing their feet back down, they took identical, graceful bows.
“Hey, when you were up on that tightrope last night, did you see any zombies?” Ernestine asked curiously.
“Zombies!” One twin clutched a hand to her throat. Ernestine thought it was the one named Libby, but it was hard to tell for sure. “Are there zombies about? Mora, do we have any organic pest spray that might keep zombies away?”
Ernestine, Catastrophe Queen Page 4