by Jeff Strand
I ignored that comment. “I’ve got his card. We’ll find a pay phone and call him. Maybe since he’s had a few minutes to chill out, he’ll be in a more understanding mood.”
I had to stay calm and think positive. Ultimately, what was the driver going to do with the doll? He wasn’t going to take a hacksaw to it or anything like that. There would probably be some blackmail involved, but that was okay. At this point, I was fine with a little light blackmail.
“What do we do with him?” asked Kelley, pointing to Mr. Click.
“Do we need to do anything with him?” Adam asked. “Let’s just go.”
“We can’t leave a zombie on the street.”
“Why not?”
“He’s dangerous.”
“Like that? Who’s he gonna outrun?”
“What if somebody sees what they think is a poor, injured man flailing around on the ground and go over to help?”
“Right. Because this place has been swarming with Good Samaritans so far. It’s unbelievable how many people ran over to help us with our carjacking problem. People had to take a number. I wish we’d had those flashing signal things you get at busy restaurants that let you know when your table is ready—it was a shame that people had to stand around waiting their turn to help us when they could’ve been window shopping!”
“I don’t appreciate your tone,” said Kelley, “but I’ll admit that was kind of clever.”
“Thank you.”
“But we obviously can’t just leave him crawling around in the street.”
“Should we put a ‘Warning: Zombie’ sign around his neck?” Adam asked.
“Stop being clever now.”
“If we had a car, we could hide him in the trunk,” I said. It was kind of a dumb thing to say, because we did not have a car, and if we’d had a car, it would have saved us all of our problems from the carjacking forward. Unfortunately, sometimes your mouth opens and words come out and they aren’t the greatest words in the world and there’s nothing you can do about it except hope to do better the next time you talk.
Kelley rolled her eyes. “If we had a car, we never—”
“I withdraw my comment.”
“What if we chopped off his head?” Adam asked.
“We’re not chopping off his head!” I said.
“Do you have a better idea?”
“Yes. My dumb comment about us having a car was a better idea.”
“He can’t hurt any innocent pedestrians without a head.” “Didn’t this whole thing start because you were scared that we’d go to jail for using the doll on him?” I asked. “We had a zero percent chance of actually getting caught for that.”
“Not zero,” said Adam.
“Zero point two.”
“Zero point six or seven at least.”
“Fine. But we at least agree that we probably weren’t going to jail for it, right?”
Adam shrugged.
“So if you were worried about getting caught for the voodoo doll, why in the world would you think there wouldn’t be a problem with dismembering him?”
“I didn’t say dismember. I said decapitate.”
“Same thing.”
“Well, sure, if you think that chopping off somebody’s arms, legs, and head is the same as just chopping off their head.” “You’re missing the point.”
“My point is that you’re accusing me of wanting to dismember an innocent man when I only wanted to decapitate him.”
“Well, we’re not doing either of them.”
“I bet if Kelley said we should chop his head off, we’d do it.” “I am absolutely not suggesting that we chop his head off,” said Kelley.
“But if you did.”
“Enough!” I shouted. “All we’re going to do is put him someplace where he won’t hurt anybody. Any ideas?”
“Let’s just drag him to the back of an alley,” said Adam. Kelley shook her head. “I don’t want to go into those alleys even without a zombie teacher.”
I looked around. “This is a little disrespectful,” I admitted, “but what about the sewer?”
“You mean flush him down the toilet?” Adam asked. “You get all whiny because I want to cut his head off, and now you’re suggesting we cut him into toilet-sized pieces?”
“Adam, think about what you’re saying.”
Adam was silent for a moment. “Okay, maybe I didn’t understand your plan.”
“We lift a manhole cover and throw him down. He won’t be able to hurt anybody down there, and if we need him, we’ll know where to find him. The worst thing that can happen is that rats chew on him.”
“You say ‘worst thing’ as if being eaten by rats wasn’t actually
the worst possible thing that could happen to somebody,” said Kelley, cringing.
“He’s a zombie. He won’t care,” I said.
“We don’t even know that he’s a zombie. He could be possessed.”
“I’m pretty sure he’s a zombie.”
“Either way, I’m not convinced that he can’t be fixed. If this happened to you, wouldn’t you want people to make sure that rats didn’t gnaw on your body? You’re all panicked about your foot, but he could wake up without a nose!”
“For the record, I’d like to say that I’ve been very easygoing about my toes,” I said. “I could be doing nothing but bawling and going ‘Wahh! My poor toes!’ but I’ve hardly mentioned them at all. So I’d like an apology.”
“I didn’t say that you were being a baby about them. I said you were panicked. And I’m saying that having your nose gnawed off by sewer rats is worse than losing two of your little toes.”
“I’m not sure I agree with.” I considered the two options. “Okay, the rat nose thing is worse. But still, we don’t have much choice. It’s either drop him in the sewer or drag him into an alley. And we don’t know how long we’ll have to leave him, so he might have time to crawl out of the alley and kill an old lady.” Kelley sighed. “Okay. Sewer then.”
INTERMISSION
Take a break and read The Hunger Games again.
