Zombified (13 page)

“Maybe let's call it a night,” I said.

“Maybe we can get high,” Brandon said as if that were a completely logical counterargument.

“Get out,” I said.

“C'mon,” he said. “You know it was fun the last time we did it,” he said. “That's part of the reason it scares you so much.” He dug into his pocket and pulled out a tiny plastic baggie full of black powder.
Son of a bitch,
he'd actually brought Vitamin Z into my house.

“You need to go,” I said, standing up and pointing toward the door. “My dad'll be home soon and you don't want to be here when he gets back.”

“Your dad?” he asked. “Is this the same dad I saw you drop off at the airport this morning?”

My jaw flopped open. Of course he'd been spying on me. Knowing for sure that Dad was out of the house was probably the whole reason Brandon had decided to come over tonight.

“Or maybe your new boyfriend is headed over,” he said. “Phil, really? That kid's half-queer if you ask me.”

“I didn't ask you, you homophobic ass,” I screamed at him. “And if you think I need someone's help to throw your skanky butt out of this house, then you are delusional !”

His jaw muscles bulged; it looked like he might be grinding his teeth. Then he relaxed. Gave up. It looked like he gave up.

“Okay,” he said. “Fine. This was obviously a terrible idea and I'm . . . I'm sorry.”

The deflation was crazy. He'd gone from angry, preening attack animal to a little ball of self-pity in two seconds flat. I was having a hard time keeping up with the emotional hairpin turns of this conversation. I felt like I was trapped in one of those crappy reality shows Phil and his aunt loved so much.

He stood up. “I'll call my friend.” He looked around. “I'm sorry, but first can I use the bathroom?”

I was so relieved that he'd agreed to leave that I pointed down the hall.

He nodded and went that way. I turned my back on him. I felt like I couldn't look at him anymore.

Once I heard the bathroom door close, I sat back down in the seat—fell back, really. Jesus, all of it seemed unreal.

I got up quickly and went to the kitchen. I poured myself a glass of water and drank it. I wished it was a beer or something harder, but Dad doesn't keep liquor in the house. I kept replaying the scene. Brandon reaching into his pocket and pulling out a baggie of Z, a huge smile plastered on his stupid junkie face.

I stopped and set the glass down. The baggie. I couldn't believe I was thinking this, but now that it'd popped into my noggin, the thought refused to just go away. If I got Brandon to sell me that baggie, there'd be no need for me to go up and see Buddha. I asked myself if that was completely evil. Was there a chance Brandon might interpret it as renewed interest? Shit, I might just need to chance it. I'd just wait for him to come out of the bathroom and then I'd ask him to sell it to me.

It occurred to me he'd been in the bathroom for a while already. Did taking Vitamin Z affect your ability to go to the toilet? I didn't know, and I wasn't keen to learn the answer, but I decided it was time to get this little show on the road.

I walked down the hall and knocked on the bathroom door. No answer. I knocked again.

“Brandon,” I asked. “Is everything okay?”

I heard a soft thud, like something falling onto carpet. It sounded like it came from my dad's bedroom. I knocked on the bathroom door again.

“Brandon,” I yelled. When I got no answer, I pushed the door open. Of course he wasn't in there.

I took a deep breath and stepped down the hall to my dad's room.

“I swear to God,” I said, “if you have your pants off, I'm going to kick your balls into your throat!”

I threw open the door.

Brandon lay facedown on the floor, his face toward me so I got a good view of his glassy eyes and the black foam coming out of his mouth. The empty baggie, a lighter, and a spoon sat on top of the bed. A syringe stuck out of his arm. A scene from a bad after school special was playing out in my dad's bedroom.

I ran to him and knelt down. I tried to remember everything I'd learned about overdosing. How did I check if he was breathing? Where was his pulse? Mostly, why the hell did they spend so much time teaching us how to avoid becoming zombies and so little on more important topics?

I got him turned over and more of that black foam dribbled out of his mouth. I gagged a little, then rested my head on his chest. I couldn't hear a heartbeat. His chest wasn't rising and falling.

I called his name, shouted it right in his face. I shook him with all my pathetic strength. Nothing. Holy shit, Brandon Ikaros was dead in my house.

I scooted away and dug my phone out of my pocket. I speed-dialed Phil.

“Hi, Courtney,” he said. Then, “Why are you crying?”

“What?” I said. Oh, God, I really was crying. When had that started?

“Phil, I need you to come to my house,” I said as calmly as I could. Which wasn't very.

“What happened?” he asked. “Is it your dad?”

“Brandon,” I said. “He's dead. Here at my house.”

I think most anyone else would have had a long set of questions about how Brandon came to be there, dead or alive. Phil just said, “I'll be there in fifteen minutes.” Relief welled up in me. I started crying again. “Do you need me to stay on the line?” he asked.

