A Living Dead Love Story Series (10 page)

“How far now?” I ask an hour or so later, holding
The Guide
tightly against my chest and rubbing my eyes.

“Not much farther,” Dane says, “but the ceremony takes awhile.” He eyes
The Guide
in my hands. “You read about it?”

“The Assimilation Ceremony for the Newly Animated? I read about it; sounds pretty official.”

“It's basically to make sure you understand your rights and responsibilities as a member of the zombie race,” Dane says. With a straight face. Like this is all really happening. Right now. To me.

I sigh. “I thought being dead would be …easier.”

They both snicker.

“Being dead is easy,” Dane says. “Being
undead
is what's so hard.”

Finally Dane pulls off the interstate, makes a few sharp turns at the next three intersections, and has us pointed down a lonely strip of dirt road in the middle of nowhere. I have no idea where we are, but Dane seems unfazed by the rocky road and lack of visibility. There are no street signs this deep in the middle of the state, no road markers, not even streetlamps.

“How do you know where you're going?” I nervously bite my lip.

“Every zombie has to visit the Council of Elders before they're official,” Chloe says. “I made the trip; Dane's made the trip. It's not hard to remember.”

“I meant, how can you
see
out here?”

They look at me.

“Maddy,” Dane says calmly, “we're only using the headlights for the protection of others. We could see this road
—you
could see this road—without the headlights.”

To prove it, Dane turns them off. I open my mouth to scream, but Dane is actually right. I gasp. Even without the lights, everything—the outline of the dirt road in front of us, where the line of trees ends, even how tall they are—looks crystal clear.

“Why is it yellow?” I ask, blinking rapidly as if the yellow “zombie vision” might suddenly clear up or go away.

“Nobody knows,” Chloe says. “Something to do with the color spectrum is our best guess. The point is, zombies have excellent senses. Without your heartbeat and your lungs to drown them out, your other senses come more sharply into focus. We can smell for miles, see in the dark, and hear a mosquito fart two towns away.”

“Lovely,” I say as Dane flicks the lights back on. Moments later a large, rectangular building suddenly appears out of the dense brush cover.

“Here we are,” Dane says, a tad unnecessarily. He sees me hugging
The Guide
and gently pries it from my hands. “They'll give you your own,” he whispers, looking around suspiciously. “I'm not supposed to show it to anyone.” As if to prove it, he hides it in the glove box.

I'm about to ask him why he's whispering when I suddenly find out. From nowhere, four armed guards approach the truck. They are not very old, our age, mostly, maybe a tad older, and dressed in solid blue uniforms, blue ball caps, black boots. Very official-looking, very grim, very …menacing; like Bones in boot camp.

“Sentinels,” Chloe says as she rolls down the passenger side window. “They protect the Elders and enforce zombie law.”

“Identification,” says the Sentinel at the driver's side door.

Dane pulls out a laminated card with his picture and a number on it.

Chloe hands hers over as well.

The Sentinel looks at them both, then glares at me.

“She's new,” Dane explains. “We're here for her Assimilation Ceremony. We called a few hours ago.”

“How long?” the Sentinel asks me. His face seems carved of granite, his navy blue jumper hiding (but not very well) thick muscles and broad shoulders. “How?
Long?”
he says again, yellow teeth and thin lips spitting out the words one at a time.

Dane nudges me. “He wants to know how long you've been a zombie.”

“L-l-last night,” I stammer.

The Sentinel looks angry and about to shout out something else when Chloe says, apologetically, “We only spotted her this morning, when she showed up at the local grocer's looking for brains. We got here as fast as we could.”

It sounds so odd to hear Chloe—surly, angry, bully Chloe—sound so meek as she talks to the Sentinel. She seems almost afraid to look him in the eye. Almost.

He looks from Dane to me, past Chloe, and out her window to where two more of his Sentinel friends stand. “Proceed to the main hall,” he says in his croaky youngish but oldish zombie voice. “We'll alert the Elders you're on your way.” The Sentinel slings his rifle back on his shoulder and salutes us.

