Holiday Magick (26 page)

“Of course they're gonna cancel school tomorrow—it's the frikkin' zombie apocalypse!” Cameron twisted around on the bus seat and grinned at Josh and me. “So, what should—” The bus dropped into a pothole with a teeth-shuddering bang, “What should we do instead? I say we grab the bus in Concord and go into Boston.”

I shook my head. “Cam, that's the worst idea you've had since the time when we were nine and you decided to make a flamethrower with your mom's hairspray.”

“That totally worked! I mean, the shower curtain melted, but—”

“Not the point, Cam!” I gave him a wide-eyed, WTF look. The bus hit another pothole and I zero-graved off the seat for half a sec. “They're sending us home early for a reason. Whatever's going on, it—it's bad.” My chest felt like it had a giant rubber band wrapped around it. The rumors sounded like the stuff of horror movies—dead bodies walking around, not stopping even after the cops shot them again and again…

Josh nodded. “Yeah, Cam. Mrs. Haverhill looked like she'd been crying when she came back to class.”

Cam snorted. “Crying? No way. She's, like, a history-teaching cyborg sent from the future.”

I nodded. “No joke—she was. I bet they're gonna set up a curfew and stuff.”

Across the aisle, Ella Eaton—the girl destined to be the love of my life if I could somehow manage to stop acting like an idiot around her—gasped at her phone, and then started texting like mad. A fat tear dripped down, splashing against her screen. “Dammit!” She rubbed the hem of her T-shirt across the surface.

I tried to keep my voice from cracking as my heart thudded.
No guts, no glory
. “Ella? You okay?”

She gasped again and looked up, wiping her hand across her face. “Huh?” Her eyes focused on me. “Jared?”

She remembered my name!
“You okay?”

She bit her lip and shook her head. “My dad texted me. They've shut down all air travel. And…and he's still in L.A., so he won't—he's stuck there, and it's one of the places with a big outbreak.”

Instead of some supportive or helpful words, the image of once-tan blondes in bikinis shuffling down a palm-tree-lined avenue drifted through my head.
New from Mattel—zombie Barbie!

Guess today wasn't going to be the day I vanquished my inner idiot around Ella Eaton.

“I'm sure he'll be okay,” Josh piped in from next to me. Ella gave him a watery, grateful smile and I suppressed the urge to punch him in the head.

Her phone trilled with another incoming text. “I hope so,” she said, biting her lip.

I sat back against the seat and stared out the window at the white houses lining Main Street in the little town of Carter, New Hampshire, now set in a sea of mid-May green. The trees gave way to the open sky over the old cemetery, its rows of white crosses standing in formation over their fallen soldiers. Some of the reenactors were in there again today, probably sweating buckets in those blue wool uniforms.

There always seemed to be a bunch of them around, especially at this time of year, just before Memorial Day. They were dedicated, too—most even had beards. Wearing their full costumes in a cemetery seemed…extra creepy, even creepier than playing dress-up as grown men and re-fighting battles that had given the real participants a lifetime of nightmares. I frowned and bit my lip. I wasn't a jingoistic, “U.S.A. all the way” guy or anything, but it still seemed…disrespectful, a mockery of the people who were buried there, the people who'd dressed in those uniforms because they symbolized something important to them. No one else on the bus seemed to care that they were there, though; at least, no one said anything about them, or even seemed to notice them at all.

Today there seemed to be a larger group than usual. They clustered together around the fire-split foundation stones of the old army hospital and watched the road, as if dressing up and playing soldier would somehow be effective if trouble came here. The bus slowed as Mrs. Cavanaugh stepped into the crosswalk, and my gaze met that of a tall man with a mustache and pointy little devil-beard, his front-sloping blue hat pulled low on his brow. His eyes widened in surprise, and I stifled my gasp. The creeper with the beard started toward the bus—
geez, what was he planning to do?
—but stopped at the wrought-iron fence by the road, where he kept watching the bus—watching
me
, it seemed like—as we pulled away.

Beyond the cemetery, the hill dropped down and Mt. Webster came into view. The pale-grass ski trails slicing around tufts of trees made the hill look like a poorly groomed poodle this time of year. I watched it all pass on the other side of the glass and felt the sick, sinking feeling in my gut that my town—and my world—might be coming to an end.

And I hadn't even made it through ninth grade…or gotten Ella Eaton to notice me.

“I've been sayin' it for years.” Aunt Rosie rubbed at a coffee spot on her white cotton gloves—the ones that made people give her funny looks when she wore them in summer—and then tapped one of her chins. “The spirits have been hearing things, stories of powerful dark magic. There's a necromancer out west that's been riling them up—building an army of corpses. Now it's getting big enough, even those without the Sight gotta notice.”

My mother's lips thinned into a pale line as she swallowed what she really wanted to say. She kept her eyes focused just to the right of her sister—as though crazy worked the same way as a solar eclipse—and watched two chipmunks chase each other around the flowerbed.

