Special Dead (22 page)

Chapter

32

The
next day, Mr. Foster came to them, along with Mr. Cummings and Mrs. Weller. No
helmets, no burn team, no shackles. It was another day at the lab, with one
twitchy, special-education certified civilian to take care of Mike, and
electronic locks on the doors.

“What about Jeff?” Sam asked.

Mr. Foster giggled. “Jeff’s been outsourced to
another school, to better utilize the educational facilities there.”

“Hell,” Mrs. Weller muttered to Mr. Cummings, but
loud enough for the room, “he sounds like an administrator.”

Mr. Cummings elbowed her in the ribs. “Wait to see
if he
utilizes
the
discipline piece
. Then we’ll know for sure.”

“Can I help you?” Mr. Foster asked, somehow
without giggling.

“I doubt it,” Mrs. Weller said. “Unless you
smuggled in a retirement buyout.”

He giggled. “They didn’t let me bring anything in.”

Mr. Cummings stage-whispered, “They
utilized
the
security piece
.”

“Aaah,” Mrs. Weller said.

A bemused look on his face, Mr. Foster sat next to
Mike and handed him a pencil—not a crayon, but an honest-to-goodness pencil.
They talked in low tones, while Sam, Devon, and Ani sat with the dead teachers.

They spent the day trading off between teachers,
learning and intertwining history, philosophy, English, economics, government,
and even a little bit of statistics. Both teachers were useless at science and
knew no precalc or calculus, and they all spent a lot of time looking things up
on computers and in their e-texts, but by the end of the day everyone looked as
mentally exhausted as Ani felt.

The teachers left at 3:30 pm, though where the
dead ones went wasn’t clear. Ani smiled at Devon. “Wow. If every day could be
like that—”

Devon turned her back on Ani, and Sam joined her.

“Oh, come on, guys. What do you want me to do?”

They didn’t move.

Ani sighed. “You know what, fine. You want to act
like we’re all kids and this is some silly game, cool. I grew out of that
bullshit a long time ago.”

She walked home, played the piano for an hour, and
looked up in surprise when the door opened.

Dr. Herley gave a short, conductor’s bow in
greeting, slipped off his shoes, and approached the piano.

“What is this I hear coming down the hall?”

“Nothing, really. Something I’ve been working on.”
If Deadmau5 ate Beyoncé and vomited up music....
“It’s not even finished
yet.”

“Play it.”

She did, conscious of his every fidget. Her hands
stuttered on several chords.

“Again.”

She repeated it with a little more confidence.

“I hate it. One more time.”

She was halfway through when pain exploded in her
temple. She jerked to the side, rolled off the bench, and looked up. Dr. Herley’s
face was twisted into a rictus of hatred. His left hand was balled into a fist,
his right clutching a pencil like a dagger, the tip glistening with gray
matter.

Is that
my
brain?

She lifted her hand to her temple and had just
felt the hole when he dived on top of her, pinning her arms to her sides with
his legs, shrieking about Jesus and judgment and righteousness. Hands together,
he brought the pencil down with the full weight of his body. She jerked, and it
jammed into her neck. She crushed her hands together on his left wrist and felt
the bones crumble under the force. He screamed through gritted teeth, yanked
out the pencil, and stabbed at her eye.

The blow glanced off her forehead with the
sickening sound of tearing meat.

A profound sadness came over her. “Please don’t.”

You can’t kill me. Not like
this. Not without a gun.

His face twisted in rage; he raised his hand
again.

She pulled her right arm free—it took no effort—and
punched him in the sternum. His ribs imploded with a sickening crunch, and
blood showered her from his mouth and nose. He fell to the side. She shoved his
twitching body off her.

She looked at the security camera and at the shuddering,
soon-to-be-corpse and wondered at the fact that she felt almost no craving. She
folded her hands over her head and knelt, facing the camera next to the door.

