“Really?”
“Zombies don’t feel pain, Roger; that’s just one of our few tiny little perks. Already your pain receptors are fried, so don’t be afraid of claws or fangs or fists or dirty Mean Girl looks, okay? And whatever you do, don’t think twice about hitting a girl!”
He smiles conspiratorially, just before Piper finally breaks through the door and literally yanks him through.
Looking at the Roger size hole he’s left behind, I see the stake clattering to the floor just outside the door.
Great; so this is going well…
* * * * *
Chapter 23
I leap through the hole and find Piper and Bianca tearing Roger a new one, literally clawing at his elbows and arms as he flails his arm in a vain effort to get away.
I rush to his aide but just before I do he makes a huge growling lunge and stands, knocking both girls from his side.
They scramble on the floor tiles, their nails sharp like claws and clattering across the floor like lobsters, fighting for purchase.
“Bianca!” I shout to Roger as she finally stands.
I turn my attention to Piper and watch as she rises from the floor as if on strings, her elbows bent and pointing toward the ceiling, her knees bent and pointing in my direction.
Vampires can’t fly, exactly, but they sure are graceful and seem to defy the laws of nature from time-to-time; this is one of those times.
She darts at me, building momentum along the way; but momentum is good.
I dodge just as she nears, pivoting on my left and slamming my right foot down as I grab her by the backpack purse and sling her across the room.
She lands in a heap of cafeteria chairs and I’m almost there by the time she clatters to her feet, just close enough to launch myself at her.
Her shoulder is softer than I’d imagine, but it sure feels hard when we both hit the ground.
I hear a grunt and then two piping hot lungs full of stank vampire breath bathe me in their putrid putridness full of putridity.
The smell is so disgusting I slam my fists into her chest just to stop it.
She grunts once more and shoves back, toppling me to the floor where she pins me, her fangs glistening with spit, hot, sizzling spit that drops off each fang and spills onto my clothes.
It’s dank and fiery, like her breath, and I shake against the floor beneath her.
She laughs, her mouth open, her fangs wide, but she’s careful not to bite me because we both know a zombie who’s been bitten by a vampire is twice as powerful as a mere zombie or vampire alone, and the last thing she wants is that kind of competition.
Still, she uses her sharp nails to stab me, jab me, and although I can’t feel pain I don’t want to spend eternity with gaping holes in my skin so I get traction with my sneaker bottoms, lift her up, up until I buck like a bronco and topple her right onto her head.
I sneak a look at Roger as I’m getting up and see him cornered by Bianca and Alex, but he’s somehow broken a cafeteria table in half and is using the sharp, jagged edges to hold them off like a giant shield.
(Nice one!)
I turn back to Piper and she is gone, if only for the briefest of moments.
I hear the whooshing against her skin and look up, just in time to find the bottom of her foot planted against my forehead.
I go sailing across the room, lose my stake and am still scrambling for it when she breaks a cafeteria chair over my skull.
She’s left holding the plastic part of the chair and I reach for the metal legs, finding myself with one in each hand as I lift up to one knee, driving the first under her chin where it pierces flesh and she gushes blood, hot and sticky all over my arm.
With the other I aim for the other side of her throat but there is so much blood I slip just as I’m making another plunge; it ends up piercing her side instead.
She hisses hard enough to just about break my ear drums and slithers away while I race for my stake.
But she is cagey enough to climb, climb the walls, bleeding everywhere, the walls looking like crime scenes, the tables at her feet not much better.
While she’s catching her breath I race to Roger, swatting at first Alex then Bianca with my converted chair leg nun chucks; they squeal and hiss and allow me to pass.
I give him one chair leg and he tosses the table, literally, halfway across the room.
I watch it sail and think, “I’m glad he’s on our side.”
He doesn’t watch it sail; he quickly rushes from our safe protective circle to join the fray, which now includes Piper.
Together the vampires close ranks, with Alex in the middle looking equal parts menacing and amused; it’s like he can’t quite grasp this is life and death now.
I smack him on the side of the face with a chair leg and that wakes him up; he hisses and hits back but Bianca shoves him aside.
Roger plows into her with his considerable weight and brings her to the floor, where I quickly trade out metal for wood and plunge the stake dead center into her chest.
The flash of sulfur fumes and ash and light knock both Roger and I onto our feet as Piper and Alex cower to the sides.
I’ve seen that happen before with vampires; it’s like they can’t stand the literal heat coming from their fallen comrade’s body.
I use the time, the ash, the soot, the smoke and flames to drag Roger through the broken door to the kitchen and onto the other side, where I yank open the walk-in cooler door and yank Tara and Fiona out, one by one.
Fiona says, “What’s that smell?”
I look at Roger and say, “Sorry, sleepyhead, I just wasted a vampire; get used to it!”
