by Scott Craven
“But really, sometimes you give too much. Like you did in the locker room. Have to tell you, Deadeye Jedi, that was going beyond the call.”
“(Sorry).”
“What?”
“I’m sorry about that, it’s nothing I can control.”
Robbie stepped closer, and I could feel Ooze on my forehead. If I just leaned forward I could probably get some on his chin, and we could end this thing right now.
He took a quick step back and stuck the cigarette in the corner of his mouth. It bobbed as he spoke.
“Not again, ooze-meister,” he said, pulling on a pair of what looked like garden gloves covered with, uh, were those daisies? “Yeah, these are my mom’s. Any glove in a storm, I always say. You have a problem? Something to say?”
I shook my head.
“I know about stuff that’s uncontrollable. Anger, for example. Can’t seem to get a handle on it. Joe,” Robbie said, his eyes never leaving mine, “what can’t you control?”
“My mom’s drinking,” Joe said.
“Yeah.” Robbie smiled. “Bennie, what about you?”
“What?” Ben asked.
“Have you not been listening?”
“No, I’m sorry, it’s that I’m trying to listen for security so—”
Robbie’s left hand shot out so fast that, had he been aiming for me, I would have ducked about a second too late. Instead it flew over my shoulder, and I heard the sound of garden glove on flesh, followed by Ben’s yelp.
I looked over my shoulder. Ben cupped his nose with both hands, blood slipping between his fingers, cigarette still in his mouth.
“Jeezus, Robbie, what the hell,” Ben said. “My nose, oh my God, you broke it, damn, dude.”
“See what I mean about stuff you can’t control?” Robbie said. He took a long drag from his cigarette, then stubbed it out against a stall, all the while keeping eye contact.
“Ben, quit whining and grab some toilet paper.”
Ben stepped out from behind me toward the nearest stall, kicking open the door and disappearing inside. I heard the clattering of a metal roller as it spun in the toilet-paper housing.
My eyes went to the left, quickly, hoping to size up where I was in relation to the exit. That was enough to tip off Robbie, who grabbed my right arm.
“Not so fast, my boy,” he said. “What you and I need to do is come to some sort of understanding. Bygones and all that.”
He pulled me over to the sink. Joe stepped forward and grabbed my other arm.
“Hold him,” Robbie said as he released me, his hand going back into his jacket pocket. He pulled out a pack of cigarettes.
“What we need to do is shake hands and smoke on it,” he said, lighting up another cigarette. He inhaled deeply, then exhaled in my face.
He shook another from the pack, placed it next to the one in his mouth, and produced a lighter, flicking it inches from my nose.
“I wonder,” he said, “do zombies burn fast or slow?”
The flame was an inch from my left eye. I didn’t so much feel the heat as sense it. I squeezed my eyes shut.
“Now, now, what was I thinking, this is about friendship,” Robbie said. “Let’s start from the beginning.”
The heat, the light, I didn’t sense either. When I opened my eyes, both cigarettes were lit. Robbie plucked the fresh one from his mouth and held it out.
“For you,” he said.
“No … thanks,” I said.
“You don’t understand. I’m not asking. Right, Bennie?”
“Yeah.” Ben said from the stall. His voice was flat.
“We need to do this. Get everything out in the open.”
He turned the cigarette so the filter was toward me, used the tip to wedge open my lips. When he took his hand away, it no longer held the cigarette. I saw my reflection in the mirror, cigarette dangling between my lips.
“Take a deep breath,” Robbie said. “I’m real curious to see if you leak at all. Wouldn’t that be interesting? Smoke coming from your eyes? Out the top of your skull? Who knows how you’re put together?”
I took a breath, noticed the ember burning bright from the cigarette in the mouth of the kid in the mirror. Then a plume of smoke pushed through my lips.
That’s when the cigarette fell from the mirror kid’s mouth, tumbling end over end in slow motion.
The rest just happened at once.
