Confessions of the Very First Zombie Slayer (That I Know Of)

by F. J. R. Titchenell

  But then again, he was moving. Whatever was left of Mark had a vice grip on my left elbow, and his fingers were stretching toward my throat.

  I leaned forward to meet him, clasping his hand to the soft, sensitive side of my neck, kissing his hungrily half-open mouth, moved to blissful tears by the awesome power of this love that had overcome death itself, and . . .

  Oh, wait. No, I didn’t. That’s what I would have done two years earlier. Maybe.

  See, one of the many side effects of keeping best friends like Norman and Hector, and sharing their books and movies and games, is that I don’t actually think of corpses as sexy. I certainly don’t think of them as safe.

  So here’s what I really did: I grabbed the beautiful sawed-off with my free hand, turned it around, and slammed the butt of it repeatedly into the already dripping bruise on the side of Mark’s forehead. I didn’t stop at the weird, inhuman throat scream he gave. I didn’t stop when the plastic shattered. I didn’t stop when Norman caught up and choked out some shocked gibberish from somewhere behind me. I didn’t stop until I had the gooey pieces of what had been Mark’s cerebellum in my hands.

  Since Norman’s the one who gave me that instinct, I count that as the first time his friendship saved my life.

  Oh, and it was also the first time, or at least one of the first eighty-three times, that the dead returned to attack the living.

  I guess that’s a pretty big first, too.

  CHAPTER TWO

  I Killed Him. Twice.

  I’d like it to be known how deeply, sorely tempted I am to take advantage of the leisure and hindsight available to me to come up with a witty one-liner, something like “and stay dead,” only much cooler, and pretend it’s what I said next.

  It’s not like there are a lot of people who know the same things I know about what happened. A hundred years from now, who’s to say it didn’t go down exactly however I decide to say it did? But I’m not going to do that.

  Let’s get this straight right now.

  I, Cassandra Emily Fremont, the very first zombie slayer (that I know of), do solemnly swear that this memoir, written for the benefit of any generations of human beings that may someday, possibly, hopefully, follow mine, and in stark contrast to all pre-apocalyptic history books I’m aware of, will contain nothing but the pure and whole truth of the events it details, to the best of my knowledge, no matter how painful, private, embarrassing, or inescapably lame.

  Sound fair?

  Good.

  Unfortunately, with Mark down for the count again, it means that instead of dry action hero humor, you’re going to be treated to this loving description of me majorly losing my shit. I mean, beyond the skull-crushing, brain-mashing kind of shit-loss I’d already committed.

  Enjoy.

  “Cassie?” Norman’s voice was fragile and lost and only reached the thinnest outer surface of my awareness.

  I don’t think there were any actual words in my first response. It was this garbled screech, constricted by the urge to vomit. I scraped the tissue that had once controlled Mark’s most basic, vital impulses off my fingers, smearing lumpy streaks of blood down my jeans, which didn’t make the whole not-vomiting thing any easier.

  “Oh, dear God.” That was all that slipped out of Hector when he found us, but it was more than I’d ever heard him say involuntarily. It took him more than twice as many breaths as usual to summon the calm, reasonable tone he always used whenever there was no possible excuse for anyone to be calm or reasonable. “What happened, Cass?”

  I knew it was vitally important for this question to be answered accurately and efficiently, so I really tried to process and order my thoughts thoroughly enough to communicate them that time. I didn’t quite succeed. My next set of jumbled syllables fit together something like this:

  “Mark dead . . . then not . . . but still was . . . dead again . . . had to, had to, I had to!”

  “Okay.” Hector tried to calm me, retrieving the remnants of the sawed-off in exactly the same hovering way you reassure a cornered animal before throwing a canvas bag over its head. “Okay, you had to.”

  “I had to!” I repeated, trying to bury my face in my hands before I remembered the blood on them.

  With me unarmed, Norman worked up the nerve to drop his own gun and put an arm around me instead, which seemed to make Hector decide it was safe to retreat toward camp. I formed one more word while he could still hear me, the essential word of both defense and warning.

