She’s up in a flash, looking at the gate guiltily. “I’m supposed to do deliveries for Dad tonight, so how about I meet you in front of my house at, say, 5:30 tomorrow morning?”
I nod, and she goes without a backward glance. The gate swings shut, and I listen closely for the sound of footsteps on grass, for a car door opening or closing, for an engine to start up and slip into reverse before backing out and peeling away from the curb.
But I don’t hear anything.
When I finally get up and slink toward the gate, nudge it open, and look outside, her driveway is empty and the light is still on in the second-floor bedroom.
Chapter 24
On the Night Shift
I have work to do before school in the morning. (Wow. The thought of going to school is tripping me out.) But first, I set Stamp up in the bedroom facing the street. There are no lights to turn off, which is a good thing, and none to turn on while I’m gone, which is even better.
He harrumphs and frowns and makes all kinds of new Stamp faces. “Why can’t I come, Maddy?” he whines all the way up the stairs.
“I need you here to see if any more Zerkers come down our street.”
“You do that,” he counters, leaning against the doorjamb as I ease open the blinds just enough for him to see through—and not an inch more. “And I’ll go look on the streets.”
Yeah, that’s a great idea. Nothing could ever go wrong with that one. Not even just a little.
“Well, but you see better from a distance,” I totally lie. “So I need you up here. You’ll be really helping me out.”
He looks at me as we stand in the middle of the room. Between our yellow zombie vision and the orange street lamp streaming in through the slats, the air is a kind of tangerine glow.
“So what if I do see a bunch of Zerkers coming, huh? What do I do then, huh?”
I cringe. “Don’t say huh, Stamp. It makes you sound mean.”
He grins. “Maybe I am feeling mean.”
“No, you’re just feeling left out, which is different than mean.”
He sighs and leans against the wall next to the window, peering outside. Then he looks back at me. “Actually, right now, I am feeling mean.”
I chuckle. “Okay, yeah, I get that. But in general, huh is kind of an ugly word.”
Big eye roll from Stamp. Then, an honest question: “Well, how long will you be gone?” He sounds half hurt, half pretending he’s not.
I reach out and touch his shoulder and am happy when he doesn’t shrug it off. “I’ll be back in a couple of hours,” I lie, knowing from experience that Stamp doesn’t have the greatest sense of time. “You just watch the street and count how many Zerkers come, okay?”
He nods. “You’re sure this is big-time important stuff, right, Maddy?”
“The biggest, Stamp.”
He grunts but is already looking away, out the window, where I know he’ll stand, tall and true, until he hears me walk back in the back door downstairs, even if it’s two days from now.
Meanwhile I walk downstairs, sliding Vera’s pen into a pocket of my black thrift shop jeans and the Eliminator into the other. I grab the a gray-and-black-striped hoodie and slip it on, creeping out the back door, through the gate, and out along the side of the house.
I linger near Lucy’s place. I know she said she had to work tonight, but the house is unusually silent. Not a single TV playing, not a dishwasher grinding, not a dryer tumbling.
The light in the second-story window is the only one on. I want to look inside, but despite being dark as sin outside, it’s still a little too early for me to be pushing my dead gray nose against anybody’s living room window to see why the downstairs is so quiet.
Instead I stick to the sidewalk, hood up, hands in my pockets, just another surly teenager walking off another post-dinner fight with the fam. It’s kind of nice, being alone and out of doors for only the second time since we snuck into Seagull Shores a week ago.
With my new ID in my back pocket and the hood covering most of my face, the night sky dark and the street lights few and far between, I feel vaguely safe. Not Normal, by any stretch, but close enough to walk around without wanting to stick an ice pick into everything that moves.
I still have a couple of twenties left over from the thrift shop till. I walk into a gas station and buy a cheap grape soda, just for the sugar. The girl behind the counter is college age, kind of pretty, and I freak for a moment until I see her talking on her Bluetooth and barely even acknowledging me.
