A Living Dead Love Story Series

by Rusty Fischer

  Another squawk, and this time I’m near enough to a light pole to see a speaker clamped to it high overhead. It’s white and boxy, but there’s no doubt. That’s where Val’s voice is coming from.

  “Warmer,” Val croaks. And then, as if we’re some kind of dense or something, she starts humming the theme song from Jaws: “Duh-duh, duh-duh, duh-duh-duh-duh …”

  And just as I’m about to toss my brass dolphin statuette at the damn speaker, I turn the corner and see a sign that says Teeth Time. The letters are red with blood drips down the sides, and the sign is shaped like a giant shark’s jaw. You know, the kind they always have in pictures.

  I hear the splashing, see the fresh puddles, and know Stamp is in the shark tank even before Val says, “Very good, kids. Hurry up now. He only has a minute or two left.”

  But she’s lying.

  Stamp is already half gone by the time we get to him.

  15

  Teeth Time

  Teeth Time is like a giant pool. Metal stands surround it, and one of those movie theater ropes zigs and zags to keep the guests’ lines from getting too chaotic. A small booth has an empty cash register and a sign: Shark Chow: $25. It sounds steep, but that includes 15 minutes in a shark cage where, next to a certified dive instructor, kiddies and grownups alike can feed real, live sharks.

  The cage is empty. I’d hoped Stamp might be there, safe, even if submerged and surrounded by sharks. Sharks who couldn’t get to him.

  The pool itself is alive with activity, gray water rippling and bits of fabric and worse clinging to the white-capped waves.

  Fins puncture the surface of the saltwater tank, making it hard to see Stamp through the ripples and the black goop that is zombie blood. But there he is, finally, secured to the bottom of the shark tank with what look like cinder blocks and bike chains.

  It’s not being underwater that’s threatening him. We don’t need to breathe, so big whoop. It’s the damn sharks circling him, some close, some not so close, all interested. They are sleek and slippery and brown or gray. They’re not big, like movie sharks, but their teeth are.

  I can see the black-and-white stripes of Stamp’s hoodie and the saucers of his eyes as his mouth moves and nothing, not even bubbles, comes out.

  I crumple beside the tank, looking for an opening, letting my dolphin statuette clatter to the wet concrete. It’s no use now. You can’t stab a shark with that and watch it die. They’re like the Living Dead but not actually.

  Six sharks circle Stamp, their fins slippery, their jaws chomping. And then I notice why. There are parts of Stamp inside.

  “Dane,” I shout helplessly even though he’s kneeling right next to me. Suddenly I’m kicking off my shoes. I don’t know why I do that except it’s what you do when you go swimming, right? I’m hysterical, shouting as I leap toward the water.

  Rough hands snatch me back before I can even get wet, then toss me 10 feet onto the concrete.

  I rush back, full steam.

  Dane literally pile drives me into the ground. “Stop! Maddy. Back. Off.”

  “We can’t let him die like that.” I shove with all my might and manage, with two knees and one well-placed elbow, to get Dane off me.

  “We have to,” he says from behind.

  Something clatters to the ground.

  I look closely to see Dane grabbing a copper stake from the rubber handle end, where it’s safe for him to touch.

  “W-w-where did that come from?” I stumble toward the shark tank.

  “I always keep one handy, Maddy.” He hoists it high.

  Now it’s serious. One touch from the copper business end, and that’s it. It’s lights out, Maddy. And I can’t have that. I need to get in that water and tear those sharks in half. He has to understand that.

  “Dane, just, it’s my choice. You couldn’t control Stamp. You can’t control me!”

  “No,” he says as he inches toward the edge of the tank. “I can’t control you, but I can save you.”

  “Just, okay, just let me see him, okay?”

  He holds the copper stake close. It’s about the size of a fireplace poker, and I wonder whether he hid it up his sleeve or down his pants. I see the protective leather cover lying on the ground next to his feet and wonder why I never noticed it before.

  Water splashes me as I reach the edge of the tank. A shark’s tail flaps at the surface, and his jaw clamps down, tearing something off Stamp’s body.

