Undead and Unwary (11 page)

“Shut up,” I snapped, drawing on my vast reserves of patience. Anyone overhearing this would assume we weren’t friends and possibly were plotting each other’s murder. “Or the next time you kill yourself to avoid turning into Future Psycho Asshat Marc, I won’t accidentally reanimate your corpse.”

“No, press lower.”

I jabbed irritably at the fourth brick down in the wall.

“
Lower
. It means the opposite of higher.”

“I
am
, it’s not—oh.” There was a distinct
clack!
and the super-duper secret hidden doorway swung back, revealing a tunnel filled with overhead lights automatically flicking on even as we stared. “Ta-da!”

“Yeah, you eventually followed directions, good work, Bets. But like I was saying. Bored. Bored, bored, bored. I’m ready to shoot a wall, here.”

“No more BBC
Sherlock
for you,” I warned, which was the biggest bluff since “no smoothies for me, I’m getting sick of them.” Marc and I were tremendous Cumberbimbos, long may Benedict Cumberbatch reign. The glorious velvet-voiced bastard had even gotten me hooked on
Star Trek
movies. Benedict, not Marc. Marc’s voice was perfectly nice but he was no CumberBetsy. And for a
Star Trek
reboot (I’m not a fan of the genre) it was pretty good. Way too much screen time for Spock and Kirk, but I was used to suffering for my crushes. I’m embarrassed to say how often I’ve contemplated biting my Cumbercookie. Turning him, even. Then he would be mine! Forever and ever, his velvety voice and long neck and long legs would be mine and we would rule the world!

Um, but those kinds of thoughts were not good, and Sinclair was likely to kick up a fuss, so thus far I had resisted the sweet, sweet lure of BenBatch’s sweet, sweet neck. His throat was a foot long, for God’s sake! The man was made to be chewed on!

“You know what happens when I’m bored,” Marc, the eternally nagging zombie, was saying as we gazed down the tunnel. It was chilly. It led to the frozen river. I had zero interest in venturing down there, but less in being stabbed.

And yeah. I did know. Marc had zero interest in eating brains, but his own brain needed constant stimulation or he’d be a walking corpse for real. Right now he looked fine—very fine; I’d always thought he was super cute—and as he had killed himself with an overdose, his body had no grotesque wounds. He had no real scent, either, whereas before he’d smelled like clean laundry, dried blood, hair product, and Mennen Speed Stick. As a zombie living in close proximity with the vampire who (kinda) raised him,
²
he smelled like a piece of paper. Not offensive, but not especially memorable, either. As long as he hung out with me, he’d appear so recently dead—really recently, like, thirty seconds dead—as to seem alive.

That changed when he couldn’t keep his mind busy with puzzles, experiments, marathon TV sessions, smoothie sessions, animal autopsies, and puzzles. He once spent a week working a fifty-dollar jigsaw puzzle that was just a pile of Dalmatian puppies. Plus the thing had been cut from two sides, not just the top, making it really hard to figure which end was up. And it had the same picture of a zillion Dalmatians on the back, tilted ninety degrees. I took one look and fled. For days every time any of us closed our eyes all we could see were black-and-white puzzle pieces. The horror. The migraines. You can’t imagine.

All this because, as a zombie, my personal zombie (not a title I ever thought I’d assign anyone I knew, ever), Marc craved brains—his own. He needed to stay sharp. Boredom and ennui sped up the rot. He refused to be a doctor anymore, not trusting the occasional stiffening of his joints if he wasn’t getting enough stimulation, so he referred to himself as a kind of supermedic.

I had to admit, I had nothing but admiration for how he was dealing. I hadn’t done half so well. Sometimes I worried I still wasn’t.

“I don’t think taking you to Hell will help your zombieness,” I said, appalled. Truthfully I had no idea what Hell would do to him. And no interest in experimenting with him to find out. At all. No.

“Yeah, but it couldn’t hurt, and you kill a couple of birds with the same rock.”

“Marc, okay, first—gross. Second, I don’t even know how I would get you there. I
just
learned to get myself there—and back, but that was after wandering around the place for what felt like
weeks
. What if I can’t get you there? Worse, what if I can, but can’t get you back?”

“My risk,” he replied firmly.

“Too big of one,” I said, just as firm.

“I’ll sign a waiver.”

“I’m not giving you a waiver to sign, you zombified crazy person! We’re going to forget we had this conversation.”

