was a punch in the jaw, gazing at this naked, gangly creature drenched in blood and clawing with broken fingers in my and Trevor’s direction, desperate, and with only one intention: to feed. She was nothing like she was before. Becoming a Stiff was just as good as dying. I had always thought it was so cruel to leave these things undead. If we didn’t decide to educate them, then it was better to put them out of their misery. Most likely, though, she would be transported to the Stockade. I kind of felt bad. I had condemned her to a fate worse than death, and I didn’t even know how.
“She killed herself,” my mentor stated evenly.
Trevor gazed uncertainly at him. “How do you know?”
“Look at her wrists,” my mentor said.
Trevor and I looked as her arms flailed. We could now see what my mentor had. There were gashes in her wrists. She had slit them during the night.
“How?” Trevor demanded. “There’s nothing in the stall she could cut herself with. We make sure there isn’t!”
My mentor extended his other hand toward us. It was holding a knife. A pretty dull, harmless knife, but if one was determined, they could cut through skin and veins after a few minutes with it. The knife was covered in blood. In fact, it looked more like a letter opener than a knife.
My eyes bulged. I felt around the belt of my pants. It was gone. Shit. The human had stolen it off me. She had seen it on me and had wanted me to get close enough so she could grab it. And use it to commit suicide.
I dropped my head. Tricked by two humans in one night. I was an idiot. I deserved to go to the Stockade. All my schooling, and I was still as dumb as a Stiff.
“She got a hold of this,” my mentor said.
“Where did she get that?” Trevor cried.
I sighed. There was no lie I could invent that could save me. Even if I pleaded ignorance (and believe me, my mentor wouldn’t buy it for a second) all of the blame would fall on Trevor, who had been responsible for feeding the humans last night. I wasn’t about to let my best friend take the fall for my actions. Time to confess. “She must have stolen it from me.”
My mentor stared at me. His face was blank, conveying no emotion or sign of disapproval. It was scary. “How?”
I told him. I told him how I had talked to her, and fed her, and how she must have stolen it from me when I wasn’t paying attention.
“And where did you get the knife from, Zellner?” my mentor asked.
“Well,” I started, my brain rummaging for an answer. “I found it. By the roadside. I was going to keep it.”
My mentor stared at me ominously, his eye scanning my face. He didn’t blink. I swallowed my apprehension like a rock down my throat. “The truth, Zellner,” he instructed. “Have enough respect for this situation and myself to offer that. I won’t ask again.”
I sighed again. Whatever lies I had concocted before I fell asleep last night clattered to the floor by my ankles, undisclosed. None of them explained the knife, and even if I had a lie on hand that did, my mentor would see right through it with his penetrating eye. The truth was the only weapon I had left to defend myself with. I told him everything. How I had gone human tracking on my own. How I had been chased by Stiffs. How I had met the human, and tried to bring her into Revenant. How she had tried to escape by getting the Stiffs to attack me. How I had barely made it back in one piece. I left Trevor out of it. There was no sense in condemning us both, and all the major transgressions I had committed on my own. My mentor’s expression never changed. It remained stone, cold, unrevealing. It was like staring into a deep, black well. There was nothing there. It was hollow and empty.
“What happened to the human?” he asked calmly.
I swallowed. I couldn’t tell him that she had escaped into Revenant. That the last time I saw her she was still alive. That would mean sending a party into the Stockade after her. That would mean telling everybody what I had done. That would mean expulsion. “She’s dead,” I said.
“The Stiffs killed her?” Trevor asked suddenly.
I nodded eagerly. It was probably true. And probably true was enough to convince my mentor. A half-truth was harder for him to spot than a non-truth.
My mentor shook his head solemnly. “You infected her,” he said quietly. “The blood from the knife. It introduced the virus into her blood stream. She must have bled out slowly, and we know how quickly the infection spreads. I’m not surprised. It must have taken her a while to cut through with this dull blade.” He gazed carefully at the rusty knife and shook his head.
