by Hal Schrieve
“The undead when they lose their minds are murderous, or at least very unpredictable. It’s like asking if it’s okay for us to ignore someone on cocaine or heroin. It’s unsafe. If I see that you are decaying, losing lucidity—then I will contact the police. If I become aware that your guardian is so incompetent that you need to ask teachers at the school to perform her task for her, then I will contact the police. That is my duty.”
Z set their chin. “Do what you want,” they said. “I’m not doing anything illegal. I’m not doing anything wrong.”
“I would advise you to not bring the faculty of this institution into your private troubles, then,” Mr. Holmes said. “You and your guardian can handle your medical condition alone.”
Z felt like they were about to fall over from shaking so hard. They tried to hold eye contact with Mr. Holmes, but his face was contorted with such intense, dispassionate hate that they couldn’t bear to keep looking at him. They looked away behind him, toward the main hallway, trying to think of how to get away from him. It was then that they saw Mr. Weber standing there, watching. Z didn’t know how long he had been there, but it must have only been a couple of seconds. Behind him, people passed back and forth on the way to their lockers or to the bathrooms. The light from the hallway illuminated him from behind, so his face was half shadowed. His expression was unreadable. He had a cup of coffee in one hand.
“What are you doing, Jules?” Mr. Weber asked. “What’s going on here?”
Mr. Holmes turned around and gave a slight start. “I was just talking to Susan about not pulling you into her . . . precarious situation.”
Mr. Weber sipped his coffee and looked at Z very briefly. Then he looked back at Mr. Holmes. “I didn’t notice you outside my classroom when I left to get coffee just now.”
“I happened to hear,” Mr. Holmes said shiftily, “from Rebecca’s classroom, where we were meeting. It’s my opinion that Susan’s matter should be referred to the administration. We are mandated reporters.”
“Of abuse, neglect, and self-harm, yes,” Mr. Weber said. He pulled himself up and seemed taller. “None of which this student is currently suffering to my knowledge. There’s only a medical condition, which is for the moment under control.”
“I am concerned,” Mr. Holmes started again, but Mr. Weber cut him off.
“Jules, if you want to ask any questions of me, you’re welcome to, but please don’t pull this student into it.”
“Magical beings like her—”
“Are pretty common, on the whole,” Mr. Weber said, raising his eyebrows. “I think you know as much as anyone about that, Jules. Anyway, please do not threaten students in the halls. It doesn’t really help anyone learn.”
Mr. Holmes spluttered, and turned his body away from Z toward Mr. Weber in a gesture of indignation.
It was at that moment that the bell for the end of lunch rang.
“Excuse me,” Z said, “I have to get to class.” They edged around both men and walked down the hallway, back down toward the front entrance and the lockers. If Mr. Holmes had wanted to grab them and stop them, he could have, but he made no attempt.
But Z did not really want to go to class. They thought of walking and getting their bag, and going up the stairs toward the geometry classroom, and felt like passing out. Their throat was all dry and they were still shaking from what Mr. Holmes had said. They didn’t want to stay at school and risk seeing him again before the end of the day. They passed their locker and hesitated. They had to go to class, to prove that they were well. Their hands fumbled with the combination and they pulled out their bag and hefted it onto their back. But then they paused again. No, Z thought, I just can’t do it.
At the front office, Z could tell the desk ladies that they needed to leave school, that their head hurt, but then the ladies would look at each other in horror and think Z was about to unhinge their jaw and turn rabid on them, and the news would make its way to Mr. Holmes and Mr. Bentwood by the next morning, and Z would never be allowed to go back to school. Or possibly the police would show up at their door with gasoline and matches.
Z left through the door of the lunchroom, and wasn’t noticed. Some classes were held outside in the portables, so some people were walking outside the main building after lunch. Z walked like they were going toward one of the portable buildings until the last second and then turned and walked out between two of the chain-link fences that wound their way around the back of campus. They stumbled down the sidewalk, not sure where they were going.
