“Are you sure about this?” I ask, pulling up to the crowded state fairgrounds. The smell of cotton candy and corn dogs filters through the half-open windows.
Angel shakes her head, jingling her skull and cross bone earrings. That’s how she says “yes,” by shaking her head. “It’s totally legit and straight-up legal, Alice. Look at all these cars, they’re even using cops as security guards. Would I bring you to something where you’re going to get in trouble?”
I shove her playfully on the shoulder. “I’ve known you 2.5 weeks, what do I know?”
She turns off the engine and lights a cigarette, flashing the several skull rings on her long, pale fingers. “That’s true, you don’t.”
She wriggles her fingers, like teachers do on the day before Halloween when the lights are out and you’re all clustered in the front of the classroom and she’s reading a creepy story.
I take a drag off the cigarette, noting the dark mulberry stain from her lipstick. “Besides, it’s not the legality I’m worried about. It’s the creepy factor.”
She gets out of the giant old beater and slams the door, jingling more of her alternating black and silver bracelets around her scrawny arm. She’s in high heel army boots and black over white striped leggings, a frilly black tutu and a black tank top with a glittery skull pattern between her ginormous jugs and a black pleather jacket with too many zippers to top it all off. She calls it “goth chic.” I call it “mid-80s Madonna wannabe scary B-movie chick who gets killed by the guy in the hockey mask,” but never to her face.
The parking lot is sand and grass and not much of either, and it disappears underneath her KISS concert Army boots. She kicks up little poofs with each step as we approach a bottle neck of fat-faced rednecks in backward trucker caps and tramp stamps waiting to buy a ticket.
The big banner above the entrance is red and yellow and reads, “Cannibal Carnival.”
“Sounds classy,” I murmur in her ear, dodging the dangling skulls. “What could go wrong?”
She snorts and slings an arm around my shoulder. “That’s why I like you, Alice. You’re up for anything.”
I smirk and she nuzzles my cheek, all beer breath and boy’s perfume. I use one of my student credit accounts to pay for the ticket, worried that the ticket taker will notice the face on the card isn’t mine. But the gnarly carny with the dirty red and white striped popcorn bag vest doesn’t even look down, too busy gazing upon the feast that is Angel’s chestage region.
“Y’all have a good time, ladies,” he says, to her. (I’m surprised he even used the plural form.) “And don’t forget to whack-a-zombie for me!”
“Whack-a-zombie?” I murmur. We fight our way through the crowds, avoiding hucksters selling “Cannibal Carnival” T-shirts, the center of which features a zombie clown, with one eye hanging out and half a red nose.
She looks back at them, longingly. “I wish I had more credits,” she frowns.
I nudge her with my shoulder. “I’ll make you a deal. You get us out of here in under an hour and I’ll use my credits to buy you one.”
She frowns. “I’d rather just stay longer.”
The air is thick with fried dough and fried meat and spun sugar and caramel apples and if it wasn’t for the fact that the place was called “Cannibal Carnival,” I could probably relax.
Well, not really but at least I wouldn’t feel so completely freaked out. We stop at a few booths on the midway and I try to keep my stomach from churning. In “Bumper Zombies,” instead of trying to bump each other’s cars, the drivers try to run over zombies, which isn’t too hard seeing as they shuffle at the rate of two miles per week.
In the balloon pop game, the zombies stand there, trembling, holding balloons in their hands, their shoulders, stomachs, faces filled with darts. I turn away and Angel chuckles. “What’d you think they were going to do to those stupid zombies?”
I clench my teeth behind my fixed smile. “I dunno,” I say as she finally breaks down and uses some of her precious government credits to splurge on a dome of powder blue cotton candy. “I guess I figured they’d just have a zombie show or something.”
“They do,” she says around lips coated with sticky blue sugar. Pointing behind me, I turn and see a haunted house style building marked “Zombie Show.”
“Wanna go?”
I peel a string of candy off her tube of neon blue poof. “No thanks.” It’s so sweet, I make a face.
