She nods but doesn’t say anything more as we shadow her to her locker. I look around, watching kids listlessly shuffle around. They’re looking at empty lockers, talking about who’s not here and why.
Little mumbles reach me from the row Lucy’s in:
“I heard the reason there’s no Missing poster for Mona is that she went to visit her boyfriend in college.”
“Byron? Byron skips every Thursday. What are you talking about?”
“Sally’s mom kept her home today. Until they catch whoever’s doing this, anyway.”
“My mom wanted me to stay home, but no way I’m missing pizza day!”
We’re still a little early, and you can tell the kids who are here kind of just showed up rather than sit at home for another minute of hearing their parents tell them to be careful.
I spot a flash of red hair in the distance and tug on Lucy’s maroon jacket. “Isn’t that Ginger?”
She looks, then nods. “That’s not her name. It’s Gingham.”
I watch the girl, pale as ever. She doesn’t look all that different, actually, save for the flat, lifeless hair and dull, yellow eyes. As she walks by, other kids murmur and whisper in her path. I get the feeling from the vacant sneer on her waxy, pink lips that she kind of likes all the attention. Are all Zerkers drama queens?
My back is to Dane when I say, “So the first Zerker has officially made it to school.”
I hear the snap of a cell phone picture being taken, and then he says, “But not the only.”
I feel her before I see her.
Chapter 32
One-Armed Bandit
Val.”
She walks up, big as you please, Ginger/Gingham not far behind, a few other Zerker lackeys in too-big jackets bringing up the rear.
She sees Dane snapping pictures and smiles. “Make sure to get my good side.”
“Sure thing,” he says, and I can see him dialing his stupid outdated cell phone cockily.
She darts forward, not for the phone, but for the locker door. She slams it on Lucy’s arm. I don’t hear anything crack, but Val’s not giving up. I clutch the pen in my pocket but quickly do the math: I electrocute Val, who’s holding a metal door against a Normal’s arm. Hmm, I’m no physicist, but even I know that’s probably not a great idea.
And I’m pretty sure Val knows it’s not as well.
“Ummmppph,” Lucy grunts, struggling not to cry. She looks at me, eyes half shut, chin trembling, nodding as if she wants me to know it doesn’t hurt any more than getting your arm caught in a locker door by a crazy living dead psychopath should.
“Val,” I try, moving closer to Lucy if only to let her know I’m still here. “Leave her out of it. It’s us you want.”
She ignores me, shoulders even boxier than usual in her maroon jacket. “Give me the phone, Dane.” Val’s voice is wet gravel on a cold, December day. “Do it now, or I will slice this Normal’s arm off and beat her senseless with it.”
Dane looks past Val to me. “I can’t.”
“You can,” I say. “Look at this place. It’s crawling with cell phones. You can snap her picture later.”
He shakes his head pitifully. “You don’t under-stand.”
Val smirks and leans a little harder on the door. I hear a tear and see Lucy’s jacket rip, crisp white dress shirt just a bit bloody underneath.
“Damn it,” Dane hisses, handing it over just the same. “Damn it.”
Val drops it and crushes it under a black army boot. As she focuses on her dramatic moment, I yank open the locker door and it slaps the side of her head.
Ginger gasps, but Val raises a hand as I yank Lucy out of her grasp and a little farther away from the action, just in case.
“It’s fine, Gingham,” Val says. “We’ve got all day to get her back. And we will. Just you wait and see.”
Her hair is spiky, of course, and for effect she rubs the side of it where I hit her. A few random Normals are watching, but if they’re waiting for fireworks, then they don’t know Val very well. That’s just not her style.
Not yet anyway.
A balding adult ambles over, sweaty and wearing bad shoes that make him look uneven. “Everything all right here, people?”
We all mumble and nod.
“Gingham?” he asks, recognizing only one of us.
“Yes, Mr. Frankenmeyer,” the redhead answers sweetly.
“Who are all your new friends?”
Before she can answer, Val waves a printed schedule. “I’m the new exchange student. From Sentinel City.”
