A Living Dead Love Story Series

by Rusty Fischer

  Dane stops at a classroom, shoving the door wide open. Inside, the chairs are overturned, a bloody handprint on the chalkboard. He turns back and looks at me, then at Lucy.

  She looks pale, drained, scared in a way she didn’t back in the teacher’s lounge, scrapping with Gingham like a straight-up Sentinel wannabe.

  “We’re about to find out,” I say, grabbing her sleeve and guiding her toward the student parking lot.

  It’s a mess of open car doors and bloody sneakers and purses. Her car is there, right up front, pristine and waiting, as if we were the only ones still stuck inside when everyone else got out. We get inside, finding our familiar seats by now: Dane in the back, me riding shotgun.

  Lucy turns the key and, after all that’s gone wrong, after all we’ve screwed up, I’m surprised the car actually starts. We pull out of the lot, dodging vehicles parked every which way: on the school lawn, out in the street, windows broken, one hood up as if somebody stopped to check the oil in the middle of a zombie infestation.

  “Jesus,” Lucy says, both hands on the wheel as she goes as fast as possible toward the house on Lumpfish Lane. “Jesus.”

  A tan, drab van passes us going about twice as fast, in the opposite direction, nearly plowing into the Go, Seagull Shores Spartans! sign across from the school.

  Dane and I look at each other.

  Sentinels.

  Two more vans race by, careening after the first, tinted windows unable to hide the grim, gray faces.

  “But if Val crushed your phone, who called?”

  “Don’t look at me,” Dane says, favoring his arm. “Maybe Courtney got through.”

  “Maybe,” Lucy mumbles, turning off the main drag toward the house. “Maybe one of the cops around here is a Sleeper too.”

  Dane barely notices. “A what?”

  “Forget it,” we say at the same time.

  “Look at this place,” Dane adds. “It’s a war zone. Hell, they could have been watching CNN in the day room back in Sentinel City and seen it live and in person.”

  “Lucy,” I say through gritted teeth, nudging her shoulder. “Let’s go. Pick it up.”

  I picture Stamp, wondering if we’re too late. Wondering if we were too late by second period or even when Val walked us into homeroom when the day started.

  Lucy slides onto a sidewalk to avoid an overturned ambulance and says, just as grittily, “I’m trying!”

  I attempt to see the world, her world, through her eyes. But I can’t. It’s pretty screwed for both of us. Despite being a Sleeper, is this her first real encounter, up close and personal, with the living dead? “Okay.” I pat her rigid arm. “Okay, I know you are.”

  We see the first Zerkers in a shopping center, feeding on . . . something. Two of them wear school uniforms; one of them looks like a housewife.

  Lucy slows down while I shoot Dane a look.

  He quickly shakes his head.

  “Keep going,” I urge, looking away.

  She flashes panic. “But shouldn’t we help?”

  “Whatever they’re feeding on,” Dane explains from the backseat, “was done the minute they bit into it. It’s too late for them. It might not be for our friends. Please.”

  But it is. Too late for them, I mean.

  After drifting through a town full of overturned cop cars and fog, fire, and steam, Zerkers shuffling and occasionally feeding, we pull up in front of the house on Lumpfish Lane.

  There’s no one here but a few Sentinels.

  “Anything?” Dane asks, going to the nearest one. It’s amazing, and a little disturbing, how quickly he slides back into Sentinel mode.

  I don’t wait to hear an answer, but I can sense, as I walk past them into the living room, what he’s saying. And it isn’t good.

  Zerker blood is everywhere, but I also see Tasers on the floor, shoulder pads torn in two, scenes from an epic battle between the good zombies and the bad. How long the Sentinels were here, I can’t say, but it doesn’t look like they all made it out re-alive.

  I stomp upstairs, and it’s more of the same in every room. Shattered glass, broken closet doors, blood and more blood—all black. I look everywhere twice, even under the kitchen sink, and there’s nothing, nobody anywhere.

  I drift downstairs, empty inside. To think of Stamp, spending his last minutes alone, without me or even Dane at his side. For better or worse, we’re all he’s ever known of the afterlife. And we let him down, all the way. This whole time, he was the bait, not us. If I’d been smarter, if I’d thought a little more about someone other than myself . . .