I walk out the door with the soda and sip it while I walk, feeling almost Normal. There’s not much going on at 10:30 p.m. in a place like Seagull Shores, but there’s enough to keep my eyes busy.
A sushi place on the strip is still open, and I watch a family inside celebrating something: a birthday or a graduation or a raise. The grown-ups keep taking sips out of little white sake cups. The younger ones—college age, maybe—drink beers from tall glasses. They’re the only ones in the place, and the guy behind the sushi bar keeps saying apparently funny things to them and bowing.
I walk down the strip. All the shops—the souvenir stands, the stationery store, the drug store, and the antiques stores—are closed, dark and quiet, except for the one dress shop that left an electric jack-o’-lantern plugged in. Its neon-green eyes stare at me as I walk past. Cars pass quietly, slowly. The streets are wide and new and lined with palm trees, and there are benches every few yards on the freshly poured sidewalks.
Seagull Shores is cleaner than Barracuda Bay, maybe even newer, but it feels a little cold and distant. At least back home people said hi to each other, and you’d always see skater boys hanging out on street corners, slouching around in their neon-pink hoodies and white sunglasses, just passing the time and whistling at the bikinied girls driving home. The sidewalks might have been a little more cracked, and there were fewer benches and street lights on the main drag, but at least it didn’t feel like every trash can was going to turn into a robot and laser beam your arm off just for littering.
I walk in circles, first around the whole town, then in tighter loops, cutting out the main drag and the school and the fire department and walking around the neighborhoods, then just the neighborhood that borders where Stamp and I have holed up.
The streets are quiet but well lit, flickering pumpkins on the porches, cars quiet and cool in the driveways, the blue lights of TVs or computer screens flickering in living room or home office windows.
A few streets away from the house on Lumpfish Lane, I hear scraping behind me. On instinct, I leap into the row of bushes between two houses and stand perfectly still, watching. A minute or two later, a jogger goes by, breathing heavily, heat radiating off her in waves. She’s as human as Lucy or Dad or the chick in the convenience store just now.
I watch as she glides down the street, so sleek, like a Nike ad come to life and poured into the street all glossy and glowing. Her chestnut ponytail bounces with her peppy stride, white earbuds fixed to the iPod buried somewhere in her taut white track jacket. She’s about my age, probably goes to Seagull Shores Prep with Lucy.
I watch with envy until I hear more scraping.
Fast and hard at the end of the street.
I stand, hidden, the Eliminator in hand.
The scraping intensifies, shoes on the pavement, rough and clunky but fast. Faster than I would be.
Faster than I could be.
Human fast; living fast.
The girl is deep in the cul de sac now, running between orange pools of street light, steady in her pace, oblivious to the danger following her. I don’t know if she can’t hear the other shoes scraping or if she’s ignoring them, but then I remember the earbuds. The street isn’t very long, but I’m at the top of it, and she’s at the other end.
She moves effortlessly, as if she’s one big muscle in pink running shoes. I see the glints of eyeballs, yellow and fierce, under the next street light. One pair, then two, then three.
Three of
them. Here. In Seagull Shores. Already. In under a week. They scrape clumsily along the sidewalk, lurking in the shadows, but they can’t hide their eyes, hunting her like a wolf pack.
I inch closer to the street but not entirely away from the safety of the thick hedge. I’m close enough for the Zerkers to sense, if they cared to, but judging by the scraping and sniffing, it’s clear they only want fresh meat.
I’m torn between leaping out and confronting them, but they’re Zerkers. I’m no wimp, but I’m alone.
I’ve never been alone before. Not really. There’s always been Dane around to help or Stamp or at least the Sentinels lurking in the background.
Now it’s just me. I’m Vanished. No one to help me, no one to hear me, no undead cavalry to rush in and save me at the last minute. Stamp is three streets away, too far to see what’s going on. Besides, he’s so literal I know he’s looking down on only our street, period, because I told him to. Even if a mushroom cloud flared just to the left of his field of vision, he’d ignore it.
