Generation Dead (16 page)

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the field, taking a seat on the bleachers. Wilson the janitor was going to be pissed, he thought, there was so much food and crap all over the seats and aisles.

As soon as they were seated on the bleacher below, Pete started his speech.

"We're the Pain Crew, right?" he said.

"Hell yeah!" Stavis bellowed, and Harris nodded. This was a promotion for him.

"And the Pain Crew is all about what?"

"Inflicting pain on our enemies," Stavis said, rubbing his thick hands together. "Like we did today."

"That's right, TC," Pete said, smiling. "Like we did today. But we weren't the only ones who inflicted pain, were we?"

TC looked puzzled, so Harris helped him out. "The crowd," he said. "I got hit with a goddam carrot." He shook his head. "Who throws a carrot?"

Pete clapped him on the back. "I got egged, man. Don't feel so bad." He looked at them both in turn. "Yeah, the crowd. But why was the crowd throwing stuff at us?"

"The dead kid," his subjects answered, in unison.

"That's right," Pete said. "The dead kid."

He took the blue paper with the work study students listed out of his shirt pocket. He unfolded the paper and smoothed it on the bleacher between them.

"This paper has the names of a bunch of dead kids, and the living kids that love them. Adam Layman's name is there, as is Scarypants's--Phoebe Kendall."

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"Her little friend is in that class, too. Pinky McKnockers," Stavis said. "Thorny is too, I think."

"Yeah," Harris said, nodding. "Coach lets those two and Williams miss practice once a week to go to that thing. And he wouldn't even let me leave early for my grandmother's birthday party."

"Believe me, Morgan, Coach isn't happy about it. Kimchi ordered him to let them go. If he had his way, they wouldn't be going, and the zombie wouldn't even be on the team." He looked at each of them, his fingers tapping on the paper. "Which is why we really need to do something about this."

"You mad 'cause we got punked by those zombies in the woods, huh, Pete?" Stavis said.

Pete wanted to hit him, but he still needed him, so he continued to drum with his fingers on the page.

"Sure, that's part of it. We can't let anybody punk the Pain Crew, ever. But it is more than that. We need to do something because what's going on isn't
right
. Dead ...
things
walking around, going to school, playing for the Badgers? It isn't right. This whole crap about
living impaired
and
differently biotic
is just
crap
. These things aren't even human. I read some stuff that says they're demons or signs of the end of the world or something-- and it's probably true."

Stavis, who, Pete knew, had no hope in scoring high on the critical-thinking portion of his SAT, was nodding his head. Harris still looked like he was wondering where Pete was going with this.

"I don't think they're human, and they're certainly not alive.

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I'm just waiting for the day they throw down and start shuffling around trying to eat our brains, to be honest with you. But even if that doesn't happen, what's next? Worm burgers making your milk shakes down at the Honeybee? Taking up scholarship money that should be going to kids with a life ahead of them? Just wait until a zombie wants to date your sister, Harris."

"I don't want any zombie sniffing around my sister," Harris said, and Pete knew he'd turned the corner.

"Me neither, pal, and that's why we've got to do something about this list," he said, shaking it in front of their faces before handing it off to Stavis, who pursed his lips and squinted as he read the names. "We've got to do something to ...discourage them. Whatever they are."

"What do you mean by discourage?" Harris asked.

"I mean we have to take them out of the game," Pete said, "permanently."

"We can't go killing
people
," Harris said. "That's crazy."

"I'm not talking about killing people, man. The actual people on this list--Adam, Julie, and the others--I think they deserve a good beat-down for fraternizing with these monsters, but I'm not talking about killing them." He smiled. "Just the others."

Harris shook his head. "Pete, man ..."

"Wait up, Harris. I want you to think about it. These aren't
people
. They aren't
citizens
. They don't have any rights at all. Haven't you been hearing all the talk in Washington? What that senator or whatever the hell he is was talking about today before the game, that's all BS, man. They're like mushrooms--

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there's no law against killing a mushroom. People destroy these things all the time and nobody cares. It is only a matter of time before these things start to want to get with real girls. And real boys. Then they'll be marrying each other. Can you imagine that?"

"I've got a couple of thirteen-year-old cousins," Stavis said, scratching his stubble-covered head. "I'd kill any zombie that went for them."

"That's why all those zombies crawled out of the forest to attack us," Pete said. "Because that
thing
that they are calling Tommy Williams is trying to get into Julie's pants. And we
cannot
let that happen."

"Who's Julie?" Stavis asked, looking up from his list.

"What?"

"I said, Who's Julie? There isn't any Julie on the list." Pete felt the heat rise to his cheeks.

"So sue me, idiot," he said. "Phoebe, Julie, Jenny, Katie, Hildegard. Whatever her name is, we have to protect her from them. We have to protect her from
herself
."

Stavis handed back the list and then spread his hands.

Pete held his gaze a moment. "So are you with me on this?"

"Absolutely."

"Harris?"

Harris rubbed his jaw with a nervous hand. "I guess so. Yeah, I guess so."

Pete reached out and clapped them both on the shoulders, the same way he'd slap their pads if they were in a huddle out on the field.

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"Good."

His crew leaned in, and he told them his plan.

For the fifth time Phoebe read the note that Adam had given her. Once at the field, once in the car on the ride home, another three times throughout the course of the night, and the last as she sat in front of her computer screen.