“No,” I was finally able to say. “Just get here.” And the line went dead.

So I just sat there for a while and cried it out. I kept thinking it was about to stop, then I'd look at Brandon's corpse again, and it would start up all over again. It just seemed so stupid, all of the events that had brought us to this exact moment. If he'd never smoked Vitamin Z. If he'd never been interested in me. If he'd never come into the Bully Burger that first time. If neither of us had ever been born. If. If. If.

And the tears stopped. Playing the “if ” game was stupid. I'd have plenty of time to regret everything after I'd dealt with the body in my house. I got up and I meant to get a sheet or something to cover Brandon. I stopped cold when I saw his hand twitch. My heart started to race. Maybe it was just some weird dead body thing, but maybe it meant that I was crap at determining whether or not someone was dead.

I ran over and knelt down next to him. “Brandon,” I said. “Brandon, please be alive. If you're alive, we can be best buds and braid each others' hair.” I shook him, but not as hard as before.

A moan escaped his lips, along with more of that awful black foam. I started to laugh. He was still alive. In my relief, I nearly hugged him.

Then he opened his eyes, and I knew I was wrong. I thought his eyes had been dull before; now they were lifeless. Somehow they still locked on me. There was a beat where we stared at one another, then he opened his mouth and hissed at me, black spittle spraying in my face.

I was up and running to my room, my gun. I heard him doing the same, and I blocked out the sound. All that mattered was finding the pistol. My bag lay open on the desk. I ripped it open and the gun was right there, thank God. I grabbed the holster, yanked the pistol free, and turned toward the door.

Brandon stood in the doorway. He looked at me hungrily. There was something else in that look, too, but I couldn't tell what. Didn't matter. I raised the pistol in a two-handed grip.

The moment he saw it, Brandon whirled around and ran. About two seconds later I heard breaking glass. My dad's bedroom window.

I glanced into the room as I ran down the hall; a gaping hole stood in the center of the glass. I pounded down the hall and out the front door. Careful not to get too close to the corners of the house where Brandon might try to ambush me, I raced around to the backyard. The grass was cold and wet on my bare feet.

I spotted him vaulting over the chain-link fence—four feet tall and he took it like an Olympic athlete. I stopped, got the pistol in a two-hand stance again, and aimed.

I squeezed off a shot and Brandon stumbled, but kept running. Before I was able to draw a bead on him again, he turned a corner out of sight. Somewhere nearby a dog started to bark, probably startled by the shot. Other dogs took up the chorus.

“Courtney?”

Phil stood back by the front of the house. Even in the light of the streetlights, I knew he was afraid.

“What the hell, Courtney?” he said.

“Brandon's a zombie,” I said.

And to his credit, Phil didn't freak out, and he didn't start asking a million questions. Hell, he didn't even curse. He just nodded, then said, “Of course he is.”

CHAPTER TWELVE

I
gave Phil the bullet-points version of what had happened. When I was all done, we stood in Dad's bedroom, and Phil's only response was to ask, “Do you have any plywood?”

Turned out we did have some in the garage. Phil used it to cover the gaping hole in the window.

“Tomorrow we'll call Cody,” he said as he got it in place. “His dad works for Cherry City Glass. He'll give us a deal on replacing this.”

“Okay,” I said. For some reason, I felt weird about all of this. I thought that Phil needed to be having a bigger reaction to Brandon coming over, but I also didn't want to push it. Basically, I was worried that it meant he didn't care enough to be jealous, which was stupid because I knew that jealousy was a toxic emotion (thanks, Dad!). Still, I felt distant from him.

“We'll keep this door closed,” he said. “That way the rest of the house won't get too cold, okay? You said you thought you shot him. Should we go outside and see if we can find a blood trail?”

That seemed like a good idea, especially the “we” part, but when we opened the door to go outside, it was raining again. Thanks a lot, Oregon. Any blood would have been washed away. Phil said not to worry about it.

“I'll be back in just a sec, okay?” he said. Before I could say anything, he ran out to his car and popped the trunk. He rummaged around, got something out, and closed the trunk again.

I almost asked him what the hell he was doing, but then he brandished his baseball bat—the one with the nails pounded through it.

“What's that for?” I asked when he came running back in.

“In case he comes back,” Phil said.

My blank stare must have prompted him to elaborate.

“I'm going to stay the night,” he said.

“To help protect me,” I said.

“Safety in numbers.”

I wondered briefly if this was some sort of attempt to get into my pants, but decided no, he wanted to stay the night out of concern for my safety. Sweet. Sort of annoying, but sweet.

