Zomburbia Read online

  It slowly dawned on me. Brandon Ikaros. He was in my Journalism class. Not an AP class. He played a bunch of sports and mostly wrote human interest pieces for the Quotidian—which is a stupid name since the paper comes out once a week. Sometimes Mrs. Johnson even lets him write movie reviews despite the fact that he’d seen and liked all the Transformer movies.

  Also, I’d never done anything to make him aware of me, ever.

  “Right,” I said, “Brandon.”

  “Yeah,” he said. “I just wanted to say hi, because,” he hesitated and smiled at me and I did my best to deflect it. “Because I didn’t know you worked here.”

  “Okay,” I said. “Hi.”

  Why was Sherri not taking their orders? Why was she not breaking this up and saving me from this terribly awkward situation? If I was on fire, she’d put me out, right? Actually, I might have to think about that one.

  “Listen, Brandon,” I said, “it’s great to see you, but,” I waved my hands over the grill to indicate I had other, more important matters to attend to, “I have to get back to work.”

  “Sure,” he said, nodding his head. “No problem. I’ll see you in class tomorrow.”

  Rather than reply, I just nodded and then shot daggers at Sherri as Brandon turned away from me and faced her, ready to give his order. Maybe if I stared at her hard enough, her head would explode all over Brandon’s letterman jacket.

  The cream of the school’s jocktocracy was about to give their orders to Sherri when I heard a voice behind me.

  “Hey, there’s someone outside.”

  Phil stood behind me. He stared past us all and into the parking lot. The rest of us turned and looked.

  He was right: there was someone out there who hadn’t come in with the rest of the football team. This someone shuffled awkwardly, slowly, dragging one leg behind. His shoulder hitched in a weird way with every step.

  One of the boys said, “Shit.”

  Chacho moved fast for a big guy. He sprang up out of his bright plastic seat and started throwing on his body armor. The knee pads and shin guards were already on, so he got on his elbow pads and the pads for his forearms. He ignored the high-necked body armor and just put on the helmet. Then he scooped up his clear plastic shield and his club and he sprinted out the door.

  Sherri and I ran from behind the counter and stationed ourselves next to the picture window closest to the action. Phil was close behind us and the jocks came up more slowly; maybe they felt like they shouldn’t be watching this. But, really, how could they not?

  It was totally a zombie, a pretty fresh one, too. It was a dude, maybe my age, maybe a little older. He wore jeans and a MELVINS T-shirt. He wore one Dr. Martens boot. The foot missing the shoe looked like it had been chewed on pretty well. Also, except for half of his face being gone, he was probably pretty good looking when he was alive.

  “If I were a zombie,” I whispered to Sherri without taking my eyes off the scene, “I’d totally go with him.”

  “Uh-huh,” she said.

  When the shuffler moved into the light, I saw that he had a death grip on a bloody stump of a leg. Someone somewhere was missing everything below the left knee. I shivered when I noticed that the foot was wearing a pink Chuck Taylor. Then I wondered if I knew anyone who owned shoes like that. I couldn’t think of anyone.

  Out in the parking lot, Chacho approached the shuffler. Zombies are slow and all that, but they can move surprisingly quickly when you least expect it. Chacho had been trained to deal with them, so he knew that better than most folks. He kept his shield in front of him and his club ready to swing.

  As soon as the undead kid saw him, he went into Classic Zombie mode—arms up like he wanted to give Chacho a hug, and he started groaning. He dropped the leg he’d been gnawing on. It lay there forgotten as the zombie eyed fresh meat. Something black and thick dribbled out of his mouth. Maybe he wasn’t as cute as I originally thought . . .

  Chacho shouted at the thing. I couldn’t hear what he was saying. Probably cursing at him in Spanish. I’d heard it before; it was pretty entertaining.

