Reanimated Readz

by Rusty Fischer

  “Because you paid me to!” I say. “I’ve got your money in my back pocket, fingerprints all over it.”

  Brock doesn’t even miss a beat. It’s as if he’s had this planned all along. “Yeah, creep. I admit it: I paid you to stay away from her.”

  I look from Brock to Ryan, waiting for one of them to crack a smile, help me up, and buy me a beer. Yeah, like that’s going to happen.

  “Is…is…that true, Randall?”

  The voice is startling, and unexpected. I turn—we all turn—to see Brandy standing on her front porch, shotgun in hand, pointed right at me.

  “Of course it isn’t,” I insist.

  She shakes her head, black curls spilling over the shoulders of her baby-doll T-shirt. “Now it all makes sense.” Her voice is sad, her eyes duller than usual, her expression placid, as if she’s used to being disappointed. “That’s why you showed up today, at the Bagel Barn, right out of the blue.”

  “No! Honest, Brandy, that’s not it.”

  “Get him, Brandy!” Brock shouts, inching forward. “Get that no-good zombie! You know you want to!”

  Brock’s voice shocks us all. It’s high-pitched and hysterical, a voice that says merely arresting a zombie isn’t going to be good enough. I wish I hadn’t heard voices like it several times over the last year, but it happens.

  All that sadness and fear, all that pent-up rage and survivor’s guilt, just comes spilling out all of a sudden. On the street, in the Slushee line, at the bank, random strangers will just explode for no reason, simply because there’s a zombie in their midst and they’ve had enough of playing polite.

  I get it. I understand. It’s the cost of living among the living, I guess.

  “Get up!” Brock says, kicking my feet.

  “Brock.” Ryan steps forward and waves a hand to get him to back up a bit. “Careful, bro. We have to do this right. Laws are laws, even if they’re zombie laws.”

  Sure, he’s saying the right words, but his voice isn’t much more than a sneer.

  “He’s stalking Brandy, Ryan. What else do you need to know?”

  Brandy looks from me to Brock. Her face does that slow processing thing like it did at the Bagel Barn after I made my “brains” joke.

  “But why tonight, Brock?” she asks, shotgun still aimed squarely at my head. “I haven’t seen Randall since they kicked him out of school a few months back. Why all of a sudden is he showing up at my work, and then…in the tree outside my bedroom? On the same night you happen to show up with one of the Reanimation Patrol dudes. Hi, Ryan, by the way.”

  “Hi, Brandy.”

  “I came by earlier, to check on you,” Brock lies. “And…and…I saw Randall up in the tree.”

  Brandy’s moving a little faster now. “So you left and went to get Ryan? That’s your first thought as a boyfriend? Not to warn me, not to sneak me and Mom out the back door? To go get your football buddy and come back an hour or so later.”

  Suddenly, she aims the shotgun down an inch. It’s still in blowing-a-hole-through-the-nearest-zombie range, but at least this way I’ll be able to keep my nose.

  I wait for Ryan to put two and two together—he was in Honors classes, before I left school for good—but from the way he avoids Brandy’s eyes, I can tell: he’s in on it. Has been from the minute Brock walked in my door, three bills in his pocket, so new they barely looked folded.

  They probably had this planned from the get-go. For whatever reason, Brock wanted me gone and ever since the plague passed and zombies who’d lived past their “violent stage” were proven harmless, this was his only way—his only legal way—of doing it.

  “Why, Brock?” I ask. I figure he owes me that much, an explanation at least. “Why me? Why now?”

  “Why any of you?” he says, face going all weasely again as he stands there, beady-eyed and nostrils flaring. “You zombies got my mother, my brother, my grammy. Why not you, Randall? Why not now?”

  Brandy pouts and lowers her gun another inch. “They got my dad, too, Brock. And they got Randall’s parents, too. Both of them. And his little sister, right, Randall? And Ryan’s brother, too. They got a lot of us, Brock. They were a lot of us. This here shotgun’s the same one I used to put my dad down. And don’t think I won’t put you down, too.”

  “Me?” Brock asks. I look up and, sure enough, she’s got the gun pointed at Brock now. I try to hide my smile, fail, then stop trying.