“Mm-mm.” He was looking at me with his usual focus, as if I were a disease he’d just diagnosed. Which maybe wasn’t that far off—it was my fault he was a zombie, after all. Just like how in the old timeline, it had been my fault he had become the thing in everyone’s nightmares, the monster under all the beds. Just thinking of it made me want to vomit. “You say that a lot. And it never works.”

“Look, we need to talk about this later. I have to . . . oh.” I’d started to take a step down the hallway and froze. “Oh God.”

He cocked his head but couldn’t hear what I did, and even I had barely caught it. Footsteps racing up to the door I’d almost fallen through. Footsteps that abruptly stopped. “Fine! You
stay
down there!” The door shivered in its frame as Jessica unleashed a wood-splintering frenzy. “You stay down there until you die again! Idiot! Pull that Sharpie shit again and I will beat you until candy comes out!”

Lovely, just what I needed, a new title: Betsy Taylor, Undead Piñata. Much better than Betsy Taylor, Registered Republican. I sloooowly relaxed as I heard the footsteps retreat, then turned back to Marc. “So. You want a field trip to Hell, huh?”

“In so many words, yup.”

“We never talk anymore.”

“We talk constantly.” He was grinning at me and easing the door to the tunnel closed. He knew I wasn’t river-bound, not anymore. He also knew I was trapped like a rat.

“Still. I’ve neglected you. Let’s catch up.”

“Because you know you’re stuck down here for hours.”

“‘Stuck,’ oh, Marc, that hurts!” I put every ounce of whiny hurt into my tone that I could. “Why would you want to hurt me?”

“So. Many. Reasons.”

“I’m thrilled to be in this cement-lined, dusty, spider-infested shithole with you.” I slung an arm across his shoulders, turned him around, and started walking him back to the other end. “So! How’s the dating going?”

“Fine until we get to the ‘I’m a Virgo,’ ‘Hey, neat, I’m a zombie’ part.”

“Superficial men.” I shook my head. “What’s the world coming to?”

He laughed at me, but that was fine. I had it coming.

 CHAPTER 

TEN

“Do you even know how many harmful chemicals lurk inside the average Sharpie?” Jess was raging, physically restrained by DadDick, who looked a) wide awake and b) like he wished he was anywhere else.

“Not the scented ones,” I whined. “Is it more than three? It’s probably more than three chemicals.”

“Oh good God.” Sinclair had his eyes closed as he pinched the bridge of his nose. “Madness reigns.” Then, at Tina’s near-imperceptible flinch, he added in a mutter, “Apologies.” She shrugged and smiled; she loved—as he did—that these days he could break commandments with impunity and still be welcome at church. A lesson for all of us! Or something.

“And excuse me for wanting you to get on the stick and name your babies already. Pretty soon they’ll be in kindergarten and when the teacher asks their name they’ll be all ‘sorry, Mom hasn’t filled out that paperwork yet.’”

“Pretty soon?” she snarled. “That’s five years away, asshat.”

“No!” I was on my feet, too, and as I stepped forward Sinclair’s hand closed over my biceps and he gave a not-especially-gentle yank backward. “That is
my
word. You’re not allowed to use that word. Take it back!”

The State of Minnesota, it must be said, was disturbingly laid-back about naming babies. I guess they figured that the mom in question had just squeezed a human (in Jessica’s case, two
of the li’l suckers) out of her body, so maybe cut her some slack on paperwork?

The babies had to be
registered
within five days, not necessarily named. And all the naming chaos aside, the question I couldn’t avoid: registered for
what
?
Register
is a noun and a verb: we sign guest registers, we register for wedding gifts and domain names, we register cars and boats, we register to vote and when we hit a mountain summit . . . and now we register babies, I guess? Good God, for
what
? What weird creepy thing did they need a statewide baby register for?

Anyway, if you register the babies but haven’t named them within those five days, Baby Girl Berry and Baby Boy Berry were the names that went on the dotted line. Jess and Nick then had forty-five days to change Baby Boy and Baby Girl to
anything
, for the love of God, just pick
something
! If they waited longer than forty-five days, they had to pay extra.

Needless to say, Jess and DadDick didn’t give a tin shit about what they had to pay. Also, when had I become surrounded almost entirely by millionaires? That was troubling, because it meant I was the white trash of the mansion. Hell, the neighborhood; this was Summit Avenue in St. Paul. The governor’s mansion was across the street! How had I let that happen?