“From where?” he asks, reaching for the schedule as Val subtly draws it out of reach.
Just then, the first bell of the day rings, and he looks mildly alarmed. “Well, fine, then. Run along, and don’t be late for class.”
“We won’t,” Val says in her best brown-nose voice.
Then he’s off, leaving us alone. Lucy slides out of her jacket, dumping it in the bottom of her locker and grabbing a spare she keeps on a hanger, just because she wouldn’t be her if she didn’t.
“Wait,” I mumble, looking at her arm.
“It’s fine,” she snaps, probably embarrassed at being the only soul in the cluster who’s actually able to bleed.
But I keep a firm grip just to make sure. It’s a scratch—two scratches, really, where the door hit and then where it hit again. I grab her old jacket, tearing out a strip of black lining and wrapping it around the gashes. “There.”
She looks at me, eyes red, chin a little less quivery now. “Thanks.”
“We’ll be fine, okay? We’ll get through this. You’ll get through this.”
“That’s right,” says Val, slinging an arm around my neck roughly and squeezing it just to remind me who’s boss around here. “Just one big, happy family. That’s what we’ll be today, right, gang?”
Dane smirks. “Val, the first chance we get, we’re so out of here.”
Val reaches for Lucy, but I yank her away. “What?” she says anyway. “And leave all these yummy, smelly humans here alone?”
Val levels her big, wide, crazy gaze at the commons, which is crawling with living beings, Normals, who, in less than a bite or two, could be Zerkers.
Dane stands an inch higher. “Why do you think there are two of us?”
So far, so good. Then again, this is Val we’re talking about here. She smiles. “And why do you think there are two dozen of us?”
Dane says, “Two dozen, my ass. We saw six last night, not counting the one Maddy dispatched.”
Val sneers, letting us know she was there, hiding in the shadows all along. “With your help, of course. Right, Dane?” She cuts me side eye.
I say, perhaps a little too boastfully, “I won’t need help to take you all by myself, Val.”
“I know.” She smiles. “Been there, lived through that. Which is why this time I made sure to bring my own little army with me. Or, should I say, make one while I’m here. Did I say two dozen? I might have underestimated just a smidge.”
Dane and I shoot each other panicked glances as Val nods toward the light-blue double doors at the front of the school. “Outside, just across the street, behind a bush, or in the stand of palm trees that line the PE field, are my friends. Like Gingham, here, and her friends too.”
Gingham looks back at me as if we’re equal or something.
Behind her, the random Zerkers Val let come to school with her chortle and snort and try to play Normal. They fail miserably.
I smile back, imagining how it would feel to shove Gingham’s hair down her throat.
Dane says, “No way you’ve turned that many Zerkers already.”
“You know how this works,” she purrs, clearly in her glory. Clearly having thought this through on a million different lonely nights while pacing in her cage back at Sentinel City. “I follow Maddy here into town a few nights ago and, just my luck, I find a few unfortunate joggers to turn. Once they’re sentient, they bite two friends, and they bite two friends—a
nd pretty soon good-bye, Seagull Shores, hello, Zerker Central.”
Dane keeps his smile fixed on, but as the next bell rings and Lucy leads us to her homeroom, I can see little cracks in his armor. The way he walks too quickly, talks too loud. He’s panicking, like me. He just doesn’t know how to cover it as well.
Or maybe it’s just never happened to him before.
The classroom is mostly empty, and the teacher is a young guy, handsome in a preppy way, tall and thin, wearing khakis and a pink Oxford shirt, sleeves rolled up. His face is kind and you can tell he was a jock or at least popular as a younger dude. It’s easy to picture that’s how Stamp would have looked someday.
That is, if I had never come along.
He smiles as we stumble in. “Whoa there,” he says good-naturedly.
We slump into seats like the Technicolor street punks in the Charles Bronson Death Wish movie.
“Lots of new students today, huh, Lucy? And, Gingham, aren’t you supposed to be in Mrs. Hammersmith’s homeroom?”
Gingham puts her feet up on the seat in front of her and sighs.
