by Gayle Katz
“Yep.”
“Oh, I forgot to mention, my house got broken into yesterday.”
Charlie sat up straight. “Say what?”
He waved his hand like it was no big deal. “They didn’t take anything. The neighbors must have scared him away or something.”
Charlie frowned. “Are you certain it was a burglar?” she whispered.
Owen nodded. “There are protections. Who else would it be?”
Charlie was silent for a bit. “I think we should double-check with Stewart, just in case.”
Their history class began. It was like déjà vu to Charlie. She didn’t know why she had flunked it when she already knew all this stuff.
Apparently, two of the other students thought they knew it all too, because they were chatting and laughing away. Mr. Warcola kept on talking about the Civil War, walking up and down the aisles of desks. He was about to reprimand the two students when he tripped and nearly fell. He caught himself between two desks on either side.
“Oh my god! I’m so sorry, Mr. Warcola!” said Charlie, grabbing her backpack and pulling it under her desk. As she did so, something toppled out of the partially zipped pocket and clattered to the floor.
“That’s all right, my clumsiness,” he started saying to her, then frowned. He bent over and picked up a dagger.
“Oh, err, sorry. That’s mine,” she said. “I brought it for show and tell. I thought it was circa Civil War era. It was my great-grandfather’s.” She frantically turned and looked at Owen. He shrugged.
Mr. Warcola pulled the dagger closer to his face. He lifted his glasses to inspect it more closely. “I believe you’re right, but there is something odd about it. It has a lot of intricate detail on it. Usually daggers are made to serve a purpose. But it’s like someone made it this way on purpose, perhaps for display.”
“Let me put that securely away,” said Charlie, trying to get it away from him.
He pulled it out of her reach. “No, I think that I need to study it more closely. But I do thank you for bringing it to class.”
By now, everyone was watching the exchange. Some of the students were rolling their eyes. They were under no allusions that the dagger had been brought for show and tell. Some of them had heard about the time that Charlie had come to the defense of a special needs student being bullied by some so-called tough guys. Rumor had it that Charlie had lost her cool and waved a knife around. Since then, everyone was certain to be on their best behavior around Charlie and her friends.
“Well, it should be kept secure from damage,” said Charlie, getting worried. She had other daggers, but Rule One of zombie slaying was to “keep your dagger close.”
“Relax, Charlie. I’ll have a look at it tonight and give it back on Thursday. You know, it would even be neat to have it on display in the lobby. Someone needs to switch out that annoying cat display for something else.”
Charlie nervously nodded. “Um, yeah, sure, put it on display. Why not?”
Owen just shook his head and tried not to laugh. He made a slight motion with his hand for her to be quiet.
Mr. Warcola locked the dagger in his briefcase and the class continued on.
Later, Owen and Charlie walked back to their cars.
“Oh my god. Stewart is going to kill me,” wailed Charlie.
Owen shook his head and laughed. “Never thought I’d see the day that the zlayer was bested by a history teacher.”
“Ha-ha, funny!” she said. “It’s not your dagger! What if he loses it? What if it gets stolen?”
“Relax. You can borrow mine, if you want.” He dug around in his messenger bag.
“No, thanks. I have a spare at home, and the zleader killing dagger is locked up in the bank safe. I’m just annoyed with myself for being so careless.”
Owen waved. “Take it easy. Oh, and be sure to dig out that other dagger. Things are getting just a bit too quiet around here.”
She headed to her Beetle. “Bye.” She got in and drove home.
zzz
When Owen reached home, he discovered that his parents weren’t home from work yet. He did the homework that was assigned to him, and then lay on the couch to watch his favorite zombie TV show.
An hour later, he woke up. “Huh? What’s that?” he mumbled, before fully waking up. “Must have been dreaming.” He sat up and shut off the TV. He did a quick tidy of the living room, as he knew his mom liked to see things neat when she got home.
He was just putting the last magazine away when he heard sounds coming from upstairs. “That’s odd. They’re not due home for another half hour.” He walked over to the staircase. “Mom? Dad? Are you home?”
There was silence. Frowning, he rerouted to the kitchen and grabbed a knife from the wooden block. Usually, he kept his dagger under his bed, but thought he’d better be prepared, just in case he didn’t have time to get it.
He headed up the staircase, knife in hand. At the top, he looked around. Up here were three bedrooms and a bathroom. One of the bedrooms was used as an office, as his family was small. He checked the bathroom first, but there was no one there. Then, he heard a slight sound coming from his bedroom. He headed that way. “What the?” he exclaimed. It was a mess.
His dresser drawers had been opened and the contents were strewn all over the floor. He raced to the closet, but there was nothing unusual in there. He checked the window, but it was locked shut, just like his dad had asked.
Worried, he dashed to the bed and rummaged under it. He quickly found his dagger. He had rigged a special holster for it that was attached to the underside of the bed. Unless you knew it was there, it was unlikely someone randomly peeking under his bed would ever find it. He was relieved it was still there. Imagine having to explain to Stewart that they had lost two daggers!
