face ugly and defiant, until he shifts the hoodie back just enough for her to see what’s hiding beneath. Then her face goes sickly and soft. She tries to stumble back but he stamps on her toes. I watch her face as the bones crack and she crumples to the sand.
Hmmm, I always thought she’d be a lot tougher than that.
Brody turns to me, hood puddled around his broad shoulders, smile grim as he points to the watch in the sand. “Get it.”
Dang, when did he become so bossy? For the past three weeks he’s been cowering in my Dad’s walk-in cooler at the butcher shop, gnawing on bone marrow and meat scraps and whatever lamb’s brains I can cadge from the delivery guys. Suddenly he’s Donald Trump?
Still, there’s something dangerous about his voice, his posture, so I obey.
“Hey,” says Booger, and I’m so intimidated by Brody I barely feel him stepping on my hand. “Leave her alone!”
Booger is tall, and wide, but he’s human and, in the end, built of soft, warm flesh wrapped around surprisingly fragile bones. Brody reaches out and grabs his nearest arm. With one tug, like snapping a fishing line when you’ve got one on the hook, he yanks Booger’s massive arm out of its socket.
Booger crumbles next to Skeeter, tears springing to his eyes, face red as he looks up at Brody. “You… you’re… a zombie!?!” he sputters, stammering, snot streaming out of his wide, pug nose. (Hmmm, so that’s why they call him Booger!)
“Shut up,” hisses Brody, and it’s the first time I’ve heard fear in his voice.
“A zombie!” Booger shouts, looking to Jimbo, waving him off. “Go, get somebody dude. Get the Sentinels, the cops, whatever. Dude’s a zombie!”
Jimbo stands, just north of the swing set. “But… I thought they rounded the last of them up, after the latest outbreak?” He’s talking to himself, mainly, figuring it out as fast as those 87 IQ points will let him. Brody cuts me a warning look.
“Yeah, there… there shouldn’t be any left!” Jimbo says, inching forward.
“Well there is, obviously,” shrieks Skeeter. “Go, Jimbo, before—”
Brody kneels down in the sand, grabs a handful and shoves it in Skeeter’s mouth. He smiles as he does so, and when he yanks his hand back to grab some more, I see a bloody tooth fall from his grip.
Skeeter mumbles and muffles and Booger starts to scream, “Zom—” before Brody gives him the sand treatment as well. Booger’s face turns purple and Brody just watches him, stuffing in more and more sand as the brute has to start breathing through his big, fat, flaring nostrils.
That’s when I hear Jimbo whimper. When I look up, he’s turning to run. “Go,” says Brody, shoving me. His hands are cold, and not just from three weeks in the cooler. “Go before he tells someone about me.”
“I… I can’t,” I gasp.
His expression is unforgiving. “You must.”
I get up. I run. Jimbo is fast, but you can tell he’s spent his whole life chasing people rather than being chased. I catch up to him in six paces, but then what? I leap on his back, because if he tells anyone – anyone – about Brody, we’re cooked. That’s it. Game over.
Not just for Brody, who’ll be rounded up and sent off to some Rehabilitation Camp on the outskirts of town, but me, too, for “aiding and abetting” one of the living dead. I’ll get sent to reform school or something, or maybe even locked up like that one family who kept their little kid zombie in the dog house for two weeks, before she eventually got out and killed the neighbors.
I get an elbow in my windpipe which, if you’ve never felt it, hurts like a Mack truck rolling over your eyeball. Twice. I roll over and climb to my knees and get a sneaker in my ribs for the effort, landing against a tree. But at least Jimbo is looking down at me, and not over at the rundown apartment complex down the block.
His fists are balled, dangling at his side like any self-respecting Neanderthal’s. I inch away, trying to lure him back to the monkey bars. He takes a step or two, then remembers where he’s supposed to be going.
I panic, picturing me in a cell surrounded by even bigger, nastier Neanderthals than Jimbo. “Hey, scumbag.” That gets his attention, but not on me. He’s looking at something, or someone, just over my shoulder. I turn and see Brody there, smiling down at me.
“How long have you been standing there?”
“Long enough.”
“I thought you were supposed to be helping me.”
He smirks. “I am.”