I gazed at the knife blankly. He was right. The blood that was on the knife had infected her. She had stolen it off me when I had gotten close to feed her and she had used it to kill herself to escape this world, unaware that doing so would turn her into a Stiff. Then she had eaten the only other human we had in zone A and devoured his brain, the only resource that Wakes truly considered of value.
I swore under my breath as I took in all of the crimes I had committed last night: illegal human tracking, letting a human into Revenant boundaries, infecting a human, being responsible for the loss of two stocks of human and rendering their brains unusable. Any one of those crimes could lead to expulsion. Together, I didn’t see any way I could avoid being sent to the Stockade.
I waited for my mentor to drop the hammer.
“I am very disappointed in you, Zellner,” he spoke gravely. “Very disappointed.”
Then he turned and led the Stiff out of the barn.
19. ZOMBIE PROBATION
Life in Revenant was not kind to me during the following week. My mentor placed me on voluntary probation. Voluntary because he feared that if he reported my transgressions to the council that Mayor Hillard would have me expelled. Zombie crimes were being met with harsher punishments these days, and Wakes had been banished from town or condemned to the Stockade for lesser crimes over the last few months. Basically, if I broke my probation, my mentor would report everything that had happened. For the rest of the school year I was expected to go to school, come home directly afterwards, and stay in studying the rest of the evening. I wasn’t to go out into town, not to zone C or anywhere in zone A, and I wasn’t even allowed to visit Trevor and his mentor. His mentor, learning that I had been responsible for the loss of the two humans, had all but banned me from the Kushner farm anyway. She had been forced to report the human deaths, but my mentor at least convinced her to cover up my involvement, blaming it on poor health and an illness that hadn’t been detected previously that had weakened and killed them both. My mentor took care of the woman, transferring her to the Stockade and salvaging the man’s remains for Stiff bait, claiming to Mayor Hillard’s administration that the bodies had been too diseased to have any better use.
My mentor had been strict before. Now he was a tyrant. I was expected to check in with him whenever I changed rooms in the house, reporting my reasons. I couldn’t even sneak a morsel of brain from the kitchen without him jumping on me. It was unbearable. I felt like a prisoner. But I didn’t have a choice. My fate was in his hands, and if I wanted to continue my living death, I had to do as he said. I did my best to be a good zombie, and even though I was bored out of my mind, studying and having nothing but homework to entertain me, I kept myself locked up in the house.
Luckily, my mentor was merciful enough to spend the credits to have me fixed up by a tailor. The story was that I, eager to begin human tracking, had followed my mentor one night and had been attacked by a Stiff. My mentor had saved me, but not before some decent damage had been inflicted. It was still a crime, but at least it happened in my zone, where my mentor had lawful jurisdiction. He convinced the tailor to keep the information under his hat, with the understanding that zombie boys will be zombie boys, and that I had learned my lesson.
The wound on my arm had been sutured with thick metal clamps, two lines going down parallel to each other on my left bicep. Regular stitches were not strong enough to hold the dense skin together. Wearing a short-sleeve shirt covered it up pretty well, and after
it had been mended it didn’t really bother me much once I got used to it. Most of the flesh hadn’t been lost, so it closed pretty well. It was more an aesthetic injury than anything else, and honestly it did look pretty cool.
My mentor spent every evening before he went tracking instilling the responsibility of human tracking in me. He went over every rule, explaining why it was so important to never track alone, and especially without any experience. Anytime I attempted to speak back or defend myself he would raise his hand showing three fingers. Three. The number of humans I had lost that night by not following the rules of human tracking. The number of humans I was directly responsible for losing. “Learn, don’t instruct,” he would say then. And I would shut my mouth and let him continue.
Sometimes I wondered why my mentor had gone out of his way to protect me, why he hadn’t reported me and had me thrown in the Stockade with the Stiffs. Sometimes I think he wondered the same thing. Another Stiff would be brought in to take my place eventually, and it seemed to me like he had always thought I was not the best apprentice. This had been his chance to start over. But he had protected me. Whatever bad blood there was between us, even for him treating me like a slave because of it, I had to be grateful to him for that. Whatever his reasoning was. And believe me, Joe,