Special Dead (14 page)

Chapter

20

Lydia
cried tearless sobs for three days straight, even after they went back to
school. Ani spent most of that time trying to forgive her mom for the lie—the
Phase VII cure was a disaster, and they had to go back to the drawing board
with Phase VI
. Banerjee murdered Joe.
She seethed with powerless hatred
every time she thought of him.

Jeff Rock came out of his coma on Tuesday. In her
selfish misery the news brought Ani no joy. For everyone else’s sake, she faked
it. At least it snapped Lydia out of her depression. The fact that they were
doing “cognitive testing” for “side effects from prolonged hypoxia” didn’t seem
to make it through her skull, which suited Ani just fine.

She got a pass to Mr. Murphy’s office for grief
counseling, said she didn’t want to go, so Kyle took her place to get out of
class. Mr. Giggles pouted around the room, not so much depressed as grumpy.

“What’s his problem?” Devon asked, ignoring Miss
Pulver’s admonishing look.

Ani shrugged. Sam leaned forward and lowered her
voice. “Principal Leoni’s leaning on him, hard. Kyle and Lydia are both failing
Applied, and that’s unacceptable.”

“Well, duh,” Devon said. “How tough is it to pass ’tard
math?”

Sam chuckled. “They’re not the ones in trouble.”

Ani raised an eyebrow. “What do you mean?”

“Special Ed kids can’t get less than a ‘C.’”

Devon glared at Sam. “What the hell are you
talking about?”

Sam threw up her hands. “Special Ed kids can’t get
less than a ‘C.’ What’s so hard to understand?”

“What if they do?” Ani asked.

Sam shook her head. “They
don’t
.”

“Okay,” Ani said. “I get it. So what does that
have to do with Grumpy Giggles over there?”

“He won’t change their grades,” Sam said. “Said it’s
against his principles.”

Devon grunted. “I’ll bet paying his rent isn’t
against his principles.”

Ani grunted back at her. “That doesn’t make any
sense. I wonder if Mom can do something about that.”

Devon rolled her eyes. “What do you care? It’s not
your grade.”

She decided to change the subject. “Do either of
you know the double-angle formula?”

*  
*   *

By mid-week things were almost normal. At times,
Ani could almost forget that there was one less chair in the room, and at other
times she’d turn to say something to Joe and just stare at where he should be.
He
should be here. Not just in my heart. Not just my memory. Here.

The flips from normal to hollow to rage and back
were too much to handle, but she didn’t have a choice. She tucked the thoughts
of murder away, hid them deep in her heart, buried them under concern for Mike,
for Lydia, for her mother. That they raged back to the surface without warning
every few hours wasn’t something she needed to talk to anyone about.

Instead, she did her schoolwork; she did her
chores, and she practiced her piano. In the meantime she managed to not murder
anyone and counted that as a win. Thursday after school she had her second
lesson.

Mr. Herley criticized her for an hour straight.
Too angry, too soft, too loud, too cheerful, nothing she did satisfied him, and
he laughed at her original compositions.

“What is this, blah blah blah? Have you no training
whatsoever in music theory?”

She scowled for the hundredth time, happy to have
a target for her disgruntlement if not her rage. “Right. Not one minute. That’s
why we’re paying you.”

“Well,” he said, “let’s start with the scales and
modes and see what you know.”

He grilled her for another hour, snapping out
commands that tested her dexterity and her knowledge, but in the end she didn’t
learn much. As he packed his briefcase he smiled. “Don’t worry, next time will
be harder.”

“Thank you,” she said to his back as he shut the
door.

*  
*   *

Ani crumpled the paper into a ball and brushed it
off her desk, where it joined a dozen just like it on the floor.
Sonnets
suck.
The structure wasn’t a problem, but the content made her want to sob
uncontrollably and curl into a fetal ball, which she couldn’t do.

She rolled her eyes toward the door as Mr. Benson
entered, the scowl on his face matched by Principal Leoni’s.

He barked his drill-sergeant’s bark. “Alright,
kids, line up!”

They looked at each other, stood, and got in a
line. A pair of soldiers shackled them together, just like at the end of every
day.