It was kind of right, what Mr. Holmes said, Z thought. Z was going to fall apart sometime. Everything kept getting messy in their head and they couldn’t sleep, and even living people go crazy if they can’t sleep. Their legs were stopping and their gut was stopping and they vomited out organs and they couldn’t think straight or remember anything. Z didn’t have any friends except a werewolf who needed to lie low. Z was messing up Mr. Weber’s life and Mrs. Dunnigan’s life. And—
My family is dead. My family is dead. My family is dead.
Z looked and saw there was a bus stop on the other side of the road. They didn’t see any cars coming, so they started to shuffle, slowly, across the asphalt to the other side. Their foot caught on a stone and they stumbled in the center of the road over the yellow strip and nearly fell over. Z thought for a second that it might be kind of cool to get run down by a car, or a bus. But gravity didn’t totally knock them over and they didn’t feel like lying down on purpose in the middle of the road, because it wouldn’t really be cool to have their skull run over, that wouldn’t be a cool way to be truly dead.
They finished crossing and sat on the little bench in the bus stop. The glass in the bus stop had been busted and nobody had fixed it so the wind blew through Z.
What would be—? Z thought. What would be a good way to actually permanently exit? They tried to think. They literally would not be able to hang themselves, or cut their wrists, or anything.
The bus came and Z got on and paid with quarters and rode it for a while without really thinking of where they were going to get off. But then they remembered that this bus line ran sort of close to the cemetery where their grandma was buried, and where their family was buried too—though Z’s parents and sisters had been cremated and put in little jars first, so it wasn’t really their bodies in the cemetery, just the little dirt jars. They couldn’t exactly remember what stop it was, so they pulled the yellow cord too soon and had to stumble-walk aimlessly for a couple of blocks until they recognized a street name. The backpack on their back felt heavy and leaden. They felt a pounding in their head that was solid like a drum or someone tapping the base of their skull with a hammer. It traveled all the way down their spine and up again.
The gates to the cemetery were open during the day and there was a path you could drive down if you were in a car, and Z walked down this path toward the middle of the cemetery. It wound around in this very inefficient way, though, so eventually Z walked off into the wet grass. The sky overhead was overcast but not totally raining. Z looked down at the graves they were walking over. Most of the graves in the graveyard were old-people graves, and a lot of the men had little flags to show they’d served in the military.
The Chilworth family grave site was near one of the corners of the cemetery, near the iron railings that divided it from the surrounding neighborhood. Behind the iron railings, between the cemetery and the sidewalk, was a screen of rhododendrons that didn’t belong to anybody. As a consequence you couldn’t see this corner of the cemetery from outside, because of all the leathery green leaves in the way. There were eight total Chilworths in the site. Two were relatives Z had never known. Z’s grandfather and grandmother had a big stone that they shared, with a picture of an angel on it. Z’s father, mother, and sisters had little flat rectangles of stone laid into the grass and dirt, with the little cups of ashes sealed into the stone in bronze or brass or whatever the metal was. Z sat down and looked at the row of stones.
&n
bsp; They reached into the dirt with their hands and started to dig. They pulled up the grass bit by bit and then scraped at the matter underneath, which was cold and packed hard. For a second they did not know what they were doing, and then they did. Z wanted to be in the earth. They wanted to lie down next to their family and and pull dirt over themselves and stop doing anything at all, forever. Eventually the worms would eat them entirely through and they would stop thinking, even if they had some kind of magic holding them together. If anyone came to check on them in the dirt when it was discovered they were missing, Z would just hold really still and pretend they were truly dead, and people would leave them alone. More dirt. More dirt. Z used their hands like shovels and raked it aside. A mole, Z thought, I’m like a mole. I’m never coming up, though.
