Unbound (35 page)

My parents were still sort of in shock, and viewed me as something between a miracle and a test. When I’d explained, very earnestly, that my return from the grave was connected to the cheerleading squad, they had opened their checkbooks, made a substantial donation to the school, and bought me a new uniform. Being alive was pretty cool. Even if Marti did need to learn how to turn the music down.

Then Laurie looked up from her yogurt—strawberry with extra fiber—worried her lower lip between her teeth for a moment, and said, “I need to go.”

Colleen kept writing. Marti kept howling along to a Katy Perry song that had been pretty much incomprehensible
before
it became a duet with a tone-deaf cheerleader. I blanched, leaning away from her. The worst thing about coming back from the dead: bodily functions. It didn’t matter what it was, if it came out of an orifice, I didn’t want anything to do with it. Doubly so if the orifice it came out of wasn’t my own.

Laurie scowled, guessing—rightly—that Jude hadn’t heard her, and repeated, more loudly, “I have to
go
.”

The car continued to hurtle down the road as fast as Jude’s commitment to safe driving would allow. The howling of the wind mingled with the howling of pop music and cheerleader, creating an unholy trio that could only be pierced by something even worse.

“I said,
I HAVE TO GO
!” shouted Laurie. Colleen jumped, her pen drawing a thick black line across the center of the page she’d been scribbling on. Marti swore, loudly enough to be heard over the song. And Jude hit the brakes, slamming us all forward. I gasped, closing my eyes.

To become a zombie, you have to die. That’s just Necromancy 101. And I, well, died in a car crash when my boyfriend-at-the time decided that he wasn’t too drunk to drive. I couldn’t put all the blame on him. I had been too drunk to stop him. End result: while I don’t mind riding in cars, I don’t like it when they swerve, or brake abruptly, or do anything else that feels like losing control.

“Dammit, Laurie, you scared the crap out of Heather,” snapped Marti. I could hear her, which meant she had turned the radio off. That was a nice change.

“No one was listening to me,” said Laurie sullenly. I opened my eyes. Laurie had her arms crossed and was sulking at Marti, who had twisted around in her seat to glare into the back. Jude had pulled off to the side and was also twisted around, although her expression was more concerned than accusatory. Her sleek black hair fell in perfect wings to either side of her face, held back with a pumpkin-shaped hair clip that would have seemed immature, if not for our school mascot. Being a Fighting Pumpkin meant never needing to apologize for shopping at Claire’s.

“What do you need, Laurie?” asked Jude.

“Can we—” began Laurie.

Jude held up a hand, stopping her. “Please don’t,” she said.

We all had our little quirks, like me having been dead for a while, or Marti being allergic to gluten. In Laurie’s case, “quirk” was another way of saying “people generally did what she asked them to do.” She could turn a simple request into an order, just by phrasing it the right way. Jude had been working with her on finding ways to say things without making them an irresistible compulsion for the people around her.

(Laurie’s parents were both perfectly nice, perfectly normal people who didn’t seem to understand why anyone would want to do anything apart from what their daughter asked. But Colleen, who was the squad’s record keeper and had access to all the Fighting Pumpkins handbooks, going back to the foundation of the high school, said that she was pretty sure Laurie’s great-grandmother had been a river nymph of some sort. Some things can skip a generation or two. Like gills, or an irresistible voice.)

“But I need to
go
,” whined Laurie. “I gotta go
bad
.”

“Can’t you just piss behind a bush like a normal person?” asked Marti. She sounded annoyed. That was pretty normal. Marti generally sounded annoyed by anything that wasn’t all about Marti, which made her a perfect mean girl attack dog for the rest of us. Any time someone started to question why the Pumpkins did things a certain way, we’d just point Marti at them and run in the opposite direction. After she was done stripping the flesh from their bones with her tongue—metaphorically speaking, anyway; she wasn’t a real flesh-stripper—they were generally way more willing to tolerate the rest of us being a little odd.

“No!” Laurie shot a horrified look at the back of Marti’s head. “I don’t need to go number one. I need to
go
.”

