Special Dead (25 page)

“It’s my understanding,” he replied, “that there
will be close cooperation between the new facility and the one already in place.”

“Does that mean,” A male reporter said from
off-screen, “that zombies are here to stay?”

He looked at something the camera didn’t catch
before replying. “Yes, it does. Ohneka Falls is going to be the zombie capital
of the world!” He smiled to put a good spin on it, but the flat reaction from
the crowd left him looking like an idiot.

Mr. Cummings muted the TV and opened his arms. “You
know what I just realized? If we don’t get cured, I can never quit. Awesome!”

Sam smirked. “I don’t know about that, Mr. C. One
of these days you’ll run out of stuff to teach us.”

Mrs. Weller snorted. “Don’t count on it.”

*  
*   *

The next two weeks blurred into one long,
agonizing cram session. By the time the exams came, Ani felt well-prepared. She
figured that what amounted to house arrest added up to hundreds of hours of
study time that a lot of students didn’t get—they were too busy with sports and
movies and making out and living their lives. With no lives to live, the girls
found that school wasn’t much of an issue.

Ani felt good coming out of the history exam but
struggled on lit. It seemed to her that whoever wrote the test had a bit of a
fetish for Native American captive literature and had never heard of the likes
of Shakespeare, the Bronte sisters, or Mark Twain. Sam killed English and calculus
but remained nervous about physics that coming Monday.

On Saturday, Devon got the Phase IX injection.

Chapter

34

Tuesday morning, Sam’s jaw dropped
when Devon walked into the lounge. “Holy crap, is that peach fuzz?”

Ani joined them at the door,
going so far as to run her hand over Devon’s head—which was, indeed, sprouting
a covering of downy, blonde hair, almost too fine to see.

“Wow,” Ani said. “How do you
feel?”

Devon took a breath, held it,
and let it out. “It almost feels like that does something...but it doesn’t.”
She ran her fingertips over her scalp. “And that’s new.” She rubbed her
fingertips together in front of her eyes. “Everything feels...tingly.”

“Tingly?” Sam asked.

“Less dull.” She looked at Ani.
“Kind of like what you described, I think. I feel a little, well, normal.”

“Well,” Mr. Cummings said from
inside, “you look dead enough. Class is starting. Let’s go.”

The next morning, Devon’s hair
had grown a full inch, and her cheeks had actual color. By the afternoon she
was breathing, and after school she asked for a meal. They brought her one,
which she took back to her room to eat.

She ate again the next morning
and at lunch. At two o’clock, she coughed, then shuddered. Ani froze, memories
of Joe washing over her, as Devon hunched over, gasping.

“Are you okay?” Sam asked.

She looked up, her face lit
with a dazzling, brilliant smile. “Yeah. I think so. Check this out.” She
grabbed Sam’s hand, pulled out two fingers, and touched them to her neck, just
under her jaw.

Sam’s eyes widened. “That’s a
pulse.”

Devon’s fierce grin punctuated
her reply. “My heart’s beating, bitches.”

*   *   *

Saturday morning, they crowded
into the lab. Ani’s mom stood next to the smart board, her smile triumphant. “That,”
she pointed at a block of cells, “is a group of virus-free, healthy human skin.
Anyone want to guess where I got it?”

Devon raised her hand, and Ani’s
mom swatted it down.

“Anyone who doesn’t already
know?”

“Devon’s cheek?” Sam asked.

Devon laughed.

“Close,” her mom said.

“Yeah,” Devon dimpled her
cheeks with her fingers. “But not these ones.”

“So what does that mean?” Mrs.
Weller asked. “She’s cured?”

Ani’s mom shook her head. “No,
she still has infected cells. We need to wait and see how this plays out, but
it’s very, very promising. Phase IX kills ZV, and, coupled with regenerative
therapy, might make the damaged or dead healthy again.”

“Mom, I think you just cured
cancer.”

She beamed. “Let’s be cautious.
We’ll give it a few days, and keep Devon here in the lab where we can monitor
her closely, and we’ll see how it goes.” She looked at the picture on the
board, then smiled at Ani. “But yeah. We may have just cured lots of things.”

*   *   *

That night, her mom came in the
door, wrapped her in a hug, and spun her around. They said nothing, just
giggled and laughed and hugged until they collapsed at last on the couch, still
laughing.

Ani shook herself to sober up.
Once her elation had calmed to the point where she could speak, she licked her
lips and asked, “What now?”

