A Living Dead Love Story Series (14 page)

I'm staring at both of them when he says, uber-casually, “What's up?”

You know, like he didn't ditch me at some party the night before, like he didn't not come looking for me the next morning, like he didn't completely diss me in Art class.
What's up?
That's rich.

So, of course, I respond appropriately, really letting him have it. “Nothing. I just …I wanted to apologize for not making it to the party last night.” (Okay, so I
didn't
let him have it, but you'd do the same damn thing if you were looking at the same two feet of naked man skin I'm drinking in.)

“Please.” He snorts, waving it off. “I just figured you stood me up. You know, playing hard to get is all. No biggie.”

“Really?” So
that's
why he didn't come looking for me the next morning. “I dunno, Stamp, I'd be pretty peeved if somebody did that to
me.”

He gives me that funny Stamp look. “Water under the bridge, Maddy, really. But listen, I've got a few more minutes until coach starts bitching about warming up for tonight's game. Hey, you coming, by the way? Anyway, I wanted to ask you something …”

In the back of my mind I'm thinking,
Fall Formal, Fall Formal
, but I don't want to jinx it, so I say, “Yeah, what?” as casually as possible. Which is pretty hard to do when you're already mentally making hair and nail appointments and predicting the color of his tux so you can match your eye shadow.

He blushes, looks away, spots something over my shoulder, and frowns.

I figure maybe it's the school PDA Police coming up from behind but turn to see Hazel slinking up instead.

Great. Where before there were merely half pants and six-pack abs and Stamp's stammering question, suddenly there's Hazel and her flowing red hair and her ample, man-magnet booty …and a dreadful, awkward silence.

After what seem like 10 full minutes, I look at her and ask, flat out, “What's up?” Girl talk, of course, for,
Back up off my man, biotch
.

“Oh, nothing. I just wanted to let you know Ms. Peppercorn asked me to be on the Decorating Committee for the Fall Formal. She wanted some male input, and since I don't trust any of the other guys in this school, I figured maybe I'd invite some new blood to participate.”

“Me?” asks Stamp.

“Stamp?” asks me.

Hazel rolls her eyes. “Yeah.” Then, she shoos me off. “This is a formal invitation, and I have to do it right, so …scram.”

And, just like that, suddenly
I'm
the third wheel in my
own
conversation. I kind of stand there for a second, disbelieving, but Hazel is obviously serious, to the point of kind of turning her back halfway on me and forcing Stamp to look at her.

I say, “Okay, well, I'm going now. Bye!”

Stamp smiles helpfully, unsure whether to take any of this seriously, until Hazel snaps. “Focus, Stamp. Now, as I was saying …”

I stumble away, head down, taking little looks over my shoulders to see Stamp gazing forlornly after me and Hazel reeling him back in with a hand on his cheek.
Her
hand. On
his
cheek. Meanwhile, the question he's been meaning to ask hangs unanswered in the air.

I'm confused, hurt, hopeful, and embarrassed, all at the same time. I mean, what if he
wasn't
going to ask me to the Fall Formal after all? What if he was only asking, “Hey, what's up?”

I've never dated a jock before. What if that's just what jocks do? Hang their landing strips out to dry in front of the boys' locker room every day and see what sticks? What if it was all innocent and what I think happened didn't really happen?

But it did; I know it did. It doesn't take my superhuman zombie senses to figure out I was about to get asked to Fall Formal and Hazel just …just …yock-blocked me. I'm halfway through the parking lot, kicking every stone and blacktop pebble in my path, when I realize someone's leaning against my car.

Chloe Kildare.

“Get in,” she says when I get close enough to the driver's side to hear her.

“Yeah,” I say with my new zombie comeback cool, already pissed from Hazel's jock-block and in no mood for any other chicks I can't stand messing with the rest of my afternoon. “I plan on it. It's
my
car, remember?”

Ignoring her, I bend down, get in, and slam my door to avoid seeing her any further. Unfortunately, the electric keychain has unlocked all four doors, and before I can protest, Chloe is already riding shotgun.

