Dead (A Lot)

by Howard Odentz

  He shook his head in disbelief with this stunned, amazed look on his face. “I knew people like him existed, but, I never thought . . . I mean, I never . . .”

  Prianka sighed and gave him the quick rundown on Sanjay.

  While Jimmy’s head was still reeling I asked Sanjay again. “Do you think you can get us there, Buddy?”

  Sanjay consulted with the dirty dog for a moment before nodding his head once. “Go straight,” he said. “Poopy Puppy says all roads lead north.”

  Jimmy laughed. “I said that, didn’t I? I mean I said that just this morning, and he repeated it word for word. That’s wild. That’s really wild.”

  “Yes, we know,” I said.

  Trina turned to Jimmy and sort of shook her head a little. That was enough for him to stop talking.

  “Straight it is,” I said, and we all motored out of the entrance of Sugarloaf State Park and one step closer to my mom and dad.

  25

  MY MOM USED to tell us a story about the people in the hill towns. This was the part of Massachusetts that nobody ever visited—kind of north of the University but not north enough to be in Vermont, and kind of west toward the Berkshires but not west enough to be part of the Berkshires.

  It was no man’s land. Oh, sure, there were towns there with weird names like Lucifer’s Knoll, and Black Water, and Devil’s Pulpit, but they were so small that most Bay Staters never even heard of them.

  My mom said there were some weird things that went on in some of those towns—things that people never talked about. Supposedly, that’s where all the witches from Salem eventually settled back in the sixteen hundreds, or at least the ones who didn’t get burned. Also, tons of people from the state mental hospitals went there when they were closed down for lack of funding.

  There were even legends of a whole group of people called the Big Headed Clan that lived deep in the woods. Supposedly, their heads were huge—like the size of watermelons. Mom said they were all inbred—like having kids with your sister, or your uncle, or your cousin once removed. From time to time, she would tell us that she heard talk about the Big Headed Clan, but no one ever really saw them. Even kids in my school would joke about them every once in a while, which scared the crap out of me because I was convinced that my mom had made the whole thing up.

  Just the same, my mom would tell us that if we were bad, she’d take us up to one of those towns like Lilliput or Covered Bridge and leave us there for the Big Headed Clan. They’d know what to do with kids who misbehaved. They’d know what to do and how.

  As I meandered down the road, weaving past stalled cars or the lone poxer here and there, I couldn’t help but think about the big headed people. Were they real? Did we have more things to contend with than just poxers? For a few miles there, I really spooked myself out. I kept scanning the woods for people with heads too big for their bodies. What if there were big headed poxers now, too? Did they eat more? Did they take bigger bites out of you because their mouths were as disproportionately large as their heads? Were they smarter than the average poxer?

  Chill, I told myself. All this nonsense is the byproduct of three candy bars, a bottle of coke, and something so processed and gross and good at the same time that I shoved the whole thing into my mouth before catching the name on the wrapper. All the sugar was playing tricks with my head.

  That—or maybe the revelation that, as of two days ago, monsters were real after all.

  Thankfully, by the time five miles had passed, the heebie jeebies had simmered a bit. We came to the end of the road we were on. Without asking, Sanjay pointed to the right.

  “That’s away from the highway,” said Jimmy.

  “Away from the highway is just fine with me,” I said as I turned the wheel.

  Another few minutes of silence and Prianka spoke up, “So whatever happened to all the animals?”

  “My aunt and uncle’s animals? They got them back. Like I said, that was a couple of years ago, and the whole story was all a big misunderstanding, anyway. I mean, don’t get me wrong. Their farm is kind of gross, but it’s no glue factory.”

  “It’s gross,” said Trina. “Every time we come home from there I have to take an hour long shower.”

  “What a girl,” I said, and simultaneously Trina punched me in the arm while Jimmy and Prianka both flicked the back of my head.

  “Quit it,” I yelped. A nanosecond later I was slamming my foot hard on the breaks.

  There was a kid standing in the middle of the road with a bow and arrow in his hand pointed directly at us.

