Best New Zombie Tales Trilogy (50 page)

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Robert walked into the kitchen, a heavy plastic bag clutched in his hand. Their keening was especially loud today; it had been almost a week since he had last fed them.

“Hold on, it’s coming.”

He got the flashlight and opened the basement door panel, taking his usual step back and waiting a moment before stepping forward again and shining the light inside. There was Emily, hands clawing the air, and little Bobbie, wailing and writhing on the floor behind her. But now there was a third one in the basement, much fresher than the other two and wearing a pair of coveralls. He stared up at the light with a blank, unseeing gaze, his mouth opening and closing hungrily.

Robert smiled. “I really appreciate you helping me out like this, partner. It means a lot to me.”

The male moaned, as if in response to Robert’s words, but he knew the thing was just hungry. He lifted his find––a possum that he’d managed to hit while out in Joe earlier that day––and stuffed it through the opening. The possum struck the floor, and Emily and Kenny fell on it like starving dogs.

Bobbie screamed for his share, and this time it was Kenny who took a mouthful over to the baby, feeding the boy with a gentle kiss.

Robert felt no jealousy. Not only had he provided food for his wife and child, he’d found a way to be down there with them, if only through a surrogate. Still, they were truly a family again, in every way, and that was all that mattered.

Robert watched them for a while longer, then he closed the panel and put the flashlight away. Time for bed; he had to get up early for work tomorrow. Not only did he have a new partner to break in, he had a family to feed.

The Truth About Brains

NARRELLE M. HARRIS

My little brother Dylan is dead, but that doesn’t stop him from being a pest. He still follows me everywhere, and Mum still makes me take him with me when I go to the shops.

It wouldn’t be so bad, except he’s always trying to bite people. He tried to bite me the first few days, but I hit him across the nose with a rolled up newspaper and he gave it up.

I had to take him with me to the movies today. That was rank. Dylan mumbled all the way through the film, then he tried to bite the kid in the row in front. The rest of the time he was kind of farty, with a swampy, decayed stink that put me off my popcorn. We did get a row to ourselves, so I guess it’s true that there’s always a bright side.

He’s only been like this for a few days. I thought it would be cool, having a zombie for a brother, but it’s not. The fact is that it stinks. Literally. And it’s getting worse every day. Maybe it’s okay in Europe or wherever, but Australian summers are bad news. Nothing’s fallen off him yet, but it’s only a matter of time. I hate to think what’s going to happen when school starts again in February. I don’t think Mr. Browning is going to let Dylan on the school footy team this year.

It stinks metaphorically as well. It turns out that I do like Dylan after all, even though he’s a brat. Zombie Dylan doesn’t steal my stuff, or whine about whose turn it is to do the dishes, or race me home, or anything. He just sits there. Dylan is no fun when he’s not being a pest.

It’s partly my fault this happened to Dylan. It’s kind of his own fault too, but he’s just a kid, so that’s not fair. Mostly, it’s Ryan and Carrie’s fault.

Four days ago, summer was doing its usual summer thing. It was hot and sticky and buzzy with flies. I wanted to go swimming and I didn’t want to have to take Dylan with me so I snuck out through the back yard with my bag. I climbed the fence and ran for the tram, making it just in time. Looking back, there was Dylan the Dill, standing by the side of the road. He had an evil look in his eye, and I figured he was going to dob me in to Mum for taking off without him. I sort of miss that look now.

I met Jase, Ant, Kyle and the gang at the pool and we swam a bit. Ant was showing off her new bikini, or rather, her new boobs which had suddenly appeared this summer to fill out her bikini, and the guys were all slack-jawed about it, except Adam and Jase, who have a pash for each other. Adam and I were getting Jase to time us, to see who could stay under water the longest, when Kyle started shouting for me.

“Amy! Amy!”

Springing out of the water like a dolphin, I spat a fountain of water at him. Adam laughed and scooped a splash of water at Kyle as well.

