A Living Dead Love Story Series (69 page)

“Really?”

“Yeah, you don't think so?”

I shrug. “I've never really thought about it before.”

She looks at me—specifically, at what I'm wearing. Black sweatpants, too-tight sneakers, gray pullover with a zipper collar. “So you're not going to school here yet?”

“Not yet. Like I said . . .”

“Your parents, yeah, got it. So, well, when do you start?”

“I dunno. I guess when my parents get here and bring my paperwork and stuff.”

She seems busy all of a sudden. Restless, as if I'm keeping her, when she was the one stalking me. “Okay, well, maybe I'll come over later. After school, I mean.”

My eyes get big. “Oh well, really, I mean, the place is a mess and the furniture isn't here or anything, so . . .”

But she's already running on her stumpy legs to the house next door, up the steps and stopping on the front porch, hand on the doorknob. “Cool. It's a date. See you then.”

I watch her walk inside, cursing myself while smiling, waving like an idiot. A big, Vanished, zombie idiot. The door shuts behind her, and a light goes on inside.

I'm about to turn around when I notice the divot in her front yard. I inch a little closer, not wanting to be seen but needing a better look.

I fiddle with the trash can, like maybe I'm throwing something away, and steal a glance. Sure enough, I see fresh grass, kind of a different color, on a square divot of lawn. It's a little lower than the rest. Fresher too.

I creep inside the gate, pretty sure there was a For Sale sign in front of that house just the other day.

T
he doorbell rings
later that afternoon, right on time. I curse as Stamp peeks out the dining room blinds while I crouch behind the front door, Eliminator close at hand to decapitate any and all comers: traveling Bible salesmen, Zerkers, SWAT teams, whatever. Bring it.

He makes his crumple face. “Did you order Chinese?”

Jesus. It must be Lucy. “Don't
say
that, Stamp!”

He lets the blind down, face blank and hurt. “Why? What'd I say?”

“Not all Asian people deliver Chinese food . . . I mean
Asian
food, Stamp.”

His eyes get wide, like this is big news to him. “No, I know that, but this Asian person has Chinese Asian food. She's waving at me. I think it's for
us
.”

Holy God. Have I screwed up that badly?
Already
? Four days in town, and I've already blown our cover?

I open the door and, indeed, Lucy Toh has come bearing Chinese food. “It's from my parents' place,” she says as I slip the door shut right behind her. “They own Lop Sing's in the Breezeway Strip Mall. Right by the Family Value Mart?”

She says it so casually, as if she thinks I should know where it is, and I think I do. Wasn't the thrift shop where I stole the clothes I'm wearing right now in the Breezeway Strip Mall?

Or was it in the Sailfish Shopping Center?

The Grouper Galleria?

“It smells so good,” I say, standing in the doorway so she'll see she's not really welcome. “Thank you so much, but our parents don't really want us to have people over while they're not . . .”

Forget it. Too late. She's already breezing in.

She's in a gingham skirt now and high knee socks and shiny black shoes and a maroon blazer with a school crest on the outside of the left lapel. She must go to a private school.

“When did you say your parents were coming, again?” she asks, walking right into the kitchen, where she puts the food on the counter.

Stamp follows her like a puppy.

I think she kind of likes it.

“Next week,” I say, trying to remember what I said just this morning. Ack, I'm no good at this being Vanished stuff! I'm going to get us nabbed before I ever have a chance to find out where ZED is and, more importantly, how Dad is.

“So what are you going to do until then?” She's busy taking out the food, lining it up precisely.

Stamp lurks, sniffing over her shoulder, glancing at me with a look on his face that says,
Is it okay?

I shake my head. Half Zerker or no, he knows we can't eat Normal food. A little meat, maybe, but very little and cooked rarely. Then again, who knows what Zerkers can and can't do? I should have asked Dad more about them while I had the time.

He ate that Twinkie all up on my birthday and didn't keel over, right? Could Chinese food be much different?

