Special Dead (6 page)

Chapter

8

The next day Mr. Foster was out sick,
and instead of calling a sub the principal turned the class over to Miss
Pulver. They spent the morning playing Jenga. Mike laughed as the pile crashed
down, Kyle’s hand still holding his piece. Of all the kids, Ani had the best
remaining dexterity, with Mike a close second. Lydia had been a bit twitchy
even when she was alive.

As they walked down the
deserted hall toward PE, Teah kept bumping into Ani’s back. The third time Teah
stepped on her heel, Ani whirled around. “What is your problem?” She enunciated
each word through the bite guard. It wasn’t Teah’s fault she was in such a bad
mood, but she made a convenient target.

Teah bounced on her heels. “I
just have to see him, you know? It’s been two days.”

Behind Teah, Devon rolled her eyes.
“Wow, you made it a whole weekend.”

“Keep walking,” Mr. Benson
said.

They passed the art room. Six
out of seventeen kids wore black and bowed their heads as they clanked past.
Mr. Frazer put an easel in front of the door, blocking the view.

Once outside under the black
clouds, Teah shuffled to the fence to see Bill, while the rest of them hung
near the door. Devon unfolded the chess board and challenged Sam, while Mike
and Kyle squared off against Joe and Ani in euchre. Lydia stood next to Sam,
humming and rocking on her heels.

After a few minutes, Bill’s
voice drew their attention. “Hey, asshole, you dropped your rock!” Ani looked
up in time to see Bill throw a pebble at the small group of protesters. A
volley of pebbles responded, most of them directed at Teah. Pastor John hefted
a marble-sized rock and whipped it overhand. Teah cried out, her hand going to
her face.

Kyle leapt to his feet,
scraping up a handful of gravel as he did so. He took three running steps and
threw. The rocks pinged off the chain-link fence. Kyle threw another pebble
while Joe and Ani ran toward Teah. Bill retreated to his car under a hail of
stones. Kyle grabbed another handful.

Devon screamed at Kyle while
Joe sheltered Teah with his body. Together with Ani they retreated toward the
school building. Devon slapped the pebbles out of Kyle’s hand just as he went
to throw again, and it spun him off balance. He stumbled. His shoulder erupted
in a spray of bloodless meat, and then they heard the gunshot.

Devon put her hands on top of
her helmet and dropped to her knees. Sam copied her, then so did everyone else.
Everyone but Kyle. Kyle writhed on the ground, his mouth opening and closing,
his dead eyes rolling in their sockets. Silence reigned.

The door flew open and four
soldiers piled into the yard. Led by Mr. Benson, they half-circled the group,
assault rifles raised.

Mr. Benson cleared his throat,
then spoke in a flat voice devoid of his normal drill-sergeant bravado. “Violence
against the living will not be tolerated. Offenders will be incinerated, as per
policy.” He stepped back and called out. “Mr. Clark.”

Behind him, Mr. Clark’s stepped
out of the doorway, the pilot light on his flamethrower stoked to an angry
blue. Ani saw her own terrified face reflected in his mirrored visor. Gravel crunched
under his boots.

“
No
!” Lydia cried. She
dove on Kyle and wrapped him in a hug. Defiant, she snarled at Mr. Benson. “If
you burn him, you have to burn me, too.”

Nobody moved. Mr. Benson’s eyes
moved back and forth between Kyle and Lydia. He nodded. “Mr. Clark, proceed.”

“Me, too,” Joe said, though he
didn’t move. “If you try it...I’ll stop you. I’ll try. All he did was throw a
rock. They threw first.”

Mr. Clark hesitated.

Devon weighed their expressions,
lingering on Ani and Sam, then spoke for the group. “Me three. I think you’ll
have to kill us all.”

Ani looked up at the soldiers,
young men barely older than she was, their faces tight with anticipation, their
knuckles white. She clenched her fists and prepared to leap.
Holy crap, I’m
about to die.
A dim part of her mind felt it odd that she had no racing
heartbeat, no hyperventilating lungs, no adrenal response. A less dim part
wondered if she’d be able to eat before they took her down.

Mr. Benson licked his lips. “Fire
at—”

“Belay that,” came a voice from
the door. Dr. Banerjee stepped forward and put his hand on Mr. Clark’s
shoulder. “Gentlemen, fall back to the main hallway and await orders.”

The soldiers snapped to
attention, saluted, and backed their way through the door, weapons still
raised.

“Colonel, I don’t think—” Mr.
Benson began.

“I know,” Dr. Banerjee said. “Go
with them, please.” He nodded at Mr. Clark. “You, too, Ed.”

“But,” Mr. Benson said. “You’ll
be alone with—”

“Children, covered by snipers.
Now go inside.”

“Yes, sir,” Mr. Benson said
with a salute. Mr. Clark just nodded. They left.

