App of the Living Dead

by App of the Living Dead (retail) (epub)

  “Bex!” Willa said, snapping me out of it. “Your zombie is getting a little close.”

  “Oh, right.” I launched a cure, then a second. The woman in her cute cloud pajamas briefly looked around, said, “What in the world?” and fell to the ground beside the others.

  “My parents are here,” I said to Willa.

  “Cool. We’ll get to them eventually.” She frowned as she missed a shot, then refocused on her phone to throw another.

  I didn’t want to wait, though. I didn’t want to get to them eventually. I wanted to cure them now. I needed to cure them now.

  “Just get my zombies, too, while I take care of this,” I said.

  “What?” Willa looked at me. “No! Stick to the plan.”

  “It will only take a minute,” I argued. “I’ll come right back. Just cure your zombies and mine for a second.”

  I broke away from our line and approached the outskirts of the big group.

  “Mom? Dad?” My voice trembled. My parents didn’t turn to look at me, though. Their attention—and that of the other zombies—was fully on the dwindling gamer army in the middle. Mostly because of their panicked screams.

  “I’m going to cure you!” I yelled, aiming my phone.

  I tossed a cure at the back of my mom’s head. It bounced off my dad’s shoulder, angering him, and he swatted at it like a mosquito.

  “Bex!” Charlie yelled. “What are you doing?”

  “Just give me a second!” I called back.

  My dad’s attention got pulled from the action in front of him, and he turned around and headed toward me.

  “Um, okay, hi.” I stopped trying to cure my mom, who had been frustratingly swaying back and forth, missing each of my tosses, and focused on my dad. I frantically sent three cures in a row, all the while stepping backward as he got closer.

  Finally, I landed one, square in the center of his forehead.

  He shook his head and blinked quickly. He only had time to say, “Bex?” before he fell to the ground.

  But then dread filled me as I looked behind him. My mom was heading this way, too. And others from the edge of the group had noticed me. It wasn’t just singular zombies breaking off from the group now. The horde was splitting in two.

  “Need a little help here!” Marcus called out.

  “I have too many!” Willa yelled.

  Cries of pain and panic were all around me. Almost all of the gamer army had been bitten and they were turning back. So the zombies were now headed toward us . . . the last humans in the lot.

  “Retreat!” Charlie yelled as he ducked from a lunging zombie. “We need to get into the school.”

  Willa shrieked at the top of her lungs as a little kid zombie bit her ankle.

  “No!” I cried.

  A group of football-jersey wearing zombies reached for Charlie. Jason jumped in the way, sacrificing himself. He attempted to climb out of the fray, only to be dragged back down.

  I reeled backward, my eyes scanning the lot. There was one clear path to the school, between two abandoned buses. I could make it, but Charlie and Marcus were too far behind.

  “Go!” Charlie ordered. “Get inside. Get safe. Figure out a new plan.”

  I refused to give up, launching cure after cure, but it wasn’t fast enough. The zombies were turning faster than they were being cured. And the ones who were cured were sleeping it off rather than helping.

  I heard Charlie cry out and turned in time to see Jason chomp down on his shoulder. Bitten by his own brother. Not for the first time—if I remembered the kindergarten incident correctly—but the consequences of this bite were more severe. I turned my head, unable to watch my best friend change into a member of the undead.

  Marcus climbed on the roof of a car, surrounded by zombies grabbing at his legs. “Go, Bex!”

  My throat clenched in panic. It was hard to get deep breaths.

  “I’m not leaving you!” I cried.

  “You have to! You’re the last of us. If you turn, too, the town is toast!”

  I staggered to the side, heading down the clear path between the buses.

  “Remember to look at the big picture,” Marcus called. “You’ll figure something out.”

  I ran blindly, imagining zombie hands grabbing for my arms and legs. I rushed through the front doors of the school and closed them quickly behind me. Then I peered out the window at the car where Marcus had stood. It was empty. He was down with the others.

  I was the only one left.