She laughs and shows her yellow teeth. I buy us a soda and we split it, just like we did in that coffee shop across from Nightshade High two and a half weeks ago.
I’d just cut seventh period and wandered in for some sugar relief when I spotted her, in the corner, stringing safety pins through the strap of her black and white camouflage messenger bag.
She didn’t have coffee or a donut or even a plain white napkin in front of her. There was a heavy guy behind the counter, with sweaty armpits and a bad haircut who looked like he might be crushing on her. I asked him, “What’s with the chick in the back?”
I hooked a thumb over my finger pointlessly, since she was pretty much the only person under 100 in the joint at the time. I’d seen her around school, so she fit the bill, but I wanted to be sure she wasn’t 100% demented or something before I introduced myself.
“She’s out of credits for the month, but I let her sit there anyway.” His voice was high and soft but his eyes were gentle and endearing. “I offered to buy her a coffee or something, give her a day-old cruller but… I think she doesn’t want to lead me on.”
I failed to hide my smirk and ordered two sodas, two crullers -- fresh -- and used a fake student credit card to pay them off. Every month, every student in the New US gets a credit allowance, depending on what year of school they’re in, how many other survivors are living with them, that kind of thing.
I’m off the grid now so I don’t get them anymore, but I trade them when I can, bartering for stuff along the way. I’ll do a book report here, beat up a bully there, impersonate some bookish chick so she gets her PE credit, that kind of stuff. I score a surprising number of credits just serving detention for kids. After all that’s happened, they’ll pay anything to get out of it.
Anyway, I brought the stuff over and she looked up, suspiciously, nostrils flared and showing off a silver ring in the left flare. I said, “Take it easy. I just thought I’d buy a fellow school skipper a treat, that’s all.”
She huffed, but downed the cruller in three bites, washing it down with desperate gulps from the free soda. Her nails on the paper cup were bitten to the quick, the black polish faded and cracked.
She avoided my eyes while she chewed on an ice cube from the bottom of the empty cup. Finally, she flicked me a look and said, “Thanks.” Then, two seconds later, “What do you want, anyway?”
Suddenly, I remembered. “Home Ec, that’s where I remember you from. You burnt the cinnamon toast and the smoke alarm went off and we had to spend the rest of the period on the soccer field until the air cleared out.”
She snorted, clearly proud of herself, and that was that. For the price of a soda and a compliment, I had my “in” in Nightshade and now, here we are, on the lookout for zombies at the “Cannibal Carnival.”
Well, I am anyway.
“Ooohh, look,” she says, dragging me along by the hand. “Whack-A-Zombie!”
I groan and follow. It’s the last booth on the midway, run by a skinny redneck in a red and yellow “Cannibal Carnival” T-shirt with greasy underarm stains and ginger red stubble on his chin.
He actually says, “Step right up, folks, and take a whack at a zombie.”
My stomach turns and I say, “Come on, Angel, let’s go. I thought you wanted to show me the Zombie House.”
“Later, later,” she murmurs, distracted, fumbling for her credit card. It’s at the bottom of her purse but the carny enjoys looking down her tank top while she’s bent over, fumbling for it. She snatches it with a visible “aha” look and slides it thr
ough the scanner in front of a little padded sledge hammer chained to the game booth.
There are six more just like it, and four folks have joined in to play. I inch closer to Angel, noticing a board in front of her. It’s like a game board, only bigger, with holes cut in it. There are twelve of them. Holes, that is, and as the carny shouts, “Get ready, get set, whack-a-zombie,” heads start to pop out.
Human heads. Well, at least they used to be, anyway.
The zombies creep up, awkwardly, wincing in advance. The minute they do, the players whack at their heads with the padded mallets, but none more viciously than Angel.
She sticks her tongue out between her teeth, like she does when she’s reading, and whacks and whacks until the zombies finally retreat.
Their heads look battered and bruised, bandaged with ears and the occasional nose missing. I can hear the sizzle of the cattle prods the carnies down below the little wooden platform we’re standing on must use to get them to stand up and be pummeled and, when I look down, sure enough I see the spark and sizzle in the dark.