  How long did he hold out before they ganged up on him, tearing him apart or feasting on his flesh or toying with him, Courtney by his side, trying her best but doomed from the start?

  Why did we go to school and leave them here to their fate? Why couldn’t we have just thought a little more, planned it out? Maybe if Dane and I hadn’t been still ticked off over what happened back at Sentinel City, we would have. I’d hate to think that Stamp got the shaft again, the soggy corner in this limp love triangle, just because we wanted to see who could find Val the fastest.

  Dane is waiting for me at the foot of the stairs, Lucy at his side. They look up at me expectantly, and halfway down I realize they’re waiting on me for some news, any news. I shake my head and keep walking past them, toward the sliding glass doors. Shattered, half open, splattered with still-drying black goo.

  I just need a minute away from people, the living and the dead.

  There is movement out in front of the house, a car or truck or van screeching to a halt like something in the bad B movie that is our afterlife. Doors slamming, boots clomping, voices shouting. I ignore it and keep walking until I hear Vera’s voice.

  And then this: breathing.

  I turn, expecting her to be yelling at Lucy or Lucy yelling at her, a real Sleepers versus Keepers catfight going down. Instead I see Dad, lab coat clean, back straight, moustache combed, a white beret atop his balding head.

  A white beret? Dad? He swore he’d never wear one. So what now? I mean, they don’t exactly hand out berets for nothing. Especially to a guy who the Elders think let a Zerker escape in the first place.

  “Maddy!” He sees me, comes running, spryer than ever, a healthy, strong human.

  Mortal.

  He smells like hotel room soap and drug store cologne and gas station coffee, and I can’t get enough as I nuzzle into his chest. God knows I can’t cry, but he cries enough for both of us.

  He pushes me away, a first, and looks at me. Really looks at me, gripping my shoulders, kind of shaking me for emphasis each time he wants to make a point. “When Vera came to ZED to get me, when she told me what had happened here, what was going on, I thought . . . I thought I’d never see you again. Again.”

  We laugh, the sound of naked relief. It seems like every few months, Dad and I are thrown into some ordeal where we think we’re never going to see each other again. Again!

  Then some of his words cut through the nervous laughter.

  “Vera? Came to ZED?”

  He nods emphatically, taking his hands off my shoulders to straighten his stiff white beret. It’s more off-white, I notice now, like his long lab coat.

  I look to Vera, rigid in her own blue beret, her voice neither kind nor judgmental, merely factual. A zombie Spock without the ears. “When Lucy told me you were here in Seagull Shores with Stamp, I thought we’d have more time. I thought maybe your dad could help somehow, knowing Val the way he did from his studies. I didn’t think she’d move so fast.”

  Behind her, Dane clears his throat. “None of us did.”

  Next to him, Lucy nods grimly. “We wouldn’t have left them here otherwise.”

  Vera ignores them, even her teacher’s pet, Lucy, and looks at me. “I’m so sorry, Maddy.” She doffs her trademark light-blue beret and troubles it in a circular motion, like a Frisbee, in her cement-gray fingers.

  “Don’t apologize to me,” I say, staring into her eyes
. “Apologize to—”

  “Stamp!”

  They all say it at the same time. Dane. Lucy. Dad.

  I turn and see Stamp and Courtney lurching out of the canal. Dripping wet, seaweed and algae falling off them in clumps, little fish flopping at their feet as they clamber onto the dock behind the house.

  Never have they looked more like the living dead, rising from the sea, water streaming off them, hair wet, clothes sticking to their gray skin. They look at one another, brush seaweed off each other’s shoulders.

  We run across the patio, onto the grass, and down to the dock.

  “What took you guys so long?” Stamp asks, smiling, then clearly remembering and frowning, whisking water from one eyelid. “And where did all those Zerkers go?”

  Epilogue

  Bon Voyage

  The Sentinels come, and the Sentinels go. They move around silently, diligently, like giant black ants. Body bags line the back of drab, tan vans just as they did in Barracuda Bay, in Orlando, in every town I’ve ever passed through since I became the living dead.