Robbie bent to pick up the cig, and the mirror kid yanked his arm away from Joe, turned, and bolted for the door, but didn’t even get a step before he was jerked off his feet.
Suddenly I was on the floor, I couldn’t see the mirror kid anymore. Instead, I saw Robbie standing over me. He had a hold of my arm.
But I was on the floor. No way my arm would reach.
Then Joe— “Robbie, we gotta get outta here, drop that thing and let’s go.”
Ben— “Holy crap what happened, let’s go now now now. We gotta go.”
Robbie— “Yeah, one second.”
He turned, I couldn’t see. Looked at my right arm. No, had to look for my right arm. Robbie, keep watching Robbie, he had it last.
Footsteps, a slamming door.
Looked around. No one around. But my arm, they took my arm.
A squeak, another. The door opening.
“What happened, kid? Hey, you all right?”
“What’s going on?” A different voice. “Are the culprits still here?”
“No, Mr. Buckley, but, well, you just have to see.”
Footsteps. Two people standing over me. Robbie? No, adults.
“Not as bad as it looks, Bob. This happens to be our resident zombie boy; you’ve probably heard about him.”
“Yeah, but, Mr. Buckley, his arm.”
That was Mr. Stanzer, the one teacher who’d always been pretty decent to me. After the shower incident, he started letting me leave PE a little early so I could shower in peace. When Luke and I hit the court after lunch, he made sure to give us the only basketball that wasn’t lopsided.
“Yes, I know.” The voice was Principal Buckley’s. That was when I just knew I was going to be in trouble. “Please help him to his feet and let’s take care of this situation before the bell rings.”
Two hands under my shoulders, lifting me. Principal Buckley was bent over in front of the mirror. He picked something up.
“I do believe we’ve found the source of all the smoking that has been reported,” he said.
He held my arm out in front of me. Between the first and middle fingers, a cigarette smoldered.
“Not mine,” I said.
“Your arm, your hand—your cigarette,” Principal Buckley said. “Possession is, after all, nine-tenths of the law. Bob, let’s escort him to the nurse’s office. She’ll know what to do. Then Jed and I will discuss the consequences.”
Which, as it turned out, boiled down to a week of detention. But at least I knew where I stood with Principal Buckley.
I was just happy Mr. Stanzer was on security that day. When I got back to school, at lunch Mr. Stanzer handed me a brand-new basketball. “You’re a tough kid, hang in there,” he said. If the price for having a friend on the faculty was a temporarily severed arm, it was a small price to pay.
But Robbie was right with one thing. Some things are uncontrollable.
The need for revenge, for example.
Chapter Twelve
“So what do you think?”
“I’m not so sure this is a good idea, Jed. You’re just gonna piss him off even more.”
“Well, yeah, that’s the point. Like that’s going to make it worse?”
“I guess. But remember, it can always get worse.”
I looked at Anna. I wasn’t sure she was going to come, and I nearly passed out when I asked if she would meet Luke and me after school. When she said, “Sure,” like it was nothing, I felt we had reached another level in our relationship. Acquaintances. Maybe even casual friends.
I even started to think there could be something more. For no
w, I was just happy she was here.
“How about you?” I said to Anna. “Worth trying at least?”
“As long as you make sure it works,” she said, smiling. “And I know you can make it work if you put your mind to it.”
Ever since Robbie burned me in the bathroom, he was on my butt even more. Sometimes it was as simple as lunging at me in the hall. I’d backpedal instinctively, usually into someone, and they would shove me into someone else, who shoved me into someone else—someone started calling it Zombie Pinball, and the name stuck.
Other times Robbie would make a big show of pulling on latex gloves he’d stolen from Biology Lab, grabbing me under my arms, and placing me in the nearest receptacle. I’m not sure, but I think I even lifted my legs to make it easier. It just happened without me even thinking.
If I didn’t do something, this was going to last the rest of the year. I imagined twenty years from now, me leaving my job, and there being a middle-aged Robbie in the parking lot. “Deeeeeeeeeee Jaaaaaayyyyyy, time to play Smell My Finger. If you can’t guess where it’s been, you know what happens.”