“Well, like I said, we give it
some time, see what happens. Devon’s body isn’t yet virus-free, and even if we
eliminate every symptom, if she’s still a carrier they’ll never let her free.”

“Ouch,” Ani said. “That goes
for me, too, huh?”

She nodded.

“So how’d you do it?”

Her mom chuckled. “Um, it’s complicated.
Like, twenty years of work complicated. The short version is that we tricked
her body into acting like yours did for the first fourteen years of your life,
then stripped the virus of its protein sheath and killed it with highly toxic
levels of some really nasty antivirals. Ironically, it was the virus itself
that kept her alive—you know, alive-ish—while we killed it. As it weakened, we
could back off on the antivirals and let the regeneratives do the repair.”

“What’s your prognosis?”

“She has almost no trace of the
virus left in her body. I anticipate that in two to three days, she’ll be a
normal twenty-year-old girl—in a seventeen-year-old body.”

Ani ran her tongue over her
teeth. “That’s got some interesting ramifications.”

Her mom didn’t reply.

*   *   *

By Wednesday, Devon’s ZV levels
were undetectable. By Friday, all traces of Phase IX were gone from her body.
Saturday morning, exactly two weeks after the Phase IX treatment, Dr. Banerjee
announced to the lab staff that Devon had been cured, but ordered her into a
two-week quarantine in a hermetically-sealed room just to be safe.

Saturday morning, they all lined
up at the lab for Phase IX. Mrs. Weller went first, then Mr. Cummings, then Sam,
then Mike. Each treatment took twenty minutes.

Ani walked into the lab, hugged
her mom, and sat down on the bed. They had her lie back and strapped an IV to
her left arm. She didn’t feel the needle go in, nor the fluid that followed.
When the bag was empty, her mom pulled out the needle.

“That’s it?” Ani asked.

“Yup. That’s it.”

“Seems...anticlimactic.”

Her mom frowned. “Be grateful.”

“Oh, I am.”

They hugged, and Ani whispered
into her ear. “What about you?”

“Last night.”

They separated, and her mom
kissed her forehead. “Now go play. I’ve got a lot of paperwork to do.”

Ani made it halfway to the
door.

“Mom?”

“Yeah, sweetie?”

“What about all the zombies
downstairs?”

Her eyes flicked toward the
camera, then back to Ani. “They’re next. We didn’t make enough for everyone
right away, and we only have enough baths for a few at a time. Figure two,
three months, and there won’t be any need for this place, ever again.”

*   *   *

That night, Ani hammered on the
piano, the first movement of Franz Liszt’s Sonata in B Minor, a joyous, bouncy
celebration in musical form. She heard a voice, so she lifted her fingers from
the keys.

“What?”

“Can you come here a minute?”
her mom called from the bedroom.

“Sure. I’ll be right in.”

She got up and skipped through
the door into the bedroom. Her mom held up a black and white dress that Ani had
never seen before. “I have a function with some bigwigs at CDC tomorrow, and I
want to alter the buttons on this. Hold it, would you?” She held it up between
Ani and the security camera. “Right like that.”

Ani grabbed it and held it.

“Good.” Her mom let go and
picked up the scissors. As her hand came around the dress, a surgical scalpel
fell out of her sleeve and into her left hand. “Now just hold still.”

Ani grunted as the scalpel
entered her abdomen and smiled to hide a hiss of pain as it drew a line from
her navel to the base of her sternum. “What’s wrong with the buttons as they
are now?”

Her mom pushed her fingers into
the cut, then up. “There’s just something about them I don’t quite like.” On
the last word, she tore her hand out, and Ani grunted in surprise. Her mom held
a microchip attached to a tiny canister, covered in viscous zombie
not-quite-blood. In one fluid motion she dropped it into the sewing box, where
Ani saw one just like it, wiped her hand on Ani’s jeans, and picked up a
button.

She sewed it on, taking the
time to trace two letters—ZV—on Ani’s stomach with her fingertip—then pulled
Ani’s shirt down to cover the wound. She stood, took the dress, held it up to her
neck, and smiled. “What do you think?”

“Better.”

“That’s what I thought. Now get
in the bath—healing is critical at this juncture.”

“Okay, mom.”

Ani took care to shield her
abdomen from the camera in her bedroom as she took off her clothes and slid
into the icy, putrid liquid, her mind aflame.