  “Zombie,” I said.

  Neither of my friends answered me, but I could tell by the moment of complete stillness that they had both heard.

  I don’t blame Hector for reporting me to Kim, or Kim for calling the cops. What else were they supposed to do? I don’t blame Rory for screaming much worse things than “slut” and chucking briquettes at Norman and me until she had to be restrained. She couldn’t hit the broad side of a Sandcrawler anyway.

  I’ve seen corpses walk, skyscrapers crumble in disrepair, and the busiest freeways lie vacant at 8:30 on a Monday morning, but those forty-five minutes it took to get a full emergency response to our nice, secluded campground were the most surreal of my life.

  Mark was dead. I had killed him. Without the zombie factor, it was the kind of big deal that adults always handled quickly, behind drawn curtains, leaving us to squabble over carefully portioned scraps of information—with so few of them and so many of us stuck with so much evidence for so long, it couldn’t work that way this time.

  Kim tried at first to stop people from seeing the body, but by then everyone had gathered too close, ready to snap up the precious details while they could. Once they had seen it, they had all the knowledge anyone had on the matter, and then no one seemed to know what to do. Some stayed, not too close, watching. Others spread as far away from the mess as they could, busying themselves with whatever could be packed up. No one would be staying in the tents or making brownies in the fire pit that night. Lis went off somewhere out of sight to throw up. She wasn’t the only one.

  Norman didn’t speak, just kept me wrapped tightly in all there was of his slight frame, simultaneously cradling me and pinning my arms to my sides, ignoring the film of paint, blood, and grey matter covering us both. Hector and Rory settled on either side of us, sentinels, whether for our protection or everyone else’s, I couldn’t tell.

  No one tried to separate us, even though Norman had no particular authority to handle the situation. It wasn’t as if there was any specific, applicable protocol to observe.

  Really, I can’t question the way anyone handled things, except maybe me.

  I got a whole lot more warning than a lot of people do when they’re about to be arrested. You’d think I’d have used it to try to escape before the cops arrived, or at least come up with the most plausible possible excuse.

  “It wasn’t me, it was a cougar! I was trying to beat it away!”

  I’d watched way too much CSI to try that one.

  “When we were alone, he attacked me and I . . . was really, really mad about it!”

  That’s probably about the best I could have done, but I didn’t give it more than a passing thought.

  All I did during the wait was bury my face in Norman’s curly brown hair, trying to make the comfortingly familiar scents of his shampoo and sweat blot out the rusty bite of blood, breathing very slowly until the worst of the hysteria had passed.

  Norman is the guy I started listening to first, back when I was all about dating strategy. He wasn’t the target (a little too much of a goofball even for my tastes), and he’d only ever had eyes for Rory anyway, but since I’d had a thing for Hector in those days, I’d figured we could use each other to get closer to what we wanted.

  It hadn’t gone exactly according to plan. Rory would barely look at him. Maybe that part shouldn’t have surprised us. I’d never, ever say that anyone was too good for Norman, but Rory and Lis did have a special kind of hotness written into their identical DNA that set them a little
way apart from most people, even by Oakwood High’s pretty rigorous hotness grading curve.

  And Hector ended up stringing me along for almost a month before taking me aside to “ask a serious question.”

  I was hoping for, “Be my Valentine.”

  I got, “Could we still hang out if I told you I was gay?”

  Yeah, he’s the one who doesn’t really count.

  Oh well, it hurt, but there really isn’t a more sincere version of “it’s not you, it’s me” out there, so I got over it, and the three of us had been pretty much inseparable ever since.

  The process of accepting the beginning of my zombie-slaying years wouldn’t have been easy under any circumstances, and it would have been impossible to get through it as quietly or non-destructively with anyone else at my side.

  By the time we heard sirens on the access road, I’d been able to settle on one simple fact.

  Here’s where it starts getting kind of cool again.

