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

by F. J. R. Titchenell

  Norman lay still with shock for just a few seconds before rolling me off of him so that he could stand up and look.

  A few of the boxes had opened on impact, sending cans rolling in every direction, hissing as foam sprayed out of the cracks, mixing with the pool of fresh blood on the tiles, making it spread even faster than it would have on its own.

  There was no other movement, no other sound.

  “Did I get them?” Rory asked shakily, feeling backwards for footholds as she slid down to us.

  Them, like she was aiming for them both.

  Neither of us answered. We didn’t have to.

  “He . . . he was going to be one,” she said, like we didn’t understand that.

  I looked at Norman, standing so still and quiet, streaks of sweat and Diet Mountain Dew cutting their way through his cartoonish, painted smile, remembering the first time I’d seen it on him. “We’re all going to be one,” I reminded her.

  “He was going to be one today!”

  We both nodded, and for several seconds there was silence, except for the hissing of the soda cans.

  Then Norman grabbed Rory by the shoulders, slammed her against a rack of potato chips with a deafening crunch, and shook her, like he’d forgotten who she was. He shook her like she was me, or Hector, someone he touched every day, like the physical contact could offer some shadow of comfort, let off an ounce of the crushing pressure, leaving room for a glimmer of hope for things to start moving back in the direction of okay. That’s not what happened.

  “He’s gone, and we’re still here!” he shouted hoarsely in her face, the knuckles of his one bare hand white against the burgundy of her sleeve. “As long as there are enough people left to look for your family, mine can rot in hell, is that the idea?!”

  Shake him back, I thought hard at Rory, you’re supposed to shake him back.

  But if thinking at someone hard were good enough, she never would have been in that situation in the first place.

  Rory wasn’t the shaking type. She only knew how to do much worse things. She just stood there, distant and cold, and under that, about as hurt as it was possible to be without being bitten.

  “Yeah,” she said, “that’s pretty much it. Isn’t that how it was when Peter and Claire’s family needed your help, Boy Scout? Is this what you’ve got planned for an encore? You want to top things off now by hitting a girl?”

  That stopped Norman in mid-shake, and I watched him remember that she hadn’t been one of us, they didn’t come from the same place, they had never had an understanding in the old world, and maybe no amount of vodka, fifties rock, and fighting for our lives together could really change that in this one.

  I just waited and watched them trying somehow to communicate across that gap.

  There was silence, and silence.

  And more silence.

  And then Norman laughed. And laughed, and laughed, this high, endless, hysterical peal.

  “Good one, Ror!” he cackled. That really is the best word for the sound he made as he backed away from her, slapping his own knee like some demented, washed-up old prospector at the bar of a saloon (or as Caleb Summers had so delicately put it, like kind of a complete lunatic), and half-stormed, half-skipped back out into the stockroom, knocking a rack of multicolored condoms to the floor with that little padded mallet as he passed it, leaving Rory and me alone with the mess and the silence.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  No, the Guys Totally

  Like You Better

  Norman kept me sane when the world fell apart.

  There’s no question about it. He gets full credit for that. Most of the time, I thought of him as an anchor point that would never be uprooted. We explored that all-but-empty world, waiting to find out if we were its new beginning or just one of its more stubborn loose ends, like a shipment of orphaned worker ants in a kid’s ant farm, digging tunnels to nowhere and waiting to die because it’s illegal to send queen ants through the mail.

  Was illegal. I don’t think anything is anymore. Not that it matters without a postal service.

  During those times, his jokes, his laughter, those reminders of what it’s like to be human, to be happy and alive, they were what kept me going. He gave surviving a point.

  But then there were the moments like that one, when he laughed too hard; when I closed my eyes and couldn’t separate the makeup from his face in my mind; when I was aware that he might be even closer to the edge than I was, even as I leaned on him for balance, and at any moment he might trip over, slap on an acid-filled boutonniere, and call it a day.

