They’re in civilian clothes, bloody civilian clothes. And they shuffle, like the old zombies, before they found the Cure. The Cure that makes them semi-human, like Reggie, and not cannibalistic inhuman, like… like these three.
My heart is hammering, like it did the first time I faced zombies, and the second and the third. No matter how many times you do it, you never quite get used to it.
“What now?” I ask, just because listening to them stalk among the grass outside the cafeteria is freaking me out.
He looks at me, then out the window. They’re getting closer, with every shuffle. “Here,” he says, taking off his shirt. “Put this on.”
I don’t argue, because he’s a zombie and I’m not. I start to put it on over my hoodie and he says, “No, trade.”
Oh, I see now. I take off my prep school hoodie and hand it over. We both have tank tops underneath. I slip into his shirt while wriggling out of my jeans. He has on those kind of longish boxer briefs, the kind that hit guys mid-thigh. He looks like he’s on the swim team, lean and bony and all sinews and hard angles.
I slip into his dark brown uniform pants, and while they’re loose in the thighs they’re long at the ankles. I roll them up once, then twice, as we switch shoes. His ankles stick out of the back of my flats, but they kind of look like flip flops once his long, gray feet are inside. The jeans are a little short, but he yanks them down at the waist so they don’t look entirely like floods.
The door is rattling, pounding, but it’s not locked; they’re just kinda stupid. “Hat,” he says, handing his over. I scoop up my hair into the back and slide it on.
He sniffs the air, inches closer and sniffs me. “You smell too human,” he says. The pounding increases at the door. I look at the sandwich, still grilling in the giant pan. I can hear it sizzling and turn the heat way up.
“Give it a sec,” I say.
He says, “We don’t have one.”
And that’s when the door bursts open. They are big and angry, they haven’t lost their muscle mass yet. They look fresh and my first thought is, “Oh great, another infestation. Happy Zombie Thanksgiving!”
But I can’t worry about where my roommate Carmen is right now, or my Mom or any of my classmates at Paranoia Prep. This is real and this is now and I’m alone, pretty much.
Reggie stands by the door, looking at the zombies. I stand near the frying pan, hoping the smell of burnt cheese is enough to mask my human odors.
The tallest zombie is in front, he’s wide like a trucker and dressed like a lumberjack. There is something hanging from his teeth, like a flap of skin. He grabs Reggie by the shoulders and sniffs him, grunting all the while. Reggie pushes him back and says one word: “Same.”
The zombie cocks his head, sniffs some more. Reggie is thin and wiry, but strong. The big zombie still pushes him aside, and the others stumble past. Reggie stands from the floor, looking at me as the big one heads over.
He sniffs me, grabs me, his fingers cold on my shoulders. “Same,” I say, in a low voice, but he shakes his head.
I quiver and know this won’t work. It was stupid, stupid to think it would. The other zombies are behind him, like a kind of formation, never coming much closer. I see the flap of skin hanging from his teeth and wince.
His eyes are black, pure black, like they are in this phase. He looks fresh, he smells rotting, and immediately I know these aren’t the only three zombies I’ll face this Thanksgiving weekend.
But I won’t face any if I don’t make it through this. The three ignore Reggie, even as he creeps up behind them. The big one eyeballs me, shoving me, sniffing me, but now the sandwich is burning and I can barely smell them.
A smaller one, a woman, wiry but gaunt, gray and bloody, sniffs behind her, finds the big box of brains from the cooler. She opens it, eats one while a few spare brains drop to the floor with a squishy flop, flop sound before bouncing to a stop.
The second one turns, grabs a brain off the floor, eats it. The big one sniffs, turns, grabs two, eats one, hands me the other.
“Eat,” he says, mouth dark like a cave, breath stank enough to blow me over even with the burning cheese in the sizzling pan.
I flick my eyes to Reggie, who nods. I take the brain. Oh God, it’s jiggly, both fleshy and firm and soft and squishy at the same time. And cold, so cold. I hold it up to my mouth and smell that dark meat and rusty copper scent again, like the one on Reggie’s breath after he grunted through one or two of them.
I press it to my mouth, my trembling mouth. I gag. The big guy sees me and starts to reach out a hand, either to snatch the brain away or yank my neck off, I don’t know which.