  “Crap,” said Jimmy.

  “What do I do?”

  “Run him over,” said Trina, the ever so practical one.

  “I have a better idea,” said Prianka and reached in the back for one of the rifles. She passed it forward to Trina and took another one for herself.

  “Watch Sanjay,” she said to Jimmy. “Trina, time for acting 101.” She opened the door, and my sister followed.

  “Get out of the car,” the kid barked. He couldn’t have been more than eleven or twelve.

  “We’re getting out of the car,” said Prianka rather nonchalantly. Once her feet were firmly planted on the ground she lifted the rifle and pointed it directly at the boy. “The point is—what are you going to do about it?”

  Trina lifted her rifle too and took a step forward. “Yeah,” she said. “What the hell are you going to do?”

  I gripped the wheel tightly. Who did they think they were, anyway? Bonnie and . . . well . . . Bonnie? They didn’t even have bullets. My sister never shouldered a gun in her life, and I don’t care how perfect Prianka Patel thought she was, I’d lay odds that she never had either.

  “Not good, not good, not good, not good,” Jimmy kept saying over and over from the back seat.

  “Go ahead and shoot me,” challenged Prianka. “My friend here will drop you before I hit the ground and vice versa.”

  “Try me,” said my sister, repositioning the rifle on her shoulder and cocking her head like she was figuring out the best line of fire.

  The boy’s face turned white. Trina was scary enough, but Prianka Patel? Yikes! The bow and arrow he was holding began to shake so badly that I though he was going to let the arrow fly by accident. Trina stood her ground, and Prianka’s face was a mask of menace.

  A few seconds later, a wet stain began to spread across the kid’s crotch. He dropped the bow and arrow and ran down the embankment to our right and off into the woods.

  We all watched him go. I probably even felt bad for him—but not for long. Trina casually slung the rifle over her shoulder, high fived Prianka, and together they climbed back into the Hummer.

  “What a girl I am,” she said as she passed the rifle back to Prianka.

  I never made that mistake again.

  26

  “DON’T YOU THINK we should go back for him?” said Jimmy. He craned his neck to see if he could catch a glimpse of the kid in the woods

  “No,” I said a little too quickly, but no one jumped down my throat. “Listen, Trina and I haven’t heard from my parents since Friday night. We just want to get to my Aunt Ella’s house. We can save the world tomorrow.”

  “He’s just one kid,” said Jimmy.

  “Yeah, a stupid one,” I snapped. “What the hell does he think this is anyway, cowboys and Indians?

  Prianka muttered something under her breath.

  “What? You have something to say, too?”

  “I said we don’t have any room.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “We don’t have any room.”

  That, in fact, was the truth. With all our stuff and the food from the store and the wheelchair and the bird, we were packed tight. I stepped on the gas and continued down the road. There were fewer cars here. Every once in a while we saw a poxer ambling alon
g the median, but other than that, it was relatively quiet.

  After what seemed like an eternity but was probably only a minute, Jimmy said, “We’re going to have to do a lot of bad things. Hopefully we’ll forget them or maybe the good things will outweigh the bad.”

  None of us responded, because we all knew he was right. Now more than ever I wished that I could go back three days and have a do-over. Not that it would have mattered anyway. I wasn’t the one who created Necropoxy or somehow let the disease loose. I didn’t kill the world. Still, I felt crummy. I could only hope that the crummy feeling would disappear after a while.

  I could only hope.

  I can’t understand why I used to watch all those movies about zombies and the apocalypse. Maybe because they were really cool from the outside looking in, just like watching people hike the Grand Canyon or camp out on the frozen tundra. Adventure looks so neat and exciting on TV, but when you’re living it, it’s hard and scary.

  I never thought I’d have to deal with zombies. Zombie movies were fantasy. Zombies were the things that were totally made-up. Not like a government-created super-flu that kills almost everyone or a natural disaster wiping out the world. Zombies fell into the same category with vampires and werewolves.

  Until now. This was real life and poxers were upon us.

