“Oh, all right.” Ernestine hefted her backpack onto her shoulders. “Whatever it is, I suppose we might as well bash its brains in just to be on the safe side.”
As they ran through the cemetery, Ernestine kept an eye out for open graves in case it turned out Zombie Herbert really had gotten lost on the way out of the grave. If that was her zombie over there, shouldn’t there be a big mound of dirt where it had clawed its way up out of the earth? Maybe it had burrowed sideways like a mole and come up across the street in the garden or something. After all, it was a zombie, right? How hard could it really be to confuse it?
Reaching the chained entrance gate, Ernestine pried it open just enough for Charleston to squeeze through. He’d had the presence of mind to grab the raw drumsticks off the grave and now carried them gloppily in his hands. Ernestine slid through after him, but before they could bolt across the street, a car swerved around the corner on two wheels, squealing and sending clouds of smoke up to dissolve into the black night sky.
It wasn’t any ordinary car, though. Ernestine immediately recognized it as Mrs. MacGillicuddie’s baby-blue 1937 Studebaker limousine, driven by someone who clearly should not be behind the wheel.
Slamming down onto all four wheels, the car sped up and narrowly missed a fire hydrant before bouncing over several flower planters, freeing a mailbox from its bolts so it could learn to fly. If a nearby park bench could have gotten up and run away on its iron legs, it probably would have. Fortunately, the driver seemed to have grown tired of terrorizing inanimate objects, cranking the wheel hard to the left.
Aiming the car toward the graveyard on the left side of the street.
Straight toward Ernestine and Charleston.
Chapter Two
Even Zombies Like to Party
TUESDAY, 12:23 AM
“EEE-III-AAA-YYY!” Charleston shrieked, still clutching his armful of chicken parts. Ernestine grabbed him by his most convenient part (which happened to be his arm) and dragged him across the street just in time to avoid being turned into pre-zombies.
The antique limo swiped the graveyard’s wrought-iron gates, breaking apart the chain and padlock. Then, as though the driver was playing a game of tag with Charleston and Ernestine, the car turned again, hurtling toward the brick wall surrounding MacGillicuddie House.
Ernestine ducked into the garden to escape, but Charleston froze like a deer (or zombie) in headlights. Running back out again, she tried to tug him into the garden with her, but he remained rooted to the ground.
“Charleston!” Ernestine cried, but he just pressed the poultry parts tightly against his body and huddled for impact as the driver hit the brakes, causing the tires to shriek and burn into the ground.
Shoving her stepbrother as hard as she could, they both tumbled out of the way of the car’s massive silver grille just in time. Instead of their bodies, it bit into the brick wall as the car came to a halt in a cloud of blue smoke.
Coughing and sputtering, they both rolled over and looked at the dented fender a few inches away from their heads.
“What were you doing?” Ernestine demanded, scowling at Charleston. Being afraid always made her irritable.
“You said to make sure we saved the drumsticks for supper.” From behind his glasses, Charleston blinked at her like this was obvious.
“Not if it means ending up as a zombie!”
“Wouldn’t I just be a corpse, not a zombie?”
“Well, sure, not right away.” Exasperated, Ernestine helped her stepbrother up. Charleston never did make any long-term goals. Nobody ever starts out as a zombie. It’s something you have to work toward, obviously.
The driver’s side door flew open and out tumbled their landlady, Mrs. MacGillicuddie, owner of MacGillicuddie House, an apartment building that served as a retired artist colony. Which was sort of like an ant colony only filled with loopy old artists rather than mindless insects. Mrs. MacGillicuddie lived on the ground floor in an apartment approximately the size of a small neighborhood. The rest of the three stories she rented out to retired painters, musicians, and actors, while Ernestine’s family lived in the attic and took care of the building.
Mrs. MacGillicuddie herself was eighty years old with jet-black hair, lots of makeup, and a face that had had so much cosmetic surgery done to it that a very exclusive clinic in Switzerland threw a party every year in her honor. Tonight she wore a silver dress, a mink coat, and a real diamond tiara on her head because, as Mrs. MacGillicuddie had once explained to them, when you were eighty, you never knew how many more opportunities you might get to wear the family jewels.
