Zombie Apocalypse Serial #2
Page 11
Jill kept these opinions secret, of course. The immortals weren’t just held in high regard, they were practically worshipped. They were more than leaders. They were symbols of what everyone wanted to be. They were proof that anything is possible, that, for one lucky girl from the senior class, dreams do come true.
The girl who won Coronation would get everything she could ever want: wealth, status, power, immortality. But if the contest were left at that, every girl in the school would enter. To make it interesting, Coronation also demanded the ultimate sacrifice from the loser. While the winner got a visit in the night from a vampire who made her immortal, the loser got locked in a cage and became the winner’s first meal.
Disgusting. To Jill, Coronation was a horrid, vile event that celebrated the worst parts of humanity, and Thorndike was a disgusting place for hosting it. Jill had never wanted to come to Thorndike, but here she was, now in her senior year and on the ballroom floor, waiting for the party to start. For Homecoming, Jill’s Aunt Ruth helped her assemble an outfit built around a sleeveless satin dress whose dark green color was, in the words of her aunt, “A nice way to offset your hair.” None of her aunts liked Jill’s hair. Black, curly, “unruly,” it was her mother’s hair, and none of her aunts approved of Jill’s mother.
The dress went from her chest to just below her knees, and had a silk sash that hugged her waist and “gave some shape to that stick figure of a body” (another trait that came from her mother). Jill’s mask was a small gold oval with high relief designs worked into its edges, created by a Brazilian sculptor named Cristiano. Her shoes were green sparkly heels that looked to Jill like something more suited for a St. Patrick’s Day parade than a formal dance, but all her aunts declared the shoes to be “just perfect,” and, in fairness, so did everyone else who saw the outfit.
Now, having been in the mansion for a little more than thirty minutes, Jill couldn’t wait to get out of this crazy outfit. The dress restricted her movement. The mask cut off her peripheral vision. The shoes…well, the shoes were just something a girl had to live with, weren’t they? Jill’s aunts had ensured that she knew how to wear a pair of heels, as much as she hated to.
They were half-way through the arrival portion of the night, an hour-long look at me celebration before the dancing began. Arrival was the time when the girls showed off their fabulous outfits and the guys stood and stared. It was a time to be seen, to grab a drink, to develop the social skills that would become so important to all of them when they graduated into the world of their parents.
After engaging in all the pleasantries of arrival, Jill went to the bar, where she pushed her way through a throng of her impossibly giddy classmates to order two glasses of wine. The bartender had filled them nearly to the top. Now she was walking to the center of the ballroom with sloshing glasses of red wine in each hand. It was kind of ridiculous, like some test of her womanhood. Spike heels on her feet, a crowd of teenagers in formal wear all about, some of them barely able to see out of the giant showpieces on their faces, glasses of night-ruining stainmakers in each hand – could she make it to her target without spilling a drop?
Her target was Annika Fleming, the daughter of the governor of Oklahoma, and despite all the obstacles in her way, somehow Jill reached her with both glasses of wine intact.
“Thanks, Baby,” said Annika as she took one of the wines.
“You’re welcome,” said Jill.
Thanks Baby. Sure thing, Honey. What can I do for you, Sweetie?
This was the way Annika talked. She got away with it because: a) She was a knockout who was extremely well endowed and knew how to dress in a way that showed off her assets. b) She had that cute Oklahoma lilt in her voice that drove guys crazy. c) She was a skillful flirt who had a way of getting what she wanted. d) She was a social butterfly who knew how to party like nobody’s business.
It was that last one that really worked for her. Annika’s ability to bring life to any party was legendary. On this night, as Jill approached, Annika was just finishing up a story about some mishap in the school courtyard involving a freshman and an exploding bottle of soda. She had a crowd of people around her who were struggling to catch their breath after laughing so hard.
For Annika, this was either the second or third glass of wine since the doors had opened. For Jill it was the first, and she had every intention of nursing it for the rest of the night. No one in Thorndike’s senior class was older than eighteen, but silly things like the legal drinking age didn’t apply in Renata’s mansion. The vampires wouldn’t think of hosting any party, even one for high school seniors, without red wine. Later in the night, when the vampires stepped onto the floor, their own masks making it difficult to distinguish them from anyone else, all the students feeling tipsy, it would be impossible to tell the difference between a glass of wine and a glass of blood.
“Hey Honey, have you seen Nicky?” Annika asked.
And there it was. The question everyone should have been asking but wasn’t. Annika said the words with such innocence in her voice. To Annika, it wasn’t even a possibility that Nicky hadn’t arrived yet. Nicky Bloom was the new girl, having just transferred in. Nicky filled the vacancy left by Shannon Evans, who had died in a boating accident a few months before school started.
“Yeah, about Nicky,” Jill began. “I have something to tell you.”
She’s not here yet. She’s coming any minute. She’s going to blow your mind when she walks through that door.
Jill couldn’t bring herself to say any of those things. She was too nervous. As soon as she spoke the words, it was game on. As soon as she told Annika that Nicky wasn’t here yet, the real night would begin.
There was an arrival schedule to Homecoming, as formal and orderly as the dance itself. Boys came first, then girls in colorful dresses, then, late in the evening, just before the dancing was to begin, the girls wearing black showed up.
Having the girls wearing black arrive last added some dramatic tension to the event. With a hundred students in the ballroom, all of them wearing masks, it took a little bit of time to confirm who was present and who was absent. As the minutes passed, and word started to spread that no one had seen this girl or that girl yet, rumors started to fly. Was that girl going to wear black? Was she entering herself in Coronation?
Now, as Jill and Annika stood in the ballroom, nine o’clock approaching, everyone thought all the girls wearing black had been accounted for.
There was Kim Renwick, the daughter of notorious Washington lobbyist Galen Renwick. The odds-on favorite to win, Kim got a round of applause when she burst through the doors wearing a black dress.
Five minutes after Kim arrived, Mary Torrance, the blonde bombshell daughter of a high-powered lawyer from Atlanta, showed up in black. Ten minutes after that, Samantha Kwan, whose parents were both executives at Ventigen Corp, arrived in her own black get-up.
And that was it. Three powerful, popular girls had put themselves out there and would compete for the crown. The other girls who might have entered, girls like Serena Snow or Terri Weingarten or even Annika Fleming – they all were here and were not wearing black.
Only Jill was aware that one girl from the senior class was still missing. But Annika was curious.
“I’m sorry,” Annika said to Jill. “What was that? You have something to tell me about Nicky?”
Jill took a deep breath. She had a lot to tell Annika about Nicky, but she needed to make it brief.
“Nicky’s not here yet,” Jill said.
Annika looked at her like she was crazy.
“What?”
“Annika, there’s a group of us, of families…we don’t want Kim to win but we knew her father would skewer us if we crossed her out in the open.”
“You’re saying that Nicky hasn’t shown up yet?”
“My parents are part of it,” Jill said. “It’s kind of like a secret club. We want you to join. I know you’d love to see Kim go down.”
Annika held up her hand and spoke in a
slow, deliberate voice. “You’re telling me that Nicky is about to walk through that door wearing--”
She didn’t get to finish, for as she was about to say the words, the front door opened one last time, and Nicky Bloom stepped inside. She was wearing black.
Acknowledgments
Once again I turned to the immensely talented Chris Stenger for the cover to this book. Thanks Chris for always coming through with something outrageously awesome. See more of Chris’s work at http://stiing.com/
Thanks to Traff, Yvonne, Rusty, and Keith for talking zombie apocalypse with me during the writing process.