  I scanned the main hall. It seemed empty. I just had to get to a room where I could sit, collect my thoughts, and figure out a plan. I willed my feet to move forward.

  Mr. Durr groaned from behind the closed door of a classroom. He’d been contained by someone at some point, but that didn’t mean other zombies weren’t roaming the halls. I poked my head into the computer lab. It was empty. This would be as good a place as any to rest.

  I closed the door and slid down the wall to the floor, pulling my knees up to my chest. I couldn’t believe this happened. Everything had gone so wrong. If only I hadn’t tried to cure my parents. If only we’d gotten to our gamer army earlier. Charlie and Marcus had seemed confident that I’d come up with another plan, but I felt hopeless. I had no other ideas. No matter how hard I tried to think of one.

  I gazed around the room looking for anything. A forgotten notebook lay on the floor. A framed photo of our entire class hung on the wall. I remembered when we posed for it, the first day of school. Charlie had pushed through the crowd to make sure he was standing next to me. A bunch of kids in the back had made bunny ears with their fingers, and the photographer made us start over. I looked away. I didn’t want to see all the happy, excited faces, knowing how many of them were zombified right now.

  The swirling screensaver on one of the computer terminals caught my eye. It was the one Marcus had wanted to show me his new project on before we had an emergency dismissal from school. That seemed like three years ago, not three days.

  I pulled myself up to standing and dusted off my jeans. With a quick jiggle of the mouse, the screensaver dissolved and a list of files appeared. In the chaos of dismissal, Marcus had forgotten to log out. The top file, FOR BEX, stared at me.

  I wondered if it was wrong for me to open it without him. But, then again, he was currently staggering around the parking lot as a zombie. I had no idea how to fix the situation. We might not get out of this one. Marcus had been so excited to show me his new game. I was stuck in here anyway . . .

  I double-clicked on the file.

  Jingly, happy music began to play and a gray sidewalk appeared on the screen. A character who looked very much like Marcus walked to the middle of the scene. A huge smile broke out on my face. Then a second character—a girl in jeans and a T-shirt with freckles and frizzy hair pulled up into a ponytail—walked up to computer Marcus. My mouth dropped open. That was me. The graphics were a little glitchy, but that was clearly me.

  A thought bubble appeared above Marcus’s head with the words HI, BEX. Underneath was the call to action, click to continue. Stifling a giggle, I reached out and clicked the mouse.

  HI, MARCUS! my character said.

  I clicked to continue again.

  I HAVE SOMETHING TO ASK YOU, Computer Marcus said.

  My shaking hand clicked to continue again.

  OKAY, Computer Bex replied.

  Marcus’s character suddenly had a bunch of flowers in his hand. They came out of nowhere—total plot hole—but I clicked to go on.

  WILL YOU GO TO THE DANCE WITH ME? Computer Marcus asked.

  And then a big box came up on the screen with a checkbox for YES and NO.

  My heart soared. It wasn’t a game Marcus wanted to show me, not really. It was an invitation. He must have spent hours creating this. He’d worked so hard.

  Tears pricked my eyes as I selected YES and clicked.

  The screen filled with hearts. Pink hearts, red hearts, small hearts, huge hearts. They flowed to
ward the middle of the screen from all corners. Then the game/invitation ended.

  Willa was right. I still didn’t know if catastrophizing was a real word, but I’d definitely been assuming the worst about everything. Marcus hadn’t asked me to the dance yet, so I thought he didn’t like me at all. Meanwhile, he’d been working on the perfect invitation. And if I had been so wrong about that, maybe I was wrong about other things, too.

  I was not this hopeless, pessimistic person I’d become. I was smart. I was tough. I never gave up. It had been a rough few months, but I’d been looking at things the wrong way. Instead of thinking about how it was my phone that had unleashed monsters into town, I should have focused on how it was my friends and I who had recaptured them. Instead of it being my fault that aliens were summoned here, it was our combined strength and smarts that figured out how to overcome Veratrum and send the aliens back home. And now, even at our lowest point, our town overwhelmed by zombies, I still stood. I survived.

