Ernestine, Catastrophe Queen

by Merrill Wyatt

  Ernestine said, “No, there’s just the one, and if you find any pest spray that works, please let me know. I’m putting together a zombie survival guide so we don’t all get our guts torn out during the apocalypse. I’d like to keep the cleanup to a minimum.”

  “Goodness!” Libby opened her eyes wide.

  “If you see it, try not to let it eat anyone, and I’ll take care of it after school.” With a wave good-bye, Ernestine and Charleston headed on their way.

  They got there early, which was just as well since Ernestine needed to go to the library to print off a list of suggestions she’d made for Principal Langenderfer on how to keep the school safe and free of zombies. Ernestine summarized them for her during a meeting she’d requested in the principal’s office. She hadn’t planned on giving it to her until next week, but with a possible zombie on the loose, Ernestine figured she’d better step things up a bit.

  “First, why do we have to practice fire drills?” Ernestine asked, handing over her proposal in its plastic sheeting. She made sure to sit upright, speak clearly, and maintain eye contact, all important skills for getting someone to listen to you. She’d also worn her blazer and skirt rather than a jumper and a cardigan so she’d be sure to look more businesslike. “I mean, seriously? If there’s a fire and you don’t know to run out of the building rather than staying in it, I don’t think practice is going to improve your odds of survival. Our time would be much better spent practicing what to do in case of a zombie attack. There are nuances there that could make the difference between life and death. Will you be safer staying inside the building and barricading the entrances or fleeing to wide open spaces where you can at least see the zombies coming? Making the right choices could make all the difference on where you end up on the food chain.”

  “Wow. This is quite a… thorough analysis of the, uh, situation.” Principal Langenderfer appeared to be struggling to find the right words as she flipped through the first twenty pages or so of the report.

  Ernestine glowed with pride.

  “You even made charts. Goodness…”

  “Yes, as you can see, I outlined a few scenarios. For example, I don’t think it’s a good idea for everyone to eat together in the same location. It gives the zombies one target. All they have to do is break into the cafeteria, and it’s lunchtime for everyone, living and dead. On the other hand, if you separate the lunch groups out into individual classrooms, you’re guaranteed a much higher likelihood that at least some of the students will survive. Rather than losing a whole school of kids, you’ll just lose one small group of them. I mean, that’s got to impact your insurance rates, right?”

  Principal Langenderfer sent her to see the school psychologist. Again.

  Which Ernestine didn’t mind at all. Mr. Price always made her a cup of hot chocolate and never forced her to talk about bad stuff that had happened in the past. That scored a lot of points with Ernestine. The past was over and done. Why get all obsessed with it when there were plenty of future disasters that needed worrying about right this second?

  No, Mr. Price always listened to her when she explained how to survive zombie attacks and asked good questions. He also took lots and lots of notes about what she said. So Ernestine was pretty sure she’d managed to teach him a thing or two, which he’d definitely appreciate when the apocalypse finally got underway.

  Of course, she didn’t mention to him that she might have raised a zombie last night. First, she didn’t want to admit that she’d misplaced it. And second, she still wasn’t entirely sure it had been a zombie sneaking around the back of the building. She’d hate to tell everyone to be on the lookout for a ravenous zombie when what they should be looking for was a bloodthirsty, psychotic murderer instead. You just didn’t want to get the two confused. It could lead to all sorts of misunderstandings.

  “Maybe we should put up missing posters around the neighborhood for the zombie,” Charleston suggested after school as they stood by Herbert’s gravestone. “You know, like they do for missing dogs and cats.”

  A light snow fell from the leaden sky, decorating the grass around his stone marker with lovely white flakes. What the grave wasn’t decorated with was a hole. The hole of the ravenous undead clambering out of the ground to wreak havoc on the city.

  There weren’t even any teeny tiny holes, like maybe he’d been poking his fingers up out of his casket. Ernestine had hoped she’d awoken Herbert just a little bit. Enough to make him at least climb halfway out the grave to see who was trying to raise him.

  “I don’t know, Charleston. I think it would have crawled out by us if we’d actually raised one,” Ernestine sighed as they lugged their backpacks across the street to the mansion.

  “Oh, yeah? Then who tried to break in last night?”

