“Then why don’t you turn yourself in and save the rest of us?”
Someone gasped, I’m not sure who. Trina and I turned around to face the owner of the voice. It was Freaky Big Bird—Felice Lefleur. She stared at us with her beady eyes and her hooked nose and her stick-thin arms. Her lip curled as she spoke.
“There, I said it,” she hissed. “I said what all of us are thinking.”
“I’m not thinking that,” murmured Trudy. She had finally found that pack of Twinkies she was looking for and was eating one like it was a banana, with the plastic wrapping folded half-way down.
“You leave my children alone,” hissed my mother, her hands balled into fists.
“They’re my kids,” said my father. “Are you mad?” He stared at Felice with hatred in his eyes.
“Mad? MAD? Yes I’m mad,” she bellowed. “I’m mad that I’m not in my own home with my cat and my goldfish and my ancient mother who sits in a wheelchair all day long and smells like dirty diapers. I’m mad that I had to watch that old woman turn into a zombie before my eyes and there was nothing I could do about it. I’m mad that we’re running, running, running with no place to go, all because of these two brats. I’m mad that they’re immune and I’m not. I’m mad that—”
CRACK.
Nedra Stein stepped forward and slapped Freaky Big Bird hard across the face. The sound stunned us all.
“Shut the hell up, Felice,” she whispered to her so softly you could almost hear a pin drop. “If it weren’t for those two children, you’d be dead right now. They saved your life from that woman—that, that Diana.”
“How do you know?” Freaky Big Bird cried. “How do you know? Maybe Diana was trying to heal us.”
“From what?” murmured Randy. “Selfishness and stupidity?”
High five to the tall guy—I was liking Randy Stephens more and more.
“We’d be fine without them,” Freaky Big Bird screamed, her voice getting higher and higher. “We’d be fine without all of them—the retard and the cripple and that murderous child who has no business shooting a gun. And you,” she pointed at Prianka. “What are you doing with him?” Felice leveled a bony finger at her. “He’ll get you killed, missy. Mark my words—he’ll get you killed.”
Prianka was still stuck on ‘retard’. I knew her well enough for that. The anger started to bubble up and spill off her like a volcano getting ready to explode.
It didn’t matter, anyway. A poxer practically fell on Freaky Big Bird from behind a magazine rack. None of us saw him and none of us could stop him as he bit into her shoulder, tearing her thin skin like tissue paper.
Blood splattered everywhere.
51
“I’M DYING,” Felice Lefluer screamed. “Oh, Lord, I’m dying.” The poxer chewed at the mouthful of flesh and muscle he had ripped free of Freaky Big Bird’s bony hide. His teeth turned red and blood dripped down his chin. For some reason I noticed that he was wearing a name badge on his filthy shirt. ‘Sales Associate’, it said. ‘Juan’.
Part of me thought, just for an instant, that Felice deserved what she got and Juan deserved to choke on her, too, but no—I was wrong. Nobody deserves Necropoxy.
Newfie began snarling and barking. Aunt Ella grabbed his collar with both hands and held him back.
Felice fell to her knees, blood spilling out of her like a faucet, and Juan the poxer stepped forward again, opening his mouth wide for another taste of Freaky Big Bird.
Bullseye pulled his gun out of his pants and fired first—just one time—and Juan simply had no face. His mouth was a sputtering hole. His nose disappeared in a gush of black goop. One cloudy eye remained where there had been two.
Still, he staggered forward. Newfie growled and Bullseye steadied his aim and shot him again, this time in his thigh. The bullet made a ragged mess of gray meat and corduroy, and Juan’s legs buckled. He fell down right behind Freaky Big Bird, smearing the linoleum floor with what was left of his face.
Then Bullseye stepped forward and leveled his gun at Felice LeFleur.
“Help me,” she screamed as she clutched her shoulder. “It hurts. It hurts so much.” Tears spilled down her face as blood seeped between her fingers.
“I don’t know what happened,” gasped Nedra Stein. “One minute I was reprimanding Felice and the next minute that thing was just there. I’m sorry. I’m so, so sorry.”
