Special Dead (24 page)

“Okay. I’m okay. You can let me up.”

Dr. Banerjee stared at her until she averted her
gaze, then turned to Sarah. “No more surprises. If you disobey, she burns. If
she disobeys, you both burn. Acceptable?”

Her mom said nothing for a long moment, then
finally nodded. “I accept.”

He turned and left without another word.

Chapter

34

Ani
stepped into the lounge at 11:50 am, in the middle of class, almost three weeks
since they’d first locked her away. Everyone looked at her in abject surprise,
but only Sam’s face transitioned to worry.

“Where the hell have you been?” Devon asked, at
the same time Mr. Cummings said, “The prodigal daughter returns!”

Chunks of flesh and tattered
blue dress and liquid red streaks across the wall.
Ani blinked the memory away. “Nowhere.
I had a bad reaction to a new serum, I guess.” The agreed-upon falsehood
screamed its lack of authenticity, but they all seemed to buy it.

“Shit,” Sam said. “You’d think they’d tell us.”

“Mushrooms,” Mr. Cummings said. Mrs. Weller nodded
as if that made some kind of sense.

“What—”

Arms wrapped her from behind and squeezed the air
from her lungs. She patted Mike’s forearms, the only things she could reach
while he pinned her arms. She tried to breath in and couldn’t, so she waited
for him to let go.

When his arms slacked, she turned around and
smiled, inches from his lips.

“Hi,” he said.

She struggled back against his loving embrace,
putting a full foot between them only by pushing on his chest. “Hi, Mike. How
are you?”

“I missed you,” he said. He raised his eyebrows,
but his eyes remained dead. “Want to play Jenga?”

At that moment she wanted to hurt something or
someone, more than she ever had before. Her suffering, her pain, her anguish, screamed
for release. She looked into his eyes and she smothered it.

“Sure, Mike. Let’s play Jenga.”

He clapped in anticipation as he trotted over to
the box.

“Shit,” Devon said. “We just played four games.”

The third time the tower fell, Mr. Cummings handed
her an envelope. The front said,
Ani
in Tiffany’s impeccable
calligraphy. She opened it and forced a smile through impotent, murderous rage.

Tiff lay in a hospital bed, cradling a pair of
infants, wrinkled little trolls swaddled in fluffy pink. Ani wanted to scream,
to cry, to lash out and hurt something, anything, anyone, and instead she
smiled. She told herself she was happy for Tiff, happy for the children to have
a mother who cared, no matter how screwed up that mother was, and yet all she
could see was Shaylah.

Who were you? Is your mother
dead, too, or does she miss you? What did you die for? What is there to
protect? What is there that matters?

“Are you okay?” Devon asked.

Ani put up her hand, turned away from them, and closed
her eyes. By the time she’d recovered, they were knee-deep in the Russian
Revolution. Mrs. Weller gave her a concerned glance as she pulled herself
together but continued with the lesson. When she felt able, Ani pulled a chair
up next to them. She almost lost it again under the weight of their sympathetic
scrutiny, but with closed eyes and a few deep, unnecessary breaths, she managed
to stay with them.

After school, she wrote Tiffany a reply—three
short lines congratulating her on the birth of her babies—and sat at the piano.
She didn’t play, only sat, until her mother got home from the lab and told her
to get in the bath. As she sank into the cold fluid, Shaylah’s innocent face
filled her vision. Ani wasn’t contagious, which meant Shaylah was truly dead,
not stuck in the bowels of the lab awaiting possible rescue.
But what about
the rest of them?

*  
*   *

Devon passed Ani her twenty-five-week report card.
“Remember that bitch Kate?”

Ani looked at the card—straight A’s, same as her
own and Sam’s. And Mike’s, for that matter. “Kate Jackson?”
You mean, the
girl who idolized you and became you once you became one of us?

“Yeah. What do you think she’ll do when she
realizes I’m going to be valedictorian?”

Sam snorted. “She'll bitch that you padded your
GPA with easy classes?”

“I did not!”

