I realized that I was stroking her image with my fingertips, as though I could reach into the photograph and touch her and assure myself that she was all right. It bothered me that she hadn’t been aware of this shot being taken. It bothered me that someone was able to open my locker undetected and tape it there. It bothered me that I didn’t know the nature of what was obviously a warning—no, not a warning, a threat. Was it myself or Karen that I was supposed to worry about?
I looked around. I was almost certain that it was Dorman who had put the picture in my locker, but I had no proof. If it had been Pete Martinsburg, he would have been waiting at the intersection of the hallways with a few of his cronies, grinning like jack-o’-lanterns as they waited for my reaction. But whoever had put the photo in my locker, it wasn’t Pete. The amnesty granted to the undead at Oakvale had not been granted to him; he was still not allowed to attend school. This was someone who was far more calculating, someone paradoxically far less emotional about the way he hated me.
This was the way “life” would be for us now, I thought. Now that we’d made some progress and were granted some protections and rights, we no longer had to huddle in the shadows and were free to shamble out in the light. But that didn’t mean that we’d overcome our enemies. All we’d really done was switch places with them, because they were still out there, and we would be forever looking in every darkened doorway and every place where shadows gathered for the next bioist threat.
Boom.
* * *
Time slowed to a speed agonizing even to one with the patience of the dead as I waited for sixth period to roll around. I thought of her, I thought of Karen, I thought of Tak. I thought of Margi and of Adam, and I had a sudden flash of insight. I knew why Adam didn’t hate me, even though my inaction had led to his death and zombification. He didn’t hate me because my inaction also allowed him a slim window to pass through and capture Phoebe’s heart. One’s life for her love? It seemed a fair trade.
My train of thought was interrupted when I realized that the differently biotic boy who sat down next to me in my fourth period biology class just as the final bell rang was someone I recognized.
“You again,” he said, which may have been the warmest greeting he’s ever given me.
“Popeye?” I said. “Is that you? I didn’t recognize you without the pins and studs.” He still wore his sunglasses, though, which was a good thing for all of our traditionally biotic classmates.
“Once again your sense of…humor…underwhelms,” he said. “I will not…be your…lab partner.”
The next time he spoke was to ask the teacher if he could dissect his own arm rather than the fetal pigshe was going to assign. I laughed along with the other DBs—and a few of the braver traditionally biotics—and I thought about the irony that the only laughs I’d had since my return were provided by humorless guys like Popeye and Tak. He was on his best behavior for the rest of the class, and I tried to pretend it was normal for the living and the dead to discuss cutting up another dead thing. Alas, poor piggies, what secrets do you hold? I would have to look forward to those secrets on another day, because apparently it took a whole day to discuss the dissection before the dissection could actually begin. Popeye, for his part, looked very eager.
Outside of class I was stopped in the hall by Kevin Zumbrowski, and unlike Popeye, at first I didn’t recognize him at all. The pronounced hitch in his walk that I remembered from our time together in Undead Studies class was nearly gone. He was carrying books in his left arm, and from what I remembered he could barely move his arm a few months ago. He and Sylvia had been the most severely limited zombies in our class in terms of their mobility, and here he was, getting around nearly as well as Adam or I could. I took my seat wondering if Kevin had met someone like Phoebe that was bringing him back to life.
I learned that it was not the affection of a girl that was giving him new spark and verve. I said hello to him after he called me by name and gripped me by the upper arm. I didn’t have the sensitivity to gauge such things anymore, but my sense was that his grip was strong, surprisingly strong for a boy who hadn’t been able to grasp a pencil just a few months before.
I saw that his expression hadn’t changed from when I’d seen him last; the placid, slightly surprised grin he always wore on his face was still fixed in place. But that would come, I thought; control over the facial muscles was much harder to regain than control over the larger muscles.
“Tommy,” he said to me. “It is not…too late…for you…to repent.”
