Zombies: The Recent Dead (31 page)

Mom and Pop were both teachers at my school. Having them with me at home, with their lingering smells of chalk dust and textbooks, the tiny snowflakes of spiral-bound notebook paper torn from its binding caught unmelting in the hems of their clothes, was like bringing the funeral home with me. It was because of this that I started to wonder if maybe the transfer wouldn’t be so bad.

Strangely enough, however, it was when I suggested this very notion, and the uncharacteristically positive outlook inherent therein, that my folks started worrying, in earnest, about my mental well-being.

As the bus drove on, the sky grew dark. My surroundings grew increasingly unfamiliar as we passed into a stretch of suburbs which had taken an early turn toward fall and even winter. On the street below, the bus’s enormous tires scattered decay-colored leaves across sidewalks that crumbled into the road like rows of rotting teeth. It soon became apparent that we would be making no other stops.

Jesus Christ
, I thought as we passed into the overcast farmlands beyond the city—a bleak stretch of wild, untended wheat interrupted only by the occasional skeleton of a burned-out barn,
I’ve been transferred to Deliverance High.
The sky was nearly black. The sight of it took me back to the tornado drills we practiced on days like this in the second grade, when we would duck under our desks with our thickest textbooks held tight over our heads, a mere three hundred pages of long division standing between us and total, whirling annihilation.

Eventually, the rolling fields gave way to a vast stretch of incinerated woodlands—black, emaciated cedars reaching out to the day-for-night sky like the arms of the damned on Judgment Day. I opened my mouth to holler down the row of seats, to casually inquire about the fire which had apparently torn through this area. But when I opened my mouth, the nervous vacuum inside me would let no words escape. I looked up at the mirror suspended above the driver, at the yawning sweatshirt hood which now absorbed his features entirely, then at the massive fog bank rushing toward us as we began to accelerate.

The landscape was quickly erased by the fog, as though we’d traveled beyond the borders of Nature’s grand composition and were barreling toward the edge of God’s very canvas. I closed my eyes, felt the bus shimmy and shake as it continued to accelerate. Every bump in the road felt like the one that would dislodge a wheel, every turn was the road ending at a thousand-foot cliff.

“Please, God,” I muttered to myself, a knee-jerk theological reaction. “Please.”

The word itself was the prayer, not so much asking for a safe arrival, but to simply let me
keep
everything that I had and was, to finish the things I’d planned to do. The bus shook and shivered, tires screaming against the road. All my blood pressed against the surface of my skin in a centrifuge of fear. Everything that had ever happened to me: birth, laughter, friends, growing up, jerking off, Christmas, was boiled down to one word—

“PLEASE!” I screamed, my cry punctuated by the sound of the bus’s door folding into itself as we came to a gentle stop. We were there.

I marched down the aisle on wobbly sea legs, bracing myself on the rubbery, crimson seatbacks. When I came to the driver I stopped to say something nasty, or sarcastic, or grateful, but when I saw his hands gripping the wheel, knuckles pressed against their gloved surfaces like only bone hid beneath, I thought better of it and climbed down the stairs to the curb.

“A fucking cemetery?” I asked myself aloud.

I surveyed the endless rows of tombstones to which I’d been delivered. No school. No students. Nothing but graves, trees, hills, fog.

I turned around to get back on the bus and ask the driver wh—

The bus was gone.

I looked down either side of the empty road, swallowed entirely by mist after ten yards in either direction. The driver had taken off as silently as he had arrived at my house that morning.

“Great. So what the fuck am I supposed to do now?”

As if in response, a lone crow cackled down at me from a nearby tree and took off over the stones. I watched him glide, then turn to croak at me again. A third time I watched him cruise out a dozen yards, double back, and let out another sonorous cackle.

“I’m already looking back at this and wondering what the fuck I was thinking,” I said. I hopped the low wooden fence and followed the old black bird into the cemetery.

Most of the headstones were for people who’d died before I was born. Some dated within the year. Covered with moss and undergrowth, the sweat stains of finality and neglect, grave markers of every size and shape, from hand-carved mausoleums to wooden planks nailed together in cross formation, covered the surrounding hills in rows so crooked the caretaker had to be either cross-eyed, blind, or both.

