Zombified (6 page)

“Typical,” Cody said. “We're probably invisible to people in her caste.”

Nice vocab word, Cody, I thought.

“Well,” said Warren, “the way she tells it, things were pretty confused that night. Lots of gunfire, lots of real fire, zombies everywhere. That sound right?”

“Yeah,” said Cody. He sounded suspicious.

“In all that noise, she probably just wasn't aware of you two helping out.” Warren fixed Cody in the rearview mirror. “Next time I talk to her, I'll set her straight, okay? Not in a mean way, just lay out the facts, okay?”

“Okay . . .” Sheepish.

“And I was serious about wanting to hang with you all,” Warren went on. “We'd probably have a lot to show one another.”

“Sure,” said Cody. “We could do that, right, Phil?”

“Sure.” I wasn't able to read anything in Phil's voice, but I settled back in my magic seat a little more relaxed. Whatever else he might be, Warren wasn't coming off as arrogant. That was good.

Something started tickling my brain. It was that part of me that was unable to allow a peaceful moment to go by without lobbing a shit grenade into the middle of it. I tried to suppress it, I really did.

“Let me ask you something,” I said to Warren.

Cody chose that moment to sit forward and offer several instructions on how to get to my house.

I cringed as this obviously rich kid started to steer us past the ugly yards, cheap chain-link fences, and peeling paint that meant we were close to home.

“Shoot,” Warren said after Cody got him on track to my house. It took me a moment to figure out he meant I could ask away.

“All this past week, people have been telling me that some guy has been asking about me.” I shifted in my seat, hoping it didn't make a fart noise when I did. “And every time I asked who it was, what he looked like. So I could identify him in the halls if I ran across him. You.”

“Sure,” said Warren, “and so you'd be able to hightail it if I turned out to be a creeper or a bagger.”

It took me a second to understand that bagger meant ugly.

“Naw,” I said. “Most folks, mostly girls, told me the guy was good-looking.” He didn't have anything to say to that—and neither did the audience in the backseat, so I went on. “In all the times I asked what you looked like, no one ever said that you were . . . you know . . .”

“Black?”

“Right.”

He chuckled. “White folks,” he said like that explained everything. I waited for more of an explanation. “Most white people are raised to think it's bad to notice if someone is a different color. They'd never say I was black. Unless they were describing me to a cop, I guess.”

“What?” I asked. “Are you accusing everyone I know of being racist?”

“Not racist,
per se,
” Warren said. “Just overly sensitive. You mostly get it in people who don't see a lot of people of color. Where I'm from, you grow up with all sorts of people, so it's no big deal to say, ‘Oh, yeah, Warren's a black kid,' or, ‘Tom, he's that Korean guy, right?' ”

“Where'd you grow up?” I asked.

“Seattle,” he said. I knew that Seattle was one of the first big cities reclaimed from the zombies. I'd never been there.

“Why the hell did you move here from there?” I asked.

“Dad got a new job, the family moves.” He gave an eloquent shrug of the shoulders. “I might move back there for college after high school. Or maybe I'll go to Gonzaga. I'm not sure.”

“I like your confidence,” I said.

“Oh, look.” Cody sprang up between the two front seats. “There's your house, Courtney. Have to cut this little jaw session short.”

There it was. Thank God clouds were covering the moon just then. For some reason it looked really ugly to me at that moment.

“Yeah,” I said. “Well, thanks for the ride,” I told Warren.

He gave this sort of two-fingered salute, like he was touching the brim of an invisible hat. But his smile saved it from looking totally douchey.

I turned in my seat. “'Night, you guys. Sorry the Z hunt was a bust. I hope you get your car fixed.”

“Thanks,” Phil said, his voice flat.

“Yeah, well, good night.” I opened the door and started to remove my ass from that amazing seat when I felt a hand on my arm. Warren grinned at me, but the grin was different. There was something else behind it I couldn't read.

“I meant what I said, Courtney,” he said. “I'm glad I was finally able to meet you.”