He called his aunt and uncle and I got to hear one side of what must have been a very peculiar conversation. For me, the most interesting part was that he didn't ask if it'd be okay for him to stay over; he just told them. He said I'd had some trouble with an ex-boyfriend and he'd feel better about things if he stayed there with me. He stressed several times that he didn't think it was necessary to call the police. That was a relief.

I left the room before he was done and went to clean up the black shit Brandon had spewed on my dad's floor. Luckily, the room was covered in this thick, 1970s-era shag carpeting that was sort of brown, but not really any color at all. Like camouflage. I used to think that a unicorn might vomit a rainbow in Dad's room and you'd never be able to tell. Blotting it with damp paper towels seemed to do the trick. After that, I carefully picked up shards of glass. Phil came in while I was doing that and helped.

“Thanks,” I said when we were finished.

“You're welcome,” he said. “Sorry it took so long on the phone. I'd have helped you clean up sooner.”

“I mean, thanks for coming over,” I said. “Thanks for not being freaked out. Thanks for everything.”

“Okay,” he said. “I'm happy to do it. You know that, right?”

“I'm starting to get it,” I said. He smiled—just for a second, but I saw it.

“I just thought of something,” I said as I put more glass in the wastebasket.

“What's that?” Phil asked.

“Brandon ran away from me.”

“Sure,” Phil said.

“Have you ever known a zombie to run away once it catches sight of a living person?” I took Phil's silence as an answer in the negative. “And yet, when he saw the gun, he ran. Like he was concerned for his life.”

“That is weird,” Phil said, “but sort of consistent with all of the other zombie weirdness we've been experiencing lately.”

I couldn't argue with that. I picked the last of the visible glass up out of the carpet. I'd vacuum in the morning.

“Well,” I said, “I'm pretty wired. Don't think I could sleep right now. What should we do?”

“Want to watch a movie?”

No, Phil, that wasn't really what I wanted to do. “Sure,” I said.

I asked him what he wanted to watch and he named a couple of things I wasn't even sure were movies. Like what is
Tokyo Gore Police
or
Karate-Robo Zaborgar
? I told him I'd pick something. Turns out he'd never seen
Animal House,
so I put that in the DVD player. That one was a big hit in our house. It was filmed down the road in Eugene at the University of Oregon, which was where my dad went to college.

Watching the movie with him was really interesting. He sat forward and took it all in, very intense. At the parts where most people might laugh, he just sort of made grunting noises. The physical stuff made him laugh way more often than any of the word play or situational stuff. He also got caught up on factual stuff, or lapses in continuity or logic.

When it was done, I asked him what he thought.

“I get why people like it,” he said. “Comedies are hard for me to track. I don't get a lot of the jokes. I guess that's why I like action movies.” He shrugged.

“What now?” he asked.

“Let's just sit here, okay?” I said. I pushed him back a little so he'd actually relax, or at least recline, on the couch. Then I had him wrap his arm around my shoulders so I could cuddle with him. His body was stiff and unyielding for a while, then he eased up.

“Tell me if this isn't all right,” I said.

“No,” he said. “It's fine.”

Good,
I thought.

After we got settled, I said, “Guess who e-mailed me?”

“No idea,” he said and I knew he was done with that game.

“Dr. Keller,” I said, keeping any trace of pout out of my voice.

He thought for a moment. “The TV professor guy!”

“That's right, Einstein, the TV professor guy.” I went on to recap what the e-mails said, ending with the good doctor's suggestion that I might get my hands on a sample of Vitamin Z.

“That seems like an odd request,” Phil said.

“I think he was just throwing it out there,” I said. “Not that he was assuming I was some sort of drug kingpin. Anyway, I was wondering if it was okay to ask you a favor.”

“You can ask,” he said.

“Cute,” I said and pinched his side. He slapped me away. “Any chance you'll come up with me to visit Buddha?” I asked. “I already called him—I'm going up Tuesday.”

“And if I don't go with you, you'll go up alone?”

“Yes,” I said. “But don't make that the reason you come. If you're coming.”

He scratched his chin. “I think I can make room in my schedule on Tuesday,” he said.

“Only if it's not too much bother,” I said. “I know how many demands there are on your time.” I looked up at him and he craned his neck to look back. “I do appreciate it. Thanks.”

We talked for a while. I asked him to tell me about the cartooning school he wanted to go to. Turns out it was in New Jersey, not far from NYC. We'd be able to see each other while I was going to Columbia.

While we talked, I snuggled in closer. I started, you know, rubbing his chest with my free hand. He shifted and cleared his throat, but he didn't say anything. We kept talking about future plans and I decided to go for it—I let my hand travel south to see what it might find.

Phil jumped like I'd electrocuted him. He pushed me away.

“What are you doing, Courtney?”

I sat up and scooted farther away from him.

“Isn't it obvious?” I asked. “I'm trying to seduce you.”

“Is that what that was?” he asked. “Because I thought maybe you were checking me for a hernia.”