He finally pops up in the last few minutes of the game, toward the back, looking frightened and bruised. His skin is gray and ashen, his hair dark and close-cropped, his eyes black as night and half-slitted out of fear. I see the fear there, behind the grimace and the growl in his thin lips. He’s wearing a small “Cannibal Carnival” T-shirt, stretched tight over his torso, with not an ounce of fat on him.
Angel whacks him in the ear and I can’t help myself; I yank her away. “The hell!” she spits, literally, a fine spray of mouth mist filling the air as she spins around.
“Come on,” I beg, dragging her away. “This is gross.”
“But I paid my credits,” she whines, following me just the same.
I buy her a T-shirt on the way out, to make up for it, but she pouts all the way back to the Women’s Shelter. I’m new to Nightshade, so I can’t live in a family home until I’ve been here six months, and after what I’ve seen of the town, I won’t be here another six hours if I can help it.
“If you didn’t want to whack zombies…” she grumbles when we’re finally pulling into the parking lot, “then why did you agree to go to the Cannibal Carnival?”
The Shelter is really just an old hotel they converted after the third outbreak, when half the town, when half of every town, was gone; folks either turning into zombies… or zombie food. The Shelter has a curfew, and the smokers mill about the pool area, enjoying their last breath of fresh air and sunset of the night.
I tell her what she wants to hear. “I thought we could spend some quality time together, that’s why. I didn’t know you got off on whacking zombies.”
She looks at me like I’m crazy. “I think I’m due a few whacks after what they did to my family, Alice. What they did to this town.”
“I lost my family too, Angel. I lost my town, too. But every zombie you whack is just another person that got turned. What if… what if one of them was your brother, huh?”
She slams the car in reverse, reaches over me, opens the door and waits for me to get out. When I do, she pokes her head out the passenger window. “You obviously never met my brothers!”
With that, she peels out, lurching into the street and burning rubber past the guard shack where the Sentinels stand, hatchets hanging from their gun belts, rifles hanging from their shoulders.
The smokers give me “wtf” face but I ignore them. I’ve got bigger fish to fry and, besides, after tonight I’ll never see them again.
Upstairs my roommate glowers into her schoolbooks, headphones on, not even bothering to look up when I enter the room, or when I slam some fresh underwear and baby doll T-shirts into my backpack.
Finally, just when my hand hits the doorknob on the way out she says, “Curfew starts in twenty minutes.”
I look at her, her sad face, her stupid earphones, and I know she won’t even hear me when I say, all high and mighty like, “My life starts now.”
Downstairs I’m just another chick with a backpack purse, and when I slip through the front doors some chick reminds me, “Don’t go too far, we’ll be doing a room check in half-an-hour,” I smile and point at the deli across the street. “Just doing some last minute shopping,” I lie over my shoulder.
The deli is vaguely crowded, which is good. I slip in line, take a number and wait my turn. The guy in front of me orders two pounds of bologna, and I do, too. It won’t be enough, but it’s a start and, besides, the one time I got cocky and asked for brains the butcher called the Sentinels on me, so… it’s either bologna or hot dogs, and the bologna’s easier to stack in my backpack.
“Big night, huh?” asks the butcher, a large woman in a bloody apron.
I shrug. “About average.”
She snorts and calls out, “Next!”
I muscle through the crowd, the meat heavy in my pack, trying to gauge how long it might take to get back to the fairgrounds on foot. It was ten minutes by car, so… an hour or two?
It’s not the walking I’m worried about. I’ve walked hundreds, maybe thousands of miles since the third outbreak, looking, searching, in every new town. I just want to make sure I get there before the Cannibal Carnival leaves town.
I start seeing fair lights in the distance after an hour and a half, my shoulders warm under the backpack straps, my ankles sore from the soft sand on the side of the road.
The parking lot is empty now, and heavy metal music blares as the carnies strain to take down the tilt-a-whirls and kiddy rides. Their torsos are bare and sweaty, their red and yellow T-shirts worn around their heads like bandanas.