  When it got close enough, Chacho did a pretty good head feint to the left and when the zombie moved that way, he slammed into it with his whole body, the shield between them. The shuffler stumbled back, grunting in surprise, and then Chacho brought his club up and over from behind the shield. There was a dull crack we could hear even through the glass and then the kid’s head was barely attached to his body. It hung there at a weird angle that made me feel sick. But, of course, the kid already being dead, that didn’t stop him. So Chacho swung his club again and caught the kid on the other side of his head. That drove him to the ground.

  Chacho dropped his shield onto the thing’s chest and then put all his weight on top of it. He left the head exposed, though, so he could go to town on it with the club, which he raised and brought down again and again. Pretty soon it went from a cracking sound to something like sucking mud every time he did it.

  After a while, Chacho stood up and the zombie kid didn’t even twitch. Chacho stood over him, bent over with his hands on his knees, and breathed hard. After a few seconds, he took off his helmet and wiped his forehead. He placed his gear on the ground next to the body and grabbed the kid’s legs. He started to drag it toward the incinerator that lives in the back of the store. A wet trail snaked behind him from the kid’s shattered melon.

  I realized that I hadn’t breathed in a while, so I took a deep breath. Sherri and a few others did the same thing. I turned and smiled at Sherri, though it felt forced. She didn’t say anything if she noticed.

  “Good times at Bully Burger,” she said, and she sounded a little shaky.

  “Yeah,” was all I could say.

  We turned and made our way back behind the counter. Phil held the kitchen door open for us, and Sherri must have been feeling generous because she didn’t snarl at him or order him back to the depths of the store, she just mumbled a thanks and returned to the register.

  Brandon and his friends were up at the counter then, Sherri at the register ready to take their order. I stood in front of the grill and Phil was in the back of the store. The only sound I heard was Chacho outside banging open the incinerator door.

  We all stood like that for what seemed like a long time. “Welcome to Bully Burger,” Sherri said finally. “How can I help you?”

  I shuddered and I thought, for the millionth time, that I needed to get the hell out of this town.

  CHAPTER TWO

  A Topic for Casual Conversation

  I was totally young on the Day the Dead Came Back. Like three or four? The point being, I don’t remember it at all. Okay, maybe that’s an exaggeration. But only barely. I remember being scared, mostly because Mom and Dad were scared, and that was something that’d never happened before.

  I have a few concrete memories that I can call up. I remember my dad buying a gun. A shotgun. Now I know it was a cheap pump action from Walmart, but at the time I’d never seen a shotgun, or a gun of any kind, really, except on TV, and I was pretty fascinated by it. I wanted to look at it and hold it. My dad got, like, red-in-the-face mad at me for even bringing it up.

  “This is very bad and dangerous,” he told me as he put it in his closet and then locked the door with a key. There’d never been a lock on it before he brought home the shotgun. “This is only to keep our family safe,” he said as he carried me out of the room. I remember being confused that something so dangerous would keep us safe.

  The only other thing I remember well is sitting on the living room floor in front of the TV. Mom and Dad were behind me on the couch. We all watched the news, which I never really cared about. I sat on the floor playing with Legos or toy ponies or something else stupid little kids do. Then I heard the dude on the TV say something about the dead coming back.

  “Does that mean Grandma is coming back?” I asked.

  Usually when I made these kinds of, what do you call them? Intuitive leaps, right? When I did that, there
were two possible reactions. One: Get patted on the head and told that I was right and, gee, wasn’t I smart. Two: Get patted on the head and told that I was wrong and, gee, wasn’t I cute. This time though, Mom just started bawling and Dad looked at me like I’d just taken a crap in his shoe. Not at all what I was expecting.

  So, there you go. My only memories of the event that defined our whole life, more or less. Not real great, huh?

  But anyone that’s interested in learning about those times just has to turn on their TVs most any night and they’ll see some made-for-TV movie or Discovery Channel re-enactment about it.

  And, weird, zombie movies are a big hit now. Especially old ones. They’re kind of thought of the same way sci-fi movies from the ’50s used to be viewed: quaint in how wrong they showed a future the makers could only barely imagine.

  Because here’s what all the George Romeros in Hollywood got exactly wrong: The zombie infestation didn’t cause the world to come to an end. Sure, things were real shitty for a while—in a lot of places, especially big cities, they still are—but for the most part, things recovered.