“Are we going home early?” Kyle asked.

By way of answer, the soldiers produced seven
pairs of handcuffs and, one by one, cuffed their wrists behind their backs.
Kyle, already restrained from his chain implants, wracked his shoulder blades
back to accommodate the new restraint.

“What gives?” Devon asked.

Mr. Benson hid a sidelong look at Principal Leoni.
“It’s temporary. Just stay quiet and do as you’re told, please.”

“Hi,” Mike said.

Once secured, they shuffled into the hallway,
where Mr. Benson stopped them. For once he spoke at a normal volume, his
distaste palatable. “All right, kids, just stand there. Don’t move, don’t moan,
don’t twitch. Just do exactly nothing.”

Used to solitude and silence, they waited as the
guards fidgeted and Principal Leoni walked to the end of the hall to make a
call. Mr. Benson said a few words to Mr. Clark, then went back into the Special
Dead room.
At least they’re not planning on burning us.
A moment later a
janitor rounded the corner with a vacuum, his dark glare not leaving the floor.

A brunette in her mid-twenties rounded the corner,
leading a small child by the hand—he couldn’t have been more than six, and he
stared at the line of chained zombies with wide blue eyes that held more
curiosity than fear. Behind them marched a line of sixteen children, as young
or younger than the boy.

The teacher led them so that they stood
immediately across from the Special Dead.

“Take two steps forward, kids, but don’t touch.”

Mr. Benson’s gaze hardened.

The kids stepped forward to within inches of the
line of chained zombies. Flecks sprang from them, tiny bits of debris flying
from their heads and clothes.
What the hell?

Mike laughed at the spectacle, spooking a little
redheaded girl, who started to cry. The teacher grabbed her hand and soothed
her with unintelligible coos while Ani tried to figure out just what was going
on.

Devon gaped in disgusted astonishment. “Lice.”

Oh, gross.

Devon was right. The debris were tiny white,
yellow, and brown insects, scrambling to escape the vicinity of the walking
dead. As they skittered across the floor in blind, animalistic panic, the
janitor triggered the vacuum and sucked them up.

Sam scoffed. “Are you serious, Nick?” Mr. Leoni
frowned at her. “Mr. Salter will have your ass in a sling faster than you can
spit. And that’s if Ani’s mom doesn’t eat you alive.”

He puffed up his chest. “I have the full support
of the school board.”

Sam lunged at a little boy, who fell back onto his
bottom. Tears sprang to his eyes even as Mr. Benson choked up his pistol and
pointed it at Sam’s head. Lydia squeaked.

“Not funny, Miss Kickbush,” Mr. Benson said.

Sam stepped back. Benson dropped the gun to his
side, but his gaze didn’t falter. “Unless you want to end up like Mr. Lee,” he
nodded at Kyle, “you won’t do that again.”

Sam dropped her gaze and leaned back against the
wall, while the little boy sobbed in an expanding pool of urine, drowning the
lice unlucky enough to be in the way.

“She’s right,” Devon said to Mr. Leoni. “Support
of the board or not, the public’s going to eat you alive for this.”

His chest puffed even harder. “You let me worry
about the taxpayers. And Doctor Romero.”

In other words, Dr. Banerjee
already gave his blessing, and the taxpayers will never find out.

Ani tried not to scream in frustration around her
bite guard, and drool dribbled down her chin onto her shirt. Standing still was
the hardest thing she’d ever done, but Mr. Benson hadn’t holstered his pistol,
and his finger remained next to the trigger.

They cleaned up the boy as best they could and sent
the janitor for a mop bucket, then herded the dead back into their room.
Unfettered, they sat back down and looked at Mr. Foster.

“So,” Sam said, “what’s next? Got a vermin problem
in the basement?”

Mr. Foster giggled. “Look, I didn’t have anything
to do with that.”

“You could have said, ‘no,’” Sam retorted.

He threw up his hands. “I don’t have tenure. They
can fire me any time they want to. And you know what? Even with the
differential I don’t get paid enough to put up with shit from a stuck-up
corpse.”

