Undead Much (3 page)

  “It’s trashy,” her twin, Kate, seconded. “Boys from other schools think Carol girls are easy.”

  “It’s no wonder.” Dana’s eyes raked over every one of us, silently judging our bare midriffs and tight spandex pants. “The Slut Squad gives us all a bad rep.”

  Oh no she didn’t.

  Moving with a single-minded purpose, the rest of the pom squad filed in behind Monica, lending our silent support to our captain. If they wanted to rumble, we’d rumble, by God. I’d never scratched faces or pulled hair before, but I was getting in the mood to.

  Or maybe Monica and I could try out some of our new moves on the platinum brats. Our Enforcer training had included hours of training in self-defense and combat strategy as well as spell work. It seemed a shame for all that to go to waste now that the black-magically raised zombie situation around Carol was under control.

  “So you’re telling me Principal Watkins and the boosters did this without even notifying the captain of the pom squad?” Monica asked, her voice surprisingly cool and controlled. “I find that hard to believe.”

  “Believe what you want. We’ll all see I’m telling the truth come Saturday when we take the court at halftime.” Dana nodded her head in that twitchy way she did right after giving the “ready, okay” that signaled her minions should begin a new cheer. “Come on, girls. We’d better go-Aaron said he found a top-secret place for us to practice.”

  Aaron was the only dude cheerleader as well as the newest member of the squad. He was a junior, vice president of the Honor Society, cute in an all-American kind of way, and had naturally blond hair, so it wasn’t like he could help fitting in with the clones. But he was obviously a passenger on the cheerleader cruise liner of evil if he was scoping out “top-secret” practice locations.

  What was with that? Like we were going to steal one of their lame routines? Between us we had over fifty years of combined dance training.
We
were the experts-
they
were the pretenders to the throne.

  “What are we going to do?” Alana asked, as soon as the cheerleaders from heck had vacated the locker room.

  “You’re going to hit the old gym and practice,” Monica said. “I’m going to hit Principal Watkins’s office and remind him how things work here at CHS.”

  “Don’t you think you should put on a shirt first?” I asked, then immediately wished I’d kept my mouth shut. “I mean, if what she was saying about Watkins is true, then wouldn’t it pay to tone it down?”

  Monica glared while I did my best not to cringe. Geez, she still scared me, even though I had stuff on her that would keep her from a full-out attack. She’d been dabbling in black magic last fall, in an attempt to steal Ethan away from the sophomore nobody who had somehow captured his attention. (The nobody would be me.)

  I’d agreed not to tell Settlers’ Affairs about her journey to the dark side as long as she let me have a special tryout for the pom squad-since I’d missed the first one due to potentially deadly situations beyond my control. But now that I was on the squad, she couldn’t kick me off. I could, however, spill my guts to the Elders at SA and get her kicked out of Enforcer training. Not that I would, but it was a nice ace to have at times when Monica seemed primed to revert to her old Megan’s-life-destroying ways.

  Times like this one, for example.

  But instead of ripping me a new one, she smiled. “Megan, I think I know how to handle men-even men old enough to be my grandfather.” She pulled the ponytail holder from her hair, shaking her head until her glossy locks spilled over her shoulders in a sexy tangle.

  How did she do that? Make it look so effortless?

  “Okay, fine. I was just trying to help.”

  “Well don’t. I don’t need…” She paused at the door and turned back to me with this little gleam in her eyes. I knew I was in trouble before she opened her mouth. “No, you know what? Helping is a good thing. We’re all sisters here, and we should help each other out.”

  “Right! We must stand united against our common enemy,” I said, knowing Monica would get my insider reference.

  We’d been forced to unite our powers before. Monica’s former BFF, Beth, and my BFF, Jess, had been special friends (um, okay girlfriends) and partners in a plan to kill me and Monica for causing Jess’s mom’s death when we were just kids. Which was a totally bogus charge. Jess’s mom had been raising the dead, and all Monica and I had done was work a
reverto
spell to send them back to their maker. We’d had no idea the zombies would munch on her until there was nothing left but bones.

