Zombies Don’t Read: 25 YA Short Stories

by Rusty Fischer

The chick in the nurse costume is alone at one of the tables. Oh, there are other girls there, but they ignore her, clustering together and flipping through the pages of a glossy magazine while nurse chick stares down at her chipped black nail polish.

  She waves me over and what can I do? I sit there as she tries to figure out who I am. “Jerry?” she says in that husky voice of hers. “No, too tall. Philbert? No, too skinny. Why won’t you just say?”

  I shrug and pretend it’s a game. Her breath smells like watermelon gum and it’s so fragrant against my mask as she talks and talks and talks. The teacher looks bored behind her thick, trashy romance novel in the back of the room. I listen, smiling behind the mask even though I don’t know half the people she’s talking about, or care. It’s just nice to talk to someone with a heartbeat.

  She touches my zombie gloves often, not romantically, just in telling a story with her hands. I watch her eyes get big when she whispers about her last boyfriend, and force myself not to shrink away when she leans in to tell me that about one of the other girls at the table, Shirley something, and how she’s “got a bun in the oven but don’t say anything because no one else knows.”

  I nod but I can tell by the color in Shirley’s cheeks she’s heard Nurse Chick. I find out her name by accident – Nurse Chick’s, I mean – when she drops one of her books and I go to pick it up. There’s a book cover around it, some hairy guy from a bad rock band wrapped around both covers, and she’s scratched out her name with an eraser, making white letters against the dude’s leather jacket: “Brie.”

  The last bell rings and I stand and so does she. She doesn’t wait for me, and as she walks through the door I take a risk and croak, “Happy Halloween, Brie.”

  She stops, still freaked out by the voice, but smiles uncertainly, offers a little wave and then disappears. The teacher turns off the radio as I leave and I hear her say, under her breath, “Thank God!”

  There seem to be more kids in costume now, clustered in front of the busses, back in the park, out at the bike rack, walking home. I ease through them, gently, and wander down to the Rec Center where, every year as long as I can remember, there’s been a costume contest after school.

  Lots of kids are going this year, some in cheesy costumes, like mine, some in homemade masterpieces like the kid in the cardboard Millennium Falcon, but mostly there are just sexy nurses and dudes in gorilla masks and Army jackets.

  I blend right in, sore from smiling all day, almost… almost… warm from the body heat of all the other kids in the auditorium. The Mayor is there, and there’s a table with refreshments, punch and cookies and cupcakes with orange frosting and a spider ring sticking out of each. I want to eat one so bad, but human food makes me sick so I can’t.

  There are rows and rows of folding chairs, and the kids who enter the contest go up front and get paper numbers tacked to their chests. I sit in back, warm from the sight of it, the thought of it, half-looking, half-expecting for Brie to walk in.

  She never does.

  It takes awhile to get through them all, but finally a kid dressed like a whale wins, even though personally I think Millennium Falcon girl got robbed. By the time we all shuffle out it’s dark and I unfold my trick or treat bag from my back pocket and fall in line with a laughing group of middle school kids who don’t question another gangly kid in a hoodie and hockey mask tagging along.

  I mingle on the fringes, rubbing shoulders with the living and sticking my neon green trick or treat bag with the Frankenstein face on front in every door I walk up to.

  It’s so strange, walking past the half-empty houses of a town, like they all are now, stripped of half its residents thanks to three major outbreaks in two short years. The survivors are amazingly plucky and proud to fill their front stoops with flickering dead pumpkins and blinking orange lights and enough fake cobwebs to fill six Spiderman sequels.

  There’s Mrs. Humphries, the librarian who used to give me first dibs on the new Goosebumps books back in the day. She used to have a husband, but I don’t see him as she passes out boxes of raisins that the kids later dump on her lawn. I pick them up and toss them in a trash can so hopefully she doesn’t get hurt feelings.

  There’s Mr. Chalmers, who used to be my neighbor, and had about forty gnomes in his yard until he had to use half of them to ward off the zombies with. Now his fence is lined with barbed wire and he meets trick or treaters at the gate, handing out pocketknives instead of candy. I take one just because, you never know when it might come in handy.

  And Sally Winters, who now lives alone in her big house. She was my guidance counselor at school, and made us call her “Sally” instead of Ms. Winters. She lived with her sister, and had about 60 cats. They saved her during the first outbreak, and the 40 or so that remained tried during the second outbreak, but they got her sister during the third. She hands me a popcorn ball in orange cellophane and I say “thank you” really softly, but not for the treat.

  There are more houses, but it’s getting too sad coming face to face with survivors so I head down a back alley, hanging my trick or treat bag on the branch of a tree at the end of the street. Some kid will find it, and double his spoils for the night.

  And, after all, next year there will be another, new bag, courtesy of Mr. Schmidt. I come to the end of the paved road, about to head for the cemetery and another long year counting pennies and crumpled dollar bills when I look behind me to see if anyone’s followed me.

  They have.

  “Brie?” My voice is tight and dark, but so is hers.

  “Stop,” she says. “We know what you are.”

