Zombified Page 7

  “Let’s meet up,” he said.

  I nearly gagged. That statement did not flow logically from what we’d just been talking about. We were supposed to talk about the relative merits of Sid Caesar’s performance as Coach Calhoun, the awesomeness of Rizzo’s overall aesthetic, and the way “Beauty School Dropout” almost flushes the whole production down the toilet. We weren’t supposed to jump nearly context-free to suggesting we get together. I sat up in bed. Even though we were talking on the phone, I felt like I needed to be ready to run away.

  “I don’t know, Brandon,” I said. “I don’t think that’d be a good idea.”

  “I’m not going to force it, Courtney,” he said. “I just think it’d be good to see you.”

  “Yeah, well, I . . .” I started.

  “And I think you’d like to see me, too.”

  “I just wanted to know if you were doing okay,” I said. “That’s why I was asking folks at school about you. You weren’t at the football rally.”

  He laughed, a genuine Brandon laugh. Somehow it chilled me more than relieved me in that context.

  “No more football,” he said. “It just doesn’t seem worth it.”

  “What changed?”

  “Meet me and I’ll tell you,” he said. “It doesn’t have to be tonight. Whenever you’re ready. Listen, I gotta go. An old friend of yours is calling. I’ll say hi for you.”

  “What?” I asked, feeling lame. “Who?”

  “I’ll talk to you later, Courtney. Thanks for calling.”

  The line went dead.

  I sat on the bed looking at the phone wondering about the last thing he said to me. An old friend of mine was calling him? What the hell was that supposed to mean? Crystal? Were they a thing now? And if they were, why was he suggesting that I meet with him? I had no idea what was going on and it was frustrating the shit out of me.

  “I refuse to let you control me,” I said to the phone as if it was Brandon I was talking to. “I broke up with you and I refuse to let you manipulate me into changing my mind. Also, I am talking to my cell phone.” I needed to go to bed.

  This time I got up and changed into my nightclothes. Then I went to the bathroom, did my business, and brushed my teeth.

  I climbed into bed and made sure to turn my phone off so any new, incoming messages wouldn’t wake me.

  I lay on my back and stared at the ceiling again like earlier, but I wasn’t angry at my dad anymore, though I guessed that’d come back. This time I replayed my conversation with Brandon. Especially the last part. Who was he talking about?

  “Nope,” I said out loud. “I’m done with you.”

  I turned over and closed my eyes. I fell asleep wondering if it was possible that my dad heard how often I talked out loud to myself. I wondered if he thought I was crazy. Then I was asleep.

  I sat in one of the hard plastic benches in the Bully Burger and squinted under the too-bright fluorescent lighting. I hadn’t been back since I’d quit the place six months before. It hadn’t changed. Ashley and Mary-Kate were still behind the counter. Glum customers gave their pathetic orders without making eye contact.

  Somewhere I heard a moan.

  “Hey, Chacho,” I called out to the only decent person who ever worked at Bully Burger besides me and Phil. He was the security guard, and as with most nights, he sat reading the newspaper, his anti-bite armor piled up next to him. “How’ve you been?” He kept on reading the paper like he hadn’t heard me.

  “I said, how have you been?” I practically yelled it across the dining room but he just kept on reading the stupid paper. What the F, Chacho? I knew I hadn’t come to visit him in half a year, but that was no excuse to give me the cold shoulder.

  “He can’t hear you, dim bulb.”

  Sherri threw a tray of paper-wrapped food down on the table. I just gawked at her. Sherri, my best friend from birth, my constant companion, the girl I always trusted to be ready with a snide remark. God, I loved the crap out of her. Too bad I watched a sniper put a bullet through her zombified brains last year.

  Now she was sitting across from me munching on a double Bully Burger dripping with Rough Rider sauce. Some of it ran down her chin, and she wiped it off with the sleeve of her faux leather jacket.

  “Jesus, this is terrible,” she said. “I’ve missed it so much. I can’t get it in my face fast enough!”

  “What do you want?” I asked. I wasn’t exactly thrilled to see her.