“Um, yeah,” I said, ever ready with a pithy comeback. “It was good to meet you, too.”

I closed the door and as the car's dome light faded, I saw Cody and Phil looking at me. Cody glared, but Phil's expression was blank. He might be thinking anything. I shuddered. Warren put the car in gear and pulled away.

I hugged myself for a second, then I remembered I was on the wrong side of our chain-link fence. I hustled into the yard. I found my bedroom window still open—whenever I sneaked out, I was half-convinced I'd find my dad waiting to bust me, but my room was dad-free.

I stripped down to my delicate underthings—boy shorts and a sports bra—and crawled into bed.

It was a really long time before I fell asleep.

CHAPTER SIX

T
he next few weeks went really well, all things considered. My dad started to let me off the leash more and more. Phil came over to dinner with us every once in a while. I even invited Cody over but he claimed that “family stuff” gave him the heebie-jeebies, whatever that meant. I was acing my classes, including a couple that I had at the community college where my dad worked—by the time I got to Columbia University I'd have enough credits to be considered a sophomore. If the credits transferred.

While we hadn't gone out zombie hunting with Warren, we had all hung out with him a few times. He introduced us to a bunch of people in the upper crust of the school hierarchy. Which was funny when you thought about it. We'd gone to school with most of these people since kindergarten, but it took a new kid to give us access to their world. High school was a weird, shitty world. Like if Philip K. Dick wrote for
Degrassi High
, or something.

Things were going so well in my life, that one Saturday in November, I decided to do something I hadn't done in a long time. I flipped open my laptop and Googled news about the recovery of NYC. I figured that even if there was no news, or even bad news, things were going so well that I would only be laid low for a day or two. A week tops.

I fired up Google, entered the search term, and hit return. Then I closed my eyes and crossed my fingers.

When I opened them again, I nearly crapped my pants. From excitement.

ARMY ANNOUNCES RECLAMATION OF NYC BEGINNING IN NEW YEAR,
screamed the headline. Then I screamed.

Dad came running down the hall. He threw open the door and stood there panting from the twenty-foot jog.

“Is everything okay?” he asked.

“They're going to take back New York!” I gushed. I jumped up and hugged him. His body was oddly resistant and he didn't return the hug. In my overhyped state, I ignored it.

“Um, yay?” he said.

“Isn't it great?” I asked. I smiled up at him. Signals began to seep through my bubble of joy. Brow: furrowed. Mouth: frowning. Body: stiff. What the hell? Why wasn't he joining in on my lovefest?

“Um, what gives?” I asked. “I thought you'd be excited, too.”

“I'm happy,” Dad said, “for the people of New York, a city so nice they named it twice, I might add.” He paused for me to laugh, but that wasn't going to happen, so he went on. “Anyway, I'm glad they'll finally get their city back, but I'm not sure why you're so excited.”

“Not sure . . . ?” How was he so dense? I almost said that out loud, but a finely honed sense of self-preservation made me swallow it. “Columbia University,” I said instead. “The Mailman School.”

“Courtney, you know that's not part of the plan right now,” he said. Not part of what plan? Whose plan? It sure as hell was a part of my current plan.

“What does that mean?” I demanded.

Dad sat on my bed and patted the place next to him. I chose to stand, even though I felt bratty doing it. He sighed.

“I thought you'd go to Chemeketa for the first two years,” he said and then held up his hand to stop me. Chemeketa was the community college where he taught. “And then we might see about you transferring somewhere.”

“There's no way I'd be able to transfer to Columbia after attending community college for two years,” I said. Dad frowned. He hated it when I talked down about his place of employment. He didn't understand why I didn't jump for joy at the chance to go to something just a step above vo-tech.

“And how would we afford it?” he asked. “There's no guarantee you'd be able to get enough in scholarships. I know you're brilliant, but that's an awful lot of money.”

“Scholarships? Money?” I heard the edge of hysteria in my voice, but I wasn't able to control it. “There's a whole brick of money in your sock drawer that says we can afford it!”

