And what about after that? What if it’s really the real thing and he wants to get married? Have kids someday? Can zombies even have kids? I’m doubting it since they have no heartbeat—and don’t nutrients move through the blood?
And no, just …no. This has to stop. Now.
Whatever Stamp is saying, I shut him down in the worst way possible. “I don’t mean I can’t go to the dance, Stamp. I mean I can’t go to the dance with …you.”
Ouch. And now his eyes go soft, not tearful soft, just …hurt soft. Great. So now I’m the creep at the end of White Fang? Tossing sticks at the wolf to get him to go away because I know he has to go live in the wild but he doesn’t know that?
“I don’t understand. I mean, I thought we had …something?”
“We do, Stamp; I mean, we did. But I’m not who you think I am. I’m not what you think I am. A good girl, I mean. I’m not, really, a good girl.”
He shakes his head. “There’s someone else?” he says, almost like he can’t believe it.
And suddenly—right then and there—he gives me the out, the really mean, nasty out I’ve been struggling to find since he walked up the bleachers. “Yes, I mean, I didn’t want to tell you but—”
“Who?” he asks. “Who is it?”
“You wouldn’t know him.”
“I don’t care, Maddy. I want to know who it is.”
Now his face is ruddy, and I’m mad that I have to do that to him, and mad that he’s pushing it so hard, but most of all I’m mad that he can get red in the face when I never, ever will again.
“Fine, Stamp,” I shout, standing in the bleachers, making a scene now. “You want to know why I can’t go to the stupid dance with you, Stamp? I can’t go to the Fall Formal with you, Stamp, because I’m already going with …with …Dane Fields.”
Wow, that comes out of nowhere. He looks momentarily confused; then the clouds clear and the light shines and he smiles, thin and mean, and says, “What, that creep who’s always hanging out with that Goth Amazon chick? The one who never takes down his hoodie, even in class? The one who smokes out by Shop class every day? That’s the loser you chose over me?”
I want to say Dane’s not a loser, that I’m the loser, but this is for the best. I keep telling myself this is for the best. So I let it go, I let him rant, and with every word, with every fleck of spittle that flies from those beautiful, full lips, I thank him, thank him for doing what needed to be done when I was too weak to do it myself. Because whatever he thinks of me, whatever lies I’ve had to tell, whatever happens next, at least he’ll never know the truth.
Not the real truth.
“Fine, Maddy,” he says, standing now, towering over me, his curl wagging left and right like that hanging ball in a grandfather clock. “Whatever. Take your little punk loser to the dance. I don’t need you, Maddy. I can ask two dozen, three dozen chicks right now to go with me.”
“Well then,” I shout over my shoulder as I stomp down the bleacher steps, “I guess you better start stocking up on corsages.”
23
Any Grave Will Do
LATER THAT DAY, sketch pad in hand, satchel over my shoulder, feeling desperately in need of a little grave rubbing therapy, I come across Scurvy toiling earnestly at the cemetery gates. He’s pruning some bushes, looking ruddy with his sleeves rolled up and his gardening gloves on.
Blinking against the late afternoon sun, he asks, “What’s got you smiling?”
I shake my head, taking in the strong scent of his clean sweat, his health, his …normality. “I shouldn’t be smiling about anything with the day I’ve had, but sometimes you just gotta laugh to keep from crying, right?”
“Ain’t that the truth?” He says it earnestly, like maybe a guy named Scurvy would know all about it.
I stand there beside him and dig around in my satchel until I find the little freezer Baggie full of oatmeal cookies I made after school and hand them over.
“Ah.” He slips off a glove and digs into them straightaway. “If only I wasn’t married and 11 years older than you and you weren’t the coroner’s daughter,” he says jokingly.
I wave him off over my shoulder and scuttle deeper into the graveyard, leaving behind the sound of Scurvy’s headstone teeth chewing on warm cookies.