Colleen looked up from her notes and said, in a surprisingly clinical tone, “She’s been eating yogurt for the last hour. By now, her colon is probably ready to explode. She needs to—”

“I am begging you not to finish that sentence,” said Jude. “We’ll stop at the very next place we see so you can use the bathroom, all right, Laurie? Do you think you can hold it for just a couple of miles?”

“I can try,” said Laurie. She sank deeper in her seat. “Just hurry, okay?”

“I’ll hurry,” said Jude, and hit the gas.

* * * * *

One car, five cheerleaders, and a totally disregarded speed limit: these are the things that dreams are made of. Jude drove like a girl who desperately didn’t want to have her upholstery cleaned, until an exit loomed up ahead of us, complete with a large, hand-painted sign advertising JACK’S COFFEE * GAS * HOMEMADE BEEF JERKY.

“I bet they have a bathroom,” said Laurie, with strained enthusiasm.

“I bet they have a man in a hockey mask waiting to carve our faces off and wear them like pretty little masks,” said Marti. “I don’t want to stop here. This looks unhygienic.”

“I gotta
go
,” said Laurie.

“I don’t know—” began Jude.

And that was when Laurie, sensing that the bathroom was about to slip out of her grasp, did the unforgivable. “Jude, can we please stop? This place seems nice.”

“Sure, Laurie,” said Jude, and swerved for the exit, ignoring the way Marti and Colleen were shouting for her to slow down. I didn’t shout. It wouldn’t do any good now that Jude was on a mission, and I had a better task to perform: glaring at Laurie like I was willing the flesh to melt right off of her bones.

To her extremely slight credit, Laurie grimaced apologetically and whispered, “I’m
sorry
, I know I’m not supposed to put the whammy on squad members, but I have to
go
.”

“You didn’t put the whammy on a squad member, you put it on the squad
leader
,” I whispered back. “You’re going to be lucky if you don’t spend the rest of the season sitting on the bench as a punishment for treason.”

“I wasn’t aware that we were a totalitarian government,” said Colleen, adjusting her glasses as Jude got the car back onto an even keel. “There’s nothing in the bylaws about treason charges.”

“Shut
up
, Colleen,” snarled Marti.

Laurie crossed her legs, looked apologetic, and said nothing.

We were approaching the end of the exit, which looked exactly as promising as an area that played host to Jack’s Coffee should. Heavy weeds choked the fields in every direction, broken only by the shapes of twisted, claw-like trees. None of the trees had leaves, naturally; that would have been too friendly, and too welcoming to travelers. It was like we were driving into a bad horror movie from the late 1970s, before anyone had discovered concepts like “production values.”

Then we came around the bend, and things got worse.

Jack’s Coffee, Gas, and Homemade Beef Jerky was a wooden shack with two antique pumps shoved into the cracked concrete out front. One of them was listing to the side at an alarming angle. The other had a sign on it that read “Out of Order.” Completing the picture was a green porta-potty, shoved off to one side with a piece of cardboard declaring “Customers Only” taped to the front.

“Go be customers buy something I don’t care what,” wailed Laurie, launching herself out of the car as soon as it started to slow down. The door slammed shut behind her as Jude brought us to a full stop.

The sound was the trigger: Jude’s hands tightened on the wheel, her shoulders going abruptly stiff, before she leaned forward, attention focused on the fleeing Laurie. “We’ve stopped,” she said.

“Yes,” said Colleen.

“I did not want to stop.”

“True,” said Marti.

Jude made an irritated noise. “She whammied me.”

“Yes,” I said, opening my door. “And then she whammied us all. Excuse me, but I need to be a customer and buy something.”

Grumbling and muttering, the other three cheerleaders followed me as I climbed out of the car. We were an odd streak of color in the blasted landscape: we had changed out of our uniforms after the game, choosing comfort over remaining encased in cotton-poly blend, so we were all in jeans. But our sweatshirts and hair bows were in various permutations of the school colors, orange and green, the high school social structure equivalent of those deep-sea fish that look like rainbows and will poison the shit out of anything that tries to eat them. Even with most of the squad elsewhere, we moved like a pack, smooth and fluid and completely united.

The door was unlocked. That was good. It creaked like a prop from a Vincent Price movie. That was bad. Nothing creaked like that unless it had been abandoned for twenty years, or was being intentionally damaged by a local horror enthusiast.

