The Zero Degree Zombie Zone

by Patrik Henry Bass

  Wardell nods. “Yeah, he’ll hold all the cards. That can’t be good for us.”

  I’m looking around, and I see a bunch of tall figures heading our way from the direction of the houses. “Hide it, quick,” I warn Keisha. “And don’t anybody let on we have it.”

  For once she doesn’t say anything back. She just nods and slips the ring off her thumb and into a pocket somewhere. I don’t see where, which is probably for the best. Anyway, I’m too busy watching the ice zombies approach.

  There are five of them, plus Zenon himself. He’s taller than any of them by at least four heads, and his walk’s not as stiff. Plus, there are the eyes — his sharp blue ones versus their blank white ones. No mistaking who’s in charge here. Especially since he calls out to me as soon as he’s close enough.

  “Welcome back, Bakari Katari Johnson!” Still using my whole name — maybe ice zombies, even ice zombie lords, don’t understand how names work on Earth? Maybe Zenon is his whole name, and everyone here just has the one name, so he figures my full name is the name I need to be called each and every time? Or maybe he just knows it annoys me. Anyway, he’s still talking so I force myself to pay attention again. “And this time you have brought your friends!” Well, friend, I correct in my head, but I’m not gonna tell him that. Though it might be better for Tariq and Keisha if I did.

  “We are no friends of his,” Keisha snaps. That figures. “Bakari Bad Breath? Not a chance. We were just standing too close when you sent that circle to collect him, and got pulled in with the fool.” She straightens to her full height and scowls up at Zenon, who’s now closed the distance to us and looks like a skyscraper beside her. “So just whip up another of those disks and we’ll be on our way.”

  “I don’t think so.” The smile he gives her is all teeth, like a jungle cat about to pounce. “My zombies are hungry, after all. I didn’t let those I sent through before eat anyone, because I wanted to make sure Bakari Katari Johnson would not be obstructed in his return. But now that you are here, I see no reason not to feed you to them. They deserve a reward for such patience.”

  “Look Zenon, we crushed your dumb zombies like icicles. Nobody’s feeding anybody to anyone,” I tell him, standing my ground when he turns those ice-laser eyes and that sparkling shark smile on me. “Not if you want your ring back.”

  In an instant he’s covered the space between us and is leaning in over me. “You have it? Where is it?”

  “I don’t have it,” I tell him. “Not on me, anyway.” Which is at least partially true. “And I’m not gonna tell you where it is, either. You let us go back — all of us — and I’ll get it for you, but not before.”

  “Hm.” Zenon strokes his chin, staring down at me. Finally he chuckles. “Well done, Bakari Katari Johnson,” he says slowly. “Well done. I had planned to simply take the ring and then feed you to my zombies, but now things are going to get even more interesting. Are you lying to me? Do you have it on you? If so, I can stay with my original plan — I get my ring back, my zombies get a good meal, and I regain total access to your world. But can I risk it? If you are telling the truth, killing you now would cost me the ring, and I need it if I plan to open enough portals for a proper invasion. Hm.” He goes back to stroking his chin. “Yes, clever indeed.”

  Keisha lets out a little snort, like she can’t believe anyone’s calling me clever. Bad idea on her part, because it draws Zenon’s attention. “You say you don’t have the ring,” he muses, studying her with those icy blue eyes, “but that doesn’t mean it isn’t here, does it? Perhaps one of you has it. Do you, my dear?” He looms over Keisha again.

  Fortunately, she’s not easily intimidated. Not Keisha. “You think I’d take anything that fool offered me?” she asks, squinting her eyes. “Please! Anything he touches is gonna have loser stink all over it, and I don’t want any part of that!”

  Zenon’s eyes go wider — I guess he’s not used to anyone speaking to him like that, without any fear — and he scowls a little, but he doesn’t pursue it any further. Whew! Instead his gaze swivels back toward me. “I will give you a few moments, Bakari Katari Johnson,” he announces. “To ponder your fate. Know that toying with me is ill-advised, for I have little patience and a great many hungry followers.” He turns and stomps away, taking his little ice zombie posse with him.

