Something... something... was building, rising up as if underwater and rushing to the surface. I was supposed to finalize something, but what? John's mouth was moving but no sound was coming out. He was arguing with Jonesy and flailing his arms as he spoke. The whispering of the corpse in the earth was so loud it drowned out his words.
Jonesy's hand suddenly connected with my face. My teeth slammed into my tongue, and the taste of copper pennies filled my mouth. I leaned over, and a drop of blood hung tremulously on my bottom lip, before falling to the grave like a black gem.
Everything clicked into place, vertigo spinning the graveyard on its side as if it had been waiting for that moment. The ground rushed toward my face, and I threw out my hands to brace my fall. My fingers bit into the damp earth. A hand broke through the ground like a spear through flesh and grasped my wrist. The vise-like grip and intense coldness of the grave lingering on its dead flesh made my breath catch in my throat.
The head of the corpse broke free of the ground, then the hand released me. I scooted backward and got to my feet, swaying, overcome with some unidentifiable emotion. I had done it, but I didn't know how to undo it.
The corpse moved toward me with purpose, using the undisturbed ground for leverage. When it reached my feet, another drop of my blood landed with a dull plop on the corpse's forehead. Jonesy ran out of the cemetery and stood at a “safe” range from what the ground had disgorged.
The zombie's gaze fixed on me. It put a hand on its knee and began to push itself upright. Dull, lank strands of hair hung loosely from a scalp of rotten sinew. “Why have you awoken me?” The words sounded garbled.
I stared at it. “You asked me to.”
John was standing at my right, trying to mask a fine, all-over tremble. His freckles stood out from his pale face like beacons of fright.
“What the hell is this?”
I turned and gave him a duh look.
The zombie’s eyes rolled wetly in their sockets.
“Why have you awoken me?” it repeated, shambling a little closer.
The smell... wow. It rose like a torrent of rotting garbage. John clapped his hand over his nose and backed up a bit.
The corpse took another step closer to me.
“Got any brilliant suggestions?” I asked John, keeping my eyes on the zombie.
“Sorry. I don’t have the Zombie Handbook handy,” John said.
Not helpful.
The corpse tilted its head. “You're just a boy. For what purpose have you disturbed my slumber?”
“I, um… I didn't... uh, mean to… um, wake you up.” I wasn't usually so tongue-tied, but meeting a corpse in the flesh—ha, ha—seemed to have stolen my ability to speak coherently.
“You do not know what you would have of me? You use your life-force to awaken me and without purpose? Put me back.” His clothes hung in tatters, and the smell was definitely old, dark coffin, not that I knew what that smelled like.
John's look clearly said, Do something! What I hadn't told my friends was that I had never thought that I could actually raise the dead. But there the dead guy was, standing before me in all his rotting glory.
“To whom much is given, much is expected. Put me back,” he said.
Adults were all the same, even dead ones; lecture, lecture.
“How?” I asked.
“You are the necromancer, boy, not I.”
“I’m a what?” I felt surprisingly calm. For the first time, there were no whispers. Perfect, blessed silence filled my head. Talking to the dead seemed like the most natural thing in the world. I could still taste the blood from my busted lip. Its eyeballs were inky marbles staring back with uncanny devotion.
“A necromancer. A diviner of the black arts,” he replied.
I thought about that for a minute. Things had only gotten über-weird when Jonesy had smacked me. I looked back at the corpse, no longer feeling that sense of swimming power just beneath the surface. I needed to regain that essence—fast.
“Ah... hang on a minute,” I told the corpse. I turned to John.
“John, give me your blade.”
“What the heck, Caleb? What are you planning to do with that”—John pointed at the patient corpse, “...thing?” Who was as immobile out of his grave as in.
“I figure my blood made it jump out of its grave, so now I need some to put him back. And you're going to help me.”
John's face got even paler. “Ah, we're good friends and all, but no, not a good plan! We don't know that for sure anyway.”