What she wasn’t wearing were her glasses, which might possibly explain why she had almost turned Ernestine and Charleston into zombies-in-waiting.
“Oh, hello, darlings!” she trilled as she spotted them. “I didn’t see you there!”
“Mrs. MacGillicuddie,” Ernestine said sternly. “You know you’re supposed to be wearing your glasses when you drive.”
“Don’t be ridiculous, darling!” Her landlady waved her gloved hand about dismissively. “I can see perfectly well without those silly things! However, with all of the fog about tonight, I thought I’d better pull over before something else jumped out at me the way that awful mailbox did. What it was doing in the middle of the road, I don’t know!”
“Where’s Eduardo?” Ernestine demanded, referring to Mrs. MacGillicuddie’s butler and limo driver.
Eduardo himself answered the question by tumbling out of the car, dressed as a Roman general for reasons unknown. After the wild car ride, his feathered helmet was askew on his head and he seemed a bit unsteady on his legs. Still, he managed to remain impressively upright, which was just as well given that he also held a swan in his arms.
Ernestine and Charleston stared at them both. This was not, exactly, what Ernestine had in mind for an apocalypse. Their zombie was missing and now they seemed to have gained a swan.
“Oh, the swan’s ours!” The Swanson twins, Libby and Mora, tittered as they climbed out of the back of the limo and saw Charleston and Ernestine’s looks of confusion. They had just moved into apartment 3A the previous week, and by the standards of MacGillicuddie House, the twins were quite young, being only about sixty years old, and they were identical, right down to every last wrinkle. They had once been famous acrobatic dancers, known for their ability to each simultaneously balance a spinning plate upon a big toe while balancing on a tightrope. How a person discovered they had this ability, Ernestine didn’t know, but evidently the Swanson twins had found a way.
Tonight, they wore their signature swan costumes, which involved sparkly white swimsuits with enormous white feather headdresses, more white feathers around their wrists, and extremely high, sparkly heels that Ernestine suspected you had to be a certified acrobat to even buy, let alone walk in. They made the stiletto high heels Mrs. MacGillicuddie always wore seem downright sensible.
As soon as the Swanson twins made it out of the car, they were followed by Mrs. Talmadge, a pink-haired, retired British pastry chef who lived in apartment 2C.
A pink-haired, retired British pastry chef who was carrying the front end of a whole roast pig. Well, Ernestine assumed it was whole. Right now she could only see its snout, an apple shoved into its mouth.
“Oh, hullo, luv!” Dressed as an egg with horns, she gave Ernestine a cheerful little finger wave. “Have you come for the party?”
“No, I’m looking for my zombie. I seem to have lost it.”
“Oi, keep on moving there, Pansy.” The roast pig poked at Mrs. Talmadge. For one startled moment, Ernestine thought that not only was it a zombie roast pig, but one that had also learned to talk in spite of the apple stuffed in its mouth. Then Mrs. Talmadge tugged the pig free of the car, allowing her husband, Mr. Talmadge, to emerge.
“Vegan garbage,” he muttered. Mr. Talmadge carried a rubber knife and had cereal boxes strapped all over his body. “Frou-frou rabbit food, that’s what he was trying to serve us. What she wa
s thinking having him cater, I don’t know.”
“I thought there was a party going on in your suite, Mrs. MacGillicuddie.” Charleston peered through the wrought-iron bars of the fence to confirm that, yep, there were indeed the silhouettes of people clearly having a very good time in Mrs. MacGillicuddie’s half of the mansion’s first floor.
“Oh, there is, darling! A costume party for Mardi Gras!”
“But it isn’t Mardi Gras yet,” Ernestine pointed out.
“Well, I don’t want to be throwing a Mardi Gras party when everyone else is throwing a Mardi Gras party, now do I? How gauche would that be?” Mrs. MacGillicuddie took the swan from Eduardo and set it down on the ground so it could follow along next to her on its leash. “We just had to run out and get some meat for Mr. Talmadge since he doesn’t like the vegan canapés dear little Dill was serving, and some swans for the Swansons here! Eduardo had forgotten them, the silly boy!”
