Special Dead

by Patrick Freivald

  She sat up as the lid pulled back, the air almost hot after the bath. Twenty-eight-point-two degrees Fahrenheit, perfect for Dr. Banerjee’s best preservative. Banerjee. The name was a curse, a profanity, a blasphemy. Ani had never considered herself a vengeful person, had never seen the point of it, but her every idle thought was consumed with making him pay for what he’d done.

  She toweled off, stepped into a bra and panties, and shuffled to the dresser for jeans and a T-shirt. She pulled open the drawer and grunted when she saw the present. The safety-orange bow complimented the black wrapping paper studded with jack-o-lanterns. The black construction-paper card read, “Sweetie” in pink gel pen.

  She shredded the paper and lifted out the triangular object, a Santa hat in the same safety orange as the ribbon. When she put it on, it drooped over her eyes, but she got dressed and walked into the living room anyway.

  Spying her mom’s feet from under the brim, she threw up her hands. “It’s too big.”

  “Happy Halloween, babe,” her mom replied. She plucked the hat off Ani’s head and kissed her on the cheek. “I made it big enough to wear over your helmet.”

  “Zombie Santa?”

  “Zombie Awareness Santa. Regulation says you have to wear orange. There’s a sash and beard by the door.”

  “. . . because?”

  “Because it’s Halloween, and Mondays stink, and I love you.”

  Ani smiled. “I love you, too, Mom.”

  * * *

  As she got on the bus, Teah bobbed her head in approval.

  “Righteous, Ani. I wish I’d thought of that.” Her safety-orange tutu was the only other costume in evidence.

  Sam smiled at Ani. “You look like an idiot.”

  Devon clacked her helmet against Sam’s. “Right, because the rest of us look so damned normal.”

  “True,” Sam said. Ani plopped down next to her as the bus rolled toward the gate.

  Stop-and-go traffic was unheard of in Ohneka Falls, so the fourth time they lurched to a stop Ani raised her head to look out the window. In the distance, a forest of tents and canopies surrounded the village center.

  “Oh, right,” she said. She’d forgotten about the First Annual Zombie Festival, wherein all things zombie-clichéd would be celebrated with deep-fried cheesecake on a stick, carnival rides, and absolutely no costumes under any circumstances whatsoever...or so promised the festival organizers.

  In this economy, anything that brings in money can’t be all bad.

  Outside Lydia’s church, Pastor John read from a thick red Bible in front of a pyre of palettes. Chained to them were straw dummies in bright orange helmets. Across the street, a legion of black-clad, ankh-wearing adults heaped Bibles onto their own pile of palettes. Each group eyed the other with hateful expressions.

  Okay, maybe it can.

  The bus trundled by, and pulled up to the school only five minutes behind schedule. They clanked through the halls during the announcements, dragged themselves up the stairs, and entered the classroom at 8:07. Miss Pulver sat in her usual seat, crocheting, but Mr. Foster’s desk sat vacant.

  “Think I scared him off?” Sam asked.

  Miss Pulver shook her head. “Mister Foster will be up in a minute. He’s greeting our new student.”

  The class fell silent. Mr. Clark cleared his throat.

  “New...student?” Ani asked.

  There can’t be another zombie. There just can’t.

  “Yes,” Miss Pulver said. “He should—”

  The door opened. They all turned to look. The man at Mr. Foster’s shoulder overshadowed him by half a foot and was half again broader at the shoulders. His black hair stood in a short-cropped flat-top, and his dumb smile matched Mike’s.

  “Holy shit,” Devon said.

  Mr. Foster giggled. “Class, meet Jeff. Jeff, class.”

  “Hi, Jeff!” Mike said.

  “Hi,” he said back.

  Nobody else said anything, and Jeff made no move to sit, so Ani improvised. “Have a seat, Jeff.” Jeff smiled at her, but didn’t move.

  “No, seriously,” Devon said. “What’s he doing here?”

  Mr. Foster’s constipated grimace said all it needed to, but of course he spoke anyway. “Budget cuts. He needs an 8-1-1 per his IEP, and this is all we’ve got.”