“You can put your hands down,”
Dr. Banerjee said. “I need you to hold down Kyle so I can inspect his shoulder.”
They did, and he probed the wound with latex-covered hands. He frowned. “Ani,
call your mother. We have a shattered clavicle that needs to be replaced. The
rest should heal up in the bath.” He patted Kyle on the helmet. “You’re lucky
to have a head. Any more funny business and you won’t.”

“They started it,” Teah said.

“Irrelevant,” he replied, his
eyes pinning her in place. “They have rights that you do not. We need due
process before prosecuting them for assault. You can, and will, be shot or
burned without a trial.” He looked at each of them in turn, then back to Teah. “Now,
let me see your face.” He turned her head back and forth. A shallow gouge
marred the flesh covering her cheekbone. It reminded Ani of her own injury from
Halloween two years past. “You’ll be fine.”

“What, sweetie?” came the voice
on the phone. Ani passed it to Dr. Banerjee. He took it and walked away.

He spoke for a few minutes out
of earshot, then stepped back to the group. “You will be returning to the lab.
No school for the rest of the day.”

“What about them?” Devon
pointed outside the fence.

Dr. Banerjee turned his cool
brown eyes toward the protestors, chanting and cheering at the spectacle of a
fifteen-year-old shot in the schoolyard. “I’ll deal with them.”

*   *   *

Back at the lab, Kyle shuffled
his sullen way to the operation suite while the rest of them were locked in the
rec room under the loving care of Mr. Benson. Ani wrote her essay for English
under the blaring TV while Lydia paced, stepping over her with every lap of the
room, burning off nervous energy that Ani couldn’t bring herself to feel.

Her phone buzzed. A text from
Tiffany. “u hear about bill?”

Ani looked up at Teah, watching
TV and paddling her stomach like a tom-tom. She replied, “No. What about Bill?”

She was halfway through the
next paragraph when it buzzed again. “arrested AWOL lol”

Shocker
. She texted
back, “Thanks. Not telling Teah yet. Make sure Kyle’s ok first.”

“I herd about that sounds scary
lol”

“Gotta go,” Ani replied. She
didn’t, but she didn’t want to talk about it, either.

“Kkkkkkk,” Tiff replied.

She put away her phone and
waited for the wrath of God—or Mom—to descend.

Three hours later, her mom came
in with Kyle. Nobody had to explain what had happened. The security cameras had
captured everything, and the offending party would be prosecuted for assault if
Teah’s parents would press charges. The town judge had agreed to push the
picket line back.

They had to listen to an
hour-long litany of why they “had to be more careful and just how dangerous it
was for them because even the tiniest mistake would be met with deadly force
and Mr. Benson is there to protect them but is more there to protect the world
from them and Mr. Clark seems nice and all but would have pulled that trigger
and Kyle was lucky Devon had hit him and blah blah blah” before they were
allowed to go back to their normal boring routine.

Chapter

9

Two days later, the picket line had
been pushed back another two hundred feet. The inane chants were difficult to
decipher over the wind. The trees shed leaves with every gust, coating the
ground and causing the occasional small fire at the base of the fence. Since
the concrete wouldn’t burn, the guards ignored the flames.

“I hope there are a few leaves
left for the festival this weekend,” Devon said. Ani had lost track of the
date. Making funnel cakes and fried dough with her mom was ancient history.

Kyle turned in circles,
frowning at the ground. “No sticks? What the hell?”

He was right. There wasn’t a
stick or pebble to be found. Inside the yard there barely any leaves.

Joe smiled at him, lips pulling
back from the bright orange rubber hiding his teeth. “You want some chalk,
Kyle?”

“For what?”

Joe patted the sidewalk next to
where he was sitting. “Come here. I’ll teach you how to draw something.”

“Teach him how to write,” Sam
mumbled. Ani elbowed her, though it didn’t look like Kyle had heard.

“It’s not his fault he’s dumb,”
Ani said.

Devon snorted.

Sam shook her head. “No, maybe
his brain isn’t his fault. But years of choosing to screw off instead of work?
His fault. You don’t get better if you don’t practice.”

With that in mind, Ani closed
her eyes and leaned back out of the wan September sun. In her head she replayed
Mark G. Carroll’s “Why Mine’s Not the Same as Yours”, a poppy number for cello
and piano. Something about it really appealed to her, even though or perhaps
because the individual parts didn’t quite marry well. There was an
either-or-ness to it that she liked but couldn’t quite wrap her brain around,
and—

Sam shook her shoulder. She
cracked an eyelid. “What?”

“You’ve got a visitor.”

She sat up and tried to rub her
eyes, her fists deflecting off the face guard. Squinting against the bright
sky, she saw a dark figure standing near the fence. The snipers, warier now,
were half-trained on Tiffany.

Ani brushed herself off and
approached the fence. “Hey, Tiff.”

“‘Sup?”

Ani gestured at the fence. “Still
dead. How about with you?” Tiffany’s puffy face was tinged a little green. “You
feeling okay?”

