Special Dead

by Patrick Freivald

  “No,” Sam said. They all shook their heads.

  “If I find out later—”

  “NO!” Lydia shouted, cringing into her chair when everyone looked at her. “Nobody knew but me.” She sat up, her face taking on an unfamiliar look of determination. “I knew she was talking to Bill, and I helped her hide it. Any punishment Teah gets, I should get.”

  “Done,” Dr. Banerjee said.

  Dr. Romero put her hand on his shoulder, then jerked it away. “No, Rishi. She doesn’t know—”

  “I said, ‘done.’”

  Ani’s mom looked at Lydia in panic as Dr. Banerjee motioned to two of the guards. They approached Lydia, and Ani cried out.

  “Wait!”

  The guards stopped. “This is my fault. All of it.” Her mom circled the table, shaking her head, so she talked faster. “I’m the one who broke the rules, who went to prom. I knew I was dangerous. Infected. This is my fault, not Lydia’s. Not Teah’s. Nobody would be here if it weren’t for me.”

  Halfway around the table, her mom covered her mouth with her hand. “No, sweetie....” She kept walking.

  Ani looked at Devon, at Sam, at Lydia, and at Mike. “All of this is my fault. If anybody should be punished for anything, I should share it.”

  “I won’t allow that,” her mom snapped, not to her but to Dr. Banerjee.

  “I know you won’t,” he said. He gestured to the guards, who grabbed Lydia by the arms and hoisted her from the chair. “But every negotiation has a price.”

  “No!” Ani said.

  Her mom slapped her.

  Ani recoiled in shock, not pain.

  “Don’t say another word.” She looked at Devon and Sam, not bothering with Mike. “Any of you. Not one.”

  They sat, hands folded in their laps, as the guards escorted Lydia out.

  “Now,” Dr. Banerjee said, directing his remarks between Dr. Romero and Superintendent Salter, “effective today we’re shutting down the Ohneka Falls CSD program.”

  Mr. Salter’s triumphant smile made Ani want to punch him.

  Her mom shook her head. “Rishi, we had a deal.”

  “And now we have a dozen dead people. This farce is over, and here is your new deal: the children, as well as Mr. Cummings and Mrs. Weller, will be allowed to live in the lab as they have and can continue their enrollment in the school district, but all classes come to them. No more transports, no more lockdowns, no more of this foolishness.

  “Your plan would never have swayed the courts, anyway, especially not after today, and when the ruling comes down, they’ll die unless they’re under my protection. They can still be students, but they will be students at the lab.”

  “And Lydia—” Dr. Romero started.

  “Miss Stuber has made her decision and is going with Miss Burnell.”

  “But—”

  “One more word and Sam is going as well.”

  Her mom’s jaw snapped shut, but her eyes burned with fury. If Dr. Banerjee noticed, he didn’t care. Instead, he turned to Mr. Benson.

  “Geoff, ready everyone for transport. I’ll see you back at the lab.”

  “Yes, Colonel.”

  * * *

  As soon as the bus lurched forward, Devon turned on Ani. “You. This is all your fault.”

  Ani couldn’t deny it. “Yeah, it is.”

  “You stupid...Jesus. All these deaths are on your head. Yours.”

  She said nothing.

  Sam put her hands to her face. “Oh, my God. Joe, Keegs, Kyle, Jessica, everybody. They died...for what? So you could sneak around with Mike?”

  Mike looked up at the sound of his name. “Hi.”

  Ani looked at the ground. “I didn’t know I was dangerous, dammit.”

  “No,” Devon said. “Don’t pull that shit now. We heard you. You knew you were infected.”

  “Three years,” Ani said. It brought them up short. “I’d been dead for almost three years.”

  “Impossible,” Sam said. “ZV overwhelms neocortical—”

  “Yeah, it does, but I’d been taking serum.”

  Sam looked at Devon, then her. “Why would you be taking serum unless you were—”

  “Dead. For three years.”

  “Bullshit,” Devon said. “Why would your mom even have serum on hand? You’d have eaten her first.”

  “I tried.” She chuckled, a dark, humorless laugh that filled the small bus. “I really tried. But she was ready for it, always ready for it, every day of my life.”

