Zombies vs. Unicorns

by Holly Black

  On the field Jack violently checks another player. They fall to the churned-up turf while the ball sails into the net. The crowd cheers, even though Jack gets fouled. The goal is good. Jack is a lot more violent on the field than he is off of it. But then you remember that strange, fierce way he looked at you for a moment yesterday afternoon. You remember the scar on his forehead and his ice man dad.

  At halftime he comes over to the bleachers, breathing hard and grinning. A few other students give him high fives. You hang back, knowing he sees you and wondering if he’ll say something. It’s Saturday. You’ve never come to a game before. The whole field smells ripe, hundreds of walking, talking, laughing Happy Meals, and even from a few feet away, Jack smells better than all of them. For a moment you contemplate leaping over the bleachers and just eating him in front of the whole crowd. You’d probably get at least a few bites in before the police come. Maybe they’d even use deadly force, seeing as how you’re clearly a rabid beast, and finally solve all your problems. Saliva pools in your mouth. Jack looks up at you.

  You won’t eat him. No matter what.

  “Grayson,” he says with a half smile. He climbs the bleachers and sits next to you. “You like the game?”

  You breathe very slowly. His arm brushes against yours, slick with his sweat. You have such a raging hard-on you can only hope he doesn’t look down.

  “Nice,” you say. “You always that aggressive?”

  Jack shrugs, but his grin is pleased. “If I need to be. We’re winning, aren’t we?”

  “Guess so.”

  Jack looks at you quickly and then away, and once again you’re enthralled by his countervailing waves of awkwardness and ferocity. “Grayson, about yesterday … my dad …”

  “He’s not here, is he?” you say, playing at being scared, though actually the ice man does sort of scare you.

  Jack laughs. “God, I hope not. Dad barely tolerates extracurriculars. He thinks I should be training… . Hey, you want to go into the city with me tonight? I’ve got an extra ticket to Modest Mouse.”

  This would be marginally appealing even without the additional bonus of Jack, but you look back down at the braces girl, now chatting with her friends. Your hunger is starting to feel like that first time, a longing that cuts into your muscles and makes the world turn red. You can’t go much longer without a meal.

  “Sorry,” you say. “Can’t.”

  You know you ought to offer a better explanation. Homework or community service or a part-time job. But you don’t want to lie to Jack.

  So you hurt him instead.

  “Okay,” Jack says. He looks away. The game is starting again. He walks back onto the field. Deliberately, knowing he’s still looking, you move so you’re right behind the girl. You smile at her.

  “Haven’t seen you here before,” you say.

  She goes bug-eyed. She blushes. You can smell her blood like it’s already broken the skin. “Visiting from Boulder,” she says. She says other things. You can’t quite hear her. Jack is staring at you from the edge of the bench. Even from here you can see the ice in those blue eyes. Like he wants to kill you.

  You arrange to meet the girl—she has a name, but you try not to remember it, easier that way—in the parking lot in an hour. You tell her about some concert you have tickets to, would she like to come? In a converted farmhouse just outside the town limits. You wonder why you always get away with this routine. Like none of these girls or boys ever actually listened to a thing their guidance counselors told them about date safety. Sometimes you want to shake their shoulders and yell, “Hello? Doesn’t this sound strange to you?”

  Whatever. You’re hungry.

  The game is almost over when Jack’s dad walks onto the field. His limp is more obvious now, but it doesn’t make him less threatening. The referee stops the play and yells at the ice man for a few moments before deciding it’s hopeless. Jack doesn’t say anything, just walks off the field with his shoulders stooped. You wonder what’s happened—did he forget target practice again? You wait for him to come back, but instead he grabs his gear and leaves with his father. He glances at you once. You can’t see his face from so far away, but somehow you know he’s afraid. I need you to be ready, the ice man said yesterday. Ready to kill a monster?