  I yelp and turn away, then turn back. I peer into the water, feeling Dane’s hand on my collar, and try to find Stamp’s eyes. But there is too much tissue in the water, making it cloudy, too much swirling around.

  I’m not doing it. I’m not sitting here while Stamp gets pulled to pieces. I yelp and leap.

  Dane yanks me back again, tossing me to the floor and sticking the business end of the copper stake deep in my throat.

  I gurgle and grind and hear a molar crack in my mouth, and then the lights go out.

  16

  Deader Than Usual

  I wake dripping wet but not because I’ve made it into the tank.

  My head pounds like someone is beating a drum inside, a side effect of the copper short-circuiting my electrical system and shutting me down cold so that, in effect, my zombie brain’s had to reboot for me to wake up.

  Dane and I call it a copper hangover, usually laughing because we’re not on the hangover end.

  Right now I feel dead. Deader, I guess, than usual.

  I blink, the blurry frame gradually coming into focus but slowly. So slowly.

  My clothes are soaked. That’s the first thing I notice. But also the dripping of water from, well, everywhere. There is a flapping sound everywhere I turn, like someone’s just dumped a bucket of fresh fish onto a dock.

  I blink to see the sky, yellow with my zombie vision. My joints are sore from the copper hangover.

  A shark is next to me in the open air, tail flipping, eyes gone white. It’s clearly dead, impaled by a brass dolphin statuette shoved to the hilt inside its dull brain. Red blood pours from the wound and mixes with the green saltwater puddles all over the deck.

  I sit up to find five more sharks, each one deader than the last, each with a dolphin statue—sized hole in its skull. My eyes stay open as I take in the scene. It’s like one of those end-of-the-world movies where the camera pans to show dolphins washed up on otherwise empty shores.

  Although these sharks didn’t die from the elements or global warming or some tidal wave. Someone killed them.

  “What happened?” I blather, tongue still partially paralyzed as I struggle to stand. It’s too hard, and I crash on my rump, resting my arm on a dead shark tail to steady myself.

  Dane turns, dripping and seeming dead inside too. “I tried, Maddy. I tried to save him—”

  “What? Tried?” I scream.

  I rush to his side and see the tank empty. The cinder blocks and chains are there. The water still laps against the side of the blue pool. Little bits of black-and-white cloth swirl in the water. But no Stamp.

  “Where is he?” I shout, tongue gradually regaining its composure.

  Dane struggles to speak, his face dripping and crumpling as if he might cry, but we both know that’s impossible.

  “Dane, where did he go?” My voice sounds desperate and dangerous, even to myself.

  “He’s gone.” Dane averts my gaze, pointing to the sharks bleeding on the deck. “He’s gone.”

  I limp toward him and, with each step, say, “Where. Did. He. Go?”

  Dane points to a shark. “H-h-he’s in this one and this one here and—” His voice breaks, and he turns his face away.

  I reach for the nearest shark. Its belly is fat and firm and tears easily beneath my rock-hard fingers. It’s like ripping open a wet suit, rubbery beneath my skin. It splits with a gushing sound as water and blood and body parts rush out.

  I see Stamp’s wrist, leathery and gnawed, and his ankle chewed off at the bone and still clad in half a sock,
teeth marks puncturing his cold, gray skin.

  “All?” I whimper, thudding to the ground and reaching toward, but not touching, Stamp’s battered extremities. “They’re all like this?”

  Dane nods, kneeling next to me.

  “At least he didn’t feel it, Maddy.” Dane looks at me now.

  Finally, I look back.

  “But he’s gone,” I say quietly. “He’s … gone.”

  “I know.”

  “No,” I say more urgently now. “I mean, he’s gone. Last time I could bite him and bring him back. Now I wouldn’t even know where to start.”

  He waits a beat, as if wondering if I’ll overreact to what he’s about to say, then says it anyway. “Maddy, this isn’t where it starts. It’s where it ends.”

  “But it can’t end here. Not here. Not like this.”

  He nods and says no more.

  I sit there, dripping and hopeless, staring at Dane’s dark eyes.