*   *   *

On Thursday, the Special Dead
ate lunch together. The electric atmosphere skyrocketed when the media got wind
of Devon’s condition—and though Dr. Banerjee was fit to be tied, nobody else
seemed to care that TV crews lined the building and news helicopters circled
overhead. Ani’s mom, decked in a full hazmat suit to keep quarantine, wheeled
in a meal of salad, breadsticks, and soup donated by the Olive Garden. Soft
foods, greens, and soup seemed to be the safest choice as their digestive
systems ramped up to full functionality.

Ani had tried for days to
isolate her mom, get her somewhere that they could talk. With cameras
everywhere and the increasing festivities, the opportunity eluded her. Monday
morning she put on a blouse just so she could lose a button in the lounge. She
beat her mom home by a matter of hours, and rummaged through the sewing box in
plain view of the cameras, but she found nothing—not even a button that
matched. Tuesday they’d all been moved to their own quarantine, separated from
Devon by a polycarbonate window thick enough to stop a truck.

Mike and Devon spent a lot of
time talking through the phone on the wall, looking at each other through the
glass. As his mind healed his memory returned, and he re-learned the truth
about Ani, her mom, Dylan, and prom. Ani tried to talk to him, but he just gave
her a hurt look and walked away. She left him a note, asking not for
forgiveness but just to talk when he felt he was ready. Insight into his mental
state she got second-hand from Sam.

“This is all new to him,
remember? And there’s a lot to be angry for.”

“I know,” Ani said, running her
fingertips along the tile as they walked. “I’m amazed you forgave me.”

“Who said I forgave you?” Ani
shot her a look, and Sam stuck out her tongue. “Seriously, though, life’s too
short for grudges. If anything I’ve learned that.” They hugged. “You did what
you thought you had to, and you followed your heart.” She chuckled. “I guess
you didn’t read enough of the classics.”

“What do you mean?” Ani asked.

Sam ran a hand through her
hair. “Following your heart’s a recipe for disaster, every time. And yet, it’s
what makes us human.”

“Do you think so?”

She snorted. “What the hell do
I know?” She nodded toward the end of the hall, where Mr. Cummings walked
hand-in-hand with Mrs. Weller. Neither of their marriages had survived their
deaths, and a twenty-year difference in age crumbled under their shared
experience. “They’re the worldly ones. Ask them.”

“I don’t think they want to be
pestered by kids about now.” Ani turned and walked the other way, and Sam
followed.

*   *   *

“WHERE IS SHE?” Mike yelled,
his baritone voice booming down the hallway. Ani jumped up and took a step
toward the door.

“Whoa, there, kiddo,” Mrs.
Weller said from around the corner. “Where’s who?”

Ani peered around the
doorframe. Mike hulked over Mrs. Weller, his face a mask of hopeless rage.

“Devon’s gone. They took her.”
He hammered the wall with his fist. “WHERE DID YOU TAKE HER?”

Mrs. Weller’s laugh disarmed
him, and he dropped his arms. “Nowhere, silly. They let her go.”

He blinked. “What?”

“She’s outside, talking to
reporters with her mom and Doctor Banerjee.”

He grinned. “Seriously? She’s
out?”

Ani ducked back into what
passed for a living room under quarantine and sat on a folding chair seconds
before Mike walked in, jaw slack in surprise. Tuned to CNN, the TV showed a
close-up of Devon, who wore a knit cap to cover her pseudo-bald head, hand-in-hand
with her mother behind a podium. The bottom of the screen read ZOMBIE GIRL
CURED.

“Look,” Devon said, staring
daggers at a reporter. “I don’t want to talk about it, okay? I just want to get
on with my life, get back to being a girl, you know?”

“What do you plan on doing now?”
a man yelled.

“Final exams,” she said to
laughter. “Seriously, though. I have, like, three Regents exams to take next
week or I don’t graduate.” They laughed again, but she didn’t join them.

“What about my baby?” a female voice
shrieked. “Where’s Lydia?”

Dr. Banerjee stepped forward
and took the microphone, his face impassive, his voice calm. “Miss Stuber, your
daughter was not in the first or second rounds of treatment. We can only make
the cure so fast, and have not geared up to full-scale production. I assure you
that your daughter will be home within a month or two.”

Sam grunted.

“I thought she was dead,” Ani
said.

“Me, too,” Mr. Cummings said
from behind her. “And what about Teah?”