  Out of habit, I picked up my cell phone, charged courtesy of the Hummer, and punched in my dad’s phone number. I got nothing. No busy signal or anything.

  “What?” said Trina as she studied my face.

  “I don’t know. I thought that Mom and Dad might answer.”

  “The towers are dead,” said Jimmy.

  “What do you mean?”

  “The cell phone towers. If the towers don’t have power, all cell phones are shot, too.”

  “Well how are we supposed to talk?”

  “With your mouth,” said Prianka. “You don’t seem to have too much of a problem with that.”

  I started to say something but stopped myself. There was no point. Up ahead there was a big sign for Butterfly Kingdom. The sign felt sort of random, like seeing a sign for Sea World in the middle of Ohio. I had heard of this place before—a big, tropical room filled with thousands of plants and butterflies. For a few bucks, you were allowed to walk through and let the butterflies dance around your head. Talk about torture! If I wanted to be swarmed by bugs, there were plenty of woods around. Who would pay for the privilege?

  Still, I wondered what was going to happen to all the butterflies. I mean, up until Friday night someone had the job of feeding them kibble or butterfly chow or whatever butterflies eat. What about all the pets in pet stores? Who was feeding the puppies and the fish? Were they just going to starve to death? For that matter what about all the animals caged up in zoos or on farms or in people’s houses?

  Jimmy spoke from behind me, interrupting the ‘oh so happy’ thoughts that were filling my mind.

  “What?” I said.

  “Up here. The road curves to the left. It’s the back way into Greenfield. It’s going to start getting residential soon. Be careful.”

  The road slowly curved, and I followed it. Jimmy was right. Houses started popping up on both sides of the road, and with them came the poxers.

  There were a lot, like in Bellingsfield and Amherst. Most of them were milling around on front lawns and sidewalks. They took notice of the Hummer as we drove by, and some started to follow the sound. There weren’t any sizeable groups of poxers. Nothing that could challenge us in the Hummer, but the roads were bad here. Not as bad as Route 116 or the highway. I was able to maneuver around the car wrecks and pile-ups and the occasional poxer posse.

  What a mess.

  Just two days ago, all of these people were alive. They had lives. They had jobs. The kids went to school, and the old people did whatever old people do. Now, they were all just mindless, disease ridden bags of death.

  Up ahead was a sign that said Greenfield Center with an arrow pointing left. Underneath was a smaller sign with the number 2.

  “That’s Route 2,” said Jimmy. “The Mohawk Trail starts right on the other side of Greenfield.”

  I went up a hill and took a left. Main Street lay before us like a creepy picture postcard of a creepy New England town. There were a lot of cars and a lot of poxers. I was just about to ask Sanjay if there was another way to go that was a little more remote when the Hummer lurched to the right.

  Andrew flapped his wings and cawed.

  “What was that?” said Trina.

  “Oh, no,” said Jimmy.

  “Oh no what?” said Prianka. “Oh no what?”

  In my gut I knew what he was going to say. I closed my eyes and shook my head.

  “That, my friends, was a flat tire.”

  27

  RIGHT HERE? Right now? Really? If we were out in the country or on one of the back roads, a flat wouldn’t have been so bad, but we were right at the top of Main Street and there were zombies everywhere.

  “I can still drive on a flat, right?”

  “If you want to ruin the tire for good, you can,” said Jimmy. We’ll be riding on the rim before we get out of town.”

  “So now what do we do?”

  He didn’t answer me. He was staring at a poxer looking at us from across the street.

  “Look, a clown,” cried Sanjay, his smile curling up to touch his ears.

  Yup. As if zombies weren’t creepy enough, we’d found a zombie clown across the street. He had bright orange hair and big pull-up overalls with oversized autumn colored leaves painted on them. His shirt was pumpkin orange.

  I made what my parents called my ‘what the hell’ face. For once, I was stunned into silence. Trina pointed to a banner that stretched across the street that read, ‘Greenfield Fall Fest, Sept. 17-19.’ It was decorated with the same sort of leaves that were on the clown. “You gotta be kidding me,” I said.

