Zomburbia (23 page)

The image of her went blurry as I started to blink away tears. She stopped just a little way away from the fence. I stood and took an involuntary step away from her, hating myself as I did. A long, soft moan escaped her lips.

“Oh, Jesus, Sherri,” I said. “Oh, I'm so sorry. We should have never gone to Buddha's. It was stupid and I knew it. I should have said no.” She didn't respond, just stood there panting, watching me like a cat watched a mouse.

A sob escaped me and I wiped at my eyes. I wanted to turn away from her, to get her out of my sight. I needed to call her parents. As shitty as they were, they needed to know what happened to her.

I was just about to turn when an idea came to me. Despite the revulsion I felt when I looked at her, there was something I had to try.

“Sherri,” I said, “Sherri, if you're still in there, I know you'll hear me and be able to answer.” I waited and got no reply. “Listen, can you tell me what it's like? Is it like when we took Z? Does it hurt?”

She took a step forward. She opened her mouth like she was going to start speaking.

“Cor . . . ,” her voice rattled out of her throat.

“Yes,” I sobbed. “It's me, Courtney!”

Sherri looked right at me and something passed between us, some connection or understanding. Then her eyes went blank again.

“Cor . . . ,” She said again. “Cor!” The sound became a roar and she threw herself at the fence. Her mouth opened wider and wider. It looked like a snake dislocating its jaw to swallow a rat.

“No, don't,” I moaned. I stepped back from her.

With her mouth opened wide, Sherri pressed her face against the chain-link fence. She started to work her jaw up and down.

“Stop it.” My shoulders shook as I held back a sob. “Please, stop it.”

When biting through the fence didn't work, she started to rub her face back and forth against it, working her jaw the whole time. The fence was acting like a cheese grater, gouging bits of flesh out of her face.

This couldn't get any worse.

Then, of course, it did.

As Sherri pressed herself against it, the fence lurched forward. I jumped back in surprise and then noticed that the concrete moorings stuck in the ground were barely half a foot deep. She gave it another shove and the fence moved again.

“Stop it, Sherri,” I said. “Don't do this. It's me!”

With one last push, the fence fell inward to the ground and Sherri rode on top of it. I had to run backward to avoid being caught underneath it and I tripped over my own stupid feet as I went. I landed hard on my tailbone but didn't take any time to nurse my sore ass. Sherri was already scrambling toward me over the fallen fence and she was closer than I would have guessed possible.

I meant to tell her to stop again, to beg and reason with her. What came out when I opened my mouth was a scream that burned my throat. I just kept on screaming as I pushed myself backward as fast as I was able, my mind blank except for the thought that I wasn't going to get away. Sherri was crawling faster than I was.

I finally found my words, or word—I just started screaming, “Stop, stop, stop!” Over and over again. Not that it did any good. Sherri was practically on top of me and I decided to stop crawling and got ready to use my energy to kick her as hard as I could. I cocked my knee and got ready to kick her in her stupid, mauled face.

Just as her hand wrapped around my ankle, the top of her head exploded in a black mist. She managed to pull herself forward once more before she fell forward and stopped moving. That's when I heard the warning klaxon coming from the guard towers.

I jerked my leg away and stood up. I started to walk back toward the school and saw two of the stupid little golf carts the guards use rolling toward me. A ride back to the school sounded good at this point. Also, a chance to lay down, and be given super-strength sleeping pills, please.

I was pretty surprised when the carts stopped about ten yards away, the guards got out and three of them pointed their assault rifles at me. The fourth guard kept his hand on his side arm and started pointing to the ground with his free hand.

“Get down on the ground!” he yelled at me.

“It's okay,” I said. “I'm fine.”

“Get on the ground. I will not tell you again!” I noticed that he had unsnapped the strap that held his pistol in its holster.

I got down on my hands and knees and he yelled at me to lay down flat and put my hands over my head. What the hell? I'd just survived a freaking zombie attack and these guys were going Rambo on me.

I saw a couple pairs of shiny, black boots come into view.

“What's going on?” I asked, and I was annoyed at how shaky my voice sounded.

“Did the zombie scratch or otherwise hurt you?” the guy yelled at me. He was like a foot away and he still felt the need to yell. It came to me that these guys were probably all hopped up on adrenaline
and
they were pointing weapons at me. I was in really deep doo-doo.

“No,” I said, trying to be calm, trying to smack them in the face with my total badass serenity. “I'm not hurt.”

Another voice cut in, high-pitched and way too excited. “Look at these scratches on her arms! Did that thing do this?”

That totally blew my cool. “It was a cat! A cat did that!”

