A Living Dead Love Story Series (68 page)

The air-conditioning vent on the roof is a tight squeeze, but I'm smaller than I used to be and not so panicked about the side of the thin metal tube pressing against my chest as I pull, pull, pull myself up and out of it. When I'm standing on the roof again, I slide the round top back on the vent and walk to the edge.

I'm in downtown Seagull Shores now, standing above something like a main street or just off it. There's a post office at one end, a bank at the other, a drug store and a men's store and a women's store and an ice cream parlor—and no one is around. The clock on the bank says in big, red digital numbers that it's 4:43 a.m., and that feels about right.

I smell the salt air and hear the crash of the waves to my right as I step down the fire escape to the street below. I grab my bags' straps atop each shoulder and look both ways before slinking through the same alleys I crept up to get here.

There is a convenience store between the thrift shop and the house on Lumpfish Lane. A bench sits out front between two newspaper machines. I shove my bags under it, pull down my Seahorses ball cap, and walk inside, the three twenties from the deposit bag crisp in my hoodie pocket. The lights are bright, which is good. Not because it makes me look better, but it makes everyone else look bad, so hopefully I won't stand out too much.

The clerk is tall and thin with short, red hair and big, black glasses and a tan-and-red Stop N Go vest. He barely looks up from his girly mag as I walk in and head for the drink aisle. I grab some generic grape soda, something sweet and cold, and make for the pet food aisle, looking past the name-brand stuff to the cut-rate cat food, smiling when I see lamb brains down the long list of ingredients on the back of the can.

It'll do for now.

I walk to the register and slide the items next to the guy's magazine, which isn't full of naked girls, as I first thought, but muscle cars. I stand there, money out while he reads the last paragraph and looks up.

“Oh, hi,” he says, meeting my gaze.

I wait for him to grimace, but he doesn't. I can't imagine he gets many supermodels in the joint in the middle of the night, and even undead I probably look better than half of his regular customers.

He rings the stuff up so slowly I have time to notice the pumpkin-scented candles on display by the cash register. I ask him to add a few of them to my bill and then grab two 99-cent cigarette lighters at the last minute.

It comes to $12.79, and I hand him one of the stolen twenties, taking the change while he double-bags my stuff. “Quite the midnight snack,” he says, shoving everything in one bag.

“My cat Trixie got hungry.”

He doesn't even flinch, just slides the bag across the counter and goes back to his magazine.

I nod and take the bag, divvying up the items between the backpack and duffel bag so they're easier to carry through town. I save one bottle of cheap grape soda, sipping it slowly on the way back to the house on Lumpfish Lane, my dry, dead cells welcoming the sugar rush that will last a few minutes until, like everything else we eat, it evaporates in the endlessly hungry wastelands that are our innards.

I finish it under the street light beneath our window, looking up. When I shield my eyes against the weak orange light, I see Stamp looking out between the slats.

He seems happy to see me. Or maybe it's just the soda bottle I have in my hand.

F
eel better?”

Stamp burps, wipes the cheap grape soda off his lips, and nods.

We're in the kitchen, sitting cross-legged on the tile floor, a pumpkin spice candle flickering between us, and it looks so '80s B movie that I half expect one of us to whip out a Ouija board any minute. The shades are drawn in every room, as tight as they can clench, but still I don't want to risk being seen on our third night in the house on Lumpfish Lane.

A few seconds later, he adds, “Much.”

And it's been so long since I asked him, I think,
Much what?
Then I realize he means much better. I shake my head. Talking to Stamp is like being on a seven-minute delay.

I wonder, as I watch him tidy up his cat food tins and empty soda bottles, if he and Dad ever just sat and talked like this back in the lab. I bet they did. Speech therapy, as Dad called it, was a big part of their work together.

He's kind of in a trance, moving slowly but purposefully. When he catches me looking, he smiles shyly, as if we hardly know each other. “Do you think she'll find us?”

My back is to a row of kitchen cabinets, and he's in front of the kitchen sink. “Who, Val?”