  “Whew! Man, that was close!” Wardell blurts out as soon as they’ve gone. “I thought they’d figure it out for sure!”

  Keisha smiles. “Nah, I had it covered.” She looks at me, and it’s not a look I’m used to from her. It’s not smug or snarky or nasty. More … considering. “You was telling the truth about him, before,” she says after a minute, and her voice is quieter than usual, and without any spikiness. “And about the ring.”

  I nod.

  “We’ve gotta get it out of here, away from him,” she declares. “And ourselves back to Thurgood Cleavon Wilson Elementary.”

  Another nod.

  Then she sighs. “Any idea how?”

  “Try the ring,” I suggest. “You opened disks to here before, maybe you can open one away from here now.”

  She nods, retrieves the ring, slides it back onto her thumb, and waves it in the air. “Ring, ring, do your thing,” she orders, shaking it about. “Get us back to school, double-time!” Nothing happens.

  She tries again before lowering her hand. “I’m not feeling it,” she confesses. “Before, it was like this jab of cold in my brain, like the worst brain freeze ever. Now, nothing.”

  Huh. I’m not sure why that is, but Wardell offers an idea. “Maybe it’s ’cause we’re here and not home,” he says. “Maybe on our side you can use it to open disks to here because you’re from home and it’s from here, but now you’re here so it’s not working.”

  That actually makes some sense. “And Zenon could use it to make disks into our world because he’s from here,” I say. “The ring’s a key but it only works from whatever side of the door you’re from.”

  Wardell nods and grins at me. This is just like when he and I hang out after school, coming up with all sorts of crazy ideas and bouncing them around all afternoon. Only, of course, this time it’s real and we’re liable to get eaten by ice zombies, which takes away some of the fun.

  “So that ring’s useless here?” Tariq asks. His skin’s looking a little blue and he’s shivering. So are the rest of us. “How’re we gonna get home, then?”

  Looking at him, I have an idea. “My marble,” I say. “Give it to me.”

  Keisha snorts. “We’re freezing and about to be zombie food and all you can think about is your dumb marble? Really?”

  “That dumb marble may be the only thing that can save our butts,” I snap back. I hold out my hand. “Give it up, Tariq.”

  He glances over at Keisha, then at me, then back at her, then back at me. Finally he shrugs and pulls it from his jacket pocket, dropping it into my palm. “Yeah, sure.”

  The second the marble touches my skin, I feel whole again.

  And maybe something else, too. “Come on, Granddad,” I mutter, closing my fist around it tight. “You always said it was magic, and right now that’s exactly what I need. Light, courage, power, right? Well, I got the courage. Give me the power!”

  There’s no glowing disk, but I do feel warm all of a sudden, like there’s heat radiating out from my hand. And the air all around me starts to shimmer. “Grab hold of me, quick!” I tell the others. Wardell latches onto my shoulder at once, and Tariq grabs my other one, with Keisha wrapping both hands around his arm. Good thing, too, because the shimmering is growing, the whole ice world is blurring around us, all of it fading in a big ball of light and warmth and color —

  — and then everything snaps back into focus and we’re in the hall in front of the library again, like nothing happened. Except for the puddle at our feet.

  “There you are!” Mrs. Crump says, appearing around the corner of the library. “I was wondering where you four had gone! Come on, come on, the rest of the
class is inside already!” she says, ushering us into the library. We all follow her without a word. I wish I thought that was the end of it, but I know it isn’t.

  What the heck are we gonna do about all this?” Keisha corners me the second we’re in the library. Mrs. Crump has ditched us again — she’s off talking to the librarian, Ms. Braithwaite. It doesn’t matter, we all know the drill. Pick up a book and sit and read quietly the whole period, then check it out at the end if we want. So basically this is a free period — if you know how to sit with a book open and keep your voice down, you can just hang out and talk the whole time.

  Before I can grab a book, Keisha shoves me toward a corner table. She slaps a book into my hands from one of the bookshelves as we pass and grabs another for herself. Tariq scoops up a paperback, and Wardell simply pulls a comic from his backpack as we all drop into chairs. We’re far enough away from everybody else that they won’t hear what we’re saying. Okay, I’m sure it might look strange seeing the four of us sitting together, especially with Tariq battling me for hall monitor.