  The clown stood there quietly watching us. All of a sudden, it snapped its head to one side. Everyone in the car, except Sanjay, yelped.

  When the clown took a step off the curb, we all yelped again.

  “Sharks and clowns,” cried Prianka. “Only sharks and clowns. I can deal with snakes. I can deal with spiders. I can deal with poxers. I can even deal with you, Tripp Light.” Her voice began to rise. “But the two things I absolutely, positively, can never, ever, ever handle are sharks and clowns.”

  “What about clowns who bite?” Total bad timing for a joke.

  Sanjay said, “Clowns are comical performers stereotypically characterized by the image of a circus clown replete with a grotesque appearance, colored wig, stylistic makeup, outlandish costume, unusually large footwear, and red nose. Although some find clowns to be scary, their aim is to entertain people.”

  “Red nose,” repeated Andrew, and Sanjay clapped his hands together in delight.

  I shifted the Hummer in reverse, but something was drastically wrong. Now we weren’t moving at all, and the more that I pressed on the gas, the louder the engine revved, and the more the engine revved, the more poxers noticed us as being uncharacteristically alive in their very dead world.

  The clown was closing the gap between us. Prianka gripped the back of my seat like a terrified cat.

  With time running out, I opened the door and got out to see what was wrong.

  Not only was the tire flat, it had totally burst. What’s worse, the reason we were no longer moving was that underneath the tire and almost fully wrapped around the rim was a dead guy, guts and clotted blood dripping out of him, grappling to get untangled.

  “Get out of the car,” I ordered. “We’re footing it.” No one moved, so I threw open the back door. “We run, or we die,” I yelled. “There’s a poxer wrapped around the wheel.”

  That was enough to get them moving. Jimmy grabb
ed his chair. Prianka grabbed Sanjay. Trina grabbed a hair brush, don’t ask me why, and we were all out on the pavement in seconds.

  “Watch out,” Prianka cried and tossed my dad’s crowbar at me. I barely even looked as I swung it wide and hit the clown in the head with the sharp end. He crumbled to the ground, and I swiveled to yank the crowbar back out. The clown’s maw was still chomping away as he lashed out with one dead claw and succeeded in grabbing my foot, at which point I brought the crowbar down and through his hand.

  The clown let go.

  Another poxer, this one about fifteen or so and frankly so androgynous that I didn’t know if it was a boy or a girl, was right on the heels of the clown. I didn’t have a chance to get the crowbar out and up fast enough. The androgynous zombie was on me in seconds. The thing’s hands were cold and hard with breath like the very worst part of a sewer.

  I dropped the crowbar and pushed as hard as I could. The poxer fell back a foot or so before coming at me again. That was when a black shape shot out of nowhere and engulfed the poxer’s face in a mass of movement. It was Andrew. He scratched and clawed and pecked at the poxer, giving me just enough time to grab the crowbar and run after everyone else.

  “Andrew, to me,” yelled Jimmy as he pumped the wheels on his wheelchair without looking back.

  I ran after everyone. They were headed for a storefront on the left hand side of the street. Jimmy jumped the curb with ease. By the time they all got to the door, I had caught up with them and Andrew was sitting on Jimmy’s shoulder, his beak a little bit bloodier than usual.

  Trina pulled the double doors open, and we all ran inside.

  28

  “ARE YOU BIT?” screamed Prianka, pawing at me like a terrified, overprotective, psycho mother.

  “First—I would have turned poxer on you already. And second—if you wanted to cop a feel, you could have just asked. But if you’re enjoying yourself, feel free.”

  She kneed me in the groin, and I dropped.

  I barely heard Jimmy yell for everyone to help drag whatever they could get their hands on in front of the door. As for me, I was getting the full, unedited version of what it meant to see stars. I think I did a fair bit of groaning and writhing around before I was finally able to open my eyes. Sanjay was standing over me with Poopy Puppy dangling from his hand.