  “What?” Kyle asked.

  Mr. Foster threw up his hands. “It’s not my fault. I didn’t sign up for any of this.” He giggled. “They hired me for English RTI.”

  He led Jeff by his shoulders to Joe’s old seat, and Ani’s heart burned. No! You can’t! Dammit, yes they could, and it didn’t even matter. She caught Sam’s pitying look in the corner of her eye, but it vanished as fast as it came.

  Jeff sat, folded his hands, and looked at the blank wood veneer in front of him.

  “Jeff?” Mr. Foster asked. “Do you want to say hello to the class?”

  Jeff nodded without looking up.

  At the edge of her hearing, Ani heard Lydia ask Teah, “What’s wrong with him?”

  “He’s just got a concussion. He’ll be fine.”

  Ani wasn’t sure if she believed it, but from Lydia’s relieved sigh, she did. Close enough, for now.

  For his part, Jeff wiped a string of drool from his mouth, then giggled.

  Yup. Fits right in.

  * * *

  That night, the town shook. Ani cranked Nine Inch Nails just so Trent Reznor’s noise would drown out the incessant bass of the battle of the bands. That, and the sirens. She tried not to think about what the incessant droning of the fire station’s alarm and the constant whine of police sirens might mean.

  She thought about the last Halloween she’d spent free, working at the Dragon’s Lair for Travis’s vampire party. That was the first time Dylan had been really, truly aggressive.

  A shotgun roared.

  Dylan’s headless corpse collapsed onto Mike, who gasped for air on the ground. Ani’s mom stepped over him, shotgun in her right hand, meat cleaver in the left. “Did he bite you?”

  “Um...” Mike said. He worked his mouth and nothing came out.

  She dropped the shotgun and backhanded him.

  “Did he bite you?”

  Mike held up his right hand. His index finger bore teeth marks, ragged and bloody. Her mom stepped on his wrist and brought the cleaver down.

  Ani’s whole body spasmed. A moment of panic gripped her as she pictured Joe, coughing up the last moments of his life. She lashed out, and the bath—her nightly coffin—shuddered at the impact. She screamed, her anguish muffled by the icy liquid, so she screamed again.

  Tearless sobs wracked her. She beat against the lid, the pain in her knuckles nothing compared to that in her chest. At some point she stopped, and nothing had changed.

  She waited for morning, got up, and went to school.

  Chapter

  22

  Face beaming, Lydia gave Teah a high five. She turned to do the same to Kyle, jerked her hand to her waist, then put it back out so that he could slap it at the limit of his chain.

  “Nice,” Kyle said.

  “What’s so nice?” Ani asked.

  Lydia held up her latest algebra test. Mr. Foster’s handwriting emblazoned a circled fifty-two atop the first page.

  Ani raised an eyebrow. “This is good?”

  Lydia nodded, her lips peeled back to expose her bite guard. “Fifty-two rounds up to fifty-five.”

  Ani didn’t know what to say, so she didn’t say anything.

  “Fifty-five?” Lydia asked, a hopeful whine in her voice.

  “Isn’t fifty-five an ‘F’?” Ani asked.

  Kyle shook his head, rattling his chains against his desk. “Nope.”

  Ani looked at him, then at Lydia for explanation.

  “I got ADD. Fifty-five is passing.”

  Ani raised an eyebrow. “Fifty-two is fifty-five is passing?”

  Lydia’s head bobbed in an excited nod.

  “Awesome.” Ani turned back to her home
work, twenty ‘chain rule’ questions that Mr. Gursslin wouldn’t accept unless it was at least eighty percent correct. She didn’t know whether to feel cheated or grateful.

  * * *

  On Thursday, PE was canceled in favor of an assembly. Shackled and handcuffed, the Special Dead were led into the “auditorium,” a former gym with peeling, decrepit seats donated by a defunct theater from outside of town. Three massive, new, and out-of-place screens dominated the stage, and Ani half-expected a Kleincorps Pharmaceutical logo to appear at any moment.