“I’m sorry?” I replied. He was speaking more normally than before, the pauses in his speech shorter, but I could not have been more stunned to hear him talk about repentance than if he’d been talking about purple elephants gathering for a touch football game on the field outside.
“You can still…ask…for forgiveness,” he said. “It isn’t…too…late.”
“I’m not sure what you mean, Kevin. I…”
He held his free arm out toward me, and there was a piece of paper half crumpled in his clutching hand. Hands, like the muscles of the face, were difficult; his fingers didn’t bend as I slid the paper from his hands.
“Please…read it, Tommy,” Kevin said, expression never changing. “Please.”
I smoothed the paper out. It was a pamphlet, and at the top were the words ONE LIFE MINISTRIES, which was the church organization founded and run by Reverend Nathan Mathers.
“Kevin, what…”
“Please, Tommy,” he said, releasing me and lifting his clawed hand between us. “Just…read…it.”
I watched him walk away. Kevin always had a very pronounced limp to his walk, as though the entire right side of his body had been switched off, but his movements almost seemed jaunty as he walked down the hall. He disappeared into the slipstream of the living, many of whom had less bounce in their step than he did.
I took a closer look at the pamphlet he’d pressed into my hand. There was a crudely stylized painting beneath the name of the church depicting a glowing, vaguely human form standing or riding a platform of white clouds. The form stared down from his misty perch, rays shining down from his featureless face onto a throng of ragged figures gathered below. Many of the figures were on their knees; most were raising their arms in supplication, or in fear, their pale and mottled flesh visible through the holes and tears in their shabby garments. Their eyes were wide and staring and ringed with black;their shaggy hair ideal for the nesting of vermin. These were meant to be my people, but in caricature, the hideously stereotypical depiction of my people. In the sky next to the glowing figure was a question, written in a flowing cursive script, the final word bold and twice the height of the others. “Are you among the Damned?”
Below the writhing and wretched figures was another line of text: “And the truth shall set you free…”
I opened the pamphlet, but I wasn’t expecting truth or freedom inside.
“You have died and been spat from the mouth of Hell to return and walk the earth as one of the Damned. But is your punishment to be Eternal????”
Kevin, I thought, distracted by another crude drawing of a zombie, a rotting skull face taken right out of an old comic book. What are you doing? What have you done?
“It may not be Too Late to Repent!” the pamphlet informed me. I read on through the next few paragraphs, which held out a slim hope for me and my kind to again regain our Creator’s favor. By following a strict regimen of atonement, one that included sequestering myself from others of my kind (the Evil Dead), praying a minimum of twelve hours a day, and devoting the remaining twelve hours to furthering the anti-Evil Dead teachings of Reverend Mather and One Life Ministries, I could possibly open the filthy vessel of my worm-infested body to the Creator’s touch and allow it to be rejoined with my missing soul. The pamphlet implied that this reunion of accursed body and immortal soul was an outside chance, however, but the promise of Everlasting Hellfire, which was to be my fate if I was reterminated while in my fallen state, made every att
empt, no matter how desperate, a worthwhile endeavor.
My head spun; I felt as though Everlasting Hellfire was blazing a charred furrow in my mind. I crumpled the pamphlet and took aim at a trash can outside the gym, but then I thought better of it and brought it to my locker, smoothing it out and sealing it in a pocket of my backpack. I closed my eyes and I was back in the woods with Tak, but now when we looked down at the line of shooters there were four of them, the one on the end a little more unkempt, a little more gray of complexion and sallow-cheeked, but no less steady as he squeezed the trigger of his gun. My first emotion wasn’t anger but guilt; how could we have let this happen to Kevin? What level of loneliness on his part or neglect on ours had allowed One Life’s vision of an undead-free America (and afterlife) seem more appealing than what we—what I—was working for? What good was it to march and make speeches if in doing so we overlooked the people just across the hall from us?
The bell rang, shattering my concentration. I began walking, aimlessly, and then I realized that sixth period had finally arrived.
