Read Zombies Don’t Read: 25 YA Short Stories Page 11

Echo sits in the car, pale fingers clutching the seatbelt still clicked firmly into place.

  The engine idles, exhaust pluming in the rearview mirror as we sit, parked in front of my house.

  “Babe,” I murmur, caressing his cold skin with my warm hands. (Ooohh, I hope I never tire of that sensation.) “Seriously, it’s going to be fine. They’re not bad people, trust me.”

  “I know they’re not ‘bad’ people,” he says, voice a little on the gravelly side. (Just the way I like it!) “They don’t have to be ‘bad’ people to hate zombies. Haven’t you heard? Apparently, it’s America’s last acceptable prejudice!”

  He fumes, staring down at his slick brown shoes.

  They’re new; I helped him pick them out after the last day of school before Christmas break.

  From the looks of it, he’s been polishing them ever since.

  I don’t have an answer to that, so I just kind of sit there for a few seconds, willing myself not to look at my watch; we’re already six minutes late.

  Not a stretch for most families; for mine, well, we might as well bring Twisted Sister’s Christmas album for the evening’s listening pleasure.

  Speaking of, “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas” oozes from the radio, some old lady from a long time ago really belting it out; he gives me an ironic smiley face, so I turn it down; then off.

  He turns it back on, quietly, and explains, “I was hoping there’d be some news on the latest outbreak before we go in.”

  “Last I heard,” I tell him, ignoring the knot in my stomach from the live newscasts I’ve been hearing all morning, “the checkpoints from Thanksgiving were still holding and the governor has doubled the reservists at each hot spot.”

  “That’s good,” he says by rote, knowing as I do that what they say in news accounts and what’s really happening on the ground don’t always mesh.

  “10 minutes, Echo,” I plead. “Just give them 10 minutes and if you’re not digging it, if they’re even the least bit rude – aside from my little brother Zack, he can’t help it – then we’re out of there, promise.”

  “You say that,” he says, sighing and reaching for his seatbelt. “But you don’t really mean it.”

  He’s right, of course.

  We step out of the car, feet crunching on the mushy snow sliding down the street toward the gutter halfway down the slight hill we live on.

  He reaches in back, like the gentleman that he is, and grabs the gaily-colored presents we’d spent hours fighting over in the mall just the other day.

  Despite the pasty pallor, he looks downright gorgeous in his thick turtleneck – it hides the bite marks from his run-in with a true zombie on Halloween – and starched wheat-colored chords that hug every curve he’s got, and some even I’ve forgotten he had.