  And I was going to bring my friends back. Right now.

  I started to pace in the computer lab. Use your brain, Bex. Think. Like Marcus said, big picture. I stared at the group photo on the wall. It was our entire class—together—the nerds and the jocks, the popular and the not-so-much, the gamers and non-gamers. In a rush, I realized my mistake.

  In building our army, we focused on the gamers. We had to think bigger. There was a whole community out there who cared about Wolcott and the people in it. Surely, the majority of them could download a game and toss cures with a few instructions. I didn’t need a gamer army. I needed the whole town. Anyone who wasn’t a zombie. And I knew exactly how to reach them.

  I sat down at the computer terminal and typed up a script. I reread it and gave it a few edits—changing references from zombie to “mind altering flu.” It sounded less scary that way. Then I printed it out.

  Creeping back into the hallway, I looked left and right to make sure I was alone. When I reached the classroom where I knew Mr. Durr was contained, I took a peek through the little window in the door. Predictably, Mr. Durr was at the large classroom window, staring at the chaos in the parking lot.

  As quietly as possible, I turned the knob and inched open the door. Then I steeled myself, aimed my phone, and tossed a cure that landed right in the center of the back of Mr. Durr’s head.

  He turned around, confused, his eyes returning to their normal color.

  I swooped in, grabbing him by the arm, and pulled him along with me to my final destination.

  “What’s going on?” he said slowly. “Where are we going? What’s happening?”

  “You were a zombie,” I said, pulling him as I tried to speed-walk down the hall. “For, like, three days. I cured you but you’re going to fall asleep soon. Possibly very soon. So we’re in a hurry.”

  “Still . . . don’t . . . understand.”

  He was getting heavier to pull, but I moved him forward with all my might. When we finally reached the office, I settled him into the chair behind Principal James’s desk. His eyes widened as he saw the scene outside the window.

  “They’re—they’re all—” He could only point a shaky finger at the zombies.

  “It’s okay,” I said as soothingly as possible as I booted up the principal’s computer. “We’re going to get help.”

  I put the script into Mr. Durr’s hands. “You need to log into the emergency autocall system. I can type up the email and maybe even leave the phone message. But I need you to log into the system.”

  Mr. Durr’s eyes glazed over, and I jiggled his chair. “Stay with me!”

  “Okay, okay.” He pointed at an icon on the computer screen. “I’ve seen him do this before. Click on that.”

  The emergency autocall program opened. But there was a password required. I turned to Mr. Durr.

  He shrugged. “I don’t know his password.”

  I picked up the keyboard from Mr. James’s desk and found a sticky note underneath: grownups. So predictable.

  “Here you go,” I said, handing the password to Mr. Durr. “Quickly, before you fall asleep.”

  He leaned over the keyboard and logged into the system. He showed the different options to me. “You can type up an email and send it here. You can select parents of students in the middle school only or any school in town.”

  “The whole town, definitely,” I said. “And how about a phone call?”

  He double clicked on an option. “I think I just speak into this mic here to record it, and then we send it off. I’m getting so sleepy though.”

  He blinked slowly as his eyes got heavy.

  “You have to fight it!” I said, shaking his shoulder. “Only one more minute!”

  I shoved the speech into his hands. “Read that in your most authoritative teacher voice. Then you can sleep.”

  Mr. Durr did his best, speaking into the microphone, telling parents in town what they needed to do. How to download the game and start playing. To congregate at the middle school. To tell everyone they knew to join them. He only started to slur at the end.

  When he finished and we sent the recording off to ring in thousands of phones, I took his place in front of the computer and quickly typed up the exact same message in an email. Then we sent that. And I took a moment to breathe.

  “Now what?” Mr. Durr asked, his eyes rolling up and refocusing.

  “Now we wait,” I said.

  “Or we sleep,” he mumbled as he slumped down in his chair.

