To score a date with Gray Solomon, even just a group date at the movies, had pushed Corey into the stratosphere among his peers. She’d broken up at the end of eighth grade with Drax, breaking his heart like Keefer’s nose later on, and in ninth, she got into Corey. And wow, did he want to be gotten into. Drax said that he’d lost fifteen points off his purity test in one night with Gray, bringing him to a very respectable fifty-nine percent. Corey, on the other hand, was still at an embarrassing ninety-five. A nun could get a ninety-five. He’d gone on a date, had an erection, masturbated, watched Internet porn, and humped a pillow. That was it. You basically got a ninety-five just for having a pulse. So a group of them were due to meet up at the theater at six, he’d pay for her ticket and popcorn, and hope in a few weeks that he might achieve the eighties at the very least. She was worth waiting for. You just had to go about it politely with Gray, treat her like a lady, not pretend your hands had turned into magnets and launch yourself at her tits.
And then everything changed before they could make it to the theater. So no one needed to tell Corey what he had lost. He had seen Gray afterwards, very briefly on a road. Her beautiful blonde hair was a mess, hanging in her face with leaves and twigs caught in the tangles. Her clothes were torn and filthy, and her gray eyes had been as flat as the surface of a pool on an overcast day. Mouth hanging open, feet bare, he whispered her name in horror and ran away.
Someone honked. Corey had been sitting there and now the crowd of idiots was gone. He flipped the person off for no reason and drove on. Daniel had had to teach him how to drive since Corey’s mom and dad were dead. It just wasn’t the same. When Corey had been little, his family took yearly trips to Disneyland. He’d bang around the track in those little cars with one parent or another beside him holding on for dear life and vocally fearing the day he turned sixteen. But Mom had died when Corey was thirteen, so she hadn’t gotten to teach him. An ancient asshole who should have had his license revoked a decade ago drove through a stop sign and nailed her as she was coming back from the mailboxes down the block. He hadn’t seen her there in the broad daylight, in her bright red jacket, and he’d had another accident just a year before when he put his car in forward instead of reverse and crashed into the side of the Book Biz. Then Corey’s father had died not long after the H1Z1 virus leveled the world, zombies ripping him apart. That left Corey all alone and needing a stranger to teach him how to drive.
He was so ready to move out of his foster home. He’d be eighteen really soon, just a couple of weeks after graduation, and then he was going to take any job that got him out of that house and into his own room. Mason and Marquis were drama queens, always upset about something or other, and their mother had been weird as fuck from their stories. She’d wanted a rainbow coalition of kids and selected their fathers accordingly. Mason was so white that he was nearly an albino, and Marquis was black. They had had two sisters before the change, one half-Asian and one half-Mexican. The sisters and the mom had turned into 3s. Both of the boys thought their mother’s strange selection of sperm was really cool. The men that she’d used hadn’t even known they were fathers. She’d just banged them until she got knocked up and then moved away without a word. That was so weird that Corey wished he could tell his parents about it just to see their faces. Who did that? Usually they had said that about Keefer. His father said that and added exactly what she should have done the time Gray slugged him.
It was hard going from their nice big family home to a tiny foster home full of strangers. But it would be over with very, very soon. Mason and Marquis could fight over who got Corey’s bed, his absence only relevant to them in what they could gain from it. Judy wouldn’t miss him. They neither liked nor disliked each other, and he wasn’t going to miss her either. She had her books, and some internal world far more satisfying than the real one. The only one Corey was going to miss among his foster siblings was Holly, except for when she had episodes. One day she’d run to get him a soda if he asked, the next day he’d wake up to her standing over him with a knife. Her eyes were as vacant as Gray’s had been. Knock-knock. No one home. It was creepy.
She hadn’t known who he was at that moment. In episodes, you had the barest grasp of anything. Her brain was unable to access its memories of them doing jigsaw puzzles together, or him reading one of her princess storybooks on the sofa. Episodes made everyone a stranger. He’d been lucky that she spaced out for a few seconds, giving him just enough time to wake up, yell in shock, and scoot aside before she brought the knife down to his pillow.