I crowd them behind me, behind me and Roger, as we stand facing the gaping hole in the kitchen door.
On the other side Piper is collecting Bianca’s ashes into Alex’s backpack, shoving scorched bone and a couple fangs deep down.
Roger says, “What are they doing?”
I say, “Hiding the evidence. We still have a couple periods before the big showdown and if some poor janitor walks into the cafeteria and finds a burned body, well, that’s it; game over!”
Piper ignores me to literally wipe the floor tiles clean with her hands while Alex spreads Bianca dust far and wide.
They even straighten some chairs and Piper sends Alex to wash her blood off the walls.
As she dabs at her throat with a hand wipe from her purse I notice the wound has already healed.
“They can really do that?” asks Roger, mouth agape from next to me in the doorway hole.
I nod my head and say, as if to myself, “I really, really hate vampires.”
He snorts and Piper hears him, smiling as she flips up her collar to cover a blood stain she can’t get off.
As Alex finishes with the wall and saunters over, backpack full of vampire ashes clinging to him like a wet sack of potatoes, Piper eyes our little ragtag team of zombies and humans and says, to me, “Not bad, Lucy. I’ll miss Bianca, of course, but the good news is I’ve got Alex here to take her place.”
She slaps Alex on the back, hard, in a not-so-friendly way and Fiona, who’s been MIA in the freezer this whole time asks, “Alex?”
He looks at her brazenly for a second and then, sensing her utter disappointment, looks next at the ground.
Just then the bell for 6th period rings and it’s like a wake-up call; we’re still in school.
We have just trashed the cafeteria kitchen, the entire cafeteria and, no matter how much blood they’ve wiped off the walls they couldn’t get rid of the body-sized singe burns on the floor.
I shake my head and say, “Run along to class now, Piper. You’ve got a rep to protect, after all.”
“Unlike you zombies, of course, who I dare say nobody’s missed all day.”
She takes great pride in that fact.
I frown and say, “Well, that’s probably because Dana and Ethan are still representing in class…” not bothering to think bef
ore I speak.
After all, I don’t know where Dana is, what Ethan’s been doing; and suddenly Piper knows this, too.
Her face beams, her fangs practically glisten as she says, “Oh, didn’t you hear? Your little zombie friends have been MIA all day, too. I guess you three aren’t getting along anymore, what with you having all new… friends.”
She gives the motley crew behind me a withering glance and says, “I do hope you zombies can make up before school lets out for the day. You’re going to need all the help you can get when the Marauders get here.”
* * * * *
Chapter 24
“Marauders?” asks Fiona, who’s so out of the loop I’ve almost forgotten she’s the reason we’re in this mess in the first place.
We’re in the sunlight now, early afternoon shifting to late as we creep along the back wall behind the cafeteria and sneak, single file, toward the back gym door.
There are no more PE classes for the day, so we’ll have the whole girls’ locker room to ourselves until the big finale.
I stop just shy of the gym door, look out upon the empty soccer field just beyond and sense no one in the offing.
I’m in no hurry to be stuck in the locker room with Roger and his fresh-zombie stench for the next two periods, so I linger outside for a moment and explain, “Listen, Fiona, not to name names but thanks to a certain someone – namely, you – the cat is out of the bag for the Living Dead here at Barracuda Bay. Your little column this morning set in motion a cataclysmic chain of events that is just now starting to pile up on me.”
“Like what?” asks Fiona, clearly clueless.
“Like what?” I ask. “Like what? Like, try, my best friends in the world – my ONLY friends in the world—”
“Until now,” corrects Tara.
“Until now,” I manage a smile, “my only two friends in the world – until now – are no longer speaking to me, the guy I used to have a major crush on for, like, three years and who I now wish I had made a move on THREE YEARS AGO is now a vampire, Roger here is now a zombie and—”
Fiona barks out a laugh from her crinkly, snarky face. “Wait, what? Backup: Roger is a zombie? Get out of town. Although, wait… that would explain that smell that’s been following us all the way from the cafeteria. At first I just thought one of the garbage disposals had backed up, but then why would I still be smelling it 20 paces from the cafeteria, right?”
Far from being embarrassed, Roger has chosen to embrace his newfound Living Dead status – and Fiona as well.
“Love it, Fiona!” cries Roger, sucking her into his big pale arms and smearing her face all over his chest. “Love the rotting corpse smell of your old friend, Roger!”
“Ugghh,” she spits, finally pushing herself free of his large, ample moobs. “Roger, you stink worse than that time you quit bathing to protest the Lord of the Rings movie not getting an Oscar.”
I manage a smile, picturing Roger in a Hobbit T-shirt and simmering in his own geek funk for close to a week.
“Well, the good news is that he only has another few days to smell and then, well, he’ll be just like me.”