All of the air got sucked out of the room. Dad opened his mouth, then closed it again. He took off his glasses with his right hand and pinched the bridge of his nose with his left.

I knew I'd said the wrong thing, but, dammit, it was true. Last year I earned nearly seventy thousand dollars selling Vitamin Z out of the drive-through window at Bully Burger. Now it just sat in Dad's dresser in a gallon-sized Ziploc.

“Maybe you're not so brilliant after all,” he said. He replaced his glasses. “The fact that you might suggest using that money—money you got from selling poison to people—tells me that I may have been granting you too many freedoms. What makes you think it's okay to use that money?”

“Why else haven't you got rid of it?” I asked. “I thought you were keeping it around so that I could use it to go to school.”

“I'm keeping it around because I can't figure out how to give it away to a charity in a way that doesn't end with us both going to jail!” His face darkened and the cords on his neck bulged out. Dad almost never got so mad that he raised his voice. I kept all of my rebuttals to this argument firmly inside my big, fat mouth.

“Maybe I should just burn it,” he said.

Every scrap of energy and joy I'd felt just a few minutes before drained out of me. I walked across the room and slumped into my desk chair. I put my feet up on the seat so my knees were under my chin, then hugged my legs. I wanted to be as small as possible.

“Sweetie . . .” Dad said, then stopped. He looked around the room like maybe he was seeing everything for the first time. “Your mom didn't cause the zombie invasion, you know?”

“What?” I said. This new tack surprised me so much, it shocked me into speaking to him. Something I didn't think I'd ever do again.

“You heard me,” he said. “Your mother dropping out of Columbia did not cause the dead to rise up out of their graves.”

“Well, it didn't help keep them in the ground, either.” I felt petty even as I said it.

“I guess not,” Dad said. “There was a lot going on at that time. She and I had just started dating seriously. She was already questioning whether or not she wanted to be an epidemiologist. She'd also been accepted to the California Institute of the Arts, did you know that?” I shook my head. “She wanted to be a painter. She was a great painter.” He lay back on the bed and threw his arm behind his head. What was he doing, and where was this going? And how was this going to make it okay that I wasn't going to New York?

“Her parents wanted her to go into medicine,” Dad went on. “So she chose that to make them happy. At the expense of her own happiness. Know what happened next?”

“Yeah, you two fell in love and you got a job teaching out here so you left one of the coolest places on earth to move out to nowhere, Oregon.” Jesus, was it possible for me to sound any more like a spoiled child?

Dad chuckled. “That's almost everything that happened. She got pregnant. I got her pregnant.” He propped himself up. “With you.” He frowned, then got a faraway look in his eye. “I think she saw it as an opportunity to chuck school and get away from her family. I'm sure she thought she'd be happy, but it turned out that a family of her own wasn't what she wanted, either.”

He sat up and rubbed his face. “Maybe you can blame me for the zombie invasion. I got her pregnant, after all. Or maybe you can blame yourself. Who knows, maybe if she'd . . . given you up, maybe she'd have stuck with school and concocted a miracle cure for the undead.” He stood up. “The point is that it's pointless to assign blame in a situation like this. There's a lot to go around, but assigning it won't make things better. Maybe you can think about no longer blaming her, and maybe you could stop feeling like you need to make up for something you never had any part in.”

He walked over to where I sat and put his hands on my shoulders. I didn't shake him off, but I also didn't make any move to hug him or anything.

“I love you,” he said. “And I'll support anything you want to do. I just wish you wanted to do it for you and not because you feel you owe it to the world.”

I didn't know what to say, so I didn't say anything at all.

“Okay,” he said. He bent and kissed the top of my head. “We can talk about this later.”

He walked out of the room and left me alone with my shitty mood.

“It is what I want,” I said to no one in particular.

After fuming for a long time—a period when I waited for my dad to come back in my room to apologize so that I might either scream at him or ignore him altogether—I got up and climbed into bed without changing out of my street clothes. I switched out the light, lay on my back, and stared up at the ceiling. What the hell did he know about why I was doing what I was doing? Sure, he was a psychologist but that didn't give him any great insight into my inner workings. If he really knew what was going on in my head he wouldn't just give me all of that cash, he'd be on the corner helping me sell more Vitamin Z so I could leave to go to school.

