A Living Dead Love Story Series (47 page)

And me? I was so eager to please Dane, so diehard in wanting to protect Stamp, I'd have done anything to keep us all safe and re-alive.

If Val had shown up then, with all three of us on our game, she wouldn't have been able to touch us. Not a chance. Back then Stamp still trusted me and Dane still respected my opinion, and together we managed to stop an undead army complete with footballer zombies, Living Dead cheerleaders, and even a legion of undead teachers.

A punk Zerker like Val? She would have been worm food in 10 seconds flat.

Then we ran, and everything changed.

It was like, as the school burned down in our rear-view mirror, we left part of ourselves behind. The best part of ourselves.

By the time we got to Orlando, almost as soon as we crossed the city line, everything shifted and none for the better. I chose Stamp, and Dane melded into the background. He became more father than boyfriend, and the more time I spent with Stamp, the more he knew my heart belonged to Dane.

And the more Stamp knew, the more he changed. Withdrew. He became hurt, and once we broke up for good he was distant. He became less like a friend or even an ex and more like a roommate.

Him staying out all those nights, with some new crowd we didn't know, made him worse than hurt. It made him vulnerable. Bait for a chick like Val and her charms, whatever those might have been.

And now Stamp was gone forever, and Val won. The thought of her, that blonde spiky hair, that stupid red boa, her voice over the loudspeaker at Splash Zone, teasing us. I close my eyes to drive it all away, but it only makes it worse.

I know my heart is dead, but my chest hasn't forgotten the flutter of anxiety that happens when I'm so mad I could burst. I swear I can feel it beating in there, or maybe it's just the electricity left over from Vera's mighty pen.

Vera. She'll be back. She'll want to talk, to discuss more of what's in my file. She'll bring her pen and her key. They will be in her pockets. The pockets of her powder-blue Sentinel uniform. If I can just remember which pockets they're in, if I can just grab them, then I can get out.

And Val can be mine.

Y
ou're going to
have to talk to me sometime, Maddy.” Her tone is halfway between demand and request, equal parts mother and prison maiden.

“I've talked. I'm talking. What more do you want to know, Vera?”

We're back in the little room where she first questioned me. I can't tell if it's been one day, two days, two weeks, or only two hours. There are no windows here or in my cell or in the long hallway leading to my cell.

It feels like daytime, or maybe that's just because the room is so bright. There are no Sentinels waiting gigantically outside the door this time. Either Vera thinks she doesn't need them anymore or they were just for window dressing the first time.

I eye the electric pen in her hand just the same. I think she wants me to.

She doesn't answer right away, just sits there staring at me. I can't tell if she's supposed to be the good zombie, the bad zombie, or both, but I'm not worried much either way. Talk is cheap. Only revenge matters anymore.

Her left hand, the one without the lethal pen, rests gently on my file.

I nod toward it. “Have I been that bad?”

Vera arches an eyebrow but doesn't reply.

“It looks like my file's gotten so big you've had to add a second one to fill with all my misdeeds.”

She smiles softly before apparently remembering this is supposed to be some kind of interrogation. “Actually, this is someone else's file. I thought …” Her voice, usually so confident, drifts off midsentence as she looks above my head at the window behind me. I turn, expecting to see someone—a team of Sentinels, maybe, or even Dane—but there's nothing but more off-white cinder blocks and bright, white lighting.

Then she fixes her eyes on mine and continues more confidently: “I thought if you saw it, it might help you understand a little of what makes her tick.”

“Her?” I snap, sitting up immediately. “What her? That's Val's folder?”

I reach for it, and she clicks the pen once over my hand.

I yank my hand right back. Yeah, I'm not proud of it, but it beats getting knocked clear across the room again.

“I'm not stupid,” Vera insists, removing the pen but watching my hand carefully. “I know what you're thinking. I know that nothing I say matters, that you're only thinking of the day you can get out of here and find the person who killed Stamp. But I'm warning you: Sentinels don't take kindly to escapees, and if you think you're in trouble now, just—”

“Can I see the damn folder or not?” My voice, like my jaw, like my fingers on the side of my chair, is tight.