  Okay, yes, there are whole countries where you can’t go anymore because they’re overrun by hordes of ghouls. That’s pretty uncommon, though, and those are places you wouldn’t want to go anyway. Places in, like Africa and China. Those places weren’t cool to begin with so it’s not too big a loss, right?

  A lot of people in America live in gated communities now, and those who can’t afford that—people like me and Sherri and most of the kids we go to school with—all have chain-link fences around their houses. Shufflers are not big on manual dexterity so things as simple as gate locks, doorknobs, and flights of stairs can hold ’em back. Of course, a chain-link fence won’t stop a whole herd of the undead. Not that there have been big roving groups of them since right after they came back.

  Cities are mostly abandoned since the zombies like to gather there. This means, of course, that everyone lives in the freaking suburbs.

  And it was the suburbs north of Bully Burger that I was riding through with Sherri and our friend Willie. I say “friend.” He’s got a car. Okay, I’m being unfair; I’ve known Willie almost as long as I’ve known Sherri. Somehow, though, he’s always felt like he’s on the fringe of our little group of just three people.

  Willie is tall—like, six feet at least—and kind of big. Husky. The ungenerous would call him “fat.” He’s always been this way. When we were kids, he was the boy who wouldn’t take off his shirt to go swimming. You know that kid, right? When he grew up, he dressed all in black with his dyed-black hair swept up into a really outrageous ’50s-style pompadour. I totally respect his hair. The thing about Willie is, I think he’d be kind of good looking if he wasn’t, you know, big boned? It’s kind of how a movie star lets himself go when he starts to get older. You look at him and you can still see the thin, sexy guy he used to be. Willie is like that, only he was never ever thin or sexy.

  I might be able to look past all of that, except for one thing. Please believe me that I feel sort of mean and petty when I say this: Willie is not all that smart. I mean, he’s not in a single AP class, for Pete’s sake! Me dating him would be like M. Curie dating the guy who cleaned up her lab. Right?

  His redeeming feature was that he absolutely had a car. And what a car.

  Besides being huge—probably too big to be on the road—the defining characteristic of the land boat was that it had a custom front bumper. One day the previous year, Willie and his dad beefed up the front suspension and swapped out the factory-installed bumper—a bumper that thousands of people were perfectly happy with, I might add—and replaced it with a freaking railroad tie. A huge six-foot length of seven-by-nine-inch, creosote-soaked wood. Sometimes the car felt like it rode funny because the back tires barely touched the ground, but that bumper came in handy every once in a while.

  As we drove along, Sherri told Willie about the shuffler from earlier in the night. He couldn’t seem to get past the part of the story where I talked to Brandon Ikaros. He kept asking questions about this aspect of the narrative, trying to divine if I had feelings for the aforementioned jock. Let me state emphatically that I did not have any feelings for Brandon.

  I should also mention what you may have already figured out: Willie had feelings for me. Not to worry, however. Deflecting the advances of unworthy boys is something a girl learns to do early in her life. Like hiding the fact that you’re on your period.

  I rode up front next to Willie; Sherri kept up a running commentary from the backseat. I mostly stared out the window. We were headed north on Winthrop Road, which is a sort of main road that borders the town; the west side of Winthrop is pretty much woods and the east is houses. All the houses out here have chain-link fences, the gates all shut up tight. We’d seen what we thought were a couple of zombies about a mile back. I guess they could have been just people walking along, though most people don’t go out walking alone—especially after dark. Especially in the woods on the edge of town. Zombies kind of congregate there. There’s been talk for years about developing that land, knocking the trees back to give the shufflers fewer places to hide. No one really has the money to do it.

  All I know is, I’d hate to live out there. You probably have to deal with a lot of undead trespassers out this way.

  “So, how well do you know this guy?” Willie asked. Again.

  “Jesus, Willie,” I said without turning from the view outside the car. “I hardly know him.

  “I’m just boning him, is all.”