And Foogles! She had killed the cat during another episode, stabbed it to death and been eating it when Corey walked into the room. Her face was pressed down into the exposed innards as she ripped at the meat. She looked up to Corey, blood dripping down her chin, and growled. She was protecting her kill. They’d all agreed at a family meeting to tell her that Foogles had run away, in order to protect her feelings. But after her episode ended, Mason cruelly told her what she had done. She sobbed in Corey’s lap, unable to remember it, but horrified. She loved the cats, had silent tea parties with them and sneaked them treats from the table, and to know that she had killed one was devastating. Her tears had soaked into his jeans and she pleaded Mama-Daddy-Brown Bear-Foogles-be-quiet-be-quiet-BE-QUIET. Then she’d cried more quietly and stopped speaking. Corey wasn’t mad at her. It hadn’t been Holly’s fault. It was Mason’s fault for being such a spiteful little prick, and Janice’s.
There was such a difference between a real home and a foster home. It was the difference between the utensil drawer and the junk drawer in the kitchen. In the first, everything was lined up neatly in the divider. Spoons with spoons, forks with forks, wine corks at the top, chopsticks at the bottom. In the second, everything was jumbled up. What went into a junk drawer were the things that you didn’t know what to do with, so you just dumped them in there and closed it up tight. They were a junk drawer family.
His cell phone chimed. It was a text from a friend inviting him to hang out with a group at the river. Corey didn’t answer. He had also been certain of his footing at Turley High, knowing who was ultra-cool and who was just cool, and who wasn’t cool at all. He had been in the cool crowd, and dating Gray would have bumped him up to ultra. That had all ended his freshman year, and since then he’d been at a junk drawer school with kids from all over the country. Deciding that he would go to the river just for something to do, he pulled an illegal U-turn and started for it.
Goddammit, he even missed Keefer, and Keefer was an asshole and a pervert who was on a one-way track to prison. He hadn’t liked Keefer at all, no one liked him, but Keefer was a familiar douche-y aspect of Corey’s life. You just put up with him because he went to all the same schools since pre-K and came to all the same parties. He was an equal-opportunity ass, spreading the joy to everyone, and you just told him to fuck off so he’d go away and be an ass to someone else. Keefer was Corey’s douche to contend with, and now he was gone.
Sometimes Corey thought of Gray when he jacked off. It felt so wrong, the sexy before image of her warring in his fantasies with the zombie after, and the after winning out in the end. Was she still out there? Running crazily around their hometown, eating cats and dogs and people? It would have been better if 3s just died of their virus. But they lived, minus their brains. Some even had sex. It had been in a news, a laboring pregnant 3 captured and the baby delivered with her tied down. The mom was euthanized after that, and the baby was stillborn. A specialist had been interviewed and reported that was common. It was actually good. They didn’t have to worry about 3s breeding a new generation of 3s. They would die out in one generation. Women who were 1s and 2s were still having live babies, although the infection was passed on.
He made himself think about something else as he drove. It was nice being in the minivan alone when he usually wasn’t ever alone. Workers’ housing wasn’t anything fancy, but he would be guaranteed his own room. The career counselor had mentioned that. Whether Corey was grow
ing food or stationed around the borders of Lincoln to shoot 3s coming this way, he’d go home to his own space. Guards didn’t have to do too much. Lincoln wasn’t exactly a hotbed of danger. It wasn’t a hotbed of anything.
Six of his junk drawer classmates were there in the parking lot, waiting for another friend who wrote just as Corey arrived that she couldn’t make it. So they went to the river without her, carrying chairs and coolers. Isaac threw Corey a beer and said, “Didn’t think you were coming.”
“Sister is having an episode,” Corey said. If it had been Judy, he would have added foster. But Holly always made Corey hurt a little. He’d been out there in the wild for months, just trying to survive. He knew what she had gone through, and she’d been a lot younger at the time. The others had gotten to safety much sooner.
“Is she a 1 or 2?” Anna asked.
“She’s a 2,” Corey said. It was a stupid question, but Anna was rather stupid, so to her it was intelligent. Nobody needed to get out of the house when a 1 was having an episode.