Their fingers were numb and they didn’t feel how hard the dirt was at first, until they looked and saw that one of their fingernails had half broken off. Z figured it didn’t matter. They wouldn’t need their nails anymore. This was an all right thought, but then they realized the finger with the broken nail wasn’t useful for digging, and at this rate they weren’t going to be able to dig a big enough hole before all their nails broke off. They would be shoveling up dirt with soft rotten stumps. Z sat still for a second, thinking about this, and then decided the solution was to use their shoe. They pried it off their cold foot and started to scrape with it in the dirt, pulling up half-diced earthworms. The heel of the shoe was more effective than their hands had been, but it still wasn’t a shovel. Their arms ached and got tired. Z kept going, desperately, and a little hill of earth began to come up around Z’s knees. Their hole was only big enough for their shoulders and head, so far. Their hands trembled with the effort of holding the shoe. Z tried to rest for a second and found they could not unclench their brittle fingers.
“Fuck,” Z said, and surprised themselves with cursing. They fell into a heap with their head on their mother’s headstone, next to the hole. Their whole left side was pressed against the loose dirt and they knew their clothes were already filthy. Z started to cough again, and felt stuff come up in their throat. They let it, and spat a black thing onto their mother’s name. It was wet and slimy. Z reached up with their right hand, the one with the broken nail, and touched the slime gently, trailed it across the word Died, and then pressed it into the engraved lettering of their mother’s first name. Suzanna. The slime made the word look like it had been printed in black ink on fancy paper, but the printer ink had bled and made blots. Z rubbed the black sludge out around the edges of the letters with the heel of their palm.
“Fuck,” they said again. “Fucking kill me.”
They rolled onto their back and looked at the overcast sky. The earth was cold against their spine and they felt the dampness of the grass and the earth seeping into their skin. Z thought about the corpses that got disfigured on one side due to being immersed in mud from the moment of death. Their faces turned purple and swollen, or else their back did and got green and inhuman. Z closed their eyes and tried to stop thinking. Another cough rose up, but they swallowed it.
In the cold, with the overcast sky over them, Z did not initially notice that the shadow that fell over their face and blocked out the sun wasn’t just because more clouds had drifted over the sky. It wasn’t until the voice spoke that they realized they weren’t alone.
“Susan?” a voice asked.
Z opened their eyes. Over them squatted Tommy Wodewose. He was wearing a black sweatshirt and his hair hung blond like corn silk in two braids on either side of his face, woven in with rosemary and dried plants that Z didn’t know. His face was all peaky and worried-looking. His shoes, near Z’s nose, were wet and dirty, like he had been shuffling through mud.
“What the fuck,” Z said, swearing again.
“What are you doing?” Tommy asked.
“I’m trying to bury myself,” Z said. “Fuck off.”
Tommy stood and silently looked down at them.
“What are you doing?” Z said. “You’re not dead. Go to school.”
“Why are you trying to bury yourself?” Tommy asked.
Z rolled over onto their back and looked up at him. “Why the hell not?” they spat, and then coughed again. “Ugh.” They sat up, or tried to sit up. They ended up propped up on their elbows. They couldn’t get their spine to do the thing where it acted like a lever and helped them roll over onto their knees. They couldn’t seem to make their spine do anything.
“Here,” Tommy said. He reached down and grabbed them under their armpits and pulled them up. He was surprisingly strong. Z yelled out a little syllable of protest. Tommy let them go but hung onto their shoulders.
“You’re covered in dirt,” he said.
“Yeah,” Z said.
“Don’t bury yourself,” Tommy said. “You’ll just get underground and then be claustrophobic and getting eaten by worms and stuff.”
“Why the hell are you here?” Z said again. “Are you following me?”
“No,” Tommy said. “I was here by myself and heard you yell and looked over and saw you freaking out and falling over.”
Z reached down carefully to grab their bag. “Okay, whatever. I wasn’t freaking out. Why were you here in the first place?”
“You’re not the only one who has dead people to skip school to go see.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
Tommy turned and pointed to a spot a few yards off. “You know the guy who got murdered by werewolves?” he asked.
“Archie Pagan, yeah,” Z said.