Sam threw up her hands. “She took four AP classes to
your none, and her GPA is almost as high. Take out art and philosophy, and you’re
behind her almost a full point.”

Ani didn’t bother mentioning that Sam, not Devon,
would be salutatorian in that case, and with three more AP courses than Kate.
Sam did it for her.

“If they curved AP classes the way they said they
were going to, I’d be valedictorian, Kate would be second, and you’d be third.”

Devon’s smug smile held no joy. “But they don’t.”

“No,” Sam said. “They don’t.”

“So that’s it,” Devon said. “I’m on top.”

“Conga-rats,” Sam said. Ani couldn’t tell whether
or not she cared and was faking it or just didn’t care.

“What’s your speech going to be?” Ani asked.

Devon bit her lip. “Hmmm...I’ll have to think about
it.”

*  
*   *

The following Monday, Ani got two pieces of mail: 
an acceptance letter to the University of Rochester’s Eastman School of Music,
and acceptance to RIT for graphic design. Harsh reality tempered her elation.

“Mom,” she looked up from the kitchen table, “both
of these assume I’m attending next fall.”

“Well,” her mom said, “that’s pretty typical for a
graduating senior.”

“I’m not a typical graduating senior!”

Her mom sighed. “No, sweetie, you’re not. Next
step, I suppose, is to have Mr. Murphy call them about deferred enrollment.”

“As in, deferred until I’m cured,”
which could
be never
, “or deferred until the Supreme Court says I’m a person?”
Which
could also be never and would involve a whole heap of costs for them.

“Whichever, I suppose.”

“But—”

“I’ll talk to Mr. Murphy tomorrow and see what he
has to say. I’m sure he’ll go to bat for you.”

*  
*   *

Sam got her acceptance letters to Baylor and
Vanderbilt, and Devon to Brockport and Fredonia. They had a mini “does this
even matter” party, complete with a cake nobody ate, though Mike had fun
playing with it.

The following Tuesday, RIT rescinded her
acceptance in a curt, three-line e-mail to her mom. Friday, the U of R followed
suit, though at least they sent a letter...which included an invitation to talk
to a virology professor at Strong Memorial Hospital.

The week before Easter, Mr. Murphy came to the lab
to talk to Devon. She’d already heard from Geneseo—they wouldn’t be admitting
her—but held out hope for Brockport. She took the in-person visit as a good
sign and smiled over her shoulder as they went into the room across the hall to
talk.

School was over, so Mr. Cummings and Mrs. Weller
had gone back to wherever they spent their nights. Mike played Mario Kart by
himself on the Xbox, while Ani tried to show Sam the basics of acrylic on
canvas.

“WHAT?” Devon’s screech carried across the hall. “THIS
IS TOTAL FUCKING BULLSHIT!”

Ani reached the door a step behind Sam, to see Mr.
Murphy backing into the hall, hands raised in a defensive posture. “I’m sorry,
Devon, it’s not my call. The board decided—”

Devon shattered a wall tile with her fist, then
kicked the fragments down the hall. Mr. Murphy backed away as the burn team stepped
forward. Devon gave them a sweet smile ruined by her bite guard, then sat down,
hands on her head.

Her knuckles showed exposed white bone dusted with
powder from the shattered tile. “Sorry,” she sulked. “It won’t happen again.”

Eyes wide with fear, Mr. Murphy uttered an apology
and scampered down the hall, toward the main exit. The burn team settled back,
then turned and walked away—with no humans to endanger, there was no need for
their protection. Devon moved her hands down to her face and shook.

Sam sat on her left. Ani took her right. After a
few minutes, she removed her hands and glowered at the wall. Ani hazarded a
question.

“You want to talk—”

“Not really. Yeah. It’s just so fucking unfair.”

Ani exchanged a glance with Sam. That Devon would
bring up fairness, after all this....
A breakdown of the social order
,
Mr. Cummings would call it.

“What’s unfair?” Sam asked.

“I’m not valedictorian.”

Sam snorted. “You’ve got the highest GPA.”

“Doesn’t matter.”