  I gave him a little pat on the shoulder, even though he wouldn’t feel it. I knew it must have been hard to fight off sleep, but he’d done it. We’d sent out the message. Now we just had to hope they’d come.

  I waited at the window, watching the zombies mill about, feeling more nervous with each minute that ticked by on the wall clock. Worried thoughts pushed their way into my head.

  The system didn’t work. No one got the call or email.

  The message wasn’t convincing enough.

  No one will come.

  But instead of indulging the thoughts, I pushed them away. I told that annoying voice that it was wrong. This would work. I knew it. I had faith in my town.

  Then, from a nearby house, came a person holding a phone high. Then another came from the woods. And a car pulled up.

  They came from all sides in all forms. Families in cars. Kids on bikes. Adults on foot. Some were confident, some scared. But they all held their phones up and tried. And before I knew it there were more of us than them. As the zombies started to sway and drop and sleep it off, my heart soared in my chest.

  We’d enlisted the gamers while ignoring most everyone else. And in that mistake, I’d forgotten what I loved most about Wolcott. We were a community.

  I ran out of the building and joined them—young and old, tall and short, gamer and not. Some were familiar faces and some I’d never seen before. But we all shared a love for our town and we wouldn’t stop until it was saved.

  We had started small, but more and more people showed up. We whittled the zombie horde down to only a few. When there was one last zombie left, a little boy threw the final cure.

  “Ha!” he yelled. “I finally got one!”

  With my heart in my throat and tears in my eyes, I searched the sleeping bodies until I found my parents. I settled in on the ground beside them, cradling their heads in my lap. I decided to stay with them until they woke up. And then we’d go home.

  Charlie slapped the newspaper against my locker. It was Monday morning and everything was back to normal. Well, mostly. The cured had slept most of Friday. And the town needed most of Saturday and Sunday to clean up.

  I glanced at the headlines of The Wolcott Observer.

  RARE MIND-ALTERING FLU TEARS THROUGH TOWN.

  “Ha!” I said. They used the term I’d put in my emergency message.

  “Check out the story underneath that one,” Charlie said.

  My eyes scanned down.

  VERATRUM GAMES OUT OF BUSINESS.

&nbs
p; I skimmed the story quickly. There was talk around town that a game the company had created caused the flu epidemic, but anyone in a position to investigate it laughed at that idea. Most of the employees were getting snapped up by a rival game company headquartered in Runswick. But not the CEO. “I’m taking some time off,” Preston Frick stated. “I’m going to travel and do some thinking about where I want to go from here.”

  “We did it,” Charlie said.

  I felt a swell of pride. “We sure did.”

  Veratrum wouldn’t be unleashing disasters on our town anymore. We were safe.

  But Charlie still looked nervous.

  “What’s up with you?” I asked.

  He glanced around the hall like he was looking to make sure no one was coming. “Would you throw up uncontrollably forever if—”

  “If Willa became your girlfriend?” I guessed.

  Charlie’s eyes widened in shock. “How did you know?”

  “I am your smartest friend. But I think even William Shakespaw had this mystery solved.”

  “So . . .” His voice trailed off, waiting for my answer.

  It would definitely feel weird at first, to watch Charlie hold her hand or something like that. But he was my best friend and she was my second best. If this made them happy, then why not? I’d get used to it soon enough.

  “I wouldn’t puke forever,” I said with a smirk. “Just once or twice like with a twenty-four-hour flu. Without the zombification.”

  “Really?” His eager eyes twinkled like I’d just mouthed the kindest words in the world.

  “Really. Now go ask her to the Halloween Dance before someone way more cool and popular asks her.”

  Charlie punched me lightly in the arm, then ran off. And someone new walked up.

  “Hey,” Marcus said.

  “Hey, yourself,” I replied because I was totally cool like that with unique comebacks.

  Marcus and I hadn’t really had the chance to talk since Friday. After he slept it off, his parents had kept him at home, understandably wanting some together time. But now he had that nervous look in his eyes, just like Charlie had.