She hears the tone, her eyes get a little bigger, and then she slides it across.

Now that it's in front of me, I'm hesitant to read it.

I've been staring at the mental picture of Val's face so long I'm almost afraid to look at a real picture of it. That probably doesn't make much sense, but it stops me from opening the folder right away just the same.

“Aren't you going to open it?”

“Yeah, yeah, I just … I really hate her, you know?”

Vera pauses as we both stare at the unopened file sitting on the table just so in front of me.

“Maybe you won't after reading the file.”

“The hell does that mean?”

Vera doesn't even flinch. If anything, she leans in. “It means that once you get to know Val as a person, you might not be so quick to—”

“She's not a person. She's a Zerker, remember?”

Vera ignores my tone and softens hers: “Not always.
Like you, she started out as—”

“Val was never like me. Never.”

She nods curtly, says, “You didn't kill all those Zerkers out of revenge?”

“We didn't kill anybody. We defended ourselves. We defended our town and our friends and our parents. There's a big difference.”

Vera shrugs. “Maybe that's what Val thought she was doing.”

“What? By waiting a few months and then luring Stamp into some shark tank? That's self-defense?”

She opens her mouth and, so help me God, I shove the table in her direction just to shut her up. Its legs skid a millimeter or two on the floor.

Vera kind of gasps, we share a look, and then she shakes her head. “Look at the file. Then we'll talk.” She stands, pen in hand—clicking, clicking, clicking—pacing the small interrogation room.

I finally open the file with a trembling hand. The first thing I see are the same kind of surveillance photos that the Sentinels—or the Keepers or the FBI of the Living Dead or whoever the hell—took of Dane and Stamp and me in Orlando.

They're of big-booted, spiky-haired Val doing mundane un-Zerker-like things: getting gas, shopping for mascara, going into a nightclub, coming out of a nightclub.

I'm flipping them over and over and over, sneering at Val's smug face, that pug nose and stupid,
stupid
hair,
when the first picture of Stamp pops up. I gasp out loud and don't care that it stops Vera in her tracks.

The room slips away, and I slide the picture out of the folder, holding it close so I can study every detail. Stamp is in a black T-shirt, loose but soft and clingy across his broad chest. It has long sleeves to cover up his zombie skin, and he stands awkwardly, a full foot taller than Val. They lean against some grody brick wall downtown.

I can tell it's from a few weeks back, when they first met, because he's not wearing the stupid black-and-white hoodie he must have bought—or maybe she bought for him—while they were dating.

He looks so young, so handsome, even in his Living Death. I've known him so long, I don't see the death pallor, the drawn cheeks, the hooded eyes, the crooked smile anymore. I just see the boy who ran into me that first day at Barracuda Bay High, the Superman curl he can't get back, and the boy I doomed forever by bringing him back from the dead.

And now he's dead again.

“You're lucky,” I croak, not looking up, voice deader than usual, “that zombies don't cry. Or your stupid folder would be ruined.”

I hear a cluck or a chuckle and then the shuffling of her feet to the other end of the room.

Reluctantly, I slip Stamp's picture into the file and move on.

There are more of them together: Val and Stamp in
a nightclub, Val and Stamp chugging double frozen coffee shots, Val and Stamp at the warehouse. I flip through them quickly. It hurts too much to linger.

There is a yearbook photo of Val, circa 1970-what-the-hell. She's in braces and bell-bottoms and a big, fat, floral collared shirt and feathery blonde hair. I always forget zombies are immortal, that
we're
immortal.

“How old
is
she?” I say, as if this is the biggest sin she's committed: not being an actual teenager.

Vera finally chuckles. “Does it matter?”

I shrug, flip the page, and freeze. There is a second yearbook photo, same '70s-era feathery hair and big, floppy collars and—it's Bones!

“Bones had hair?”

“Lots of it,” she says, even though she's staring at her shoes. “Apparently.”

