A Living Dead Love Story Series (33 page)

He sits in Stamp's old chair. “Yeah, actually, I do.”

“Oh.” That kind of takes me aback. “Well, I mean, I was just kidding.”

“I'm not. Now that you mention it, it sounds like just the kind of thing the Sentinels would do. In fact, I'm surprised they haven't done it sooner. Who knows? Maybe they have. Maybe we've just gotten lucky so far.”

I look at him.

He looks at me.

“Pictures,” I blurt, reaching for the phone. “Look at the pictures. Maybe he's got one of her in there and we'll be able to see if she looks like a Sentinel or not.”

He yanks the phone close before I can reach it. He scrolls through pictures. “This was last month's chick,” he says, shaking his head. “I recognize that stupid pink nose ring. God, kids these days. And I already know this one …” He's flipping through the images, one by one, until he stops and holds the phone out to me, turning it around so the screen is glowing right in my face. “This one.” He points at Stamp and some short blonde chick at a club.

“What one?” I take the phone. “You can barely see her with Stamp's stupid arm in the way.”

“Keep going.”

So I do that little finger swipe thing so that the screen changes. Suddenly there's another picture, same club, same night, and the petite chick with the spiky blonde hair is kind of purposefully hiding behind Stamp
now. Like it's a game. She's smiling all cutesy, but no one's able to get a good picture of her just the same.

I keep going and see spiky, dyed blonde hair in one, a metal bracelet in another, a thick black sock in the next, a bare white belly over a short red skirt after that—but nothing more than flashes of her here and there.

Dane takes the phone, and we look together at another picture, another night, another club: same thing. Someone's taking a picture of them together, arm in arm, and spiky blonde chick is hiding. Even when you can tell it's Stamp taking the picture, she holds something in front of her face: a cocktail napkin, a giant wineglass, or her shiny pink purse. You can see her fingers in one, all over the purse, but the flash is so bright even the purse looks dead, so how can you tell if she is?

“So she's shy,” I offer, but the words feel limp on my lips.

Dane's tongue is out, a sure sign he's working something over in his brain. His fingers fly on the phone's keyboard once more.

I sigh, then practically shriek.

The key! In the front door.

“He's back!” I say, as if Dane hasn't heard it himself.

“Sit,” he orders.

Like a dog, I obey. But I wasn't even standing! I scoot back in my chair, and so does he on the couch.

“The phone,” I gurgle as I hear the key in the third lock and the quick puff of air that happens whenever the
door slides open.

Dane grunts, looks at me, then at the doorway, and quickly tosses me the phone. I've never been good at catching things, not even a cold, but here comes this sleek phone and—yes!—somehow I clutch it from the air and slide it onto the same end table we plucked it from only minutes ago. It doesn't glide all the way to the end and hang there like it did for Stamp but stops square in the middle. I doubt he'll notice, but with Stamp you never know.

Stamp still looks surly, maybe even more so, with his hands buried in the pockets of his crisp new slacks and his chin tucked deep in his stiff shirt collar. For the first time, I notice how cheap the black shirt with red stripes looks. Not inexpensive but brassy and flashy. And I wish, for just a moment, he would have asked me to help him pick one out instead of trying to do everything for himself all the time.

“Forget something?” Dane says a little too loudly.

Stamp hardly notices. “My phone,” he says, reaching for it in the middle of the end table without further comment.

“Gonna try Val again?” I say, if only to fill the awkward silence.

He looks at me sharply, then softens. “Not really,” he says quietly, turning for the door again. “I just feel naked without it, you know?”

Before I can answer, he's disappeared again, shoes scraping the pitted concrete beyond our welcome mat, shutting and triple-locking the door behind him.

I slump in the chair. “Phew, that was close. Who were you texting, anyway?”

“Not texting,” Dane says, standing and dragging me into his room with those thin arms I always forget are so strong. “I was sending those pictures to myself so we could study them a little more closely and on a bigger screen.”

“Oh,” I say, a little disappointed.