John needed to ante up the blood, or it was going to be a long night. I tapped my foot on the disturbed mess of the grave. “Here's the deal. Let's do a little 'friendship blood bank' just for the sake of putting the dead guy back in his grave, eh? Just give me your arm.”
John took a deep breath. “Okay, but you're going to owe me big time.” He held out his arm.
I placed the blade on his forearm then made a thin slit in the skin. John let out a little gasp. When crimson oozed out, I repeated the process with my own arm then pressed my arm against John’s.
A vibrating tuning fork of trembling power welled up inside my body. A strange mixture of fear, dread and excitement paralyzed me. My teeth throbbed with the intensity of it. The zombie's hand snaked out and curled around my arm. Its skin felt cold against my warm flesh, like iced tentacles. I swabbed a blot of blood with the fingers of my other hand and dabbed it on the zombie’s forehead like war paint.
The dead guy rolled those empty eyes up at me, its dead bones clinging to my fingertips.
We shared a suspended moment in time, a terrible beauty of precariously balanced control.
“Go back and rest,” I said, feeling that I was choosing for both of us.
The zombie reluctantly let go of my arm, sand through a sieve, then lay down on the disturbed ground. His grave encased him in a shroud of earth.
John and I stared at each other over the grave for a swollen minute, his face showing a mixture of sympathy and dread. I was a corpse-raiser—one of only two in existence—and that was not a safe thing to be. John knew what that would mean for me in the world we lived in.
I was shaking from the intensity of the experience and thoughts of the future. This was not the same as Biology experiments and roadkill, this was real, huge. Looking outside the cemetery perimeter at two enemies and one friend, I knew it was time to swear the group to secrecy. A trickle of sweat slithered down my back and pooled at the waistband of my jeans, instantly chilling my fevered skin. I didn't want the same future as Parker. That loss of freedom was so not a part of my plan.
John and I headed out of the cemetery in a wave of uncertain promise.
CHAPTER 2
I smacked my alarm. Just five more minutes, I thought, dozing off.
“Caleb!” Mom yelled from downstairs.
I sat up. “Yeah?”
“School!”
I stumbled out of my bed and looked at the clothes on the floor. Hmm, what to wear that wasn't too wrinkled.
I picked up a pair of jeans and a shirt and took an experimental whiff. Good enough. I jerked on the jeans with a hop and a zip. I opened my sock drawer—a couple of socks, not matched but clean. Happy day.
I trudged downstairs to the kitchen. I sat at the table. “You cookin' today?” I asked, hopeful.
“No, but you're eating.”
Eating in the morning blows. I was that lazy. I'd open the fridge, nothing. Then the freezer, repeat. I usually ended up cramming a yogurt down.
She opened the fridge. “What flavor?”
“Do we have blueberry?” That was the only non-barf fruit I could think about eating that early.
She handed me the yogurt container. “Last one.”
“Where's Dad?”
“He is working on that new project.”
Great. Hopefully not anything new for kids to rant about. Mom and Dad were on the opposite end of the spectrum. She was free-spirited and thought the mystery of life and choice
were taken away when the puzzle of the genome mapping was solved. Since my dad was an integral part of the team who achieved that accomplishment, we had an interesting family life.
“Does that mean he'll be home for supper tonight? I've got something to talk to him about.” I wisely didn't mention the whole corpse-raising episode. Dad was logic and fairness mixed. He'd know what to do. This... I might need some help on.
“Yes, he will, you know how important meal time is,” Mom said.
Maybe, maybe not. Science was important to Dad.
After I wolfed down the yogurt, I made a two-point shot at the trash can. Swish! No mess, but that didn't stop the frown from forming on Mom's face.
I moved quickly to grab my backpack, but she blocked my way, and I was forced to look up at her. Every girl in the world was taller than I was, even my own mother.
She brushed the hair out of my eyes, but it immediately flopped back down. “You need a haircut.”
“No, Mom.” A time sucker was all a haircut was, and I had more important things to do.