  You’re not as careful as you should be when you meet the girl after the game. You don’t check if anyone sees you leave together. You don’t even bother to have a conversation once she gets in the car. The doors are locked. The prions have done their job—she has entered a permanent bug-eyed state. Her pulse speeds up like old faithful when you look at her. You’re pissed that you have to do this. Angry like you haven’t been since you first woke up in the lab. About the normal life stripped away, at the maniac left behind. You want to be at that Modest Mouse concert with Jack so bad your stomach hurts. But you can smell the food beside you, and the urge to eat it now, at the intersection two blocks away from school, is almost overpowering.

  It’s dark by the time you get to the woods. By now even braces girl is starting to get a little worried, but you tune her out. You don’t like it when they scream. Really, you don’t like it when they’re alive at all. Best to just knock them out and be done with it. But you hate to mess up the car, so you make up some excuse about the engine breaking down and stop in the middle of the gravel road. You know from experience that no one will find you.

  “Hey,” braces girl says, “I think I want to go back home. This is a little—”

  “Yeah, hold on, I have to see what’s wrong with the car.”

  She nods, nervously. You get out, pretend to look at the engine, walk back around to her side. “Something’s smoking,” you say. “I should probably call for a tow. Could you get out for a second? I think the number’s under the seat.”

  She nods, reassured, though you sure as fuck don’t know why. This is the worst part. The last moment they trust you, when some part of them must know they shouldn’t. She opens the door.

  She gets out.

  6. Dirty Harry

  The prudent serial killer’s guide to avoiding the cool, yet bureaucratic, hand of the law.

  • Move around! Superheroes call them lairs; police officers call them crime scenes.

  • Blend in. In colonial Massachusetts a Quaker living alone with cats had a front-row ticket to a witch trial. In twenty-first-century America, a solitary lifestyle is still a sign of deviance. I’m about seventeen, so I go to high school. Lots of high schools. You wouldn’t believe how easy it is to forge credentials, and all the teachers love a good student.

  • Vary your targets. I know, the victims are supposed to be the telltale heart of serial killing. The fatal flaw: Every killer likes their type. Bad idea. I’ve eaten big jocks and old ladies. I’ve raided funeral parlors (not recommended: formaldehyde is to corpses what the Kraft factory is to Vermont cheddar). I’ve even put an ad online!

  And finally:

  • Use your brains! Or someone else will eat them for you.

  7. You Know My Name (Look Up the Number)

  The girl stares at you. You stare at her. The hunger feels like knives delicately inserted into your stomach and pushed through your spine.

  And then she shrugs, takes a step forward, and kisses you. Perfect opportunity. A kiss is like a non-prion version of eating someone. But you just clench your fists and return it. Why not? The braces aren’t so bad. You imagine she’s Jack. That’s better.

  “Grayson,” says Jack. “Step away from her.”

  The girl breaks it off first, looks over your shoulder, screams. You turn around, a sudden warmth dulling the sharp edges of your hunger. Jack stands in front of the thick row of trees on the side of the gravel road. He has a gun. Despite the prion problem, you haven’t had much interaction with guns in your life. This one looks big and black and shiny. Jack looks like he knows how to use it.

  “Funny, I didn’t peg you for the jealous type, Jack.”

  He grimaces, but the blush staining hi
s neck and ears probably isn’t caused by anger.

  “What the hell are you doing? Are you robbing us?” The girl’s voice is so high she’s nearly squeaking. She’s reaching out, like she might hold you for support. But you look at Jack, his steady hand and his big black pistol, and think that might not be the best idea.

  “I’m saving your life,” he says.

  For a moment you can’t hear a thing—not your frantic pulse, not your labored breath, not even Jack as he says something to the girl and gestures with his gun.

  You wish he would just shoot already. You wish he would just fucking kill you.

  But the girl, trembling now, shuts the hood and opens the driver’s side of your car.

  “The keys are in the ignition,” Jack says. “Drive home.”

  “But the engine …”

  “Go.”

  She shuts the door. The car starts without a problem. She backs down the gravel drive, slowly at first, then so fast she nearly careens into a tree.