CHAPTER 16
“So what if we let the air out of his tires, and then we rig the car so it crushes his arms when he goes to check? He can’t give you another F if he doesn’t have arms.”
“Seems extreme,” I said.
“Well...maybe his arms don’t actually have to come off. We could just make it so they don’t work anymore.”
Here’s the thing about Adam: I knew he was only kidding, but a small part of me suspected that he really would help me rig Mr. Click’s car to crush his arms if I asked. Does it make me look bad to admit that my best friend might be a tiny bit psychotic? I hope not.
Whoa. Why did the first chapter suddenly show up? That wasn’t supposed to happen. Must have been a software glitch. Sorry about the technical difficulties.. guess that intermission threw everybody off a little bit. We’ve got it sorted out now, though, and here’s the real Chapter 16.
In the movies, manhole covers look like they weigh about three ounces and are made out of Styrofoam. In real life, they weigh about 82,319 pounds and are made out of lead. Though the three of us finally lifted it out of the way, it was a semi- pathetic display of muscular power.
A couple of cars drove by, but they didn’t seem concerned with either the three hooligans moving a manhole cover or the onelegged man in a hospital gown crawling around on the road. (Both vehicles were polite enough to steer around him, although their concern may have been the cleanliness of their automobiles.)
“Should I keep watch while you guys drag him?” Adam asked, in a tone of voice that implied that he thought he was being very helpful and selfless.
“No, you can help us drag.”
“What if somebody sees us?”
“We’ll all keep a lookout while we drag.”
“I think it’s a mistake.”
“Kelley can keep watch then.”
“Zombie Click wasn’t trying to eat Kelley.”
&n
bsp; “He wasn’t trying to eat you either. He was just opening and closing his mouth. You take his leg. Kelley and I will take his arms.” We dragged him over to the manhole and dropped him in. He landed with a splash and a thud.
That’s it. No wacky hijinks. He didn’t get wedged in the manhole or stuck on the ladder or land on his head or anything like that, and the cops didn’t show up at the exact wrong time, and he wasn’t immediately swarmed by thousands of rats and skeletonized. It pretty much worked out just the way we planned.
Alternate but made-up version of previous scene for those of you who were disappointed by the lack of conflict:
“Oh my goodness!” Kelley’s lungs bulged through her chest from the intensity of her scream. “His skin is splitting open!”
“And beetles are coming out!” Adam shouted in horror.
Millions of beetles spilled out, far more than should have fit into Mr. Click’s body. I had no idea where he’d been keeping them.
“They’re mutating!” Kelley screamed in horror.
As we watched in horror, the beetles began to sprout extra legs. They sprouted more and more legs until even millipedes didn’t have as many legs as these beetles did. The legs kept popping up until the thousands of beetles were nothing but legs. And then the legs began sprouting legs.
“Too many legs! Too many legs!” Adam screamed in horror.
And then I felt a sharp pain between my shoulder blades. I turned around and gaped at Kelley in horror.
“That’s right,” she said. “I was evil all along.”
“And so was I,” said Adam. Kelley pulled out her knife, and then Adam stabbed me in the same place. “All these years of friendship were a fiendish lie just to get to this moment.”
They both stabbed me a few more times, being very fair and taking turns.
“This bites,” I said in horror. Then I died and came back as a ghost with the ability to use a computer to write books.
And now back to the completely true version of the story, for those of you who understand that in real life there aren’t always complications when you’re shoving a zombie down an open manhole:
I feel like I should apologize, because the actual book isn’t as cool as the stuff I made up. I hope you aren’t disappointed with the rest of your reading experience.
Anyway, with the Mr. Click problem thoroughly dealt with and certain not to come back to haunt us at any inconvenient moment later in the evening, we turned our attention to the pressing matter of the frickin’ voodoo doll having been stolen again.
A brief history lesson: In the olden days, people weren’t smart enough to know how to make cell phones. If you were at home, it wasn’t any big deal, because you probably had a phone in your house and you could just make the call there. If you were at a friend’s house, it was still fine, because he’d probably let you use his phone, unless you were making what was known as a longdistance call. It doesn’t make sense to me either, but that’s the way it worked.
If you were outdoors or at a mall or something, you had to use a pay phone where you’d insert a dime (later a quarter.. .now two quarters), and the bulky contraption would let you make your call.
In the digital age, most citizens owned cell phones, making pay phones much less essential. People who owned them used to be able to roll around in their piles of quarters, cackling with glee, but now they could only roll around on a couple of quarters, which made it look more like they were just too lazy to pick the quarters up off the floor before they started rolling around. With pay phones being much less profitable, there was no longer as much need to keep them in working order. So when a quarter would get jammed inside or somebody would have a fight with his girlfriend and smash the receiver against a brick wall or the phone would get struck by lightning or some jerks would say, “Hey, let’s do us some vandalism, huh, huh, huh,” the phone would not be repaired.
This history lesson became important to me as we walked around trying to find a pay phone that was in working order. They don’t exist. By the time we found the third nonworking phone, we were all ready to have individual nervous breakdowns, and it became clear that a different strategy was in order.