Bullseye cocked the gun but didn’t pull the trigger. “We don’t shoot people, Tripp—right?” I didn’t know what to say. Any second now, Felice LeFleur was going to be a monster. “That’s what you told me,” he repeated. “We don’t shoot people.”
Randy Stephens pulled his father’s lighter out of his pocket and grabbed a box of tissue paper off a shelf next to him.
“I got your back, kid,” he said to Bullseye. “You do what you need to do.”
“Somebody DO something,” Felice wailed again. The blood poured down her sleeve and soaked her librarian’s outfit.
I tensed, waiting for the inevitable. Necropoxy was quick. My mind went back to Tattoo Guy. The old bus driver had bit him and he had changed almost instantly. ‘I can feel it in me’, he had cried. ‘I can feel it in me’.
But something was different with Felice. Something wasn’t right.
“Tripp?” said Trina. She could see it, too.
“Not changing,” murmured Sanjay.
“Not changing,” repeated Andrew. “Not changing, not changing, not changing.”
Felice Lefluer wasn’t turning into a poxer. Oh, don’t get me wrong, she looked horrible. Her face had gone white and her eyes were starting to roll up into her head, but that didn’t mean she was a poxer. That only meant that a monster had taken a hunk of meat out of her and she was probably going into shock.
“Bullseye, wait,” I said.
“Why?” he said. Both his hands were gripping the gun. Freaky Big Bird cried and cried, her eyes catching each of ours in turn, begging and pleading for help.
Still, there were no signs of Necropoxy—not even a little.
“She’s not changing,” I murmured.
Walmart Juan flailed on the floor like a fish out of water. A slowly growing pool of black made an oily slick beneath him.
Suddenly, Felice noticed the maimed poxer with his ruined face lying on the ground behind her. She yelped and scrambled to her feet, her hand still pressed against the place where she had been bitten.
“Kill it,” she screamed. “Kill it. Kill the monster.”
Randy Stephens looked from Felice to Juan and back to Felice again. “Which one?” he said. Under the circumstances it was a valid question.
My father, who had stood like a statue through the whole ordeal, suddenly woke up out of la-la land and realized that he was the one with the medical degree. He raced forward to Felice.
“Doug. No,” yelped my mom, but he was already there, pulling Freaky Big Bird away from Juan and instructing her to unbutton her shirt so he could inspect the wound.
Eddie with the fake hair turned and made his way to the front door, swung it open, and grabbed one of the televisions that were sitting on the ground. He grunted as he lifted it up. Then he came back in, stumbled over to where Juan was flopping around on the floor, and dropped the television on his head. There was a wet, smacking sound as the two connected. Eddie lifted the television up and did it again. The third time, Walmart Juan stopped moving, hopefully for good.
“I killed it,” he said quietly, then turned to face the rest of us.
We were all staring at Freaky Big Bird, not comprehending what was happening. Any second, I expected her eyes to turn cloudy and the blood lust to rise inside her like a tidal wave. Nothing was happening. She was the same old Freaky Big Bird. My father poked at the bite in her shoulder and fresh tears sprung from her eyes.
“It hurts,” she blubbered. “It hurts.”
“I need a scissors,” he said. “Hydrogen peroxide and bandages.”
None of us moved.
“Now,” he shouted. “We’re in a Walmart. Go find them.”
I remained rooted to the spot. I stared at Freaky Big Bird. She was supposed to be dead. She was supposed to be a poxer. I didn’t understand any of this. It’s like someone had changed the rules of soccer right in the middle of a game and now we could only use our hands instead of our feet.
She didn’t make sense. None of this made sense.
Finally, I heard Aunt Ella bark, “You heard the man. We need peroxide and bandages. I’m going out to the ambulance to see what we’ve got there. If you’re looking inside this place, go in groups. Who knows how many more zombies are in here. Look sharp, people.”
My father bent over Freaky Big Bird as she cried. Prianka and Trina came up and stood next to me. So did Sanjay and Bullseye.
“Why isn’t she changing?” whispered Bullseye. “She’s supposed to be changing.”
Sanjay lifted Poopy Puppy to his ear and slowly nodded. “Poopy Puppy says ‘magic’.”