I mean, I thought he was dragging me into his bedroom because Stamp was finally gone …

G
rowl. Dane chases
me across the stage of
The Great Movie Monster Makeover Show.

Stamp growls even louder, pursues even more aggressively.

I nearly duck his wide, swinging arms. “Hey,” I whisper as I hide behind him, the audience laughing as if this is part of the performance. “Take it easy on the overaggression there, big guy.” I shove him, just a little too hard, to let him know I'll only play the victim so long.

He goes flying, tumbling toward the end of the stage.

Just in time, Dane grabs the back of his jacket and keeps him from careening into the third row.

More laughter, spontaneous applause.

Dane looks at me from behind the Frankenstein mask. “Cut it out,” he says, using the nervous laughter of the audience as cover.

Stamp stumbles back, waving his arms, making a big production out of it. I think he's smiling, even though I can only see his eyes behind the goofy mask. He chases me around the stage, still growling, and now I can't tell if he's happy or sad or scared or faking it or for real mad at me. I only know there should be two Frankies chasing me and there's only one.

“Hey,” I blurt when we pass Dane, who's standing awkwardly at the end of the stage, peering past the house lights at the audience. “What gives?”

He springs to life, grunting and waving and chasing me offstage.

The curtain falls.

I punch Stamp in the arm. “The hell?”

But he's already onstage again, ruffling the curtains and poking out through the middle as he yanks off his mask.

Dane and I join him for our final bows.

It's cheesy, sure, but with these tourists, you wouldn't believe who passes for a celebrity these days. They'd rather get the autograph of some two-bit ham in a rubber Frankenstein mask than go home empty-handed.

Stamp does his thing, bounding down into the audience, still wearing his mask and then finally revealing his cute face.

The girls swoon and rush him with their little copies of the black-and-white photo they got up front. Don't worry. It's not even of us, so no danger of the Sentinels
using it to track us down.

I'm next to Stamp, feeling lonely and out of place because nobody ever asks the non-Frankenstein girl for her autograph, not even out of pity. So I'm not as distracted as Stamp is when Dane bounds by in his sweats and a flannel shirt, looking around the audience before slinking through the chairs to the exit.

“Dane?” I follow him. I don't know. There's just something about the urgency in his step, the tension of his shoulders, that screams three-alarm fire.

I look back at Stamp, still playing the ham, growling and mugging for the cameras with the tourists. He doesn't even notice me. I race past the last row. Outside, I get slight waves from folks.

“Hey, hey, lookee there,” says some red-faced bloke with an English accent, tipping his madras driver's cap. “It's the lass from the monster show!”

I bow and smile and see Dane's bristly head weaving and bobbing through the crowd beyond. I walk as briskly as possible, legs a little rigid for this kind of cat-and-mouse chase. Folks smile at me as I pass, figuring the stiff-legged walk is all part of the act, and suddenly I remember. I'm still in costume!

It's a pretty big no-no. If my manager, Mr. Frears, were to spot me offstage like this, I'd be fired. But he's not working today, so I'm not too worried about it. I look down at the scrappy dress, the fugly shoes, and the
blood splatters on my stockings. I must look a fright, but sometimes it's easier to hide as a monster than it is to pass as a Normal.

“Dane!” I finally catch up, yanking him around more roughly than I wanted to.

He turns around and clutches my hand to drag me along. “Hurry,” he says, weaving through the tourists, intent on getting to something or someone in the distance.

“Hurry where?”

He points with his free hand as we narrowly avoid toppling a tour group of Brazilians in matching green-and-yellow sports jerseys. “It's her, Maddy. The girl from Stamp's cell phone.”

“Val? How? Where?”

He stops short, pulling me behind a giant green soda machine. “I saw her in the audience at the last show.” He peeks around the corner of the machine and quickly looks back. “When you almost pushed Stamp offstage.”

I picture her from Stamp's phone, glimpses of spiky blonde hair, pale little face, black fingernails, mesh-covered thigh. “How could you tell?”

“I can't. I just … don't ask me to explain. I think, I mean, I know it's her.”

“So what are we doing behind this soda machine?”