  You and Jack are alone. He still holds the gun.

  “Grayson … it’s true? What they said about you. What you—”

  “Yeah, of course it is. Why the fuck else would I be out here?” You close your eyes. “Hurry up, will you?”

  “What are you doing?”

  “Waiting.”

  “I’m putting the gun down.”

  “So you can stick me with your samurai sword?”

  “I’m not going to kill you.”

  “Why the fuck not?”

  “Open your damn eyes, Grayson!”

  The gun is in a holster around his jeans. His hair is spiky with dried sweat, but he’s changed out of his lacrosse uniform. His face is flushed red, like he might cry.

  “We’ve got to leave. I put Dad off, but he’ll be here soon.”

  He turns without another word and walks deeper into the woods. He’s quiet, though you can’t see how. When you follow him, the cracking leaves and twigs sound like an earthquake. Ten minutes later you reach his car. It’s parked in the middle of a road that’s little more than two ruts of packed dirt. You get in. You’re not sure what else to do. He drives smoothly, carefully, and yet with the same steady fierceness you’ve sensed in him all along.

  “Jack, if you’re not going to kill me, you have to let me go.”

  “Dad’s decided to get you on his own. He’s been nuts for something like this ever since he got invalided out. It’s not safe for you.”

  You have to laugh. “Safe? Do you really know what I am?”

  There must have been something in your voice, some tremor, because Jack looks at you now for the first time since you got into the car. “Grayson … they said … ZSE is rare, but there’s a few cases each year.”

  “ZSE?”

  “Zombie Spongiform Encephalopathy.”

  Zombie. That’s what Jack thinks you are.

  “You should kill me. Your dad wants you to kill me, right? Isn’t that why we’re running away from him?” You don’t even recognize the road signs now. He’s gone far off the highway, down some long country roads bounded only by soybean fields and great tubes of hay.

  “Why are you so damn interested in me killing you, Grayson?”

  “Why are you giving a ride to a raving cannibal?”

  “Shut up!”

  “Why, it isn’t true?”

  “You sound just like him!”

  “Then maybe he’s right.”

  Jack abruptly slams his foot on the brake. The car skids a little on the deserted road before shuddering to a halt. When he turns to you now, he is crying, though you can tell he doesn’t know it.

  “I watched you decide to not kill that girl.”

  Is that what happened? You shrug, deliberately. “I’ve killed dozens of others.”

  “Maybe you’ve changed.”

  “Maybe I’m not that hungry. Maybe she smelled like brussels sprouts.”

  “I don’t believe that.”

  You’re very close to him now. Close to his long-sleeved T-shirt, his flushed cheek, his gun. “Why, Jack?”

  “I don’t know. ‘Behind Blue Eyes’ and Harajuku pop and Ian Curtis—”

  Hands and lips and teeth, and you’d forgotten—no, you’d never known—this way of knowing someone, this dissolution of self, this autophagy.

  His shirt rips, but you’re careful with his skin.

  8. Sounds of Silence

  Ian Curtis killed himself on the eighteenth of May, 1980. You might think this ironic of the lead singer of a band called Joy Division, but actually their name is a reference to prostitution in Nazi concentration camps. (Which might explain why their iconic song is called “Love Will Tear Us Apart.”) He hung himself, a death of slow asphyxiation, of utter helplessness for long minutes until he finally, mercifully, lost consciousness. There are certain theories of suicide that propose that the more self-loathing one feels, the more violent the method one chooses.

  Elliott Smith (folksinger) stabbed himself in the heart with a kitchen knife. Nick Drake (folksinger) OD’d on antidepressants.

  A qualitative difference in self-loathing? Please. When you decide to check yourself out, the difference between a gun and a rope is how long it takes to tie the knot.