  Val was right about another thing, I suppose. Everywhere I go, everyone I meet, every friend I make or town I settle into, I put the folks I love in danger. Even random citizens like the guy who sold me grape soda at the Stop N Go or Gingham and her wannabe mean girl friends—their life spans are cut short simply because they popped into my life, if only for a few seconds.

  I’m straight-up bad news, as if the Grim Reaper is my shadow or something.

  What would Seagull Shores look like right now if I hadn’t decided willy-nilly to set up shop here for a few days? Last week at this time it was just another random, generic, seaside beach town: souvenir shops and snow cone stands and surfboard street signs and a town square that looked like something out of a Norman Rockwell painting.

  Now it’s smoking and sirening—just another gutted city, like Barracuda Bay before it. And who knows what will come next? Who knows how many Zerkers got away this time? Or how many Val sent away to do her dirty work, spreading her hate and virus and gurgling black blood?

  A dozen? Two dozen? Three?

  I guess we won’t know until the Missing signs start showing up in the next few days or, depending on her master plan, weeks. I shake my head and watch the last Sentinel drag the last body bag full of Zerkers out the front door of the house on Lumpfish Lane.

  Dad is back in his element, running the show pretty much. There are jars of Zerker blood samples to precisely fill and label. I think he’s happier than ever. Not about the death and destruction, obviously, but the chance to put his mind to work to stop this from happening the next time or the next or the next. He may have lost a daughter to the living dead, but he’s found his calling.

  He catches me looking, starts to move toward me, maybe give me a hug or a smooch or a high five, something. But he looks at the sample jars and bags, big black glove on each hand dripping with stuff, and he stops, shrugs, and turns back to his work.

  I chuckle to myself. I guess seeing him happy is better than a hug anyway, right?

  Dane is back in uniform but not a school uniform this time. His sleek black shoulder pads gleam as he fishes out Zerker body parts from the swimming pool, Courtney at his side, Stamp at hers. They, too, work with purpose or, in Stamp’s case at least, pleasure. Pleasure at being included, at being wanted, at being necessary.

  Ever since they spent an entire school day clinging to the bottom of the dock, hiding from the Zerkers that Stamp spotted from his vantage point upstairs, he doesn’t seem to mind having her as his babysitter, and she doesn’t seem to mind being one.

  He splashes Courtney with the pool skimmer and, where just a few days ago she might have Tased him without even thinking twice, now she snorts and nudges him gently in the ribs.

  Dane, looking only mildly perturbed, tells them both, “Grow up.” But even so, it’s a playful growl, like when he used to tell me and Chloe the same thing back in Barracuda Bay. Dane told me he loved me maybe five times in our brief year or so together. Six, tops. But I felt like every time he growled at me to grow up, he was kinda saying it then too.

  From the patio, I look into the house. The Sentinels are all gone, but one Keeper remains. And a Sleeper, to boot. Vera and Lucy confer in the kitchen, plotting their next move, speaking softly so the rest of us don’t hear. I watch, useless, still Vanished, a nobody to everybody.

  I see Lucy’s messenger bag, crumpled on the floor, forgotten, slumped against the bottom of the kitchen counter. Inside is, basically, her life: wallet, cash, credit card, ID, iPad that’s not an iPad, a couple of Living with the Living Dead gag books, a barrette or two, protein bars, probably one of her addictive caffeine drinks. Next to Vera, she looks so young and ambitious, so eager to get on with her next assignment or help out here. So deadly serious about assisting the living dead.

  And Vera, beret spiffy on her shaven dome, dark eyes studying a map or something on the kitchen counter, so eager for an apt pupil.

  The kind I never was and now will never be. I walk closer, and only Lucy looks up, eyes crinkling in a soft smile. She sends me a curt nod before returning her attention to whatever Vera is pointing at.

  I reach down and pick up the messenger bag. It occurs to me that I’m still in my school uniform, and that feels kind of right.

  I slide the strap under my maroon lapel and wedge the bag part into the small of my back so it looks as inconspicuous as possible. I don’t even know why I bother. As I back out of the living room, away from the kitchen, past Dad and his symphony of gross-filled jars, nobody looks up, nobody questions, nobody dares.

