A Living Dead Love Story Series (19 page)

Scurvy stumbles over when I'm halfway through my rubbing, his shovel dragging business end down in the dirt, stray twigs, and grass. I look at my watch and realize I've already been at it for over an hour by now. One blissful hour with no Stamp, no Elders, no Dane or Chloe or Hazel or Goth or preppy or Bones.

“What's up, Scurv?” I say, happy to see him. Happy, at this point, to see
anyone
with a pulse.

He shakes his head. “I dunno, Maddy. I don't feel so hot.”

He's standing over my gravestone now, looking red in the face but white in the throat, like a candy cane mixture of freezing and hot skin. He drops the shovel and wipes his brow. Some sweat drops on my rubbing, ruining it completely.

“Eewwww, Scurvy. Are you okay? You don't look so good.”

“Look who's talking,” he snaps, eyes yellow and angry.

“What?” I say, blinking the sight away.

“What?” he says, almost whispering now, his eyes suddenly back to being kind—and white. “What did I say? Why are you looking at me like that?”

“Scurvy, this isn't good. You're insulting me for no good reason. You're sweating all over my rubbing. You're standing way too close to me. Seriously, back. Off! You look like you're having a heart attack or something.”

Scurvy's eyes go round and wide and all kinds of yellow, his throat and chest doing that crazy candy cane thing again. “Yeah, well
you
look like that lady on
The Addams Family.”

“Scurvy, that's
enough
now. Why are you
talking
to me like that?”

“I don't know.” He practically whimpers. He looks at me, eyes white again, almost crying now, and whispers, once more, “I just …don't …
know.”

Then he stumbles again, ripping my onionskin etching in half with his big, dirty, size-12 work boot. The tape holds the onionskin together at the top and sides, but still. Then I see the gash in Scurvy's neck, right below the collar, bright red and full of pus, bulging, almost throbbing like a cocoon getting ready to spurt out some strange new life form. When he straightens himself, the collar moves again and I see more clearly now; I see it's a bite mark, and I know. I know that Bones, or Dahlia, or maybe even Bones
and
Dahlia got to him.

And here I am, alone in the graveyard. No Dane or Chloe to save me this time. How could I have been so stupid? I back away toward his shovel, making sure it's close enough—just in case. Scurvy looks at me funny, like maybe he's seeing me for the first time, and now his skin is no longer red, or sweaty or, for that matter, Scurvy's.

Scurvy is gone; now something hard and gray and leathery and mean is standing there in his place. Yellow eyes burn above licking lips and he looks at me like I'm dinner. Or maybe dessert.

“What are you doing in my graveyard?” His voice is gravelly and strange and no longer Scurvy's. He is big and muscular anyway, and now he knows no sense of personal space. He keeps inching forward, leaning in, and then stumbling back, so that with every woozy, boozy movement he creeps closer.

And the closer he gets, the more I can see the emptiness that is Scurvy. The folksy 28-year-old I've been bribing with apples and oatmeal and peanut butter cookies for the last 3 years is now a brain-thirsty zombie; a Zerker, wanting one thing and one thing only: yes, the dreaded brains. But not just any brains;
my
brains. By now his arms are already knotty and tense, jerky and slow. His face is pale, dried out, no longer alert; no longer smiling.

Suddenly, those yellow eyes light up and he looks at my head like it's a piñata. “Brains,” my friend the gravedigger says. Friend …human …no more. “Me …eat …Maddy's …brains.”

I lean down, grab the shovel, and he lunges at me, barely missing my flesh with his teeth but clawing at my arm just the same with his rock-hard fingernails. I hear the tearing of my new black hoodie and feel his nails break my skin; they're like claws.

One of his fingers, maybe a thumb, gets stuck in my hoodie, and down we go. He is like two tons of bricks in a pair of jeans, and I hear a
whoosh
seep out of my mouth. His arms are flailing, his yellow, gnarly, bent teeth chomping against each other—
clack, clackety, clack
—as he tries to find purchase in my skin.

The shovel went somewhere; as I slam one fist into his head and both knees into his crotch, I use the other hand to root around in the grass. I finally grab hold of the wooden end and yank it around for all it's worth.