  He gently draws me close to him. I shiver but can’t cry. My eyes are open and staring into the wet, black cotton covering his bony shoulder. I flash on an image: Dane leaping into the tank, fighting off the sharks, tossing them onto the deck, snatching pieces of Stamp flesh from their cold, dead jaws.

  But I don’t feel proud of him, exactly, or even grateful to him for trying. I only feel emptiness and the sickening knowledge that nothing will ever be the same. That nothing will ever be worth it again if a kid like Stamp can be torn to pieces just for some crazy Zerker’s enjoyment.

  I push Dane away too hard.

  He falls over the nearest shark and down onto his butt on the wet concrete. He sits there looking startled and surprisingly helpless, and my heart breaks all over again.

  “Sorry.” I sniff, helping him up and ignoring the bit of black leather belt stuck in the shark’s teeth as I glance in its direction.

  Then I look at Dane’s hand and notice something missing.

  “Where the hell is your pinky?”

  Dane looks down and shrugs. “Maddy, they were sharks in there, not kittens.”

  I barely push him, and he nearly stumbles again.

  Now I see why. There’s a chunk missing from his right calf, glaring and bloodless through his torn jeans.

  “Dane!”

  I turn him around and see nicks all over his back, his arms, but nothing else is missing.

  Suddenly it washes over me: Dane jumped into a shark tank to save Stamp.

  And here he is, limping and missing a whole entire finger.

  I kneel and slip from my leather jacket, tearing off a sleeve and yanking it into strips.

  “Let me look at this. Jesus,” I murmur, turning him around as I gasp at the sight of his calf muscle just out there for the whole world to see.

  There is a four-inch gash where the skin has been sliced open and raw beef pokes out from inside: withered, gray zombie muscle and white, petrified tendons. I avert my gaze and tie two strips of leather around it to keep it covered.

  “Will it heal?” I say, already suspecting the answer.

  He shrugs as I wipe the last two strips of leather around his left hand, covering his jagged pinky stump. ”It’ll get hard and useless but, no, I don’t think it will heal. Guess my days of wearing short shorts are all over.”

  Neither of us chuckles.

  With my nursing duties over, Stamp in pieces, and sharks lying at my feet, all I want is to get going.

  “Where is she?” I stomp away.

  When I don’t hear Dane’s footsteps splashing through the shark guts, I turn to find him standing there in the same place, a worried look on his face.

  “Don’t you, I mean, shouldn’t we—?” He kneels, reaching toward a piece of Stamp.

  It’s part of an arm, ragged at both ends.

  Before he can touch it, I blurt, “Shouldn’t we what?”

  “Well,” he says, stopping short of touching it, “shouldn’t we try to bury him?”

  “No. We should try to avenge him. Now where did she go?”

  He stands, looking almost relieved that I’ve shot down his burial theory. Yeah, I know it seems cold, but what are we supposed to do? Cut each shark open? Grab every body part? Every one? Bury the sharks with Stamp to make sure? And where? When? For how long?

  I already buried Stamp once, back in Sable Palms Cemetery. It was wrong to dig him up then, to take him from his natural death and give him an unnatural life. It would be just as wrong to toss his pieces, what’s left of them, into some shallow grave now.

  “Well,” Dane says, dragging me toward a metal stairway between the shark and dolphin tanks, “she stopped laughing about 10 minutes ago, but I think I know where she is.”

  We tromp up the stairs, my fists clenched so hard my nails will leave scars on my palms. That’s the least of my worries.

  At the top is a booth cleverly hidden behind a banner: Win One for the Flipper!

  The booth is about the size of my old counselor’s office at Barracuda Bay High, with tinted windows overlooking both the shark tank and the dolphin swim areas. It must be a control booth of some kind, where technicians can make announcements or swivel spotlights or play music to start the show.

  There’s a red sign on the white door: Keep Out! Employees Only!

  With his good leg, Dane kicks in the door only to find an empty chair and another note taped on it, this one scrawled on the back of a food court menu featuring fried shrimp and hush puppies.

