Special Dead

by Patrick Freivald

  He didn’t say anything for a long moment, then scanned the hallway. “Hands against the wall, please.” They turned around, a laborious process when chained at the ankles, and put their hands on the wall. “Mr. Clark, if anyone tries to run, cook them.”

  “Yes, sir.” Mr. Clark dropped his visor.

  Sam rolled her eyes at the theatrics, but nobody moved as they undid the chain, pulled Ani out of line, then chained them all back together. “Escort them to the bus.”

  The soldiers saluted him, then did as ordered.

  As they shuffled away, Mr. Benson locked the catchpole in place behind her helmet, then steered her to a vacant classroom.

  “Uh...what am I supposed to—”

  He set the wastebasket at her feet, handed her a roll of toilet paper, then stepped behind her to re-grab the catchpole.

  “You’re kidding.”

  “Level six biocontainment protocol. The labbies will be by momentarily, and will return it to the lab for analysis.”

  Gross. She waited for him to leave, but he didn’t. “You’re not staying in here, are you?”

  “I’m not happy about it, either, Miss Romero. I promise not to look.”

  “Try not to listen, either.” Ugh.

  Two uncomfortable and humiliating minutes later, she couldn’t even bear to look at Mr. Benson as he backed her out of the room. Two hazmat suit-wearing, genderless forms stepped past them into the room.

  When she got on the bus, everyone stared at her with immature grins plastered around their mouth guards. Teah locked eyes with her. “Everything come out okay?”

  * * *

  Ani had always loved helping her mom prepare the Thanksgiving meal, even after she’d died, because she knew her mom appreciated it. This time, she drooled in anticipation—figuratively and sometimes literally—as they prepared enough cornbread stuffing, green bean casserole, mashed potatoes, squash, and pumpkin pie to feed fifteen-or-so lab employees who wouldn’t have the day off because, well, guarding zombies was a 365-day gig. Her enthusiasm soured when she realized that her mom would eat only for the benefit of the cameras, but she did her best to pretend otherwise.

  Wednesday they prepped everything in the giant employee kitchen and threw two turkeys in the brine just before bedtime. Hah, an ice bath for everyone! By 10:00 am Thursday, the birds were ready for the oven, and Ani wasn’t the slightest bit hungry.

  Shit. “Hey, Mom?”

  “Yeah?” her mom said, shoving bird number one into oven number one.

  “I’m not hungry.” If holiday cheer was all that was at stake, she would have lied and eaten a giant pile of food. But symptoms were science, and you didn’t screw around with research.

  “Interesting,” her mom said, shoving bird number two into oven number two.

  “You knew.”

  “I guessed. The assumption was that the hunger would spike, last for a day or three, then disappear.”

  Ani looked at the giant spread. Between brought-from-home items and what they’d made the day before, there was enough food for at least forty people, and it all looked delicious. But it smelled like nothing.

  “Well, rats.”

  Her mom smiled. “Can you grab the pie tins and start assembling plates for the guards? We’ll reheat them when the turkeys are done, and I recruited a couple of volunteers to pass them around. It’s the least we can do, considering.”

  “Considering what?”

  “Oh, nothing out of the ordinary. It’s just that most of these men and women have families, and they can’t spend time with their loved ones this holiday because they have to be here.”

  “Sounds familiar,” Ani muttered.

  Her mom raised an eyebrow. “Oh?”

  “Well, you know,” Ani said.

  She put her fists on her hips. Oh, shit. “I don’t know. Your only loved one is here, so you must be talking about someone else. The fact that you’re being evasive just tells me that there’s something to be evasive about. So...are you going to tell me, or are you going to tell me under duress?”

  Ani sighed. “Teah’s going to kill me.”

  “No, she’s not.”

  “Okay, Teah’s going to want to kill me.”

  “Truer.”

  She sighed again. “Teah’s been talking about busting out of school. Apparently Bill’s been hatching some plan or something.” Ani knew she’d made a mistake when the wooden spoon in her mom’s hand clattered to the floor. “It doesn’t mean anything. I meant to tell you earlier, but I got distracted—” She realized she couldn’t explain in front of the cameras.