  Then again, our quartet is hardly the most interesting event of the day. First off, there was all that weirdness in the cafeteria. Even if they didn’t figure out that we were dealing with ice zombies, they at least saw two freaky-looking guys come in and start terrorizing everybody. Someone had to see me make them disappear through a glowing blue disk. I’m sure nosy Niecy Washington saw four more zombies show up, trashing the lunchroom and trying to bite people. She probably also hung around to see that it was Keisha who made more glowing disks appear and swallow the zombies up.

  But did anyone notice that another blue disk appeared on the way to the library, and that this one swallowed us up — me and Keisha and Tariq and Wardell? Some of the others must’ve seen that, especially since most of them hadn’t even reached the library when it happened. Yet nobody’s saying anything, or even glancing our way. And Mrs. Crump wondered where we’d gone but didn’t freak out about our disappearing into a blue circle of ice? So she didn’t see anything and nobody said anything to her. At this moment I can’t decide if I’m grateful to my classmates for keeping our secret or mad at them for not caring enough to alert our teacher when we vanished into another dimension.

  “Why we gotta do anything?” Tariq asks, flipping his book open to a random page. I didn’t see the cover clearly enough to read the title, but it had a big bullet train on the front. Mine’s about some kid detective, I think. It’s not like I’m really paying much attention to it at the moment. “We’re outta there, right?” Tariq continues. “And you still got that ring, safe and sound. It’s all good, right?”

  Wardell sets down his comic and rolls his eyes. “Did this Zenon zombie lord guy need that ring to make that big hole we all fell through?” he asks, completely ignoring the fact that he’s talking to the most popular fourth grader at Thurgood Cleavon Wilson Elementary. I’ve gotta admit, I’m glad to see him dressing Tariq down like this, standing up for himself. “No. Clearly he can reach through to our world without the ring. It just lets him do it more, bigger, faster.”

  “Right, he said something about needing it to open enough portals for a proper invasion,” I remember out loud. “He can definitely still come after us without it. And he will. He wants that ring bad.”

  “What if we give it to him?” Keisha asks. “You got that marble, and it got us back home. Maybe it can shut down circles fast as he can open them.”

  “I don’t know,” I tell her. “Maybe. Is that a chance we want to take, though? What if it can’t keep him out, him and all those ice zombies of his? What if it can only close half of them, or a third, or all but one or two, even? If even a few of those things get loose …” I trail off, not wanting to finish that sentence. I don’t have to.

  We all go quiet for a minute, thinking. I use that time to tap Wardell on the shoulder. “I’m sorry, Wardell,” I say. “I should’ve trusted you. You’ve always had my back. I just, when you were over there talking to them, and then you three came over together, and she knew about Granddad’s marble —”

  Wardell smiles like when he sees string cheese. “I get it. I didn’t mean to say anything, it just slipped out how important it was to you.” He glances at Keisha and Tariq. “And I gotta admit, I knew they didn’t really like me, but it still felt good when they acted like they did.”

  Tariq studies his book like it’s going to be on the next test. “Sorry about that,” he mutters after a second. He looks up and meets Wardell’s gaze. “That wasn’t cool, jerking you around like that.” I don’t know that I’ve ever heard him apologize before. This is a day of firsts.

  I almost fall out of my chair, though, when Keisha says, “Yeah, I’m sorry, too.” At first I think she means for mistreating Wardell, but she’s looking at me. “I kind of got you into this whole mess,” she admits. “I found the ring this morning, out in the hall. I’d got in early and saw your name on the sign-up sheet. I was ducking back out to text Tariq a heads-up when I saw the ring, just laying there on the floor.” She frowns and looks away. “When I picked it up, I was still going off about you and how you were gonna regret ever signing up.”

  I jump up, then sit down quickly when Mrs. Crump glances over. “That’s why Zenon said he heard my name! The first time he grabbed me, it was out in the hall between class and the bathroom! That was probably the same spot where he dropped the ring in the first place. And somehow he heard you when you picked it up, and heard you say my name!”