I’ve gotten here early because I don’t want to be caught in the cemetery after dark. Not anymore, not with Bones and Dahlia on my case and this whole zombie and Zerker Truce thing resting in the balance. And it makes me feel better to think Scurvy will still be here even after I’m done with my latest grave rubbing. Okay, okay, so maybe I should have told Dane and Chloe about it; maybe I should have let them know where I was going to be, but you know what? I’m already dead. What’s the worst that could happen? I’ll die again?
I try to put the zombies, and especially the Zerkers, out of my mind for a minute. I attempt to forget how much Hazel and Ms. Haskins and pretty much everybody else at school hate my new “lifestyle choice.” Instead, looking for exactly the right grave to rub to forget all my troubles, I think of Stamp. The way his face looked when I told him no, the way it practically fell, like all the life had gone out of him. I’ve never had anyone look at me that way before; chances are I never will again.
I think so hard I find myself in front of a not particularly cool headstone, with no real flourishes or distinguishing characteristics, but I’m so eager to start the process, so anxious to lay down my satchel and fondle my tools, so quick to be calm, that I don’t really care.
I’m too sad to visit any of the girls from our Home Ec class; sadder still now that I know the real reason behind the Curse and how close I came to becoming Victim Number 4. I mean, Dane said the Zerkers liked to stalk their prey, to toy with it awhile and make sure the victim’s brain was in fear overdrive before chowing down.
Is that what they were doing the last few days, tripping me in Home Ec? Following me to the graveyard? Stalking me, putting my brain in a frenzy? I think of Amy and Sally and Missy and what might have been happening to them in the days before they died. Was Bones shadowing them all around town? Was Dahlia giving them the evil eye up until the day they died? I shiver at the thought and try to blink their happy, sad, smiling, or crying faces away, glad I chose to stay far from their graves today.
So I sit at the generic grave. I empty my satchel and take out the brush, and the brushing feels good; so good I clean that headstone like it’s probably never been cleaned before. (No offense to Scurvy, of course.)
Then I rip out a sheet of onionskin, tape it up tight, grab a perfectly new charcoal pencil, and start rubbing, just …rubbing, the sound of black charcoal dust on white paper, the scratch of the onionskin against the stone, the rushing, rushing back and forth and soon I’m in my place; the special place rubbings take me, where no one or nothing can get me—not even in a cemetery.
Scurvy stumbles over when I’m halfway through my rubbing, his shovel dragging business end down in the dirt, stray twigs, and grass. I look at my watch and realize I’ve already been at it for over an hour by now. One blissful hour with no Stamp, no Elders, no Dane or Chloe or Hazel or Goth or preppy or Bones.
“What’s up, Scurv?” I say, happy to see him. Happy, at this point, to see anyone with a pulse.
He shakes his head. “I dunno, Maddy. I don’t feel so hot.”
He’s standing over my gravestone now, looking red in the face but white in the throat, like a candy cane mixture of freezing and hot skin. He drops the shovel and wipes his brow. Some sweat drops on my rubbing, ruining it completely.
“Eewwww, Scurvy. Are you okay? You don’t look so good.”
“Look who’s talking,” he snaps, eyes yellow and angry.
“What?” I say, blinking the sight away.
“What?” he says, almost whispering now, his eyes suddenly back to being kind—and white. “What did I say? Why are you looking at me like that?”
“Scurvy, this isn’t good. You’re insulting me for no good reason. You’re swe
ating all over my rubbing. You’re standing way too close to me. Seriously, back. Off! You look like you’re having a heart attack or something.”
Scurvy’s eyes go round and wide and all kinds of yellow, his throat and chest doing that crazy candy cane thing again. “Yeah, well you look like that lady on The Addams Family.”
“Scurvy, that’s enough now. Why are you talking to me like that?”
“I don’t know.” He practically whimpers. He looks at me, eyes white again, almost crying now, and whispers, once more, “I just …don’t …know.”
Then he stumbles again, ripping my onionskin etching in half with his big, dirty, size-12 work boot. The tape holds the onionskin together at the top and sides, but still. Then I see the gash in Scurvy’s neck, right below the collar, bright red and full of pus, bulging, almost throbbing like a cocoon getting ready to spurt out some strange new life form. When he straightens himself, the collar moves again and I see more clearly now; I see it’s a bite mark, and I know. I know that Bones, or Dahlia, or maybe even Bones and Dahlia got to him.