“You just need to lay there until Health Services comes for you.”

The guard tower klaxons had cut off by then and far off I heard a new siren. I knew that would be the HS ambulance. I raised my head enough to see that a pretty big crowd had gathered out by the school. They were all gawking, trying to figure out who was being held down by four rent-a-cops.

The HS ambulance pulled right onto the lawn and made ruts all along its path. I thought how the custodians were going to be pissed and I felt a giggle rise up in me. I stifled it. The last thing I needed in this situation was to lose it.

Three people in Tyvek Hazmat suits climbed out of the truck. They also wore full-face respirators, and I couldn't see any sign of humanity behind the mirrored faceplates. They stood and talked with one of the guards. Then they went back to the truck and brought out a stretcher and something else before coming over to me.

“Will you roll over, please?” one of them asked, and I did. “We want you to slide onto the stretcher, please, then we're going to put these restraints on you.”

One of the HS guys held a confusing tangle of leather straps with padded cuffs. I think the guy could tell that was freaking me out, because he quickly followed up with, “Don't worry, it's just procedure. We'll let you out once we get to the hospital.”

I know he meant that to reassure me. Coming from that mask, however, it was like finding out Darth Vader is your dentist and he just told you, “This won't hurt a bit.”

But I did as he asked and scooted my body up onto the stretcher. The guy with the harness moved in, and so did one of the guards—covering me, I guess. The dude with the harness knew what he was doing because in less than a minute, my wrists and ankles were secured to the rails of the stretcher. Once I was strapped in, they extended the thing's legs and wheeled me toward the ambulance.

As we bumped along the grass, I heard a voice calling out my name again and again. I lifted my head as much as I was able and looked out toward the crowd. Brandon stood there, separate from the rest of the kids. He had his hands cupped around his mouth and he was trying to get my attention.

“Call my dad!” I screamed. “Call my dad!”

Then they hit the bumper of the truck with the stretcher, which threw my head back. They slid me into the ambulance, and two of the guys climbed in behind me as they shut the doors. A few seconds later, the engine rumbled to life and we took off across the grass.

“I'm going to take some vital signs from you, okay . . . ?” one of the guys said to me. I knew he was fishing for my name.

“Let me alone,” I yelled at top volume. Then I just started to scream. My best friend was dead on the football field and I was being abducted by men in black. I was officially losing my shit.

I felt a searing pain in my right arm and stopped screaming long enough to look down. One of the EMTs had stuck me with a syringe. I wanted to start shouting about this new indignity, but I suddenly felt like it didn't matter. I felt like I was falling down a hole and everything that mattered was still up on ground level.

At that moment, falling down was the best feeling I'd ever had.

T
he only time I visited anyone in the hospital was after my mom slipped a disk falling down in our house. It was because of that injury that she started doing Pilates to try to feel better. That, of course, is where she met her douche bag instructor and then decided to abandon her family and run away to Seattle. Anyway, when she was in the hospital, they stashed her in a big room with three other patients. It didn't matter if you pulled shut the little “privacy curtain,” you still heard the other people's conversations, TVs, or snores. I remember at the time that it was super-annoying.

But I'd have given anything to have a few other people in the room with me as I came to, strapped to a bed in a darkened space. That prick of an EMT had lied to me.

Once I was awake, only two people ever came in to see me. At least, I think there were only two people that came in—both wore the same type of Tyvek environmental suits and full-face respirators that the EMTs had. One was a nurse who looked at all the monitors hooked up to me and the other stood by the door with a hand on his side arm. I guessed they came in once an hour to do their thing. I tried to speak to them the first couple of times they came in. They never responded. I gave up after a while.

In between their visits—visits I started looking forward to even though they ignored me completely, which made me feel like I was right back at school—I just lay there in the dark, trapped with my feelings. I kept seeing Sherri. Her as a zombie, her trying to eat me, her with the top of her head flying off. I was almost constantly in tears, which really sucked because I couldn't wipe my eyes or my nose with my arms strapped down.

Around what I guessed was bedtime, they gave me some sort of sedative. Any other day and I'd have really enjoyed it. That day it just kept me in this half-awake state where I kept hallucinating. I kept seeing zombies out of the corner of my eye. When I turned to focus they were gone. At one point, I noticed that Willie was standing next to my bed. I tried really hard to apologize to him, but I had a hard time making my tongue work right. The next thing I knew, he'd been replaced by the girl in the bikini from the reservoir. After that it was just a retelling of
A Christmas Carol
with one ghost after another.