  Mr. Benson led them to the back, where the sound equipment and spotlight tower used to stand, and locked their chain to a steel ring on the wall. The other end he looped around their feet, entwining it with their shackles, and locked to a ring kitty-corner to the first one. As soon as the second lock clicked into place, Mr. Foster giggled and sat in the back row, right in front of Kyle. Jeff sat next to him, with them but not one of them. Awesome.

  A few minutes later, the student body filed in. The black-clad death worshippers filled almost a third of the seats, sitting together in front of stage left regardless of what their teachers tried to get them to do. As one they turned to Ani’s class, clasped their hands together, and bowed, just like the creepy kid at the drinking fountain had six weeks before. They turned back to the stage almost in unison while the normal kids filled in the rest of the seats. Once everyone settled in, the back half of the auditorium remained empty. Is this all there is? There couldn’t be more than two hundred and fifty kids.

  The lights dimmed, and Ani spent the next hour trying to ignore the crude, white-bread hip-hop poseurs extolling the evils of peer pressure, drugs, and bullying. Sam leaned across Devon until her helmet touched Ani’s. “Those gangsta kids say not to fall for peer pressure, so we totally shouldn’t, yo.”

  Ani formed a fist and patted her chest twice. “Word.”

  Devon’s eyes didn’t leave the screen. “Just. Fucking. Die.”

  “Too late,” Sam said. “Already gangsta. Yo.”

  Ani grinned. “East coast fo’ life.”

  Mr. Foster turned in his seat and shushed them.

  * * *

  The week ended as soon as it began. Friday night morphed into Saturday morning, and Ani dragged her feet as she approached the lab. She knew he was in there, and she knew she was capable—physically and mentally—of breaking his neck with minimal effort. She wanted to, she had the strength, and the will...but Lydia’s face appeared in her mind, nervous and terrified that the world might not like her. Mike smiled behind her, dumb as a post but undeserving of the fate Ani’s vengeance would give him.

  Shit.

  And everything went exactly as it always had.

  Physical examination, tissue samples, injections....

  Dr. Banerjee gave no indication that things between them had changed, not even the slightest twitch of the eye. Ani left the lab wondering if he was a great actor—or a sociopath. Or both.

  She took her time moving through the halls, uninterested in another Saturday pretending that things were okay. She’d made it halfway home when Sam fell in beside her and whispered, rapid-fire.

  “Ani, you got to talk to your mom. Teah’s going to get herself killed. Maybe the rest of us, too. Definitely Bill, and some of his friends. Maybe some guards.”

  Ani kept up her pace and smiled for the cameras. “Whoa, there, slow down. What are we talking about, here? And act casual.”

  For Sam, a little too intense was the same thing as casual. “Bill’s going to break Teah out.”

  “How?”

  She shrugged. “I’m a little fuzzy on the details, but she’s serious. And so is he.”

  “What details aren’t you fuzzy on?”

  “Something about smuggling her out in a truck.”

  Ani tried to puzzle through how that might work. “How would she get in the truck?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “How would they get around the guards?”

  “Look, I don’t freaking know. What I do know is that they’re serious. Maybe Banerjee—”

  “No!” Ani dropped her voice. “Don’t tell him anything. Anything.”

  Sam stopped, forcing her to stop. “You blame him for Joe.”

  Ani said nothing.

  “It’s not his fault the cure didn’t work. He’s working around the clock—”

  “I’ll tell Mom. Just don’t involve...him.”

  “All right.”

  * * *

  Ani barged into the bedroom. “Mom, I—”

  Her mom pulled the needle out of the back of her own head, set it on the nightstand, and wiped a line of drool off her mouth. Her glare was apology, accusation, and guilt wrapped into one. “You should knock, sweetie.”

  Ani stepped forward and picked up the syringe. “Is this...are you...what?” She put a hand to her mom’s neck and felt a pulse.

  Her mom plucked the syringe from her hand and set it back down. As Ani stood there, stunned, she unbuttoned her blouse and opened it, revealing a small scar between her breasts, not quite covered by her bra. “Pacemaker. I’m sure you’re familiar with the trick.” She buttoned back up and patted Ani on the cheek. “We do what we have to do.”

  “You’re dead.”

