Undead Ed
Page 1
UNDEAD
ED
Undead Ed
RAZORBILL
Published by the Penguin Group
Penguin Young Readers Group
345 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, U.S.A.
Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, U.S.A.
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Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England
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Text copyright © 2012 Rotterly Ghoulstone
Illustrations copyright © 2012 Nigel Baines
All rights reserved
ISBN: 978-1-101-59071-3
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available
Printed in the United States of America
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ALWAYS LEARNING
PEARSON
UNDEAD
ED
Rotterly Ghoulstone
ILLUSTRATED BY
Nigel Baines
An Imprint of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.
Table of Contents
Lesson 1: Find a Good Teacher
Lesson 2: Know Yourself
Lesson 3: Avoid Dying (If Possible)
Lesson 4: Take Care of Your Body
Lesson 5: Get Yourself Marked
Lesson 6: Knowing When to Run
Lesson 7: Ask a Lot of Questions
Lesson 8: Hide Well
Lesson 9: Let Other People do the Talking
Lesson 10: Never Turn Down a Free Hand
Lesson 11: Learn to Move Faster than Other Food
Lesson 12: Find Some Weird Friends
Lesson 13: When You’Re Among Kooks, Act Like One
Lesson 14: Never Bite off More than You can Chew
Lesson 15: Expect the Unexpected
Lesson 16: Flashbacks can be Useful
Lesson 17: Learn About “Unfinished Business”
Lesson 18: Face Your Fears Head-on
Lesson 19: Never Go it Alone
Lesson 20: Always Know When to Lie
The Demon Army
LESSON 1: FIND A GOOD TEACHER
My name is Ed Bagley…and I might just be your best friend. You know why? I’ll tell you. One day, the things that happened to me might just happen to you…and, if they do, you’re going to need some serious help. Well, here it is.
Forget everything you’ve ever seen or heard about werewolves, zombies, and vampires. Done that? Awesome—now, listen up…because I’m going to tell you the single most important fact you’ll ever learn:
BEING UNDEAD SUCKS
…especially if you’re a kid.
The three most miserable guys I know are all vampires, werewolves go insane really quickly, and ghouls cry all the time. Me? I’m a zombie…and that’s no picnic. Of course, I didn’t used to be like this. I used to be just like you: a normal boy from a normal school in a—well, okay—semi-normal town.
First things first—if you’re going to learn anything about the undead, you need to grasp the three BIG rules:
1) Everything dies…not just your hamster. Dying is a natural part of life (unless, like me, you’re hit by a massive truck on your thirteenth birthday—there’s nothing natural about that). You live, you die. Get over it—I did.
2) Living people don’t see or hear the dead. You know why? It’s because they don’t want to. Nobody wants a corpse for a friend. It’s logic, really—you’d be the same way. If you don’t believe me, ask yourself this simple question: if you were in a room with two other people and one of them was dead, which one would you talk to? Exactly. When you’re oozing pus and slime from a lovely variety of flesh wounds, you’d be amazed how many people will look right through you.
3) The dead have their own problems. They can get upset, they can fight with each other, and, more importantly, they can die. Yeah, that’s right—the dead can die. They just don’t do it very often.
So…I guess it’s time to tell you my story. I’ll go right back to the beginning so you can throw up in all the right places…
LESSON 2: KNOW YOURSELF
I live in a place called Mortlake. It’s a fishing town, and most folks think it’s hidden. In fact, it’s as easy to find as any other town in the world, but people tend not to see things that upset them…and Mortlake upsets people. The dead run riot here—and I’m not kidding—the place is full of zombies, vampires, ghouls, werewolves, and all the other horrors you can think of. Trust me, if it oozes slime, eats flesh, drinks blood, or chomps on bone, there’s a good chance it lives here. But I didn’t know that when I was alive.
Mortlake is a real dump. There’s a rumor that it became the way it is because, back in olden times, the people of Mortlake got into some sort of dispute with a band of local witches and the town was cursed. It’s an easy story to believe. You can tell Mortlake is cursed just by standing on the cliff and looking down: it’s all lopsided streets full of collapsing houses with crooked chimney stacks and no windows. If you want to make the place seem halfway normal, you have to stand on your head and squint.
I was thirteen years old on the day I died, and I’d lived in Mortlake all my life. I guess I was a wimpy kid: I once broke a rib by sneezing, and I’m pretty sure I’m the only person ever to cut themselves opening a packet of chips (they were salt and vinegar, too—that really hurt). Then there was the time I broke an arm in gym class, waving at a pal—or even that morning in the science lab when I got savagely beaten by the teacher’s four-year-old daughter who she’d brought from day care with a head cold.