* * *
I met Phoebe at the bleachers. She was already waiting for me, high up and all the way down at the end. She was bent over book on her lap, one finger marking her place, but her chin was propped on her hand and her eyes were following the path of a Frisbee arcing between two kids on the field before her. One of the kids made a diving leap as the wind threatened to pull the spiraling disk out of reach, and his companion cheered on his athleticism and the flair he’d employed to make the catch. Phoebe’s reaction, if any, was hidden to me. She caught sight of me, and lifted her book in a little wave which I returned as I climbed the metal bleachers.
She said my name, and for just a moment I forgot that I was dead.
She was wearing black again; she’d gone through a period after Adam’s death where she avoided wearing her usual goth-garb so as not to look like she was in mourning; but whereas once the darkness of her clothes served as an ironic counterpoint to the joie de vivre she projected with her smile and her carriage, they now seemed all too appropriate. The world has weighed upon her these past few months; there seemed to be an air of tragedy hovering around her like a gray halo. She was still the most beautiful girl I had ever seen, but it was hard to look at her and not to hate myself for my role in the darkening of her light.
“Congratulations,” she said. “Everyone is so proud of you, Tommy.”
I glanced at her; she was still tracking the spinning disk. “Thank you.”
“Not everyone, maybe, but you know what I mean. They missed you.”
“I missed them, too,” I said. Speech was suddenly a difficulty again, like when I’d first returned. “I missed you.”
Her green eyes flickered in the sunlight. “I liked reading about all the people you met on your travels,” she said, her words coming quick as though to compensate for the slowness of my own speech. “How’s Christie?”
“She’s…fine,” I said.
One of the figures below us rose up for a high-flung disk that sailed just over his outstretched fingers.
“I’d love to meet her.”
“Soon, maybe,” I said. Staring into the sun would be less painful than looking at her. I tried to watch the Frisbee instead.
“Now that you are back, what are your plans?” she said, waving her book, an old paperback with a garish reptilian creature on the sun-faded cover. “I mean, are you still going to speak out, you think?”
I didn’t answer right away. The truth was I didn’t have any real plans for a change and I couldn’t think of one with her sitting so close to me.
“You are going to rejoin Undead Studies, right? We didn’t have it for a few weeks—there wasn’t much point when zombies were outlawed from the school. Adam took a page from your book…” Here she stumbled, just a fraction, but I caught it and so did she. “. . . and kept going to school even though it was illegal. His big protest move.”
She laughed. Music. “I don’t think it was quite the same with him, though. Everybody knew him, knew him before, so…”
“Phoebe,” I said, cutting her off. I touched her arm and she startled, her book slipping from her hand, bouncing off the bleacher below us and flapping end over end to the ground below.
She’d gasped when I touched her, with surprise or revulsion or both. She peered between the gleaming silvered bleachers and then she turned toward me, smiling.
“Sorry,” we said, in unison.
We walked down the steps and went under the bleachers to rescue her book.
“You were going to say something?”
She was walking in front of me, which made it harder for her to see me lie.
“I was going to tell you how much Adam better seems since before I left.”
She murmured in affirmation, but went on to another subject.
“I’ve been reading a lot lately,” she said as we went down. “Old stuff, new stuff, anything that looks interesting.”
“Have you been writing anything?” I asked. We walked under the bleachers, striped by the light that slipped between the metal benches. I found her book in the grass beside a soda cup and cleaned the cover off with my sleeve. We were talking now, having a conversation, whereas before it had seemed we’d just entered into some strange mannered ritual of communication, a verbal dance where the things we said were just there to obscure the things were weren’t saying.
“Poetry, you mean? Some, I guess. I don’t really show it to anyone, though.”
I held the book out to her. There was a shout of joy from the field beyond, and then there was another sound, that of the lid being removed from a can of tennis balls, and then a whistle and an impact, a wet impact, and a spray of red flew from my arm and the smile disappeared from her face.