  “Distracted? From that?” She tore off her apron and tossed it onto the counter. She held up a finger, dropped it, then shook her head. “I need to...deal with this. Wait here.”

  She disappeared out the door, so Ani kept watch on the turkeys. She wondered how long it would take for Teah to kill her in her sleep. Her mom came back just in time to serve, but said nothing about Teah.

  * * *

  Black Friday. Love it or hate it, Ani wanted to go to the mall. “Public” was a dream, long-dead, but reawakened by her time back at school. Sure, they didn’t have any true freedom, but the vague semblance of normalcy left her wanting more. She looked around for her phone, couldn’t find it, but wasn’t going any farther than the lounge. She stepped out of the apartment and right into the murderous glares of Devon and Teah.

  She forced a smile. “Hi.”

  “Don’t you ‘Hi’ us, you stupid bitch,” Devon said. “Do you have any fucking idea what you’ve done?”

  “Uh...no?” The question wasn’t quite genuine.

  “The goons came through last night,” Teah said. “Confiscated everything.”

  Ani raised her eyebrows. “What was there to confiscate, exactly?”

  Devon rolled her eyes. “Try to text anyone this morning?”

  Ani opened her mouth, but Devon cut her off.

  “Well you fucking can’t, because you don’t have a fucking phone!”

  “Wait,” Ani said. “They took our phones?”

  “And disabled the ones on the wall,” Teah said. “I can’t talk to Bill....”

  Ani glared at Devon. “I warned you this would happen, or worse. This isn’t my fault—”

  “Then whose fault is it?”

  Ani put her index finger right in Teah’s face. “Hers. Hers and her stupid boyfriend’s stupid freaking plan.”

  Teah’s mouth sagged, and she turned to Devon with hurt in her eyes. “You...you told!” She ran off, hands over her face.

  “Well,” Ani said, “that was helpful.”

  Devon spoke through gritted teeth. “I told you they weren’t fucking serious.”

  “I’m not so—”

  “Where’s my goddamned phone, dammit!” Kyle shouted. His wail of frustration carried down the empty hall. “Hey, get your fucking hands off me!” Kyle screamed in rage as they ran toward the commotion.

  They skidded to a stop outside the lounge, where four guards had Kyle pinned to the floor with catchpoles looped through his chains. Another guard leaned against the wall, his hands covering a face gushing blood. Kyle strained against the steel but was no match for it. “I’ll kill you! Fucking kill you! Where’s my phone?”

  As a man she didn’t recognize tended to the wounded soldier, Ani knelt next to Kyle and ran her hand over his bald head. “Hey, Kyle, calm down. It’ll be okay.” He bit her wrist, wrenching his head to the side to tear off a chunk of flesh. Tougher than living meat, her wrist held firm against his jaws.

  “Ow!” She gritted her teeth against the pain, dull and surreal, and kneed him in the side of the head. He released his grip, so she smashed his skull into the floor with both hands and sat on his chest. “Sit still, you moron! They’ll kill you.” They locked eyes, and he smiled.

  “They can try. They took my goddamn phone.”

  “Back away, please.” The calm voice startled her. She looked up into Dr. Banerjee’s soft brown eyes. “Now.”
>
  Ani scrambled back as he turned to nod at the silver-clad men to his right. She opened her mouth to scream, but the sound drowned in the hiss of hot, liquid flame.

  The silhouette of Kyle shrieked on the floor as the guards pinning him dropped catchpoles to shield their faces. Kyle screamed profanity through the intense heat as his skin melted, then burned. Ani backed against the wall and clutched her arms around her knees, unable to look, unable to look away. His curses turned to an impotent gurgle as his tongue shriveled. The flamethrowers belched white-hot napalm for an eternity, twin beams of pure hell that reduced Kyle’s body to blackened, greasy bones and glowing, red chains.

  Gray, freezing clouds smothered the flame to smoky ash as two soldiers blanketed the area with fire extinguishers. The blackened floor tiles had curled under the onslaught, and black soot covered the walls and ceiling.

  Ani gulped in air, repulsed by the smell of cooking meat and vinyl, and grateful for the chance to breathe at all. At some point she realized that the rest of the Special Dead stood off to the side, faces slack in shock and resigned acceptance. All except for Mike, who smiled and waved when he saw her looking.