The teacher laughs a little nervously, but it’s clear he’s waiting for an answer.
To give him one, Val says, “I’m an exchange student, and Gingham is my student aide for today.”
The guy is clearly cool, far from dumb. But again, Val has this effect on people. Even if you don’t know what she is, you know this: she has nothing to lose and won’t mind taking you down with her when she implodes.
“Uh, okay,” he stammers, looking quickly around the room as if we’re supposed to cheer him on or something. “Well, is this some new protocol? You’re not my first exchange student, but you’re the first one to get her own student aide. You must really rate.”
Finally, the recognition Val’s been waiting for. “Yes, yes, I do.” Her tone is all, I’m bored with this. Get on with it.
He cocks his head.
She stares right back at him.
Finally, he blinks and shrugs. “Okay,” he says, stretching the word out. “Well, I assume you have a class schedule, so if you’ll walk it up here, I’ll—”
“Gingham will bring it.”
Suddenly his face is severe, his voice going a few octaves lower as the rest of the class watches. “You’ll bring it, Miss . . . ?”
She doesn’t answer, at least not right away. She stares back at him, crazy eyes going several notches crazier.
He doesn’t back down. I’ll give the dude that. He just stands there, hand out, not trembling, just waiting.
Suddenly Val stands up, all five feet nothing of her, and slinks toward the teacher.
He leans against his lectern, hand still out as she rises on tippy toes to whisper something in his ear.
Dane nudges me and nods toward the girl’s purse next to me.
I nod and reach in, looking for a cell phone. I eventually find it on her desk, next to her notebook. Witch!
Val turns without another word and sits down. We don’t hear from the teacher for the rest of homeroom. Not even to call roll. Which is kind of nice because Dane and I aren’t in this class either.
Chapter 33
Zombie Skip Day
It’s like that.
All damn day.
Val never lets us out of her sight. It’s like being trapped, with no bars or wires, no locks or keys, just her steely-eyed stare and stupid spiky hair. Poor, Normal Lucy’s a foot or two away, in constant danger of being bitten and turned into the living dead.
And not the good kind.
But it’s not only Lucy. In every classroom, flesh-and-blood kids in their ill-fitting uniforms watch us, but thanks to Val, they’re too afraid to ask about us. And they’re warm and full of blood and brains and meat, all a Zerker could ask for.
I imagine us getting up every few seconds, Dane and I, and tearing Val limb from limb, but it wouldn’t even matter. Whatever she’s done, however she’s done it, she has her Zerker lackeys trained. Even if we could get Val alone, by the time we turned around, a jawbone in each hand, half the class would be Zerker-izing right before our very eyes.
What makes my undead blood boil isn’t so much the threat of Seagull Shores turning into the Prep School of the Living Dead, although it should, but that Val knows the trap she’s laid. She knows its brilliance and is enjoying every last minute of it.
She’ll sit there, tapping her fingers on her desk, Lucy in the middle and Gingham on the other side: the reanimated bookends from hell. And any second, on a whim, she could bite her, or straight-up punch a hole in the side of her head.
Meanwhile, she’s being sly with her big eyes scanning the room every 0.00017 seconds. Every time I’m close to snagging a cell phone, Gingham calls me out. Or Val catches me outright.
The bell rings, and I look at the clock on the wall behind the silent teacher: 10:15. It must be third period. Chairs squeak, and the Normal children can’t get out of class fast enough. Meanwhile, Dane and I stick close together, watching as Gingham wrenches Lucy out of her chair and Val follows closely.
“The hell?” I finally ask Dane in the halls, just out of earshot of a gaggle of Normals stringing by, eager to get clear of our motley crew.
“What else can we do?” he grunts, bumping into everybody he can, the world’s worst pickpocket hunting for a cell phone, and still coming up empty-handed. “She’s got Lucy, and every other kid in this school, on her own personal lunch menu.”
I groan and follow Val obediently.
Lucy looks over her shoulder at me, offering a weak smile.