I pretty much hated my life at school: everything except—well—except her. You know the one; I bet there’s a her in your school too.
My “her” was called Candy Lipsnicki, and she was a femme geek—my buddies said that means a “girl nerd.” I reckon I spent half my school life staring at her and the other half pretending I wasn’t staring at her. Candy had a beautiful face: it wasn’t the most beautiful face in the world, but I think it might have made the top hundred. She had curly blond hair, green eyes, and a kind of odd squint that always made it look like she was about to ask a question.
Sadly, she never asked me anything, even on the day I brought a Savage Sword of Kull comic to school and I could see she was dying to look at it.
But back to my accidents. A year before I died…this is important and I’ll explain more later if I’ve still got a jawbone…I electrocuted myself on the back of a carnival truck at the local circus. I was being an idiot, trying to get some kids from my school (including Candy) a free ride on the bumpers by
jerking around with a control panel. All of a sudden there was a flash and a sizzle; the shock went right up my left arm and practically fried my brain.
I didn’t actually die, but after the accident I would faint a lot: one minute I’d be walking along the street and the next I’d wake up back at home in bed. How creepy is that? The doctors told my folks it was a “psychological” problem, which means they didn’t have a clue what was wrong. All I know is that I had really weird dreams afterward: running around in odd places and basically trying to kill myself in a million ways, always using my left hand. Rough, huh?
Well, it gets a lot worse…
LESSON 3: AVOID DYING (IF POSSIBLE)
There was a depot about half a mile from the edge of Mortlake. Apparently, it was a “distribution warehouse” for an Internet company, whatever that actually meant. The people of Mortlake hated the place…
…and that was because of the trucks.
No one really knew why they went so fast along Outskirts Road. It was like they filled up with rocket fuel instead of gasoline before they left the gas station. My best friend’s mom always said that it was a miracle no one had been killed on the road, but the thing about miracles is that they tend to run out.
On the night I died, I was on Outskirts Road doing a school project on insect behavior. It was dark and stormy, and I was totally bored. My birthday had been the usual disaster: a big party where only five of my friends turned up and three of them wandered off to “do something fun.” Then I got a shard of paper birthday hat stuck in my eye. The party was such a bust that the rest of us went out to finish the school assignment instead.
Anyway, I decided to quit the project after a while and head to my best friend’s house. He had a PS3 in every room because his dad got compensation after an accident at the morgue. Well, I say accident…but starting a frying-pan fire in a room full of dead people seems like stupidity to me.
So I headed off to see if he was home. Now here’s where it gets a bit crazy. Just remember, if I lived it, you can read about it.
It was cold as well as wet and windy, so I was totally hoofing it through the pouring rain. Then it happened.
Running across the widest part of the road, I suddenly felt the most incredible, crippling pain shoot up my left arm. At first, I thought maybe I’d been stung by a massive wasp, but then the pain got worse and worse and worse.
Unable to move my arm, I staggered slightly and made for the far side of the road. In doing so, I failed to look where I was going and stepped through a broken grate in the middle of the road. Yeah—through it.
MAJOR fail.
I doubled up in pain, twisted my foot, and folded over like an old deck chair. As the sky emptied gallons of water on my head, I made everything worse by wriggling to get free—I jammed my ankle under the bars and wedged my shin between them and pulled what felt like a tendon in my other leg as I tried to wrench myself out.
It was no good—no matter which way I twisted and turned, my foot wouldn’t work loose.
Then came the truck.
Don’t worry, it all ends well, but in the moment it was definitely a bit messy. Looking back, I guess I did everything I could have done: I shouted out and waved my arms and stuff…but that massive eighteen-wheeler sure wasn’t stopping. It hit me head-on.
I was thrown into the air, hit a tree, and cracked like an egg on the side of a frying pan.
Did I ever mention how much I hate truck drivers?
Anyway, I know all this because I saw it. There I was, drifting away from the scene like a very thin handkerchief blowing in the breeze, farther and farther until the road became a thin gray line and the trees melted into a shimmering sea of green. The world swam away and the lights of Mortlake all bled together…
LESSON 4: TAKE CARE OF YOUR BODY
When I woke up, I found myself lying in a stinking sewer. The whole place was glowing with a strange, yellow-green wash of light…which turned out to be coming from me. I was covered from head to toe in something that might have been mud but that I strongly suspected—due to the smell—was something worse.
I felt dead.
I had been…decapitated. I know: I saw it happen. I saw my own head rolling up the road: I think it even knocked over a traffic cone. Yet here I was, full-headed—now that was weird. I’ve seen loads of movies where guys get beheaded, but I’ve never seen one where the head rolls back on again. I can’t have dreamed it, surely?
Hmm…head working, no pain. Had it been…what…SEWN back on?