“He was my therapist. He’s over there.”
“Oh,” Z said. “Small world.” They weren’t sure what tone their voice had.
“Come on, I’ll show you,” Tommy said.
They walked together over to the spot of earth, which was raised in the shape of a big rectangle. Archie Pagan, unlike Z’s parents, had not been cremated. He was just a body in the earth. The headstone read, underneath the name and dates of birth and death, May His Soul Be at Peace in the Hereafter.
“Is his soul at peace?” Z asked. “You think?”
“No,” Tommy said, pulling a weird face. “He was murdered.”
“Hmm,” Z said.
Tommy looked at Z. “What’s it like to die?” he asked. Z stared at him.
“Like, does it hurt?”
“I mean, I was in a car crash and that hurt,” Z said. “Then I just fell asleep. It probably depends.”
“What about coming back?”
Z realized that if Tommy knew they were a zombie, literally everyone in school must know. “I don’t remember anything except waking up.”
“It must have been your mom or something. Some maternal protective thing.”
“Yeah, that’s what the guy at the courthouse said. It’s like a mark on my chest. It’s fucked up, though. It’s coming apart already, since she’s dead. The dude said it wasn’t very good to start with.”
“So you feel hopeless.” Tommy dropped to his knees by the gravestone and reached behind it, and for the first time Z saw he had a whole bag of stuff there with him—bells and candles and stuff. Chalk.
“Tommy, what’s . . .” Z trailed off as Tommy turned and made eye contact with them. His eyes were very bright. “Uh, what’s all that stuff.”
“I’m going to try to bring him back from the dead,” Tommy said, leading into the sentence with a hesitant, breathy noise, and finishing it with a nervous glance at Z.
This took a second to sink in.
“What?”
“I want to bring him back to life,” Tommy said.
“Why?”
“Because he was my therapist,” Tommy said. “I’ve been going to him since I was eight. There’s nobody else in town who practices.”
“That’s dumb,” Z said immediately. “Let the poor man die. You can drive south or wherever to find a therapist.”
“No,” Tommy said. “Not for me. I’m like, super crazy.” He was laying out the candles in a ci
rcle.
“Well, you can’t bring him back from the dead,” Z said.
“Why not? You came back from the dead. It can’t be that hard.” Tommy fumbled with the large stone bowl meant for ash. “I mean, I know it’s hard. But I’m good at this and I’m going to get it right. I have to get it right.”
“Let the dead be.”
“One book, right, this one from 1890, says you have to lay out candles on the grave, and a different one says you have to have a salt circle. I’m trying to figure out what would work better.”
“You can’t just try to resurrect this guy in the middle of a cemetery in broad daylight. You heard about Mr. Weber, right?”
“What about him?”
“He got arrested when he was trying help me steal these books on necromancy. Not even big stuff. Just how to preserve me. And he got arrested because someone else had stolen necromancy books a while ago and he got blamed for it, just for being there, in Willamette’s library. It’s a big crime, and the cops are racist.”
“What?” Tommy asked. His voice was high-pitched.
“Which is why I’m going to bury myself,” Z said. “It’s basically illegal for me to try to live so I’m going to go over there and lie down and just stay there. That’s where people want me. A cemetery is where people want dead people. Don’t try to bring Archie Pagan back, you’ll just make his life suck.”
“Mr. Weber got arrested?” Tommy asked.
“Yeah,” Z said. “And beat up. Have you not—he just came back today. He’s all smashed up.”
Tommy was silent. “Ugh,” he said. “Shit.”
“What?” Z asked.
“Look, Susan, I’m telling you this because I trust you,” Tommy said as if it were all one word.
“Don’t trust me. I don’t even know you.”
“I took those books. I stole them last month. I went to the Willamette library at night just when they were closing. I figured nobody would miss them.”
“Well,” Z said after a second of being very quiet, “probably don’t trust anyone else with that information.” They were wondering: How the hell did Tommy take the books when Mr. Weber and I couldn’t?