“So, you haven’t eaten anything since dinner two days ago?” Angelo asked.
“Not much,” Nick admitted. “A little turkey meat and a piece of bacon.” When he put it that way, it sounded pretty bad. “You think I got a virus in there or something?”
“I’m not sure.” Angelo turned to his bookshelf and began pulling down volumes.
Carter scooted a few feet away from Nick. “Man, a virus that kills your appetite. I’d go crazy if I caught that.” He gave a hungry glance toward the Halloween bag at the foot of Angelo’s bed. “Mind if I have a few of your candy bars? My stuff’s all gone.”
“You ate your entire bag of candy in one night?” Nick asked. That was excessive even for Carter.
“Most of it.” Carter scratched the back of his head. “My parents took away the rest after I threw up.”
“Help yourself,” Angelo said, without looking away from the book he was poring over.
Carter tore open a Butterfinger, ate half of it in one bite, and waved the rest under Nick’s nose. “This isn’t tempting at all?”
Nick shook his head. He was hungry. And he knew the candy should sound good. His brain remembered liking it. But just the smell made him start to gag.
“Sad, my friend, very, very sad.” Carter finished the Butterfinger and ripped open a Hershey’s with almonds.
Nick took off the light windbreaker he’d been wearing and set it on the floor. “Does it feel warm in here to you?”
“Nope,” Carter said, breaking off squares of chocolate one at a time and tossing them into his mouth. “Maybe you’re running a fever. Maybe you’ve got one of those rare tropical illnesses that eat your flesh.”
“I think I might have noticed if something was eating my flesh.” Nick scowled. “Besides, how would that explain holding my breath for so long?”
“The rare Cemeteria Dysenteria begins with a loss of appetite,” Carter said in a deep announcer’s voice. “Then comes increased lung capacity. The virus eats away the patient’s entire body, starting with the nose, progressing to the ears, and finally a horrible case of diarrhea that leaves you sitting on the toilet for—”
“Enough.” Nick stretched out to kick Carter with the toe of his shoe. “You’re not helping.”
“Interesting,” Angelo said, holding an old book in his hands.
Carter and Nick looked up. “Did you find something?” Nick asked.
“Maybe.” Angelo set the book on his desk, open to a page about three-fourths of the way through, and took something out of his top drawer. “Put this in your mouth,” he said, removing a digital thermometer from its plastic case.
Nick took the thermometer and eyed it dubiously. “Is this clean?”
“Disinfected with rubbing alcohol,” Angelo said, sounding offended that Nick would even ask. “Push the button and put it under your tongue until it beeps.”
While they were waiting, Carter managed to down two more candy bars while recounting the plot of a monster movie he’d watched the day before.
“Rube ettah, ache aray ror annie, rerore re eeb adall,” Nick said around his thermometer.
“What did he say?” Carter asked.
The thermometer beeped and Nick took it out of his mouth. “I told Angelo he better take away his candy before you eat it all.”
He handed the thermometer to Angelo, who studied it for a moment before referring to the book again. “Eighty-eight point nine degrees.”
“Is that bad?” Nick asked.
“Nearly ten degrees below normal,” Angelo said. “If my guess is right, it’s going to keep dropping.”
Nick started to feel afraid. “Do I have some kind of rare virus?”
“Here.” Angelo handed an empty water glass to Carter. “Stick the open end against Nick’s chest and press your ear to the bottom.”
Carter swallowed. “He’s not contagious, is he? I mean, no offense, but I think I’d rather die than stop eating.”
“Not if it’s what I think it is,” Angelo said. “But just to be on the safe side, Nick, why don’t you put that amulet back inside your shirt.”
Nick dropped the chain down his collar while Carter pressed the glass against his chest and listened.
“What am I supposed to be hearing?” Carter asked.
Angelo looked from the book to his watch. A small bead of sweat dripped down his forehead. “Keep listening.”
Carter squinched his eyes shut, his forehead wrinkling. For over a minute, no one said a thing. Then Carter’s eyes popped open. “I heard something. Not very loud. Kind of a soft lub-lub.”