Eduardo, who hadn’t been a boy in at least fifty years, leaned over to murmur into Mrs. MacGillicuddie’s ear. As he did so, the feathers on top of his helmet swiped across Ernestine’s face like a mop. She sneezed and swatted them away, as he murmured in his posh Spanish accent, “I thought the sight of Libby’s swan might get Mr. Sangfroid more excited than his heart could take.”
Mrs. MacGillicuddie giggled and said to Eduardo, “Oh, you are terrible!”
Mr. Sangfroid lived in apartment 2D and had once been an art curator. These days, he spent most of his time as a professional cranky old man, always complaining about something. Why a swan might make him grumpier than usual, though, was a mystery to Ernestine. However, before she could ask, Mrs. MacGillicuddie cried, “Come join us, my darlings! I’m sure your parents won’t mind!”
“Okay.” Never one to mind staying up late and missing school, Charleston stepped agreeably forward, only to jump backward again when the swan hissed and flapped her wings at him.
He followed her beady gaze down to the dismembered poultry parts in his arms. To the swan, he said, “Oh. Don’t worry. They weren’t relatives. Well, maybe distantly, I guess.”
“No, thank you,” Ernestine said firmly to Mrs. MacGillicuddie, still wiping feathers off her face as Charleston made friends with the bird. “We have school in the morning, and we have to find our zombie. We seem to have misplaced it.”
“Oh, well, if you find it, tell it’s welcome to come, too! My son and his awful daughter are in there somewhere, so it’ll have plenty to snack on!”
“I’ll keep that in mind,” Ernestine said dryly as Eduardo helped a second swan out of the Studebaker. She watched as the swans, Swansons, millionairess, chefs, and manservant all went inside. Shaking her head, she said, “C’mon, Charleston, let’s go find our zombie before it can eat someone.”
They headed into the front garden, which was full of very strange sculptures made by Charleston’s father, Frank. At the moment, it also contained a lot of musicians taking a break from the party.
“You cats on your way to the party?” called out a large, elderly African American man. He had a rich, deep voice and wore a very impressive black leather coat. His name was Mr. Ellington and he lived in apartment 3C. He had played saxophone with the Hep Cats since sometime in the middle of the previous century. Tonight, all of the Hep Cats were wearing purple and green peacock masks, probably because of the early Mardi Gras party Mrs. MacGillicuddie was throwing.
“Not tonight. We have school in the morning,” Ernestine called back. “Hey, have any of you cats seen a zombie go by?”
“Not tonight.”
Leaving Mr. Ellington and the other musicians behind, they continued on their way through the darkened garden, careful not to trip over, run into, or get impaled upon any of Frank’s many interesting sculptures made out of things like old washing machines, discarded VCRs, chainsaws, and obsolete cell phones.
Over by the side porch, they ran into an excitable Mr. Sangfroid as he waved his cane disapprovingly at his neighbors from across the hall, Mr. Theda and Mr. Bara.
“Those movies of yours aren’t art!” he ranted, almost whacking Charleston in the head with the pronged foot of his cane. “They’re garbage! Pretentious hoodlumism attacking our culture!”
Mr. Theda was a retired horror movie villain, currently dressed as a pasty-faced Dracula, while Mr. Bara had once been a movie special effects expert. Their movies were the sort that tended to be released straight to video back in the days when people watched things on videotapes rather than streaming them on their TVs and phones.
“They’re social commentary,” Mr. Bara said with great dignity. Or at least as much dignity as he could manage given that he was currently dressed as a mutant alien chicken from a movie called The Perils of Poultry: Sometimes, They Eat Back, which Ernestine had once watched late at night when she was four. She hadn’t been able to sleep with a feather pillow ever since, secretly convinced that it might come to life and eat her. Possibly with a side of coleslaw.
When not dressed as a monster, Mr. Bara had a bald head, very dark skin, and always wore a thick gold hoop in one ear. Ernestine had once asked him what his ancestry was, and he had told her he was ten percent Abatwan, thirty percent Basajaunak, thirty percent Zerzurian, and thirty percent Gandharvian. When she did a search online to figure out what those were, she discovered that Mr. Bara was actually one hundred percent none of her business.