  Devon opened her mouth, but Sam stopped her with an upraised hand.

  “What do you mean?”

  Ani told them everything she knew, leaving out only two details: that her biology held the only hope for a cure, and that her mother was dead as an alternative to cancer. She told them everything else—her adoption, her mother’s real name, Los Angeles, her death at fourteen, cutting, the homeless man, Dylan, Dr. Banerjee, prom.

  They didn’t say anything when she was done, and she didn’t want to press them. They got off the bus in silence, except for Mike, who said goodbye to the driver. As they walked into the lab, Ani wondered if they’d ever see the driver again. She didn’t even know his name.

  Once inside, soldiers escorted each of them to a separate room. Ani sat in the only chair and waited. Eventually her mom came in.

  “What, no interrogation?”

  She shook her head. “No, sweetie. We already know what you know.”

  “I told them.”

  “I know,” her mom said and hugged her.

  “Almost everything.”

  “I know, sweetie.” She squeezed tighter.

  “How?”

  “The bus is bugged. Rishi let me listen on the way over. He used it as validation that you couldn’t be trusted to keep secrets.”

  “Oops.”

  “Yeah.”

  “So who were Bill’s helpers?”

  Her mom sighed. “Some of the new kids. The ones who dress all in black? Them. Apparently with their parents’ blessing. They were using Bill. They planned to steal Teah to use in some kind of ritual to grant them all immortality.”

  “Oh, my God. What now?”

  “Now a lot of very weird people are going to jail for a really long time.”

  Chapter

  32

  The next day, Mr. Foster came to them, along with Mr. Cummings and Mrs. Weller. No helmets, no burn team, no shackles. It was another day at the lab, with one twitchy, special-education certified civilian to take care of Mike, and electronic locks on the doors.

  “What about Jeff?” Sam asked.

  Mr. Foster giggled. “Jeff’s been outsourced to another school, to better utilize the educational facilities there.”

  “Hell,” Mrs. Weller muttered to Mr. Cummings, but loud enough for the room, “he sounds like an administrator.”

  Mr. Cummings elbowed her in the ribs. “Wait to see if he utilizes the discipline piece. Then we’ll know for sure.”

  “Can I help you?” Mr. Foster asked, somehow without giggling.

  “I doubt it,” Mrs. Weller said. “Unless you smuggled in a retirement buyout.”

  He giggled. “They didn’t let me bring anything in.”

  Mr. Cummings stage-whispered, “They utilized the security piece.”

  “Aaah,” Mrs. Weller said.

  A bemused look on his face, Mr. Foster sat next to Mike and handed him a pencil—not a crayon, but an honest-to-goodness pencil. They talked in low tones, while Sam, Devon, and Ani sat with the dead teachers.

  They spent the day trading off between teachers, learning and intertwining history, philosophy, English, economics, government, and even a little bit of statistics. Both teachers were useless at science and knew no precalc or calculus, and they all spent a lot of time looking things up on computers and in their e-texts, but by the end of the day everyone looked as mentally exhausted as Ani felt.

  The teachers left at 3:30 pm, though where the dead ones went wasn’t clear. Ani smiled at D
evon. “Wow. If every day could be like that—”

  Devon turned her back on Ani, and Sam joined her.

  “Oh, come on, guys. What do you want me to do?”

  They didn’t move.

  Ani sighed. “You know what, fine. You want to act like we’re all kids and this is some silly game, cool. I grew out of that bullshit a long time ago.”

  She walked home, played the piano for an hour, and looked up in surprise when the door opened.

  Dr. Herley gave a short, conductor’s bow in greeting, slipped off his shoes, and approached the piano.

  “What is this I hear coming down the hall?”

  “Nothing, really. Something I’ve been working on.” If Deadmau5 ate Beyoncé and vomited up music.... “It’s not even finished yet.”

  “Play it.”

  She did, conscious of his every fidget. Her hands stuttered on several chords.

  “Again.”

  She repeated it with a little more confidence.

  “I hate it. One more time.”