“Just what I thought.” Angelo took back the glass and set it on the desk. He lifted the book and turned it around so the other boys could see it. “Does this look familiar?”
Nick slid forward across the carpet and studied the picture in the center of the left page. “It’s my amulet. My gris-gris.”
“It is your amulet,” Angelo agreed, laying the book down. “But it’s not a gris-gris. According to the author, the necklace you’re wearing is over a thousand years old. It was created for an African bokor.”
“Like a stock broker?” Carter asked.
“Bokor,” Angelo corrected. “A bokor is a voodoo sorcerer capable of bringing the dead back to life. Anyone who wears the bokor’s amulet becomes cursed.”
Nick’s hand went to the lump under his shirt. He remembered reading something about a bokor in his aunt’s book. “What kind of curse?”
Angelo swallowed. “If my book is right—and from all of your symptoms, I’m pretty sure it is—the moment you put on that amulet you invoked its ancient curse.” The house was deathly still. “You are…a zombie.”
For a second none of the boys said a word. Then they all shouted the same thing at exactly the same time.
“Awesome!”
Nick turned his hands over, looking at the fronts and backs. Other than being a little more pale than normal, they didn’t look especially unusual. No flayed skin or protruding bones. “Are you sure?” he asked. “I don’t feel like a zombie.” But what did a zombie feel like? In the movies they mostly shambled around a lot and grunted. Not a lot to go on there.
“Pretty sure,” Angelo said. “It all adds up.”
Carter stared at Nick liked he’d never seen him before. “So, you’re dead?”
“Technically, undead.” Angelo pushed his glasses up on his nose. “That’s what separates a zombie from your average corpse. His body is slightly higher than room temperature, although it should decrease over time. His heart rate appears to be less than a single beat per minute—causing his cold skin and pale complexion.”
That explained a lot, Nick thought. Why his cold shower didn’t feel cold, why normal food didn’t seem appetizing, and why he didn’t need much sleep.
“Have you noticed yourself being more clumsy than usual?” Angelo asked. “Typically a zombie’s muscles begin to break down rather quickly.”
Nick tried to think. “I might be stumbling a little more than usual. And my hands and feet feel kind of tingly. Like when you lie on your arm and it falls asleep.”
“That could be a combination of muscle weakness and poor circulation.” Angelo grabbed another book from his shelf. “If I remember right, a zombie’s heart beats just enough to keep its blood flowing. Since your flesh isn’t really alive, it doesn’t need much oxygen.”
“That’s why you could hold your breath so long!” Carter beamed, a smudge of chocolate marking his chin. “This is so cool. We need to call the TV stations and the newspapers. I’ll bet they’d pay big bucks for a picture of a real zombie.”
“No media,” Nick said, getting to his feet.
“Why not?” Carter’s smile disappeared. “They’d probably do a special on you.”
Nick held up a finger. “Haven’t you been paying attention to all the monster movies we’ve watched? What’s the first thing people do when they discover there’s a monster in their town?”
Carter slapped his hand t
o his forehead. “Destroy it.”
“Or capture it to do tests,” Angelo said.
“I don’t want to be anyone’s science experiment.” Nick shuddered. “And I definitely don’t want to have a mob show up at my house with torches and pitchforks.”
Angelo nodded. “More like assault rifles, these days.”
“Sorry, bad idea,” Carter said. He began rooting around in Angelo’s Halloween bag looking for something to eat.
Nick’s stomach growled. “So what do we do now?”
Angelo began flipping through the pages of his book. “There are plenty of theories in most of these books, but not much hard data. We could learn quite a bit. For example, can zombies communicate with the truly dead? It might be interesting to take you to a cemetery. And how do animals react to you? My dog’s in the backyard. The effect of slowed circulation on the rest of the organs might teach us…”
As Angelo continued to talk, Nick thought that he’d never realized just how intelligent his friend was. All those books he read. All those ideas. He studied more than anyone Nick knew and usually got the best scores in the sixth grade. When he was nine, he beat the entire school in a spelling bee. Nick’s stomach growled again. “You’re really smart,” he said.