I lash out with the shovel, hearing a thick
clank
against his knee as he goes down—again. And still he's coming, scrambling to follow me as I jump up. Bum knee or not, he's like a runaway train, so I
clank
the shovel into his shoulder, watching blood spurt out of a fresh wound, but still he comes.

It's like he's not even feeling it.

He's on all fours now, broken, bent, and still I whap him with the shovel, and still he murmurs, groans, shouts, screams, “Eat brains! Brains, eat!”

“Scurvy,” I'm shouting. “Scurvy, stop!”

“Brains!”

I scream and close my eyes and slice the shovel into the wind, and I don't hear him coming anymore, don't hear him moving or shouting or anything much at all until …something …rolls against my feet. Then I look and see Scurvy's head lying there, between my bloody new army boots, and then I hear it all right: the screams—the screams.

My
screams.

L
ATER, AT
D
ANE
and Chloe's trailer, they're cleaning my wounds and bandaging them and wrapping them tight. It's not that they hurt, exactly (zombies don't feel pain, remember); it's just kind of hard to explain gaping wounds to your teachers and friends the next day in school, you know? “Oh, that? That's …nothing. I was just shaving my …ears, see …and the razor blade slipped and cut out a big chunk of my throat. What? You're saying that never happens to you?”

“They got to him, Maddy,” Chloe says. “They bit him, maybe an hour before you got there; that's about all it takes to turn them.”

I can't believe it. I can't believe I can be giving a guy I've known for years—
years
—oatmeal cookies and a smile one minute and the next he's ready to rip off my head and snack on my brains.

“But then, why was he so nice to me when I first got there? We had a conversation, for Pete's sake. He even ate some of the cookies I gave him, made a joke—flirted! I mean, one minute he's Scurvy; the next he's a …a …Zerker.”

“It's called the whiteout phase,” Dane explains. “A kind of no-man's land between being a Normal and skipping being a zombie and then becoming a Zerker. They've been bitten, sure, but sometimes they don't feel it; sometimes they don't even remember it. So they go on thinking they're Normal because, well, why
wouldn't
they? Meanwhile, inside their body, their heart is slowly shutting down, their lungs are giving out, and the circuits are all switching over to electricity only. It takes about 30, 45 minutes to take effect. Then another 10 or 15 minutes or so to switch into full Zerker mode.”

Chloe adds, “They must have been following you, Maddy. They know you dig the rubbings; that's where they found you the first time they threatened you, back when this all started and you were merely some Normal they wanted to suck the brains out of. So when they saw the satchel and the pad this afternoon, they knew where you were going. They headed down to the cemetery, bit Scurvy first thing. They knew how long it took you to do the rubbings. They knew Scurvy would turn long before you finished. And, let's face it, they were right.”

I'm leaning against a counter in their tiny kitchen, my hands trembling, blood on my hands, when Dane says, “You should probably wash up.”

I look down at myself and see why. Gheez, and I drove this way? With blood splatters on my clothes and gore on my hands? What if I'd been stopped by a cop? As the water runs over my hands, turning red to pink and washing the last of Scurvy down the drain, Dane sidles up behind me and says, quietly, almost apologetically, “You did the right thing, you know.”

“I thought only Zerkers killed humans,” I say, looking out the tiny window above the sink into the tiny patch of lawn they call their backyard.

He turns me around forcefully, yet gently. “You were defending yourself, Maddy. And remember, it was Zerkers who turned your friend.”

My hands are dripping onto his shoes. He grabs a nearby dishtowel and gently, very gently, dries them off for me.

“That's just it,” I say, snatching the rag from his hand and finishing the job myself. “He
was
my friend. He looked out for me, and you and I both know the only reason they bit him in the first place was
because
of me. So how do you live with that?”

Dane nods. Then opens his mouth to say something, probably some Dad-like platitude that I'm ready to bust him for the minute it comes out of his mouth, but I guess he thinks twice about it; I'll give him that much.