  The flames extinguished, Dr. Banerjee turned his attention to Teah. “Kyle was warned. Violence against the living is unacceptable. So, too, are you warned. Any attempts at escape will be met with deadly force. Even discussing it with anyone. I will not have your petty desires interfere with my research. Behave, or burn.”

  As he walked away, the bloody-faced guard escorted behind him, Teah stretched an accusatory finger at Ani. “Kyle died because of you. You.”

  Sam shook her head. “No, Teah. Kyle died because Kyle couldn’t control himself. Be smarter.”

  I appreciate the effort, Sam, but Kyle died because he was at prom.

  Ani threw up her hands. “Blame me all you want, Teah.”

  “I’ll blame you because it’s your—”

  Devon cut her off with a hand on her shoulder. “Kyle was violent and stupid. He thought he was invincible, despite everything that’s happened. That’s not Ani’s fault. Just like it won’t be anyone but Bill’s fault if he gets himself killed trying to dip his dick.”

  Teah balled her hands into fists.

  “Don’t.” Devon smiled. “You weren’t a match for me alive, you aren’t a match for me now. You touch me, and there won’t be enough left of you to burn.” With a scornful look at Kyle’s charred skeleton, she turned her back on them and walked away, Sam at her side.

  * * *

  Saturday morning, Ani wasn’t breathing when she woke up. By Tuesday, her senses of touch and taste had faded. By Wednesday, she felt normal—cold, dead, and dull. She didn’t even have the energy to challenge Dr. Freeman’s next observance, when Mr. Foster made Jeff the “Special Student of the Month” for his improvement in reading.

  Chapter

  25

  Her fourth lesson with Dr. Herley was a disappointment. He seemed detached, distracted, as if anything else was more important, and called it a session barely more than an hour in. Ani felt cheated. She resolved to tell her mom that the maestro was way too expensive to just phone it in and that she should demand a refund if he didn’t step it up.

  That Saturday, her weekly checkup was just with her mother. Dr. Banerjee was out of town, consulting with the President’s CDC task force on disease epidemics.

  They went through a full physical. The crack on her hip had reverted just a little and her ruined lung remained better than it had been. The most interesting result came from the lab on Sunday morning, where it revealed that her brain chemistry was closer to human than zombie. They postponed her weekly injection to see what would happen.

  A follow-up test repeated the same result on Monday afternoon, and by Tuesday morning she’d neither had nor felt that she’d needed an injection. She got on the bus at the normal time, and frowned when she saw Mike scratching his forearm. Zombies didn’t get itches except under the right treatment, and Mike was too dumb to fake anything.

  She sat next to him—he smiled at her—and rolled up his sleeve. Tiny pin-pricks dotted his wrist, too large to be pores and not yet healed. Unless he wasn’t in the bath last night, these are new. He smiled and petted her head, like she was a hard, orange-skulled kitten. Devon gave them a sidelong glance but didn’t say anything later when she had the chance.

  That night she ducked into the bedroom doorway with an obvious, “Hey, Mom?” She had no idea if it would fool the guards, but it was the only idea she had.

  “Yeah, sweetie?”

  “Can I talk to you a second?”

  “Regarding?”

  “Sudden girl stuff.”

  If that wouldn’t snuff the guards’ curiosity, nothing would.

  Her mom’s cautious glare told Ani that she understood. “Yeah, come on in.” Ani stepped inside and shut the door as her mom pulled her dress off over her head, revealing mercifully old-ladyish white bra and panties.

  “In a hurry?”

  “Yes. The secretary of Homeland Security is in town, and we have a dinner in thirty minutes. What do you need?”

  “There’s something wrong with Mike.”

  Her mom pulled up a gray wool skirt that almost covered her knee. “There’s lots of things wrong with Mike. Be specific.”

  “He’s got a bunch of injections on his arm, and they itch.”

  Her mom grunted, grabbing a cream-colored blouse out of the closet. She held it up and looked in the mirror, tossed it on the bed, and grabbed a peach one. “Cream or peach?”