Anna was from Charleston and he loved her accent. She was pretty, but she was no Gray, that was for damn sure. New Jersey transplant Mia was gawky and geeky, her figure hidden in shapeless clothes. He didn’t like her accent as much. Even here, supposedly going to the river to blow off some steam, she had a backpack to get a little studying in. She always protested that she had too much work to do and came along anyway to complain that she shouldn’t be there. Corey found her highly annoying, but again, she was no Keefer. Mia was someone else’s cross to bear. And a small potatoes one, considering.
The guys hailed from California to Florida, all of them ending up in Lincoln one way or another. Only Isaac Wisquin was a hometown boy, pushing ahead to the front since he knew the best path to take. Corey liked him the most, and that was quite a lot. It was hard to dislike Isaac, who was relentlessly enthusiastic even when things were going shitty. Big test? Isaac came in with a smile and cracked his knuckles one at a time, looking out the window calmly as everyone else crammed for one last minute or hovered protectively over the facts in the delicate house of cards that was their memories. Crappy weather? Isaac passed around a kindergarten-level picture of a sunny day that he’d made, a blue strip of sky on top and a green strip of grass on bottom, with all of them labeled in a neat row, holding hands, and not wearing a stitch. The guys yelled about how they were naked with each other, because the boys were grouped all together on one side of the grass and the girls on the other. Isaac just laughed and told them to draw their own pictures. And they did. Only Isaac Wisquin could convince a bunch of seventeen-year-old guys to spend their lunch period huddled over paper with crayons and pencils and markers, coloring furiously to put everyone in a more pleasing, heterosexual-appearing alignment. That had made Corey split his sides from laughter, one guy after another holding up a drawing and saying see, Isaac? BOYS hold hands with GIRLS! Are you gay or something?
Isaac wasn’t gay. He just liked tweaking them, and they fell for it.
Isaac didn’t live in a junk drawer home or family, and his world hadn’t changed all that much. His home was the same, his family was the same, and even his school was the same as before. Although he was infected, as everyone was, he hadn’t ever had an episode and didn’t know if he was a 1 or a 2. His family should have been in medical textbooks for how rarely they became ill. He was a giant of a guy, strong from working on his family’s farm, and could probably crack skulls between his massive hands if he tried. He was out of school a lot, his father pulling him and his two younger sisters to work in the fields, so he and Corey didn’t get to hang out too much.
At the river, Mia sat down and promptly opened a textbook. The guys went dogging after Anna and to put some music on. Corey claimed a log by Isaac. They drank their beers and Isaac said, “I’m not going to make it to graduation. I have to get out of here.”
Isaac always said things like that. “Where are you headed?” Corey asked.
“Anywhere at all. And I can’t. My father would literally piss himself if I set foot outside Lincoln. The moment I set foot back, his belt would be coming off.”
“That’s child abuse,” Mia said.
“It’s how he shows he cares,” Isaac said. “Time-outs are for yuppies. Hawaii. I’m going to Hawaii.”
“Zombies,” Corey said. Hawaii hadn’t even been abandoned. The 1s and 2s there had been murdered by 3s before help could arrive. Well, the 1s and 2s who hadn’t gone into chain reactions and murdered as well. Most 1s weren’t too violent in their chain reactions, but 2s and 3s were and would target them.
Isaac spun an imaginary globe. “Paris. I want to hang my pictures on the walls in the Louvre beside other artistic masters.”
“Zombies,” Corey repeated as Mia snorted. France had wrested several of its cities from the 3s, but failed to take Paris. Music blasted out of the stereo. The song was out of date, number one in the charts three years ago and frozen at number one forever. People in America’s reclaimed cities were focused on survival, not entertainment.
“Just anywhere,” Isaac said. “I don’t care. The moon. No zombies there.”
Corey’s cell phone rang in his pocket. It was Janice. Aggravation filled him as he said, “Hello?”
“Could you talk to Holly for a moment?” Janice asked. Without waiting for him to answer, she started calling for Holly to come over to her. In the background, he heard an uuuuuuuhhhhhhh.