  “Brandy,” Ryan urges, putting on his best Official Representative of the Reanimation Patrol voice. “Put it down.”

  “I will just as soon as you’re off my property, Ryan. And you, too, Brock. Go. I’m not in any danger. And if I am,” she hoists the shotgun just a little too high, “I’ll take care of it my own damn self—”

  Brock sees what I do—the shotgun no longer pointed at his head—and launches himself over me and into Brandy, line-driving her into the front yard and toppling a garden gnome on her mom’s pathetic little postage-stamp yard. She lands with an ugly oomph sound. Something snaps, and I don’t think it’s this year’s crop of okra.

  “Now, Ryan!” Brock screams in that high, nasal, panicky voice. “Get him!”

  Ryan inches forward, pulling a Taser from his gun belt. The Reanimation Patrol is full of kids, mostly. Guys and a few girls my age, Ryan’s age, who lost somebody we loved in the 2018 Infestation and are looking to settle the score. Of course, they wouldn’t accept me. Reanimation Patrol is humans only.

  They don’t let them have real guns, anymore, on account of what happened with one of the Patrollers out in Reno. Found a nest of zombies, unloaded his pistol, reloaded, unloaded it again and kept shooting until the blood dried.

  That’s just it: zombies don’t bleed. It was a bunch of kids in zombie masks, camping out, scaring each other on a dare. Ever since then, it’s been Tasers.

  But the end game is the same for me. If Ryan tases me, I’m out. Done, over. Not dead, but I might as well be. While I’m zonked out from the overdose of electrodes, they’ll take me to Containment, sentence me, and in a year I’ll be just one of the dozens of zombies executed every March 12th, the anniversary of the Beaver Falls Plague.

  I can’t let that happen. Not when I haven’t done anything wrong. I go to stand and Ryan inches closer, zapping a little trigger on the side of his weapon so I can see—so that I can almost feel—the electricity pop between the two pinpoint chargers at the top.

  I flinch and fall back down, scrambling away. This isn’t how this gig was supposed to go at all.

  He closes in, flicking the trigger, and every time, the spit of sparks lights up his pale blue eyes. They’re happy. Brock is up now, foot on Brandy’s throat, cheering Ryan on from the sidelines like the cheerleader Brandy was so proud of becoming.

  “Come on, dude,” he cries, like this is some kind of pep rally before the big game. “Let’s do this. What are you waiting for—?”

  A shot rings out, shattering Brock’s headlight. The yard goes a little darker and I turn, still scrambling, figuring Brandy got off a round after all. But it’s not Brandy. Her mom, curlers, slippers, housecoat, and all, fills the doorway. Smoke from a single shotgun barrel curls into the dark night sky.

  “What the hell?” Ryan asks, dropping the Taser instinctively.

  I leap forward and pick it up before he can change his mind, or realize what he’s done.

  “What, you didn’t see the sign?” Brandy’s mom asks, pointing over her shoulder to the yard, where a cheap plastic sign says the same thing as Ryan’s door frame: Official Representative of the Reanimation Patrol.

  I grin. I thought it was just there as a precaution, kind of like one of those “This is house is secured by video monitoring” signs when you know good and well it isn’t.

  “Section 9.872 of the Reanimated Patrol Code says that when zombies and humans are both in danger at the same time, it’s appropriate—and legal—to defend human and/or reanimated persons alike. So step off, sonny. The real cops are on the way.”
/>   Ryan looks physically hurt by the betrayal. “But…but…” he sputters. “We’re on the same side.”

  Brandy’s mom clucks, using the smoking end of her shotgun to nudge Brock away from her daughter. “You and I may both be human, kid, but we’re far from being on the same side.”

  I get up, help Brandy get up, and thank her mom.

  She smirks, a twenty-year-older version of Brandy. “Don’t thank me ’til they’re gone, kid.”

  Later, when they’ve left, when the cops have come and gone, when I’ve filed a report and am sitting at Brandy’s kitchen table, the scent of a thousand cheesy casseroles filling the air, I thank her again.

  “You’re not very good at this private detective thing, are you kid?” she asks.

  Brandy smacks her shoulder playfully from the next chair over. I shake my head, suddenly getting an idea. “You know, come to think of it, I could use some backup from time to time. How about you and Brandy joining me?”