My phone lit up as it received a message. The green light threw long shadows up on the ceiling and made me think of monster movies. I guessed it was a message from Phil asking if I wanted to go out to kill the undead. To which I was going to give a resounding, “Hell, yeah!” Instead, the message was from a number I didn't recognize right away:

Perfect. It was from Brandon. I stared at the screen until it went black from inactivity, then I thumbed it to life. My thumb hovered over the call button. Any other night, I'd have deleted the dumb message and gone to bed. But that night I was feeling weak and vulnerable, and I was curious about what he was doing with himself. It might have made me a horrible person, but I was also flattered that he kept reaching out to me.

I brought my thumb down on the call button and put the phone to my ear. It rang three times and I started to think it was going to go to voice mail. Maybe he'd turned it off for the night, or maybe he'd gotten another call. Whatever, I was relieved as I started to pull the phone away from my head.

“That you, Courtney?” I heard come from the other end and put the phone back.

“Hi, Brandon,” I said.

“It's good to hear from you.”

Was it really Brandon? The voice sounded too thick somehow, too slow.

“Nothing to say?” he asked.

“Brandon?”

“Who else?” he asked. He laughed, but it sounded all wrong. The Brandon I knew had a laugh that was light and friendly. This laugh was slow, and thick, and somehow mean.

“You sound different,” I said. Stupid, but I couldn't think of anything else to say.

“I'm still me, Courtney,” he said. “Want me to say something only I'd know?”

I didn't answer. I grasped for something to say.

“You compared me to John Travolta when you broke up with me,” he said and chuckled.

“Not really,” I said. “I compared myself to Sandra Dee from
Grease
.”

“Right,” he said, “but that would make me Danny Zuko in that analogy, right?”

“I guess so,” I said.

“See,” he said, “I went out and watched the movie after you broke up with me.”

I winced. He kept saying that—that I'd broken up with him. It was true but mentioning it again and again seemed like bad manners. Like calling attention to someone with a disability or something.

“I liked it,” he went on.

“Good,” I said. “I'm glad you did.”

“Let's meet up,” he said.

I nearly gagged. That statement did not flow logically from what we'd just been talking about. We were supposed to talk about the relative merits of Sid Caesar's performance as Coach Calhoun, the awesomeness of Rizzo's overall aesthetic, and the way “Beauty School Dropout” almost flushes the whole production down the toilet. We weren't supposed to jump nearly context-free to suggesting we get together. I sat up in bed. Even though we were talking on the phone, I felt like I needed to be ready to run away.

“I don't know, Brandon,” I said. “I don't think that'd be a good idea.”

“I'm not going to force it, Courtney,” he said. “I just think it'd be good to see you.”

“Yeah, well, I . . .” I started.

“And I think you'd like to see me, too.”

“I just wanted to know if you were doing okay,” I said. “That's why I was asking folks at school about you. You weren't at the football rally.”

He laughed, a genuine Brandon laugh. Somehow it chilled me more than relieved me in that context.

“No more football,” he said. “It just doesn't seem worth it.”

“What changed?”

“Meet me and I'll tell you,” he said. “It doesn't have to be tonight. Whenever you're ready. Listen, I gotta go. An old friend of yours is calling. I'll say hi for you.”

“What?” I asked, feeling lame. “Who?”

“I'll talk to you later, Courtney. Thanks for calling.”

The line went dead.

I sat on the bed looking at the phone wondering about the last thing he said to me. An old friend of mine was calling him? What the hell was that supposed to mean? Crystal? Were they a thing now? And if they were, why was he suggesting that I meet with him? I had no idea what was going on and it was frustrating the shit out of me.

“I refuse to let you control me,” I said to the phone as if it was Brandon I was talking to. “I broke up with you and I refuse to let you manipulate me into changing my mind. Also, I am talking to my cell phone.” I needed to go to bed.