He nods.

“I don't know. I imagine she's far away from here by now.” Half of me truly believes that, or at least wants to, and the other half just doesn't want to worry him.

Too late. He shakes his head pretty adamantly. “No, she isn't.”

“What do you mean, Stamp? She broke out of Sentinel City almost a week ago by now. Why would she stick around that long when she knows every Sentinel in Florida is looking for her?”

“Stop talking so fast.” His tone is soft, but his words are hard.

I blink a couple of times. “What?”

“I mean, I can't keep up with you when you talk like that.”

I nod. That makes sense. “I'm sorry, Stamp. I'm used to talking to . . .”

He nods. “Dane, I know. And Dane is fast, I know. But I'm not anymore, so slow down please.”

“Okay, I will.”

The pumpkin smell is strong. I don't know if it's my zombie sense or a really strong candle, but I blow it out. We don't really need it anyway. I just thought it would be nice to live like Normals for a change, lighting a candle in the dark, having a picnic on the kitchen floor.

Guess not.

We sit silently while our eyes adjust. In a few seconds, the room glows a soft, gentle yellow even without the flickering of the candle. Zombie vision, I call it. Dad could never explain it, said there's no good reason why a dead thing's eyes should see better than a living one's, but here it is just the same. It's been this way ever since Barracuda Bay.

Stamp moves his hand in front of his face. “I almost forgot we could do this,” he marvels, like a kid on Christmas morning.

“We can do a lot,” I remind him. “We're the good guys, remember?”

“Not me.” He's pouting. I can see his features, harsh in the hazy yellow glow. “Not anymore.”

“That's not true. You're here with me, and nothing's gone wrong, right?”

“Not yet.”

I raise my voice. “Stamp, listen to me. Look at me.” I wait until he does. “You're a good zombie. You're not like Val. You never could be, even if Dad hadn't sucked half the Zerker out of you.”

“You say that now, but just wait. You don't know.”

“I don't
want
to know. If a guy like you can go bad, then . . . I don't want to know. Don't you remember, back in Barracuda Bay, how you saved me from Val?”

He leans in, as if getting a better look at me will help him remember. Finally, he rests his back against the cabinet and shakes his head. “I was all bad then. I forget a lot.”

“Well, I don't. I remember, and if it weren't for you, I wouldn't be here today.”

“Really?”

I reach across and touch his knee. “Really. If you hadn't saved me, Val would have torn me limb from limb.”

He nods but scoots back a little, so that my hand falls to the floor. “Maybe, maybe I can save you again when Val comes.”

“She's not coming,” I hiss.

He nods. “You're right.” Then, after another seven-second delay that feels like two minutes, he adds, “She's already here.”

“You saw her?” I'm ready to get up, grab my Eliminator, and cut the next tiny blonde witch I see.

“No, but I feel her. She's part of me, remember.”

“She bit you. You're not linked or something.”

He shrugs. “You don't know that.”

“I pretty much do. That's not how it's supposed to work.”

He cocks his head. “This isn't how dead is supposed to work either.”

I open my mouth to argue, but then I give up. He's right. More often than not. More often than me.

“Okay, so you feel like Val is here?”

He nods.

“So we have to be careful,” I add. “Extra careful. Which is pretty much why we haven't left this house in three days.”

He gets to his knees and crawls to me. He seems a little faster now.

“What are you doing, Stamp?”

He sits next to me, facing out of the kitchen toward the living room and the foyer. “Being more careful.”

I chuckle. He always was a sly one. “Gotcha. Right.”

“Can you hug me?”

I inch away to get a better look at his face. “How is that being more careful?”

He smiles. “It's not. Sometimes you just need a hug at night. Your dad would give them to me sometimes, when Val wasn't around or even if she was and he knew I extra needed one.”

“He would?” Sweet as he is, for the life of me I can't picture Dad hugging Stamp.

Stamp shrugs. “Yeah, he was a good hugger.”