He decided he’d better check the other two rooms. There was no one there. He had no idea how the intruder had gotten inside, or how they had gotten out. If they’d exited through a window, they wouldn’t have been able to relock from the outside, and yet, all the windows were locked.
He headed back to his room to clean up. For now, he would keep this quiet and not tell his parents. Since his room had been targeted, it must be something related to zombies. But what?
He finished tidying up his room, and then headed for the staircase. “Hey! What are you doing down there?” he yelled out.
He saw someone down in the hallway. Their clothes were filthy. As he raced down the stairs, he thought it was a zombie, as their face was partially missing, and there was dried, dark red blood all over their clothes.
He pulled out his dagger. “OK. Where are you?” he raced in the direction of the living room, but whatever he saw before wasn’t there now. There had been no time for the zombie to get out. The door was still locked. He looked behind the curtains and couch, just in case.
“That is so weird. Where did it go? Am I still dreaming?”
Then Owen heard his parents’ car heading down the driveway. He took one last look around, but nothing was amiss. He put his dagger away, returned the kitchen knife to the wooden block, and then went to grab his phone. “Hey, something weird just happened,” he started to explain.
Chapter 3
________________________________________
“Where is Owen?” asked Charlie, seated in Stewart’s living room.
Stewart gave her a diet soda. “I’ve advised him to stay and watch his house, for the moment.”
“Probably for the best,” she nodded. “He called and told me about the zombie in his house, and the earlier break-in.”
Stewart had a copy of the spell book in front of him. “This problem may require the actual spell book, which is under lock, key, and camera.”
She took a sip of her drink. “I don’t get it. How does a zombie just get inside someone’s house, then disappear?”
Stewart read through the pages. “It’s most curious.” He looked up. “You haven’t seen anything weird at your house, have you?”
She shoo
k her head. “Nope. The only weird thing that happened was that Mr. Warcola took my dagger away from me.”
Stewart dropped the book. “He what?”
She saw him trying to control his anger and smirked.
“Relax. He took it for research. It fell out of my bag at school by accident. He said he’ll return it on Thursday, or put it in the display case.”
“No, this is bad. I don’t think that teacher is a threat, but what if he shows it to someone else? What if it’s someone with the zombie gang?” He closed his photocopied spell book.
“So what? It’s like it’s from the Civil War era. I thought you said it was created to blend in, or whatever, to disguise its true purpose.”
Stewart stood up and paced. “It’s not the attention that worries me. It’s that if someone from the zombie gang sees it, then they can perform a reverse spell on it. One that doesn’t offer you as many protections, or strength.”
She shrugged. “So what? I’ve used common household objects to kill zombies before. I don’t need a fancy gadget.”
“Well, true, and I could always perform a new spell on it. But also, the dagger could have another spell performed on it. One that could harm you if you used it.”
She dropped her smile. “OK, so no big deal. I get the dagger back on Thursday,” she said.
“No,” said Stewart. “You get the dagger back now.”
“What? But that means I have to break into his house! And I don’t know where he lives!” She drained her diet soda and left the can on the table.
“I can tell you where he lives,” said Stewart. “While you do that, I’m going to Owen’s house to check the protections. That way I can determine if I need to get the spell book.”
“Fine,” she said. “I can do that.” She got up and grabbed her bag. “Um, wait a minute, I thought the spell book was in the bank vault?”
Stewart grabbed his keys and followed her to the door. “Charlie, you should know me by now. A bank vault isn’t going to stop me.”
They had a good laugh on the way to their cars.
zzz
Unknown to her team, Zan was investigating a potential zombie vaccine that she’d learned about last month. This wouldn’t be for the usual zombie strain one but for the second zombie strain that had been created by humans in Portland.
These zombies were less dangerous than your average zombie, as they simply ate people, rather than biting and turning them into zombies. There was a zombie gang that had learned how to not only create zombies by directly injecting humans with a virus, but how to control them too. Despite the real threat of zombiosis in the world today, humans still remained the greater threat.
She was currently snooping around the basement of the hospital. She’d already checked the morgue, but there was nothing but regular dead humans there. She snickered as she put sneakers on several of the corpses, and then tied the shoelaces together. She’d seen this dumb meme online about how if corpses were reanimated, that they’d be stopped as their shoelaces were tied together.
As she closed the refrigeration doors, she chuckled and thought how sometimes she had too much time on her hands. She looked forward to getting back to school where she would become busy with her schoolwork.
She was now in the lab where she’d found Dr. Arora. That whole mess seemed like a lifetime ago. There was nothing in the lab either. It was neat and orderly. The only samples in the fridge were from corpses that had been tested for influenza.
She headed for the hallway. It was long and composed of bricks that were the basement foundation of the entire older building.
Obviously the zombie gang didn’t hang out all hours of the day and night. But there had definitely been some activity happening. Dr. Arora had managed to recruit many people to her cause, most likely using the trite lures of money and power. The members of her gang had included Zan’s mother. Now both her mother and Dr. Arora were dead. It was a good thing Dr. Arora was dead, because if she weren’t, she would kill her with her own bare hands.