  She was halfway through when pain exploded in her temple. She jerked to the side, rolled off the bench, and looked up. Dr. Herley’s face was twisted into a rictus of hatred. His left hand was balled into a fist, his right clutching a pencil like a dagger, the tip glistening with gray matter.

  Is that my brain?

  She lifted her hand to her temple and had just felt the hole when he dived on top of her, pinning her arms to her sides with his legs, shrieking about Jesus and judgment and righteousness. Hands together, he brought the pencil down with the full weight of his body. She jerked, and it jammed into her neck. She crushed her hands together on his left wrist and felt the bones crumble under the force. He screamed through gritted teeth, yanked out the pencil, and stabbed at her eye.

  The blow glanced off her forehead with the sickening sound of tearing meat.

  A profound sadness came over her. “Please don’t.”

  You can’t kill me. Not like this. Not without a gun.

  His face twisted in rage; he raised his hand again.

  She pulled her right arm free—it took no effort—and punched him in the sternum. His ribs imploded with a sickening crunch, and blood showered her from his mouth and nose. He fell to the side. She shoved his twitching body off her.

  She looked at the security camera and at the shuddering, soon-to-be-corpse and wondered at the fact that she felt almost no craving. She folded her hands over her head and knelt, facing the camera next to the door.

  Blood dripped from her hand into her hair and ran down her face. An expanding pool of red-black liquid formed around Dr. Herley, and his chest stopped. His bowels let go in a burst of flatulence.

  Nice.

  She wondered if she was about to die and wondered at the fact that she wasn’t much worried about it either way. Dr. Banerjee’s warning came back to her, “Violence against the living is unacceptable.” She looked at the corpse, in full knowledge that they’d burned Kyle for much less.

  She held on to hope. The camera caught everything, and he wasn’t just trying to take her phone—he had stabbed her in the head with a pencil. Three times.

  There was a soft knock at the door. Without moving she said, “Come in.”

  It creaked open, revealing the baby-faced lunch delivery boy. “Hey,” he said. “You okay?”

  Good start.

  “Hey, back. I think I’m okay. Here to burn me?”

  He looked at the body, then at her. “No. They saw everything.” He jerked his head toward the hallway. “Why don’t you come down to lab and get checked out?”

  She got up, feeling a little surreal as she wiped her bloody hand on her shirt, and followed him out. “So how’d you rate lunch duty?”

  His nervous smile didn’t touch his eyes, which scanned the hall for potential threats. “A pair of eights and a bad bluff.”

  “Nice,” she said. “I hope it wasn’t as bad as you imagined.”

  “Sorry about what happened back there. That can’t have been easy.”

  “No,” Ani said. “It wasn’t.” But it was. Killing Dr. Herley had been as easy as brushing her hair, back when she had any. She felt...nothing.

  Halfway to the lab, her mom rounded the corner, her face sick with worry, her lab coat wrinkled and stained. “Oh, my God, sweetie, are you all right?” She grabbed Ani’s head with both hands and twisted her back and forth, looking at the wounds. She let go after a minute and shooed everyone down the hall. “Forehead’s ugly but trivial. Neck looks like it missed the arteries, may have grazed something important if you were alive. How’s your head?”

  Ani shrugged. “I feel fine, actually. It hurt when he did it, but doesn’t really now.”

  “Pardon, ma’am,” the soldier said to her mom. “Aren’t brain injuries supposed to kill zombies?”

  “That’s a common misconception,” her mom said, voice switching to lecture mode. “A fortunate one in this case. In your typical zombie, extreme trauma to the frontal lobe can cause sufficient motor problems that a zombie can no longer move, but as far as we know, the only way to kill a ZV-infected cell is to destroy it. Fire, acid, certain chemicals.”

  “Wait, are you saying that shooting a zombie in the head doesn’t kill it?”

  “Correct.”

  “That’s ridiculous. Everyone knows that—”

  She whirled on him, exasperated. “How many ‘everyones,’” she made air quotes, “are experts on zombie physiology, and of those ‘everyones’ how many have you met? It’s not common knowledge, and it doesn’t have to be. All people need to know is that sufficient brain trauma stops them from being able to eat you, and fire renders them sterile.”