Jimmy wheeled up beside us. “This is freaking me out, dude. This is really freaking me out.”
I felt little fingers grasping my hand. They were Krystal’s. She had her signature two fingers stuck in her mouth, wet with saliva. She looked up at me and smiled. I saw the bandage on her arm where Trudy bit her when she was an ‘almost poxer’. The wound probably still throbbed.
“Immune,” she giggled as she swung my hand back and forth. “Just like me?”
“No,” I said blankly. “Not like you.” I looked at Trina, my eyes widening, the cogs in my brain clicking into place.
Andrew cackled and flapped his wings. Newfie made a small woofing sound.
“I think . . .” I began, then swallowed. “I think she’s immune like us.”
52
BACK IN NINTH grade there was a freak snow storm two days before Halloween. Snow in October is bizarre even for New England. Oh, sure, turkey day got snowed out once or twice that I remember, but Halloween? That was a weird one.
The reason I remember the week of the storm was because of the damage it caused. Who would think twelve inches on the ground would create such a mess—but it did. You see, the leaves hadn’t completely fallen off the trees yet and the snow was heavy. You know—snowball snow. The kind of snow that you can make snowmen out of, or killer forts if you’re bored enough to roll that many boulders of snow out on your front lawn.
The point is, the snow was so heavy on the trees, and the trees were so heavy because the leaves were still on them, that a lot of trees snapped in two like twigs. I remember going outside with my dad during the worst of it. As the snow poured down like a giant’s dandruff, the snapping of the trees sounded like gun shots. Branches fell everywhere—on rooftops, through windows, on my dad’s car, but most importantly, on the electric wires.
We lost power during that freak snowstorm in October, and we were without power for a week.
Do you know what it’s like not to have power for a week when you’re a ninth grader? It’s like the end of the world. There was no Internet, no television, no video games—nothing. After the second day of mind-numbing boredom, Trina and I started putting together jigsaw puzzles. My mom had a closet full of them from when we were ankle-biters. She used to make them while we napped. I guess we were light sleepers and making puzzles was about the quietest thing she could find to keep her mind busy and us snoozing.
That’s what I was doing as I watched my dad use a tiny sewing kit to try and put together the pieces of Freaky Big Bird’s shoulder. I was puzzling things out. She cried, and Nedra Stein held her other hand while Aunt Ella tried to console her as my father patched her up. Trina stood beside me, both of us confused because the bony woman with the beady eyes and the hawk nose hadn’t changed into a monster.
I hashed and rehashed what was happening in my mind. People who are immune to Necropoxy are only safe from the airborne parasites, but no one is safe from the bite. We knew that much. Anyone who has two parents who are immune is super immune, meaning that even the bite of a poxer can’t give them Necropoxy. Trina and I were like that—and we were supposed to be really rare. That’s why the helicopter people were chasing us. That’s why Diana wanted us back so badly.
Then there’s what Freaky Big Bird had screamed at us during her Freaky Big Bird freak-out. I’m mad. I’m mad that I had to watch that old woman turn into a zombie before my eyes and there was nothing I could do about it. She’d been talking about her mother—the woman who had the misfortune of hatching such a beasty as Felice.
“Are you adopted?” I blurted out to her as my father worked on her shoulder. Trina stomped hard on my foot and I bit my lip.
“What? No,” Felice snapped. My father, Nedra, and Freaky Big Bird all gave us dirty looks, then Dad went back to work on her shoulder.
Trina nudged me. “Come over here,” she hissed as she grabbed me by the arm and hauled me over to the front door.
“What was that for?” I said.
She chewed on the inside of her cheek. “She’s not adopted.”
“Yeah, we just established that.”
Trina folded her arms and looked out the window. Any second, the helicopter people could come back or jeeps could stream into the parking lot.
“You know what I think?” I said to her, keeping my voice just above a whisper.
“I think so,” she said. “Why don’t you try me?”
“Okay,” my eyes darted from left to right. “Let me word purge and you tell me if I’m getting this right.”
She nodded her head. “Go for it.”
I took a deep breath. “There are fifteen of us here, right? The minivan family is six, not counting Newfie, Andrew, and the doll.”