  “I’m okay, guys.”

  This was the first thing I had said after the Z word, just as the two dark blue uniforms came into view, when Norman’s grip on me tightened in anticipation of being severed.

  I could hear the leftover constriction in my voice, but it was so steady that Norman actually looked at me like he knew me for the first time since the paintball game.

  “Would it be hopeless optimism,” he asked, “if I said we’d be laughing about this someday?”

  “Probably.” The smile felt strange on my face, but it convinced him enough of my lucidity that, after an extra hug of a squeeze, he let me walk unaided into the authorities’ waiting arms.

  “My name is Cassie Fremont,” I said, loudly enough for all the witnesses to hear even though at least ninety percent of them knew that much already. “And I’m very, very sorry, but I killed Marcus Cates. Twice.”

  Then I turned around and held my hands out behind me.

  I have to admit, I was hoping for a slightly stronger reaction than the one I got. Most of the crowd was silent, and that part was fine, they were in shock, after all. The first officer to reach me—Aleman, her nametag said—just frisked and cuffed me without batting an eye, without saying any more than, “You’re under arrest.”

  I could feel Norman regretting letting go of me even before he spoke.

  “And by that she means, ‘I want a lawyer.’”

  “Don’t need one,” I said.

  “Doesn’t need a court appointed one,” Norman corrected. “Because her mother—”

  “Works in the completely unrelated field of entertainment law—”

  “And has connections—”

  “That I also don’t need because I killed him!” I shouted over him.

  “Lawyer!” he repeated.

  “Once by accident,” I explained, “once on purpose because he was still already dead anyway, and he would have killed me if I hadn’t!”

  “Sorry, her accent’s kind of thick.” Norman said this with a completely straight (if very pale) face, in the same plain, unflavored Hollywood accent we both shared with everyone else on that campground. “But I distinctly heard her say, ‘lawyer.’”

  Aleman escorted me to the waiting squad car without a word.

  In fact, it was a long time before anyone said anything to me after that.

  Here’s the simple fact I had settled on: what had happened to me was real, or at least, it was impossible for my brain to distinguish from reality. No matter how much I thought about it, as awful and weird as it was, there was absolutely nothing about the memory to indicate a trick of the mind. It was as solid and certain as any other, and that could only mean one of two things.

  Zombies were real. Or,

  I was completely, hopelessly, irrefutably insane.

  Either way, my plan was the same.

  In the first case, people would need to be warned, and that responsibility seemed to fall squarely on my shoulders, no matter how crazy it made me sound at first.

  And in the second case, well, I certainly wasn’t going to jeopardize my spot in the cushy, padded cell where I clearly belonged by changing my story too much.

  That’s why I went quietly, if not quite as quietly as Aleman and her partner (Easton, I read backwards in the rearview mirror) might have liked.

  We didn’t leave right away. After watching the cops in the distance for the better part of an hour, spreading yellow tape around and conducting endless conversations with my troop and crew mates, when the backup cars and the coroner’s van showed up and they were finally free to come acknowledge my existence again, I guess I was a bit of a chatterbox. Mom always said I was an attention junkie. Maybe she had a point.

  “You can tell by the eyes,” I explained calmly, but seriously, as the car wound carefully down the hillside. “Also by the fact that he had just died in front of me. Are you getting all this down?”

  Aleman never took her eyes off the road. Easton had his notebook out, but his pen hadn’t moved in a while.

  They had both slipped into the sullen, offended sort of silence people get from watching pre-civil rights film strips, things reprehensible enough to be beneath arguing with. That’s what they thought of me.

  “Hey!” I kicked the grate protecting them from people in my position. “I’m the one who lost my almost-boyfriend today!”

  It was dangerous thinking about that enough to say it. There was an excellent chance that I would slip back into incoherence without Norman there to help pull me back, but I could tell that nothing I said would be heard anyway until I could prove I wasn’t a complete sociopath.