Ani’s jaw dropped, but Sam just smiled.

Devon did a slow clap. “Look at Mr. F, finally
showing some cojones.”

He grimaced and affixed his gaze on his feet. “I...I’m
sorry. I didn’t mean that, and I apologize.”

Miss Pulver jumped when Teah called her name. “What?”

“Sam needs a DASA form.” Even Teah’s smirk looked
sad. “She’s being bullied.”

“Enough.” Mr. Foster held up his hand. “One more
word and I’m going to—”

“—what?” Devon slammed her hands onto her desk,
and Foster’s bluster crumbled. “Report us to Ani’s mom? Tell Mr. Clark to
incinerate us? C’mon, Mr. F, you’ve got nothing and you know it, so why don’t
you tuck those testes back in where they belong and help the retards with their
history?” She jerked a thumb at Kyle, Mike, Lydia, and Teah.

Kyle jerked half to his feet and slammed back down
in his chair, brought up short by his chains. “Fuck you, Devon.”

She blew him a kiss. “In your dreams.”

Ani put her hand on Devon’s shoulder, drawing her
attention. “Give it up, would you? This sucks enough as is.”

Sam growled but sat back. She muttered something
about louse control and human dignity, and Ani agreed even with the words she
didn’t hear. The room back to relative calm, she looked down at her most recent
attempt at her English assignment.

In purple crayon, the paper read, “O’er.”

Chapter

21

The lights came on, and Ani sighed.
The action sent a gush of freezing liquid out of her mouth, and the thick,
syrupy liquid swirled chips of ice in front of her eyes. The dull thrum of the
lid disengaging was as familiar to Ani as her own artificial heartbeat, itself
a subterfuge she no longer needed but they hadn’t bothered to remove.

She sat up as the lid pulled
back, the air almost hot after the bath. Twenty-eight-point-two degrees
Fahrenheit, perfect for Dr. Banerjee’s best preservative.
Banerjee.
The
name was a curse, a profanity, a blasphemy. Ani had never considered herself a
vengeful person, had never seen the point of it, but her every idle thought was
consumed with making him pay for what he’d done.

She toweled off, stepped into a
bra and panties, and shuffled to the dresser for jeans and a T-shirt. She
pulled open the drawer and grunted when she saw the present. The safety-orange
bow complimented the black wrapping paper studded with jack-o-lanterns. The
black construction-paper card read, “Sweetie” in pink gel pen.

She shredded the paper and
lifted out the triangular object, a Santa hat in the same safety orange as the ribbon.
When she put it on, it drooped over her eyes, but she got dressed and walked
into the living room anyway.

Spying her mom’s feet from under
the brim, she threw up her hands. “It’s too big.”

“Happy Halloween, babe,” her
mom replied. She plucked the hat off Ani’s head and kissed her on the cheek. “I
made it big enough to wear over your helmet.”

“Zombie Santa?”

“Zombie Awareness Santa. Regulation
says you have to wear orange. There’s a sash and beard by the door.”

“. . . because?”

“Because it’s Halloween, and
Mondays stink, and I love you.”

Ani smiled. “I love you, too, Mom.”

*   *   *

As she got on the bus, Teah
bobbed her head in approval.

“Righteous, Ani. I wish I’d
thought of that.” Her safety-orange tutu was the only other costume in
evidence.

Sam smiled at Ani. “You look
like an idiot.”

Devon clacked her helmet
against Sam’s. “Right, because the rest of us look so damned normal.”

“True,” Sam said. Ani plopped
down next to her as the bus rolled toward the gate.

Stop-and-go traffic was unheard
of in Ohneka Falls, so the fourth time they lurched to a stop Ani raised her
head to look out the window. In the distance, a forest of tents and canopies
surrounded the village center.

“Oh, right,” she said. She’d
forgotten about the First Annual Zombie Festival, wherein all things
zombie-clichéd would be celebrated with deep-fried cheesecake on a stick,
carnival rides, and absolutely no costumes under any circumstances whatsoever...or
so promised the festival organizers.

In this
economy, anything that brings in money can’t be all bad.