“Bah! They’re the end of civilization, that’s what they are!” Mr. Sangfroid yelled. Though he technically hadn’t dressed for the party, Mr. Sangfroid was so old and leathery, he looked exactly like an unwrapped mummy. He was the only one among the residents who wasn’t an artist, having instead been an art curator and critic. These days, no one was willing to pay him for his criticisms, but that didn’t stop Mr. Sangfroid from offering them anyway. No one in the house liked him, but he had once done Mrs. MacGillicuddie a great favor. What that favor might be, no one knew, but whatever it was, their landlady was still apparently in his debt.
Dodging another swipe of his cane as he tried unsuccessfully to whack the antenna off Mr. Bara’s head, Ernestine cleared her throat and said, “Uh, speaking of the end of civilization, have either of you seen a zombie pass by?”
“Just the one standing in front of us,” Mr. Theda sneered, whirling his cape menacingly.
Ducking under Mr. Sangfroid’s cane, Ernestine dragged Charleston forward. “We’ll take that as a ‘no.’”
The garden path narrowed to a dark ribbon of bricks as it squeezed between the house and fence. The shadows seemed to swallow up the sounds of the party taking place on the other side of the house. Between the brick wall rising up on one side and the house on the other, the narrow passageway felt like a tomb. Which was exactly the sort of place no one wanted to hang out in, whether they were a zombie or not.
“Ernestine, are you hyperventilating?” Charleston asked.
“No,” Ernestine gritted through her teeth.
“It sounds like you’re hyperventilating.”
“I’m not hyperventilating! Brave warriors of the apocalypse do not hyperventilate! I’m just breathing deeply, okay?” Ernestine hooked her thumbs around the backpack straps circling her shoulders and forced herself to be calm before admitting, “I just don’t like tight spaces, okay? That’s all.”
“I guess zombies don’t, either.” Charleston shrugged as he studied the darkened windows staring down at them. “Hey, you don’t think the zombie could have gotten inside, do you? Maybe it’s in one of those rooms, eating someone.”
“Nah, it’s too quiet in there. If it was eating someone, we would hear it.” Ernestine didn’t want to take the time to pry one of the windows open and peer inside. She wanted to get off the garden path. Now. Not discuss zombie table manners.
“Some people are quiet eaters. Why not some zombies, too?”
“Charleston, would you just move!” Shoving him forward, they finally burst out into the backyard from behind an elephant made out of old carburetors and a thi
ck mess of network cables. Charleston let out a yelp. “Over there!”
Following his outstretched finger, Ernestine spotted a shadowy figure lurking beneath the laundry room window. As they watched, it turned and shuffled along the path ahead of them, unaware of their presence.
“Excellent.” Ernestine stood up on her toes in delight. “Be quiet, Charleston. We don’t want to startle—”
Before she could finish her sentence, Charleston—who clearly had not been listening to her—screamed, “ZOMMMBIEEE!”
Leaping over a row of dead hosta bushes, Charleston ran toward the zombie with his baseball bat raised while Ernestine clapped a hand to her head in frustration and yelled, “Don’t hit it too hard or it’ll fall apart, and we’ll have to put it back together again!”
Great. Just great. She finally managed to raise a zombie and Charleston was about to break it. How did you even put a zombie back together again, anyhow? Duct tape? Superglue?
Apparently, the zombie didn’t want to find out, either. Rather than shambling forward to slurp out their brains, the figure cringed in terror behind the gazebo in the middle of the garden, further obscuring its face. But before Charleston could get close enough to bash its head off, he stumbled over a low stone bench and into the koi pond, landing with a splash as the thin layer of ice covering the pond crackled apart.
Ernestine grabbed his coat collar and hauled him out of the slush. Sputtering, he yanked a dead lily pad off his head as Ernestine fished around in the bottom of the pond for his baseball bat.
“Charleston, in the zombie apocalypse, there are two things that are very important. One, don’t drown.” Ernestine shoved the baseball bat back into his hands. “Two, don’t let your weapon drown, either.”
“Are th-th-there any r-r-r-rules about l-l-losing your z-z-z-zombie?” Charleston asked through chattering teeth as he tried to wipe off his wet glasses with the hem of his equally wet coat.
“What?!” Ernestine looked around the garden frantically, but Charleston was right. Their zombie had disappeared.
Ernestine, Catastrophe Queen Page 2