It felt like this was going to last forever.
I had to take control, even if just for one afternoon. And it was all about embracing who I was.
This zombie was gonna strike back. Even if it killed me.
The bare bones of the idea had come to me back when I was stuck in the trophy case. These three words came into my brain:
“Use the Ooze.”
The only power I had over Robbie was my deep and unrelenting zombieness. Already he thought Ooze might turn him undead. But I needed him to believe I could turn him zombie, and not just with Ooze. I had other bodily fluids at my disposal.
First was the building of a believable foundation. Robbie was gullible, but he had to be absolutely convinced of my zombie powers.
What is the one place where fiction can become fact?
That’s right. Wikipedia.
I fashioned an “Everything you need to know about zombies” Wikipedia page. It was filled with research, quotes from experts, and facts as derived from the Bureau of Reanimated, Autonomous and Inert Neuro-energy Sciences (BRAINS), otherwise known as the top-secret and highly classified federal bureau of zombie studies. No Wikipedia page is complete without a top-secret government program—I’ll wait as the irony sinks in.
BRAINS came to the conclusion that zombies, despite their depiction in movies, have light appetites, enjoy long walks on the beach, and are relatively harmless save for one by-product of the type of cell reproduction necessary to prolong their “lives”: a sticky substance that forms on their skin in times of physical exertion (though also noticed in stressful situations).
This “Ooze,” found in much higher concentrations in zombie blood, “holds the key to life in death, and while scientists have yet to discover exactly how or why it works, it clearly is vital to maintaining organs and tissues that, by previous measures, would have been considered inanimate.”
While Ooze was necessary to zombies, it had a different effect on live tissue, according to a bunch of stuff I made up as I went along. Lab rats exposed to Ooze at first became excited, bordering on hyperactive. Within minutes they lost coordination, lurching about as if taking on the perceived attributes of zombies. Skin took on a gray pallor, and twenty-four hours later, the rats had no vital signs, yet continued to move in ways that suggested a complete loss of motor skills. Researchers determined the rats had become, in effect, the kind of living dead portrayed in such classic zombie movies as Night of the Living Dead and Dead Alive—shambling afterthoughts with purposeless lives.
There was a rumor that a researcher had been contaminated with Ooze during the study, and that while the feds had shredded all records related to the accident, those on the inside revealed the man had attempted suicide thirty-seven times before being placed in a highly classified hospice, where to this day he is the longest-living (so to speak) resident.
I threw in a few graphs and pie charts for good measure. My favorite was the “Time of Zombification” based on “Square Inches of Flesh Exposed to Ooze.”
It was easy to spread the word, thanks to Twitter and Facebook. I started it with a fake account on Twitter, @keepaneyeout, which was “Your No. 1 source of zombie-related info.” Josh and Luke were my first followers, and it took only about three days before I was up to more than fifty, just about all of them at Pine Hollow.
Pretty soon I noticed #zombiescourge was trending. Turns out I’d tapped into a very popular Twitter subject. It was filled with discussion of government conspiracies to keep the growing undead population under wraps and the outing of various zombie celebs: Lindsay Lohan, Ryan Seacrest, any Kardashian—couldn’t argue with them. In fact, I retweeted some of them.
Next was formulating a method of Ooze delivery. There were two rules: There had to be a lot, and it had to be an accident. At least, appear to be an accident.
Short of tearing off a few limbs each night, there was no way to generate enough real Ooze to make this work. That’s one reason I was depending on the Wikipedia page and its tidbit about the concentration of Ooze being much higher in zombie blood.
The plan required two things. First, Robbie had to be paying little attention when he ripped out my arm and noted how little blood was involved. Honestly, I wasn’t worried about that at all. He paid more attention to humiliating me than anything else.
Secondly, I needed my blood to spurt. Check that. I needed buckets of my blood to spurt out.