He hated how Janice did this. Refused to accept that nothing was going to wake someone up from an episode. It ended when it wanted to end, not when you wanted it to end. The only thing to do was strap the kid down until it broke. But no, she’d rather let Holly wander all around the house destroying things, whacking people, and killing the damn cat. Corey had loved Foogles, who had been a cat version of Anna. He never got tired of chasing the laser pointer around the house. He was just a sweet, somewhat dumb gray feline that had twice gotten stuck in the bars on the window in the boys’ bedroom and then settled there to rest like he’d meant to do it all along. He’d slept at the foot of Corey’s bed. Marquis whined about that and tried to explain to the cat that he was to be shared. But you couldn’t relocate Foogles for long. He always ended up back with Corey, in a fat lump of fluff that occasionally snored and wriggled all four paws. He was still chasing the laser pointer in his dreams.
Foogles shouldn’t have died that way. Corey had bitched to Daniel about how Janice set it up to happen, and Daniel replied that women were just gentler than men. It was harder for them to do tough things. So Corey had to make allowances for sex differences and cut Janice some slack. But that was bullshit. Gray was female, and she would have tied down the kid without a second thought, just like she’d punched Keefer for being an asshole. It was what had to be done.
“It’s Corey. Say hi to Corey!” Janice was saying in a singsong on the other end. The quality of the sound had changed; he’d been put on speakerphone.
“Oooonnn-uuuuuuuuhhhh,” Holly moaned.
There wasn’t a point in Corey saying anything. He did it only for Janice’s benefit, and didn’t remove the edge of frustration from his tone. “Hi, Holly. I’m sorry you don’t feel so good.”
Holly moaned again. In a couple of days she’d be fine, but for now, she should be tied in bed. Everyone was going to have bruises all because Janice was a pushover. She was speaking brightly to Holly now. Do you hear Corey? That’s Corey! Hi, Corey! You like your big brother!
“Tooooo-uuuuuhhhhhhh.”
“Are you coming home?” Janice asked for Holly. “Is that what you want to know, Holly? Is Corey coming home?”
He didn’t want to go home. He wanted to go anywhere but there, even the airless moon. “Sure, I’ll be home, Holly. Right away.” He wasn’t going back until tonight. The girl wouldn’t know the difference in her state. When Corey had been in an episode, he hadn’t understood shit of what was going on around him. And he was just a 1. After hanging up, he said, “So, who wants a houseguest for a few days
?”
That wasn’t any more serious than Isaac’s plans to leave Lincoln. All the foster homes were full, and Isaac’s father disliked foreigners. Foreigners were anyone who wasn’t a born and bred Nebraskan. He also disliked born and bred Nebraskans who had moved away, or had vacationed a lot out of state before the change, and even ones who had spent all their time in the state but subscribed to national newspapers. The man was absolutely barking mad, from the few stories Isaac and his younger sister Mindy had told. While they were undoubtedly embellishing, Corey still wasn’t going to be all that welcome to crash on the Wisquins’ couch. So unless he was planning to sleep in the minivan here at the river, he would have to go home. The minivan tempted him. He could just sleep in the back, sprawled over the seats. Or go to Alice’s, but then he’d have to deal with Mason and Marquis and her five foster kids.
“We don’t trust your kind in these parts,” Isaac said apologetically. Mia shook her head at Corey’s request, never looking up from her textbook. There were a handful of colleges still open around the country and she hadn’t been accepted to any of them. The competition was too fierce. Her grades were good, but they weren’t special enough. She wasn’t special enough, and the rejections had pissed her off mightily. Everyone in her family before the change had gone to college, and didn’t stop going to college until they had amassed two or three degrees. So she was planning to continue her studies on her own and reapply next year. Corey and Isaac hadn’t applied anywhere except for jobs.
And even though Mia was a girl, thank you very much, Corey had no doubt that she would also tie Holly to her bed. It was what you had to do, so you did it. There really wasn’t anything else to debate between saving a cat’s life and hoping that homemade chocolate chip cookies would snap someone out of a zombie episode.
Zombie Tales Box Set [Books 1-5] Page 11
