“I . . . uh,” Norman held up the duffle bag which offered no information other than that it wasn’t very heavy. “I’m going to . . . I need to do a kind of . . . memorial service. I know a place, it’s not far, won’t take more than a few hours on the scooter.”
The pizza boy’s scooter. That was what had been making the engine noises the night before. It wouldn’t carry much, but Norman was an expert with them; they could cut through places no other vehicle could, and there were sure to be more like it nearby if we looked. We were so close to New York City that they might be all we would need later for a quick, in and out rescue mission.
After a detour.
I nodded and reached for Suprbat and the evil bunny bag. Norman looked at Rory with that same strange, steady stillness. “You’re welcome to come.”
I knew he meant it, all of it, the invitation itself, the olive branch that went with it, and the refusal to acknowledge the option of not going at all.
It might have been the first thing he ever said that Rory really understood. She’d offered us all a very similar invitation not too long ago.
“No, thanks. I think you guys could do it better alone.” It wasn’t a snub, it was a gift.
Norman nodded and put an arm around my shoulders with an unfamiliar weight.
I held back a moment before he could steer me into the stockroom, long enough to dig through my bag for that forgotten paintball helmet. He tried to duck me at first when I reached up to slip it over his rough, disheveled brown hair.
“You wear it,” he said. “I’m the one with the catlike reflexes, remember?”
“You’re also the one who knows how to drive that thing,” I reasoned. “What am I supposed to do if something happens to you in the middle of God knows where?”
He surrendered and let me fasten it under his chin. As soon as I let him go, he sidestepped into the children’s section and ripped the plastic off of one of those bicycle helmets that are always next to the basketballs for some reason. It was a little on the snug side, printed all over with a ’90s bastardization of the Spiderman logo, and too cheap to protect against more than a fall from a tricycle onto grass, but I let him put it on me anyway. It couldn’t do any harm, even if he did spend a little longer than was healthy pushing my hair behind my ears, adjusting the strap, probably examining the cheapness of the Styrofoam lining.
“There,” he said. “At least I won’t look silly alone.”
If there’s a harsher, more definitive test of Norman’s unfailing talent for making me smile, I never want to know what it is.
“Since when are you afraid of that?” I asked.
I may not quite have his gift, but I like to think I’ve returned that favor enough of the time.
We gave Rory one last wave before heading back to where the scooter was parked, and she waved back, looking half sad, half annoyingly knowing, almost the way Hector had been looking at us for the last few days. I made myself stop thinking about that pretty quickly.
We wheeled the scooter as close as possible to the fire escape before arranging ourselves on it. It was the only door we could be sure would lock behind us to keep Rory safe, and with no power, there would be no alarm.
Norman took the controls, looking comfortingly practiced at it, and I slid on close behind him, arms locked around his chest for dear life, left hand on right elbow, right hand clutching Suprbat as if it were a bolted-down railing. I could feel his lungs fighting me, all those small, hidden but sturdy muscles that gave him his almost superhuman speed and balance trying to expand with his breath, but I couldn’t find the nerve to ease up, and he didn’t complain.
It felt silly, being as scared as I was. Did I mention the almost superhuman speed and balance? There was probably nowhere safer to be on the road, or in the whole zombie-infested world, really, than clinging to Norman’s back. Mom had always threatened to report him for driving unlicensed if she ever caught me riding with him in the old world, and I’d secretly been only too happy to use her as an excuse not to, but we had ridden down my driveway in my old go-cart together a hundred times, and that had to be more dangerous than something that actually had brakes.
Of course, there hadn’t been anything actually trying to kill us back then.
Rationally, I knew that the chance of getting trapped in the middle of an infestation in a shuttle with limited supplies was just as lethal and more likely than being grabbed off a scooter that could slip through anywhere. Irrationally, when Norman reached for the bar latch of the door, I knew I was really, really going to miss that casing of steel.
“Pay attention,” he said in the few moments when we could still easily hear each other. “By this afternoon, you’re going to be teaching her to drive one of these.”
Then the door was open and latched neatly behind us, and we were zipping forward through a blur of screams and rubble.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
Take That, You Picky
Dead Bastards!
Riding on a scooter was nothing like riding in a car. That much, at least, was exactly the way I expected it.
There wasn’t much conversation. It required too much effort. There was no rest, either, and certainly no boredom. It was more like one long, high stakes game. Really long. Really high stakes.
Norman made it look surprisingly easy, weaving between the wrecked and abandoned cars, dodging around anything that moved, but it was sort of like watching a well-played game of Tetris. No matter how good you are, it doesn’t mean you can drop your focus for even a second. It wouldn’t even have taken a crash. If we’d gotten cornered and had to slow down, we would have been swarmed in minutes.
At first, I was more worried about the closeness of the asphalt, absence of seatbelts, and the unbroken roar of the air rushing past us than I was about the zombies. Norman could keep the scooter on the road (or the sidewalk, when necessary), but there was only so much he could do to keep me on the scooter. Even if I’d been wearing a real helmet, there were plenty of other ways the road could undead-ify me if I slipped off and hit it.
