Dead Romantic

by C. J. Skuse

  I didn’t tell Zoe what I’d seen when I got back to the Chemistry lab. Truth was, I forgot all about it. Because Sexy Dead Boy was ready. Zoe had hooked up the copper wire to the battery and to six points along the body – his feet, his hands and each side of his head – taping them in place with plasters from the first aid kit.

  We got ready too. Apart from the scopey thing around her neck, Zoe had me to dress exactly like her, in some white rubber wellies, rubber gloves, white coats and goggles that she’d found in the Food and Nutrition department. I closed the door. It was moment of truth time.

  ‘Go to the head end and watch,’ Zoe told me, and I settled Pee Wee on my coat under the sink and tied his lead to a Bunsen burner pipe so I could do as she asked. She stayed at the feet end with one hand on the switch on the battery.

  Zoe smiled, but there was fear in her eyes. I felt it too. If this didn’t work, we had nothing and the last few weeks had been a complete waste of time and limbs. But if it did work, we’d both have everything we ever wanted. She – her dad back (in some way) and proof of the importance of his work; me – a date for the Halloween party. It was all or nothing. Like on Deal or No Deal? Except this was Dead or Not Dead? I suppose.

  ‘Ready?’

  I put my goggles over my eyes. ‘Ready.’

  Zoe slowly turned the switch on the battery, but what happened next happened fast. The body juddered into life, his legs shuddering and shaking. The wire at the feet end was alive with purple lightning.

  Fizzzzzzzzzaaaaaa juddddddddda fizzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz crack a judddda.

  His bottom half, his legs and feet, was flipping and juddering away like crazy; his top half was completely still.

  Zoe switched off the battery. Her hand was shaking.

  ‘Did it work?’ I asked, looking at Sexy Dead Boy’s face. He didn’t open his eyes. ‘The wire was all purple.’

  ‘No,’ she said. ‘The current’s not getting through to the wire at that end at all. Must be a break in the circuit.’

  ‘So what can we do?’ I asked. Pee Wee was straining at his lead, just not settling at all. ‘I think I need to take him out,’ I said.

  Zoe didn’t answer. She began removing all the wires and putting them all in again. ‘We’ll try it again.’

  Once the wires had all been replaced and the connections to the battery checked, Zoe flicked the switch again, and this time, Sexy Dead Boy’s chest rattled and juddered and bashed against the table, his arms flapping about like fish. But his bottom half stayed still.

  ‘For God’s sake!’ Zoe shouted, but instead of flicking the switch off, she turned it higher so the juddering got even more violent and soon Sexy Dead Boy’s top half was shuddering so powerfully, his whole back left the table.

  ‘ZOE, NO!’

  Fizzzzzzzzzaaaaaa juddddddddda fizzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz crack a judddda.

  An eye opened.

  ‘Did you see that?’ she cried, flicking the switch right off so Sexy Dead Boy was still again. Still and smoking hot. Literally.

  Pee Wee was barking under the sink. ‘Shut that dog up!’ she yelled at me and I went over to him and gave him a cuddle. Zoe put her scopey thing in her ears and placed the round bit over his heart to listen. Her face lit up. ‘Three beats! I heard three beats!’

  ‘Oh my God!’ I cried, leaving Pee Wee and scurrying around to the other side of SDB’s chest. ‘Are you sure?’

  ‘No question,’ said Zoe.

  ‘Let me listen, let me listen!’

  Zoe tore off her scopey thing and handed it to me, placing two fingers on Sexy Dead Boy’s wrist. I listened to his chest. It was as still as a grave.

  I handed the scopey thing back to her. ‘I can’t hear anything, Zoe.’

  ‘There were three heartbeats, Camille! We’re nearly there. Just a bit more . . .’

  ‘You’re going to shock him again?’ I said.

  Her hand was back on the battery. ‘The serum has reached every part of him so there are electrical pulses at all the key points now. It’s just a matter of time. There’s enough electricity here to get a dead elephant to its feet. COME ON!’

  Fizzzzzzzzzaaaaaa juddddddddda fizzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz crack a judddda.

  ‘But he’s not an elephant, he’s a man,’ I tried telling her, but she was like a concrete block. There was no getting through to her. And Pee Wee was still barking so loudly, I thought maybe she hadn’t heard me.