Grass crumples and Jimbo pivots, turning toward the apartment complex. “Hey!” he shouts, waving his arms. It’s late afternoon, with no traffic on the street. But that could change any minute. “Hey! Zombie Alert! Over here. Hey!”
He starts inching away when Brody tackles him, moving faster than I thought was zombie-ly possible. I hear more bones crunch and Jimbo winces as Brody turns him over and starts shoving fists full of dirt and grass into his mouth to keep him quiet. When he’s done, when Jimbo is muzzled with miracle grow lawn products, Brody tells me to drag him back to the playground.
“You drag him,” I huff.
“Fine,” says Brody, turning away. “Let someone drive by and see him here, waving his arms and come investigate.”
He starts shuffling away. I get up, dust the grass stains off my jeans and grab Jimbo by the shoulders. His eyes are big and his face is purple and he squirms and I can only move him an inch at a time holding onto his grody T-shirt, but I do it.
Somehow, I do it. He wriggles and fights the whole way, kicking out tufts of dirt as his shirt rides up his waist and his eyes bug out over his mouth full of turf. But his right arm is bent at a funny angle and his left is limp.
I step in mud, and wonder if the sprinklers have gone on while I was gone. I turn from dragging Jimbo, breathless and spent, only to find puddles of blood everywhere, and no bodies anywhere.
Well, no intact bodies anyway.
“Dig,” says Brody, handing me Skeeter’s shoe. Out falls a toe and, after belching up bile, I use its sturdy rubber heel to dig. We bury what we can and I don’t ask where the rest of the pieces-parts went, assuming they’re resting safely inside Brody’s bottomless pit of an undead stomach.
Jimbo lies there, limp and swallowing dirt. I heave and huff and ask, “Now what?”
Brody sits with his knees up in front of him, his back to the monkey bars, bloody hands on his knees. It’s getting dark now. Others will be here soon, the after dinner crowd of cool kids looking to chill, smoke pot, make out, maybe drink a stolen beer or two before curfew.
Brody looks relaxed now, like he did the first time I fed him raw meat off of Dad’s counter. I’d found him out back, middle of the night, sniffing around the dumpster. It was a few days after the last roundup, a full week after the latest outbreak. All the zombies were supposed to be gone, corralled, dissected, whatever it is they do with them.
I’d been sleeping in the stock room of Dad’s butcher shop ever since, well… ever since. I heard scraping, stumbling, and looked out the window. That’s when I saw him; scrawny, pale, half-naked, bloody, basically empty. They get like that, when they haven’t fed.
The zombies, I mean.
I limped out of the cot I’d set up back there. Booger had pounded on me that day after school, like always, so bad I could barely walk home. I was already thinking of him – of what I’d do to him – when I saw the zombie.
I grabbed a ham steak from the cooler. It was slightly past due and I knew the rotten stench would get the zombie’s attention with the quickness. I thought of where to stick him, to hide him, so I could train him. I opened the back door and lured him inside.
He sniffed me, first. I had a butcher’s knife in my free hand, just in case. He ignored it, ignored me, and yanked the ham steak out of my fingers. He devoured it, but I knew meat alone wasn’t going to satisfy him. They teach you that in school now, the zombie anatomy. So you know what to do if you ever meet one.
I grabbed another steak, a fresh one this time, prime rib, if you really want t
o know, and tossed it in the cooler. Just far back enough so he’d have to wander in to investigate. He looked skeptical there by the back door, for all of about two seconds, before following it in. As soon as his back was to the cooler door, I slammed it and locked him in.
He didn’t really fight or complain. He just sat there, gnawing on that steak, staring at me through the foggy window inside the door. I stared back until he started freaking me out, then tried to sleep.
The next day I asked one of the delivery men for some brains. Said I had a “special order” for one of my favorite customers. He said the government was stamping down on brains lately and made me give him an extra twenty bucks, under the table, before he’d give me any.
After Brody ate them, he relaxed. He even talked. A little. He seemed mad, me tricking him like that, but even when the cooler door was open and I was busy trying not to get brain juice all over myself, he never tried to leave.
After that I got him brains twice a week, and he slowly became more… human. We could have conversations, real ones, with words and everything. After a week or so, I even opened the cooler door while we talked. He didn’t