Tiff scowled. “Yeah, why wouldn’t
I be?”

Ani suppressed an eye roll. “Just
making small talk.” She checked over her shoulder. Teah stood over Joe and
Kyle, but she lowered her voice anyway. “Tell me about Bill.”

Tiff’s smile held no
compassion. “His uncle posted bail, but he’s got an ankle monitor. He’s not
allowed to leave the county until his trial.”

“They’re going to put him in
jail,” Ani said.

Tiff ran her tongue over her
front teeth. “Not jail, prison. Six months, probably.” Ani didn’t know what the
difference was, but it didn’t sound good. “Not for nothing, but he’s been
talking shit about busting Teah out.” Her eyes drifted to the guard towers. “Like
that’s going to happen.”

“Tiff, he can’t talk like that.”
Her mind flashed back to Judge Jones.
Do you feel that it’s safe to be back
at school?
“Even the threat...shit.”

“He’s got freedom of speech,”
Tiff said. “He can say what he wants.”

“He could get us all killed.”

Tiff dismissed the thought with
a wave. “He’s just talking.” She perked up. “Hey, Chuck got the job.”

The thought of Chuck Roberts
holding a job was almost too much to handle. Ani forced a smile; drool dripped
down her chin.
Well, that’s a charming side-effect.
“I’ll bet he’s quite
dashing in that red apron.”

Tiff glared. “You know what?
Fuck you.” She spun toward her car.

“Tiff, wait. I didn’t mean—”

Tiff got in the car and looked
back, tears in her eyes. “You don’t know how strong he is.” She slammed the
door.

Ani sighed as Tiff peeled out, exhaust
screaming over the old muffler. She walked back to the group, trying to wipe
her mouth through the guard. “Anyone else got a drool problem?”

“Yup,” Teah said. “All the new
serum does is make saliva.”

“Awesome.” Ani spared a glance
at the chalk art. Joe was half done with a cybernetic unicorn with black fur
and malevolent red eyes. Kyle’s crude sketch was a naked woman, boobs bigger
than her head.

*   *   *

Back in the classroom, Miss
Pulver gave them options: Jenga, Scrabble, or free reading. Devon opened her calculus
book; she and Sam had spent days trying to figure out what “f apostrophe”
meant, and seemed no closer to a solution. Teah and Lydia talked and giggled in
the corner, interrupted every few minutes by Miss Pulver telling them to get to
work. For her part, Ani spent the afternoon reading for AP History and looking
out the window, happy that the class’s set of e-readers had broadened their
ability to read what they wanted or needed to.

In the distance, tents and
pop-up pavilions emerged in front of the town hall. Her brain extrapolated what
her nose couldn’t smell: kettle corn and cinnamon-roasted almonds, fried dough
and knackwurst and
brains
.

The craving twisted her gut, so
she closed her eyes and put her head on the desk.

Don’t think
about crowds.

“Ani, no sleeping,” Miss Pulver
said.

Devon growled. “We can’t sleep.”

“I’m thinking,” Ani mumbled
through a mouthful of drool.
I’ll ask Mom for an injection when I get home.

“Well, do it with your head up.”

Ani lifted her head and forced
her eyes to her Kindle.

*   *   *

Over Sunday dinner she asked
her mom how the festival had gone.

“It was fine,” Sarah replied
through bites of tuna sandwich. “I mean, attendance is down, but the military
presence helped. Ohneka Falls is becoming a base town.”

“Down how much?” Ani asked. The
festival could account for ten percent or more of some of the more artsy
businesses’ annual sales. A quarter-million leafers could do wonders for a
small town economy.

“Rotary estimates maybe ninety
thousand attendees.”

Ouch.

“That sucks.”

“Mmmm,” Sarah replied. “At
least it didn’t rain.”

Ani brooded a moment. “I feel
bad.”

Her mom sighed. “Why? It’s not your
fault.”

No, ultimately
it’s yours, Mom. But I still feel bad about it.

“I know. But if we weren’t here....”

Her mom patted her hand. “Then
we’d be ruining some other small town. Don’t sweat it, sweetie.” She froze, in
that way that always meant she had something else to say but didn’t know how to
say it. “Besides, Rotary’s got something else going.”

Ani raised an eyebrow.

“Halloween. Zombie festival.”

Ani’s eyes widened. “No way.”

“The idea went viral on Reddit,
and people are coming from all over the country. It’s going to be a mad house.”

“Banerjee can’t let—”

Her mom threw up her hands. “Freedom
of assembly. We can’t shut down the whole town, and it will be good for the
economy.”

“That doesn’t even make sense.
You can’t dress as zombies in public.”

“What are they going to do,
arrest a hundred thousand people?”

“That many?”

Her mom nodded.

Ani pondered the implications
and didn’t like what she found.

“We’re circus freaks.”

“Yup.”