  So sorry about Stamp. See you in Barracuda Bay. If the Sentinels let you go, that is.

  XOXO,

  Val

  We look at each other, eyes big and mouths open, like two characters out of an old-timey silent movie reel.

  “Barracuda Bay?” I gasp.

  “Sentinels?” Dane says. But I can tell it’s not really a question. It’s a statement. He’s pointing out the tinted window of the control booth to the pavement below.

  A team of Sentinels pours into the park. I watch two, three at a time shoulder each other out of the way as their black berets bob and weave while they race their stiff zombie legs.

  We can see them from afar with our vantage point, and we both know there’s not enough time to run. Not anymore.

  They are striding with purpose, passing all the landmarks we did on our long, meandering loop around the park, only in half the time: the snack bars, the arcade, the food court, the trash cans, the Otter Climbing Wall, the Barracuda Bungee Jump …

  Each has a Taser in one hand, the other hand free to pump like a piston as they march gracelessly in their black cargo pants with plenty of pockets up and down each side.

  I count 10 of them, all twice our size, before they reach the shark tank and I give up completely. And I’m not just talking about the counting.

  Their thick, black boots splash through the puddles left by Dane’s shark attack. Their berets duck floating balloons and pennants while the Sentinels scour the deck for us.

  A few break rank to kneel next to the sharks, nudging them with their Tasers and watching as the rubbery bodies bounce back.

  A couple of them chuckle as they open the shark’s jaws, rubbing dead, gray skin against the sharp teeth and making faces. One picks up a piece of Stamp’s body and tosses it to a friend.

  Stupid, heartless Sentinels.

  I retch, even though I can’t throw up because there’s nothing to throw up and my long-dead stomach muscles wouldn’t let me even if there were. It’s a reaction, I guess, some holdover in my human DNA to express the shock and disgust I feel.

  Maybe Zerkers aren’t the only bad zombies after all.

  I think of Stamp and that night so many months ago. How badly I wanted to see him. How I snuck out of my house in the rain to go to his stupid party. How excited I was, how dangerous it felt to be slinking through back alleys in the downpour, how much I wanted to kiss him and him to kiss me. How much I wanted him to want me and suspected he did.

  The fact that I died that night, on the way to his house, has been a part of
me ever since. And Stamp has been a part of me ever since. Love him, hate him, date him, break up with him, but an Afterlife without him—an eternity to grieve—will be no life at all.

  I look away and slump in a seat in the control booth.

  Dane does the same. He swivels his chair toward me and holds my hand. After a long minute, he says, “She tricked us. From day one, this was all about setting us up.”

  “Doesn’t matter.”

  “But, Maddy, the Sentinels. They’ll find us. We’re cooked.”

  “Doesn’t matter.”

  “Yeah, it does. Once the Sentinels get you, that’s it. Might as well try breaking out of federal prison.”

  I look back at him and say, as if on autopilot, “Dane, it doesn’t matter.”

  He tightens his grip but says no more.

  The first of the Sentinels trudge up the stairs, making the booth tremble.

  I say, “Don’t you want to know why it doesn’t matter?”

  “Sure,” he says, but I can tell his heart isn’t in it.

  “Because, Dane, if it’s the last thing I do, I’m going to rip Val’s head off with my bare hands.”

  17

  Her Brother’s Keeper

  We ride in silence, for the most part, in the speeding SUV. My right arm is fastened to the armrest with those zip-tie handcuffs TV cops always use. They’re stronger than they look for being so thin and see-through, though at this point I’m not really dreaming of getting away, merely surviving.

  They’re Sentinels, see? And we’ve been on the run for, what, nearly five months now? They’ve probably spent thousands of man-hours and tens of thousands of dollars looking for us, and we’ve pretty much made fools of them from day one. So I’m figuring if they don’t rekill us right away, it will just be to tear off our limbs one by one.

  Either way, our future’s not exactly bright at the moment.

  I don’t try jiggling the restraint, not even once. I just sit there numb in a seat next to a giant Sentinel who stares bleakly ahead as the miles spin beneath our tires.