“Big improvement,” murmurs Fiona, just murmuringly enough for me to overhear.
“Fiona!” snaps Tara, seeming to rise two inches in height. “You take that back. Lucy has saved our butts more times than I can count this morning, and if it wasn’t for you she could have gone back to her old life and none of this would have happened in the first place.”
“Okay, okay,” says Fiona, then, to me, “You were explaining about Marauders?”
I look at the sun drifting through the blue Florida sky, at the palm fronds on the fringe of the soccer fields waving in the early autumn breeze, then look at Fiona’s frumpy mouth and say, “I can’t believe they aren’t here yet, but the Marauders are kind of like… vampire cops. Those creeps don’t have laws, per se, but they do have a kind of rule that says you can’t let humans know you’re a vampire unless you plan on sucking their blood, that kind of thing. Anyway, thanks to your little stunt this morning, the Marauders know something is up at our school, so they have to send a representative or two – or four, or six, or 600, we won’t know until they get here – to check it out, make sure everything’s kosher.”
Fiona shakes her head. “So, let me get this straight: you’re a zombie, Roger’s a zombie, Alex is a… vampire… so are Piper and Bianca and—”
“Not anymore,” says Roger, and I can’t tell if he’s smiling or blinking back a tear. “While you were in deep freeze, Ms. Vampire Slayer Lucy here turned Bianca into something that belongs in an ashtray.”
Fiona says, “Phew, okay, well, counting you and Roger and Ethan and Dana, then, that makes four zombies to two vampires, so… what are you babysitting us for? You should be kicking their butts and letting us go home early.”
Tara looks at Roger and Roger looks at me and I look at them and it’s like… seriously?
Seriously?
You can be an honor student, a Math-a-lete, walk on your hind legs, use opposable thumbs and still be this stupid?
“Fiona, what part of Zombie Versus Vampire Apocalypse do you not understand? The Sentinels are coming, the Marauders are coming and we can’t keep stopping to explain that to you. I’m trying to save your butt; the least you can do is keep up!”
And with that I’m done with Fiona.
I lurch forward, yank open the back door to the gym and in a flash I realize I’m already too late – the gym is crowded with zombies.
All sizes, all shapes, all—
“They’re here,” says Roger, lurching forward and suddenly it dawns on me that these aren’t real zombies, they aren’t Sentinels or, for that matter, Elders but Drama class zombies.
Roger streams forward to embrace his thespian buds but I yank him back, look him up and down and say, “Listen, Roger, remember; you’re not alive, okay? You’re one of us now; you can’t tell these kids you’re a real zombie.”
“What?” he looks crestfallen. “But… what’s the use of being a zombie if you can’t brag about it?”
I shrug. “Welcome to my world, pal. The point is, once this is over – if we’re so lucky – you get a ticket to a new life, to a new school, to new friends. You can’t do that if the whole world thinks you’re a zombie.”
He thinks about it for a minute, then kind of shrugs and says, “Okay, Lucy. I trust you. If you say lips shut then, that’s it; my lips are sealed.”
And he shambles off, straightening just before he greets a big group of dressed-up zombies.
I turn to Tara, who is already yanking out a camcorder and plugging in chords and checking out battery packs.
“You really think this will work?” I ask.
Tara says, “It’s got to, right?”
Fiona kind of lurks in the corner, picking through a pile of zombie clothes and says, “What am I supposed to do?”
I look at Roger back-slapping dressed up zombies, watch Tara checking for sound and light with her camcorder and spot the girls’ locker room door across the room.
“You follow me,” I snap.
For once, she does.
* * * * *
Chapter 25
Once Fiona and I are alone in the locker room, I walk to the nearest row of lockers and say, “Come here, Fiona.”
She sighs, but does as she’s told.
The minute she does, I literally grab her arm and toss her onto the top of the lockers.
“Hey!” she says. “What gives? This wasn’t part of the plan.”
I slide one of the wooden locker room benches over, use it as a stepping stool and join her on the top of the lockers.
“Maybe not your plan,” I say, “but it’s the best part of my plan.”
“What part is that?” I ask.
“It’s called the element of surprise.”
Before she can ask anymore stupid questions I punch through two of the (probably) asbestos ceiling tiles to expose a network of flim
sy metal grids keeping the rest of the tiles together.
“What are you looking for?” she asks.
I smile as I find it: “Roof access.”
The sprinkler system leads to a big red box, with a flimsy little padlock.
I break it, and instantly the square pops up and light falls down.
“How’d you know that was there?” Fiona asks as I drag her up through the square and out onto the roof.
“We have a whole semester on public school roof access at Afterlife Academy.”
“Afterlife whatzit?” she asks as I drag her reluctantly to the edge of the roof.