Outside Lydia’s church, Pastor
John read from a thick red Bible in front of a pyre of palettes. Chained to
them were straw dummies in bright orange helmets. Across the street, a legion
of black-clad, ankh-wearing adults heaped Bibles onto their own pile of
palettes. Each group eyed the other with hateful expressions.

Okay, maybe it
can.

The bus trundled by, and pulled
up to the school only five minutes behind schedule. They clanked through the
halls during the announcements, dragged themselves up the stairs, and entered
the classroom at 8:07. Miss Pulver sat in her usual seat, crocheting, but Mr.
Foster’s desk sat vacant.

“Think I scared him off?” Sam
asked.

Miss Pulver shook her head. “Mister
Foster will be up in a minute. He’s greeting our new student.”

The class fell silent. Mr.
Clark cleared his throat.

“New...student?” Ani asked.

There can’t be
another zombie. There just can’t.

“Yes,” Miss Pulver said. “He
should—”

The door opened. They all
turned to look. The man at Mr. Foster’s shoulder overshadowed him by half a
foot and was half again broader at the shoulders. His black hair stood in a
short-cropped flat-top, and his dumb smile matched Mike’s.

“Holy shit,” Devon said.

Mr. Foster giggled. “Class,
meet Jeff. Jeff, class.”

“Hi, Jeff!” Mike said.

“Hi,” he said back.

Nobody else said anything, and
Jeff made no move to sit, so Ani improvised. “Have a seat, Jeff.” Jeff smiled
at her, but didn’t move.

“No, seriously,” Devon said. “What’s
he doing here?”

Mr. Foster’s constipated grimace
said all it needed to, but of course he spoke anyway. “Budget cuts. He needs an
8-1-1 per his IEP, and this is all we’ve got.”

“What?” Kyle asked.

Mr. Foster threw up his hands. “It’s
not my fault. I didn’t sign up for any of this.” He giggled. “They hired me for
English RTI.”

He led Jeff by his shoulders to
Joe’s old seat, and Ani’s heart burned.
No! You can’t!
Dammit, yes they
could, and it didn’t even matter. She caught Sam’s pitying look in the corner
of her eye, but it vanished as fast as it came.

Jeff sat, folded his hands, and
looked at the blank wood veneer in front of him.

“Jeff?” Mr. Foster asked. “Do
you want to say hello to the class?”

Jeff nodded without looking up.

At the edge of her hearing, Ani
heard Lydia ask Teah, “What’s wrong with him?”

“He’s just got a concussion. He’ll
be fine.”

Ani wasn’t sure if she believed
it, but from Lydia’s relieved sigh, she did.
Close enough, for now.

For his part, Jeff wiped a
string of drool from his mouth, then giggled.

Yup. Fits
right in.

*   *   *

That night, the town shook. Ani
cranked Nine Inch Nails just so Trent Reznor’s noise would drown out the
incessant bass of the battle of the bands. That, and the sirens. She tried not
to think about what the incessant droning of the fire station’s alarm and the
constant whine of police sirens might mean.

She thought about the last
Halloween she’d spent free, working at the Dragon’s Lair for Travis’s vampire
party. That was the first time Dylan had been really, truly aggressive.

A shotgun
roared.

Dylan’s headless
corpse collapsed onto Mike, who gasped for air on the ground. Ani’s mom stepped
over him, shotgun in her right hand, meat cleaver in the left. “Did he bite
you?”

“Um...” Mike said.
He worked his mouth and nothing came out.

She dropped
the shotgun and backhanded him.

“Did he bite you?”

Mike held up
his right hand. His index finger bore teeth marks, ragged and bloody. Her mom
stepped on his wrist and brought the cleaver down.

Ani’s whole body spasmed. A
moment of panic gripped her as she pictured Joe, coughing up the last moments
of his life. She lashed out, and the bath—her nightly coffin—shuddered at the
impact. She screamed, her anguish muffled by the icy liquid, so she screamed
again.

Tearless sobs wracked her. She
beat against the lid, the pain in her knuckles nothing compared to that in her
chest. At some point she stopped, and nothing had changed.

She waited for morning, got up,
and went to school.