  I knew that, if that happened, it would be my job to give in to my pesky weakness for the serious, to pull him back onto solid ground. But failing that, I also knew that I would let him take me with him, spraying laughing gas and dueling windmills all the way, before I would ever let him leave me in my right mind alone.

  That was, if he ever unlocked the stockroom door.

  I hammered on it for a good ten minutes, calling out his name. He wouldn’t answer me. Now and then I could hear a brief roar of an engine revving up. I wondered if he’d found another generator and was just waiting until he was sure it was working before letting us in for another beautifully improvised wake. He never did. Still, the sound was proof enough that he was still inside and safe. When my hands and voice were tired, I took just a few seconds to debate between a dead friend and a live one, and then did the only thing that made sense, as unappealing as it was.

  Rory had finished stuffing her bag with sanitary supplies, like the quantity could make up for the lateness of finding them, and stacked up some more of the plastic packets as a pillow under her sleeping bag.

  She was lying on her back and didn’t turn to look at me when I spread my sleeping bag next to hers, but she didn’t turn her back either.

  I swear I would have found the guts to say something sooner or later, but she saved me the trouble.

  “I know,” she said. “If I hadn’t forgotten, he’d still be here. I know. Do you hate me?”

  I thought about it, but not for too long.

  “No,” I said honestly.

  “He was bitten,” she said. “We all saw it, right?”

  “Yeah, we all saw it.”

  “He was bitten badly. He could have lived for what? Hours?”

  I wouldn’t have insisted on explaining, but if she was asking, I didn’t much feel like holding back.

  “If you knew you only had hours left with Lis, you’d still want them, wouldn’t you?”

  I didn’t mean to make her cry, really. In fact, I kept forgetting that it was possible. Even then, she hid it well, but it was several seconds before her breath was steady enough to answer.

  “But more of us could have gotten bitten if I hadn’t finished things fast! We had to contain it! What I did made sense!”

  “Yeah, it did.”

  “So?” she sat up and looked at me with her getting-to-the-point expression. “Norman’s a guy! Isn’t he supposed to get that?”

  I didn’t mean to laugh at her either, God knew she’d gotten enough of that for one night, and there was nothing funny about any of this. It was just so ridiculous, the way she talked about him like some mysterious other species, that I couldn’t help it.

  “He’s a guy, not a Vulcan.”

  Rory didn’t laugh. “You know, there are plenty of other aisles to sleep in.”

  “Sorry, it’s just, for someone who can have such an effect on them—”

  “Yes,” she snapped, “I do have an effect on them. Without being a dorky little suck-up who uses the word ‘Vulcan’ in casual conversation! Without having to resort to finding the ones who’ve never seen a girl before!”

  There were plenty of things I could have said, all of which would have made things worse, but that wasn’t what I wanted. I didn’t want to take the crushing feeling in my chest out on her.

  I mean, I did want to, but it wasn’t what I wanted most. I wanted to make things better. I reall
y did. Maybe I couldn’t always speak, but damn it, if it killed me, I was going to listen, really listen, this time.

  I took a deep breath, paused a little longer to show that I wasn’t just continuing the stupid argument we’d been having, and said, “Why do we keep doing this?”

  Rory paused long enough to leave her old tone behind too and shrugged. “I don’t know. Why do we?”

  “I asked first.”

  She sighed and lay back on her makeshift cushion. “It’s up to you, I guess,” she said. “They—he’s your friend. No one’s going to help me without you, so I guess you can talk to me however you want.”

  This wouldn’t have been so bad if she’d still been yelling, but it’s harder to ignore things like that when they’re said in such a level, serious tone. Besides, hadn’t I just told myself that I wasn’t going to ignore them this time?

  “That’s . . . not true,” was the only answer I could think of.

  “No?” Rory stared off in the direction of the locked stockroom. Even on her, even after too much time, I could recognize the look of a person preparing to say something without being entirely sure of wanting it to be heard. I went extra quiet to encourage her. “I was really starting to think that he liked me.”