The interior wasn’t much better, although to be fair, it was precisely the sort of place that had been promised by the exterior. The floor was bare, splintery wood, and looked like it would give way under any but the most cautious of treads. There were shelves, which meant that the place could continue to claim to be a “convenience store,” no matter how inconvenient it actually was, but those shelves were virtually bare, and the boxes and cans they
did
hold were all brands I didn’t recognize. Judging by the hairstyles and clothing of the grinning kids on the cereal boxes, some of the groceries had been here since my parents were in high school, if not longer. Eating anything sold in this store would probably be a quick ticket to food poisoning.

“I am going to strangle Laurie with my bare hands,” said Marti philosophically, as she looked around. “If anyone wants to dissuade me, feel free, but it’s not going to work. She’s going to die, and I’m not going to be sorry.”

“At least prison jumpsuits are orange,” said Colleen. She took a dainty step forward. The floor creaked, but held. “Maybe they have gum.”

“Does it still count as gum after it’s fossilized?” I asked.

“Can I help you girls?” The voice was calm, clear, and sounded like it belonged on the radio, maybe trying to sell us a new car or something. I jumped anyway, spinning around with Marti, Colleen, and Jude only half a beat behind me. (Coming back from the dead hadn’t changed my reflexes back to human normal, and the horror movies lie about how quickly zombies react to the possibility of a good meal: at my best, I could pluck squirrels out of the trees. These days, I’m just a little quicker than the norm. Which is still uncannily fast, especially when compared to the people around me.)

The man in the doorway matched the voice. He had brown hair, brown eyes, and a chin that should have been immortalized in story, song, and the occasional soft-focus photo shoot. Only his clothes spoiled the effect, since I’d never seen a piece of prime beefcake wearing dirty brown zip-up mechanic’s overalls before. They were at least three sizes too big, and still managed to look amazing. The thought that if he looked that good
in
them, he’d look even better
out
of them occurred briefly. I shoved it down. This was the time to buy expired sodas and rock-hard gum, not to indulge our carnal natures.

Besides, while I was willing to share most things with my squad, the idea of adding my love life—or lust life, as might have been more accurate—to the list just didn’t sit well with me.

“Hi!” said Jude, falling immediately into her role as leader. She offered the stranger a winning smile. (Literally winning. That smile had put us over the top at cheer camp, twice. When it came to bringing home the gold, the power of Jude’s orthodontist could not be ignored.) “Do you work here?”

“Oh my God what the fuck,” muttered Marti, slapping her forehead with one hand. Louder, she said, “Jude. He’s wearing the logo of this shit-shack on his left boy-boob. If he doesn’t work here, he’s a murder-hobo, and we need to leave.”

“Please forgive my friend; she was raised by wolves, and she doesn’t really understand how to interact with normal people,” said Jude. She glared daggers at Marti before flashing another smile at the stranger. “I was just hoping you could sell us something. Our friend is using your bathroom, and she’s really into following the letter of the law.”

“Ah, the ‘customers only’ sign got another one,” said the man. He looked amused by the whole situation. I wasn’t sure whether that was a good thing or a bad thing. We were sort of a house of horrors once we got going—most people found us less “amusing” and more “terrifying give them whatever they want so they’ll go away.”

I’d say it was because we were a bunch of sometimes semi-supernatural weirdoes who flung each other into the air for fun, but honestly, the semi-supernatural thing didn’t seem to have anything to do with it. Every cheerleading squad had their own version of our repelling field, effective on high school students and high school graduates alike. Once you’ve known the terror of large groups of girls in short skirts and spirit bows, you can never truly be free of it.

Only this fellow didn’t seem to be batting an eye, either out of fear or because he wanted some barely legal cheerleader action (also not uncommon, unfortunately). He was looking at the four of us with an expression of vague amusement, like we were the most adorable things that had ever darkened his doorstep. That made me nervous. No, more than nervous: that made me
wary
. Never trust anybody who can look at a group of teenage girls in short skirts and not react at all. Those are almost always the people who are hiding something.

“We don’t get much business around here,” he said. “How’d you like some homemade beef jerky?”