“Don’t! Piss off!” Kyle can be really whiny, so we splashed him again, “Shit, Amy, seriously.
Don’t.
Ryan says your kid brother’s been hurt.”

“Bull. Dylan’s not even here.”

“Not here. You know that old place down the road? Looks like an old hotel or something?”

The old pub had been boarded up for a few years now. Mum reckoned there was some legal problem with the developers, and while the parties of the second part or what-ever were having their battle in court, the pub just got older and crumblier. Parts of the fence had been torn away and sometimes kids snuck inside to drink and dare each other to climb the rotten staircase.

“What’s the matter?”

“Dunno. Ryan said Dylan fell and that you should come.”

Damn. Damn-damn-damn. If Dylan busted a limb I was going to be in so much trouble. I hauled myself out of the pool, tried to dry myself and gave up. I dragged on my t-shirt, wrapped my towel round my waist, shoved my feet into my thongs and took off.

It’s hard to run in thongs. When you’re mucking about, the slipperiness and the slap-slap-slap-slap and the way it flicks water and grit up the back of your legs is part of the fun. When you think your kid brother has broken a limb it’s irritating.

Squeezing through the fence at the old pub was not fun either. I scraped my arms on the bent wire and my shins on the old wood before I got through.

“Ryan?!”

A squeak of surprise greeted my call, then swearing in Ryan’s voice. Then some wicked laughter. That would be Carrie. Carrie was Ryan’s constant companion and inciter of minor riots. I don’t know if Ryan was besotted by her or just liked that she gave him an excuse to behave like a dick. Some people are like that.

And Carrie laughed again. More of a cackle, like she was terrified, but enjoying it too. “Come on, Amy.” She sounded a bit hysterical and that scared me.

I scraped myself some more climbing past the door that had fallen off its hinges, around a pile of rotten boxes and into the pub. Light was angling through cracks in the walls like cartoon torch beams. The beams were filled with motes of dust, which looked like slices of life inside a snowdome, with stripes of dark and light. I blinked, sneezed, and stirred up more dust. After blinking a few more times my eyes adjusted and I saw Ryan. His face was white. I don’t know if it was white as a sheet, but it was pretty bloody white. Carrie had an awful grin on her face, and she was even paler.

“Where’s Dylan?”

Carrie’s face seemed frozen in its rictus-grin, but Ryan’s gaze dropped to the floor. I looked down too.

And there was my little brother. His arm was broken. You could tell that from the way everything was pointing the wrong way. Other things were broken that I couldn’t see, but why else would he be lying so still with his eyes wide open. The longer I stared the more I noticed. Like the blood pooled under his head, and the pieces of bone sticking out of his side.

Vincent Ha once told our class how he’d seen his dead granddad laid out in a coffin. At the time it had sounded exotic and a bit exciting. I’d always wondered what it would be like to see a body. Turns out, it isn’t as cool as you think it’s going to be. Now that I think about it, I don’t think Vincent Ha thought it was cool either. He was just pretending so he could hide from the sick feeling inside.

Poor Dylan. He must have fallen from a long way up. Slowly, I raised my gaze to the ceiling, glad not to be looking at Dylan for a minute. One of the dusty, dark beams was cracked in half, the two jagged ends pointing down at my brother.

Carrie’s voice, when she spoke, was so normal it was creepy. “We dared him to climb up there and walk across the beam. We called him a baby until he did.”

Straighten him out. “Yeah.” I didn’t want to look at Ryan any more, because I wanted to punch him and break his nose. Even if it didn’t help. I didn’t really want to look at Dylan either, but, I thought, what if Carrie’s right and we can save him?

Kneeling next to him, I turned Dylan gingerly onto his back. His arm flopped stupidly. I tried to put it right, but I twisted it around the wrong way and the skin stretched grotesquely. Ryan tried to help but he was all jittery and flappy-hands and I slapped him out of the way.