That meant a traumatic injury to a maneuverable body part. A part I could aim and use like a gun.
An index finger.
And where do the majority of horrible junior-high accidents occur, at least according to another Wikipedia page?
Woodshop. This revelation came from the conversation I had with Chris, about how easy it would be to lose a digit to the band saw, which popped back into my mind the moment I thought finger.
I drew everything up and showed Anna and Luke.
“So this is … what, again?” he said, pointing at the crude sketch.
“Plastic bag of blood.”
“And this?”
“Some sort of tubing.”
“And this little dangly thing? With all the spray coming out? That’s not your—”
“Dude, that’s my finger.” If zombies could turn red, I did it right then. I hoped Anna didn’t get where Luke was going. If she did, she didn’t show it.
“See,” I continued, “there’s the saw. Finger into saw and, bam! Major industrial accident. Lots of highly toxic zombie blood. Awesome.”
Luke shook his head. “That is more than just awesome. That hits awesomely awesome. But I’m not sure you’ve thought this out.”
“I’ve thought of everything.”
“Including the ‘after’ part, when all this is over and Robbie figures out he is not turning zombie and comes after us? And I do mean us. Both of us.”
“Really, that’s what you’re thinking about? Us? Like when he pushes ‘us’ in the hall? Puts ‘us’ in the trash can? Shoved ‘us’ into the trophy case? Is that the ‘us’ you’re talking about?”
Anna put her hand on my elbow. “Jed, hey, Luke is on your side. So am I. I think we’re both a little worried about what Robbie will do. You know he’s more than a little crazy.”
I knew I was asking a lot. Anna didn’t really know what she was getting herself into. It was a big risk to befriend someone so different.
Luke had always been there for me. But until this year, that hadn’t been so hard. It was a lot tougher now, and I had to make sure he at least was going to be with me on this.
If not, then I really was on my own.
Luke looked down. “So how’s this bag thing work?” he said.
Cool.
“I figure I wedge it under my armpit and, when the time is right, squeeze. And it goes through the tube.”
“What tube?” Anna said. Even cooler.
“Not sure ye
t,” I said. “Maybe taping together a bunch of heavy duty straws. I’m pretty good with duct tape.”
“That’s not going to work,” Anna said. “How about, let’s see. Surgical tubing. You can get it online. Flexible and strong.”
“That would work.” Way better than straws, doofus. “Thanks, Anna.”
“I just hope you know what you’re doing.” I could hear the caring in her voice. She was with me, too. If zombies could get the chills, I had them right then.
Chapter Thirteen
It was one thing to put it down on paper. Quite another to make it all work.
Each day after school I spent some time building the Ooze delivery device. First I would have to pick the banana peel and assorted crap out of my hair from the latest Dumpster dive, courtesy of Robbie (keeping my motivation strong). But finally I thought I had it, right down to the fake blood of pancake syrup and red dye, to which I’d add a little Ooze for effect.
When it was ready to go, I called Anna and Luke.
“Meet me in my garage,” I told each. “I think we’re ready for the first test.”
I was standing at my dad’s worktable when Anna and Luke arrived. In front of me were a plastic bag and a four-foot piece of tubing.
“Let’s set it up,” Luke said.
He poured the blood into the bag and zipped up all but the last corner. He handed it to Anna, who poked the surgical tubing into the bag before duct-taping it securely.
“Ready with this,” Anna said. “Want to strap in?”
“Let’s do this.”
She slipped everything up my shirt, wedged the bag under my armpit, and threaded the tube through my sleeve. I swear my heart fluttered a little as she touched me. Unnerving, but then pretty cool. Maybe having a beating heart wasn’t as annoying as I’d imagined.
I took the end of the tube with my index and middle finger. It was a perfect fit.
“Let’s pretend you’re sawing that bookshelf you’ve been working on since the start of the year while everyone else went on to the birdhouse,” Anna said. “There you go, saw saw saw, not paying attention OH NO WHAT DID YOU DO, YOUR FINGER IS GONE.”