  “You didn’t know him!” I shouted, letting that strangled sound grab my voice a little again. “You didn’t have to see him die, not even once! I did! You won’t miss him, but I will! Will you just talk to me for a second?”

  During the silence, I wished my hands were free to blow my nose.

  Easton sighed, pulled a card out of his pocket, circled something on it, and pushed it through the grating until it landed on the floor of the car.

  I flattened it out with my shoe and looked down at it. Circled on a pre-printed Miranda Rights waiver was “the right to remain silent.”

  “Very funny,” I said.

  Maybe it’s just me, but when I used to think of the words “Police Station,” I always kind of pictured something out of The Andy Griffith Show. My parents’ house was set into the side of the valley, big and private and peaceful, but not far from LA. I knew that I effectively lived in metropolitan So. Cal., yet somehow I’d still been expecting something quaint and small town-y.

  I could tell that wouldn’t be the case after one glance at the high concrete walls and heavy, wrought-iron gate. The most welcoming touches were a pair of surgically-sculpted hedges around the entrance and a news van parked outside, a reporter with her station’s logo on her microphone already waiting on the sidewalk. I heard a few details of my story in her introduction to her camera man.

  I didn’t know who had gotten the word out, and I didn’t care.

  Of course, a pretty, well-off, goodie-goodie teenager, beaten to death by a less-pretty but equally well-off and formerly goodie-goodie teenager now claiming to have seen a zombie was sure to catch the interest of at least a few reporters. They’d present me as a nutcase whether I was or not, but at least the Z word would be on the airwaves. If it made the difference between a hug and a headshot in the impulses of the next person to see the dear departed sit up and reach out, it might be life-saving.

  I was about to say it loudly enough for her mic to catch, even with Easton between us, shooing her away, when her hand shot to her earpiece, and without so much as a thank you or goodbye, she was gone in pursuit of some greater, breaking news.

  I let myself be ushered through the door of the station, leaving her outside, along with all other comforting signs.

  There was a key-coded door before the fingerprint machine, and then Aleman had to flick her ID card past a sensor to open the cell in the back—the drunk
tank, I guess they call it. Just touching the bed in the corner made my skin crawl, and I wished I was wearing more clothes. I didn’t have much for her to take and put in those safekeeping bags—no jewelry, no extraneous gadgets, just a wallet, a keychain, and a cell phone.

  The next words spoken directly to me, Easton’s, might have had a hint of pity beneath them. I’m not sure.

  “Do you want to tell your parents, or should I?”

  My parents were among those staying at the little resort near the campground, further down the mountains, close but not too close, enjoying their own, less rustic vacation. I certainly wasn’t looking forward to the task of talking to them, although looking back, there’s nothing I’d rather do. I wish I could hear Mom yelling at me in her scary attorney voice for not calling her the instant I knew I was in trouble, Dad berating the first officers who would listen to him for not making sure that I was warm enough.

  At the time, the only thing that made me dial the number myself was the fear that Easton wouldn’t tell it right, that he’d leave out the Z word. If I had the responsibility to warn anyone of what I now knew to be possible, my family had to top that list.

  I thought of a million different ways to explain myself while Dad’s cell phone rang. I couldn’t remember any of them when I heard the answer my calls never received.

  “Please leave a message after the tone.”

  CHAPTER THREE

  Special Accommodations

  This is where I could describe what spending the night at the police station is like. I could go on and on about how you lie down and close your eyes, but you don’t sleep. I could go into exactly how long you stare at the softly discolored blanket before wrapping it around the goose bumps on your shoulders, or how, once you’ve washed off as much of the blood as you can with your clothes on, there’s nothing left to do other than worry.

  Honestly, all of that was boring enough the first time around.

  Trust me, it’s not like I was worrying about anything important. It was stupid stuff: what juvie would really be like, how long it would be before my friends’ parents let them speak to me again, being kicked out of school and Venturers, being disqualified from the vote before I qualified in the first place, how everyone from my parents to my cousins to my children’s children would be completely screwed if they ever wanted to run for president.