Zombie Apocalypse

by B. A. Frade

  Chapter Two

  We’d tried to get the book to “talk” to us again on the bus, but it didn’t work. No matter what I wrote, the pages stayed the same with my title and the Scaremaster’s spooky response.

  When we got home, all we wanted to do was keep on exploring whatever it was that happened on the bus, but as fate would have it, Mom was waiting. And she’d brought pizza.

  I swear my legs were shaking so hard under the dining table that it looked like I was having a seizure, while Tyler downed three slices of pepperoni in less than a minute.

  “Tomorrow’s Monday, and I’ve got homework,” he told Mom, tossing his plate in the sink and making a dash toward the stairs.

  “Me too!” I said, though that was probably the most suspicious thing ever to come out of my mouth. I couldn’t think of a time that I had ever hurried off to do homework.

  Ever since Dad left and moved away, dinner has been a sacred time for us as a family. A huge wave of guilt swept over me as I glanced back from the stairs to see Mom sitting alone at the table with her half-eaten slice of pepperoni.

  I shoved the guilt aside.

  Tyler was waiting.

  Tyler and I shared a bedroom. His half, like his desk, was neat. Mine wasn’t. To prevent fights, Mom hung a curtain down the middle of the room, dividing the space so Tyler didn’t have to look at my mess and so my mess didn’t creep over to his space. It worked, mostly.

  I was half a second behind Tyler. When I got upstairs, he was already on his perfectly made bed, holding the mysterious book.

  “What took you so long?” he asked.

  “I—”

  He interrupted. “Kidding.”

  I jumped onto his bed next to him, and we stared at the journal.

  “Should I open it?” Tyler asked. There was a tension in the air. We didn’t know what we’d find inside.

  Some people might have thought the book was scary, but not us. Tyler and I weren’t afraid of anything. We’d seen so many horror movies that nothing fazed us.

  We laughed at blood and guts. Big bugs, man-eating aliens, ghosts… bring them on! We never jumped at the bad-guy-popping-up parts. Seeing the actors scream with fear was hysterical.

  Sometimes, on the weekend, we’d have a marathon and watch three different movies in a row. My favorite ones were action films with big monsters and high-stakes chase scenes. My least favorite films were about vampires, with slow-moving suspense and mystery plots. Tyler was the opposite, so together, we watched them all.

  The more we tried to scare ourselves, the sillier it seemed.

  Finding this old journal felt like we were in a movie.… We were still at the beginning, right after the opening credits, where anything was possible.

  “I’m so excited.” Tyler ran his hand over the strange design on the journal’s cover, tracing the triangles with his finger, like I’d done on the bus.

  He was taking too long, so I snagged the book.

  “Hey!”

  “Tyler the Turtle,” I said, using the nickname Mom gave him when we were little.

  “Ryan the Rabbit,” he replied, knowing I hated being called that. But then again, being a rabbit, I hopped into action and twisted the latch. The cover fell open. “What the—” I exclaimed.

  The pages were all blank. Even the berry stains seemed to have disappeared. I looked through the whole book. Nothing was written anywhere.

  I turned to Tyler. “Ah, man. Did I imagine what happened on the bus?”

  Tyler shrugged. “Weird. Even though we share matching chromosomes, it’s highly unlikely that we imagined the exact same thing.” My logic-loving brother took the book back from me and flipped through the pages himself. The book still smelled like dirt and metal, but otherwise, it was just a plain journal.

  “Well, that’s that, I guess,” I said with a long sigh. “I’d hoped it was really possessed.” As if that were possible… Nothing in horror movies ever really happened. But it would be cool if it did!

  “We should have known it was a gag book.” Tyler took the journal again and flipped it over. “How does it work? Disappearing ink? Maybe there’s a computer attached?”