And here I am, alone in the graveyard. No Dane or Chloe to save me this time. How could I have been so stupid? I back away toward his shovel, making sure it’s close enough—just in case. Scurvy looks at me funny, like maybe he’s seeing me for the first time, and now his skin is no longer red, or sweaty or, for that matter, Scurvy’s.
Scurvy is gone; now something hard and gray and leathery and mean is standing there in his place. Yellow eyes burn above licking lips and he looks at me like I’m dinner. Or maybe dessert.
“What are you doing in my graveyard?” His voice is gravelly and strange and no longer Scurvy’s. He is big and muscular anyway, and now he knows no sense of personal space. He keeps inching forward, leaning in, and then stumbling back, so that with every woozy, boozy movement he creeps closer.
And the closer he gets, the more I can see the emptiness that is Scurvy. The folksy 28-year-old I’ve been bribing with apples and oatmeal and peanut butter cookies for the last 3 years is now a brain-thirsty zombie; a Zerker, wanting one thing and one thing only: yes, the dreaded brains. But not just any brains; my brains. By now his arms are already knotty and tense, jerky and slow. His face is pale, dried out, no longer alert; no longer smiling.
Suddenly, those yellow eyes light up and he looks at my head like it’s a piñata. “Brains,” my friend the gravedigger says. Friend …human …no more. “Me …eat …Maddy’s …brains.”
I lean down, grab the shovel, and he lunges at me, barely missing my flesh with his teeth but clawing at my arm just the same with his rock-hard fingernails. I hear the tearing of my new black hoodie and feel his nails break my skin; they’re like claws.
One of his fingers, maybe a thumb, gets stuck in my hoodie, and down we go. He is like two tons of bricks in a pair of jeans, and I hear a whoosh seep out of my mouth. His arms are flailing, his yellow, gnarly, bent teeth chomping against each other—clack, clackety, clack—as he tries to find purchase in my skin.
The shovel went somewhere; as I slam one fist into his head and both knees into his crotch, I use the other hand to root around in the grass. I finally grab hold of the wooden end and yank it around for all it’s worth.
I lash out with the shovel, hearing a thick clank against his knee as he goes down—again. And still he’s coming, scrambling to follow me as I jump up. Bum knee or not, he’s like a runaway train, so I clank the shovel into his shoulder, watching blood spurt out of a fresh wound, but still he comes.
It’s like he’s not even feeling it.
He’s on all fours now, broken, bent, and still I whap him with the shovel, and still he murmurs, groans, shouts, screams, “Eat brains! Brains, eat!”
“Scurvy,” I’m shouting. “Scurvy, stop!”
“Brains!”
I scream and close my eyes and slice the shovel into the wind, and I don’t hear him coming anymore, don’t hear him moving or shouting or anything much at all until …something …rolls against my feet. Then I look and see Scurvy’s head lying there, between my bloody new army boots, and then I hear it all right: the screams—the screams.
My screams.
Part 3
The Afterlife
24
And So It Begins
LATER, AT DANE and Chloe’s trailer, they’re cleaning my wounds and bandaging them and wrapping them tight. It’s not that they hurt, exactly (zombies don’t feel pain, remember); it’s just kind of hard to explain gaping wounds to your teachers and friends the next day in school, you know? “Oh, that? That’s …nothing. I was just shaving my …ears, see …and the razor blade slipped and cut out a big chunk of my throat. What? You’re saying that never happens to you?”
“They got to him, Maddy,” Chloe says. “They bit him, maybe an hour before you got there; that’s about all it takes to turn them.”
I can’t believe it. I can’t believe I can be giving a guy I’ve known for years—years—oatmeal cookies and a smile one minute and the next he’s ready to rip off my head and snack on my brains.
“But then, why was he so nice to me when I first got there? We had a conversation, for Pete’s sake. He even ate some of the cookies I gave him, made a joke—flirted! I mean, one minute he’s Scurvy; the next he’s a …a …Zerker.”
