Zombified (29 page)

He snapped his jaws inches from my face, but I was able to hold him back with the tool, which I held across his chest with both hands. He tore at my arms and chest with his claws. If it hadn't been for the extra layer of sweatshirt, I'd have been toast. I needed him off me, fast.

As fast and as hard as I could, I turned my whole body, bringing the tool with me. The tile-ripper head caught him in the face and I kept turning. I felt the tool meet resistance, then it wrenched free of whatever had caught it. I heard a weird, strangled cry come from Brandon, then silence.

I rolled a few feet away and got to my feet. I turned to face Brandon and found him kneeling in a pile of his own guts, his jaw half ripped off. He looked at me, his dead eyes filled with anger and betrayal.

“Sorry,” I said. I took a step forward and swung the tool like a short baseball bat. It connected with his head and sent a shock wave up my arms. He fell backward.

I dropped down on his chest, my legs on either side of his body. He tried to fight me, but he had nothing left to give.

I got the chisel head up where his chin would be if his jaw had still been attached to his face, then, with all my strength, I pushed it up into his mouth, through his soft palate, and into his brain.

Brandon's body convulsed beneath me a few times, and then he was still.

I pulled the tool free and stood up to face the army of zombies. I showed them the tool, their boss's necrotic brains dripping off the end.

“You want some, too, you undead assholes?” I yelled at them. “Well, come on!”

They milled around. I swear, they looked like schoolkids getting scolded by their friend's angry mom.

A few turned and walked off into the woods. Then more, then all of them were walking away. Had I just scared off a zombie horde?

Kids came running up alongside me, firing their guns into the crowd of runners. I didn't try to stop them. I turned and walked back to the cars and Phil.

I passed Warren on the way and stopped to look at him. He was surrounded by dead zombies. Zombies he'd killed.

I knelt down.

“You were a jerk,” I said. “But you were pretty good at killing shufflers.”

I pulled my pistol from its holster, put the barrel against his temple, and pulled the trigger. When I stood up, I left the pistol behind. I felt done with killing anything—even something that was already technically dead—for a while. Maybe forever.

I stripped off both sweatshirts and threw them away. Phil came out from behind the cars and held me for a long time without saying anything.

As we stood there in our embrace, the sound of gunfire petered out and I heard the distant wail of sirens.

“Better late than never,” I said.

Then I realized I was really thirsty. “I want another beer,” I said.

“Me, too,” Phil said. “I hope no one shot the kegs.”

“Oh, God, don't even say that.”

By the time the cops showed up in their anti-zombie armor, most of the kids had drifted back to the kegs and were drinking merrily away. We didn't even stop when the cops told us all to get down. Most of us sat like they requested, but we put just one hand over our heads. We had to use the other hand to hold our beers.

We were all going to have to face the fact that about a dozen of our classmates had been killed in the attack, and it seemed like a drink might help with that.

The cops made their way over to us, stepping gingerly through a mass of dead runners, and more than a few of our classmates. They found us all sitting there with illegal alcohol.

And you know what? Not a single kid got a minor in possession that night.

 

We answered questions. Lots of questions. Everyone left out the fact that we had planned for an attack. We made it sound like we'd all just been out there and it had happened. While we were being interviewed, the police sent teams out into the forest to hunt down stragglers, so we kept hearing sporadic, distant gunfire. It sounded like fireworks. You know, festive.

When I finished up being interrogated, I found Phil. He was standing there just staring at his phone, his face pale.

“What's wrong?” I asked.

“Um, nothing, really,” he said.

“No, what?” I asked.

He looked up at me and smiled. “My aunt and uncle were attacked. Their house. Their house was attacked by a big group of zombies.”

“Oh, my shit,” I said. “Are they okay?”

“They got in the crawl space and they used your chains to keep them out.”

“It worked?”

“They're alive because of you,” Phil said. “They called the cops while they were down there, and the cops came and cleared out the undead.” He hugged me, a tight embrace, and I felt his tears on my neck. “You saved them, Courtney.”