When the old crow and I crested the last hill I looked back at the boneyard, at so many stones like goose bumps running up the spine of some tired leviathan.

I turned around to see where the crow had led me—a vista no less gloomy and depressing than the graveyard.

My new school was flat and broad and as featureless as it was silent. With a resigned sigh, I crossed a field of knee-high weeds, at either end of which stood a tall, crooked football goal, and hiked up the parking circle to the empty campus. The building itself was gray and unremarkable. The front door was unlocked. Inside, the lights were out. The only light came from the windows that lined a hallway to my right. The other side of the hall was lined with blue lockers, with the occasional break where a classroom door could be found. The tiled floor was white and clean. I started walking to see if anyone was home. All in all, it looked like your basic high school on a still, overcast Sunday afternoon. It was, however, Monday morning, and by now I was more annoyed than intimidated. I could be at my old school now, getting depressed, getting bored, getting horny. But instead I found myself wandering the empty halls of a forei—

What the fuck was that?

I whirled around, heart suddenly racing, more nervous than I’d let myself believe, and spied a tall locker door hanging halfway open a few yards away.

Whatever.

I turned back to where I was headed an—

“Who the fuck is there?!” I shouted, spinning around when the locker slammed shut behind me, its flat echo continuing past me down the hall.

“WHO—”

The locker creaked halfway open, slowly.

Someone’s in there.

I took a step back with one foot, a step forward with the other, half brave and half smart. The front foot won. Slowly, I made my way toward the locker, sliding along the windows that lined the opposite wall to try and get a peek around the open door. The combination latch was missing. Only two rough screw holes remained where the lock had been torn off. I opened my mouth to say something to whoever was inside, some idle threat, but the vacuum inside my stomach had started up again, so that all I could manage was to slowly reach out, curl my fingers around the rusty locker door, and—

BA-RIIIING!!! went the homeroom bell. I jumped, slipped, cracked my head on the floor.

I stared up at the ceiling. The homeroom bell rang in my ears, bounced off the tile under my head. My first reaction was to panic that I was late, but once the combination of shock, terror, and pain had ebbed to a dull throb between my ears, I asked myself, “Late for what?” I didn’t expect an answer.

Then the sounds came.

Something stirred outside.

I stood up and looked out the window at the hideous, skinless face staring in at me.

“Late,” moaned the walking corpse on the opposite side of the glass. He looked about my age, his face puffed out in gaseous boils of decomposition. The flesh of his jaw hung loose, exposing a bloated green tongue laminated in pus and mud. He wore blue jeans and a varsity letterman’s jacket. A backpack hung from his right shoulder. Dirt littered his unkempt hair, filled the spaces between his teeth.

I didn’t even know I was screaming. The sound of my terror echoed down the hall, harmonizing with the great earthy rumble rising up from the ground outside as the tiled floor beneath my feet began to quake. Scared beyond coordination, I stumbled back on stilted legs and crashed into the wall of lockers behind me. My eyes stayed glued to the window, growing ever wider. Scores of rotten, worm-riddled bodies staggered from the cemetery beyond the football field, dusting the consecrated earth from their team jackets and cheerleader uniforms as they stalked en masse toward the school. No sooner had the first of the walking dead reached the parking lot than a ghostly white school bus pulled into the parking circle and expulsed a swarm of iridescent vapors who drifted toward the school dragging their souls and sack lunches behind them.

Thisisadreamthisisadreamthisisafuckingnightmare
, I chanted in my head, pinching myself over and over until a trail of stinging, bloody fingernail marks lit up my arm like Christmas tree lights.

“You’ll want to get those looked at.” A voice from inside the locker behind me.

Again I shrieked, turned around, staggered into the middle of the hallway, surrounded by drifting, translucent ghouls from the white school bus. Twenty yards to my left, the front doors of the school opened, admitting the horde of teenage undead as they made their way inside like a river of coagulating blood. I looked back at the talking locker, which was now open. A tall, pale kid stepped out from within. He stretched out his folded arms and yawned, exposing two rows of healthy white razor-sharp teeth.

