Special Dead (2 page)

“Miss Pulver, the injunction is
in place until the Second District Court makes its verdict. Until then, the
Ohneka Falls School District is obligated to educate these
children
.”
She emphasized the last word. “Some of us are overjoyed that the lower court
felt the need to put the injunction in place, regardless of the cost, because a
society that chooses not to educate children because they are sick is no moral
society at all.”

Miss Pulver averted her gaze. “Yes,
Miss Romero.”

“Doctor,” Sarah said.

“Yes, Doctor.”

Way to make
friends, Mom.

“Now, I’m here to make
introductions. Let’s make this as pleasant as possible.” There was nothing
pleasant in Sarah's smile as she faced the class. “Mr. Foster comes to us from
SUNY Geneseo, where he recently earned his bachelor’s degree in special
education. I believe you all know Miss Pulver.” Miss Pulver twiddled her fingers
and smiled. “Mr. Clark you know.” She nodded at the man with the flamethrower,
and he nodded back. Ani was happy for a familiar face, even if she couldn’t see
it behind the visor. She liked Mr. Clark, and he seemed to like them, even if
he was paid to convert them to small piles of ash if they started acting funny.
“The guards outside the door will rotate on a daily basis. You will not get to
know them.”

“Now, to establish some ground rules.”
She touched the smart board and opened a PowerPoint presentation. She narrated
as she flipped through slides. “All school rules are in effect at all times. This
includes swearing.” She looked at Kyle, who shrugged, and Devon, who averted
her gaze. “In addition to appropriate dress, you’ll wear your helmets and leg
shackles whenever we’re not at the lab and will be chained in a line when
moving through the halls. Any attempt to remove any of these protective devices
will result in the suspension of the program for everyone, and Mr. Clark will deal
with the offender.”

It took Dr. Romero five agonizing
minutes to outline everything they couldn’t do: leave the room without escort, be
in the halls when classes changed, use sharp objects, get within arm’s reach of
non-zombies, touch the big red button on the wall....

Their fire drill procedure was
pretty simple: stay put until everyone else was out of the building, then
follow Mr. Benson, who would come up to lead them.

When she finished she didn’t
ask for questions, but Kyle raised his hand anyway. She favored him with a cool
glare.

“What?”

“So what happens to us if we
swear?”

Ani tried not to roll her eyes
as her mother answered.

“Our options for discipline are
limited, Kyle. Just remember that Doctor Banerjee and I control every aspect of
your life and have gone out of our way to make it as pleasant as possible. That
doesn’t have to continue. Any other questions?” Her tone made it clear that she
wouldn’t be taking any more questions. She looked at Mr. Foster. “They’re all
yours. Good luck. Call if you need me.”

She walked out of the room.

Kyle muttered, “Your mom’s a
bitch.”

Yeah, but she’s
my bitch.

The door locked with a clang. Mr.
Foster giggled.

It was going to be a long year.

*   *   *

Sarah talked through a bite of
mashed potatoes. “Is it just me or is Kyle more obnoxious than normal?”

Ani smirked. “I don’t think it’s
professional for an administrator to talk about students in that way, Mom.”

“Do you think it’s because he’s
back in school?” She washed down another bite of potatoes with a sip of Diet
Coke.

No, I think it’s
because his dad’s a drunken redneck and his mom’s a meth-head with a negative
IQ. Plant corn, get corn.
“Maybe. He was a bully before prom, and now he’s
an outcast. He’s probably feeling self-conscious. It’s not like we’re
conspicuous or anything. The helmets were a rude surprise.”

Her mom shoved a spear of
asparagus into her mouth, then scraped the rest of the food into the garbage.
“It was part of the deal, sweetie.” She put her plate in the sink.

Their little apartment in the
lab wasn’t much, but at least it was private space.
Sort of private.
Ani
did her best to ignore the security cameras that covered every inch of every
room.

“How’d it go at the doctor’s
today, Mom?”

“I’d rather not talk about it.”

Ani bit her lip. “That’s not
the deal.”
No secrets.

Sarah sighed. “The new medicine
is awesome, but it makes me so tired. I feel like such a grouch all the time
because I don’t have the energy to both get my job done and be nice.”

And this is
different from normal, how?

“Between Doctor Banerjee and
the new superintendent and school board, I get a mountain of paperwork every
day, but it doesn’t seem to matter how fast I get it done. There’s always more.”
She collapsed onto the sofa and put her feet on the coffee table. “Still, it
beats the alternative.”