I slung my pack over my shoulder and left. I wanted to reconnoiter with the dudes, get things straight in my head from last night. Once outside, I slowed to a walk. I'd still be there early, and I was feeling lazy.
The canopy of trees allowed the morning light to filter through, speckling the ground with sunspots. My head began the familiar thrumming, a buzz seeping into the crevices of my mind as I walked toward the school.
I stopped. The buzzing became whispering. My heart rate sped up, my breath quickened, and my palms dampened.
The voices of the dead had arrived.
The whispering grew louder. The dull roar of the insidious voices was like a magnet, pulling me toward the forest. I followed it and was rewarded with even higher volume.
At the edge of the tree line, a crumpled body, lay beside a ditch. The head was canted at an awkward angle. My hands trembled as the whispering gave way to images flooding my head like a pulse-screen.
Headlights burst like twin spots before the cat’s eyes as she tried to escape them. Rushing forward, she sprinted across the street. She didn’t time the advance properly, and the twin orbs bore down on her.
Pain. Intense pain and blinding light.
The cat thought of her litter, her people... then, she was no more.
My breath returned in a paralyzing rush. I stood next to her small body. She had shared the last moments of her life with me.
I remained there, taking it in and realizing that life as I knew it was never going to be the same. I wasn't going to breeze through being a teenager.
Snapping back to reality I realized I was the Pied Piper of road kill.
Great. Definitely my life-goal.
I thought of the frogs in biology. There had been so many that I hadn't been able to camouflage what happened to me.
I wished I could develop something righteous like pyrokinesis. That would be tight. At least only Brett and Carson knew the corpse-raising part. Getting them to cooperate with silence was another deal. People were going to get suspicious.
I trudged toward school, my limbs heavy and my head swimming with the heaviness of an undead moment. I lifted my hands. The fine shaking was almost gone. I wiped the sweat off my face with the back of my hand. I needed to get a hold of myself. I was on it.
The familiar doors to my daily prison came into view. I walked the rest of the way with my head down and went inside the school. I spotted the “cemetery group” right away.
John and Jonesy stood apart from the others. Almost five-ten with a shock of frizzy, carrot-colored hair and pale blue eyes, John looked a little freakish, but he was my main dude, my go-to guy when things went sideways. In stark contrast, Jonesy had short, nappy hair and teeth that stood out like white Chiclets in his dark face. He was taller than I was, but built stocky. They'd been my friends since kindergarten.
Standing a few feet away from my friends was the rest of the group. They were a mixed bag, didn't feel solid. It would take some clever conniving to get promises of secrecy from the rest. Brett Mason and Carson Hamilton. They had identical white-blond hair and were about the same height, making them hard to tell apart. They'd been in my class since kindergarten too, but not in a good way.
Edging through the throng of kids, I made my way to John and Jonesy. Jonesy leaned against the locker, arms crossed. John seemed ready to explode, not a typical look for him.
Jonesy nodded at me. “Sorry about the bludgeoning.”
“Yeah... what the hell?” I asked.
“Your face sorta got in the way.”
“Oh... really?” Gee, hadn't noticed that.
“It was an accident, John and I were discussing—”
John broke in. “Arguing.”
Jonesy glared at him. “I changed my mind is all.”
I raised my eyebrows, Jonesy never switched gears.
“About the merit of them knowing,” John finished.
I glanced at Bret and Carson. Too late. The milk was spilled and dripping on the floor. They walked over to us.
“I wasn't pulling a hypo in Biology,” I told them, “and now Aptitude Testing is coming up.”
Brett smirked. “Yeah. You have your dad to thank for that.”
I caught sight of a grape-sized bruise the color of pale chartreuse at the base of Brett's neck. His smirk faded as he shifted his shoulder to make his shirt cover the mark.
Jonesy straightened. “Shut up. It's Caleb's ass on the line.” He jabbed his thumb at my chest. “You know what happens when you hit the radar as a corpse raiser. He'd be a government squirrel, like that Parker dude.”