  Only Stamp, waving the pool skimmer like a second hand, notices me. “Hi, Maddy. Wanna look for fingers in the pool with us?”

  “Gosh, I’d love to, but . . .”

  Dane focuses on me for a hot second. “But what?”

  I turn away, toward the sailboat I’ve been studying ever since Stamp and Courtney rose from the canal like creatures from the black lagoon. “But . . . I’m leaving.”

  Dane looks into the house, as if maybe he wants to alert Vera or something. “You can’t just leave,” he says, dragging an arm out of the pool and rolling down his black sleeve.

  “Why not?”

  He blinks twice.

  I don’t move. “I’m supposed to be long gone already, so this just makes it official.”

  He kind of can’t argue with that.

  Courtney is more specific. “But where would you go?” I look at her to see if she’s being pissy, as in, Catch you later, reanimator. But her head is cocked, eyes expectant.

  “I have no idea.” I chuckle. “Left, I guess.”

  She snorts. “You mean north?”

  I shrug and offer her a smile, since it’s probably the last time I’ll ever see her. “Sure, whatever.”

  I step forward, from the pool deck to the grass that leads down a sloping hill toward the dock. It’s still spotted with dead or dying crabs and minnows and crunchy, dried seaweed from their underwater hideout.

  The sailboat rocks gently in the canal, drifting back and forth against three white buoys tied to the dock. I hear footsteps behind me as I quickly slide the messenger bag under a seat cushion in the boat.

  When I turn, Stamp is on the dock, his lanky body leaning against a piling. He wanted to wear Dane’s school jacket after we dried him off, so he looks vaguely sporty, like something out of an ’80s prep school movie starring Rob Lowe and Phoebe Cates.

  Dane and Courtney stand just behind him, heavy zombie feet sinking into the tall grass.

  “Maddy?” Stamp says. There’s a look in his eyes I’ve never seen before, not even when he was a Normal. “I thought . . . you said we were a team.”

  “We are, buddy,” I lie, stepping off the boat. I hug him, but he clings to the piling. “Hug me back right now,” I say, pulling him forward. “Or you’ll regret it later.”

  He nearly crushes me, which is saying something considering I just punched my way through a
vending machine to save Dane.

  He looks away as we part.

  “How did you know to hide in the water?” I ask.

  He tries not to smile, but he’s never been very good at being humble. “Your dad told me to protect you, right?”

  I wait for him to go on, then realize he’s actually waiting for an answer, so I nod quickly.

  “Well, when I saw all those Zerkers coming down our street, I knew the only way to protect you was to stay alive. And the only way to stay alive was to hide. And the only place to hide was”—he risks a cautious look over the side of the dock—“down there.”

  I hug him once more. “That’s good thinking, Stamp.”

  He doesn’t quite push me away, just sort of squirms out of my grip, like a teenager who’s getting too old to hug his mom in front of the other kids when she drops him off at the mall. I can’t say I blame him. “Yeah, well, now you’re here and you’re leaving, so I can’t protect you anymore.”

  I smile and whisper in his ear, “Look around you, Stamp. There are lots of people to protect around here.”

  He does. He looks around at the people gathered near the dock. Only when I see a smile tickle the corner of his lips do I back away. Slowly but not quite reluctantly, I get back in the boat.

  I’m there when he’s done looking around and tries to find me.

  Courtney arrives gently at Stamp’s side. For once, I’m grateful for her nosiness, even her timing. “She’ll be back,” she says to him softly while looking at me. “She just . . . She just doesn’t want to cause any more trouble right now.”

  Dane flashes her a withering look, but I smile. I couldn’t have put it any better myself.

  Stamp shakes his head. “But your dad said . . . Your dad said that I—”

  “It’s okay, Stamp.” Dad appears, black gloves sticking out of one of his lab coat pockets. “You did exactly what I asked you to do.”

  This is too much for him. “I did?”

  Dad puts an arm around Stamp’s shoulder, which is not so easy since he’s shorter than him. “Look at her, my boy. Why, she’s better than ever.”