Under Zenith (6 page)

I can readily admit that split second decisions aren’t my strong suit. There were two options sitting before me and I’d need to make my decision pretty quickly if I didn’t want to be eaten. I could either sit there on the roof and let the zombie come after me, hoping he couldn’t get up there, or I could jump right at that very second and try to get through the front door before it reached me.

“What are you waiting for?” Hayden yelled inside of the house, spurring me into action before I could really think about what I was doing.

With a loud yell I jumped off of the roof, boots in hand, and yanked on the front door as hard as I could; opening it with more force than I’d meant to.
It took me all of two seconds to get inside and start shutting the door, though the corpse’s arm that was now flailing wildly, was definitely blocking my path.

It felt like I was in a horror movie with the zombie’s arm wedged in the door and me panting and yelling as I tried to shut it out.
All I needed to do was lock the door, just like Hayden had said, and I’d be safe. I would have passed the first task.

Judging by how horrible the first task had been, I didn’t even want to think about what the others would be like, or just how many I had in store for me.

“You can’t just push his arm out for me? Is that
really
interfering that much?” I asked Hayden, still pushing against the wood of the door with all my might.

This zombie wasn’t budging.

“Can’t help you,” he said again, lifting his hands up in surrender.

“I really don’t like you,” I panted, pushing hard enough that the creature finally withdrew its arm.

The door shut, I locked it, and then I turned around and slid down the door into a pile of sweaty shock. There wasn’t much more I could do. I was completely exhausted and really wanted to punch Hayden in the face as he smiled innocently at me, wrinkled his nose, and said, “Rough day, huh?”

Chapter 6

“What was that?” I asked, angrily getting to my feet and ignoring the pins-and-needles sensation that was now travelling through my entire body.

“I thought we decided to call it a zombie,” Hayden retorted, throwing a few sticks of wood into the dusty fireplace and pulling a lighter out of his pants pocket.

“Not
that
,” I spat, probably not making any sense at all. “Why did you leave me out there to die you--,” I stopped myself, trying to keep from using a few choice swear words that had gotten my mouth washed out with soap as a kid.

Just because I was dead didn’t mean I’d ignore all the good life lessons my mama had taught me.

“You almost did a good job out there,” he answered, finally managing to get a fire going. “Almost.”

“Oh, well I’m sorry I didn’t live up to your high standards of zombie dodging.”

“Maybe the next task will go a bit smoother,” he said with a shrug.

I really didn’t like this guy.

“What kind of place is this? What kind of afterlife makes you run away from zombies under the guise of completing an agility test?” I asked, sitting on an old wooden rocking chair and disturbing a few spiders that had been resting in the woodwork.

“Guise? Fancy word for someone so…,” he let his words trail off.

“What?” I asked threateningly, daring him to finish his sentence.

“Southern.”

“I graduated from a well-respected university yesterday, thank you very much,” I informed him.

“With a degree in vocal performance,” he pointed out.
“Then you got yourself killed.”

“Oh yeah? Well what did you major in? How to piss people off?”

“Yeah, that was my major,” he deadpanned. “You know what your problem is?”

“I’m sure you’re going to tell me.”

“You worry about the wrong things. All of your anxiety is completely misplaced,” he said, his British accent getting thicker now that he was upset.

I wished I didn’t find the accent so alluring. Though I’d never admit that to Hayden. He didn’t need a reason for his ego to be inflated
any more than it already was.

“How is it misplaced?” I asked, trying to keep my cool as he took a seat on the
moldy bed across from me.

“You’re dead
, Isla,” he said simply, as if that should explain his cryptic opinions. “You died last night and you haven’t said one word about being sad or upset. All you’ve done is worried about your family’s finances, or questioned my chivalry, or figured out some new and interesting way to make me want to throw you off a cliff.”

He shook his head in disbelief and threw me an eye roll.

“Aren’t you the least bit upset that your entire life was stolen away from you at such a young age?”

I didn’t say anything to him, not wanting to get into something so person
al with someone so unfeeling. Of course I was upset, but as long as I didn’t explore those feelings, it would almost be like they weren’t real.

I may not have been scared of wolves or
moody men, but I was definitely terrified of my own weaknesses, and emotion was one of those weaknesses.

“What about the fact
that you won’t ever see your parents again? Does that bug you?”

“Are you trying to get a rise out of me or something?
Because I don’t really get what’s going on here. Why do you care if I’m okay with being dead? Is that really part of your job description as my afterlife liaison?”

He shrugged his broad shoulders at me and
laid down on the bed, placing his hands behind his head and closing his eyes. “I don’t care. I just think it’s weird,” he said.

It looked like he w
as done with the talking thing.

“You want to talk about weird things? Why can’t you tell me what you did before you became a Guide?” I asked, fully aware that my voice was squeakier than normal because of my heightened emotional state. “You must know how you got here. So why can’t you tell me any personal information?”

“What if I told you it was against the rules to give you any information about my own personal life?”

“Would you be lying?”

“Yes, but would it shut you up?” he asked, mimicking my voice once more.

“You’re rude
,” I told him. “Needlessly rude; which is the worst kind of rude to be.”

“There’s a good kind of rude?”

“Why are you still here? Now that I’ve finished the first task can’t you leave me alone for a while?” I asked, wanting nothing more than to be alone right at that moment.