Blood dripped from her hand into her hair and ran
down her face. An expanding pool of red-black liquid formed around Dr. Herley,
and his chest stopped. His bowels let go in a burst of flatulence.

Nice.

She wondered if she was about to die and wondered
at the fact that she wasn’t much worried about it either way. Dr. Banerjee’s
warning came back to her,
“Violence against the living is unacceptable.”
She
looked at the corpse, in full knowledge that they’d burned Kyle for much less.

She held on to hope. The camera caught everything,
and he wasn’t just trying to take her phone—he had stabbed her in the head with
a pencil. Three times.

There was a soft knock at the door. Without moving
she said, “Come in.”

It creaked open, revealing the baby-faced lunch delivery
boy. “Hey,” he said. “You okay?”

Good start.

“Hey, back. I think I’m okay. Here to burn me?”

He looked at the body, then at her. “No. They saw
everything.” He jerked his head toward the hallway. “Why don’t you come down to
lab and get checked out?”

She got up, feeling a little surreal as she wiped
her bloody hand on her shirt, and followed him out. “So how’d you rate lunch
duty?”

His nervous smile didn’t touch his eyes, which
scanned the hall for potential threats. “A pair of eights and a bad bluff.”

“Nice,” she said. “I hope it wasn’t as bad as you
imagined.”

“Sorry about what happened back there. That can’t
have been easy.”

“No,” Ani said. “It wasn’t.” But it was. Killing Dr.
Herley had been as easy as brushing her hair, back when she had any. She felt...nothing.

Halfway to the lab, her mom rounded the corner,
her face sick with worry, her lab coat wrinkled and stained. “Oh, my God,
sweetie, are you all right?” She grabbed Ani’s head with both hands and twisted
her back and forth, looking at the wounds. She let go after a minute and shooed
everyone down the hall. “Forehead’s ugly but trivial. Neck looks like it missed
the arteries, may have grazed something important if you were alive. How’s your
head?”

Ani shrugged. “I feel fine, actually. It hurt when
he did it, but doesn’t really now.”

“Pardon, ma’am,” the soldier said to her mom. “Aren’t
brain injuries supposed to kill zombies?”

“That’s a common misconception,” her mom said,
voice switching to lecture mode. “A fortunate one in this case. In your typical
zombie, extreme trauma to the frontal lobe can cause sufficient motor problems
that a zombie can no longer move, but as far as we know, the only way to kill a
ZV-infected cell is to destroy it. Fire, acid, certain chemicals.”

“Wait, are you saying that shooting a zombie in
the head doesn’t kill it?”

“Correct.”

“That’s ridiculous. Everyone knows that—”

She whirled on him, exasperated. “How many ‘everyones,’”
she made air quotes, “are experts on zombie physiology, and of those ‘everyones’
how many have you met? It’s not common knowledge, and it doesn’t have to be.
All people need to know is that sufficient brain trauma stops them from being
able to eat you, and fire renders them sterile.”

“What about me?” Ani asked. She pondered the
implications of being unable to move ever again, effectively dead, but still
able to think. Would they bury her? How long would she remain conscious,
rotting in the ground? Without microbes to consume her cells, would she even
rot? Her mom’s answer snapped her out of her reverie.

“A few inches of pencil shoved into your temple?
Pfft. You’ll be fine. Most brain damage comes from lack of oxygen due to
bruising, swelling, improper temperature regulation...all things you don’t have
to worry about. I can already see your motor function is unaffected. Worst
comes to worst you’ll forget our old address or something.”

“That’s so weird,” Ani said.

“Well, be happy about it.”

Blue-eyes said nothing the rest of the way to the
lab, his face schooled to careful neutrality tinged by a frown. Ani thanked him
for the escort. He gave her a curt nod in response. Another nod to her mom, and
he walked off.

“I don’t think he’s happy about that,” Ani said.

Her mom hugged her. “Well, I am.”