“It worked?” I asked. I couldn't get it through my head. “And the zombies attacked? I knew they might. I knew Brandon might want to eff with my life like that.”

“I wish we could kill him again,” Phil said.

He broke the embrace and looked a little embarrassed at his display of emotion.

“He's dead enough,” I said.

“Let's think about finding a ride home,” he said.

“Maybe soon, but there's something I want to do first,” I said.

“What's that?”

“I want to see if the cops will let me help with the bodies of our friends,” I said. “I want to see everyone who gave up their lives, you know?”

“I'll help,” Phil said.

A few others helped, too—Crystal and some folks I didn't know. It didn't take long. There were fewer than I'd feared, but still too many.

We caught a ride with Hannah and Cody and one of Hannah's friends. No one said much on the way home. I mean, what was there to say?

EPILOGUE

T
hings seemed to move fast for a while after that night. Like we were living in a crappy movie and we'd come to the montage.

I woke up the next day—evening, if you want to be accurate—to find Phil standing in my doorway. Diane and Gene were somewhere else in the house whooping it up.

“Are we under attack again?” I asked.

Phil held up a sheet of paper.

“Yes?” I asked.

“I got in,” he said. “The Kubert school.”

I lay back down and felt a huge grin spread across my face. “I knew you'd get in,” I said in a singsong voice.

“I was pretty sure I would, too,” he said. “Get dressed, we're going out to celebrate.”

“Where we going?” I asked.

“Olive Garden.”

I groaned.

“Don't mock the ways of my people,” he said. “Come on, Cody and Hannah are going to meet us there.”

That made me sit up. I remembered what Cody had said the night before.

“Did you tell him?” I asked.

Phil nodded.

“How'd it go?”

“He said he was really happy for me,” he said. “But . . . but there was something else to it. I didn't press him.”

“He's going to lose his best friend,” I said.

“He's not going to lose anyone.”

Do you really think there's going to be a lot of hanging out between us in the future, Courtney?
Cody had said that the night before. Maybe I shouldn't have been surprised that he was better at judging the situation than Phil was. I forced myself to smile.

“Okay,” I said. “Let me get dressed.”

A few days after that, I got a double-barrel shotgun blast of happy news. When I turned on my computer, my e-mail beeped at me. It was a Google alert notice I'd set up with news about New York. The Army was announcing the end of major operations in New York City and was now moving civilian contractors into the city for cleanup.

I was dancing around in my chair when my e-mail beeped at me again. I almost ignored it. I didn't need a late notice from the library or a piece of Viagra spam to bring me down. I went ahead and checked it anyway because I was compulsive like that.

That was all I needed to see. I screamed and ran out of the room. Diane was the first person I found. She was supervising a guy installing a new front door—the zombies had wrecked the old one. She was startled, of course, but then I told her about the e-mail I got and she joined in on my screaming and dancing and hugging. The guy hanging the door just stood there staring at us.

We all went out together that night again. I chose a place that was not Olive Garden, thanks very much. All night long, Cody kept giving me weird I-told-you-so smiles, but he seemed genuinely happy for me and Phil. Maybe he was smarter than I ever gave him credit for.

After dinner, Phil and I were driving home in Phil's new-to-him Subaru.

“I could do with some dessert,” I said.

“After all the Vietnamese food you packed away?” Phil asked, but then he saw the look on my face and backed off. “What are you in the mood for?”

“A milk shake,” I said, “but one made without a trace of real dairy products.”

He thought about that for a second. “Bully Burger it is.”

“Chacho will want to hear our good news,” I said.

A few minutes later we came around a corner and there was the BB parking lot. But something was wrong. Huge high-intensity lights had been set up so that construction workers were able to see what they were doing in the darkness. The building itself was completely boarded up, and it looked a lot like it might have been set on fire, too.

We parked and I was out of the car before it had even come to a complete stop. I ran to the fence and looked in at all the workers. Where was the security guy? There had to be security with this many people around.

Phil joined me and gave me a confused look.