“Hey, watch it!” warned a female voice. The tall boy’s clothes wavered in an unseen breeze.

“Fuckin’ vapors.” A second kid emerged from the next locker down, his face as gaunt and bloodless as his neighbor’s. Beside him, one of the walking dead from outside bumped into a locker and fiddled clumsily with its combination.

“Next one down, you
moron!
” hollered a voice from inside the locker. The zombie moaned, lurched one step to the left, opened his locker, and pulled out a spiral notebook riddled with teeth marks.

“Hey!” yelled the voice from the locker. “That bonehead locked me in, you guys!”

The two boys in front of me snickered.

“You guys suck!” The voice banged on the inside of the locker.

“Yeah,” the tall one chuckled. “That’s kind of our thing.”

The two vampiric jocks stalked down the hall, laughing wildly. By now the hall was swarming with rotten, lurching corpses, pale red-eyed kids staring ravenously at the cuts on my arms, and a gaggle of ghostly, transparent figures drifting over and through the meandering rabble. Wolf-men, swamp things, and hellhounds ambled to and fro, chatting briefly with each other as they parted ways to head to class.

“Come on, you guys!” pleaded the voice from inside the locker. “Lemme out!”

By the time the second bell rang, I was on my feet and the rest of the hall was empty. Well beyond shock, my heartbeat returned to normal. Calmly, I surveyed my surroundings. The occasional puddle of blood and ectoplasm notwithstanding, the loose bits of paper and scattered contraband cigarette butts at my feet gave the impression of a typical, harried Monday morning at Average Joe High School, USA.

“Hey,” came the sad voice from the locker in front of me.

I turned to look at the three dark slats at the top of the locker door.

“Hey, new kid, lemme out or I’ll suck the jelly from your eyeballs.”

I stood there, staring blankly at the locker, slightly perplexed and, perhaps as a result of previous exposure to the relentless bullying I’d witnessed at my old high school, slightly amused. He clearly wasn’t one of them. Just trying to fit in.

“Please?” the voice said, pitiful now, drained of all pretense of malice or ferocity.

I stepped up to the locker and tapped the combination lock. I always felt sorry for geeks and nerds, always helped them pick up their books while they dug wedgies out of their lower intestines.

“What’s your combination?” I asked the locker.

“Six . . . six . . . five,” the voice muttered hollowly.

At last the locker opened and out spilled the lanky, woe-begotten creature inside.

“You’d think with all the brains they ate, those fucking zombies would be like, geniuses, right?”

The kid bent down, dusted himself off. His voice sounded familiar. At first I was unsure. It sounded deeper and farther away than when I’d last heard it, a certain knowledge of things beyond haunting its cadence. But the sarcasm was unmistakable, and when he finally straightened himself up and showed me his bloodless, trademark smirk, all doubt vanished.

“Art?” I gasped, dropping my backpack into a splat of green, luminous jelly at my feet. I looked down at the long, deep canyons he’d cut into his arms only three months before. “Is that you?”

“Holy shit, man,” my friend laughed, dead eyes wide with friendly astonishment. He leaned forward, pressed his cold, stiff chest against mine and hugged me. “Welcome to Purgatory High!”

“English, History, Health, Woodshop, Geometry, P.E.?”

Behind the registrar’s desk, a skeleton in a moth-bitten sky blue pantsuit stared blankly up at me through a pair of faded pink reading glasses as I read my schedule aloud. Behind me, Art sat reading an old newspaper.

“Would you look at that,” he muttered to himself. “Ollie North sold guns to Iran. Wait a minute . . . ” He flipped over the newspaper, examined the date, then shrugged. “News to me,” he obliged, and continued reading.

“Is that it?” I looked up from my schedule to the registrar, at the heavy layer of foundation mortared evenly across the surface of her skull, punctuated by two slashes of red-light-red lipstick, explosions of rouge, and neon-blue eye shadow, all watched over by a magnificent, Babel Tower beehive hairdo. A regular Bloomingdale’s Day of the Dead Special.

“Is there a problem?” the secretary asked. Her rusty screen-door voice rose up from the center of her rib cage and escaped through two empty eye sockets adorned by a set of outrageously long false eyelashes.