  She nodded. “I was going to die anyway. At least this way I can be of some use. It turns out that ZV is inherently oncolytic—it obliterates cancerous cells and doesn’t reanimate them.”

  “But Doctor Banerjee—”

  “—installed the pacemaker. He knows. And now there are three of us, but he doesn’t have to know that you do.”

  Ani looked at the surveillance camera. “A lot more than three of us. Every guard on duty knows, has known forever.”

  Her mom shook her head. “No, sweetie. The camera in here doesn’t go to the guard station. They’re for his eyes only.”

  Ani shivered. “That’s disgusting.”

  “It’s part of the deal. Besides, I can’t imagine he watches this thing anyway. What’s there to see?”

  “But...I don’t understand. What about the bath?” Her mom lifted the mattress, revealing a silver metal lid underneath. “Jesus, Mom, the bucket of brains in court. What, how did you resist?”

  Her smile was as dazzling as it was unexpected. “That’s how we know we’re so close! Once we’ve nailed the cure for ZV, we’ve got a cure for, well, just about everything. ZV destroys disease—even AIDS—and sustains the body, just wipes out cancer, completely. We can infect the terminally ill, then cure them.”

  “Wow.” She waited for more but didn’t get it. “You didn’t answer my question.”

  Her mom patted her cheek. “Treated from the very beginning, my cravings are almost zero.”

  “Almost.”

  “Yes.”

  “So...” Ani gestured to the world in general. “All this is just for show, then? The guards, the fences, the orange helmets, Mr. Clark? If we’re that much of a danger, then so are you, and Banerjee knows it.”

  “Right.”

  Ani asked the only question left. “Why?”

  Her mom wrapped her head in her arms and pulled her to her chest. “Because it was the only deal I could make, sweetie. With your cover blown, there was only one way to ensure your survival. Banerjee needs me, and I need you.”

  “I love you, Mom.”

  “I love you, too, sweetie.”

  * * *

  Mr. Cummings was five minutes into a rant about kids, laziness, career planning, and unrealistic expectations for the future—Wednesdays seemed to draw the grumpy right out of him, and the lunch crowd served as his sounding board—when Ani realized she’d forgotten to tell her mom about Teah.

  “Oh, crap,” she said under her breath.

  Devon raised an eyebrow, the gesture just visible under the helmet.

  “Nothing.”

  Devon left her eyebrow up and didn’t look away.

  “Just forgot to tell Mom about something.”

  Devon jerked her eyes at
Teah. “That one?”

  “You know?”

  She rolled her eyes. “Of course I know. Those two chuckleheads are too stupid to, like, actually keep their mouths shut about anything. Even Kyle knows.”

  “So why is it my job to tell my mom?”

  “Why would you bother?”

  Ani froze. “What do you mean?”

  “You have Teah Lee, Lydia Stuber, and Bill Watson hatching a plan to break a zombie out of a maximum-security installation. They have the collective IQ of a burrito. Why would you worry even one split second about it?”

  Ani crossed her arms, conscious of Sam’s eyes on them from across the room. “Sam thinks they’re serious.”

  “They are serious. But who cares? They’ll eventually figure out that none of them are smart enough to come up with a plan that won’t get them all killed. Meantime, we don’t have to deal with any more security than the ridiculous amount we already have.”

  Ani didn’t reply.

  “You know I’m right.”

  Do I?

  * * *

  Thursday brought the end of the marking period—Ani had straight A’s—and her third piano lesson. They spent more time discussing theory than hitting keys, but over the course of the two-hour block, Ani learned a lot more than she thought she had to. Mr. Herley’s exacting, uncompromising demands kept her on her toes mentally and physically, and he left her mentally and emotionally drained. As soon as the door closed her mom looked up from the pile of paperwork on the kitchen table.

  “That man is worth every penny.”

  Ani grinned. “Yeah, he is.”

  Chapter

  23

  Ani heard voices as she shambled into the lab.

  “No,” her mom said. “Absolutely not. It’s Teah’s turn, not Ani’s.”

  “It is whoever’s turn I say it is, Sarah. It’s Ani’s turn.”