“Hey!” I shouted. “Hey, where's the security guard?”

A couple of guys stopped what they were doing and looked at me, but then they went back to whatever tasks they were being paid to do.

I kept shouting until I saw a black-clad dude toting a shotgun come out of a single-wide trailer off in the corner of the lot.

“Courtney,” Chacho shouted, “what's going on?”

“Oh, thank God,” I said. “What happened here, Chacho?”

He came up to the fence, took off his helmet, and wiped sweat off his bald head.

“We got attacked the other night,” he said. “A whole swarm of zombies. I haven't seen anything like it since Baghdad.”

“Saturday night?” I asked.

“Yeah,” he said and squinted at me. “How'd you know?”

I told him a very shorthand version of what our Saturday night had been like. Chacho shouldered his shotgun and wiped away more sweat.

“Doesn't sound like a coincidence to me,” he said. “Must have been something to that theory of yours.”

Of course Brandon knew that I considered Chacho a friend. So he'd sent some of his undead army out here to try to kill Chacho. God, that guy had sucked. I agreed with Phil: I wished we could kill him again.

I bit my tongue and didn't shout, “I told you so!” in Chacho's face. Instead, I asked, “What happened here?”

He looked back at the shell of the Bully Burger.

“Like I said, a big load of zombies came crashing through the fence,” he said. “We called the cops and then we defended the stupid place.”

“Who was here?” I hooked my fingers through the chain link.

“Me, Mr. Washington, the twins,” he said, “a few people you don't know. A guy named Karl, another we all called Mullet.

“We ended up huddled behind the counter fighting off the zombies. I finally doused the dining room in oil and set a bunch of them on fire. When the fire suppression system activated, we went out the back door and made our last stand in the shelter with the garbage.

“We lasted long enough for the cops to show up.”

“Did everyone make it?”

Chacho looked down at the ground and spat. He shook his head.

“Mullet got it in the first wave. Mr. Washington died saving Ashley. Stupid old man.”

“Mr. Washington's dead?” Phil asked.

“Yeah,” Chacho said. “Mrs. Washington is running the show now. She's having this whole place remodeled. It's going to be an ‘upscale coffee boutique,' whatever that means.”

“Jesus,” I said.

“Yeah,” said Chacho. “Hey, I'm glad to hear you two made it through okay, though. Anything good going on with you?”

“Oh, shit, yes!” I exclaimed and Chacho took an involuntary step back, then caught himself and grinned.

“Well, don't keep it to yourself,
chica,
” he said.

So Phil and I got to take turns telling him our news, and Chacho listened, grinning from ear to ear the whole time.

“I knew you'd both be going places,” he said. “That's really great news.”

A guy in a hard hat came out of the trailer and looked around until he spotted us.

“Hey, Chacho,” he yelled. “Barry wants you to do a check on the . . .” He made a circle motion with his finger.

“The perimeter, gotcha, Frank,” Chacho shouted back.

“Listen, I gotta go,” he said to us. “But it really is great news. Like I said, come by the house on the Fourth. We're having a big barbecue. We'll celebrate.”

We told him we'd think about it.

“Bring your family, Phil,” he yelled as he walked away. “And your friends. But not too many.”

 

We spent the next month getting ready for a move across the country and for school in the fall. Gene helped me out a lot—he put me in contact with an apartment broker who found me a place to live in a rent-controlled building. The guy assured me that rental prices had never been as low as they were right now, and they never would be again. “There are a lot of advantages to being one of the first people to move back into the city,” he told me via e-mail. The same broker put Phil in touch with a woman who helped him find a place in New Jersey.

The lawyer, Alvarez, got me set up with an account at an East Coast bank. He also offered to have all the accounting stuff transferred to a lawyer on that side of the country. Or I could take it all on myself since I'd just turned eighteen. I told him he was doing a great job and to please keep doing a great job.

And, yes, that's right, in all of the craziness, I forgot my own birthday. Even Gene and Diane had missed it. I didn't mention it to them, but I did bring it up with Phil.