  “Well, it might have been a zombie,” Ernestine admitted reluctantly, “but it might also have been just your normal, average, run-of-the-mill homicidal maniac.”

  “Huh.” Charleston thought that one over. “That could be interesting, too.”

  “I think so, yes. So let’s keep a look out for one of those, too.”

  A chunk of missing bricks marked the spot in the wall where Mrs. MacGillicuddie had almost turned Ernestine and Charleston into windshield smears. Coincidentally, as they reached the sidewalk, one of the bricks flew out of the gate and whizzed right past Charleston’s nose.

  Just as Ernestine had reached the most logical conclusion that a poltergeist must have invaded the garden, Dill the vegan grocer shot out of the gate with a yelp, clutching his delivery basket and running with a high-kicking step that made his legs look like spokes on a wheel.

  “AND STAY OUT!” Mr. Talmadge roared, bursting out of the gate after him with a brick raised in one hand. He screeched to a halt when he saw a disapproving Ernestine and shocked Charleston. He lowered the brick and looked sheepish. “Oh. Er. Hullo, you two.”

  “Mr. Talmadge,” Ernestine said sternly, “while it’s always a good idea to practice your skull-bashing skills for when the apocalypse begins, you almost whacked Charleston in the face with a brick!”

  “Oh,” Mr. Talmadge said again, looking even more chastened. Aged around seventy, he had flames tattooed all around his neck and wrists. Ernestine assumed this was some sort of chef’s joke. “Sorry ’bout that. But ruddy Mrs. MacGillicuddie won’t do anything about the… the… travesty that culinary quack has planned over on Delaware Street! It’s a sign of the end of times, it is!”

  Ernestine perked up at this. She didn’t really know Dill very well, but if he was planning on ending the world, too, perhaps she should get to know the competition.

  “Do you mean the vegan restaurant Dill would like to open?” Charleston asked, carefully prying the brick out of Mr. Talmadge’s fingers and stacking it with the rest of the pile just inside the gate. “But how could she stop that?”

  Mr. Talmadge blushed so deeply that it looked as though his tattoos had set his face on fire. He muttered something about never minding and that it didn’t matter, anyhow, but just because he was old that didn’t mean he couldn’t still cook as well as he could when he was younger and if anybody should understand that, it was Mrs. MacGillicuddie, so he just couldn’t believe…

  The rest of his grumblings trailed off as he marched back into the house. Ernestine and Charleston exchanged bewildered looks.

  “Wow. It seems like everyone’s angry at Mrs. MacGillicuddie all of a sudden,” Charleston said as they trudged through the garden. “Her son. Mr. Theda. Mr. Talmadge.”

  “That’s hardly everyone, Charleston,” Ernestine pointed out.

  Still, he had a point. Ernestine had always thought that everyone loved Mrs. MacGillicuddie. Well, everyone except for her son. Clearly, that wasn’t the case.

  How many other people held mysterious grudges against her? Just Mr. Theda and Mr. Talmadge? Or were there more?

  How many of them would have been just as happy if the chandelier last night hadn’t missed?

  And wha
t if last night’s accident hadn’t been an accident at all?

  Chapter Four

  Tidying Up Before the Apocalypse

  TUESDAY, 4:26 PM

  To Ernestine’s surprise, Frank and Maya had actually managed to clean up both the fallen chandelier and all the debris it had created. True, a crater had carved out a large chunk of the foyer, but given that the floor was actually an elaborate marble mosaic of Apollo and Artemis, Ernestine supposed that it might take a while to fix it. A draft swirled down from the attic above through the hole in the ceiling, and the lack of a light plunged the hall into a murky twilight.

  Upstairs, the broken chandelier jutted out of Frank’s workspace, a clear indication that he planned on incorporating it into one of his sculptures. A swan sat in a large galvanized tub of water, floating happily as Maya painted its portrait.

  Ernestine found her list of maintenance tasks still lying on the kitchen table. Several coffee rings marred it, but no one had bothered to X off a single task.

  “Mother, you and Frank need to fix these things!” Snatching it up off the table, she marched over to her mother’s studio and shook the piece of paper in exasperation.

  “We will, Nestea! We will!” Maya got up and tried to give her a paint-smeared hug, which Ernestine dodged because she didn’t want to mess up her uniform. Her mother compromised by kissing her on top of her head. “Cleaning up that chandelier took the better part of the day, and someone had to do something with the swans.”