We drive on. A few seconds later, I say, “I thought I read somewhere in
The Guide
how bullets can't kill us.”

“The rifles aren't for us,” Dane says. “They're for the Normals. You know, in case they wander onto the property or threaten to out us.”

Dane puts the truck in park at the main hall, a low, slender, almost tubelike building in the center of the Council of Elders compound. The whole place has a community college campus feel to it.

When I mention that to Chloe, she nods. “It used to be a college until the Council of Elders bought it.”

I'm about to ask how zombies make money or, for that matter, how they convince the state of Florida to sell them an entire college, but I figure I'd better prioritize my questions for now. Like Chloe says, I've got nothing but time.

More Sentinels guard the front door to the main hall, only now they've holstered their guns and stand at the ready with what look like phasers from that old
Star Trek
show.

“Stun guns,” Dane whispers, following my gaze, “like the cops use.”

“Wouldn't the rifles work better?” I whisper back.

“Not on us. The rule is if electricity brings us back to life, electricity can kill us again.”

“So
that's
how zombies die?” I ask as Chloe opens her door.

“That,” she says, leaning back in, “and physically removing the brain from the skull. Trust me, the stun guns are a lot less messy.”

As I slide out, Dane taps his temple. “The brain's the power generator for the body. Take it out, no more power. No more zombie. No more life.”

“Good to know.” I smile, easing past him.

Four Sentinels flank me on the way into the main hall, two on each side. Chloe and Dane are stopped at the main door and told to wait outside. I look back at them helplessly, like a kindergartner being dropped off at her classroom on the first day of school.

The main hall is actually a gym, complete with accordion bleachers folded up and pushed against one wall and basketball hoops yanked up to the very high ceiling. The light is sufficient but not as bright as any I've seen in a gym before, where usually the rows and rows of ceiling lights are so bright you can see a wart or blackhead from all the way across the auditorium. I look up and see why; every other bulb has been left out of the dozen or so fixtures hanging high overhead.

The Sentinels guide me to a single chair directly in front of two fold-out picnic tables shoved together. Seated at the tables and facing me are six Hollywood movie-looking zombies. I try to keep from gasping and barely—just barely—manage. But it's hard.

One of the Sentinels, seeming to sense this, gives me a compassionate wink. “Just look at their ties,” he whispers as he hands me my own copy of
The Guide to the Proper Care and Feeding of Zombies
,
24
^th
Edition
. “It makes it …easier.”

I swallow and do as I'm told. Or, at least, I try to. They're all dressed in suits—gray suits, mostly; a few black—and stiff, white shirts. A tie dangles loosely around each fat-free neck. It's too hard not to stare at those old, skeletal faces.

These are your real zombies, your true immortals. Some of them have to be centuries old. One has no hair. I mean, he barely has skin. His eyes are deep and dark, his lips pulled permanently away from his teeth so that you can see the gray gums and large, yellow teeth and the dozens of wide spaces between. Another only has tufts of soft, white hair sticking up at all angles from his rawhide skull covering. Two more have wigs.

I look at the Elder in the middle and smile.

He clears his throat. “State your name, zombie.”

I
WINCE, NOT
only at his dagger-sharp voice but at being called a zombie by a true zombie. “Madison Emily Swift, sir.”

Behind each Elder stands a Sentinel, erect as a two-by-four and ever wary, like we're at some fancy restaurant and each Elder has his very own personal butler. The Sentinel behind the Elder who asked my name types the answer into a laptop no bigger than most cell phones. The Elders may look last century, but at least their technology is cutting-edge.

“How long?” asks the Elder in the middle, who must be the ringleader.

“I turned last night, sir. I didn't, well, I didn't know about any of …
this
…until my zombie friends explained everything to me. We got here as soon as we could.”

“Ignorance is no excuse,” the Elder on the end says, wheezing.

“I know that now, sir.”