I grabbed the can of Coke I'd come down to the kitchen for and tried to remember the odds of second-degree relatives both developing schizophrenia. I'd Googled them back in junior high, for obvious reasons. The sound of the fridge door closing startled my aunt, but her wide face lit up with a smile when she saw me through the porch screen. “Jared, honey! You're here early! Why aren't you in school?”

My mother gave me a strained look that somehow conveyed a preemptive apology for whatever delusions my aunt was about to throw at me. I shrugged it off—no one else was around to hear her—and opened the soda can. “School's cancelled. There's a zombie apocalypse.”

Aunt Rosie nodded, her face serious. “I know. The dead are more easily raised this time of year. It was inevitable that someone would try to take advantage of that. It's connected to the position of the sun and the Earth—the veil between the living and the dead is easier to breach in May and November. Every so often, some necromancer gets it in his head that bringing back the departed is something that needs doing. They usually try in the fall, though—probably because Halloween puts it in their heads. Stupid holiday—a silly, sanitized play-acting of a real danger.” She let out a big sigh, and turned back to the notepad she was writing on.

My mother turned a don't-encourage-her look on me, but I shrugged it off. The mention of play-acting made me think of the reenactors in the cemetery. There was something…freeing about talking to the mentally unbalanced. It really didn't matter what I said, because whatever was going on in their heads would turn my words into something weird anyway. And delusional people didn't see me as a skinny dork who'd failed to qualify for the ski team. Sanity made me cool by comparison.

I'd seen a bunch of “reality-challenged” people at her last group home, and I'd even drawn some pages for a graphic novel based on the rantings of the guy whose weird wiring told him he was destined to save the world from the electrical monsters that lived in the internet. I still had a lightning spider on the front of my notebook—some of my best work.

But ever since the group home had shut down back in February, Aunt Rosie had been living in the guest room. Mom searched the web for new group home placements when Rosie wasn't looking.

“We'll need a lot of salt, of course,” said Aunt Rosie, reaching a gloved hand down to stroke the cat curling around her ankles.

I returned her serious nod. “Of course we will. What for?”

Mom rubbed a hand across her mouth, sighed, and went back to watching the chipmunks.

Aunt Rosie gave me a don't-mess-with-me stare. “Be serious. If the spirits are right, and this army of the dead is the work of a necromancer, we'll need to surround ourselves with a line of salt. Disrupts the energy fields, you know. It's why living things can't grow in salty ground.”

I was pretty sure they'd given me a different reason in bio class, but whatever. When it came to home defense, I was more of a board-up-the-windows kind of guy.
Speaking of which…
“So, Mom? Are we going to leave or something?”

My mother shook herself out of her thoughts. “I—I don't know where we'd go. But I stocked up on bottled water and canned goods this morning.”

“You did?”

“Can you bring them in from the car?”

I nodded, gulped my Coke, and headed out the door, able to breathe more easily now that I knew someone in the family had prepared.

My stomach tightened as I looked in the back seat.
Two bags? That's it?
My mom's survival kit wouldn't last a week.

We were so screwed—and I couldn't do a damn thing about it.

“Psst, Jared. Wake up.”

I opened my eyes a crack, realized it was still dark out, and then groaned and pulled a pillow over my head. “It's night, Aunt Rosie.”

She pulled away the pillow. “I need your help making this place safe. Your mom's not facing reality.”

Of all the people to question other people facing reality…

“Can we…” yawn, “talk about it in the morning?”

“Captain Simmons wants to speak to you now.”

Who?
“Have him text me.”

She gave an exasperated sigh. “Jared Dustin, it takes a tremendous amount of energy for spirits to travel, and it's just plain rude for you to keep the Captain waiting.”

“Aunt Rosie, I'm trying to sleep!”

A deep baritone filled the room. “Son, that's no way to speak to a lady.”

Holy
—I shot up, suddenly
way
awake. The devil-beard creeper stood at the foot of my bed, still in his Union soldier get-up. My mouth opened, but no words came out. She'd let some weird guy into the house in the middle of the night? Into my bedroom? He could be a pervert or something! I grabbed my covers and pulled them up to my chin, as though hiding my T-shirt from his sight would keep his pervert-thoughts from focusing on me.

“I knew it!” Aunt Rosie chuckled. “You just heard the Captain—I know you did. And you can see him, too! I knew you had the Sight.”

Oh, hell no
. My mother's warnings not to play along with crazy people suddenly seemed much more insightful. “He's not a ghost! He's just a guy who hangs out in the cemetery in a costume!”

The mustache over the devil-beard twitched as the creeper stepped around to Aunt Rosie's side. “Allow me to introduce myself. Captain Thomas Simmons, New Hampshire Third Infantry, at your service.” He extended a hand. Up close, he looked grey-faced and clammy, as though he was sick or something, and he seemed…hollow, somehow.