“Nobody wants to have their life planned by somebody else,” John said.
“My dad didn't have anything to do with that,” I pointed out.
“But thanks to him, everyone's tested now because of the mapping. All the do-gooders want to 'realize our full potential.'” Brett made air quotes as he said the last phrase. “What an ass-load of crap that was.”
Carson nodded. “So even if we don't want to be mathematicians or scientists, we're on that freight train until it reaches the depot.”
His murky-green eyes burrowed into mine.
It was an old argument. Kinda like being the preacher's kid, I got blamed for everything my dad did… or didn't do.
“You dickface...” Jonesy pointed at Carson. “Yeah you. It isn't Caleb's fault that his dad started that ball rolling with the mapping. If it hadn't been him, it would've been someone else.”
Carson clenched his hands into fists and looked as though he might take a swing at Jonesy. He didn't like being told the obvious. Probably shouldn't have opened his mouth and crammed a foot in there until he choked. Kinda brain dead—kinda consistent.
“Listen, guys,” I said. “This isn't helping. It's the now we need to figure out. I don't want to pop a five-point AFTD on the APs. They're only a week away? My dad”—I saw Carson roll his eyes, but I ignored him—“says that puberty is when they test because scientists have proven that abilities come on then, sometimes for the first time.” Not for me, I added silently.
The first bell gave its shrill beckon. I looked at Brett and Carson. “I need you guys to cover for me. At least until after the testing.”
“You can't force us, Hart,” Brett said.
Carson nodded. “Yeah, just because Daddy's famous doesn't give you clout.”
So much for that.
“How about doing it because it's the right thing to do?” Jonesy asked.
“Because it’s the human thing to do,” John interjected.
“He's not human.” Carson said, stabbing a finger toward my chest.
“You got that right,” Brett agreed.
They turned and moved into the multicolor sea of kids.
“Did ya see that bruise necklace Brett was wearing?” I asked.
“It's the dad,” John answered.
Jonesy turned his liquid eyes to me. “Feel sorry for him, Caleb? Don't go soft
on me, bro. You're always giving jackasses the benefit of the doubt.”
My conscious teetered on the balance of right and wrong. Brett had it bad, but he chose to act the way he did.
Jonesy clapped me on the back “Yeah, my cup of care is empty too.”
CHAPTER 3
The Js and I went to shop class. I was making my mom a heart-shaped box, though my heart was definitely not in it.
After talking to the ass-monkeys, I couldn't get the genome out of my head.
The mapping of 2010 happened under pressure from President O'Llama. Desperate for health care reform, the government wanted to activate “markers” for the population. Mapping the human genome was the key to identifying potential for cancer, heart disease, stroke, and even alcoholism and drug addictions. If the people wanted government health care, they would have to be mapped, and have a microchip implanted that contained their genetic codes. Refusal of the microchip meant no health care. The program had been expanded, and disease markers weren’t the only things on those chips.
The teacher, Mr. Morginstern, approached our table with a cheery “Good morning, fellas!”
It was criminal that he was so happy. Didn’t he know the Monday-is-hateful-rule?
“Hey,” I mumbled, as Jonesy and John gave Morginstern the nod.
Morginstern was excited about teaching and we were excited about... school ending for the day.
“So how was your weekend? Do anything interesting?”
Yeah.
I imagined a conversation like: Ah no problem, Mr. Morginstern, just creeping around illegally in a graveyard, raising a corpse, enemies seeing the blow-by-blow... real interesting.
Instead, I shrugged and said, “It was okay.”
Jonesy looked to be choking back a laugh. I gave him a don’t-blow-it look.
John was unflappably silent as usual, controlling a sly grin with effort, the anchor to our madness.
Morginstern seemed to accept our weird responses, and he went over the whole process of our boxes again. Adults were painfully redundant.
We got to decide what kind of box to make. Heart shaped was the hardest, but I was a masochist. I got out my sandpaper—one-twenty grit, extra fine.
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