“Thanks for all this Asian food, Lucy,” I stumble. “But we—”

She smirks, looking at Stamp. “Asian food?” She looks back at me. “It's Chinese food . . . It's okay. You can say it. Chinese. Food.” She chuckles.

Stamp chuckles too, but I know from the glazed look in his eyes he's just being nice to whoever brought him food.

“Oh, okay, well, I never know what I should call it. I mean you . . . I mean . . . Oh, man . . .” I bury my face in my hands, hoping when I look up Lucy and her food will be long gone.

No such luck. She turns to me with a half-skeptical, half-disappointed, half-superior look (yes, I'm aware that's too many halves). “You must not hang around a lot of minorities.”

I give her the same look back and cluck.
Honey, if Val gets her way,
I think,
the human race is about to become one giant minority.

She arches a smooth eyebrow.

Out loud I say, “Sorry. It's just, where I come from, everybody's pretty much the same.”

And it's true. White, black, red, or brown, we all turn up the same shade of freshly poured concrete, gray after a week or two of being undead. Shoot, the Council of Elders could be the original Temptations, for all I know.

She leans against the counter, studying me more carefully. “I guess you were just trying to be polite.”

I don't say anything more.

She looks up at Stamp, who stands next to her like a giant lap dog begging for scraps. “What's up with this guy?”

“That's Stamp,” I say, because what else can I call him? I'm me and he's him—and if Lucy keeps pushing, I don't know what will happen.

Obviously I'm not going to decapitate her like a CPR dummy.

I'm no Zerker, but it will mean gagging her with her own prep school tie and going out to the backyard for a bunch of garden hose to tie her hands while Stamp and I make our way out of Seagull Shores for good.

“Hi, Stamp,” she says, sticking out a hand.

I gasp.

Even though Dane and I taught Stamp the whole sit-on-your-hands trick back in Orlando, I'm pretty sure he's forgotten it by now.

Sure enough, on reflex, he just holds out his hand.

Lucy takes it almost greedily. Her eyes get big, and she looks at me, not Stamp. “My, how cold your hands are.”

“He's been sick,” I state flatly, because suddenly this witch is on my last nerve. “So if he can't eat any of your food, just forgive him.”

“Oh, he can at least eat the meat, right, Stamp?”

Stamp looks at me, but I look at her. “He can have a little.”

She pulls out white boxes with red dragons on the sides and little aluminum tins with white lids. “This is moo shu pork,” she says, opening one and filling the kitchen with wafting steam clouds of hot, Normal goodness. “Lots of meat for you.”

“Not lots,” I interject, leaning against the counter so I can keep one hand close to the Exterminator. “But maybe just a little.”

Stamp nods, and a part of me is happy to see she hasn't completely lured him away with the promise of hot animal flesh. She undoes a Baggie and hands him a plastic fork.

“Okay?” she says to him.

He kind of nods and digs in.

While he's busy, an awkward silence grows between me and Lucy. She breaks it first.

“So, look,” she says, gazing past me. “Let me just put this out there: I know who you guys are.”

As I blink rapidly, she finally looks at me. “Or, should I say,
what
you are.”

S
he slides two
sheets of paper out of a red-and-black plaid messenger bag covered with sew-on pink-and-black skull patches. She sets the pages facedown on the kitchen counter.

It's pretty hard to hyperventilate when you can't breathe.

Hard but apparently not impossible.

“That's not us,” I spit, tapping the counter but not touching the papers. “It can't be us.”

She cocks her head, straight hair leaning with it. “I never said it
was
you. She turns the sheets over, and I can tell right away from the big, bold letters on the first one: they are Missing posters.

I look at Stamp, but he's still digging for strips of meat in the moo shu pork.

Idly, not even really conscious while I'm doing it, I warn him, “Not too much.”

He nods at me just as robotically, as if to say, “Stuff it, lady. I'll eat as much as I want.”

Meanwhile I'm transported back to Barracuda Bay where, in every shop window, taped to the side of every mailbox, stapled to every tree, the same kind of Missing posters littered our beach town during my last few weeks as a living, breathing human.