“Why’s that?” Ani asked.

Devon formed air quotes with her fingers. “I’m not
in the ‘right cohort.’ Whatever the hell that means. Basically, if I’d have
graduated two years ago, I’d be on top. Now...” she shook her head. “Now I’m
just another shithead.”

“I lost Baylor,” Sam said. “Vanderbilt can’t be
far behind.”

Devon snarled. “I could just fucking kill somebody.”

Ani closed her eyes and thought of Shaylah, alone
and starving, locked in for days with the monster that would ultimately devour
her. As shitty—as
unfair
—as it was, she couldn’t summon the energy to
care about Devon’s class rank.

“Or,” Sam said, “you could do what I’m doing. The
University of Phoenix doesn’t care that we’re dead, and it might not be Ivy,
but it’s a college.”

“Because that matters,” Devon said.

Sam rolled her eyes and pushed herself to her
feet. She grabbed Ani’s hand, hauled her up, and they left Devon sulking on the
hallway floor. “So,” Sam said as they sat back down at their canvases, “how
come when you mix colors you get all kinds of cool stuff, but when I mix colors
all I get is brown?”

Ani was halfway through an explanation about warm
and cold colors when she noticed that Devon no longer sat in the hall.

Whatever.

*  
*   *

With nothing better to do and nowhere they could
go, they held class through Easter vacation. Sam spent most of her time
cramming for AP English, calculus, and physics—the latter two without help—while
Ani concentrated on AP US History and AP Literature. Not vying for AP credit,
Devon spent much of the week playing chess with Mr. Cummings. She won more than
she lost, but he held his own.

As the AP exams approached, the world condensed
into immediate problems. Class focused on the AP exams, after school time was
spent with review books instead of at the piano, and Sarah administered
practice exams twice a week. They started off pretty bad but got better as time
went on. Ani had a hard time caring but, with nothing else to do, went through
the motions. The distraction helped.

Midway through April, Dr. Banerjee interrupted the
intense, marathon studying with an announcement. He called a meeting that
included all the zombies, Dr. Freeman, Mr. Benson, several people in lab coats
and others in military uniforms that Ani didn’t recognize, and Ani’s mom. They
crammed into a small auditorium, the zombies shunted off to one side, with a
buffer of armed men between them and the rest of the audience.

Dr. Banerjee tapped the microphone, then leaned in
close so that he didn’t have to raise his voice. “Thank you for coming. I’ve
called you here to make two announcements. The first and less important
announcement is:” He cleared his throat. “Preliminary indications from Supreme
Court justices are that they are not in favor of personhood for zombies.”

He continued over the top of their anxious mutters.
“The second and more important announcement is that I’ve received executive
imprimatur to continue our research regardless of the outcome of the case. We
expect that life around the lab will continue very much as it has, although I’m
afraid that, should the court rule against personhood this summer, no
non-living persons will be allowed outside under any circumstances.”

Sam raised her hand, and he gestured to her. “Who
knows about this?”

“The people in this room and a few high-ranking
government officials.”

“I assume, Colonel,” Mr. Benson said, “that this
won’t remain the case for long?” Dr. Banerjee nodded. “And that there’ll be new
security protocols?”

“There will. Personnel will be briefed on a
need-to-know basis.”

Mr. Benson gave a satisfied nod and stepped back.
As soon as he did, a blond man Ani didn’t recognize, wearing a white lab coat
over blue jeans, put up his hand. “I hate to be that guy, but with an increased
threat from anti-zombie crazies, will we be getting an increase in hazard pay?”

The question-and-answer period lasted twenty
minutes past when Ani had stopped paying attention. Later that day, they
interrupted class to watch the mayor announce an agreement with the Department
of Homeland Security to raze and replace four vacant buildings in downtown to
serve as a new DHS “Class Five Bioterrorism” training facility. Behind the
podium to his left stood Dr. Freeman.

“Excuse me, Mr. Mayor,” a female reporter said,
shoving a microphone toward the podium. “What is this facility supposed to do,
exactly?”