  “We didn’t have Wi-Fi on the bus,” I reminded him. While Tyler mulled that over, trying to figure out how the book had talked to us, I came to a realization. “Who cares how it works? It’s spooky looking, and that still makes it cool. I say let’s get started on those awesome costume ideas. We only have five days till the dance.”

  I took a pencil from the cup on Ty’s desk. On the first page of the book, I drew a stick figure with shorts and a T-shirt, then asked Ty, “Where do you want to put the bone pieces we got?” I pointed to the ankles. “Here? Or higher, like on the shins?”

  “I think—” His words weren’t even fully formed when writing appeared under my drawing.

  Want to hear a story?

  My artwork faded away.

  Across the top, the page now said in a deep cursive scrawl:

  Tales from the Scaremaster

  “Whoa!” Tyler grabbed the journal back from me. “Awesome! We gotta find out how it works before the ink disappears again.” He started chopping at the cover with a pair of scissors. “This must be the best grade of leather ever,” he said, showing me that his art scissors were now bent, but that the cover wasn’t marked. “I’m getting a kitchen knife.” He headed to the door.

  “Wait, Ty,” I stopped him. “Who would spend their time and money planning a prank against two kids they don’t even know?”

  Tyler came back into the room. “Maybe we are on one of those joke TV shows?”

  That seemed unlikely unless there were cameras in our room, in which case Mom would be in on it, which was even more unlikely. She didn’t have much of a sense of humor. “Or…” I said in slow breathy voice, “maybe, fingers crossed, the book’s really haunted after all?”

  “That would be neat…” Tyler said, quickly adding, “though about as likely as your TV show idea.”

  I knew supernatural possession was a long shot, but there was only one way to find out.

  “Let’s write in it,” I suggested. “If it’s obviously fake, then you can stab it with a knife.”

  Tyler agreed.

  The Scaremaster had asked if we wanted to hear a story, so I wrote:

  Yes.

  The tale started right away:

  Once upon a time, there were twin boys, one named Tyler and the other, Ryan.

  Okay, so that was strange, but in a positive way. I raised the pencil to write:

  How do you know our names?

  The story continued without answering the question.

  They believed they weren’t afraid of anything, but the Scaremaster knows everyone is afraid of something. The Scaremaster would reveal their greatest fears.

  “What’s he talking about?” Tyler looked at me with a puzzled expression, then back at the book, where more handwriting appeared.

  On Monday morning, frights will begin. Which twin will be the first to admit he’s truly scared?

  I looked at Tyler, and he shrugged. “What’s he gonna do to me?” Tyler wondered. “Write a spooky story about a twin who finds sticky trash on his desk and a knocked-over pencil cup?” He wrapped his arms around himself. “Ooooohhhh,” he said in a mocking voice.

  It was true. That was probably Tyler’s biggest fear, and it wasn’t very scary. For me, we considered ways I might get scared, but came up blank. Not even a spooky book that talked back frightened me. In fact, I thought it was great. What were the chances it really was possessed by a disembodied soul? Ha. Real frights… How cool would that be?

  We’re in, I dared him. Do your scariest.

  The Scaremaster seemed to accept the challenge and wrote:

  There was a girl named who was afraid of spiders. The very thought of them gave her the chills. She couldn’t go camping and mostly stayed inside, just in case a spider might crawl by.

  “I guess he’s taking his time getting to know us
while he figures out our fears.” Tyler raised his eyes from the page. “This story sounds a lot like he’s talking about Maya,” he said.

  When we were in kindergarten, Mrs. Walterson read us a book about the adventures of Sally Spider and her friend Gordy Grasshopper. Maya began to cry so hard she had to go to the nurse.

  I thought Maya had grown out of it, until last year when we went on a field trip to the science museum. She refused to get off the bus when she heard there were spiders on display inside, even though they were dead and pinned to viewing boards. Her dad came and picked her up.

  Out of curiosity, I filled in the blank where her name would go.

  Maya

  The Scaremaster changed my handwriting to match his own, then went on using Maya’s name in his tale.