  “What about me?” Ani asked. She pondered the implications of being unable to move ever again, effectively dead, but still able to think. Would they bury her? How long would she remain conscious, rotting in the ground? Without microbes to consume her cells, would she even rot? Her mom’s answer snapped her out of her reverie.

  “A few inches of pencil shoved into your temple? Pfft. You’ll be fine. Most brain damage comes from lack of oxygen due to bruising, swelling, improper temperature regulation...all things you don’t have to worry about. I can already see your motor function is unaffected. Worst comes to worst you’ll forget our old address or something.”

  “That’s so weird,” Ani said.

  “Well, be happy about it.”

  Blue-eyes said nothing the rest of the way to the lab, his face schooled to careful neutrality tinged by a frown. Ani thanked him for the escort. He gave her a curt nod in response. Another nod to her mom, and he walked off.

  “I don’t think he’s happy about that,” Ani said.

  Her mom hugged her. “Well, I am.”

  * * *

  She checked out fine, as promised, and the next day grunted in surprise to see the local news reporting the tragic accident that killed renowned composer, conductor, and pianist Dr. Christopher Herley. Authorities had found his body not far from his Pittsford home, thrown from his car into a utility pole.

  Sam and Devon said nothing to her, as much as possible pretending she didn’t exist, with the exception of class time, when they treated her with cool detachment. Part of her felt lonely and hurt, but the rest didn’t care.

  They’ll grow out of it.

  Or not.

  * * *

  “Check this out,” Sam said, pointing at the computer screen. Devon rolled her chair over behind her, while Ani walked over with Mr. Cummings and Mrs. Weller.

  The headline on NBC.com read AFRICAN STRONGMAN BAKSMATY DECLARES HIMSELF “EMPEROR IN PERPETUITY.” The publication date was February 5th.

  Yesterday.

  “So what’s it say?” Mrs. Weller put her hand on Sam's shoulder.

  “Says two months ago he was eighty-seven years old, dying of cancer, and his main general was set to take over. Now he’s back in charge and not breathing. But he’s not eating people, either.”

  “Oh, how wonderful the
world will be,” Mr. Cummings said, “when despots and politicians can’t die.”

  Sam grunted. “That has some interesting ramifications for the Supreme Court. Appointed for unlife. Yikes.” Sam scrolled through the article, then clicked images.

  “Emperor” Baksmaty was handsome in a wizened way, and his appearance had changed little in the past thirty years. Picture after picture showed him in a green military uniform bedecked with far too many ribbons, medals, and pins.

  “He looks like the ‘Last King of Scotland,’” Mrs. Weller said.

  “He looks like a Christmas tree,” Devon retorted.

  “Much the same.”

  A face flashed by on the screen, jolting Ani with a shock of recognition. “Wait!” she said. Sam stopped. “Scroll up.” Sam did. “Stop.”

  Ani tapped the screen with a fingernail. Behind Emperor Baksmaty stood seven people, one of them white. The white man had a round face and gray eyes. “I know that guy.”

  “Sure you do,” Mrs. Weller said. “From the last party you went to in West Nigeria or whatever.”

  “No, shut up,” she said, ignoring Mrs. Weller’s scoff of indignation. “That’s the pistol. That’s one of the guys who stole my blood. The guy they didn’t catch.”

  Mr. Cummings frowned. “Who else knows about him?”

  “Everyone,” Sam said. “Superintendent Salter put the camera shot on the website ‘to aid in the manhunt.’ Dad says Banerjee wasn’t very happy about it.”

  “Why would he care?” Devon asked.

  “Maybe...” Mr. Cummings said, “that’s not a rhetorical question.”

  Ani pointed at the camera in the corner of the room. “You know he’s watching, right?”

  Mr. Cummings twirled his finger in the air. “Whoop-de-doo. What’s he going to do, take away our rights?” He surveyed the room with distaste. “Orwell never dreamed of this place.”

  “So what happens when Memespace puts two and two together?” Sam asked.

  “Sorry?” Mr. Cummings asked.

  “Both stories hit the international media. Someone’s bound to notice. What happens when they do?”