  She nods. “Yeah, that’s the way I figured it, too.”

  We all just sit there for a minute. But finally I clear my throat.

  “Okay, so we’re all sorry,” I say. “That’s super. Now we’ve just got to figure out a way to stop Zenon from getting his hands on this ring and invading the world, while not getting eaten by ice zombies ourselves.” Piece of apple pie. Sure.

  Keisha pulls out the ring and taps it with a fingernail. “It’s like a key, right?” she says slowly. “It lets us open those holes to his world, or him open them to here.” I nod but don’t say anything, because I can see she’s got more. “And your marble, that was like a key, too, at least that time.”

  “Yeah,” I say. “Not sure that’s what it usually does, but it did the trick when we needed it.”

  She locks eyes with me. “What if we use them together? You with your marble, me with this ring? And what if we try doing the same thing at the same time? And that thing is locking the door for good — all the doors, in fact — so he can’t come through here ever?”

  I think that over. “It might work,” I agree. “Like turning the key in the lock and snapping it off so the lock’s jammed.” I smile. “Let’s give it a try.”

  “Rock on!” Wardell says, grinning. “Grab those magic stones, roll some bones, it’s time to save the world!”

  Tariq rolls his eyes and Keisha glares at Wardell, but I grin right back at him and we bump fists. Whether this works or not, I’m glad I’ve got my best friend back.

  We can’t do this in here, can we?” I ask, scanning the library. Mrs. Crump is done gabbing with Ms. Braithwaite and is now sitting in an armchair near the librarian’s desk, flipping through a magazine. The rest of our class is milling about like usual, pretending to read, but I’m pretty sure everybody’d notice if we pulled out an ice ring and a magic marble and started doing stuff with them.

  Keisha clearly thinks the same thing, since she gives me her patented, “Were you absent the day they handed out brains?” look. “We need someplace private, duh,” she tells me.

  Something else occurs to me, too. “We should be near that first disk,” I say as the four of us rise to our feet. “It’s right where you found the ring in the first place, so it’s like the first door.”

  She nods. “Yeah, and nobody’ll be around there right now. Nice.”

  Wardell gulps. “Only question is, how’re we gonna get out there when we’re supposed to be in here?” he asks.

  Tariq smiles. “Leave that
to me,” he says as he leads us over to Mrs. Crump.

  “Is there a problem?” our teacher asks, glancing up from her magazine as we approach. It’s about gardening, I notice. Does Mrs. Crump even garden?

  Tariq shrugs and hits her with his golden-boy smile, full wattage. “Bakari and Wardell left some stuff behind in the cafeteria,” he explains. “Lunch was … a little crazy today.” You can say that again, I think. “Is it okay if Keisha and I accompany them back there to get their things? We won’t take long — we’ll be back before library is over.”

  It all sounds so smart, and of course he and Keisha can do no wrong in the eyes of any adult, so I’m not all that surprised when Mrs. Crump says, “That sounds fine, Tariq. Thank you for offering.” Her gaze switches to me and Wardell. “Try to be a little more careful where you leave your things next time, you two. Now run along and hurry back.” Then she goes back to her magazine. Who knew flowers could be so fascinating?

  “Smooth,” I tell Tariq as we head out of the library. He just shrugs, but he looks pleased. Must be nice to use his evil powers for good for a change.

  “Don’t we need a hall pass or something, though?” Wardell asks.

  Keisha smirks at him. “Why would you? You’ve got the class’s hall monitor with you instead.” She’s eyeing me when she says that last bit. Yeah, Keisha, I got it, thanks.

  The four of us trek down the hall, stopping right about where I remember being grabbed. “Yeah,” Keisha agrees, “I found the ring right over there.” She points at a spot between us and the nearest wall. “This is definitely the place.” She raises her hand — I hadn’t noticed she was wearing the ice ring again already — and I quickly pull out Granddad’s marble. “You ready?”

  “Uh, sure.” At least, I think so. But ready or not, looks like we’re doing this, so I don’t have much choice.