Zombie Elementary (11 page)

“Come on! We haven’t got all day!” yelled Francine. Then she was running forward with the lacrosse stick, I followed with my bat and Jermaine was aiming at the cheerleader at the bottom of the pyramid.

He got her in the leg. The girl turned around, like you would if you’d been shot in the leg with a BB gun. Which was good, because the girls on top of her all fell onto the lawn.

It took them a moment to get up, and that was good too, because Francine was smashing at them with her lacrosse stick. And I shut my eyes and brought my bat down on something hard. It was someone’s head. She fell over, and then I fell over her because my eyes were shut.

“Open your darn eyes!”
yelled Francine. “That one almost got you!”

I opened my darn eyes, and she was right. I had to take notice of what was going on. I could always throw up later.

The girl with the ponytail hopped toward me. I took up a slugger’s stance and smacked her good leg. I knew I should smash her over the head, but gee whiz—

While I was thinking about that, she grabbed my ankle.

“Hey! Hey, quit that!” I shouted.

Jermaine was trying to reload his BB gun. Francine turned around and slammed the butt of the lacrosse stick into the back of ponytail’s head. Another cheerleader down.

“Pay attention!” shouted Francine. (Boy, she’s bossy.)

Then she twirled around and swung the stick across Isobel Davenport’s nose. Isobel’s always been real friendly for a cheerleader. And she was real pretty, uh, yesterday. She had big blue eyes and—one of them was hanging out like it was on a stalk. I wanted to push it back into place.

“Behind you!” shouted Jermaine, and I turned around to see Whitney, the head cheerleader, coming toward me. Her eyes were red, and it was like she’d grown fangs. There was blood all down her uniform. She was reaching out to grab my arm.

“BRAAAAIIINNNSSS
!!!!!” she called out.
“GO-O-O-O-O BRAAAAAIINNNNSSS
!!!!!” She was still pretty chipper, which was why they picked her for head cheerleader, I guess. Except now there was no Whitney inside. It was just a zombie in cheerleader costume repeating stuff that Whitney used to do and say. It was real scary. I mean
Real Scary
.

I couldn’t move.

No, really. I was stuck to the spot, like I was Velcroed to the lawn.

(Yeah, I know Velcro doesn’t work on grass. I’m not stupid.)

And suddenly Celeste jumped out of the tree. I mean, really jumped out of the tree, feet first. She slammed into Whitney from above, knocked her all around, and started kicking. The whole time, Celeste was yelling stuff I didn’t understand, and Whitney’s head was swiveling around trying to bite her. Except she couldn’t, because Celeste had actually kicked her head right off, like a soccer ball.

Boy, those zombies come right apart if you hit ’em right.

Then Francine arrived with the lacrosse stick. She teed up the head like she was Tiger Woods and smacked it right at the wall of the Phalen house. Bounced off a window and everything.

GOAL
!!

Celeste and Francine were hugging and crying, like girls do when it’s somebody’s birthday or they got a new puppy or they’ve wiped out the entire zombie cheerleading squad.

I was feeling pretty weird about the whole thing.

“S’okay, bro!” said Jermaine, clapping me on the back. “They were zombies. Nothing you can do with zombies.”

“Mr. O’Hara said he could cure zombies,” I said.

“Even when bits of them are all over the lawn? C’mon, Larry!”

I guessed that was true. I didn’t know what to do when someone’s head was forty feet away from the body, face down against the aluminum siding. I wiped my bat on the grass a real long time.

“Come on, Larry!” said Francine. “Can’t stick around here. We gotta get home.”

So we all took off as fast as we could.
Francine was supposed to be grounded, so we walked her home first. Her room’s in the back of the house, and she was able to scramble over the fence and sneak across the yard without her folks seeing her. Like I said, she’s real athletic so none of that was hard for her to do. “Talk soon,” she whispered.

We watched her clamber through her bedroom window, then headed to Celeste’s house.

Celeste’s family is from Haiti. I guess that’s why she could yell at zombies in French. Plus, being from Haiti, which was where zombies first came from, she knew all about them. (She told us that zombies are, like, the national monster of Haiti.)

“What I know,
Larree
, is that we must get away from these zombies. We cannot defeat them all. There
are more than we could ever fight. I will tell my parents of these events last night, and we will all go to visit family elsewhere until it is safe to return here.”

Huh.

I was hoping she knew all kinds of cool ways to fight the zombies. But it seemed that people who are used to having zombies around mostly want to go some place where there are no zombies around. Go figure.