I send one back, but I don’t know how long I can keep faking that I’ve got this, that it’s all under control. That I know what the hell I’m doing.
I just want to run away from all this, the Eliminator in my hand, slicing off Zerker heads all the way back to Stamp. I want to forget about Lucy and the kids at Seagull Shores and everyone I don’t know and never will and just turn into a Wonder Woman head-blitzing zombie badass, but I can’t. Every time Gingham yanks Lucy around, I know I can’t.
And I hope Stamp understands that. If he can.
If he’s still around to understand anything.
I keep my pen handy, just looking for a chance to strike. One jolt from that sucker, and she’s out like a light and maybe, just maybe, I can get to Gingham before she bites Lucy or anyone else. But it’s Val we’re talking about here, and she’s quick and slick. Every period, it seems, there are more of them around her.
It’s not only Gingham anymore but a guy or two as well, a few random girls with yellow eyes and vacant expressions. Every class we walk into, more and more have turned. But it doesn’t work like that. They take time to be functioning. To get dressed in maroon jackets and skinny little ties, crooked though they may be. You don’t just bite someone in third period and by fifth they’re solving quadratic equations. No, uh-uh.
“She’s been at this for a while,” Dane whispers as we walk into Chorus, Lucy’s next class. “She—” He stops in the doorway.
Val shoves him hard, but the teacher doesn’t stop her. Doesn’t even quake at the sudden burst of violence. Because the teacher’s one of hers—one of them. Now I know why Dane never finished his sentence.
“Mr. Phillips?” Lucy asks, eyes wide.
Inside, a dozen kids, a quarter of them undead, sit quietly. The living ones are quivering; the undead ones are literally licking their chops.
“Screw this,” I shout, pulling Lucy out of the class.
She leaps along with a yip and emerges on the other side of the door. I turn and see Val’s double-wide crazy eyes until the door shuts, obliterating that god-awful image of her stupid spiky hair I want to mow down with my own teeth.
Dane is right behind me but not following.
“Dane,” I shout, heading for the front office, as far away as I can go.
He nods, waving me ahead. “I’ll be right there.”
I stumble backward. Lucy, at my side, keeps me steady as I watch Dane launch i
nto Gingham, who stands just outside the closed Chorus room door. Even from two classrooms away, I can hear something crack.
Something big or at least pretty important-sounding.
Chapter 34
All That and a Bag of Chips
Where are we going?” Lucy asks, out of breath.
I hear Dane’s sloppy footsteps as he races to catch up.
“The office, teacher’s lounge, whatever. Somewhere with a phone. Somewhere we can call 911!”
Lucy inches forward on her flesh-and-blood Normal legs. “But last night you said the cops wouldn’t believe us.”
“They won’t believe this,” I say, passing the board with all the Missing posters on it as Dane finally catches up. “But we’ll call in a bomb threat or something. All we need are warm bodies.”
“And their guns,” Dane grunts, stumbling beside us.
He’s not alone.
Val is at his back, some of her new Zerker buddies along for the ride. Minus Gingham, of course.
We stand just outside the office, never sure if she’s going to bite Lucy or sic the Zerkers on us but ready for anything and nothing all at once.
Val’s smile is infuriating. If I didn’t think her Zerker goons would devour Lucy in the time it takes me to crack my knuckles, I’d love nothing more than to wipe that smile right off her face. Literally.
“Here. Let me help!” She cracks open a glass box on the wall next to her and slams down the fire alarm. Instantly, the commons fill with noise and, a few seconds later, bodies, not all of them living.
The office door swings open, and secretaries, principals, assistant principals, and counselors flee, trudging past us toward the front doors. Kids follow them: office aides, some alive, some not.
Those who are not stand in front of the office door, blocking it.
Val joins them, beaming that triumphant smile.
“What the . . .” Dane murmurs, watching them flood by, too many yellow eyes to count. He shakes his head. “Holy hell.”
“Here.” I haul him inside the teacher’s lounge, figuring there’s gotta be a phone or two in there.
A Living Dead Love Story Series Page 60