Ani got up from the table and
sat at the upright piano. She missed her baby grand, but there was no room for
it in the tiny apartment. “Alternative?” She coaxed a few bars from the keys,
piano
dolce
.

“What’s that?” Sarah asked.

“Giazotto’s Adagio in G Minor. I’m
adapting it to piano.”

“I thought it sounded familiar.”
She raised her voice as she went into the bedroom. “So anyway, being dead.”

“What?”

“Being dead is the other
alternative. I don’t mean dead like you, I mean
dead
.”

A year earlier, when Ani woke
in Dr. Banerjee’s lab, strapped to a table and reeking like the decomposing
corpse she was, she had assumed that she was in Arizona and that her mother was
dead from cancer. She’d never been happier to be wrong or to hear her mother’s
voice.

The miracle remission was
almost complete, and her mother showed little sign of the exhaustion that had
plagued her the previous year. Ani wasn’t sure if there was a God that loved
her or if she was just the luckiest person to ever contract ZV; she just knew
that she didn’t deserve a second chance and was happy to have it.

Sarah’s voice startled her. “Penny
for your thoughts?”

“Oh, I was just daydreaming,” Ani
hollered over the piano.

“About?”

Never one to
let things go, are you, Mom?

Ani pressed Middle C and held
it, gathering her thoughts. “Mike, mostly. The others, the ones who didn’t make
it.”
Not Mike. Don’t talk about Mike.
“Mr. Cummings and Mrs. Weller. How
are they doing, anyway?”

Her mom came out of the bedroom
wearing her jogging suit. “Not too bad. Their grievance is sort of tracking
Romero versus Ohneka Falls through the courts. I think they have a hearing or
something next week with the arbitration panel.”

“So they might be coming back?”

“I hardly think they’ll be
welcome, but the lab will cover the additional expense and the District might
not have a leg to stand on. They were infected in the line of work, after all.”
Chaperoning the prom.
“So yeah, I think they might be coming back.”
Good
save.
“So, what about Mike?”
Damn.

“It was so sad watching him in
school today, trying to add three-digit integers. He’s just so...dumb.”
Because
I ate a chunk of his frontal lobe.

Sarah bent down and touched her
toes. She wasn’t as limber as she had been a year ago, before Mike’s dad had
moved on to a younger woman. “These new regeneratives are pretty impressive. Once
we cure you guys, he’ll probably gain back most of his neural functionality.”

Ani closed her eyes. “I hope so.”
She put her hands on the keys and started to play. It wasn’t ready to record
yet, not even for YouTube, much less to go through the bother of writing it
down.

“Back in a bit, honey,” her mom
said as she left.

Chapter

2

The next day there weren’t quite as
many protesters, but the creepy cultists were still on the sidewalk outside Wegmans.
A fender bender in front of them delayed the bus a few minutes, so they got to
school in the middle of the announcements. As they lurched and clanked their
way through the school, Ani took the opportunity to peer into some of the other
classrooms. They were half empty. All of them.

“Where is everybody?” Lydia
asked.

“My dad says attendance is down
almost sixty percent,” Samantha said. Sam’s dad was on the school board and was
one of the most vocal opponents of the ZV mainstreaming program. According to
Sam, it wasn’t that he didn’t love his daughter, he just felt that it was too
risky to let the living and the dead socialize.

The dead. The
Special Dead.
Ani had heard the term the day before when Principal Leoni said it. Adults
always talked about teenagers as if they weren’t even standing there, but now
it was worse. Miss Bell had called them “the corpses” when she was taking
attendance, but even that was better than Mr. Gursslin. Mr. Gursslin sneered,
crossed himself, and slammed the door when they went by.

*   *   *

Ani was trying to figure out
what a derivative was when the period-change bell rang. Her precalculus book
looked like it was written in English, and it sounded like English when you
read it out loud, but it was written in some kind of sadistic, torturous code
she couldn’t decipher. Mr. Foster was useless. Since Ani was ahead of everyone
but Devon and Sam in every subject, her formal “education” consisted of “peer–modeling”
and tutoring her classmates.

I’m never
going to pass the finals.
She sighed.
What a cheery freaking thought for
the second day of school.

When the fourth-period bell
rang, Mr. Foster looked up from Teah’s desk. “Okay, kids, it’s yard time.”

Everyone looked at him.

“Yard time?” Joe asked.

“You can’t do traditional
physical education, so the school decided to give you forty minutes outside every
day. In the yard.” He giggled. “Yard time.”

Huh.

They sat there, eight kids in
utter stillness, not even breathing.

“How do we get down there?”
Devon looked from Mr. Foster to the barred door.