  The mom scoffs, but Brandy perks up. “Joining you?”

  “Private EyeZ could use another detective.” I nod. “Or two,” I say, smiling at her mom. “I mean, it’d be even better if I had a female detective to go where a guy can’t.”

  “Or a zombie can’t,” her mother reminds me.

  I nod again. “And it wouldn’t hurt if that female detective knew her way around a shotgun or two.”

  Brandy looks at her mom for approval, and Mrs. Hutchins shrugs indifferently. I seize the opportunity, imagine my lonely office filled with the likes—the life force—of Brandy Hutchins a few days a week.

  “I can’t pay much, but….” I fish the hundred-dollar bills out of my pocket and slide them across the desk. “The sign-on bonus isn’t too bad.”

  The Zombie Vote

  A Reanimated Readz Story

  By

  Rusty Fischer

  “Yeah, Tanner, but you can’t say that. Out loud. To anyone else but me. You know that, right?”

  “Why not?” I ask. “He can’t. I mean, it’s a proven fact: zombies can’t read, so….”

  “Because of people like him, Tanner. I’m not quite sure why you’re not getting that yet. People. Like. The. Zombie. You’re not going to get elected by putting him down. Period. You have to remember the zombie vote.”

  Remember it? How can I forget it?

  Unsteady on my heels, which I’m not really used to wearing, I inch past Brody to the heavy violet curtains that currently cover the stage. (Why are all high school auditorium curtains purple? Tell me! Why?) If you angle yourself just right, and Brody’s not trying to weasel in right next to you, which he usually is because he’s that kind of guy, you can see through a slit in the last curtain out to the auditorium.

  “It’s standing room only,” I say, turning back to him.

  Brody is tall, angular, sharp, and even more so in his tailored navy blazer and pleated khaki slacks. He rolls his big brown eyes and says, “It’s the last debate before the election tomorrow. What’d you think everyone was gonna do? Stay home and knit?”

  Kinda, I think but don’t say.

  There is a drink station set up backstage, just for the candidates. It looks a lot like what a fancy hotel might have at a continental breakfast. Coffee, sugar cubes, Red Bull, mineral water in blue bottles—that kind of thing.

  I’m not really thirsty, but they never give anything away at crummy Hillcrest High so I saunter over and grab a long silver can of fancy-looking iced coffee from a big metal bowl filled with crushed ice.

  “That’s gonna make you wanna pee,” Brody reminds me, clutching his clipboard to his chest and wagging a finger.

  “I won’t drink it all,” I say, hating the fact that I have to explain anything, to anyone, period—about peeing or otherwise. “Or maybe I will,” I add as an aside.

  Brody catches it, like he catches everything. “I’ll chalk that up to nerves, Tanner B. Simpson.”

  I roll my eyes and return to the slit in the curtain. The crowd is getting restless. I wish the administration would get started already. Every minute they spend waiting—and blaming us—is one more minute the candidates for class president will have to spend working really, really hard to get them back.

  You don’t cram twelve hundred students into an auditorium at the end of the day and then not get up on stage and tell jokes or toss beads into the crowd or something to keep them occupied.

  Don’t the clowns who run this school know anything about crowd control?

  “All the zombies showed,” Brody points out unnecessarily, inching a long finger into the fold of curtain and sliding it open an extra half-inch so we can both see the bad news at the same time. “That’s not good.”

  “Well, this is the first year they’ve been allowed to have a candidate,” I remind him—not that he needs it. “Of course they showed.”

  He frowns, peppering me with his minty breath. “I just thought, you know, since it always takes them so long to get to the bus, they’d let them go early like usual.”

  I nod, picturing a zombie-free gym for the debate. “That would have been nice.”

  I follow his gaze to the back half of the auditorium, top upper left. The zombies sit together, wearing their mandatory green jackets with yellow stripes down the sleeves.

  When the government passed the Reanimation Reform School Act last year, and the zombies were allowed back into school, the bill came with all these restrictions. The green jackets were one. Supposedly, it’s to help teachers spot the dead from the living. You know, as if the gray skin and yellow teeth and glazed expressions and shuffling feet weren’t enough.