  I ran back up to the feet end and in an instant the body jolted again, harder and faster, and this time, the wire at the leg end was a force field of purple lightning.

  Sizzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzajudddddddddddddda judddddda juddddddda fizzzzz.

  The circuit was alive and the whole body was charged again, this time his arms and feet thrashing about all over the table, and the room echoed with the crackling noise.

  Fizzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzcracka cracka crack cracka fizzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz . . .

  Zoe turned up the battery again.

  ‘Just a bit longer!’ she cried, her eyes widening with every second the battery pumped him full of electricity.

  His legs spasmed. There were sparks coming out of his feet.

  ‘Zoe!’ I cried. ‘Stop! His toenails are going black! His hands are fizzing!’ I could smell burning too. ‘Zoe, his hair’s smoking. Zoe, stop, stop, STOP!!!’

  ‘No! It’s working! His toes twitched!’

  I had to physically switch the battery off myself and pin Zoe against the store cupboard door to stop her from shocking him any more.

  ‘Camille, let me go, let me go!’ she shouted, trying to squirm away from me, but I held her there with every ounce of strength I had. It wasn’t enough. She wriggled free and darted back over to Sexy Dead Boy and listened to his heart again. The air around us was filled with the smell of burnt meat.

  She whipped her head round and snapped, ‘It’s your fault it didn’t work that time, Camille. You shouldn’t have stopped me!’

  ‘Zoe, it wasn’t working. He wasn’t coming to life; he was burning.’

  ‘It was working!’ she cried, scraping her hands through her hair. ‘I heard his heart beat three times,’ she said and her voice was going all wobbly. I joined her at the table and stood by her side.

  ‘It could have been your mind playing tricks on you, Zoe,’ I said to her. I watched as she rested her hand on Sexy Dead Boy’s still chest. ‘When you want something so much, your brain starts imagining it’s really happening.’

  ‘His. Heart. Was. Beating!’ she said slowly through her teeth.

  ‘Okay,’ I said. ‘If you say so.’

  ‘Don’t patronize me, Camille. I heard it, I know I did.’

  I nodded. Zoe looked at Sexy Dead Boy’s smoking hair and slumped down beside the table with her head on her knees. When I joined her on the floor, there was water trickling down her cheeks.

  She sniffed. ‘His heart was beating. For a short time.’

  ‘Yeah,’ I said.

  She wiped her cheeks with her rubber-gloved hands. ‘Maybe I incorrectly hooked up the circuit . . .’

  ‘You didn’t, Zoe,’ I said gently. ‘You don’t make mistakes like that.’

  ‘Yes, well, you think I can work wonders and shit miracles,’ she sniffed. ‘And I can’t. Much as I’ve always thought I could, I can’t. What would he do?’ she muttered. ‘What. Would. He. Do?’

  ‘What would who do?’ I said, but she didn’t answer me. Sexy Dead Boy’s hair was still smoking. ‘Look,’ I said, trying to perk her up. ‘We’ve come this far. We’ve gone to all the trouble of stealing a body and sawing off feet and sticking him together, so we’ll just keep trying. We have to find another way, that’s all. Okay, it worked on Pee Wee and the hamsters and all those other animals your dad tried, but maybe for a human it has to be slightly different?’

  ‘In what way, slightly different?’ she said, clearing her throat.

  I shrugged. ‘I don’t know. If it’s not something we’ve done, maybe it’s something we haven’t done. Wha
t have we missed?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ she said sadly. ‘If I knew that, we would have done it by now.’

  ‘Can we look it up? On the Net? Or in one of your books?’

  ‘No. I don’t have Corpse Reanimation for Dummies I’m afraid.’

  ‘Is there one?’ I said. ‘Maybe they have it in the library; I’ll go and check . . .’

  ‘Camille,’ she said, holding me back. ‘I have no Plan B.’

  I put a hand on her arm. She didn’t look like she wanted it there but she didn’t shrug me away either. I shuffled up next to her. I couldn’t quite get the angle right to hug her so I moved my hand away and sat down cross-legged, and when I felt the time was right, I rested my head on her shoulder instead. She didn’t move.

  ‘Why do you care so much?’ Zoe muttered.

  ‘Cos you really want this. You need this to work. And I’m your friend.’

  ‘But why?’

  ‘That’s what friends do. They help each other out. They stick together.’