  “So you solved that problem by painting their portraits,” Ernestine observed dryly as Maya’s attention slid back to her artwork.

  “Mmm, what was that?” she asked vaguely as she considered the way the light of the setting sun was making the swan’s wings glow red as though tinged with blood.

  “Nothing.” Ernestine rolled her eyes at Charleston. On the other side of the attic, behind an enormous curtain, they could both hear the sounds of power tools that meant Frank was hard at work on his latest masterpiece. With their gallery show coming up this weekend, neither one of them was likely to get anything else done for the rest of the week. Not that Mrs. MacGillicuddie would care if the mansion fell down around them, so long as everyone had a marvelous time while it happened. “C’mon, Charleston. It looks like we’ve got work to do.”

  “Oh, man. I really wanted to watch TV.” Charleston flopped onto the couch and burrowed his head into the pillows as though he could hide there.

  “And I wanted to start the apocalypse. We can’t always get what we want, you know.” Ernestine heaved a sigh. “You make some sandwiches, and I’ll get the toolbox.”

  Changing out of her uniform, Ernestine put on overalls and covered her hair with a red handkerchief. She grabbed her toolbox and an ancient, dog-eared book left behind by the previous maintenance man called The Handyman’s Handy Helper! Ernestine liked a book with an exclamation mark in the title. If you weren’t going to be enthusiastic about the book you were writing, then why write it at all?

  Charleston was waiting for her out in the kitchen. He’d changed into old jeans and a plaid shirt. He handed her a mayonnaise-pickle-and-bologna sandwich while he munched on one of his own. Ernestine handed him his half of the list, and they went to work.

  Her first stop was 2C, where Mrs. Talmadge peered anxiously over Ernestine’s shoulder as she poured a big bottle of gloopy stuff down the drain of the kitchen sink and asked her, “Aren’t you a little young to be handling dangerous chemicals?”

  “Not at all!” Ernestine replied confidently since she firmly believed that one was never too young to handle dangerous anythings.

  Mrs. Talmadge was on the plump side and had once been a chef to various punk rock bands back in the nineteen-seventies and eighties before eventually becoming Marilyn Manson’s pastry chef. She kept her white hair dyed bubble-gum pink and wore about a dozen earrings in her left ear. They all looked like nuts, bolts, and possibly a corkscrew.

  “Mr. Talmadge seemed a little, um, irritated with Dill,” Ernestine said delicately as she put down the bottle and took off the heavy rubber gloves and goggles she had been wearing. “And with Mrs. MacGillicuddie.”

  “Oh, that.” Mrs. Talmadge tutted. “He’s just worried about what his old mates the Dead Kennedys would say.”

  “I’m sorry, what was that?” Mr. Talmadge knew some dead people named Kennedy? Where on earth had he found some dead friends to hang out with? Perhaps he could give her some pointers.

  “That was back when I was still cooking for Sid,” Mrs. Talmadge continued mistily, not exactly answering Ernestine’s question. “That’s Sid Vicious, of course, dearie.”

  “Did Sid viciously kill them, which is why the Kennedys were dead?” Ernestine asked. If so, maybe she could get his number so she could ask a few questions about how he’d brought them back afterward.

  “No. Personally, I blame MTV.” Mrs. Talmadge peered into the bag Ernestine had brought downstairs along with the drain cleaner. With her thumb and forefinger, she pulled out one of the drumsticks they’d dumped on Herbert’s grave last night. “Speaking of dead things, what are these, dearie?”

  “Oh. Those. Those are tonight’s supper. Hey, you haven’t seen any zombies wandering around today, have you?”

  “Do you count Mr. Sangfroid when he’s overdone it on his medication?” Mrs. Talmadge pulled some dead grass off one of the chicken legs.

  “Did he try to bite you?”

  “Not this time, no.”

  “Then I don’t, unfortunately.” Ernestine ran water down the drain until she was sure it had cleared up. “It should be good to go now, but if any body parts come up, let me know.”

  “Uh, is that likely, dearie?” Mrs. Talmadge peered down the drain anxiously, apparently unaware that there might be a minor zombie apocalypse going on in the neighborhood.