“Let’s cry,” said Adam.
“It’s going to be okay,” I assured him, even though now I knew that the world was a dark, scary place that hated teenagers.
“It seems like we’ve been walking too long to still be in the bad part of town,” said Adam. “Shouldn’t we have reached a highway or something by now?”
“It feels like we’ve been walking longer than we have because I’m slowing us down,” I said, jiggling my bloody foot for emphasis.
“It does seem like we’ve been walking a long time,” Kelley agreed. “I don’t know this area, but I don’t remember it being this big.”
“So what are you saying?” I asked.
“I’m not saying anything,” said Adam. “It was only an observation.”
“We need to start knocking on doors,” said Kelley.
“Do you think that’s a good idea?”
“No, Tyler, I suggested it because I think it’s a bad idea, and I wanted to make sure we continued with today’s trend.”
“Are you being sarcastic?”
“Do you think I’m being sarcastic?”
“I don’t know. I really don’t know.”
“We can’t fight amongst ourselves,” said Adam. “That’s what it wants.”
“That’s what what wants?”
“I’m not sure. But don’t you sense that? I can’t quite describe it, but don’t you have the feeling that something’s just a little bit off?”
“Well, yeah, once Mr. Click’s leg shot across the classroom, I started to think that the universe might have gone a bit askew.” “See, more sarcasm. It wants us to be sarcastic. Snark is its weapon.”
“You’re an idiot,” I told him.
“That’s not snark. That’s just rude.”
“Look, we need to not turn this into something bigger than it is. We’re not wandering around The Twilight Zone.”
“Twilight Zone!” said Adam. “That’s what I was trying to think of! Yeah, it’s like we’re in The Twilight Zone! Thank you! That was driving me crazy.”
“I’m serious. You need to stop getting carried away,” I said. “We’re still in the real world, except that voodoo exists. Everything else is normal.”
“Look!” Adam said, pointing ahead. “That pay phone is the exact same one we just passed! We’re in a loop!”
The three of us walked over to the phone. “No, it’s not,” said
Kelley. “The other one had different graffiti, and the nine key was missing. This one doesn’t look anything like it.”
Adam studied the phone, then nodded. “Yeah, you’re right. Also, this one doesn’t have a cord.”
We each cursed in turn and then resumed walking.
“I think we’re getting close to some houses,” Kelley said. “Somebody is going to be nice and let us use their phone.” “What if we knock on the door of a meth lab?” asked Adam. “As long as it’s a meth lab with a phone, I don’t care.”
“I care,” I said. “Let’s skip the meth lab if possible.”
The neighborhood was well lit, and none of the homes looked as if they were dangerous hotbeds of illegal activity. A middle- aged man was walking his Schnauzer at the far end of the block, but he turned around when he noticed us.
At the closest corner was a one-story white home with a white truck in the driveway. The lawn needed mowing, but not in a the- owner-was-murdered-weeks-ago-and-nobody-is-maintaining- the-yard sort of way.
“What approach should we take?” I asked.
“No special approach,” said Kelley. “We just say that you’ve been hurt and ask if we can use their phone.”
“What if they say no but they’ll call an ambulance for us?”
“I don’t know. We’ll just play it by ear.” Kelley paused and massaged her scalp, as if she had a skull-crushing head
ache. “Sorry, I forgot who I’m with. Playing it by ear is a terrible idea. Okay, if they say no but offer to call 911 for us.. .we pretty much have to let them, right? Otherwise it would look too suspicious.” “Yeah, I guess so.” We walked up to the front porch, but I didn’t go up the two steps with Kelley and Adam. “I’ll wait here so I don’t track blood on the porch,” I said.
Kelley rang the doorbell.
Inside, a dog barked.
The peephole went dark for a moment, and then the door opened a couple of inches, as far as the inside chain lock would go. A heavyset man in a white T-shirt narrowed his eyes at us.
“Unless you’re selling Girl Scout cookies, I’m not buying anything.”
“We’re not soliciting,” said Kelley. She gestured at me. “My boyfriend lost a couple of toes. Do you have a phone we could borrow?”
“How’d he lose the toes?”
“Fireworks.”
“Serves the little bastard right.”
He slammed the door.
“Next house?” I asked.
Kelley shook her head. She rang the doorbell again. The peephole went dark, as if the guy were checking that it was still us on his porch, and then he reopened the door.
“What?”
“We really need a phone.”
“Last year, you little crapheads shot those things off until two in the morning. My dog spent eight hours hiding under the bed, and when I finally dragged her out, all of her fur had fallen off.”
“I’m sorry to hear that.”
“You and your blown-off toes can just bite me. I wish you’d swallowed one.”
“We’ll ask somebody else.”
“And why don’t they sell Girl Scout cookies in stores? Why do you take a product that people actually want to buy and put a stranglehold on it like that? Tell you what, you find me a box of Thin frickin’ Mints, and you can use my phone to call 1-800 horoscope numbers for all I care.”
“Thank you for your time.”
“Have you ever seen a Shih Tzu without fur? You can’t un-see that. It’ll haunt your dreams.”
“We’re leaving now.”