  ‘You know I used you, don’t you?’ she sniffed. ‘I used you because you were the only one who even bothered with me.’

  I shrugged. ‘Yeah. I kind of used you too though. I needed a friend. And I wanted a boyfriend.’

  Zoe’s huge blue eyes stared at me in their usual starey way. There were tears in them again. ‘I’m not friend material.’

  ‘But we kind of work well together, don’t we?’ I said.

  ‘We don’t have a single thing in common,’ she sniffed.

  ‘Neither does he,’ I said, looking over at Sexy Dead Boy. And she laughed. I actually heard Zoe laugh for the first time ever. It made her whole face totally change. I still had so many questions I wanted to ask her, so much I still didn’t know, but one thing I did know for absolute certain at that moment was that Zoe Lutwyche wasn’t a psycho. She was odd, she was starey, she was stupefyingly intelligent, but she wasn’t mad. She was just lonely. And desperately in love with the idea of bringing her beloved dad back to life.

  I felt her head rest against mine. I heard her take a tiny in-breath, but she didn’t let it out. She was looking at the door. Her mouth was open. So was the door.

  ‘You locked it,’ she said, though I didn’t know if it was a question or a statement of fact.

  ‘Yeah,’ I said. ‘I thought I did.’ I couldn’t remember though. I really couldn’t. ‘I definitely pushed it to. I know I did.’

  ‘Where’s Pee Wee?’ she said, getting to her feet and peering out into the corridor.

  ‘He’s under the sink,’ I said, looking over for him. But he wasn’t there. His lead was still dangling from the Bunsen burner pipe. He’d slipped right out of it.

  I got to my feet. There was no sign of him. ‘He was right there,’ I said, pointing to the little cubby-hole underneath the workbench where my coat was. The yellow incineration bag of hands was there too. The bag had been chewed open.

  And one of the rotting hands had gone.

  So Pee Wee had run off

  The sky outside was full on black as night. If it hadn’t been for Zoe’s torch I would have fallen over oodles of times. The air smelled musty and damp and owls overhead twooted to remind me to be scared. Every now and again, in the distance, came a yelping kind of scream. I looked at Zoe. ‘It’s just a fox,’ she said but the sound only strained my already shredded nerves.

  We had spotted Pee Wee as he scampered across the rugby pitches and seen him dart into the woods that separated the college from the town park. Zoe had chopped a couple of fingers off the other rotten hand as a lure and was beckoning him with them, just in case he had finished the hand and wanted seconds. I just prayed that he wouldn’t go out of the grounds because if anyone found him with the hand, we’d never be able to explain it away. I mean, what would we say?

  ‘What do we say, Zoe, if someone finds him with the hand? What if the police find him? Or someone hands him in and they put him in the pound.’

  ‘My dog has a taste for rotting human flesh, Sergeant. Don’t they all?’ said Zoe. ‘And it’s not the 1930s. They don’t have dog pounds any more. If you hadn’t left the door unlocked, he wouldn’t have got out; ergo we would not be here on this hopeless wild goose chase.’

  I was agog. ‘I forgot, okay? And anyway I didn’t know he was going to chew through that bag, did I?’

  ‘He’s no ordinary dog though, is he? I knew we should have been more careful. Should have known not to let that thing into the lab in the first place. He’s obviously been waiting to get his teeth into those limbs.’ She stamped her foot on the hard earth.

  ‘Is your leg on the blink?’ I asked her.

  ‘No, it is not,’ she snipped.

  I rubbed the hem of my dress. ‘Why did you stamp it like that?’

  ‘Because I’m annoyed, Camille, and it’s the only way I can project my annoyance without resorting to physical violence. This is yet another obstacle we don’t need and which we do not have time for.’

  We came to a large dip in the earth, which I’d seen boys riding their bikes in and out of and doing their skateboard jumps in, like a natural half pipe in the ground. Zoe shone the torch into the trees on the other side. ‘He’s not here, is he?’ she sighed. ‘But I can smell it. I can smell the hand.’

  ‘Can you?’ I said, marvelling at how Zoe’s body always seemed to be doing things mine couldn’t. I wondered if that was one of the powers you got when you had someone else’s limbs. ‘You’re like a detective. I wish I could smell it. So, what now?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ she huffed and her breath cloud seemed never ending. ‘Wait.’ She held out her hand and shone the torch higher up. ‘I saw white.’