As Zan walked down the hallway, she suddenly remembered that there had been a crematorium at the back of the hospital where Dr. Arora had destroyed evidence of her zombie experiments. It was also where dead zombies had been dropped off to be destroyed, as generally, the zombie apocalypse was not observed in the city. Seattle was different than Portland. They were open about their zombie outbreak, which was now gone.
Zan pulled a hammer out of her bag and used it to destroy the deadbolt lock on the last door in the hallway. She opened it, and flicked on the light switch.
“Yep, got it,” she muttered to herself.
This was the room she was seeking. It appeared to not have been used for months. She pulled open a small trap door from the furnace itself. Inside, she just saw the remains of burned books and papers. Nothing odd there. She guessed someone had cleaned it out and removed all traces of human and zombie cremains. She closed the trap door and sighed.
Most likely the gang didn’t meet up at the hospital. After all, that’d be stupid. Was there anyone alive who might know what was going on? So many people involved in the zombie uprising were now dead.
And then she remembered. Ray Orzola, the clothing factory owner, was still alive and in police custody.
As she headed out of the hospital, she smirked. First, she would interrogate Ray until he gave up all the information he had on the zombie gang, and then she would seek revenge for the death of her mother by killing him slowly.
zzz
Before Stewart headed to the bank, he decided he needed to check the protective spell surrounding Owen’s house. Since Owen was a truthsayer, that made him a target of the underground zombie gang. The spell protected him and his family, and the house itself, however, it didn’t protect against your average human criminal who simply wanted a few bucks to buy some drugs.
Stewart was hoping it was nothing, just some kid who had broken into their house for fun, and that Owen was just sleepwalking and hallucinating, perhaps from all the stress of the past year. Still, he should really check.
He parked the car in front and got out. He walked to the spot just before the gated fence and stopped. “Adde me zombie,” he muttered under his breath. This was a short spell that meant, “turn me into a zombie.”
Suddenly, the house disappeared from view. In its place was a large concrete wall. He tried to walk forward, but he hit the wall. The only way to go was back to the car, or left or right down the sidewalk. He looked directly up into the air, but the wall went forever. He walked down the street to the neighbor’s house. At the neighbor’s house, he saw how the wall wrapped around Owen’s house. It was like a large box had been placed in its spot.
“Ahhh!” screamed a young boy who had been playing in the yard with a basketball.
Stewart tried to speak, but the words came out wrong. He chuckled. Everything he said came out as a moan.
He turned and walked back the way he had come. He double-checked, but sure enough, the box wrapped around the other side, and to the back. He was just returning to his car when a mist surrounded the yard. When it dissipated, the box was gone. The spell had turned him back into a human again.
He really wished he had brought a mirror to see what he had looked like! Satisfied that the spell was really doing its job, he headed back to his car and to home.
zzz
Charlie hopped out of her car at Mr. Warcola’s condominium building. It was nice, in arts and crafts-style architecture, not like the many boxy condos that had gone up in recent years. She checked the slip of paper that Stewart had given her. He was on the ground floor, so she could get in through the back patio. She headed around the building, hoping that he wouldn’t be home. Otherwise, she’d need to create a diversion. She needed to get that dagger back as soon as possible.
At the back of the building, the patios were actually balconies. The land dipped down to the river so she’d have to climb up onto the balcony, but that wouldn’t stop her.
She
didn’t see any lights on in the home, so she reached up to the structure and grabbed onto it. She pulled herself up, and then caught her feet on the edge. After that it was simple enough to hop over the railing and onto the balcony. She peered into the living room but couldn’t see anything.
She pulled a library card from her pocket. It was best to be prepared. Hopefully, the glass door would have a simple lock on it. She tried it, and it easily slid open. Disappointed that she wouldn’t be using her advanced lock-picking skills tonight, she put the card away. She quickly slunk inside, and then closed the door behind her.
“If I were a dagger, where would I be?” she whispered to herself. “Ah-ha!” She spotted Mr. Warcola’s briefcase. She clicked both of the clips and it popped open. But sadly, there was no dagger in there. Perhaps the teacher had left it at the school? Or maybe they had already placed it in the display case?
A rustling noise came from the bedroom. “Oops!” she whispered to herself. “Should have checked all the rooms first.” She slowly crept to the bedroom door. It was slightly ajar.
She peered in. Mr. Warcola was there. He was seated at what appeared to be a small vanity with a mirror. There were some ornate jewelry items and perfumes on the surface. She hadn’t known that he was married. There was a small candle right in the center. The flame burned bright.
Charlie looked more closely. Was that a pentagram? That was so last century. She heard Mr. Warcola mutter some words, probably in Latin. Oh, why hadn’t she paid more attention to learning Latin, like Stewart had wanted her and her friends to do? He’d given them projects to work on, but there never seemed to be enough time, probably another reason why she and Owen had flunked a couple of classes. But not Zan, that Zan was smart.
As she watched Mr. Warcola, the room seemed to fill up with mist. She had no idea what type of spell he was performing. She backed up, as the mist seemed to leave the room. Perhaps it was time to get out of here. She had a feeling that her dagger was back at school. She went to turn and head back to the living room when the mist surrounded her.