There was an e-mail address at the bottom of the note. Phoebe typed a short reply and hit SEND.

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***

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

O
N MONDAY A BLUE VAN picked Phoebe and Karen DeSonne up at the school and brought them to the Hunter Foundation so they could do the work part of their work study. They exchanged brief pleasantries and then Karen took a book out of her satchel and read, and Phoebe stared out the window. Phoebe sneezed at one point and Karen coughed a minute later, and Phoebe thought that the dead girl might have been making fun of her, but she wasn't sure. The book Karen was reading was William Faulkner's
As I Lay
Dying.

Phoebe was certain that in getting the clerical job, she'd drawn the dullest detail of the lot. Margi was selected to work in the lab, and it sounded like Adam had a pretty easy gig on the facilities-management crew. The plan was for everyone to switch every six weeks, but after the first day, Phoebe knew she couldn't wait. They spent the entire four hours of their shift

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opening mail and sorting it into three piles--support, complaint, and junk. Angela stopped by at one point with two thick stacks of paper.

"E-mails," she said. "Please sort them in the same manner. I hope neither of you is easily offended."

Phoebe said that she wasn't, and as she turned, she saw Karen fluttering her eyelids with mock concern, her long lashes twitching with more movement than some of the other zombies seemed capable of. Karen's eyes had a thin corona of crystalline blue at the far edges of her retina but were the color of diamonds close to the pinprick pupils. Phoebe wondered what they had looked like when she was alive.

Most of the mail was hate mail, and it made for interesting reading, at least in the early going, when it seemed that there was some variety in the letters. Phoebe was initially impressed at how creative the writers were.

Dear Necrofiliacs,

What you are doing is sinful and wrong and deep down you know it. Why don't you just die too so you can be with the dead people that you love so much. Dead people are evil and demonaic and should all be burnt up. Jesus is coming and He will be very displeased at the filthy things you are doing. You will burn in Hell

Sincerely,

A rightious soul

"A rightious soul" wasn't as concerned with spelling as

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he/she was with pronouncing judgment, apparently. There were a lot of righteous souls who wrote in with various admonitions, and while Phoebe thought the letters were vaguely creepy, they were nothing compared to the dozen or so that promised threats of a less metaphysical nature.

"Here's a good one," Karen said, walking over from the other cubicle with a piece of yellow notebook paper someone had block printed on. It was a short letter.

You are just like an abortion clinic but worse. You steal the right to death as they steal the right to life and the explosions will reach you, too. This is your last chance.

"Oh my," Phoebe said, looking over at the pile of mail in front of her.

Karen laughed. "Why don't you let me do the snail mail?" she said, scooping the pile off Phoebe's desk. "Who knows what sort of spores or toxins the ...freaks ...could send through the U.S. postal service?"

"Thanks, Karen."

"No worries, Phoebe. If I say I smell something funny ...start running."

Phoebe smiled and hoped she was kidding.

At the end of the shift, she had two communiqués, both e-mails, in the positive column. One from a senator in Illinois who "believes in the work they are doing," and another who had forwarded a PayPal receipt of twenty dollars to an edress of the Hunter Foundation.

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I
hope that one day I can send my daughter to you good people. I thank you for the literature you e-mailed to me and we are trying our best but it is difficult since my husband moved out. We are still married and trying to be a family but my youngest is too scared to live with Melissa right now. Melissa is able to speak more clearly now but we were worried because when Jonathan took Emily, Melissa stopped talking all together. Any advice you have I would appreciate as always. Bless you all.

Phoebe didn't know who she felt worse for in the shattered family, the girl who died, her parents, or her little sister. They were all suffering in their own ways, and Phoebe doubted that there was an easy answer for it. She wished she could have read the previous correspondence so she would know what it was that Angela or Alish wrote that had made such a difference for the writer of the e-mail.

She was going to show it to Karen, who had not looked up from her three tidy piles since grabbing the rest of the snail mail, but then Mr. Davidson, the director of operations, came to let them know that the van was ready to take them home.

The encounter group that comprised the bulk of their sessions was led by Angela in a comfortable lounge with a number of cushioned chairs and sofas arranged in a jagged semicircle. There were coffee tables, which usually had soft drinks and bags of potato chips that the living students had taken out of the adjoining pantry. Sometime during the orientation Phoebe had mentioned liking coffee and she noticed that they

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had added a coffee maker. The cushioned chairs were far more comfortable (and less creaky) than those in the library, and the sofas were long enough to seat two without touching. For the second session Phoebe and Margi plopped next to each other on a sofa.

"Hello," Angela said. "How was everyone's weekend?"

No one answered. The differently biotic kids were silent and still; the living kids, likewise, except for Thornton, who had difficulty remaining motionless.

Angela smiled. "The questions get much harder from here on out."

"I had a great weekend," Thornton said. "We won the game."

She nodded. "That's right. I had forgotten so many of you played."

"Yeah," Thorny added, "Tommy was the star even though he only got in for a few plays."

He meant it as a joke--Thornton didn't have a mean-spirited bone in his body--but the joke fell flat. Phoebe tried to read Tommy's expression but saw nothing there that she recognized. She wished she could tell if he had any feelings whatsoever about their upcoming date--was he nervous, excited, regretful, what?

"Tell you what," Adam said. "Denny would not have gotten sacked in the first half if Tommy had been on the line next to me."

Angela nodded. "No?"

"No. He's better than the kid Coach played instead."