My dad was in my room at one point, too, and I was convinced I'd stopped tripping and that he'd come to get me out. Then his face melted off. My screams must have been pretty annoying. The nurse and guard came into the room then and the nurse gave me another shot. That one knocked me out but good. I remembered having time to be grateful.

When I came to, the guard sat in a chair by the door. They'd opened the blinds on the window and sunlight streamed into the room. I blinked against the light and then rubbed my eyes. Then I stared at my arms like I'd never seen them before. I turned to the guard.

“When'd they take off the straps?”

He stood up and opened the door. “The doctor is going to want to see you,” was all he said to me, and then he left and closed the door behind him.

It only took the guard, the nurse, and a tall, old guy a couple of minutes to come back to the room. I spent most of that time just moving my arms and legs. It felt good.

The doctor smiled at me when he walked in, but it wasn't a real smile. His eyes didn't really change. He smiled the way some people ask, “How are you?” Like it was a social nicety. He flipped open a chart and looked at it for a minute. The nurse was also out of the environmental suit. She was a pretty Latina. Older, like fifty or something. She gave me a real smile. The doctor spoke to me without looking up from the chart.

“Do you often take drugs, Miss Hart?”

“Why are you asking me that? I thought you were just watching me to make sure I wasn't going to turn into a zombie.”

“We were observing you for signs of zombification,” the doctor said, and he was still looking at his chart. “Part of that process is to do blood work and look for the presence of the zombie virus. We didn't find it. We also did a tox screen and we found modified cocaine in your system. I think the name on the street is ‘Vitamin Z,' right? I'd guess that you'd taken it sometime within the last seventy-two hours.”

“Will you look at me when you speak to me?”

He looked up from his chart, uncertainty in his eyes. He probably wasn't used to being spoken to like that by patients. I didn't really care, though; I didn't like him all of a sudden and I wasn't going to hide it.

“So, how often do you use, Miss Hart?”

“That was the first time. On Saturday night.” I fought hard not to lower my eyes or sound apologetic.

He made more notes. “It
is
my business, Courtney,” he said, and I sat up straighter. I hadn't said it was none of his business. I got the sense he'd rehearsed this little play once or twice before he came in to see me. I also didn't like him calling me “Courtney.” When people like him start calling you by your first name, it's usually a sign of trouble. “The hospital has to decide whether or not to report this to the police. We have to report it to your parents, of course.” And then he looked up from the chart and he smiled for real this time.

Asshole. I kept my face neutral. He went back to his chart.

“Anyway,” he said, “if you'd been infected during your attack, you'd have exhibited signs by now, so we're going to release you to the care of your”—he flipped over some pages—“your father.”

“Great. Thanks, doc.”

“One last thing, Courtney. A couple of your fellow students reported that it looked like you'd been trying to
speak
with the zombie before it attacked you. Why would you be doing that?”

That stung. I thought about Sheri getting high with me and how things turned out for her. Something wanted to click in my brain because of that thought, but the more I tried to latch on to it, the faster it receded. I let it go for now.

“Can I get dressed now?”

He gave me that smile again. “Of course. Your father should be here any minute. The nurse will show you where you can find your clothes.”

He and the guard cleared out, leaving me alone with the nurse.

“Don't worry about him,” she said as soon as the door closed. “You've heard that joke about doctors?”

“Which one?” I asked.

“What's the difference between God and doctors?”

I smiled. “What?”

“God doesn't think he's a doctor.”

I knew I liked her.

The hospital had washed my clothes and now they smelled like industrial-grade cleaner. Not exactly spring fresh. Whatever, it was nice to be out of the backless gown—and out of the restraints, come to think of it. I could scratch being tied up off any list of possible fetishes.

The nurse walked down the hall with me and pointed me in the right direction as she went off to do some Florence Nightingale stuff.

I found the family lounge where I expected my dad was waiting for me. What I didn't expect was for Brandon to be there, too, holding a huge bouquet of Mylar balloons. He sat right next to Dad. They were
talking to each other
. Seeing him threw me. The memory of Saturday night came flooding back on a wave of resentment for him. If he'd just said something, stopped us, Sherri would still be alive. Then I had to admit that I could have stopped it, too. Hell, I could have not been selling Z, right? None of this was Brandon's fault—that was a little fantasy I'd have to give up on.

Still, why the F was he here with my dad? Part of me wanted to crawl back to the hospital room and tie myself to the bed before they noticed I was here. Best just to get it over with. I cleared my throat.