  When he was done, I tried writing back.

  If you want to scare us, why write a story about Maya?

  There was no answer.

  Chapter Three

  The screaming was so loud I could hear it all the way across the lunchroom.

  “Is that Maya?” Tyler asked me, his mouth full of hamburger.

  “Nah.” I brushed off the possibility, then reconsidered. “We’d better check.”

  We left our lunch trays on the table and followed the shrieking.

  It was Maya!

  There was a crowd of teachers around her, so it was hard to see what had happened, but her friend Rachel was holding court by the wall, sort of like a press conference for the curious. Rachel reported that when Maya had opened her lunch box, hundreds of spiders crawled out onto the table. They scuttled onto Maya’s arms and legs, even getting in her hair.

  I squeezed through the crowd to get a look, and sure enough, a gaggle of fuzzy black spiders was scurrying across the floor. There were so many they looked like a flat black cloud as they moved together.

  Both students and adults were hurrying out of the spiders’ path.

  “Eww,” I heard someone say.

  “That’s a health code violation for sure,” I heard someone else mutter.

  One stray spider had lost the pack and was crawling near Tyler’s foot. I pointed.

  “Unsanitary,” he moaned, making me realize who’d declared the health code violation. “Should I step on it?”

  Whenever there were bugs in a movie, stepping on one created more. It was as if they were primed to multiply. I said this to Tyler, and he agreed.

  “Seems prudent to be cautious,” he said, kicking it across the room with the side of his shoe instead. We watched as the lone spider immediately joined its brothers, who were now crawling up the wall.

  Without even looking at Tyler, I knew we were both wondering whether this had anything to do with the Scaremaster’s story.

  Maya’s terrorized screaming had ended, and the room was silent except for the school nurse, who was pushing his way through the students.

  The mass of spiders had formed a thick black line and was escaping out an open window. With the exception of a couple of kids who really loved bugs, everyone was keeping their distance. I would have liked to go check the spiders out but decided sticking near Maya was more important. Tyler and I had a few questions we needed answers to.

  “What happened?” the nurse asked Rachel, who had unofficially become the source of all information.

  “She screamed, and then she fainted.” Rachel was short and skinny, wore glasses, and had long blond hair pulled up into two pigtails. I was pretty sure that, like me and Ty, Rachel wasn’t afraid of anything.

  Nurse Dixon was more concerned with whether or not Maya had hit her head on the bench than where the spiders came from, though he did want to catch one to make sure they weren’t poisonous.

  “They aren’t poisonous,” I told Tyler, a bit too loudly.

  “How do you know?” Nurse Dixon turned to me. He’d been a military nurse in an active war zone, which made him a hero—and intimidating.

  I’d never lie to Nurse Dixon, but what was I supposed to say?

  The Scaremaster’s story talked about scaring Maya, not killing her. Then again, there was still the possibility that this didn’t have anything to do with the book. It could just have been a random infestation.

  “Uh, I saw them,” I said after an awkward pause. “They didn’t look dangerous.”

  “Still,” Nurse Dixon said, “I’d like to see one for myself.” He called over Mrs. Clancy, who was the school’s head janitor.

  She took her job very seriously, saying, “I’ll get a spider for you, then call the exterminator.” Mrs. Clancy added in a deep and compassionate voice, “I hope the young lady is all right. Arachnophobia can be a terrible thing.…”

  A few minutes later, Maya had recovered from fainting and was able to walk out by herself. As she left the cafeteria, her glazed-over brown eyes settled on my face.

  “What?” I mouthed.

  She didn’t say anything but also didn’t look away, staring at me until I finally blinked and dropped my eyes to the floor.

  “I have the book,” Tyler told me when we went back to our lunch trays. He reached into his backpack and put the Scaremaster’s journal on the table between us.