  My stomach got way tenser than it should have, even with my oldest friendship out in the open, on the line.

  “Norman? You’re kidding, right? He’s nuts about you!”

  “Me,” she emphasized. “I was starting to think he actually liked me, as a friend, not . . .” She trailed off, gesturing down at the body I could never help envying even when I pitied the rest of her.

  “He does like you,” I repeated firmly, though it made my stomach feel even queasier. “If you like him back, please, seriously, do everyone a favor and let him know.”

  “Why, so you can take him from me, too?”

  I tried to find a way, but really, how do you answer a question like that? I just ended up waiting for her to elaborate.

  “You know you would.”

  “So . . . you do like him?” I asked.

  “Um . . . ew.”

  I tried to be offended on Norman’s behalf, and part of me was. The rest of me was distracted by the rush of relief in my stomach.

  “Don’t tell him I said that,” Rory added even though she’d pretty much said that to his face a thousand times. “Don’t get me wrong, I get it now, what you see in him. You were right, he’s not a total jackass all the time, and I guess I do like him, but not like that. But what if I did? What then? What do you think would happen if I told him? If I kissed him?”

  “What do you mean, ‘what would happen?’” I asked. My stomach was tensing back up and making me irritable, but I tried to be patient. “He’d sing Halle-fricken-lujah! What do you think would happen?”

  “Yeah, I know, but who would he go to, to sing it with?”

  “Oh,” I said. “Yeah, at first. That’s just because he doesn’t know you like he knows me, and that’s because you haven’t let him! If you just—”

  “I know, I know,” Rory brushed me off. “Put myself out there. Invest the time. Be a friend first, blah, blah, blah. Been there, done that. Didn’t work.”

  It wasn’t until then that I figured out that we weren’t actually talking about Norman.

  “You mean Mark?” I asked. His name was still taboo except for extreme circumstances, but I figured this qualified.

  “I mean Mark. I mean the guy I was friends with for eleven years of my life. The one who liked me. The one who knew me. The one I thought I could have something with. The one who, after two weeks of knowing you, suddenly couldn’t talk about anything else!”

  The one I killed.

  I didn’t say it, didn’t say anything for a little while, trying to absorb, trying to think of something that wouldn’t plunge us straight back into all-out war. I’ve already admitted that I did know Rory wanted Mark, but he was really, really cute. Lots of girls wanted him. I honestly didn’t know how serious she was about it, I swear. But I should have known.

  “I’m sorry,” I said, but I wanted something more helpful to say, too. “Mark was cool.” That wasn’t a strong enough word. “He was special.”

  “You have no idea.”

  She was probably right about that.

  “But eleven years goes back a long way. Maybe you were just too much like a sister or something by then. And just because it happened that way once, with one guy—”

  “He wasn’t just one guy!” Damp sinuses. “He was my Norman!”

  That almost wasn’t fair. Connecting that name with the name of a dead person, the way that knocked the air clean out of my lungs, it had to qualify as below the belt. At least it made me give up the lost cause of saying something useful and go back to, “I’m sorry.”

  In order to convince myself to spread my arms, I basically had to decide that I didn’t care if she hit me, how hard, or where. She didn’t.

  She did stay rigid for a few seconds after I pulled her close to me, but finally, she hugged me back, pressed her eyes to my shirt, and let slip something I’d never heard from her before: a real, chest-heaving sob.

  “I want Lis back,” she sniffled.

  “I know. It won’t be long now.” Her tears made her fine, blonde hair cling to both our faces, and she still smelled like vanilla.

  “I want just one person I know for sure loves me. Is that so much to ask?”

  “No, of course not.”

  “I miss Mom, and Dad, and Carol, and Josh.”

  “I know.” I wanted so badly for her to stop. I didn’t want to remember the names of her stepmother and half brother. I didn’t want the weight of dead people I’d never even met suddenly becoming real to me.

  “I want my family back!”