I crouch down in the bushes outside the main entrance, trying to remember my way around. Stupid Angel and her stupid cotton candy distracted me, but I’m pretty sure if they were going to store the zombies anywhere, they’d be around the back.
That is, if they haven’t taken them anywhere. In the last town, they were gone before I got there and in the town before that, they had a bunch of protestors waving around “Zombies Are Not Sideshow Attractions” banners, and the Sentinels had to break it up so I never got a chance to sneak in.
But this time, I can hear the zombies growling in their cages and the protestors are nowhere to be seen. I pull the stun gun out of my back pocket and flick it, twice, just to clear off the cobwebs. It’s been weeks since I used it, and you never know with these things.
There’s a padlock on the door, and it rattles every time a zombie shuffles by. The holding pen is like one of those horse wagons you see driving down the road, part railroad car, part jail cell, with little slats down the side for the horses – or, in this case, zombies – to get air; not that they need it anymore.
I try to see his gaunt face and shaved head shuffle by, but it’s too dark and I’m too far away, waiting behind a bush. I could break the padlock on the door with bolt cutters, and keep the others at bay while I rescue him, but that would only mean the others would get out eventually and I can’t do that to Nightshade.
Instead I wait, impatiently, for a carny to come and feed them or hose them down, but hopefully feed them. The worst part is listening to them grunt at each other, or fight, or just shuffle with their bare feet against the metal floor.
I kneel there for who knows how long, until I hear a different kind of shuffling: shoes, worn by human feet, and a carny slipping back into his red and yellow T-shirt. He is big, but I can tell by the way he kind of strolls along, stretching his right arm out, that he’s tired.
He drags a trash bag with his left hand, and I can tell by the weight its meat. He has a stun gun of his own, and he keeps it handy as he unlocks the cage.
The shuffling intensifies, and in the shadow of the bright carnival lights I can see the zombies move toward the door inside the cage. He barks at them, but they smell the meat and crowd forward anyway. He shocks one, and that’s all it takes for the rest of them to hunker back.
He tosses the meat in, slab after slab, and even from six paces I can tell it??
?s rotten. I wrinkle my nose and rise from the bushes, watching the muscles in his neck flex as he tosses in raw steak and hamburger by the handful.
Now that the door is open, I can see the inside of the cage and the zombies, hunkered down, on their knees, like I just was, devouring the meat with their hands and faces, bloody and stinking.
The walk is mostly sand, or sandy, and I’m two steps away when he hears me. Turning, he’s about to open his mouth when I jab the stun gun under his raised arm. He bucks, the smell of BO sizzling beneath the twin points of my gun, and down he goes.
While the zombies are still occupied with their raw, stinking meat, I grab his keys and walk to the door. I see him, in the middle, reaching for meat while the other zombies crowd him out. His hands are clean, his face is clean and I realize; he hasn’t eaten.
The others haven’t let him.
And I flick the stun gun in their faces, and I back them in the corner while I grab him with my free hand. He resists, but only until I flick the gun at the others, then he nods his head.
The others crowd in the back, inching forward, but only because I’m standing smack dab in the middle of their rancid meat supply. I drag him from the cage, slam the door and lock it shut.
His T-shirt is thin and cold under my fingers as I yank him back toward the bushes. I toss the keys at the shocked carny; it’ll be ten or so minutes before he wakes up and by then we’ll be long—
“Hey!” I turn to find another carny, with another trash bag of meat, beaming a flashlight at us. “The hell!”
I stand there, frozen. I thought… I thought it would just be one guy with the meat. But this guy, this one must have been dragging behind. Stopping to have a smoke or something along the way. I raise the stun gun but we’re too far apart. He has a gun in his waistband – a real one, with bullets and everything – and I watch him raise it up.
The zombie snarls, next to me, my hold tenuous on his red and yellow T-shirt. He yanks me forward, but only because I’m still latched to his collar. And even as he does, he gets in front of me as we walk, shoving me back as we approach the carny.