I sigh. “Chloe, seriously, I don't have time for … this …today.”

“Girl,” she says without a trace of irony as she looks from my pale skin to the dark circles under my eyes, “you literally have all the time in the world.”

“I may be immortal, but that doesn't mean my schedule's any lighter these days. My dad's been working all week and wants me to have dinner with him tonight, I've got a Sociology paper due next Thursday, and I
still
don't have a date to the Fall Formal, thanks to my best friend, so I have absolutely
less
than zero time for you to sit in my car and bully me around, and—”

“That's fine.” She reaches for the door and pushes it open. From the seated position, she calls out to Stamp, now leaning against the wall outside the locker room as Hazel flanks him like a one-woman she-wolf pack licking her lips before dinner. “Hey, Stamp,” Chloe cries out. From here, I can't tell if he can hear her or not. “I wanted to tell you a little secret about your girlfriend.”

“Get in here,” I shout, grabbing Chloe by the arm and yanking her halfway across the seat toward me.

As I fire up the Honda and peel out of the parking lot, she says, “God, you're so easy. Did you
really
think I was going to break about three dozen zombie laws and squeal your secret to Stamp? Right there, in broad daylight?” “I dunno.”

“Yeah, well, I wasn't.”

I sigh, my head not exactly hurting, but my brain feeling like it's caught in a vise. “So, what is this, Chloe, some kind of zombie intervention or something? First Dane corners me in sixth period to tell me I'm not living up to my full zombie potential or whatever, and now you're staking out my car after school? What gives?”

“What gives,” Chloe says as she looks me up and down in the unforgiving sunlight streaming through my windshield, “is that you look like 10 pounds of crap shoved in a 5-pound bag—and we can't have that. Dane and I have a rep to protect, you know, and now that you're one of us, well, we can't have you giving death a bad name.”

I look at Chloe with her pancake makeup and pierced nose and cringe. “So
you're
the makeup expert Dane was talking about earlier?” I ask, unconvinced.

“What?” Chloe says. “You were expecting maybe Heidi Klum?”

I frown, but it's hard when I want to laugh. Who'da thunk it? Chloe Kildare? Cracking jokes? Giving me makeup advice? Riding shotgun like she owns the car, feet up on the dashboard and all? The world truly is upside down. Or, at least,
my
world is.

“I thought it would be easier, I guess,” I say as we steer slowly through the long line of kids getting out of school on this beautiful fall Friday in sunny Barracuda Bay.

“Yeah, well, it
does
get easier, but not if you get outed by the whole school your first full day with the Z-disease. We've been watching you all day, Dane and I, checking to see how you'd do. I have to tell you, zombie to zombie, you failed.
Big-time
. I mean, kids who never look up from their textbooks were talking about you today. The whole school thinks you have malaria or something.”

I brake for the next stop sign and peer into the rearview mirror. A stranger peers back—a dead, white, pale, broken stranger with no clue, no life, no future. “Is it
that
bad?” I ask for the dozenth time that day.

She doesn't answer the question. “Listen, you take me to the mall, and I'll make sure you pass and nobody finds us out. Deal?”

Instead of turning left toward home, I turn right and head toward the Barracuda Bay Galleria. “Do I have a choice?”

Chloe's dry chuckle is my answer.

W
E SIT IN
the food court, mostly deserted this time of day, two zombies slurping sodas like a couple of poodle-sweatered girls in a ‘50s diner. Aside from yesterday's grilled cheese sandwich, it's the first human food I've had since I died (do brains count?) but, more importantly, the first nondiet soda I've had since I was maybe, what …eight years old?

A few tables away, a frazzled mother sits with her two young boys, yelling at one then another while trying to stuff a quick gyro into her stressed-out gullet. “Jeffrey, stop. Brian, don't
do
that. Jeffrey,
put
that down.”

Chloe ignores them, staring out at the mostly empty stores beyond the food court perimeter.

“So remind me again why I'm not drinking diet.” I take a tentative sip of the thick, syrupy soda. It's surprisingly good. So good I take two more long, big sips. The viselike tension from my head immediately lifts, as it always does when I've been too long without caffeine and drink my first snort of Red Bull—
wham
—32 grams of sugar straight to the cerebral cortex.