  I shut the curtain and pace some more. Brody follows me, pace for pace, a head taller and with those giant cricket legs of his, slowing down to keep up.

  I hear footsteps, slow and heavy, and grunt. Brody stops at my side and says, “Be nice, Tanner.”

  “Hi, Tanner,” says Calvin, my opponent for senior class president at Hillcrest High. “Good luck.”

  He sticks out a hand, and I know I should shake it because Brody and Principal Jenner and Calvin’s campaign manager, Sylvia Hecker, are all watching me to see if I’ll take it, but I just…hate…touching them, you know?

  I look down at his hand then up at Brody, who gives me six inches of eyebrows and four shades of judgmental, then back down to Calvin’s hand.

  “Thanks,” I say, brushing fingers with him slightly to keep the icy-cold feel of his dead, gray flesh down to a minimum. “Good luck.”

  He shrugs. They do that a lot. “I don’t really need it,” he says, slowly, the way they talk. His skin is taut around his high cheekbones, his eyes not quite black, but a smidge more than gray.

  I’m about to say something snarky, even though Brody is shooting me daggers from two paces, when Calvin finally finishes his sentence. “I know I have no chance of winning against someone like you anyway, Tanner.”

  I’m still wondering if this is some kind of political trick when Sylvia steps in, clipboard in tow. What’s with campaign managers and their clipboards these days? Have they never heard of tablets?

  “Don’t be so humble, Calvin,” she smarms in her smarmy way. “You have every right to be here and, as our polling indicates, you’re neck and neck.”

  Yeah, that’s the problem. There are one hundred twenty-nine zombies attending Hillcrest High and just over a thousand humans—and I’m neck and neck with the zombie? What’s wrong with this picture?

  “I wouldn’t say neck and neck exactly, Sylvia,” Brody pipes up.

  “Me either,” Calvin agrees. “Besides,” he adds in that hoarse, halting voice of his, “it’s not so important to win.”

  We all look at him as if he’s speaking gibberish. “Well,” I can’t help blurting out, “if you don’t care about winning, then…why are you running?”

  He looks at me and smiles. I try not to wince at his yellow teeth, but it’s hard—real hard. “I just thought it would be nice to show my friends they belong.”

 
Brody blinks twice and starts to practically applaud him, and I kick his shin. Sylvia brushes back her long red hair and then uses the same hand to rub Calvin’s shoulder protectively. Standing just off to the side, Principal Jenner clears his throat, gives me a kind of thumbs-up behind Sylvia’s back, and approaches the curtain.

  “Now remember, gang,” he says. He calls everybody “gang,” even when it’s just one or two of us. “The moderator will ask the questions, and Tanner, you’ll have two minutes to respond. Calvin, since by law you are allowed twice as long to do pretty much everything, you’ll have four minutes. Once the moderator’s questions are done, I’ll open the podium to the audience for the last fifteen minutes of the debate. Got it?”

  I nod nervously. The moderator’s questions don’t bother me so much; I’ve been preparing for this for weeks, maybe even months. It’s my fellow students that scare the hell out of me.

  Calvin stands next to me. I can feel the cold creeping off his skin, just like I can feel his eyes searching for mine. Staring straight at Principal Jenner’s back, I ignore him.

  The curtains open and Principal Jenner walks to the middle of the stage, just as we’d rehearsed yesterday after school. The crowd applauds politely as he introduces us.

  I walk out first, striding carefully in the black heels I wore to prom last year. I have on my favorite gray slacks and the white blouse mom got me, the one with the stiff collar to show off my pearl earrings. My hair is back, making my rectangular reading glasses the centerpiece of my face. I don’t really need them, but Brody said they made me look “presidential.”

  Again, there is scattered applause and a big cheer from my besties on the cheerleading squad and, of course, my bros on the football team. But they’re only so loud, and there’s only so many of them. By the time I’ve reached my own microphone to the left of Mr. Jenner, the crowd is silent.

  I kind of stand there, tasting the hostility in the air, trying to ignore it.

  Then Principal Jenner announces Calvin, and boom! The rafters start shaking. Kids are standing, the zombies are pounding their feet and pumping their cold gray fists into the air. The entire upper left hand corner of the auditorium is a sea of green sleeves with yellow stripes, all waving as fast as they can go.