I would have been happy to bury my face in the back of Norman’s t-shirt and keep my arms locked for the whole ride, no matter what terrible muscle cramps it gave me, but I only had a couple of miles to get almost comfortable with that before it stopped being an option.
“Cassie?”
I could barely hear him at all through the air, but I could make out the syllables in the vibrations spreading from his skeleton into mine, so I made myself look up and squint against the wind.
The interstate was at ground level on its way out of Cherry Hill. That was part of the problem. It hit a choke point just as it was angling down to the water again, no side streets to cut onto, just thick trees on both sides. I’ve seen zombies do inhuman things to reach people, but when there are no people around, I guess they tend toward the path of least resistance because the crowd that was gathered in front of us by the bank, at the end of the downhill slope, was intimidating, to say the least.
Swerving around the usual, city-level peppering of zombies is one thing. A solid mass of them, closed in on both sides, is another. The scooter was faster and stronger, so we might have been able to bowl straight through them; though, with so many hands, one could easily catch hold of a bit of hair or clothing and pull us over into that shrieking, writhing mess.
“Cassie!”
I was looking at them, but what Norman wanted me to do about them, exactly, I had no idea.
All the undead eyes that still functioned among that horde were fixed on us, the sound of their screams hurt even through the howling of air in my ears, and they had begun to march up to meet us, ready to converge around the point of the inevitable collision. We were going too fast to make a U-turn, even.
“Cassie, you have to swing!”
I could hear the words, but I couldn’t quite process the meaning. Swing what? Suprbat? I couldn’t do that. I didn’t have access to my arms. They were the only thing keeping me alive. Then again,
they weren’t going to be able to do that for much longer.
“Cass, please, for the love of God.”
I could feel panic pulsing through his ribs. He swerved hard to the left to avoid the epicenter of the crowd, leaving the road for a moment and crunching twigs and pebbles under the tires.
“Now!”
I held the scooter between my legs like a horse, sure that I’d topple over backward as soon as I let go of Norman’s shirt, just like I’d felt about letting go of the saddle horn back in my first year at Western Summer Camp with the Girl Scouts. I couldn’t remember the counselor’s name, but suddenly, I could hear her, clear as day, telling me to stop thinking and do it anyway.
Think about something else. Think of campfire songs for tonight!
“Black socks never get dirty,” I sang, and did it anyway. “The longer you wear them, the blacker they get.” Just like on a horse, I did somehow catch my new center of gravity, and as soon as I had it, I leaned all the way over to the right. In a motion a lot like the one I always imagine Suprbat getting confiscated for in the first place, I held it in both hands and hit the first zombie, clean to the side of the head, knocking it flat.
“Someday, I think I might wash them”—two more went down—“but something keeps telling me”—and another two—“‘don’t do it yet.’ Not yet, not yet, not yet.”
The eighth zombie broke my stride when I broke its shoulder instead of its skull on the fourth “yet,” but it didn’t matter. We’d made it around to the bridge, and in a few more seconds, we were far out of reach.
“Uh, thanks,” Norman called out. I felt a nervous laugh in his diaphragm when I wrapped my arms, a little less crushingly, back around his middle.
“Don’t thank me,” I shouted back. “Thank the character-building teachings of the Girl Scouts of America!”
That made his laughter turn real and easy, so maybe I was holding up my end of things okay.
There was something very unsatisfying about crossing back over the Delaware bay, after all the work we’d put into reaching the east bank the day before. The fact that it had narrowed to barely a river once we got away from Delaware itself didn’t make things any better. It could only be a good thing, of course, our new freedom of movement. I just couldn’t help thinking that it could have been an even better thing a day earlier. The New Jersey/Pennsylvania border wasn’t the last formidable cluster we had to pass, and the nerve-wracking effort of the task never lapsed, especially once those dark clouds started to sprinkle, making our eyes sting and the roads go slick. The fact that it had become a two player game somehow helped. At least I could occasionally channel my nerves into some nice, constructive violence.
I was having trouble imagining what a whole day of this kind of travel was going to be like. For the time being, at least, Norman had calculated well, and in spite of the above average infestation on the streets of Philadelphia, it took us barely more than half an hour to find the building he was looking for.
He didn’t shout to announce our arrival—there was no point in sounding more human and edible to the surrounding area than necessary—but I knew when he started circling, and on the second pass, I found a chance to look away from my next batting target just long enough to read the plaque on the front wall.
Curtis Institute of Music.
Somehow, I’d always expected the school of Hector’s dreams (the one he hadn’t been able to resist mentioning in every single conversation ever until the rejection had come and all mention of the pursuit of music had ended) to be a little more . . . prepossessing. I’d pictured ivy-covered walls and wrought iron gates and a sprawling, green campus. It was just a building, square and brown like all the ones around it, across from an unremarkable public park.
“We’re going to have to jump,” Norman finally called on the third circuit, nodding at the metal awning over the entrance of the restaurant next door.
I nodded and held Suprbat at the ready. He braked exactly as hard as he could without skidding on the wet street or sending us flying over the front, though my elbow did collide pretty hard with the small of his back.