She shakes her head. “For starters, you'll never have to count another calorie again. Look at you; you're in the first stages of Assimilation. I bet you've lost at least 15 percent of your body fat already. Trust me, it doesn't take long. By the final stages, you'll be down to 4, maybe 3 percent body fat, tops, for the rest of your life.

“We're literally running on electricity now, Maddy, so your metabolism is crazy fast. So
this”
—she holds up her half-empty cup, as big as most popcorn buckets—”the liquid keeps your cells hydrated; the sugar gives your brain a boost. You don't
need
to drink it, not exactly; you
can
go without it; it just …helps you feel more …human.”

Her voice has turned almost wistful, her eyes falling on the frenzied mother and looking downright sad. I give her the moment, although a thousand questions run through my brain. The biggest one being,
Why is Chloe suddenly being so nice to me?
The mother looks up, sees Chloe's stark white face, severe black makeup, scowling eyes, and T-shirt studded with safety pins, and gathers her boys to leave without cleaning up.

Chloe turns to me without comment.

“How long have you been, you know, like …this?” I ask.

“Thirty-seven years,” she says nonchalantly, as if I've just asked her the weather. “But …how?”

She turns to me, taking another deep, almost desperate slug of soda. She explains, too calmly, “I was holing up in an abandoned warehouse with my boyfriend. It wasn't only us; lots of kids did it back then. It was called ‘squatting'; Google it sometime. Anyway, the cops got a tip, raided the place; everybody took off, even my boyfriend. I'd had a little too much to drink, maybe a few other things, so I couldn't move quite as fast as everybody else.

“Anyway, the cops tried to bust me, I resisted, they tased me; both of them at the same time, set Tasers to quadruple stun. I don't think they planned to; it just worked out that way. You have to remember, this was back when they first started using Tasers. They were pretty much brand-new, experimental, unproven—twice as big, plus twice as
strong
, as they are today.

“Anyway, I went through the Awakening; that's what they call it when you actually die and go into a kind of hibernation. But I wasn't totally gone; I could hear what they were saying, those cops. I mean, they thought I was dead; no pulse, no breathing, cold skin, the works. One said he had a family and kids and he wasn't ‘going down for some punk skank.'

“I still remember that: ‘punk skank.' Nice, huh? The other guy was young, only a kid himself. He said this could ruin his career. So they just left me there; didn't even throw a blanket over me or anything, like you would for a dog. When I came to a few days later, I stumbled off, figured things out, needed to get away from there as fast as I could. Didn't want the same cops catching me again, obviously. I went here, went there; soon enough I figured out what I was, learned what I had to the hard way and, well, here I am.”

“How'd you find out about the whole eating-brains-within-48-hours deal?”

She shakes her head. “I didn't. I just …got really, really hungry and …that was the only thing I had a craving for. I guess it's like when girls get pregnant; they know what they want. It got so bad after a day that I could literally smell the brains through the grocer's deli door. I waited and broke in that night and chowed down. It was …awesome.”

The way she's describing it, I can almost taste the brains right about …Hold up, girl. Focus. Stopping myself from licking my lips at the thought of fresh brains, I ask, “And you never saw your boyfriend again?”

She sucks the last of her soda up and shoves the gargantuan paper cup away. “What, you mean that creep who left me to deal with the cops? No, Maddy, I didn't; didn't want to. Not like you and that football stud you were drooling over after school. What's his name? Stamp?”

I roll my eyes, sipping carefully at my soda. “Lot of good that's going to do me. You saw Hazel jock-block me.”

Chloe smirks. “Thought you two were best friends.”

“Me too.”

Finally, Chloe points to her temple and says, “Lemme see it again.”

“See what?” I ask, instinctively pushing my ridiculous beret tighter onto my head.

“The mark,” she says, inching closer. “I saw you showing Dane in the trailer, but I want to get a better look. I've heard of zombies being reborn by lightning but never met one before. I just want to check it out.”