  “I think we should hide that until we get home,” I said, recalling the look Maya gave me as she was escorted out of the lunchroom. Her shoulder-length brown hair was tangled and sticking up at odd angles. Her clothes looked wrinkled, like she’d been pulling at them, trying to get the spiders off her. But it was the look that would haunt me for hours. She was terrified—that was certain—but there was a message in her eyes: Maya thought I’d been the one to put spiders in her lunch box!

  I hadn’t done it! I really liked Maya. I’d known her longer than anyone else at school, except Tyler, of course. Her family came from Korea, and every time she went to visit her grandparents, she brought back the best chocolates. They were so yummy, and I’d never do anything to her to stop the candy flow.

  That’s what I told Tyler.

  “I know you didn’t put spiders in her lunch box,” he told me.

  Which led me to say, “And I know you didn’t either.” Though I reconsidered and asked, “Did you?”

  “Of course not!” Tyler was insulted, as if him doing something so evil was even a possibility. “There were only three people who knew about last night’s spider story in the journal. So if it wasn’t us, that leaves the Scaremaster.” He put one hand on the journal. “Now can we cut this apart and see how it works?” Tyler was always so logical. In the last few minutes since Maya had left, my own theory had solidified.

  “It’s possessed,” I said firmly. I had to admit, the conclusion thrilled me. “We might be the only people on the planet with a truly supernatural, possibly demonic book. How cool is that?!”

  “If only…” Tyler replied with a grunt. “Unfortunately, like how behind every great movie is a special-effects person making the scares look scarier, I know there’s an explanation to the book. We just have to discover what’s behind the pages.”

  “No, Ty, I’m serious. It’s almost Halloween, and the lady at the costume shop gave us a possessed book!” I said it loudly so there could be no doubt I was serious.

  Tyler shushed me so other kids wouldn’t hear. “No way. We’ve seen every movie, heard every ‘true life’ horror story, read a zillion possession stories—and as much as we want them to be true, we always find some logical flaw.” That was true. “Someone else knew about Maya’s spider fear.” He stood. “I’m going to ask Cook for a knife. She probably won’t give me one, but I’m still going to ask. If I can get one, we can slice through the cover and the binding and find out how it works. Scissors bend too easily.”

  While Tyler went to the kitchen, I opened the journal cover.

  Under the Maya spider story was a new question:

  That was scary, right?

  I dug through my backpack for a pen.

  I had to admit I still liked the idea of frights before Halloween. Just not that one. It was scary to Maya, but it
was way too mean. The Scaremaster, who or whatever he was, wanted to play games, so let’s play. I wrote: No. Not scary.

  Well, then let’s try a different story.

  There was a boy named who was afraid of dogs. He was walking home from school when a dog broke through a fence and began to chase him.

  I knew who he meant. There was only one kid at school that was so scared of dogs he would get all freaky and weird if one barked, even if the dog was miles away.

  It felt good to have it figured out, like on the rare occasion that I knew an answer on a pop quiz. Without considering what might happen, I filled in the blank with the name Eddie.

  Again, my handwriting morphed into the Scaremaster’s and the story continued.

  Eddie ran, but the dog was faster. The twins tried to help him escape, but he was wild with fear. He ran into a neighbor’s yard, where he fell into a swimming pool. The twins couldn’t help but laugh, seeing Eddie, wearing his school clothes and backpack, floating in the pool.

  I was frowning when Ryan came back to the table. “As I predicted: Cook won’t give me a sharp knife. She said for ‘safety’ reasons students couldn’t have knives.” He made air quotes around “safety” as if that was the dumbest thing he’d ever heard. “I can handle a knife,” he grumped, settling back in at the table to eat the last bites of his hamburger.

  I didn’t respond. I silently turned the book toward him. “Read this.”

  Tyler was quiet for a while, then asked, “Is this all?” He turned to the next page to see if there was more. There wasn’t.

  The last words the Scaremaster wrote were:

  Maybe that will be scary enough for you.

  Chapter Four