“What?” Angelo looked up from his book.
Nick licked his lips. “I’ll bet your brain is huge.”
“What’s wrong with you?” Carter asked, taking his hand out of the bag.
Nick blinked. “What do you mean?” Why were his friends staring at him so strangely?
“You’re…drooling,” Carter said.
“No, I’m not.” Nick touched his fingers to his chin and they came away wet. His stomach growled louder than ever.
“Of course.” Angelo ran his finger down the page he’d been reading. “You haven’t eaten almost anything for nearly two days. You must be starving.”
“No, he isn’t.” Carter laughed. “I just offered him a candy bar.”
“Zombies don’t eat candy,” Angelo said. “They eat flesh and…human brains.”
Carter’s eyes bulged. He clapped his palms over his ears—his bright red hair sticking out from between his fingers—and backed toward the door. “Stay away from me, you brain-sucking freak. I don’t have much to begin with. If you’ve got to eat someone’s brains, start with Angelo’s. He’s got extra.”
“Cut it out,” Nick said. “I’m not going to rip open anyone’s skull.”
“But you are going to have to eat,” Angelo said. “Even zombies need food.”
Nick’s stomach growled for the fourth time in the last few minutes. He was hungry. And now that he’d identified what it was his stomach wanted, he couldn’t stop thinking about brains.
Angelo tapped a fingernail against his teeth in thought. “I guess we could try and find a fresh grave. I don’t think they remove a dead person’s brain when they embalm him.”
“Gross,” Nick said. He might be a zombie, but the idea of prying open a coffin for a quick snack was beyond disgusting.
“Maybe we could find some food in your kitchen,” Carter suggested, still keeping his distance. “There’s got to be something other than human brains a zombie will eat.”
“It’s possible,” Angelo said, clearly uncomfortable there was anything he didn’t know for a fact. “The books mostly talk about brains. Still, it might be worth a try.”
As the three boys headed down the hall, Nick glanced around. “What’s your mom going to think of us poking around her kitchen?”
“She’s out in the greenhouse working on cross-pollination of cucumbers,” Angelo said. “She wouldn’t notice if we blew up the house with dynamite.”
Carter opened the Ruizes’ refrigerator and poked his head inside. “Yum, coconut cream pie,” he said, his voice slightly muted by the door.
“We’re looking for food for Nick, not you.” Angelo pushed him aside. “Hmm, what about this?” He pulled out a package of hamburger and set it on the counter.
Nick sniffed the meat. It didn’t smell as bad as the pancakes had.
Carter rubbed his stomach. “We could fry you up a couple of burgers with onions and pickles and maybe—”
Nick peeled the plastic back and popped a piece of the raw meat into his mouth.
“Disgusting,” Carter said, his lips pulling down in a horrified grimace. “That’s not even cooked.”
Nick’s throat tightened as he chewed the raw meat. “It needs to be…thicker.”
“Let me see.” Angelo moved around a few things in the fridge and came out with a plastic bowl. “Leftover mashed potatoes from Sunday dinner.” He dumped the hamburger on top of the potatoes and mixed them around with a big metal spoon.
It was definitely thicker. But now it looked… “Too pale.”
Carter grabbed a bottle of ketchup and squirted it into the bowl. It was better. Nick stuck in his finger and tried a taste. “Too bland.”
Angelo shook in most of a bottle of hot sauce and mixed it all together. Nick stuck a handful of the concoction in his mouth and chewed slowly while Angelo and Carter looked on. “Close,” he said. “But there’s still something missing.”
He walked around the kitchen, sniffing. His sense of smell wasn’t strong. But he sensed…he wasn’t quite sure. He passed the open refrigerator, stuck his head in the pantry, started to turn around, and paused. Something. Something close. He sniffed again and looked down.
There. On the floor. He reached down and snatched up a plastic bowl.
“Dog food,” Angelo said in horror. “You want canned dog food?”