Euggghhhhh.
I tried to raise a hand to my throat, but it wouldn’t budge. Nothing would. My muscles were frozen. I tried to blink, or sniff, or swallow but failed to get the slightest reaction from my body. All I could do was lie completely still with my eyes wedged open by some strange gunky stuff, observing the weirdest stage of my sad, pitiful existence.
Then…then something started to move.
My left arm, which was stretched out in front of me, twitched—once, twice, three times. After that, nothing happened for a few seconds.
I watched and waited…feeling nothing.
Then, with the speed of those very tiny ceiling spiders that leap when you try to squash them, my left hand flipped over and all four fingers clawed into the slimy cracks on the sewer floor. They wriggled a bit, hooked themselves well into the cracks, and then flexed, dragging my body toward the edge of the weedy, scum-covered bank.
There was a problem: my legs were trapped under something. This was apparently bad news for my freak arm, especially since I was starting to get back some feeling in other parts of my body.
The fingers on my left hand flexed again, but this time they dug into the cracks with such frantic force that a soft and disgustingly sloppy ripping sound echoed around the sewer. To my horror, flesh and bone tore from my shoulder and my arm slapped noisily onto the wet stone. I gasped, partly because I was shocked that I was able to breathe at all, but mostly because a disgusting green ooze had begun to pump steadily from my now-empty shoulder socket.
A terrible stench filled the sewer.
My former arm flopped around like a fish gasping for air, then seemed to realize it was free and stuck up a thumb to celebrate.
As it scrambled farther and farther away from me, I managed to cry out—a pathetic, tiny little sound that barely escaped my lips.
“Hey,” I managed, trying to get used to the sound of my own voice. “Hey! Arm? Arm! Come b-back…”
There was no reaction, but then, how could there be? It didn’t have an ear!
Fingers working madly, the arm made a break for it, eventually toppling over the edge of the bank and sliding into the filthy sewer water below. It started to swim away, circling over and over in the water in what might have been a perfectly normal front crawl were it not for the fact that it was missing an entire body beneath it.
As I looked on, the arm disappeared under an archway and was gone. I think the sight of it vanishing might have shaken me from my frozen state because I finally managed to wriggle my legs free and struggle onto my feet, stumbling around in a sort of bewildered daze as the discharge from my open wound began to slow to a steady, sickening drip.
I raised my single remaining hand to my neck, expecting to feel a line of sharp stitches, but there was nothing. It was as if my head had somehow suckered its way back onto my neck. I gagged at the thought and almost threw up.
This was the start of my new life. I was undead…and it didn’t just suck. It BLEW.
That being said, my previous existence hadn’t exactly been perfect…
FLASHBACK INTERLUDE
GRIM LIFE EVENTS NO. 1
—HALLOWEEN
I said before that I never in my life spoke to Candy Lipsnicki, but that wasn’t exactly true. I did speak to her ONCE…on Halloween.
It was the worst conversation EVER…and if it had been a scene in a movie, it would have run like this:
SCENE: Two kids arrive at the same door on Halloween: a boy in
a skull mask and a girl in a rabbit costume with the face cut out. NIGHTMARE ELEMENT: The boy has his PARENTS with him (yeah, you read that right). Parents are both dressed smartly and neither of them is SMILING.
Boy presses bell. There’s an eternal pause while they wait for the door to be answered by the old woman who lives there.
Boy: Heya.
Girl: Hey.
Boy: It’s Candy, isn’t it?
Girl: Yeah.
Boy: Cool; thought so. I’ve seen you around at school. My name’s Ed Bagley. I’m in your class.
Girl: Oh.
Boy: I’m a skeleton. What are you supposed to be?
Girl: The Easter Bunny.
Boy: Is that a Halloween thing?
Girl: It’s the way I do it.
Boy’s FATHER: Ed would have come as a werewolf, but he needed the toilet really bad and he couldn’t get the suit off quick enough.
Boy’s MOTHER: So we had to wash it.
END.
OF.
MY.
LIFE.
What I’ve always wondered is this: why did it take that old woman so long to answer the door?
LESSON 5: GET YOURSELF MARKED
At the beginning of the week, I had written out a list of things to do before Friday night arrived. I thought I might spend a night or two completing Fortress 7 on Xbox, maybe catch up with a few buddies on Facebook, possibly even do Mr. Bixby’s summer geography homework. One thing that wasn’t on the list was “Die and spend Friday night chasing your own renegade arm through a stinking sewer system,” but—list or no list—that box was seriously getting checked off.
I was belting it along. I never realized how fast I could run, despite the fact that (a) having only one arm majorly screws up your ability to run in a straight line, and (b) slipping in your own blood is a serious drawback for the newly undead.