In all honest
y, having company would have been nice to keep me from thinking too much about the questions Hayden had asked me. I didn’t want to think about how much I’d miss my family or how unfair it was that my entire life was now gone. But Hayden wasn’t good company and so I thought having to deal with those unpleasant demons would be a better alternative than sitting in a room with him for another second.

“I have to stay until the end of the cycle,” he responded, as if that response should
have made perfect sense to me when all it did was confuse me more.

“Cycle?”

“Each day is a cycle. You get one task per cycle and I have to stay with you through the entire thing.”

“So when is the cycle over so you can leave?” I asked, being sarcastically sweet to him.

“Trust me, love, I want to leave just as badly as you want me out of here. Don’t you think I have better things to do than sit around all day listening to you drone on with that awful, slow accent?”

“Do you?” I asked.

“Obviously.”

“When is it over?” I asked again, since he had opted for a snarky comment the first time I’d asked him that same question. Maybe if I kept asking, one day he’d finally answer me.

“Once the snow starts to fall, I can leave,” he said cryptically.

I glanced out the window at the foggy woods. It had been chilly once the sun had disappeared
, but I wouldn’t say it was snow weather. It just wasn’t cold enough.

“Please don’t state the obvious and tell me it’s not cold enough for snow,” he said, stopping me before I could
voice that exact thought.

“Well it’s not,” I mumbled in response.

“It’s also impossible for zombies to be real,” he pointed out, reminding me (not so subtly) that I was dead and the rules of life had changed.

“What was with the zombie thing anyway? I didn’t really picture the path to heaven littered with zombies.”

“Zombies scare you, so that’s what came to motivate you,” he responded.

“Zombies don’t scare me,” I protested with a nervous laugh.

“Listen. I don’t make this stuff up. I didn’t come up with the creepy running corpse thing. That came out of your own imagination. You have way more control over this world than you think you do,” he said dryly. “Besides, you snuck out of bed when you were nine and watched a zombie movie your parents had rented and you’ve been terrified of them ever since.”

My mouth hung open in sh
ock that someone I had just met could know a detail about me that was so intimate. I hadn’t even told Tuck and Monica about that night. Mostly because I was embarrassed that out of all the things in the world I could be scared of, zombies was at the top of my list.

Still, it could have easily been a lucky guess.

“Who told you that?” I asked.

“No one had to tell me. I’m your Guide
, remember? I know things.”

“Yeah, but things about my nine year old self? Why would that even be useful?”

Hayden didn’t respond. Instead he just gestured to the dark, dirty cabin we were currently stuck in as if the answer to that question should be painfully obvious.

I guess it
was
a stupid question.

“How many people have you guided?” I asked, wanting to change the subject.

“Just one other girl,” he said, his eyes trained on the ceiling very pointedly as he lay on his back.

“Were you this mean to her?”

“The job does bring out some of my less desirable traits I guess,” he began, making the biggest understatement ever spoken. “But she was my niece so I was definitely nicer to her.”

“Niece?”
I asked, my interest suddenly piqued. “So you did have a life before this.”

“It’s not important,” he said, sounding like we were treading on dangerous ground.

“Did she make it to her Destination?”

Hayden was quiet for a long time. I couldn’t tell if he was hesitant to answer me or if he was just completely ignoring me like he usually did.

“No,” he finally said after a long silence. “She didn’t.”

I mulled this over for a moment.

It was possible to fail this series of tests, which made them infinitely scarier. But the scariest thing was not knowing what that actually meant.

“What happens if we don’t make it to our Destination?”

“I don’t remember,” Hayden said, sounding genuine.

“How can you not remember something like that?” I asked incredulously.
             

I realize
d I should have been a little nicer to him since he was opening up about his niece and he hadn’t made a snarky comment in the last few minutes, but it just didn’t make sense to me that he could forget such a monumental detail.

“Things get a bit cloudy when I get here at the beginning of a cycle,” he said gruffly, indicating to me that our time of ‘open discussion’ was quickly coming to a close.

“Does that mean you can’t remember what you did before this? You must remember something if you can recall your niece,” I pointed out gently, trying to sound as unobtrusive as possible.

“We’re done talking about this,” he said with a note of finality.

Honestly, I was surprised I’d gotten that much out of him. He didn’t really seem like the type to share his feelings with the class.

Still, he wasn’t all
snark and threats and that gave me a small glimmer of hope that he wasn’t completely soulless.

We sat in silence for a while, me trying not to think about my family or my stolen life, Hayden brooding and giving me the silent treatment. It was a good forty minutes or so when the snow finally started to fall. Only it wasn’t just falling outside. Delicate white flakes made their way through nonexistent cracks in the ceiling, landing on my bare shoulders and making me shiver.

“It’s cold,” I commented, quite obviously.

“It’s snow,” Hayden pointed out in exasperation.

“So does this mean you’re leaving?” I asked, yawning loudly and finding that I suddenly had an overwhelming urge to kick him off of the dusty bed and take it for myself.

“Sadly
, our riveting conversation will be over in about thirty seconds when you fall asleep.”

“Sorry,” I said, more out of habit than anything else. “I’m not sure why I’m so tired all of a sudden.”