“Stop!” the gunman shouts, and he’s getting louder. Someone will hear, or lots of someones. “Stop walking or—”
The gun goes off and I shriek, ducking, but I can tell by the way his right shoulder jumps in front of me the bullet’s gone into the zombie. And, like that, it’s all over. He leaps onto the carny, biting the hand with the gun, tearing it off with his hands, feasting on human flesh and cracking open his skull like it’s nothing more than a can of tuna fish.
I scramble for the gun and dump it in my backpack, yanking on the zombie’s shirt. “Here. Stop. Come—”
He turns, snarling, chin covered in gore, teeth clattering and about to take a hunk out of me when he stops, just shy of my cheekbone. His breath is cold and still as we stand, face to face.
I blink, twice, and he turns, staring at the half-eaten corpse still twitching in the sand. He follows and I head toward the bush, desperate to get away from the Cannibal Carnival when I hear voices from behind.
They are distant, but I don’t have a car and there’s no way I can—
A horn honks, in front of me, and lights beam in my eyes. I shield them and the zombie growls when a familiar voice calls out, “Get in you crazy witch!”
“Not without him,” I tell Angel, racing to the passenger door just as she throws it open.
“Hell no! No zombies in the car, ever!”
“He’s just fed, look at him.”
Angel looks, he’s docile, but she knows better; we both do.
“Plus… he’s my brother.”
“I knew it,” she bellows as I shove him in the backseat. “I knew it!”
She peels out, just as half a dozen carnies come running, bullets whizzing all around as Angel drives the other way.
She yells over the sound of cracking glass and ricocheting ammunition. “I knew there was a reason you freaked out on me today. That’s why I came back after I dropped you off. You were just walking across the street to the deli, and since I know you’re a super duper vegan, I figured something else was up.”
“So, what… you were following me?”
“Pretty much.” Her face is bland, considering the predicament we’re in. She drives, out into the deserted parking lot, nearly taking out the ticket stand as she sails, doing 60, hitting a ditch and landing on the pavement, peeling out and sailing away.
She keeps it up, faster and faster, until she takes a 180-degree turn onto the main road leading out of town. She kills the lights and we sail along, cruising by the light of the moon and the few remaining streetlamps that still actually work.
“I’m glad you did,” I huff, still trying to catch my breath.
I reach out, touch her hand. She takes it off the wheel, squeezes it, gives me a lingering look. At least until my side mirror takes out a mailbox and she readjusts her course.
I turn around to find my brother staring, slack-jawed, out the window.
She drives and drives, faster and faster, until we leave Nightshade and, hopefully, the Cannibal Carnival in our dust. “We’ll have to hide him in the trunk when we get to the border,” she says, unnecessarily.
“Let’s leave him be for now,” I insist. “We still have an hour or so and, he just ate.” When she glares at me I add, “A lot.”
A few minutes later she says, “So, your brother, huh? Why didn’t you tell me?”
I shrug. “I didn’t want you to think I was using you.”
“Using me? How?” Then it dawns on her: me walking into town, out of nowhere. Buying her soda and a pastry, becoming her new BFF, getting the lay of the land, pretending like I didn’t want to go to the carnival so, of course, she’d take me. “Oh, right.”
“I just, I needed a safe place to land, you know. All these towns, looking for him. There are so many of these carnivals, all over now, ever since they made it legal to use zombies as ‘attractions.’ I just, I needed you and I thank you.”
She shrugs, asks, “What’s his name?”
We both look at him in the rearview at the same time. “Justin,” I say.
His eyes are deep and dark as he looks from me to her, and back again.
“Car,” he grunts, voice as dry as gravel and as deep as a pit.
“He can talk?” she asks.
“Car!”
Suddenly, we hear honking and swerve just in time, readjusting the road.
“They won’t come after you,” he says, sitting back.
“How… how can you talk?”
I turn, over the seat, noting his handsome features ravaged by the Z-disease, his pretty face hard and gaunt, his teeth big and yellow and gums covered with dried blood.