  “Peach.”

  She put on the peach blouse, buttoned it, and nodded in satisfaction. “Good call. Now, given that I didn’t give him any injections, we’re presuming Rishi?”

  “That’s the only thing that makes sense. It’s not like he’s got a crack habit.”

  “True...tell you what, I’ll look into it when Rishi gets back from Washington. Meantime, I have to go.”

  Ani frowned. “Okay.”

  Sarah kissed her forehead. “I’m serious. We’ll get to the bottom of this or die trying.”

  “Don’t say that,” Ani snapped.

  Her mom grabbed her on either side of her head and pulled her close, so that they were forehead to forehead. “I mean it. Some things are bigger than us, and something doesn’t smell right.”

  You mean, besides the dead children, armed guards, clandestine medical research, and murder?

  “Yeah, Mom. That’s the point.”

  Sarah kissed her. “We both know Rishi’s up to something. But it’ll be okay, I promise. Deep down, he’s a good man. I’ll talk to him when he gets back. But I need to go.”

  She opened the door, slipped on her two-inch heels, and left.

  * * *

  By the end of the week, Ani had started to get a bit twitchy. Halfway through Mr. Foster’s fifth rendition of what makes a radian a radian, after Teah’s fourth question that demonstrated an utter lack of comprehension, Ani found herself staring at Mr. Clark. His gray goatee covered a rugged, handsome face that had seen more than its share of sunshine. This late in the day, his cheeks sported an eighth of an inch of bristle, and a mere inch of flesh and bone separated her from his glistening, gray brains.

  She shook the thought out of her head, but it sprang back with a vengeance.

  Five steps, maybe four, and a quick jerk of the arms. I’ll bet I could eat most of them before the rest of the class—

  She jerked her hand up.

  Mr. Foster held up a finger and continued to talk, so she interrupted him. “Get Mr. Benson.”

  Drool pattered down her chest as Mr. Benson walked into the room, flanked by a pair of soldiers. She looked up at him and slurred around the drool-soaked guard. “Injection, please.” She looped her hands into the leather guards on her desk, and put her head face-down.

  The sharp prick of the needle piercing the base of her skull was replaced with a cool, soothing peacefulness. She mumbled something that might have been, “Thank you.” />
  A few minutes later she sat up, eliciting a giggle from Mr. Giggles. “Can you call my mom, please, and tell her I needed a shot?”

  “Already informed,” Mr. Clark said from the back of the room. “She said that eleven days is a huge improvement on seven.”

  “Sure,” Ani said. The shot had cooled the craving, but it was still there, lurking beneath the surface. If Mr. Foster or Mr. Clark or Miss Pulver or Mr. Benson or those two soldiers got near her, she was pretty sure she wouldn’t have to crack them open and gorge. Pretty sure.

  Twenty minutes later, she was positive. Eleven days was an improvement on seven, but she should have gotten an injection at ten. Maybe nine.

  Chapter

  26

  When she walked into the lab Saturday morning—walked, not shuffled—Dr. Banerjee settled his cool brown eyes on her. “Miss Romero, you’re walking well.”

  “I am.” She did a clumsy pirouette, all the weight on her no-longer-bad leg.

  “I’ve seen the MRI. A promising development.” He patted the table. “Lie down, please.”

  She slid up onto the table and lay on her back. He flicked on the overhead lamp, wreathing himself in a blinding silhouette.

  “Where’s Mom?”

  His hands slid up under her hospital gown, pressing and prodding at her hip. “In the serum lab. Roll onto your side, please.”

  She felt something that might have been cold press into the side of her pelvis and heard a hiss.

  “Does that hurt?”

  She shook her head. “No, but it’s...cold, maybe?”

  Metal clattered on the instrument tray behind her. “Hot. Extremely hot. I want to see if the bone tissue regeneration is persistent.”

  “Jesus, what did you do?”

  “Nothing you’re apt to notice. I’ll check it next week. You may sit up.”

  She sat up, conscious of the power he wielded with his delicate instructions. “So, you just, like, burned a hole in my hip?”

  “Yes. With a high-powered, orthoscopic laser, thus avoiding damage to the intervening tissue.”