“Jesus Christ, Phil.” How repulsive did he find me that even the direct approach didn't work on him?

“Jesus Christ what?” he asked.

I put my head in my hands. I couldn't believe this was happening. I was having to explain to Phil why I was upset that he found me to be some sort of monster or, worse, he considered me a sexless friendbot.

“Most guys would like that,” I said.

“Is that why you like me?” he asked. “Because I'm like most other guys.”

Him making a valid point made me angry.

I stood up and slumped into the armchair. “We've been hanging out all summer, all school year,” I said, “and you haven't expressed any interest in me.” I paused and took a deep breath. Then I closed my eyes and said, “You know . . . sexually.”

“And that's a problem?” he asked.

“Right now it feels like it,” I said.

He didn't say anything for a bit, but his jaw was working like he had a piece of gum in his mouth.

“First,” he said, “that's not true. I think it's more accurate to say that I haven't tried to get physical with you, right?”

“Well, why haven't you?” I asked.

“Courtney,” he said. He said it slow and careful, like he was talking to a kid. Or like he was angry that he had to be saying any of this at all. “Courtney, I like you, but there's no way I want to rush into something physical. I didn't know if you were ready, hell, I don't know if I'm ready.”

“I think me grabbing your junk is a clear sign that I'm ready,” I said. I was trying to make a joke to lighten the mood. The look on his face told me I'd failed.

“You realize that the only reason I'm here tonight,” he said, “is because you invited over your ex, he OD'd and became a zombie, and now we need to keep watch for him, right? Forgive me if I find that to be something of a boner-killer.”

“Oh, Jesus,” I said. “I've really screwed this up.”

“Courtney, listen,” Phil said and he sat forward. “I have a lot of anxieties. About everything. About sex. I've never been with anyone, I've never kissed anyone, okay?”

“Me, neither,” I said.

He stopped and I know he kept himself from asking, “Really?” Which was good. That question would have derailed the progress we'd been making in the last couple of minutes.

“Okay,” he said. “So you get where I'm coming from. I'm sorry if you've mistaken my, um, hesitancy as disinterest. It's not that. I have trouble reading people and I honestly couldn't tell if you liked me, too.”

“Me probing your crotch wasn't a good indicator of interest,” I said. This time he did laugh.

“It was subtle,” he said, “but I think I got it. Now you know that I have anxieties, and now I know you have them, too. That will make things easier in the future.”

Or much more awkward
. But I didn't say it out loud.

“But nothing's going to happen tonight,” he said. “Not under the circumstances. I'm sorry if that upsets you.”

“Not upset,” I said, and I stood up. “Maybe a little sad, but I can't knock you for telling me what you're thinking. Maybe I should have tried it myself a little.”

He stood up, too. There we were, facing each other, close in that little space between the chair and the couch. I was willing to stand there a long time. He gave me a half smile.

“How about we go to sleep?” he asked. “I can take the couch.”

And there were my hopes, raised up and dashed in the space of two sentences.

“Let me get you some blankets and stuff,” I said.

As I turned to go, he reached out and stopped me with a hand on my shoulder. He put his other hand on my chin and lifted my startled face up to meet his own. He kissed me. His lips were soft. I remember that. Then I realized I didn't really know what to do with my own lips. I was never one of those girls who practiced kissing with a teddy bear or a mirror. Mostly I resisted the urge to grab his head and eat his face in a good way. So, I just kind of probed his lips with my own. He smelled good, like mint gum, and faintly of some aftershave.

When I felt him breaking the kiss, when I knew it was almost over, I darted my tongue out of my mouth, just the tip, and tasted him. I always expected French kissing to be weird. Like, you're licking another person; won't they taste just like you? No, I learned the moment my tongue touched his receding lips, no, they don't taste just like you. They taste electric, they taste like magic, they taste like them, they taste like not-you.

I can't remember whether or not I whimpered when he broke the kiss.

He smiled at me. “There, we've both had our first kiss. It'll take some of the pressure off, right?”

Take the pressure off? The sensations I was feeling south of my waistband told me that Phil had no idea what the hell he was talking about, but I didn't want to spoil the moment.

“It was nice,” I said.

“Yeah,” he said. “It was.”

“Let me go get those blankets,” I said.

Jesus, I was going to need to take a cold shower before I went to bed. If the tent in Phil's pants was any indication, so would he. Well, I guess I was happy I wasn't the only one going to bed frustrated.

 

The next day, Phil called Cody. Then Cody showed up with his dad in a big panel van. His dad was squat and barrel-chested. He had Popeye forearms, complete with an anchor tattoo, which I barely made out through the thick, black hair that covered him. There was something chimp-like about Cody's dad, and I didn't think that as an insult, but I also kept it to myself.