  “Depends on whether the zombie apocalypse has started,” Ernestine explained helpfully. “If it has, then you’re likely to find body parts anywhere.”

  Next, Ernestine went to fix Mr. Sangfroid’s leaky pipe. When he answered his door, he was holding the enormous, dusty old photo album that had fallen from the attic when the chandelier crashed down.

  “Isn’t that Mrs. MacGillicuddie’s photo album?” Ernestine asked pointedly.

  “That’s none of your business! You’re just the hired help!” Mr. Sangfroid snapped the album shut as though she was the one doing the peeking. “And why didn’t you come sooner? Why aren’t your parents here? Maybe I should be contacting Children’s Services, eh?”

  “Maybe you should,” Ernestine retorted, spine very straight. “I think they should know about an adult harassing a child.”

  The Adam’s apple in Mr. Sangfroid’s throat bobbed up and down as he glared back at her in outrage for daring to stand up for herself. However, rather than slamming the door on her as she had expected, Mr. Sangfroid followed her down into the warrenlike basement so he could rant at her some more, this time about the end of the world. Unfortunately, his apocalypse was a lot less interesting than the average kind.

  “Rubbish! That’s what those Talmadges are! Cooks! Kitchen help! Not true artists!” He pounded the dank floor with his cane as Ernestine unlocked and then relocked various small rooms, looking for the correct pipes. Each resident got a storage room along with their apartments above. “And what of Mr. Theda and Mr. Bara, eh?”

  “What about them?” Ernestine located the pipe in a room full of debris from MacGillicuddie House’s glory days, including several very ugly paintings, a broken mirror or two, and an absolutely ginormous frame that had freed whatever it once held many years before.

  Ernestine tried to reach the pipe but couldn’t. Mr. Sangfroid watched disapprovingly as she hopped up and down, trying to get to it, but didn’t offer to help.

  “Cheap, low-brow entertainers, that’s what they are!” Mr. Sangfroid harrumphed.

  Ignoring him, Ernestine tested the empty frame to confirm it was sturdy enough to hold her weight from where it was
propped up against the wall. It was, and she climbed up on it. Mr. Sangfroid’s eyes widened at the sight, but he still didn’t offer to help. “Those horror movies of theirs appeal only to the low-brow, you know. Just like those Swanson twins. Common dancers! Not even ballet dancers! Little better than chorus girls. Why, it’s no wonder their parents—”

  Mr. Sangfroid suddenly clammed up. Ernestine stopped winching the pipe to stare at him. “No wonder their parents what?”

  “None of your business,” he snapped. “I disapprove of gossip!”

  Straightening his back and jutting his chin out at her, he marched off with one final parting shot. “It’s just a pity that chandelier didn’t take care of Mrs. MacGillicuddie before she could invite in any more trash like your parents and you nosy kids!”

  “Well!” Ernestine slid down off the picture frame as it began to crack under her weight, hands on her hips. “If you think things are bad now, wait until the zombies move in!”

  He made her so mad that it wasn’t until she was out in the garden looking for Charleston that she realized she’d forgotten to lock that last door down in the basement. Meanwhile, she couldn’t find Charleston anywhere, even though litter patrol in the garden was the second item on his list, so he should have been on it by now. Hopefully, that didn’t mean he’d been hideously eaten or bloodily murdered on the way. She’d never had a stepbrother before, and she quite liked him, even if they did have to share a room. She’d prefer it if he didn’t get either hideously eaten or bloodily murdered. He was fine just the way he was.

  If Charleston was missing, Mrs. MacGillicuddie’s 1937 baby-blue Studebaker limousine had returned. That meant Rodney and his daughter must be skulking around someplace like the ghouls in one of Mr. Theda’s movies.

  Speaking of which, Ernestine found several crumpled flyers that the wind had torn off telephone poles and then deposited in the shrubbery along the wall. A fanged and clawed Mr. Theda sneered out at her from the page, advertising a showing of his movies over at the old Palace Movie Theater by the university, featuring a special performance by the Swanson twins. Though retired, Mr. Theda was actually more popular than ever, thanks to Mr. Bara’s social media savvy. The two had quite the online following and made an extremely comfortable living showing up at horror movie, sci-fi, and comic book conventions.