“Get down!” I yelled, and in turning I half felt another whapping impact on my side and then on my thigh. I willed myself to be twice as tall, twice as wide. I willed myself to be a magnet for bullets, for slings, for arrows, for all manner of harm. There was no pain, there is never any physical pain anymore. The shots were coming from the tree line beyond the bleachers. I saw the slightest movement, a branch displaced, and I was running. I was running, a target as large as a school bus, a target with a gravity strong enough to pull down the sun and the moon. They would not hurt her. I would not let them hurt her anymore.
I was hit again, a solid thump in the chest like an echo of a heartbeat, and the next one struck me directly in the center of my forehead. Head shot—the only way to permanently kill the dead was with a head shot like the one I’d just received. An explosion of red filled my eyes and cascaded down my face and I knew it was over. I sank down to my knees, half the distance between her and the Oxoboxo woods.
And I was happy, happy like I hadn’t been since she had followed me out into the woods on a cold moonlit night. Happy like I hadn’t been since I’d held her in my arms in the humid glow of lights at a school dance. Happy like I hadn’t been since I thought that there was something other than the cold, dead existence my “life” has become.
No one knows why we, the dead, have returned. Theories both logical and ludicrous abound, though no one has solved that mystery to the satisfaction of anyone concerned. But in that moment as I was kneeling, head-shot in the grass, the sun shining down upon me, I thought at last I knew.
I’m not certain how long I remained on my knees, but eventually it occurred to me that zombies, when they bleed, do not bleed red. I wiped some of the stickiness away from my eyes. The “gore” covering me was a viscous and pinkish, almost Day-Glo color. I’d been shot, yes, but not with bullets. Paintballs.
They—or he—had shot me with paintballs. The goal this time had been to terrorize, not to reterminate. Everlasting Hellfire would have to wait.
I heard Phoebe running toward me as I struggled to my feet.
“I didn’t hesitate this time,” I said over my shoulder. My vision was blurry; my left eye sticky with the paint.
“Are you a
ll right, Tommy?” she said. I was more than all right; I was elated. I hadn’t hesitated, and I was about to repeat that fact when I noticed the splash of pink-red on the black sleeve of her left arm and knew then that acting quickly wasn’t always enough. I faced her, a ridiculous clown spattered in paint, a fitting mockery of my supposed heroism.
“There was no Christie, Phoebe,” I told her. “At least not one that mattered. There was only you. There was always only you.”
I couldn’t see her reaction, but I knew that my words had stopped her as surely as the shot to the head had stopped me. The Frisbee players had trotted over to the bleachers by this time, one of them proclaiming how I got “pasted,” the other asking me if I was okay. I turned and walked into the woods. I knew that whoever attacked us was long gone, his gear stowed, the evidence removed, and that he would be whistling softly to himself as he returned to class. I walked into the woods without any plan or purpose. Maybe I would return to school tomorrow, maybe I wouldn’t. Maybe I would “live” every moment wondering if someone close to me was going to be harmed because of me; maybe I would find some way to overcome that fear.
Maybe I could forget Phoebe like I should. But I knew I wouldn’t.
I walked into the woods, and this time it was she who hesitated, or worse, made a conscious and deliberate decision not to say my name, not to stop me.
* * *
Of course I went back to school; I was there the very next day. I hugged Margi, I told Kevin that he would always be my friend, I forced eye contact with the boy I now knew to be David Lee Dorman from Pitkin, Louisiana, and I wished him a good morning. If I was a “symbol,” as Principal Kim had termed me, then I was going to be the best and most visible symbol that I could be. And if they reterminated me, so be it. Few symbols had greater impact and influence than a martyr for the cause.
I found Adam and Phoebe, and I told them that I loved them. Adam looked at me like I was crazy, but as I turned I imagined that I could hear Phoebe whisper, “Thank you.” I couldn’t entrust her protection to anyone else, not even Adam. I won’t be leaving Oakvale again anytime soon.
Generation Dead: Stitches Page 7