  We both ran down the hollow and back up the other side and looked up into the branches of the enormalous tree. A flash of white caught the light.

  ‘What was that?’ I whispered. ‘Is it Pee Wee?’

  She squinted up the torch beam. ‘Yes, looks like it. You’ll have to get up there and coax him down with the fingers.’

  ‘Me?’ I squawked. ‘I can’t climb trees.’

  ‘Well, I can’t. People with reanimated limbs aren’t supposed to climb. It can damage us irrevocably if we fall.’

  ‘Really?’ I said, thinking that was the worst excuse ever and even I wasn’t going to fall for it. ‘We’re stuck then, aren’t we?’

  Zoe’s jaw clenched. ‘Camille, will you please climb the tree and retrieve that flesh-eating puppy of yours. Pretty please?’

  ‘I can’t climb trees, Zoe,’ I said again, much more slowly. ‘Seriously, I actually probably literally will shit myself. I fell out of one when I was seven, right onto my grandma’s pavlova when we were having a picnic. I swore, from that day forth, I would never climb trees again.’

  Zoe ran the torch all along the branch to the other end and back again. ‘He looks quite at home up there.’

  ‘I didn’t think dogs could climb trees,’ I said.

  ‘Normal dogs don’t have a penchant for killing and eating other dogs or munching rotting human body parts either but yours does. Who knows what else it likes doing?’ She looked up towards Pee Wee. ‘I’ll wait here. You go to the caretaker’s shed and find the retractable ladder, and then you can climb up and get him, can’t you?’

  ‘Get what?’ said a voice behind us.

  I flipped around to see two figures standing on the edge of the hollow. It was Damian’s trainers I saw first. The brightest white trainers I’d ever seen. They matched his teeth. He also had on his tightest black shirt and jeans. Next to him was Louis in a sleeveless yellow Zombie Apocalypse t-shirt, long shorts and scruffy pink-and-yellow Nikes.

  ‘Oh go away,’ said Zoe, putting all her emphasis on the ‘way’ part of ‘go away’ as though she really was quite irritated by the sight of them.

  Damian walked down into the hollow and swaggered towards us. ‘Hello, Blue Eyes. Princess Peach. Now what would you two be doing in the woods on a Friday night, eh? Waiting for us, was ya?’

/>   Zoe threw me a look. I threw Zoe a look.

  ‘You’re sticking your noses into a particularly angry bee hive here,’ Zoe warned him.

  Damian laughed. ‘Come on. You know this is where Damie likes to hang with his women, don’t you? Don’t tell me this is a coincidence.’

  ‘Ugh,’ said Zoe. ‘Just when I thought I couldn’t hate you more.’

  Damian laughed and scratched the tip of his nose.

  I glared at Louis. ‘It was you who Zoe saw hiding in the trees at the front of college, wasn’t it? And who I saw in the hedge outside the Humanities block. Have you been following us?’ I glanced up into the tree in case Pee Wee truly let the hand out of the bag.

  ‘Uh . . .’ said Louis, flicking his hair out of his eyes. It was wet; I guessed he’d showered recently.

  ‘Yeah it was us,’ said Damian. ‘We went up to Spook Central to see what was going on and when we saw the van leave, we followed you down here. Then we waited. And we watched. Ate a couple of burgers. And . . .’

  ‘. . . and we wondered if you needed any help or anything,’ Louis cut in.

  ‘Well we don’t,’ said Zoe. ‘So you can go now.’

  ‘Can’t,’ said Damian. ‘Loser was worried about the Princess here. Thought you were chopping her up or something,’ he sniffed.

  ‘What?’ I snipped.

  ‘You didn’t answer my texts,’ said Louis. ‘I was thinking all sorts.’

  ‘He thinks you’re a psycho,’ Damian told Zoe.

  ‘Most people do,’ she replied, looking up into the tree. She didn’t even look angry. Then I realised, she wasn’t. She got called a psycho or a freak every day of the week. It was water off a duck’s beak.

  ‘Course, I don’t,’ said Damian, folding his arms. ‘Actually, I think you’re pretty sexy, for a goth.’

  ‘Zoe’s not a goth, she’s a . . . scientist,’ I said, ‘and I told you what we were doing, Louis. It’s a sheep, okay? We’re seeing if the reanimation serum works on a dead sheep.’ I looked up into the tree again.