“She stopped at the caramel corn booth.”

I risk a glimpse past his shoulder, although he grimaces like I'm about to get us caught. The midafternoon
crowd is thick, but I know the popcorn stand he's talking about. There, in a line of about five people, is a waif with spiky blonde hair. And then she's gone, abandoning her place in line and making for the caricature booth.

“Let's go, Columbo.” I snort. “She's on the move. Although, it doesn't look like her.”

Then again, as I catch flashes of her in the crowd, it could be. A peek here, past a burly man in a tank top, looks like her. Then, as she coasts through a sea of sticky-fingered field trip kids, she looks nothing like her. Too tall, too short, too broad, too thin.

“Why is she avoiding us, then?” Dane says.

“Have you seen yourself lately?”

“Funny.” Then he stops, turning his back to her as I peek under his arm and notice a spiky blonde-headed someone sniffing our way, then turning quickly to disappear into the crowd.

“That little minx!” I'm sure it's her. Kinda, sorta, maybe. I'm dragging Dane along, weaving in and out of tour groups and sweaty, sunburned families until we turn the corner near the cheesy pretzel stand, and—poof! No more Val. Or maybe-Val. Or could-be-Val. Or probably-was-Val.

I start again.

Dane holds me back. “We could do this all day,” he says, stretching one arm over my shoulder. “And we've got another show to do in an hour.”

It feels good, his arm like that.

People smile at us, two kids obviously on break from some show, not hiding their affection.

“Why would she be here?”

“If it even was her.” Dane cocks one beautiful eyebrow.

I slap him playfully on the chest, right between two smears of fake blood on his T-shirt. “You're the one who convinced me it was, remember?”

He sighs, shaking his head. “Maybe I've just been on the run too long.”

And I know he means forever, not just now: his whole Afterlife, ever since he was reanimated. This school, that school, before Chloe, after Chloe, and now with Stamp and me. I lean into him, to show him I understand, that I care, and he nuzzles his chin on the top of my head, you know, the way guys do.

It feels good, and I don't want to think it was Val scoping us out. I want to be anonymous, boring. I can't believe undercover Sentinel skanks are watching our every move, like Dane believes they are.

“It probably wasn't her,” I say. “We're just being paranoid.”

“Yeah, probably.”

We're almost back to the front entrance of the theater, all fake spooky with cobwebs in the windows and plastic ivy on the brick facade. A little girl in a Victorian apron and bonnet hands out pictures to our fans.

She nods at us warily, as if she's going to tell our manager about our little between-show excursion.

“Let her,” Dane says, reading my mind as we enter the darkness of the theater. “If it was Val, I don't see us being under the radar for too much longer anyway.”

“And if it wasn't?” I open the door to backstage.

He pauses on the bottom step below me, shrugs. “Then we tell Mr. Frears we were just hunting down some audience member who forgot her camera.”

He smiles as if this is actually what happened.

I smack him again on the shoulder and turn, finding Stamp standing there, still in his stage makeup, tapping one shoe on the floor.

“Where the hell did you guys go?”

“Didn't you hear me? That little girl from the third row dropped her camera,” I say, taking Dane's cue.

“So you had to go halfway around the park to catch her?” He's clearly not buying it.

“What can I say?” Dane slides into his cast chair and grabs a makeup remover pad. “She was a lot faster than a couple of zombies.”

T
hat's definitely zombie
flesh,” Dane murmurs Rainman-like a few mornings later. “Definitely. Zombie. Flesh.”

Yes, we're back in his stupid room.

Yes, we're studying stupid pictures of stupid Val on his stupid computer.

And no, we're not doing anything else. Not one little thing.

Dude. Is. Obsessed.

“You don't know that,” I remind him for the 673rd time.

“Look!” he says, as if he's suddenly remembered I'm in the room with him, as if I haven't already given it 1,000 looks, as if my neck isn't going to snap in half from looking so much. “Look at the way the concealer is smudged on her wrist in this one picture. See, I've blown the image up. Now, I ask you, who else but a zombie would have gray skin underneath?”