  Another low moan, louder this time, filled the room. No one, including Sherri, seemed to notice.

  “What is this?” I asked.

  “It’s the double Bully, you dick,” said Sherri with a grin that was full of half-chewed food. “You slung enough of these in your time here. You should be able to recognize it.”

  “That’s not what I meant and you know it.” I knew this was a dream. I was huffing in my dream, which annoyed me to no end. “I thought we were done with your little nocturnal visits after the zombie attack last year.”

  “That was just the beginning,” Sherri said just before she took another bite. Why did that burger look so rare? It dripped blood. Bully Burger regulations called for us to cook every last bit of flavor out of the patties. It pooled on the table, candy-apple red and thick.

  “I don’t want to do this.”

  “Yeah, there are things we all wish wouldn’t happen.” With her free hand, Sherri made her finger and thumb into a gun and pointed it at her head. A small, neat hole had appeared in the center of her forehead. I knew that was the hole left behind by the round that ultimately killed her. I imagined the crater left on the back of her head, and I knew I didn’t want to see it.

  Another moan, louder. I turned to look behind me. It came from the back hallway where the public restrooms were.

  “You can ignore it for a while,” Sherri said. It sounded like she spoke around a mouthful of food. The smell of rotted meat flooded the room. I breathed through my mouth to keep from gagging. I turned around slowly, trying to prepare myself for what I was about to see.

  And there was Sherri as I’d last seen her. Zombified, undead, but still pretty freshly dead. Her mouth and cheeks were shredded and raw from when she tried to get at me through a chain-link fence. She still had the bullet hole—black fluid dripped out of it and ran down her face. It formed into a puddle of black gore on the table.

  “Eventually, you’ll have to deal with it,” Sherri said. I tried to give her the benefit of the doubt, but I swear I heard a hint of glee in her undead voice.

  I put my head down. I did not want to deal with this. Or with anything. I thought I finished this last year when I helped hold back a huge zombie attack and saved a good chunk of my high school class. The thought of doing more made me feel exhausted. I was just going to sit here until it all went away.

  Then a huge centipede crawled up onto the table and slithered away toward Sherri.

  I stood up in disgust. Then anger filled me.

  “I’ll just deal with this now.”

  Sherri played with the centipede, letting it slither from hand to hand, never letting it get free of her grasp. After a second, she clutched it in her fist and shoved it in her mouth.

  “Atta girl,” she said and smiled. She had tiny insect legs stuck in her teeth.

  I turned and stalked off toward the bathrooms. I noticed that there was no one else in the store. All of the customers who’d been sitting around us, each of the employees behind the counter, they were all gone. The moaning grew louder. It sounded like more than one voice now. The handle to the bathroom door rattled. Someone was trying to get out and couldn’t quite figure out how to work the door.

  The anger seeped out of me with every step, but I kept going. I’d deal with this and be done.

  I stood in front of the door. It shook so hard I thought the door frame was going to come loose from the wall. I reached out slowly toward the handle.

  The door burst open and the thing inside reached for me.

  My eyes flew op
en, my heart beating fast, and I stared off into my darkened bedroom. Whose face had I seen right at the end of the dream? I almost dredged it up, but it kept receding. It seemed important to remember, but the more I struggled, the dimmer it became.

  I finally gave up and rolled over to try to go back to sleep.

  “It was good to see you again, Sherri,” I said to the darkness.

  I didn’t care if Dad thought I was crazy.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  Time to Stomp Some Zs

  On Fridays that semester I got off early from school. I had enough credits that I didn’t need to carry a full load. That sounded like bragging, didn’t it?

  Anyway, one of those Fridays a week after the call with Brandon, Phil skipped his last class to come hang out with me at a local coffee shop called The Governor’s Cup. Everyone just called it the Gov Cup. I guess politicians used to walk the few blocks from the Capitol to come hang out here. They didn’t do that much anymore. I liked it because they roasted their own beans, they had good Wi-Fi, and it wasn’t a certain, unnamed corporate coffee joint. It’s sort of dark in there, it never gets much sun, and the dark wood furnishings sort of swallow up the available light. Call that a plus.