Brown, curly, frizzy hair. Big buckteeth. Eyes that were not yellow but green. Val's eyes, too, I find, looking back.

I slip the photos out of the file and line them up next to each other. Only when they're side by side can I see the resemblance of brother and sister. It's in the eyes, the bridge of the nose, the jut of the jaw.

“They look so goofy.”

“It was the '70s. We all looked goofy.”

“You … you were in the '70s?”

Vera rolls her eyes. “You don't wanna know.”

There are only a few more pictures in the file.
Younger ones. Bones and Val as little kids on tricycles. Looking awkward in fuzzy red jumpers in front of a Christmas tree.

I put those images back and stare at the yearbook photos.

“Why do they stop here?” I say, already suspecting the answer.

“That's when they were turned.” She returns to the seat across from me.

While I stare at the yearbook photos, memorizing each freckle, each eyelash, each pimple, Vera rustles through the few remaining pages of the file to slide out a yellowed newspaper article. I can't see the front as she holds it up, but I see a cigarette ad on the back: 75 cents for a pack of cigarettes. Not too shabby.

“Mysterious illness infects local church,” she reads from the article, holding it by the edges gingerly. “Thirty-four members of the Zionist Pioneer Church on 47th and Sycamore were buried in a mass grave yesterday, in accordance with local health codes. The only two survivors of what local residents are calling the yellow flu, named for its resulting flu-like symptoms and yellow eyes, were not in attendance. Valerie Simmons and her younger brother, Randolph, watched the funeral on TV from the local orphanage. Their parents, Bill and Carol Simmons, were two of the earliest victims of the yellow flu and—” She pauses.

I've slid the pictures into the file and closed it. “So they were human. I get that. They had parents, friends. Their whole life changed. So why us? Why did Bones, or this Randolph Simmons dude, get to the point that he hung out in high schools baiting regular zombies and chomping on Normals' brains?”

“Why do any of us wind up anywhere?” Her voice is sad.

I wonder if, like me, she is thinking of her own parents and how she became a zombie and when and why and what she left behind.

“All we know is that Valerie and her brother, Randolph, aka Bones, survived a Zerker outbreak by becoming ones themselves. We could only trace them as far back as the orphanage they stayed at after the funeral. That is, until they broke out. After that, they came up as only blips on the Sentinels' radar from time to time over the years.”

I shake my head and slide the file across the table. “So if they were so close, where was Val when Bones was terrorizing me and my friends?”

Vera shrugs. “Another high school, perhaps? Divide and conquer? All we know is that Val showed up in Barracuda Bay a few days after the first team of Sentinels got there to try and find you. A surveillance team tracked her all the way to Orlando, where she apparently located you guys. That's where these photos were taken. After that, well, you could probably tell us more than we
already know. If you'd talk, that is …”

I nod but don't. Talk, that is.

She sits there patiently.

Suddenly, I remember: “You said this would change my mind about Val. Why?”

Vera shrugs. “She was human once, just like you.”

I stand and linger by the door, my back to her. “You forget,” I say, my tone so cold it almost frosts over the window in the door. “I'm not human anymore.”

I
'm pacing when
I hear the door at the end of the hall open and boots squeak in the hall. Then something starts scraping ominously in time with the boot steps.

Clomp, clomp, scrape. Clomp, clomp, scrape. I stop my pacing long enough to inch away from the bars of my cell, just in case it's some cyborg with a machine gun arm or laser beam eyeball or something.

I know, I know, too much Syfy, but I can't help it! What else am I supposed to watch at 4:00 a.m.?

The clomping and scraping get closer and closer—did I mention, it's a really long hall—until at last I'm nearly pushed against the far wall of my cell and a flash of faded blue enters my peripheral.

Vera comes into focus and sets down the four-legged chair she's been scraping down the hall. She sits in it
outside my cell. There's a self-satisfied smile on her face, like maybe she did all that on purpose, just to scare me or tease me or just plain bug the holy crap out of me.