I stand there, watching the girl, her face blissful and serene, so happy and carefree. They strike faster than I would have expected and in tandem. While the third lurks in the shadows, the boy—Astrid or Harrington or whatever his name is—still in his running shorts, strikes her high on one bare shoulder, crunching down so hard I see a flash of white bone beneath the spurting blood and the torn sleeve of her track jacket.
She screams, but the girl—Chelsea or Chalice, whoever—is on her, mouth over the girl’s mouth, chewing and chomping on her face.
I can’t help myself. I leap from the shadows, Eliminator in hand, sprinting down the street, but I’m no track star. I’m stiff and zombie slow, watching in vain as they drag her into the shadows, crunching and chewing, branches cracking and twigs snapping.
By the time I get to the first blood splatter, they’re gone. Deep into the shadows, everywhere and nowhere all at once.
I go left a few yards, smelling nothing but grass and the ocean breeze. By the time I turn back to go right, the blood trail is cold on the salt air, the dark maroon drops smaller and smaller as they disappear into a vacant lot between two streets, and a dozen more streets beyond that one.
I stand in the middle of the lot, watching, listening, seeing nothing, hearing nothing. They could be lying in the tall, unkempt grass three feet away or at the bottom of the retention pond. They could be picking their teeth in somebody’s garage five streets over, for all I know.
I curse myself and turn back toward the street. It is still and silent—the lights on in the houses, the cars dewy in the driveways—as if nothing happened.
In a beam of street light, lying on its side, laces bloody, is her shoe. I look around, waiting for someone to come out of a house, point at me, call me out, tell me I let it happen, but nobody does.
In the end, I pick up the shoe, because blood is blood and a good Florida rainstorm might wash it away. Even a good case of sprinklers could make it just another rust-colored smear on some yuppy’s drive to work. But a shoe is hard to hide and just gets people talking.
I bring it home with me, cutting across backyards and houses to double-time it to the house on Lumpfish Lane.
I put the shoe under the kitchen sink, just in case. I don’t know why. I don’t want anyone finding it, but I can’t quite bring myself to throw it away either.
I climb up the stairs, suddenly sad and lonely and ashamed and in need of some company.
Stamp is there, standing guard, just like I thought.
“See anything?” I ask a little too loudly.
His eyes get big at the sudden noise. “Nope,” he answers, kidlike. “You?”
I shake my head, feeling it’s less of a lie than actually saying no.
“Should I keep looking?”
I reach for his hand and drag him away from the window. “No, we’ve done enough for one night.”
We stand in the middle of the room, hand in hand.
“So what now?”
I smile and lead him downstairs. “Let’s put our feet in the pool. You like that, right?”
He nods and follows me onto the deck.
Chapter 25
School Daze
How’d it go?” Lucy is waiting for me on a bench outside the library. She’s facing the back door to the office as I walk out, admiring my new student ID.
Madie Swift
11th grade
Transfer
B-Lunch
Next to my vital signs is my ghoulish picture, shaved head, pale face, thin lips, drawn eyes.
I hand it to Lucy as she rises, smoothing out the green-and-blue gingham pleats in her skirt.
“I think they took pity on me. Maybe they think I’m dying or something.”
She shrugs, handing the ID back. “You look edgy; that’s all. Maybe if you would’ve let me put on a little blush, some eyeliner, it wouldn’t look so bad.”
“Been there,” I say, thinking of Hazel and the clown makeup she applied my first morning as one of the reanimated. “Tried that. Epic fail.”
She studies me critically, fixing the lapel of my maroon school jacket. “A little lip gloss.” She fumes. “Something. I mean, I didn’t go to all this trouble just so you could stumble around like something out of a haunted house.”
“Maybe I’ll just scare the Zerkers away,” I huff, shaking off the guilt from last night.
We walk toward our lockers. “I’m pretty stoked Tony was able to slip your school records into the central computer like that.”
“Tony?” I stop at a bulletin board outside the guidance counselor’s office.
“My brother,” she explains, joining me.