  She saunters over, all white in the pale moonlight, three kids in costume behind her. One is a giant green Army Man, complete with a big green mask, another is a doctor with a surgical mask and the third is Thor, complete with a winged hat, plastic, sculpted face and cheesy rubber hammer.

  “You mean… a serial killer with red hair?” I croak, though if they do know what I am, and are loaded for bear, I’m kind of screwed because while I might be able to take one or two of them at a time, four on one is a bit of a stretch and I know I’ll never be able to outrun them, at least not on my shuffling zombie legs.

  “No,” croaks Thor. “We know what you really are.”

  Something in his voice sounds familiar. Not that I know him, but I know the sound. It’s like we speak the same language.

  “What… what do you…?”

  I don’t get to finish. Thor drops the hammer, takes off his gloves. His hands are leathery and gray, like mine. Like the face beneath his mask.

  The Army man is next, same story. Same with hospital guy as well. “But… the rest of you,” I say. He smiles, yellow teeth, tight gray skin, and uses a rag out of his lab coat pocket to wipe heavy tan grease paint off his gray, lined skull and his pointy, hollow chin.

  He hands it to Brie who uses it on her face, her ears, her arms, her fingers. Beneath is a girl zombie, not quite as old, or far along, as her friends. Her skin, like mine, is more greenish than gray, more supple, but far from human.

  “How…?” I ask.

  “Same as you, I guess.” She shrugs, taking off the cute little boxy nurse’s hat and tossing it in one of the other guy’s trick or treat bags. “We figured this would be a good night to sneak out and walk among the living, you know?”

  I nod, realizing I’m still in costume. I take off the wig, the mask, the gloves. Thor holds out the bag and I toss them on top, but he doesn’t throw them away. He knots the bag and slings it over one shoulder, like a knapsack. I look at him questioningly. Brie says, “There’s a haunted house in the next county, they go on all year. And another one two towns from there, same thing--”

  “And after that,” Thor cuts in, kind of excited, “there’s the zombie elves display at the Brogan County Fairgrounds from November through New Year’s…”

  Now it’s Army man’s turn to cut in: “… and the Zombie Dance-A-Thon for Valentine’s Day…”

  Zombie Doctor i
nterrupts, “And there’s a four-day Zombie Leprechaun Festival in Chester Town after that…”

  My dead, crumpled heart soars. It’s like finding out Christmas is suddenly going to last all year long.

  Brie puts up a hand, a pale, cold hand, to silence her spazztastic fellow living dead. “He gets it, I think. The point is, you don’t have to wait for Halloween to come out of the shadows anymore. We don’t…”

  “But how? How do you get from here to there? All year long?”

  “Same way you got here tonight,” Brie says. “Same way you were going to get back just now. In the dark, in the shadows, on the back roads, who cares? It’s better than hanging out in some catacombs 364 days a year, don’t you think?”

  I blink a few times and Thor smirks. “What, you think we didn’t know from the get go? We’ve been hanging out in this dump of a town for two days, waiting for Halloween to come. We saw you on top of the drug store this morning.”

  “Wow. I thought… I thought I was being so slick.”

  “You were,” says Brie, “to the Normals, anyway. But we’re not normal anymore, and we shouldn’t have to be. Right? Come on, come with us.”

  “Yeah,” Thor snorts, but I can tell he’s playing. “Cause we need one more zom-guy along for the ride.”

  Brie snorts back. “I don’t know, we could use a cute one.”

  The others chortle, which is zombie for “laugh,” and turn, drifting into the forest. “Come on if you’re coming,” says Thor without a backward glance. “We can make Bristol by morning, and they always have a great ‘Trick or Treat Do-Over’ so… shuffle or get off the pot.”

  His voice is light, but there’s menace to it as well. Brie stands between both worlds, one foot pointed toward the forest at the end of the alley, her face looking up at mine.

  I think of the catacombs, the others, the dripping from the ceiling and the pile of bones in the corner and the endless days shuffling from one end of the tomb to the other.

  “But your notebook, in Home Ec,” I stutter, cocking my head. “You had ‘Brie’ erased into your book cover. And… and it seemed like you knew those girls, and they knew you.”

  “Never seen them before.” She smiles. “Besides, why do you think no one wanted to sit next to me, Jason?”

  “Jason?” Now I cock my head in the other direction.

  “Yeah, you know… the hockey mask?”

  “Oh, that Jason.” I smile, my face feels suddenly naked without it. “But that’s not my real name.”

  “And I’m not Brie, either, but… those’ll do, for now. It’s a fresh start, right? Why not have fresh names?”

  I nod and take a step forward and Brie clutches my hand, lightly, uncertainly, to help me up the hill. I take it, and let her, and follow even when she drops her hand from mine. We make slow progress, but reach the top of the hill as the moon crests, seemingly just above us.

  The others move on without hesitation, heading down in the same, silent, grudging way they walked up. I turn, and look down. In the distance I can see my old school, my old street, my old house, and Schmidt’s Discount Wares and Pharmacy.

  The weird thing is, even as I turn and follow the others down, it’s Schmidt’s I’ll miss the most…