They looked up and they both broke into smiles. I didn't buy Dad's, though. I wanted to ask him what was up. Then Brandon was mauling me like a big, friendly dog. He wrapped me in his arms and pressed his face into my hair. Dad smiled more genuinely then, so I decided I could let myself ease into the hug a little. I'll admit that it was nice.

When the hug broke up, Brandon took a step back and gave me one of those “you are so brave” smiles. His eyes may have been a little moist.

“I was so worried about you,” he said.

“I'm sorry,” I said. I couldn't think of anything else to say.

“I heard you'd been attacked by a zombie and I just—I don't know, I freaked out a little. I'm glad you're okay.”

He hugged me again.

“Okay,” I said. “Thanks.”
You know who that zombie was, right?
I wanted to ask him. I kept my mouth shut.

Brandon stepped back when my dad stood up and opened his arms for me. I stepped into the embrace and pressed my face into the hollow of his neck. We didn't say anything for a long time and just stood there. He smelled like Old Spice and just a hint of sweat. It felt really good. Holding him made it easy to ignore everything that had happened and everything that was going to happen. There should be stores where you can walk in off the street and get a hug and then go on about your business. It would make life easier.

Dad pulled away finally and rubbed my back. He gave me that same sad smile and then looked over at Brandon who was standing there so patiently with his dopey grin and his bunch of balloons.

“I hope you don't mind that I invited Brandon to come with me,” Dad said. “He called the house asking about you several times so, I figured . . .” He trailed off.

“No, it's great.” I smiled at Brandon. “I'm glad you're here.”

“These are for you,” Brandon said, and handed me the balloons.

“You shouldn't have gone to any trouble.” Sixteen years of politeness training at the hands of my dad sometimes made me say things I didn't believe.

“Yeah, well, it was no trouble. There's a guy in a coma down there who won't miss them.”

“So sweet.” I gave him a nod, acknowledging the joke. “Really, thanks.”

“Brandon asked if he could drive you home,” my dad cut in.

“Oh, that isn't a good idea?” I couldn't keep the question out of my voice.

“I told him it was fine with me. But only if he drove you straight home, and if it was okay with you.”

Brandon was assaulting me with that grin and those teeth. God, the ability to hypnotize their prey must be an inherited trait in WASP families.

“S-sure,” I said. “I guess I'll see you at home in a few minutes?”

Dad kissed my forehead. “Yeah. Drive safely.”

“I will, sir,” Brandon said. “I always do.”

Sir?
If I hadn't just been released from the hospital following a zombie attack, I'd feel like we were in a 1950s educational film about etiquette. Dad gave me a wave and headed off toward the parking lot. I let it go.

“Let's go,” Brandon said, and he took my arm. This was getting to be too much. I let him lead me down the hall in the opposite direction from my dad. The balloons he gave me kept bumping into stuff as we went. Carrying them along felt weird. Some other girl who wasn't me could pull it off. Maybe I could “accidentally” let go of them once we got outside.

He led me to his truck and opened the door for me.

“Want me to help you up?”

“You know, I was in the hospital for observation, not because there was anything
wrong
with me.”

“Right. Sorry.”

Damn. “No, listen, Brandon, I'm sorry. It's just been a stressful few days, you know? Having shit heaped on me like that tends to make me a bitch.”

“It's okay.” He gave me a weak smile.

“Not really. Thanks, though, for—you know, for everything.”

“You're welcome, Courtney.”

“Okay,” I said, “now help hoist me up there before someone tells us to get a room.”

Once we were both in the truck, Brandon navigated out of the parking lot and got us pointed toward home.

“It's good to see you again,” Brandon said.

“You said that.”

“I know, but it's true. What was it like?”

“Do you know who the zombie was that attacked me?” I asked. I really hadn't meant to say that. Brandon looked at me like I'd just booted his puppy into traffic.

“I know it was Sherri,” he said. “I'm sorry.”

“You are sorry,” I repeated.

“Jesus Christ, Courtney! What do you want me to say? Is there anything that would make it better?” His cheeks were red. I couldn't tell if he was mad or embarrassed.

“Yeah, well, she wanted to do something stupid. Mission accomplished.”

We drove to my house without speaking after that. I guess I kind of burst his bubble. Which I hadn't meant to. It's sort of my superpower. I'm like the Spider-Man of inappropriate conversational gambits.

When we parked on the street in front of my house, Brandon said, “I really am sorry, Courtney. I'm sorry about Sherri. I know you two liked to egg each other on, but I know you liked her, too. I hate that she died. I feel responsible for it. At a bunch of points, I could have said something or I could have stopped it, and I didn't. I'm sorry that I was so weak.” Tears welled up in his eyes. He really looked like he was in pain.