Zombie Elementary (4 page)

I really needed to find out what was going on.
So I called Jermaine.

As I mentioned, he’s my best friend. He’d been out of school for two days with a nosebleed. Nobody fakes a nosebleed like Jermaine. But it’s always just two days, tops, because otherwise his mom would insist on taking him to the doctor, and Jermaine doesn’t want to risk that. He’s the smartest person I know.

“Larry! What the heck happened today? All the kids are talking about the bus!”

I remembered that, even though Jermaine had been out of school, the Torres brothers live two doors away from him, and Luke would have gone right over to tell Jermaine about Alex Bates. So I told Jermaine the whole story.

It’s the same story I’ve already told, so I’m not gonna say the whole thing over, if that’s okay with you. Anyhow, Jermaine was pretty much floored by the whole thing. Then he said something that shows how smart he really is: “Sounds like Alex got turned into a zombie.”

“A what?” I replied.

“A zombie,” he said. “You know, an undead creature with no will of his own except to kill the living and suck out their brains for sustenance.”

He says stuff like that. Like I told you, he’s real clever.

“How does that happen?” I asked him.

“Different theories,” Jermaine went on. “A virus. Or radiation. Bad fish sticks in the back of the freezer. Lots of ideas floating around. There’s a whole field of study.”

“How do you know this?” I said.

“Science magazines,” he told me. Jermaine’s dad’s a dentist and Jermaine’s been reading everything on the waiting room table since he was, like, five. He’s a genius.

“Plus movies,” he said. “You know,
Night of the Living Dead
—that’s real old, like, before my dad was even a little kid.
28 Days Later. Resident Evil
, parts one to five.
World War Z
. Also
The Walking Dead
on TV. You need to do some research.”

“How am I gonna do that?”

“I’ll be over later with some documentation,” he answered.

About that time, Honor peeked around the door into my room. She’s pretty good about not messing with my stuff, and I guess we get on better than most kids I know. But she’s only seven—no, she turned eight awhile back—and mostly we don’t talk too much except, you know, “Did you spit in my Pepsi?” and “What’s that sticky stuff?” Normal brother and sister conversation.

“Hey, Larry,” she said. “You did really good today on the bus. I never saw anyone act like Alex did. I’m glad you kicked him out the back door.”

“I didn’t really kick him out, but I was gonna. I think.”

“What was wrong with him? He was acting crazy. Bad crazy, not goofy crazy.”

“He’s been turned into a zombie,” I told her.

“Oh,” said Honor. “That’s bad.”

So Jermaine showed up to stay overnight
carrying a pile of DVDs. “This is research material,” he said. “You need to memorize this stuff.”

He said this like Coach Chicka (who coaches our Little League team, the Tigers) talks about memorizing baseball plays. I had to concentrate real hard.

“That’s it,” said Jermaine. “I can tell when you’re trying to learn stuff, ’cause your eyebrows meet in the middle and you chew on your lip.”

Huh.

Anyhow, he slipped a disc into the player in my room.

The movie was real old, black and white. I guessed it must be about a hundred years old. It was called
Night of the Living Dead
. I settled down to watch it.

There’s this girl who goes with her brother to the cemetery, and he’s teasing her, and then a zombie gets him, which I guess serves him right for being kind of a dope. She takes off in his car, the zombies chase her and she gets kind of upset about the whole thing. I could understand that part. Anyway, she shows up at an old house where a guy acts all superhero and takes down a bunch of zombies. Then he wants to board the place up to keep the zombies out, which makes sense, you know? I mean, zombies don’t care if they get cut up by broken glass when they come through the windows. And then there are some other people hiding in the basement, and they don’t want to come out. One guy’s being real mean about the whole thing, and the hero guy argues with him. Then there are more zombies and a truck that’s outta gas and a
kid who turns into a zombie and this real pretty girl who eats her boyfriend.

But you don’t need to know the plot. I was watching it for tips. You know, useful plays in case I had to fight zombies myself.

Stuff I found out about zombies:

My mom came in while we were watching. I’m not supposed to watch scary movies (or pro-wrestling or shows on cable with the parental advisory “Nudity, Language, Adult Situations”) but I guess that, since the movie’s real old and in black and white, she figured
it was
The Addams Family
or
Leave It to Beaver
. “Huh!” she said as the zombies hammered on the door to the house. “I never got why this was supposed to be so funny.” I don’t know what she thought it was
—The Munsters
, maybe? Then she reminded us not to stay up late, even though it was Friday and no school the next day, because we had a Little League game against the Pirates in the morning.

Alex Bates was on the Pirates’ team.