He nods, satisfied. So does the Elder in the middle of the table, licking his lips with a dry, dead tongue.

Though every muscle of my head and neck wants me to look away, I look straight ahead and smile back.

With a voice as dry as crackling paper, the main Elder asks, “How much did your friends tell you, Madison Emily Swift?”

“Just, well, that there are rules, laws I must abide by. And those rules and laws are in
this
book.” I hold up my own personal copy of
The Guide to the Proper Care and Feeding of Zombies, 24
^th
Edition
.

He croaks, “Laws are all we have, Madison Emily Swift.”

His fellow Elders murmur, a few of them nodding so severely I think some heads are going to roll, literally.

“Laws, Ms. Swift, are all that separate us from the Zerkers.”

I raise my hand, and the main Elder smiles. Or, I think it's a smile; either that or his jaw shifted. (I hope he'll be all right.) “What are …Zerkers?” I ask.

There's a slight change in the room; the Sentinels behind each Elder stiffen, the Elders themselves seem to puff up slightly and, finally, the main Elder says, “The Zerkers are the worst of the zombies, Ms. Swift. That's why we don't even call them zombies. Zombies can talk, reason, drive, think, communicate, read that book you're holding, and …care. Zerkers
care
about only one thing: brains. About feeding their insatiable need for electricity. Read
The Guide
, Ms. Swift; read
The Guide
and you will know all you need to know about the Zerkers and how it is every zombie's duty to wipe them out, one by one.”

I nod, clutching
The Guide
for good measure.

The Council nods, too, and one of them, the one with the powder gray wig says, “Stand, now, and repeat after us.”

I stand, tempted to put my hand over my heart, but I scan the gym and there is no flag in sight. Instead I kind of hug
The Guide to the Proper Care and Feeding of Zombies, 24
^th
Edition
like a Bible to my heart as the main Elder says, “I, Madison Emily Swift …”

Slowly the others join him until the voices, old and creaky and wheezy as they are, sound like one, and I repeat them after each pause.

“I, Madison Emily Swift …”

“Do hereby solemnly swear …”

“To uphold the zombie laws and regulations as published in
The Guide
…”

“To the best of my ability …”

Then comes the final line: “Under penalty of death.”

“Under …penalty …of
death?”

The Council of Elders stands, with a little (okay, a
lot
of) help from the Sentinels behind them. With veiny hands that look more like Halloween party props, they manage a bony, mostly silent golf clap as I bow.

The four Sentinels who brought me in lead me gently back outside. I turn back around before we exit through the double gym doors. The Elders are still staring at me, smiling with their skeletal jaws, some of them still clapping until, at last, their Sentinels guide them slowly, very slowly, away from the table.

W
HAT'S A
Z
ERKER?”
I ask when we're nearly home. Beyond the dusty windshield of Dane's truck, the sun begins to rise.

Dane and Chloe share one of their “how could she be so stupid?” glances.

Dane says, “Didn't the Council explain Zerkers to you?”

“Of course they did,” I say, “but obviously not well enough. I thought I'd eat some brains, hang out with you guys, get used to being celibate for the rest of my life, and that would be that. Now I find out there are these Zerker characters that aren't like regular zombies. That we're supposed to hunt them down and eliminate them. What's up with that?”

“They're not just ‘not like' regular zombies, Maddy,” Dane explains gravely as he signals to turn off the interstate and onto Marlin Way, the main road into Barracuda Bay. “They're not zombies, period.”

“Well, what makes a regular zombie a regular zombie then?”

Dane looks at Chloe.

Chloe rubs her eyes. “The same thing that makes a kid get to school on time, or follow the rules, or not drown live kittens: a conscience. Regular zombies are like regular people, only dead, reanimated regular people. Zerkers have no conscience; they don't read
The Guide;
they don't visit the Elders, register with the Book of the Dead, or follow the rules.”

“Why not?”

Dane says, “The thing about Zerkers is, they aren't personally reanimated; they're turned.”

“Huh?”