  But Jess and Beth didn’t care that we hadn’t meant to hurt anyone. They’d nearly killed me and Monica with a bunch of skeleton zombies. They’d even planned to film the event so they could enjoy the magic of our deaths again and again-the freaks. Sure, they were suffering for their evil now-Beth was in a mental institution in upstate New York and Jess was in SA prison and had been hospitalized twice for seizures brought on by working black magic-but the entire experience had still been pretty horrific.

  You’d think that surviving something like that would have bonded me and Monica, but no such luck.

  “Exactly. We have to unite.” Monica crossed the room to link her scrawny arm around my waist. She was definitely up to something. “So I think Megan should come with me to see Principal Watkins.” She grabbed the bottom of my T-shirt and tugged it up around my ribs.

  I snatched the material from her hands and tugged it back down. “What are you doing?”

  “Teaching you a thing or two about managing men.” She rolled her eyes at my scandalized look. “Your sports bra is black and covers everything you
don’t
have-what’s the big deal?”

  “I don’t want to go talk to the principal with my stomach hanging out.”

  “Come on, Megan. You have pants on, for God’s sake,” she said. “You’re dating a college guy and you’re too shy to show less skin than you do in a bathing suit? Are you sure things are okay with you and Ethan? I mean, I know he’s never been exactly what you call the innocent type.”

  Ooooh, she knew just where to aim her evil poison darts.

  “Everything is fine with me and Ethan. Better than fine. But it’s freezing outside. I don’t want either of us to catch a cold before the big game,” I said.

  Monica glared and grabbed her T-shirt. “Fine.”

  Ha! Score one for Megan!

  But as I followed Monica out into the late-afternoon chill and raced up the hill to the main building, I still felt like I’d lost a battle. I couldn’t really put my finger on what that battle was any more than I could figure out what had been making me feel so restless the past few weeks. Was it just that I’d finally had the time for all the horribleness of Jess’s betrayal and my multiple near-death experiences to hit full force? Or was it something else?

  I didn’t know, but that odd, unsettled feeling made me kind of glad the cheerleaders had stirred up a hornet’s nest. It was comforting to be able to concentrate on a normal problem instead of the seemingly groundless fear that my entire life was about to fall apart.

CHAPTER 3

  “
W
hat the heck is this?” Dad hit the brakes hard enough to give Mom and me whiplash and glared at the banner under the Kroger sign late the next afternoon. “
This
is the fund-raiser?”

  Oh God. I should have known this would happen. Why hadn’t I told my parents I would ride my bike? Sure, it was cold outside, but at least I would have been spared the embarrassment of having everyone stare while my dad malfunctioned in the grocery store parking lot.

  “It’s not what it looks like, Dad. It’s just a joke and I’m already late so I’ll just-”

  “Stay in the car, Megan,” he barked, his military background coming through loud and clear. He’d been retired from the air force for a couple of years, but his super-loud “obey me now or I’ll throw you in a military prison where you will rot for a thousand years” voice was still in prime working order. “No daughter of mine is working at a topless car wash.”

  “Dad’s right, it’s barely forty-eight degrees,” Mom said, twisting to give me the concerned-mom look.

  “Who gives a crap how cold it is? I don’t care if it was a hundred degrees, Jennifer, Megan is keeping her clothes on in public.” He shifted into reverse and glared at me as he prepared to turn around. “
And
in private!”

  “Dad! Stop! We’re not going to be topless,” I said, knowing I was blushing. Geez, why did Monica have to put up the sign so early? “We’re going to wash everything except the tops of the cars. Get it?”

  Dad stepped on the brake again, but didn’t shift back into drive. The anger drained from his face and I could see he was starting to feel kind of silly. He looked nearly as angry as Principal Watkins had when he’d walked into school this morning and seen our posters advertising the car wash in the hall. Once we’d explained our gimmick, he’d calmed down fairly quickly, however. No matter what the cheerleaders said, Watkins didn’t seem to care about taming the “Slut Squad” or what went on during halftime one way or the other.

  He just wanted peace and had therefore gutlessly handed the decision of who did what at halftime over to the booster club. In a truly mercenary show of capitalism, the boosters then decided that whichever team could raise the most money by the end of the week would own halftime for the year. Hence, the last-minute borderline-scandalous Tuesday night car wash.