He shrugs. “Some of us can, some of us can’t.”
I’d heard that, on the road. Gossip about talking zombies, zombies that could read or write, or both. Zombies using guns, driving cars, but it always sounded like such BS. Suddenly, I’m not so sure anymore.
“Can… can you remember me?”
His stare is blank, even as he lies. “Sure, of course.”
“Justin.”
“That was my name?”
“You don’t remember, do you?”
There is a long, awkward pause as he shakes his head.
“You know they don’t,” reminds Angel as she flicks her headlights back on as we approach the next town.
“I’m sorry,” he says. “Did I… did I hurt anybody?”
I picture him that day, working on his bike in the garage. It was the first day of summer, hot and dry in the mountains, and he wanted his dirt bike ready for constant use over the next ten weeks.
The first outbreak had already happened by then, so we were primed for something but never actually thought any Shufflers would make it past the city. I was hanging shirts out to dry, on one of those drying racks we kept near the washing machine.
A couple of his friends came up the drive, looking funny. It wa
s early, just before eight, so I figured the spiky hair, the dragging feet, the pale skin, they were just sleepy.
Then I saw the blood. “Justin!” I screamed, grabbing the shotgun Dad bought after the first outbreak. He turned, and that was when his buddy Ralph took a hunk out of his shoulder, turning him instantly.
I took them out, every friend he ever had, and was reloading when Justin turned on me. I racked in a shell, pointed at his head but, at the last minute, couldn’t do it. I jammed the butt against his chest, pushing him back, back, out into the road.
He turned away, saw our neighbor Mrs. Finnegan being pulled apart by the mailman, and ran to get sloppy seconds. That’s the last I saw of him until the flyers for the Cannibal Carnival showed up outside the post office, three months ago.
There, right under the words “See for your very eyes real zombies on the midway” was a picture of Justin, climbing into the whack-a-zombie game. Even in black and white, I recognized his face immediately.
I went to the Cannibal Carnival in town, but Justin wasn’t there. The ticket lady, when I showed her the flyer, said there were five or six carnivals, traveling all over the southeast, and nine more on the east coast.
That’s when I started the search. It didn’t take much for me to leave. They got Dad in the second outbreak, and Mom in the third. I was only weeks away from the census takers kicking me out of our house anyway, so I packed up a few things, a hatchet in my belt loop, a stun gun from Dad’s stash, some beef jerky and bottled water and started walking.
And now, here he is. In the backseat, and can’t remember a thing.
“You can’t keep me,” he says, evenly.
I turn to Angel, frown.
“He’s right,” she says, sounding relieved. “He’ll get hungry, and that’s that.”
I shut them both down. “I didn’t walk all the way from Tennessee to find you, just to get rid of you the minute I do. I’ll feed you, like they did at the carnival.”
He nods, mulling it over.
I look at Angel. She sighs. “Listen, I’ll get you past the next border, but… I’m not sleeping with one eye open for the rest of my life, you know? Besides, I’m a semester away from graduation, and already have my scholarship to New State University, so…”
Her voice trails off as the car slows down. We see the border, up in the distance. She pops the trunk, but stays in the car. Justin and I get out at the same time, like we must have six thousand times getting out of the car for school, or to beat the other to the rest room at some gas station pit stop while on family vacation.
I smile, faintly, but I can tell it doesn’t mean anything to him other than he has to get in the trunk. “They’ll search it, you know.”
His voice is firm, almost hopeful.
Angel hears him, props up the firm, pert puppies threatening to burst out of her skull tank top. “Thanks to these two, I’ve never been searched yet.”
He looks over, unimpressed, as I hold the trunk open for him.
He pauses, one leg in. “I’m not your brother, you know?”
“Yes, you are.”
“Your brother died, back wherever you come from.”
He slides in and I slam the door. Looking from Angel to the border guard shack, I make the sign of the cross over my red and black striped hoodie.
“So did I,” I say, to myself.
* * * * *
Story # 9:
Zombies Don’t Write Valentines