I hear a wooden chair scrape against clean linoleum, and Chloe joins us at the sink. This many people, in this tiny kitchen, it's like wedging three freshmen in a locker.

“If it helps any, Maddy,” Chloe says, “he wasn't your friend anymore. The minute they bit him, he stopped being Scurvy.”

I nod, glad for once that I can't cry because it's not very ladylike blubbering in a tiny kitchen in a green double-wide trailer.

Then she clears her throat and looks at Dane. “We should probably go see about the …body.”

M
Y CAR IS
idling in Hazel's driveway early the next morning. She's been so busy with decorating for the Fall Formal since Wednesday that she's ditched me the last few afternoons and caught rides with Tracy Byrd (aka Cheer Club captain, junior class president, leggy Southern blonde, and all-around Stepford Teen). But if there's one thing I need right now it's a friend who knows my secret—even a passive-aggressive one who vaguely resents me for being undead—so I stalk Hazel and force her to ride with me to school.

“But Tracy will wonder where I've gone,” she says, biting her lip and leaning in my driver's side window. Her red hair is still wet, and she has two Styrofoam cups of coffee, one in each hand, which makes it even more difficult than usual for the so-not-a-morning-person Hazel to finagle her way into my car. When I look vaguely unsympathetic, she says, “She's the head of the Decorating Committee this year, you know.”

“Is that for Tracy?” I ask as I guilt her into the passenger seat. When she doesn't answer, I say, “I've been driving you to school for a year and a half and you never once brought
me
coffee before school.”

Somehow she wedges the steaming cups in my undersized cup holders. “You don't drink coffee, remember?”

I think of how long it's been since I've had human food. “How does your precious Tracy Byrd take her coffee? Sugar? Cream?”

“Two sugars. No cream. Gheez, carb much?”

“Perfect.” I grab the second cup, whip off the lid, and take two big chugs.

“Careful! It's still hot.” Then she remembers my secret, remembers what I am, and sits back.

I don't flinch but keep drinking until I feel semihuman.

Halfway to school, she says, a little vaguely, kind of standoffish, like,
oh, ho hum
, “I hear Stamp finally asked you to the Fall Formal.”

“Yes, he did,” I say, knuckles white on the steering wheel. I wonder how she heard, seeing as I haven't talked to her since then. Stamp? Or one of the clowns in his PE class who no doubt heard my little temper tantrum on the bleachers the other day? Who knows? Maybe she has ESP.

“I hear you turned him down,” she says. See what I mean?

“Yes, I did.”

“Hmmm.” She sighs judgmentally over her steaming coffee. “Any particular reason? Or are you just bound and determined to sabotage what's left of your junior year?”

I pull up to a stop sign a few blocks from school and shoot her a sideways glance. Rather than whipping off her lid and tossing it in the backseat, like moi, Hazel has actually used that little bend-it-back-and-stick-it-in-place feature and is sipping through the little open triangle. I shake my head. Dead or alive, can't I do
anything
right?

“Hazel, let's quit pretending like this is any old school year, okay? Let's quit pretending like what happened Saturday night never happened, like you don't know I'm the Living Dead. Now, given that I have a few bigger things on my mind than the Fall Formal right now, do you really think I give one
shit
about the rest of my junior flippin' year?”

She doesn't answer. At least, not until we're finally angling for a spot in the student parking lot. Then she says, quietly, calmly, like she's been giving it a lot of thought, “So what am I supposed to do, Maddy? Sabotage
my
junior year, too? Just because you're dead, just because
you
don't care about school anymore? It still matters
a lot
to me. A
whole
lot, and I can't …afford …to waste a whole year following you around while you finish learning what it means to be a zombie. I mean, I still have to get into college, find a man, you know …things most human
beings
care about. So you're not entirely alone in this, okay? When your best friend turns into a zombie, well, there's …there's …collateral damage.”

I turn to touch her arm, but she's already clattering the seat belt out of its clasp and grabbing her purse and bolting from the car.

“I'm sorry, Hazel,” I say, not caring that she's turned it all around—again—and made it about her; not caring that it hurt me more than she'll ever know to dump Stamp like that. Just wanting, just needing, my best friend back.