I took a deep breath before pulling up Dylan’s shirt to see where the ribs were sticking out of his skin. It was horrible and fascinating. As I pushed at the bones, trying to get them back in place, there was a squishy noise, then a grindy one, and I was nearly sick.

My hands were covered in blood, which I wiped off on my shirt.

Dylan was still dead.

I was starting to realize I was sad about that. Even after he’d nicked my skateboard and glued his Transformers onto it. Even after he’d drawn aliens all over my training bra with a biro. Little brothers are a pest, but he was still my brother and he wasn’t all bad. Sometimes he was nice.

I tried to remember a time when he’d been nice.

Nothing had come to mind when a creak and a shower of dust heralded Carrie’s return. Her eyes were glittery bright as she came in, a stuffed-full beach bag over her shoulder and an ancient leather-bound book clutched to her stomach.

I looked past her. “Where’s the ambulance?”

“No ambulance,” she said with a breathless grin, “I’ve got this.” She brandished the book.

That was something new. Carrie was never caught with books on her person. She gives hell to Treece Muldoon for reading. Treece Muldoon reads all the time, big fat books with no pictures in them. I always want to borrow them off her except for the facts that a) that would put me in the book-geek camp with Treece Muldoon and I don’t want that kind of social death and b) my Mum hates Mrs. Muldoon for something that happened back in the day which she won’t discuss, and she’d ground me forever if I tried to make friends with ‘that Muldoon kid’. Mum didn’t like me having anything to do with Carrie either, because of the same back in the day blow up. Normally that wasn’t a hardship, though I did sometimes wonder what our mothers had been up to at university that caused them to not talk for twenty years.

“No probs, Amy, it’s full of
spells
,” Carrie assured me with the same kind of expansive confidence Vincent Ha once employed before falling flat on his face off the gymnastics horse. Oh, so many problems, actually. But what else could I do?

Carrie upended the bag, and pots, knives and a handful of herbs from her dad’s garden tumbled onto the dodgy wooden floor. Kneeling in the middle of the debris, she opened the old book and thumbed through it.

“I’ll need some dirt,” she said, “Get some dirt, Ryan.”

Ryan had been looking at her like he was sleeping with his eyes open. When he didn’t move, Carrie cast a hard look at him. “Ryan. Get me some dirt from outside. Now. Or else.”

Ryan scrambled to the rickety opening and came back with pebble-strewn dirt cradled in his two palms. She directed him to put it in a pot. Then she rolled the herbs around in Dylan’s blood and put them in the pot. After that, she took a knife, held it against her palm, then thought better of it and made a cut up her forearm. It was short and didn’t seem deep, but blood dripped freely from the wound into the pot too. The rest of the blood on her arm she mopped up with another handful of herbs, and threw that into the mix as well.

“I didn’t have some of the stuff the book says,” she explained, “Like wolfsbane and stuff, so I got parsley and rosemary from Mum’s garden.”

“Will that…work?” I asked, thinking it probably wouldn’t.

“Yeah, sure. No probs. It’s all in the words, see?”

She took the knife and stirred the blood, dirt and herbs together. Then she dipped her hand in a couple of times and wiped it over the obvious injuries at Dylan’s arm and ribs. Another dip she wiped over his eyes and mouth. Satisfied, she scrubbed her hand clean on her jeans and bent over the book. After studying it for a minute, chewing her lower lip, she kneeled high over the book and stuck her hands straight in front of her so they were held above Dylan’s body. She looked like a magician at a kid’s party trying to make the rabbit appear.

When Carrie spoke it was strange and stumbling. She kept looking back at the book to see where she was up to.

I went through my Harry Potter phase like everyone else and I recognize Latin when I see it, even if I don’t know what it means. Or how to pronounce it. I was pretty sure that Carrie didn’t know how to pronounce it either, but she rushed through it, wiggling her fingers in the air over Dylan from time to time for good measure.