“It’s called the whiteout phase,” Dane explains. “A kind of no-man’s land between being a Normal and skipping being a zombie and then becoming a Zerker. They’ve been bitten, sure, but sometimes they don’t feel it; sometimes they don’t even remember it. So they go on thinking they’re Normal because, well, why wouldn’t they? Meanwhile, inside their body, their heart is slowly shutting down, their lungs are giving out, and the circuits are all switching over to electricity only. It takes about 30, 45 minutes to take effect. Then another 10 or 15 minutes or so to switch into full Zerker mode.”
Chloe adds, “They must have been following you, Maddy. They know you dig the rubbings; that’s where they found you the first time they threatened you, back when this all started and you were merely some Normal they wanted to suck the brains out of. So when they saw the satchel and the pad this afternoon, they knew where you were going. They headed down to the cemetery, bit Scurvy first thing. They knew how long it took you to do the rubbings. They knew Scurvy would turn long before you finished. And, let’s face it, they were right.”
I’m leaning against a counter in their tiny kitchen, my hands trembling, blood on my hands, when Dane says, “You should probably wash up.”
I look down at myself and see why. Gheez, and I drove this way? With blood splatters on my clothes and gore on my hands? What if I’d been stopped by a cop? As the water runs over my hands, turning red to pink and washing the last of Scurvy down the drain, Dane sidles up behind me and says, quietly, almost apologetically, “You did the right thing, you know.”
“I thought only Zerkers killed humans,” I say, looking out the tiny window above the sink into the tiny patch of lawn they call their backyard.
He turns me around forcefully, yet gently. “You were defending yourself, Maddy. And remember, it was Zerkers who turned your friend.”
My hands are dripping onto his shoes. He grabs a nearby dishtowel and gently, very gently, dries them off for me.
“That’s just it,” I say, snatching the rag from his hand and finishing the job myself. “He was my friend. He looked out for me, and you and I both know the only reason they bit him in the first place was because of me. So how do you live with that?”
Dane nods. Then opens his mouth to say something, probably some Dad-like platitude that I’m ready to bust him for the minute it comes out of his mouth, but I guess he thinks twice about it; I’ll give him that much.
I hear a wooden chair scrape against clean linoleum, and Chloe joins us at the sink. This many people, in this tiny kitchen, it’s like wedging three freshmen in a locker.
“If it helps any, Maddy,” Chloe says, “he wasn’t your friend anymore. The minute they bit him, he stopped being
Scurvy.”
I nod, glad for once that I can’t cry because it’s not very ladylike blubbering in a tiny kitchen in a green double-wide trailer.
Then she clears her throat and looks at Dane. “We should probably go see about the …body.”
25
Home Ick
MY CAR IS idling in Hazel’s driveway early the next morning. She’s been so busy with decorating for the Fall Formal since Wednesday that she’s ditched me the last few afternoons and caught rides with Tracy Byrd (aka Cheer Club captain, junior class president, leggy Southern blonde, and all-around Stepford Teen). But if there’s one thing I need right now it’s a friend who knows my secret—even a passive-aggressive one who vaguely resents me for being undead—so I stalk Hazel and force her to ride with me to school.
“But Tracy will wonder where I’ve gone,” she says, biting her lip and leaning in my driver’s side window. Her red hair is still wet, and she has two Styrofoam cups of coffee, one in each hand, which makes it even more difficult than usual for the so-not-a-morning-person Hazel to finagle her way into my car. When I look vaguely unsympathetic, she says, “She’s the head of the Decorating Committee this year, you know.”
“Is that for Tracy?” I ask as I guilt her into the passenger seat. When she doesn’t answer, I say, “I’ve been driving you to school for a year and a half and you never once brought me coffee before school.”
Somehow she wedges the steaming cups in my undersized cup holders. “You don’t drink coffee, remember?”
I think of how long it’s been since I’ve had human food. “How does your precious Tracy Byrd take her coffee? Sugar? Cream?”
A Living Dead Love Story Series Page 14