  “Oh. Well, I still don’t like it.” Dad sighed in a way that made it clear raising a teenager was wearing him out. “But if your mother thinks it’s okay…”

  “I don’t know.” Mom wrinkled her nose, which made her look really young even though she was all dressed up. The woman had good genes, including great skin and the ability to eat like a pig and not gain weight.

  Still, she was a mom, no matter how young looking, as evidenced by her next words. “Actually, I think it’s pretty tacky.”

  “Well, tacky sells.” I grabbed my backpack and mittens and prepared to evacuate.

  “You mean sex sells,” Mom said.

  “Whatever.”

  “‘Whatever’? What happened to the girl-power/feminist thing you and Jess were always…”

  The car got really quiet, like it did every time someone accidentally mentioned Jess, the girl who had been my best friend for nearly six years before she’d tried to kill me.

  “Yeah, well, we’ve got to do whatever it takes to raise more money than the cheerleaders or we lose halftime rights for the entire basketball season. The team that makes the biggest contribution to the boosters by Friday night wins,” I said in a breezy voice, refusing to let Mom know how much thinking about Jess still bugged me.

  She’d been after me to go “talk to someone” since last September, but I didn’t have the time for therapy. I had zombie stuff to learn and pom squad and school and would like to spend some time with my boyfriend at
some
point. Maybe after the car wash. He said he’d come by once he got off his Protocol shift. In addition to going to college part-time, Ethan was a Settler cop.

  Is there anything hotter than a cute guy who is also armed and dangerous? I think not.

  “Call us if you need a ride home,” Dad said.

  “And don’t get wet! You’ll get hypothermia.” Mom called as I slammed out the door.

  I thought I heard her mumbling something about the idiocy of a car wash in winter but didn’t respond. She was right, but what else were we supposed to do? We only had four days to make enough cash to win this stupid competition before Saturday’s game, and a car wash was the only thing we could get up and running fast.

  We had other irons in the fire, but for now scrubbing dirt from cars and trucks wrecked by the mess they’d put on the streets after the snow was the best we could do. Not a fun way to spend a Tuesday night, but at least we wouldn’t have to wash the tops of the cars, and it wasn’t cold enough to make the water freeze.

  And we already had one customer. The senior girls were hard at work scrubbing a Mustang while a couple of juniors held up signs near the road and the rest of the team stood around trying to look adorable and worthy of the ten dollars per vehicle we were charging-plus tip, of course.

  “Was that your mom and dad? They’re cute.” Penny was one of the three other sophomores on the team, and a girl I thought I’d like to get to know better if I had the time. She was always very sweet, and her curly copper hair and nose freckles reminded me of Lindsay Lohan when she was still the cute little kid from the
Parent Trap
remake.

  “Thanks. Yeah, they weren’t thrilled with the gimmick,” I said, rolling up my coat sleeves and scoping out a bucket to commandeer for my personal scrubbing use.

  “Oh God, my mom wasn’t either. I thought she was going to have a stroke. And then she saw Monica and…” Our eyes drifted to where Monica was halfheartedly scrubbing the sides of the red Mustang. She had on a sweater and jeans, but both were so tight she looked like she’d been poured into a catsuit. And she was wearing stiletto boots. Who wore high heels to wash cars? “Well, after that I was lucky to get out of the car.”

  I laughed and Penny did too, and for a second I thought I might enjoy this evening of slavery. Penny was cool and we have never had the chance to just hang out and talk at practice.

  Then I smelled it-death wafting across the parking lot.

  It wasn’t grave dirt or the sickeningly sweet odor of rotting flesh, but there was no doubt that whatever this was had been summoned from its grave with black magic. After months spent studying the various ingredients one could use to reanimate a corpse, I had the pungent odor of wormwood and gardenia memorized.

  Still, I didn’t want to believe it. This couldn’t be happening again! Carol was a nice, sleepy small town, not a hotbed of black magic and mayhem. Or at least it hadn’t been until four months ago. Now, it seemed the rules had changed.

  I heard the unmistakable groans of flesh-hungry zombies and was running toward the tree line at the edge of the parking lot a second later.