  Willie said, “Ha, ha,” real slow and sarcastic. In the backseat, Sherri let out a real laugh.

  “Oh, yeah, Willie,” she said, “you could feel the chemistry. It was like Sid and Nancy.”

  “Ike and Tina,” I added.

  “Probably more like . . .” Willie’s voice trailed off. It was obvious he couldn’t think of anything to say. I felt a little bad for him. We needle him a lot and sometimes it was just a bit too much. I hoped that Sherri would let it lie.

  “Nice . . . one,” came from the backseat, and I grimaced. Then I turned away from the window. Willie made a point of keeping his gaze straight ahead.

  “There’s nothing going on, Willie,” I told him. “I neither know, nor like, the guy. He’s of the ruling class and therefore repugnant.”

  “Yeah?” Willie asked, sneaking a sidelong glance at me.

  “Yeah,” I said.

  I heard Sherri muttering from the backseat, which was fine—it’s her favorite pastime, really, being generally unhappy with the state of things. I’m sure she wished I’d destroyed Willie by proclaiming my love for Brandon, and I usually would have, but I just wasn’t in the mood at that moment. Being nice to Willie felt like atonement for something. I wasn’t sure what.

  “Before your mouth becomes otherwise engaged up there, Courtney,” Sherri said, “tell me if you’re working tomorrow night.”

  “Not again until Friday,” I said.

  Sherri immediately went into a full-blown fit.

  “Does that mean you won’t be at my party?” she yelled. “Why didn’t you tell me, you bitch!”

  I spoke to her like you’d talk to a dog or a really slow kid.

  “I am only scheduled until ten,” I said. “I should be there before eleven.” I turned and looked at her. “Unless you think it’ll be over by then.”

  “Hell, no,” she said. “We’re not shutting it down until someone calls the cops!”

  “Right,” I said, and sat back. Our parties almost always involve a bunch of us sitting around, drinking whatever booze we could convince our older brothers and sisters to buy for us, listening to terrible music, and talking Olympic-level amounts of B.S. Really, the booze was the only thing that distinguished our parties from our daily lives.

  “Saaaay,” Sherri drawled, “why don’t you bring along your new boyfriend?”

  Both Willie and I cringed. I decided not to answer, as any response would just feed the fire.

&n
bsp; “How’s your sister doing, Willie?” I asked him as a diversionary tactic. It is well known that the only member of Willie’s mutant family he can stand is his little sister, Julie. She has mild Down syndrome, and she is, by general consensus, the sweetest kid in the whole world.

  “She’s great,” Willie said, “despite everything my mom does.” His mom refused to accept that Julie was different from other kids at all and insisted that she be put into regular classes and stuff. So, instead of getting the help she needed to thrive, she was always behind and confused and upset. Willie’s mom believed she was doing what was best for her daughter, even though anyone who wasn’t an ass could see she was doing just the opposite.

  That’s the way it was with most parents.

  “She read a story to me the other night,” Willie said, and he smiled, which didn’t happen very often. “It took a while and I had to help her a few times. Still . . .” He trailed off and left it hanging, like he didn’t know how to talk about stuff that made him happy. That was probably the case, actually.

  The car rumbled through the night and we all fell silent. I could tell by the way the woods thinned out that we were close to my neighborhood. I sank a little lower down in my seat.

  “I don’t have to take you home,” Willie said. He was actually pretty good at reading my moods, not that it was too hard where my house was concerned.

  “And where would you take her, Willie,” Sherri asked. “Your house? And what would you do with her there?”

  There was what I can only describe as a dramatic pause.

  “Maybe you could finally deflower her and do us all a big favor,” Sherri squealed.

  “Jesus, Sherri!” As fast as I could, I turned around in the seat and slapped at her. She was laughing and swatting me away.

  “I thought you didn’t care who knew the status of your hymen,” Sherri managed between giggles.

  “That doesn’t mean it’s a topic for casual conversation,” I said as I sat back down. Truth be told, I may have huffed. “Bitch,” I added.