“Not for nothing,” I complain, “but they weren’t exactly themselves in there this morning.” I point to the latest Missing poster, stapled next to the first two. “Emlyn James,” it says, next to the yearbook photo of the pretty chestnut blonde the Zerkers bushwhacked while she was out jogging last night. Maybe it’s just me, but in the picture her eyes are quietly judging me. “I think this latest missing kid has them more than slightly distracted.”
“I heard about that,” Lucy says in that intense voice of hers.
I turn, looking down at her. “Did you know her? Emlyn, I mean?”
She shrugs and tugs me away from the bulletin board, toward the commons area, where the slamming of lockers and squeaking of shoes gives me déjà vu all over again. “She was on the school newspaper, I think, but we didn’t hang out, if that’s what you’re asking.”
The halls are full and not full. By that, I mean they’re so wide that even with a few hundred kids all getting ready for homeroom, it still looks half empty.
The lockers are alternating blocks of green and blue, the school colors.
Lucy stops at a blue block and points to the green block one row over. “You’re down there, I think.”
I walk until I find the locker on my school schedule, fiddle with the combination, and open it up. I open Lucy’s loaner backpack, which is maroon and pretty sweet, and dump some notebooks, extra pens, and cute locker magnets on the top shelf. If the Zerkers are already out snatching joggers off the street before midnight, I doubt I’ll be here long enough to hang any candid snapshots on my locker door, if you know what I mean.
Lucy walks up.
I smile. “Thanks again for taking me back-to-school shopping this morning.”
“How’s the uniform fit?” She tugs at the safety pin keeping my gingham skirt around my waist.
“So far, so good.”
She looks almost cheerful, a rarity. Her hair is clean and straight, her face not very made up but young and healthy. I’m suddenly jealous of her aliveness. We’re standing there inspecting each other, BFF style, when a trio of girls walk by.
I smell anger and then fear. They’re angry; Lucy’s afraid.
She kind of shrinks back, and I turn just as one of them yanks the books out of her hands. They tumble to the floor, and Lucy scrambles to her knees to pick
them up.
Mean girls. Already. Okay, I get it.
The one in the middle’s in charge: red hair, alabaster skin, tall, curvy, flawless, smiling for miles.
Next to her a girl with mocha skin and straightened hair puts her hands on her hips, licks her lips.
The blonde who shoved Lucy’s books to the ground examines her fingers. “I think I chipped a nail.”
They laugh and laugh as I inch forward.
From the ground, still on one knee, carefully shuffling her homework to avoid standing, Lucy hisses, “No, Maddy, it’s not worth it.”
I turn to her and grin. “Trust me. It’s so worth it.”
The redhead reaches out a warm hand. “Nice look,” she says and ruffles the close-cropped hair on my cold head. She jerks back as if she might get scabies. “What’d they do, let you off the cancer ward for the day?”
Her BFFs echo her laughter.
I step toward her, hands at my sides. I’ve got to give her credit: she doesn’t even falter. “That’s the best you got?” I growl. “Cancer jokes? So lame.”
Finally she squints. “Watch who you’re calling lame, Schindler’s List.”
I shake my head and grab her tie, yanking her down to her knees. She hits the tile floor with a quick thwick-thwack of kneecaps on the shiny floor. She grunts, palms on the tiles. I shove my foot into the small of her back so that she’s lying facedown in seconds flat.
I gently kneel next to her, eyeing her friends already backing away, as I whisper into her bright-pink ear. “Let’s just skip the two months of emotional bullying and cut to the chase, okay, Ginger? Just ’cause I’m new here doesn’t mean I haven’t seen your kind before. From now on, Lucy and I are off limits, okay?”
“Bitch,” she hisses, trying to get up.
I shove her back down with—no lie—my chill, gray pinky. “Try and get up again, and I’ll use my whole hand.”
She shakes her head but doesn’t move.
“Say it with me, Ginger: Lucy and I are off limits.”
“Screw you, trash!”
A Living Dead Love Story Series Page 54