“Go on,” she said.
“Dad, Aunt Ella, and Krystal make nine.”
“Crap,” she whispered. We were thinking the same thing. Wonder twin powers activate.
“That leaves Nedra, Eddie, Randy, Trudy, Freaky Big Bird, and Mom,” I began.
Trina finished my sentence. “And all of them were experimented on while they were at Site 37. They all got sick and they all got better.”
“Exactly,” I said. “So maybe while Diana, Dr. Marks, and those other scientists were poking and prodding them, they somehow did something right and came up with a drug or a vaccine that actually makes them immune to the bite of a poxer. That’s what they’re trying to do anyway, isn’t it?”
I remembered the poor woman that Diane had put in a room with a poxer while I was there. All the pretty eggheads had watched her with unfeeling eyes as that thing bit her, and then they timed how long it took for her to change.
She wasn’t like Tattoo Guy. He changed quickly. That woman had taken over a minute to poxify. Felice was going on twenty minutes. Could it be possible that something they had done to her worked? Was she really super immune?
“But is it all of them?” Trina asked. “Are they all immune?”
I thought about that for a moment then shook my head. “No, they can’t be. If they were all immune then Tattoo Guy wouldn’t have turned when he got bit. They must have done different things to different people.”
“Like a control group,” said Prianka. She had come up beside me and was listening intently as I talked.
“A what?”
“See,” she said. “That’s why I always got better grades than you. This is science 101. In any experiment you test only a portion of your group, and don’t do anything to the rest. The ones you don’t do anything to become your control group.”
Trina scrunched up her forehead like she was thinking too hard. “You mean some of them might be like us?” she said. “Super freaks?”
“Yeah,” I said. “Super freaky, huh?”
“But why couldn’t it have been Randy or Eddie?” she whined “Hell, even Trudy. Why did it have to be Freaky Big Bird? I can’t stand her.”
Our little tea party abruptly ended as Jimmy came fast down the wide aisle behind the row of check-out counters. “We’ve got more p
oxers,” he yelled as he came. “They got Eddie, too. Eddie and Randy.”
No. It couldn’t be. Still, in the back of my mind, I couldn’t help but think about what Prianka just said. If either of them were in the control group, we’d find out soon enough.
53
JIMMY, EDDIE WITH the fake hair, and Randy Stephens had found a bank of electrical boxes near the back of the store. Yeah, I know, they were supposed to be looking for peroxide and bandages for Felice, but when Randy saw the door with the Electric Room sign written on it with big red and white letters, he had to take a look.
“I tried to stop him,” Jimmy huffed, the sweat on his forehead matting his red hair down. “I told him that we had to be careful because there was no way a place this big was poxer-free. Too many dark corners, you know? But he didn’t listen to me. He told me he just wanted to check on the boxes to see what kind of power we had.”
“Idiot,” said Trina. “And he was doing so good.”
“Not good enough,” I said. “What happened?”
“So he opened the door and it turned out that there was some sort of break room there, with a soda machine and candy machine and a coffee maker. And poxers—there was a boatload of poxers.”
“Damn,” whispered Trina.
“That’s gross,” said Prianka. “What did you do?”
“Well, Eddie froze and before I could even do anything, a dumpy old lady rolled out from under one of the break tables and bit him on the leg.”
What a nightmare. Stupid adults—they think they know everything. This is a whole new world. How is it that a bunch of kids are able to make it on their own for over a week without getting bitten, but the adults come along and screw up the odds? Tattoo Guy dies. Dorcas gets shot. Freaky Big Bird gets attacked, and now Eddie?
“What about Randy?” asked Prianka.
“Here’s the thing,” said Jimmy. “Eddie didn’t turn right away, so Randy grabbed him, pulled him out of the room and shut the door. He thought Eddie was going to be like Felice. Besides, Eddie wasn’t screaming or anything. I think he was paralyzed with fear—almost catatonic. Randy was standing over him trying to shake him out of it, and I kept yelling for Randy to get away from him because he might turn into a poxer.”
The Dead (a Lot) Trilogy (Book 2): Wicked Dead Page 22