  I wanted to shush her before I could feel her words, to scold her for always being the one trying to drag the rest of us back down into the Unspeakable Past.

  But I’d decided to listen, and I’d known going in that it would hurt.

  “Me, too,” I said, and the next thing I knew (whole truth), I was sobbing, too.

  I wanted to go back an hour, a week, two weeks. I wanted Hector to challenge me to paintball, The Eagle Scout to crane his neck to see if we were breaking any rules, Claire to ask me why I played a game that stung like hell. I wanted my own mom and dad, coming to pick me up in that cramped little Prius, laughing and gasping at all the right parts of my stories afterward, telling me to enjoy being young, that I had so much life ahead of me. I wanted my computer and a double-double and to be in a place that didn’t smell like decay. I wanted people, enough people that I didn’t have to be sleeping-bag-close to all of them or worry about how long they would live. I wanted to take things for granted again. I wanted to go back to how things were before, wanted it so badly that I don’t know how long it was before Rory and I were finally able to breathe, loosen our grip on each other, and look at the way things really were again.

  “So,” Rory sniffed, her voice going back to normal, “what do we do now?”

  “Ugh,” I groaned. “Don’t ask me. I’m sick of ‘what now.’”

  I was. I was sick to death of it. That was part of what I wanted so much to go back to, having someone else to tell me “what now.”

  Luckily, by then the sky had gone pure black and the only real option for the immediate “what now” was to try to get some sleep, so that’s what we did. The last thing I said before we turned off the flashlight was possibly the lamest making up line ever, but it was true.

  “I do love you, you know. Even if you are a pain in the ass to try to hang out with.”

  “Yeah,” Rory snorted into her sleeping bag. “Back at’cha.”

  I’ll take a real hangover any day over the next kind of morning after.

  Rory and I both stirred and stretched ourselves awake a little after sunrise, dressed and made use of the bottles of water, tubes of toothpaste, and fresh toothbrushes on the shelves. We didn’t talk. There was nothing to ta
lk about other than yesterday that didn’t seem silly by comparison, and yesterday itself was too big and difficult and awful to tap into.

  We sat on the floor of the protein bar section, eating our breakfast out of the foil. When I felt the extra figure standing calmly over us, slim and shadowed, with its head cocked slightly, thoughtfully, to one side, my first half-awake thought (whole truth) was that we’d stumbled into the metaphorical storm shelter of another dazzlingly gorgeous local survivor boy for us to fight over. When I turned to look at him properly, it was just Norman, waiting silently for our attention.

  It wasn’t really my fault I needed a double-take. If I hadn’t known him so well, he might have been hard to recognize at all.

  He was still in costume, but he had turned it inside out, muting the colors to the palette you see in those period movies that always win “Best Costume.”

  Always won “Best Costume.”

  His face was still painted, but strictly in black and white, in a sort of Gothic harlequin design. It still had a smile, though. A small one.

  His wrench and the strap of one of our spare duffle bags hung from his left hand like he’d shifted them there out of the way. The mallet was nowhere in sight. That wasn’t all that was strange, though. He was too still. I’d never seen him that still unless he was hiding, waiting to jump out at someone, and that couldn’t be the case when he knew we’d already seen him.

  There was silence while Rory and I stood up to meet him, more to level any advantages of position than out of welcome, and it continued for a while afterward as we all tried not to look at each other too much.

  “I’m sorry,” Norman said first. “Rory, I’m sorry if I scared you, and I’m sorry—” He almost gave up twice that I counted before finally continuing, “I’m sorry for trying to blame . . . on you, I’m sorry—”

  “I’m sorry we lost him,” Rory cut in. “Really sorry.”

  There was a very, very awkward handshake after that. I was relieved by it, of course. I just think there’s a very narrow window of time when two people say hello for the first time, and maybe another when they say goodbye for the first time, when they can have a handshake that has a chance of not being awkward, and those two didn’t have either situation going for them.