Mr. Benson’s arrival answered
her question. He clapped his hands several times before the door had finished
creaking open. “Let’s go, kids. I don’t have all day.”

Teah snorted as they stood. “Isn’t
this what you do all day?”

He glared at her. “Single file,
no monkey business. Mr. Clark, you take up the rear.”

Kyle grinned. “That’s what she—”

“Don’t,” Sam said. “I’ll have
to kill you. Again.”

“Oh, yeah!” Joe said. He
laughed. “You were the one who bit Kyle, weren’t you?”

“After Mike got Steve and Steve
got me,” Sam said as they filed out of the room. Steve hadn’t made it.

“Um,” Lydia said. “Did they
ever figure out how it all started?”

“No,” Ani lied. “They think
maybe Dylan”—
who Mom turned into a zombie to use for medical experiments—“
infected
somebody before he died.”
Before Mom blew his head off.
“No one’s sure
how he lasted so long without treatment.” Ani looked at Mike, who smiled at her.

Please don’t
remember what I did to you. Please. For a hundred reasons, don’t.

“That kid was a freak,” Devon
said.

“My mom said it would’ve been a
lot worse,” Joe said, “if the army and Doctor Banerjee’s team weren’t already
in the area because of Dylan.”

“Yeah,” Kyle said. “Because twenty-six
dead and ten zombies is just fucking awesome.”

“Language, Kyle,” Miss Pulver
said.

“Sorry, Miss Pulver.”

Kate Jackson rounded the corner
and stared at them, eyes wide behind hipster glasses. Ani froze. Devon’s former
minion, Kate was now a senior and captain of the soccer team. She’d really
grown up, and the boys’ varsity jacket she wore almost kept her tiny white dress
from being indecent.
There’s no way that skirt’s past her fingertips.

“Hi, Kate,” Devon said. It was
weird seeing Devon as the tentative one.

Kate stepped back, her lip
curled in a sneer. “Get away from me, freak.” She turned and half-ran down the
hall.

Devon stood there, mouth open,
until Teah grabbed her arm.

“C’mon, let’s go.”

Their shackles jangled on the
stairs. When the group got to the bottom, a black-haired boy Ani didn’t
recognize gaped at them from next to the drinking fountain. He wore jeans, a
black T-shirt, and a silver ankh on a chain around his neck. He put his palms
together, closed his eyes, and gave them a small bow. “Welcome back, sacred friends,”
he said in a high, prepubescent voice. And then he stayed like that, eyes
closed, half bowed, while they passed. He couldn’t have been more than thirteen.

“Some of the new kids are f...”
Kyle looked at Miss Pulver, “freaking weird.” Miss Pulver nodded her approval.

Mr. Benson led them out a steel
door that Ani didn’t remember from before. The “yard” was about the size of a
soccer field, closed off from the rest of the campus by a chain-link fence
topped with barbed wire. It abutted the main fence about ten feet from the
sidewalk on Mechanic Street. The sky was overcast, but it was still warm. As
soon as they were all out, Mr. Benson cleared his throat.

“The fence is twenty thousand
volts. More than enough to cook a zombie. So don’t touch it. Just like at the
lab, the snipers aren’t trained to wound, so behave.” He stepped inside and
closed the door. Ani heard a loud click. There was no handle on the outside.

Mike lay down on the turf next
to a half-inflated kickball. Joe sat next to him. The insects in the grass scattered
in blind, mindless panic.

Kyle found a stick and started
scratching it against the brick wall. Ani made a mental note to make sure he
didn’t try to smuggle it inside.

“So,” Sam said, “we just, like,
hang out?”

Devon snorted.

Ani sat against the wall,
closed her eyes, and kept working on her music.
Well, this is physically educational.

*   *   *

Joe tried to help Mike with
addition, ticking off numbers on his fingers.

Devon’s face twisted in a mask
of rage behind her math textbook. “This is bullshit,” she whispered. “I’m not
learning
anything
.”

Ani could only nod in agreement.
“I know. How do they expect to teach eight kids six different subjects all at
the same time?”

“It doesn’t help,” Devon said
through teeth clamped down on her bite guard, “that our teacher is just out of
diapers and thinks we’re going to eat him. Tee-hee.”

Sam snorted. “Will you two shut
up? I’m supposed to be in AP English, not reading the
Lord of the Goddamned Flies
again.” Ani wondered if it’d be possible to smuggle in books they actually
wanted to read.
Probably not.

“Miss Kickbush?” Mr. Foster
asked. “Do you have something you want to share with the class?”