  Phil and I sat in the upper level. I nursed my coffee, which Phil bought for me—I probably needed to start thinking about getting a new part-time job. Maybe if Phil ever decided to stop buying me stuff I’d get serious about that.

  “Are we going out tonight?” I asked. Both Phil and I knew that this meant hunting zombies. No dating was implied.

  “Can’t,” said Phil. “I close tonight and open tomorrow.”

  “That,” I said, “sucks.”

  “Agreed.”

  “But you still like working at the theater?”

  He sipped his drink and nodded. After he quit the Bully Burger, he scrounged up a job at the indie movie theater, Salem Cinema. “I like running the projectors,” he said. “They’re kind of crotchety and need to be coaxed along. Actually, there’s just one thing I don’t like about working there.”

  “The customers,” we said in unison.

  “The bane of the service industry,” Phil said, “is that you have to actually, you know, serve.”

  “Sure,” I said.

  “Maybe we can go out tomorrow night,” he suggested. “I’ll get off early enough.”

  “That’d be great,” I said. I paused for a second, gathering up the courage to say this next bit. “I think we should invite Warren to come along.” He fixed me with his gaze without answering. Hey, it wasn’t a “no.” “We’ve hung out with him a few times and he isn’t a total tool, right?”

  “Sure.” His face was completely impassive, no emotion, no hint at what he thought. Sometimes his stoic, tough-guy demeanor was okay, but this wasn’t one of those times.

  “And it’d be nice to have some backup, you know?” I plowed on, hoping to bury Phil under an avalanche of logic. “Last time we went out, there were more shufflers than we originally thought and Cody nearly got his ass bitten by a—”

  “I said, ‘Sure,’ ” Phil said in that same flat tone.

  “Oh, I thought you were talking about him not being a total tool,” I said. “Okay. That’s good.” I studied his face. “You’re not mad, are you? Are you mad? It’s just hard to tell sometimes.”

  “Courtney, I said he could come if he wants to.” He downed the last of his coffee, then stood up. “You can ask him. I’ve got to get to work.”

  “Okay,” I said. “I’ll call you tomorrow.”

  He turned and left without saying another word.

  I sat there wondering if I’d said the wrong thing by asking for Warren to come along, then I got mad. Who the hell was Phil that I had to grovel and ask him for permission for someone I considered a friend to join us on stupid and suicidal zombie hunts? He could blow it out of his unemotional butt if he didn’t like it. Damn right I was gonna ask Warren to come along.

  I whipped out my phone and did just that.

  We’re going on a Z hunt tomorrow. You in?

  My phone buzzed in my hand almost immediately.

  Of course. Just say where and when.

  Thank God. I put my phone on the table and popped open the laptop I got as a gift for my last birthday. I planned to start doing research for a paper I had due after Thanksgiving for my AP World History class. I figured if I got it done early, I’d be able to treat myself to worry-free gorging on turkey and starchy foods. But first, I put in my earphones, cranked up The Killers, and drowned out whatever terrible lite jazz the coffee shop saw fit to inflict on its patrons.

  It hadn’t been very long into my reading about the relationships between George IV of England, Wilhelm I of Germany, and Nicholas I of Russia and how it led to WWI when I started to get the sense that someone was watching. Listen, I’m a girl who hadn’t grown up sheltered in a cave, so I was used to boys—and men—staring at me in public. It was unpleasant, but something I just had to put up with, like dealing with my period. I hunkered down and tried to send out a “screw off” vibe and got back to reading.

  A few minutes later, a shadow fell across the table and I knew I’d have to deal with someone who had no clear idea about boundaries. More than likely, I’d find some doughy nerdy boy standing there, his lack of experience with the fairer sex more pathetic than irritating, though it would certainly be irritating. I started preparing a speech about how, even though I looked like the girl of their dreams, I was, in fact, a real person with real thoughts and emotions, many of which would probably be off-putting to the average sheltered man-boy.