  9. Eat the Music

  You stay in motels. And not the kind with friendly signs in primary colors and “Kids Stay Free!” deals on weekends. These motels have sputtering neon spelling “vacancy” and long rows of rooms, identical as LEGOs. The bathroom floors are coated with grime spread thin by lazy efforts to wipe it away. Sheets are haphazardly laundered. The second night, you see a bloodstain that covers half the floor. It blends well enough with the carpet and you don’t tell Jack. You’re hungry and you don’t like to remind him of what you are.

  Jack pays for the rooms, and no one asks questions. For a last-minute escape, he’s managed well: a few thousand in cash, a box of emergency food supplies in the trunk, two swords, and three more of those big, black guns. You nearly vomited when he offered to let you use one. Now you just try not to look at them.

  You haven’t eaten human flesh in ten days. You might have snapped before now, but Jack bought a haunch of pork from a local butcher. He couldn’t look you in the eye when he handed it to you. “Second thoughts about your charity case?” you asked, and felt the hollow reward of his silence.

  Pork works. Not as well as warm human flesh, not even close, but at least you can keep away the worst of it, the insanity you remember from those first moments with the prion. Whatever madness you feel, whatever longings you have, are bound up in what you and Jack do late at night on scratchy sheets, and the only music you share is the hum of the hallway ice machine, the occasional rumble of pickup trucks speeding by on the country roads. During the day there are no lingering glances, tentative hand-holding, butterfly kisses. During the day you’re the zombie and he’s your keeper. At night he’s still afraid of his father, but at least he lets you see the fear. It descends like an army. It makes him pace up and down the room, makes him cry, sometimes vomit. You hate what he won’t tell you, and you hate knowing anyway.

  The third night, his father calls. This is not the first time Jack’s cell phone has buzzed, not the first time he’s gone too still and too pale and you’ve wondered how much his ice man father did to him. But this time Jack picks up.

  “I’m not coming back,” Jack says. He’s trying to sound tough, but you can see his fears as clearly as you can see his scars in the moonlight.

  “I trained you for better than this.” Jack likes his speaker volume the way he likes his music: too loud. I can hear every word his father says.

  “You trained me to be a monster.”

  His father is silent for a few seconds. “You’re in room 303 of Jimmy’s Truck Lodge in Osler. I’m about ten minutes away. Let me finish this, Jackson. The boys at the agency have orders to kill that creature and anyone with him.”

  “Dad, you’re not—”

  “You should let me finish this.”
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  The line goes dead. You wonder for a moment what he’ll do, but Jack doesn’t even hesitate. He rushes you out the door. It’s not hard to leave quickly—everything important is in the car. Jack is steady, so iced and cool that you wonder how much longer before he’s just like his father. Maybe that’s what this is really about—not loving you, not a sense of fair play, but one last, desperate ploy to not become a monster.

  He gestures angrily at you. “Get in!”

  “If I stay behind—”

  “And anyone with him, remember?”

  “Your dad wouldn’t …”

  “Will you bet my life on it?”

  “I could bite you. Make it look authentic.”

  “Fuck you, Grayson.”

  “Why does it matter? I’m a fucking zombie! You think even this cure they gave me will last forever? What the hell is wrong with you? Let your ice man dad kill me, and you can run away somewhere and have a decent life with some decent people.”

  Jack isn’t steady now. He punches the door—solidly, enough to hurt. “You’re the only person—Fuck. You know, don’t you? Get in the car. Please.”

  You knock him out.

  It’s brief and efficient, to the jaw. You know how to incapacitate people. He only has time for one wide-eyed stare before he slumps into your arms, unconscious. You carry him back into the motel room and rip his shirt. You figure the shoulder’s as good a place as any. But when you look down, the light illuminates another scar, still-pink marks from stitches running across his collarbone. You swallow back bile and rip his shirt some more. Hopefully that will be enough.

  Ice man is standing in the doorway when you turn around.

  “So that’s what this is about?” he says. Of course you couldn’t fool him.

  “You wondered?”

  “No. Not really. I guess I never … I don’t know what they’ll do to him. Not if they think you two …”