Three girls had gone missing from my own Home Ec class before I became one of the living dead and learned they weren't missing at all but dead, their brains food for the Zerkers.

I slide these new posters toward me.

Lucy watches me carefully, Stamp munching indiscriminately.

The first poster is for a boy, slim and handsome in his yearbook photo. They always use a yearbook photo for these things. His name is Armand Suit, and he was captain of the swim team up until three days ago when he went for an early morning jog and never came back.

The second poster is for a girl. She's blonde and sun-kissed in her yearbook photo, the kind of girl you see all over Florida beach towns, slim and pretty in a bikini or short shorts, hair pulled back, zinc on her nose, always on the way to or from the beach.

Her name is Cecile Brigham, and she's an honor student, captain of the volleyball team. She, too, went missing the other morning while running with . . . Armand Suit.

I look up at Lucy, narrowing my gaze. It's my new thing. It's kind of like a laser beam squint, but it doesn't seem to faze Lucy much. “I thought you had to wait at least a few days before reporting someone missing,” I say. “This could be some senior skip day prank or ‘Let's run off to Make-out Point and make out all day.'”

She nods. “You're probably right, except Cecile's dad is the sheriff, and she hasn't missed a school day since second grade. She's been gunning for the perfect attendance award since the first day of freshman year and, as lame as that sounds, if you knew her, you'd realize that if she's not at school twenty minutes early on a weekday, then she's missing.”

I slide the posters back. “You said you know what we are. What does this have to do with us?”

She eyes me coolly. “Nothing, or you'd be locked up by now.”

I lean a hand on the counter, peaceful, cold, and pale. The other is about two millimeters from my Eliminator. “Quit playing around, Lucy. Spit it out or hit the road and take your food with you. Stop now, Stamp. That's enough!”

They both flinch.

While I've got his attention, I wrench the tin out of his grip. Half of it is gone. “Stamp?”

He shrugs and uses a sleeve to wipe the oily brown moo shu juice off his lips.

When I look back at Lucy, she's pulling something out of her messenger bag. I swear I almost click the button on my Eliminator and shove the ice pick through her wrist just for kicks, but I give her a second.

Out comes a book. Well worn, dog-eared, as if she's been studying it for quite some time. Weeks, at least. The title leaps out at me in those cheesy blood-dripping letters, like the ones in those bad late-night horror movie titles:
The Living Dead for Losers
.

She flashes those superior eyes at me. “I'm not stupid, you know. You show up in the middle of the night, in a foreclosed home, wearing bloody hospital scrubs, and—don't look at me like that, Maddy Swift. I'm a light sleeper, heard the back gate slam the other night and couldn't sleep. You couldn't
either
, I guess. Walking around in the house all night, eating—what was it—grape juice and cat food by candlelight?”

She thumbs through the book, finding a dog-eared page. She scrolls down it with maroon-painted nails until she finds what she's looking for, reads it out loud as if we're in Reanimation Reform School or something:

“The living dead cannot partake of humans' food, except in the rare cases of sugary sodas, which replenish their decaying cells with much-needed liquid energy and the occasional can of pet food, many varieties of which feature brains as a main ingredient, especially those off-brands found in all-night convenience stores. While such food cannot sustain the living dead indefinitely, in periods where fresh human or even animal brains are scarce, the latent brain tissue found in the processed product can keep their energy levels high enough to keep them alive for up to two weeks . . .”

She actually has a pleasant reading voice. You can tell she's good in school.

Still, I make a sneer face. “So, because we like grape juice and fed a stray cat for a few nights, we're . . .
what does it say?” I make a big show of snatching the book out of her hands, slapping it shut to gaze at the front cover. “The living dead?”

Lucy rolls her eyes and does a soft golf clap.

I'd blush if I could.

“Very nice performance, Maddy. Maddy Swift, did you say?”

I nod, dreading the decision to use my real name as she digs into her messenger bag. That stupid bag! What is it, bottomless or something? Magic? Did Hermione herself give it to her?