I take a sudden bite, just to shut him up. I tear it, it’s hard, to get a chunk off. Blood comes out, cold across my lips, and finally the piece tears away. It’s thick and coppery inside my mouth, slimy like leather and chewy like gristle and I can’t help myself, every Cheesy Poof and Mallow Mar and Cocoa Pie and Choco Taco I’ve eaten since school let out for the holiday goes gushing forth, onto Big Guy’s face and down his lumberjack shirt.
I turn, reaching for the stove, knowing my goose is cooked, and grabbing the sizzling skillet by the handle. I launch it at the big guy’s face, splashing him with hot grease as the sizzling cheese goes flying and fuses with his left cheek like some special effect in a cheesy B-horror movie.
He howls and reaches for it and I slam him again with the pan, chopping off two fingers that go flying, black goo gushing in place of blood. He knocks the pan out of my hand and reaches for me, giant hands with cracked nails and blood all over his palms, but slips on my gelatinous projectile puke. He goes down, hard, hitting his head on the red hot burner and sloshing around helplessly in my vomit puddle.
I turn to find Reggie tearing limbs from the other two. I mean it, limbs. An arm goes flying, tendons waving like tentacles at the end, still squirming, just past my head.
“Come on,” I beg him, running for the door. “We’ve got to get back to the dorms. There are weapons there, things we can fight back with.”
I open the door and hear more grunting, groaning, and not just from behind us. There are scattered zombies here and there, shuffling around, chewing on limbs, blood oozing from their mouths, and not their own blood, either.
Reggie joins me, grabs my hand.
“I know a place,” he says, turning from the crowd, running back behind the school. It’s narrower back here, big air conditioning units and Dempsey dumpsters and giant trash compactors lining a gross but, for the moment, safe alley I’ve never seen before.
“They built a bunker, after the third outbreak,” he tells me, dragging me along. “For the faculty and staff. We had to stock it with potted meat and bottled water, then just last week we had to deliver an order of sterile pillowcases, so…”
He turns, fast, and by the time I catch up to him he’s shoved his fist through a skinny zombie’s chest. It comes out the other end, covered in black goo, and he yanks it out and just. Keeps. Running.
We turn a corner and there’s a door, gun metal gray, marked “No Admittance.” If you didn’t know any better, you’d think it was just another utility shed or janitor’s closet. He fumbles with his keys, smashes the glass axe box by the sign with his elbow.
“Here,” he says. “You know what to do.”
I hold it, tight, like my stepdad trained me to do three years ago during the first outbreak. He hadn’t made it through that one, but I had. Thanks to him, mostly.
And here I am, an axe in my hand again. And I thought, I thought we were done with all this. The government said, with the Cure, there was no chance of another outbreak. So much for trusting the guy in the New White House.
A zombie is shuffling forward, a kid, my age, his eyes black, his mouth open, his nose gone. He looks like he’s fallen into a garbage disposal and come back out again, without all of his original parts.
I hear my own whimpering over the sound of his one sneaker shuffling through the gravel. “Hurry,” I whimper
to Reggie, who is fumbling with the keys. “Stop,” I whimper to the missing shoe zombie, who doesn’t, of course.
He keeps shuffling forward, mouth open, gaping, arms outstretched, covered in gore, nails broken, fingers broken. He looks at me, then through me, and I close my eyes and start swinging. Swinging, swinging, the axe handle feeling familiar in my hands, even the blood on my fingers feels familiar. When I open them again, the zombie’s in pieces on the gravel in front of me, black gooey blood draining into the cracks.
I feel a hand on my shoulder, whir, and Reggie knocks the axe out of my hand. “We’ll need it,” I say in a strange voice, half breathless, half demanding. “When they get inside.”
He shoves me in, shuts the door, twists about a dozen locks, bolts and finally a wheel that slams them all into place. “They won’t get in here. Trust me.”
I do. Amazingly, I do.
There are cots, bolted into the side walls, six to a wall. There is a table, and chairs, in the middle of the room, the fold up kind Mom would always use, under a nice tablecloth, of course, on Thanksgiving. There are stacks of boxes marked “potted meat” and