We came to a stop precisely on target with all the head start we could hope for on the closest zombies, just a scant few yards.
Norman set the kickstand, dismounted right between me and the closest one, split its head into two jagged pieces with the wrench, jumped up to catch the awning, swung himself up to crouch on top of it, and reached down for me in a single, seamless, fluid motion.
It’s funny how, when you’re around someone enough, you forget to be impressed by even the coolest stuff they can do. It’s even funnier how sometimes, without warning, you suddenly remember to notice again.
I waited to clobber the next zombie that reached for me, a quick girl who looked like she’d been a school athlete before someone had shoved broken glass in her neck, and then shoved Suprbat in my bag and jumped up to reach his hands. I had to kick another set of teeth away from my ankle while I hung there, and the layer of moisture coating everything made me sure for a moment that I was going to slip and fall. After a couple seconds of struggle, Norman managed to hoist me up high enough to get a good grip on the edge and pull myself on top with him before any more of them could get too close. We were going to have to set a good lure to get the scooter back later, but neither of us cared just then. Norman leaned over to the nearest window of the Institute’s main building and smashed every last bit of it out of its frame so we could both climb, one after the other, into its unattainably exclusive halls.
“I was expecting something a little bigger,” Norman panted as we both unbuckled our helmets, wrung out the hems of our shirts, and waited to catch our breath. “But this is okay, perfect, actually. We’ll just have to do everything from indoors.”
I nodded before asking, “Do what?”
I imagined us giving a eulogy in the assembly hall, wherever that was, maybe finding a piano and seeing if we could pick out Hector’s song by ear, to know that it had been played in that place, just once, whatever the admission board had said.
Norman held up the spare bag and, with a wicked grin, the first real smile I’d seen on him since the soda cans came down, pulled open the zipper.
Inside were a shelf’s worth of shaving cream bottles, a real goose down pillow, a double-wide carton of eggs in a Ziploc with most of the shells still intact, and about a dozen and a half rolls of toilet paper.
I cannot overstate how much better that was.
“Hmm,” I said. “Where to begin? Decisions, decisions.”
Norman didn’t have that problem. He dropped the bag, took the first roll of paper, backed all the way into one of the grand, wood-paneled walls, and pitched it to me over the giant, ostentatious crystal chandelier.
“This is for Hector Zane!”
I caught it and pitched it back, looping it over one of the ornate rafters. “Greatest guitarist and songwriter never to be chosen by you picky, dead bastards!”
“Best post-apocalyptic dance party entertainer!”
“Best paintball partner ever to watch my back!”
“Best yearbook editor!”
“Listener!”
“Alibi!”
“Peacemaker!”
“Best friend ever not present today!” Norman threw so hard that the roll bounced off three corners of the room and then down an especially grand staircase. We went down to find it, but not right away.
The Institute felt a lot bigger on the inside with all its floors and concert halls. When you first walk into a thousand seat auditorium faced with the task of thoroughly trashing it with nothing but its small share of what fits in one duffle bag, there’s actually a moment when it looks pretty daunting. But then you get started, and, well, you’d be surprised how fast and economical destruction can be if you really get creative.
We chased each other up and down the staircases, through the halls, around the theaters, the dining hall, the studios, throwing and catching, kicking and smashing and splatt
ering all the way.
“This is for how he tried to save Kim.”
“This is for bringing the coffee.”
“This is for teaching me to play Magic.”
“This is for the time he didn’t tell about the washing machine.”
“This is for the Vanilla Coke incident.”
No one, under the circumstances, could have resisted the allure of a good ceiling fan, and when we found one, we weren’t about to try. If you think the lack of power to get it spinning stopped Norman, well, what memoir have you been reading?
He inched his way up one of those over-decorated columns as easily as if it had been lying on its side, swung across on the rafters like they were monkey bars, and set it spinning by hand. I climbed on top of one of the piles of furniture we’d overturned to get a better shot and threw half a dozen of the eggs and most of a bottle of shaving cream up into the blades.
Plenty of it hit Norman’s outstretched arms before it could reach the over-polished walls, and about half of it hailed right back down on me, but neither of us cared by then. In fact, Norman chose that moment to let go of the ceiling, somersault cleanly back onto his feet, and take a kitchen knife to that feather pillow before the blades had time to stop spinning.
In the end, we climbed onto the roof with the last of the toilet paper rolls, just to make sure, from a safe height, that the place would have the proper, TPed look from the outside, whether anyone would ever see it or not.
The rain was coming down in drops the size of blueberries by then which made it hard to get that good long streamer effect without the stuff disintegrating—that didn’t stop us from trying, sprinting and throwing back and forth, tossing the broken ends over the edge to flutter in the cool, rising breeze, leaving channels of feathers and bubbly egg whites in the puddles behind us as the mess slowly washed off our clothes. The rain seemed to fall slower than usual, and clearer. I could see each individual drop as it passed by in front of me, feel each one hitting and instantly soaking through my hair and my shirt, icy cold but with no impact on my body temperature.
Confessions of the Very First Zombie Slayer (That I Know Of) Page 17