Sam grabbed the sides of her
helmet with both hands, as if trying to pull out her hair. “No, Mr. Foster. If
I have something to share, you’ll know it.”

Mr. Foster giggled. That titter
was skyrocketing up Ani’s list of least favorite sounds. In a day and a half it
had passed “dogs howling” and was set to overtake “little girls on fire” in a
matter of moments.

“Well,” he said, “can you help Teah
with her questions?”

Sam banged her head on the
desk, causing a crayon mass-suicide. Still face down, she said, “I’d be
delighted to.”

Teah looked up from her
worksheet. “What’d I do?”

*   *   *

At the lab, Ani stepped off the
bus and let Mr. Benson unlock her mouth guard. It felt good to take off their
helmets. As Mr. Benson unlocked Sam’s, her hair fell in blonde rivulets to her
shoulders.

“That’s so not fair,” Lydia
said.

Kyle hissed, and Joe nudged Lydia
with his elbow. Grinning, Joe said, “And what’s fair?”

They’d made a deal almost a
year before:  being dead was hard enough without constant whining about it. Nobody
was supposed to complain that anything was unfair.

Lydia rolled her eyes. “A four-letter
‘eff’ word.” She jutted an accusing finger at Sam. “But look at her hair!”

Lydia was right. Sam’s hair
looked almost perfect right out of the helmet. The rest of them wore wigs,
except the boys, who claimed not to care. Even so, there was no point
complaining about “fair” when you were one of ten people on the planet unlucky
enough to be the walking dead.

Sam smiled. “It’s only a matter
of time, Lydia. One of these days we’ll have a cure, and no one will have to go
through this ever again.”

Joe chuckled. “It’s not like we
chose to be this way. If I had to choose a monster, I’d be Godzilla.”

Ani tried not to smile, and
failed. “Sparkly vampire, Joe. That’s where it’s at.”

A blue Audi four-seater
screeched to a halt next to the bus. Sarah Romero had bought the car seven
years before, when she was still a practicing surgeon, and liked it enough to
keep paying for repairs instead of getting a new one. She got out, stretched,
and waved. Mike waved back.

“I got them from here, Frank,”
she said. Mr. Benson gave her a curt nod and walked off without another word. Ani
had the impression he didn’t much like his job. “Okay, kids, homework first,
free time until nine, and then bath time.”

Nobody bothered to complain. Every
night from 9:00 pm until 6:00 am they soaked in the “bath”—a noxious mix of
formaldehyde, regeneratives, and ice. At least now they had their own rooms so
they could listen to their own music. Kyle liked alt-punk and thrash metal,
Devon preferred silence, and Lydia liked pop and dubstep. Ani’s tastes meshed
with Lydia’s, but Ani also liked classical music, which Lydia hated.

Her mother tapped her shoulder,
shattering her reverie. “You okay, sweetie?”

“Yeah. Just thinking.” They
stepped toward the lab and Ani’s thoughts turned to the ride to school. “What’s
up with the weirdos outside Wegmans? The ones all in black? I think we met one
of them in school today.”

“Yeah, those guys are creepy,”
Lydia said, hugging herself.

“Since the injunction allowed
you kids to come back to school, a lot of people moved out of town, but others
have been trickling in. A weird group. They started some kind of pagan church
up on Vine Street.”

Devon raised an eyebrow. “Are
they dangerous?”

Kyle snorted. “What’s going to
be dangerous to us?”

Joe grinned. “Nothing would be
dangerous to me if I were Godzilla! RAWR!” He clawed the air and stomped around
in a circle. Mike laughed and clapped his hands.

“All right, guys. Homework time.”
Sarah pointed toward the lab door. Joe stomped in that direction, Mike and Kyle
at his heels. A final roar and they were inside.

“Boys,” Teah said.

“Men are no smarter,” Sarah
said. “Just bigger.” She followed the boys inside.

Teah’s voice dropped to a
conspiratorial whisper. “Bill’s coming to visit next week.”

“Is he on leave?” Devon asked.

Teah flashed her eyes. “Not
exactly.” Ani and Sam exchanged looks.

“And how ‘exactly’ is he going
to visit?” Devon pulled off her blonde wig, ran her hand over her puckered
scalp, and put it back on.

Teah pouted. “We just want to
see each other, you know, through the fence? It’s been a year.” The whine in
her voice put Ani’s teeth on edge.

“Just don’t do anything stupid,”
Ani said. Ani knew first-hand that zombism didn’t suppress hormonal stupidity. Bill
going AWOL from the army to see his dead girlfriend was already stupid. Anything
beyond that was a bonus prize.