*  
*   *

She checked out fine, as promised, and the next
day grunted in surprise to see the local news reporting the tragic accident
that killed renowned composer, conductor, and pianist Dr. Christopher Herley. Authorities
had found his body not far from his Pittsford home, thrown from his car into a
utility pole.

Sam and Devon said nothing to her, as much as
possible pretending she didn’t exist, with the exception of class time, when
they treated her with cool detachment. Part of her felt lonely and hurt, but
the rest didn’t care.

They’ll grow out of it.

Or not.

*  
*   *

“Check this out,” Sam said, pointing at the
computer screen. Devon rolled her chair over behind her, while Ani walked over
with Mr. Cummings and Mrs. Weller.

The headline on NBC.com read AFRICAN STRONGMAN BAKSMATY
DECLARES HIMSELF “EMPEROR IN PERPETUITY.” The publication date was February
5th.

Yesterday.

“So what’s it say?” Mrs. Weller put her hand on
Sam's shoulder.

“Says two months ago he was eighty-seven years
old, dying of cancer, and his main general was set to take over. Now he’s back
in charge and not breathing. But he’s not eating people, either.”

“Oh, how wonderful the world will be,” Mr.
Cummings said, “when despots and politicians can’t die.”

Sam grunted. “That has some interesting
ramifications for the Supreme Court. Appointed for unlife. Yikes.” Sam scrolled
through the article, then clicked images.

“Emperor” Baksmaty was handsome in a wizened way,
and his appearance had changed little in the past thirty years. Picture after
picture showed him in a green military uniform bedecked with far too many
ribbons, medals, and pins.

“He looks like the ‘Last King of Scotland,’” Mrs.
Weller said.

“He looks like a Christmas tree,” Devon retorted.

“Much the same.”

A face flashed by on the screen, jolting Ani with
a shock of recognition. “Wait!” she said. Sam stopped. “Scroll up.” Sam did. “Stop.”

Ani tapped the screen with a fingernail. Behind
Emperor Baksmaty stood seven people, one of them white. The white man had a
round face and gray eyes. “I know that guy.”

“Sure you do,” Mrs. Weller said. “From the last party
you went to in West Nigeria or whatever.”

“No, shut up,” she said, ignoring Mrs. Weller’s
scoff of indignation. “That’s the pistol. That’s one of the guys who stole my
blood. The guy they didn’t catch.”

Mr. Cummings frowned. “Who else knows about him?”

“Everyone,” Sam said. “Superintendent Salter put
the camera shot on the website ‘to aid in the manhunt.’ Dad says Banerjee wasn’t
very happy about it.”

“Why would he care?” Devon asked.

“Maybe...” Mr. Cummings said, “that’s not a
rhetorical question.”

Ani pointed at the camera in the corner of the
room. “You know he’s watching, right?”

Mr. Cummings twirled his finger in the air. “Whoop-de-doo.
What’s he going to do, take away our rights?” He surveyed the room with
distaste. “Orwell never dreamed of this place.”

“So what happens when Memespace puts two and two
together?” Sam asked.

“Sorry?” Mr. Cummings asked.

“Both stories hit the international media. Someone’s
bound to notice. What happens when they do?”

*  
*   *

The answer came that evening, when Fox News
reported a “tentative link” between the Ohneka Falls Research Facility—a.k.a.
the ‘Zombie Lab’—and Emperor Baksmaty. Less than an hour later, the roar of
protesters outside almost drowned the news coverage of that same crowd coming
from the TV. The white noise of disjointed chants and screams of rage and
hatred followed Ani to the bath and continued all night.

By morning, the crowd had swelled to
Rockin’
New Year’s Eve
proportions. Ani had no windows to look from, and the yard
was off-limits, but the TV showed crowds choking the streets well past midtown.
A confused mob even picketed the school, despite the lack of zombies there.
With nothing better to do, they held classes as normal—though Mr. Foster couldn’t
attend due to the sea of humanity outside.