  I looked up to find a junkie standing there. He was painfully thin with long, greasy hair that fell into his sunken eyes. While he stood there, he seemed to jitter or vibrate. Every wiry muscle in his body jumped beneath his skin. How had this guy been allowed into the coffee shop? Like any city, Salem has its share of crazy people and druggies, but most stores have the good graces to keep them away from their customers. That system had obviously failed here.

  Then it struck me why this guy had come in here to pester me.

  “Listen,” I said in a harsh whisper, “I don’t know what you may have heard, but if I ever did sell drugs—which I didn’t—I certainly don’t sell them anymore.”

  “No kidding, Courtney,” the dude said.

  I stared at him and he smiled. Even though the guy’s teeth were no longer the brilliant white I remembered, there was no mistaking that orthodontia.

  “Brandon?” I asked.

  His smile broadened and there was no denying it. This wrung out–looking skeez was somehow the boy I’d started to fall for last year. What the hell had happened?

  He sat down across from me despite the lack of an invitation.

  “You look good, Courtney,” he said. “Just like always.”

  And you look like the post-apocalyptic version of yourself, I thought. I’d asked myself what had happened to him, but I knew the answer. I’d happened to him. Last year, he, my best friend, Sherri, and I had all smoked Vitamin Z together with my supplier, Buddha. The experience had scared the shit out of me, mostly because Sherri’d OD’d and been turned into a zombie, but Brandon had developed a taste for it. Looking at him, I guessed it was true what they said about there being no such thing as a casual Z user.

  Knowing that I was responsible for this train wreck didn’t make me want to stick around to study the results. I started to pack up my gear.

  “My dad’ll be here in a minute to pick me up,” I said.

  He looked toward the entrance. “Oh, yeah? How’s he doing?”

  “Fine,” I said. Boy, wasn’t he in for a surprise when he got a load of the all-new Brandon?

  “So,” I said, “I didn’t see you in the football lineup this year.” Mostly I was trying to kill time until Dad came to rescue me.

  Brandon started to laugh, and it was that same low, thick sound I’d heard on the phone the other night. It sounded nothing at all like the laugh I remembered. That ha
d been clear and ringing and open. This sounded dark and guarded.

  “You mentioned that when we talked on the phone,” he said. He shook his head. “Yeah, football. I decided that wasn’t as important as I used to think.”

  “Uh-huh,” I said lamely. “And school? I haven’t seen you around school lately. Is that unimportant, too?”

  “Right,” he said with a grin. “I got a job.”

  I slipped my laptop into my bag and started to gather all of the cords.

  “Where are you working?” I asked as I zipped up my bag.

  “All over town,” he said, and he shrugged.

  What did that mean? I was just about to ask him when I heard someone call my name.

  My dad stood down by the entrance. He looked up at me and his smile faltered a bit.

  Brandon waved. Dad hesitated and then returned the wave, his smile gone now.

  “I’ve got to go.” I stood up and shouldered my bag.

  “We should get together sometime, Courtney,” Brandon said. He flashed me that smile again. It was a lot more effective before his teeth had turned gray.

  “Uh, maybe,” I said. “I’m sort of busy. School and stuff, you know.”

  “Sure,” he said. “Well, say hi to Phil and Cody. And to that new kid you’re hanging out with. Don’t know his name.”

  I stared at Brandon for a long time trying to formulate a response. How did he know I was hanging out with Warren? Had he been following me?

  “Courtney?” Dad called from downstairs.

  “I’m leaving,” I said to Brandon.

  “I’ll see you around,” he said back to me.

  I rushed down the stairs and joined my dad. He gave me a brief one-armed hug.

  “Who’s that you were sitting with?” he asked.

  “You don’t recognize him?” I asked.

  “I do not.”

  Brandon waved down to us again.

  “He’s just someone I used to know from school. He’s not doing too well now.” I turned and walked outside.

  “Well, it’s good to try to help people,” Dad said as he walked beside me. “Just don’t get mired in whatever trouble he’s in.”