“I forgot,” he said. “Hell, I'm sorry. I'd been planning something, a new drawing, but then . . .”

“But then we were fighting the undead, getting into college, preparing to move across the country.”

“What do you want to do to celebrate?” he asked.

“Hang out with you and your family,” I said.

“That's what we always do,” he said.

I shrugged. “And yet, that's what I want. Finish that drawing you were working on and give it to me,” I said.

“Okay,” he said.

I leaned in for a quick kiss. “Okay,” I said.

 

The next time we came up for air was to go to Chacho's Fourth of July cookout thing. Gene and Diane and Cody went with us. Chacho's wife was super-excited to hear all of our news and gave us hugs. The food was amazing, and all of the adults looked the other way when Phil, Cody, and I sneaked some Mason jars full of sangria.

As the sun was setting, we had Gene and Diane drop us off at the waterfront so we could watch the fireworks along with most of Salem and every armed policeman on the city's payroll. It was a very well-behaved crowd at events like this.

As we waited for the fireworks to start, we lay on our backs in the grass. The sky was a deep blue-black and it was going to be full dark soon. Even though I'd eaten most of a cow back at Chacho's, the smells coming from the food booths made my mouth water.

“So, when are you two leaving?” Cody asked. We'd talked about this a bunch of times, but he kept asking. It was like he wasn't able to hold it in his memory, or maybe like he couldn't accept it.

“Monday,” Phil said. “We drive off on Monday. Courtney mapped out the whole route.”

“I found every city that's safe to stay in between here and New York,” I said.

“I want to hang with you every day between now and then,” Cody said. “Even if all we're doing is packing your stuff.”

“You know it,” Phil said.

We fell silent as the fireworks began to burst overhead.

And somewhere in there, the local newspaper ran a story about how the Salem chapter of Narcotics Anonymous received a cash donation of nearly sixty thousand dollars. Anonymous, of course.

A few days after the Fourth, Cody, Hannah, Gene, and Diane helped us load our things into the Subaru. The bulk of our stuff was already being shipped to our apartments.

We all said our good-byes and hugged and maybe, just maybe, there were a few tears, too.

When I hugged Cody, I whispered in his ear, “Thanks for being such a great friend to Phil.”

“Now it's your turn,” he said. “Don't screw up all of my training.”

“Never,” I said.

We got into the car, Phil behind the steering wheel, and I told him I wanted to take a little drive.

“Maybe you haven't noticed, but we're about to head out on a long drive, Courtney,” he said. “The car's all packed up and everything.”

“A side trip,” I said, “before we get going.”

He blinked at me and asked where I wanted to go. When I told him, he actually looked surprised.

“Well, let's get going,” he said.

He backed out of the drive and got headed in the right direction as we waved good-bye to Diane and Gene. And to Cody, of course.

Without me asking him to, Phil drove us past my old house. The new renters had painted it and had redone the landscaping, but it was still my house. I half expected my Dad to step out of the front door and wave at me as we cruised by. I don't know if he'd have been happy with me leaving, but I think he'd have been proud of me anyway.

I wiped at a tear. There must have been something in the air.

 

Phil sat on his rock and looked out over the city.

“I can't believe you wanted to come out here again,” he said.

I shrugged. “Seemed appropriate somehow.”

I sat next to him and took in the whole of Salem. It hadn't changed much at all since the last time we'd sat there, at the beginning of the school year. There was the Gold Man on top of the capitol, the banks and churches, the tree-lined streets. Somehow, though, I felt differently about it. It didn't make me angry or nauseated.

I think that since I was leaving, I wanted to be a little generous toward the place where I'd grown up. But I swore I'd seek out counseling if I ever started to miss the place.

“It feels like a lot more than a year ago that we sat up here,” I said.

“It was nine months ago,” Phil said. “And we remembered to bring our weapons this time.”

I rested my head on his shoulder.

“If you ever tell anyone that I said this, I'll deny it,” I said, “and then I'll kick you in the junk, but it's sort of pretty.”