Anyway, it had been weeks and the babies were still Frick and Frack. Or whatever we were calling them that day. Salt and Pepper hadn’t gone over well, probably because of the whole biracial thing. Sprite and 7-Up were greeted with derision bordering on rage. The reaction to Rocky and Bullwinkle will never be spoken of again, though DadDick did take me aside to quietly mention he thought Batman and Robin were the best so far. My faves: little Manolo and little Blahnik.

“Are we fighting about your hallucination, you bugging my mom for no reason, Sharpie ink, or how much you hate government paperwork?” I asked, trying and failing to wrest myself from Sinclair’s clawlike grip. The man hung on like a velociraptor. “Because with all the yelling I can’t deny I might have lost track! Which makes me even madder!”

“We’re talking about deflection as it relates to the modern vampire queen.” Marc, piping up helpfully, got a double glare from Jess and me.

“No, we’re talking about how Betsy puts the dumb in dumbass,” Jessica snapped.

“That doesn’t even make sense!” was my outraged rebuttal, followed with the ever-intellectual, “and you have barf in your eyebrows!”

“Oh.” DadDick, who’d been holding Jess back, peeked around her, let go with one hand, rubbed his thumb across her left eyebrow, then said, “It’s just a little spit-up.”

“Gross,” was my revolted comment. I know. I was being a megabitch. Realizing it didn’t make me want to behave, though; it just made me as mad at myself as I was at her.

“I just had two babies!”

“We know
.
”
I threw my hands up in the air. “It’s all you talk about. And what, being a new mom means you don’t have five seconds to look in the mirror?”

“Yes,” she replied, relaxing in DadDick’s grip. “That’s exactly right. I don’t expect you to get it.”

I groaned. “Oh, please. Not this again. Come on. Come
on.
Please not with the ‘I as a parent now understand all the mysteries of the universe, which you, poor babyless imbecile, will never, ever be able to grasp with your babyless mind and which is why your poor babyless existence is forever doomed to be unfulfilling, you poor idiot.’”

“Well.” Jess coughed. “That’s pretty much it.”

I glared and was casting around for a rejoinder when I saw the corner of her mouth twitch. Then she did the awesome thing I could never resist. When Jessica was trying not to laugh, she sort of swallowed it. That’s the only way I can describe it: her mouth would twitch and she’d fight the smile, and while she fought the smile the giggle would start to rise along with (weird!) her left eyebrow, and pretty soon her face was wrinkled up like a baked apple and the giggle would escape anyway, and now I was giggling, too, which was a helluva lot better than screaming.

“I just wish you could hear yourself sometimes,” I managed and got a hold over the giggles. I was glad something had ramped down the tension, but we still had crap to sift through.

“Betsy, I literally have a ten-dollar bill for every time I’ve wished the same of you.”

I waved that off. “Yeah, yeah.”

“Oh, here comes the ‘I’m fine, it’s everyone else who has to change’ attitude.”

“And here comes the willing victim! Poor Jessica, saddled with Betsy, which is just so stressful, it must be the hour of the martyr yet again—”

“Martyr?” she nearly shrieked. “If only I could, but you’ve been hogging the cross for
years
. Should we make a list of your ‘problems’? Let’s see, eternally young—”

“Thirty is not—”

“—eternally cute—”

“Again: thirty!
Cute
is not a word to describe a woman in her thirties. I’m not going through eternity with the ‘cute’ moniker.”

“—a house full of minions to carry out your every dumb command—”

“Minion,” Tina said. “Singular. And if I may shift the discussion—”

“—married to a bangin’ sexy vamp—”

“It’s true, Betsy,” Marc said, “you are.” To Sinclair: “You are!”

“You never have to worry about the bills—”

“Right back atcha, Jess.”

“—you’ve got superpowers—”

“Being able to walk outside at noon is
not
a superpower!”

“Enough of this.
Now
.”

Like that, the temp in the room dropped ten degrees. Sinclair hadn’t even raised his voice, but the whip-crack tone got everyone’s attention.

“Be seated and pretend to be a grown woman.”

I had no idea which of us he meant, but it didn’t matter. I sat so quickly I wasn’t actually aware of a conscious decision to sit. The only thing to make me feel better was seeing Jess had dropped, too.