I snort. “Yes, yes, he was.” Then I wonder how long it's been since I've had a hug from Dad. “Okay, come here.”

He leans in, head on my shoulder, and I have to put my arms around him while his arms stay at his side. Has he forgotten how to hug? Or is he just afraid of what might happen if he does?

W
hatcha doing?”

My fingers fly to the Eliminator in my front pocket. I'm creeping out of the back gate, looking left when a voice comes from the right.

I turn and find a short Asian girl standing casually just outside the door. I'd jump back inside if I could move that fast.

I shut the fence door behind me just the same, the plastic Stop N Go bag full of empty grape soda bottles and cat food tins dangling in my free hand. “Nothing. Just taking out the trash.” I try to sound defensive.

She puts her hands up and takes a step back. “Okay, yeah, I see that now.”

She is pretty, in a tomboyish sort of way. Short and stocky, straight black hair clipped severely across her forehead, very little makeup but a soft, clear complexion. She has on long black jogging shorts with white stripes down the side and a Spider-Man T-shirt. Her black-and-white basketball shoes are untied, and her white socks go up to her knees, which is about where the hems of her shorts end.

“You must have moved in when I wasn't looking,” she says cryptically, nodding toward the back gate as if wanting to be let in. “I've been waiting forever for some other kids to move onto this street.”

I wasn't expecting to see anyone so soon and don't really have a cover story down yet, but she's kind of just given me one. I add to it quickly: “Uh, yeah, my brother and I didn't get here until just a few days ago. We were supposed to be here last
week, but the bus broke down in Tallahassee, so . . .
here we are.”

“You moved . . . by bus?”

Um, yeah, she's right. That was kind of stupid. Well, hell, they never covered being Vanished in my Keeper training. I keep it going: “Well, not exactly. My parents won't be here until next week, but they wanted my brother and I to get checked into school early, so we came ahead so we wouldn't miss much more of the school year.”

That goes down a little better.

She looks at the house, up and down and then up again. I wonder if Stamp is back upstairs, studying her through the blinds. I try to follow her gaze and see nothing but closed shutters and pulled drapes and a normal Florida suburban house.

“So, cool, like, you have the whole house to yourself all week? Party time!” She pumps a fist.

But I don't join her, for obvious reasons. “Yeah, no, it's not really like that.”

She takes another step back. “Cool, okay, you're straitlaced; I get it. Me too. I mean, I'm not really the party type, you know. I just thought, if you were, well . . . I didn't want to make a bad first impression.”

I lean on the fence, trying to be casual but wanting to run. But I've come this far, and she hasn't bolted away screaming
Zombie
yet, so maybe it'll work.

Maybe.

“So where's your brother?”

Man, this chick. If I can pass with her and her wannabe crime scene investigative skills, we may get out of this re-alive after all.

“Still sleeping. Have you ever tried sleeping on a bus?” I yawn for effect.

Her curious eyes tell me I'm overdoing it more than just a little. Then she stands at attention and juts out a hand. “Oh my gosh, I can't believe we haven't even introduced ourselves this whole time. I'm Lucy Toh.”

I pull my hand from where I've been warming it against the back of my sweatpants and take her hand. I haven't had much time, so I hope the temperature isn't too bad. She doesn't say anything, so maybe I did all right.

But then she pulls her hand back. “You sick or something?” She reaches into one of the pockets of her shorts and pulls out a travel-size bottle of hand sanitizer, something pink and cherry scented, splotzing it all over her hands and sliming them together.

“A little,” I say, taking the bait. “Like I said, two days on a bus, you catch a lot of germs.”

Her hands now dry and clean, she taps a foot.

“What?” I say.

“I showed you mine; you show me yours.”

I blink a couple of times.

“Name. You never told me your name.”

“Maddy,” I say on instinct, as I did a thousand times in Orlando without thinking twice. “Maddy Swift.”

She smiles and looks more girly that way. “I like that. Sounds kind of like a superhero name.”