Besides, I didn’t know what Celeste’s mom and dad would do when she told them she’d been fighting zombie cheerleaders instead of staying up late and braiding their hair. I didn’t think my mom and dad would go along with “Let’s get out of town until it’s safe to come back.” They’d tell me that Dad had an important meeting on Wednesday, and Mom’s job at the accounting firm was crazy right now, and Honor had a dentist appointment on Thursday. Maybe after that we could run from the
undead hordes
.

That’s what Jermaine calls ’em. Pretty cool, yeah?

But meanwhile, we had to stick around and fight them off.

“Look,” said Celeste. “You must understand. These
creatures are not like
les zombies
of my homeland. In Haiti it is said that a bad person—a zombie master, I think you translate it—feeds a powder to a victim. The unfortunate then becomes as a slave, only like in a trance. He can be liberated from this situation and return to his consciousness. But this is not the case for these ghouls that eat of brains.”

“What should we do?” asked Jermaine.

“You must leave,” replied Celeste. “Did I not just say so?”

“Yeah, but what if we can’t leave?” I asked.

“Oh. In that case you must destroy them all. Remember, they are no longer your friends and schoolmates. They are monsters. If they bite you, you too will become a monster.”

And then she knocked on the front door. Her mom opened it, and the two of them spoke real fast and real loud in French. Celeste’s mom screamed and hauled her inside. Slammed the door.

Jermaine and I walked toward his house. I guess I was a little down, what with all the eyes on stalks and heads flying off. Nobody likes that. Plus, it’s tiring work.

We were at the corner of Third and Pine when a station wagon screeched right through the stop sign and raced off toward the interstate. It was jam-packed with bags and bedding and pets and kids. Out of the back window, Celeste waved at us.

Celeste’s dad was driving like a crazy person and almost ran a white van off the road. The driver had to swerve to avoid crashing, and almost hit Jermaine and me. The van screeched to a stop. The driver wound down his window.

“Hey, guys, you okay? Oh—it’s you!”

The van had a sign that said “Dictionary Emporium” on the side. It was Mr. O’Hara. He looked frazzled.

I started to tell him about the cheerleaders.

“I know,” he said. He pointed to a scanner on his dashboard. “I’ve got this device that tells me when the zombies are gathering. Worth more than the van. Worth even more than my house.”

“I think we, like, broke some of the zombies,” I said. “I don’t know if you’ll be able to fix them anymore.”

He grinned at me. “Heck, I don’t know either. All I do is gather all the parts and take ’em to my storage facility. My son Garrett’s helping me after school and on weekends. There’s a medical team to put them back together and cure the virus. It’s all experimental, so we’ll just have to see if it works.”

“But it’s possible?” asked Jermaine. I noticed he was as freaked out as I was.

“I guess, if they say so,” said Mr. O’Hara. “I just try and get all the right body parts into each bag. I got a thousand bags here.”

A thousand bags.

“Gotta go and handle this,” he said. “Can I just pull into the driveway at the Phalens’ house? I hate street parking when I’m carrying out zombies.”

A teenage boy was in the passenger seat. He waved at us. Garrett, I guess. Some kids work at McDonald’s after school, and some kids gather zombie parts.

We reached the corner of my street
, and I saw my mom running toward us.

“Larry! Thank God!”

I had to be in trouble. “Uh. We went to the park to hit a few balls.” I hated to lie to Mom, but I figured she wouldn’t want to hear I’d been slugging the cheerleading squad. I held up my bat. I thought I’d gotten it clean.

“No, it’s Honor. She took Mr. Snuffles out for a walk an hour ago. I thought you might have seen her.”

I shook my head.

“So, you didn’t see her over at the park?” asked Mom.

“Nuh-uh,” I replied, although I’m pretty sure my face was red. Could she tell?

Jermaine stepped in. “We didn’t see her, Mrs. Mullet, but we came back down Yew Street. I guess we might
have missed her. We could go back and look for her right now.”

My mom patted Jermaine on the head. She’s always liked him. I guess she doesn’t know how sneaky he can be. Which was good, right then. “Larry, go right there and come back if you don’t find her. No more baseball practice today. I’ll get the car and drive down toward the school in case she went off in that direction.”

We headed for the park.

I wasn’t sure if Mom would worry so much about Honor being gone so long if we hadn’t had all that stuff about Mr. Phalen in church. I mean, for a moment, when she passed the hymn book to me to throw, she understood about the zombies, even if it was like she’d forgotten all about it now. But an hour was a long time for an eight-year-old kid to be gone, even if there were no zombies in our town. Which, of course, there were.

It was a pretty cloudy day, and it looked like rain coming on. So we didn’t see a lot of people as we walked to the park.

And then we did.

A small figure was standing by the swings, yelling at a dog that was barking at a bunch of people. Mr. Snuffles does that sometimes. He’s not the smartest dog in the world.