Nick scooped the cold, gooey substance into the hamburger and mashed potatoes and mixed it all together. His stomach rumbled so loudly now it sounded like a wild creature inside of him.
“I think I’m gonna hurl,” Carter said, plugging his nose.
Nick grabbed a scoop of the glop with his bare hands and crammed it into his mouth. Then another. And another.
“Yum,” he growled, hamburger, potatoes, and dog food spilling from the corners of his lips as he gobbled them down.
It was perfect!
“I’ve got a great idea!” Carter said as the three boys headed to school the next morning.
“Well, there’s a first time for everything,” Angelo said without looking up from the book he was studying.
“Everybody’s a comedian these days.” Carter noticed the slice of banana bread Nick’s mom had forced into his hand as he walked out the door. “You gonna eat that?”
“No way.” Nick handed the slice to Carter and watched in amazement as he wolfed it down in one bite.
“Okay, listen,” Carter said around his mouthful of food. “Frankenstein’s still mad at us about Halloween. And after what happened yesterday at the pool, he probably thinks we were playing some kind of joke on him, right?”
“I guess so,” Nick agreed, although he hadn’t really considered it before. Yesterday at the pool had been anything but funny to him.
“So we’ve got seven more months of watching our backs any time a teacher isn’t looking.”
Angelo frowned. “Thanks for reminding us.”
Carter looked from one friend to the other, practically shaking with excitement. “What if I told you I have a way to stop him from picking on us permanently? Or at least for a couple of months?”
Across the street, Nick noticed a black cat. It wasn’t anything special, but instead of chasing leaves or trying to catch birds, it sat perfectly still on the far sidewalk—its eyes tracking the three boys as they walked past. It reminded him a little of—
Carter yanked his jacket sleeve. “Are you listening to me?”
“Yeah,” Nick said. “It’s just that cat…” He looked across the street, where the cat had been, but it was gone.
“I don’t see a cat,” Angelo said.
Nick looked up and down the sidewalk, but the cat was nowhere to be seen—as if it had never been there.
“Who cares?” Carter yanked his spiky red h
air with both hands so it poked up even more than normal. “I’m talking about keeping us from getting beat up and you’re looking for a cat?”
“Sorry,” Nick said. “Tell us your idea.” It was only a cat, but something about the way it had been watching them made Nick feel like Frankenstein wasn’t the only reason they needed to watch their backs.
It turned out Carter’s idea actually was pretty brilliant. If they could pull it off. He was also right about Frankenstein. When Nick walked to the basketball courts at the beginning of first recess, the bully was waiting for him.
“You made me look like an idiot at the pool,” Frankenstein said, grabbing Nick by the arm and pulling him close.
At this point Nick normally would have been looking for a yard lady or trying to pull away. But Carter was on the other side of the basketball courts nodding his head and waving his hands. Nick swallowed. “Making you look like an idiot really isn’t all that hard.”
“What?” Cody’s hands tightened as his face turned red. No one ever talked back to him.
Nick’s heart would have been pounding if he hadn’t been a zombie. As it was, his legs were shaking, though he tried not to show it. “I’m just saying, if you’re going to act like an idiot you’re probably going to look like one.”
“You are so dead, Braithwaite.” Frankenstein’s jaw went tight and he pulled back his massive fist.
Carter had told Nick to wait at this point, maybe even to let Cody hit him once. But Nick had no intention of finding out whether being undead made punches hurt any less—at least not until he had to. “Today after school,” he stammered. “You and me in the woods behind the fence.”
Frankenstein’s fist hesitated. “You want to…fight me?”
“You and me, one on one. If you bring your jerk friends though, the fight’s off.”
The bigger boy blinked as he processed this information. He’d beaten up lots of kids, but Nick wasn’t sure anyone had ever actually challenged him to a fight. The bully looked to where Angelo and Carter were watching them. “You gonna bring your friends?”
Nick licked his lips, which had started to peel a little in the last two days. “Just the two of us.”
Case File 13 Page 7