A Living Dead Love Story Series (38 page)

I smirk and play nice. “Sorry. Just … long day.”

“What's with the getup?”

I look down, realizing I'm still in my fake survey taker's uniform. “Like I said, long day.”

Iceman shrugs. Then he gets down to business. “So how were last week's brains?”

“Scrumptious,” I say, like they were his or something. “The best yet.” This is the worst part, feeding Iceman's ghoulish ego.

“I guess I should try them myself someday.”

“You really should,” I say, eyeing the bag still clutched in his grubby fingers.

“Maybe you can cook them for me one day?”

I take great glee in crushing the hopeful look in his sweaty face. “Cook them? Real brain fanatics eat them raw. I thought you knew that.”

He frowns. “I guess I'm not a real fanatic, then.”

No, I think just a freakish ghoul who sells human brains for cash.

I slide the envelope over, eager to end our transaction, get home, and start the feast. He takes it eagerly, shoving it in his Frozen Planet apron.

Finally, the bag comes my way. I have to force myself to wait and be pleasant, though what I really want is to grab it and run. But where would that leave me next week?

“Thanks, Iceman,” I say, inching out of the booth.

“You're welcome, Living Dead Girl.”

Then he does this thing, this thing he does every week, where he sits there, a king on his throne, and juts out his right cheek. I lean down, red hot nearly gone by now, and kiss it. His skin tastes like sugar and sweat. If I don't get away soon, he's going to get an earful of red hot upchuck, that's for sure.

“Until next week,” he says dreamily.

I can barely hear it with the cowbell ringing overhead on my way out the door.

S
oy sauce or
no?” Dane says from the kitchen a little while later as he splits up the fresh brain.

I'm in my room, taking off my makeup and slipping out of my phony survey taker's uniform. I find Dane's keys in my pocket and walk to his room to set them on his desk.

A piece of red string is sticking out of his top drawer. What? Is he knitting now? Making me one of those old-school Raggedy Ann dolls for Christmas? Or a scarf, maybe? Some mittens for my always cold hands?

Hearing the water still running in the kitchen, I slide the drawer open just a smidge. There's no doll, no mittens. But there is a map: a local map, with red string tying several black dots together.

The dots are plastic circles with sticky backing so
they stay glued in place, and I recognize the map as the one that came with our welcome packet when we paid our initial deposit and moved into The Socialite.

“The hell?” I murmur as I sink into the desk chair.

I lay the map out flat, trying to get my geography straight. It never was my favorite subject. I notice our street highlighted with a red dot. X marks the spot.

The red strings all tie around the red dot and make an almost perfect circle as they pull out to all the black dots. It's like a giant wheel, stretching out from our street, each red string like a spoke in the wheel.

Next to each black dot, Dane has written in his blocky handwriting a name, then a date.

Wait, that last one. That name sounds familiar.

I look in the drawer and see why. It's come from our local paper, the one I showed him the other day, about the kid who went out for bananas and milk and never came back.

The sneak! He must have taken it off my stationary bike when I wasn't looking. But what for? I dig a little deeper and find several more clippings beneath it, each with the name on the map highlighted.

I look at Rudy Ortega's picture in the paper. It's from his school yearbook. Turns out he was a junior at the local high school, Cedar Point. He's got a big, round face and weepy eyes but a wide smile. His hair is short, with a little ducktail at the front. I grin, then stop myself.

The clipping beneath Rudy's is for a big-boned redhead. Her name, Wendy Schmaltz, is highlighted. She was a nursing student at some local tech college after dropping out of high school during her senior year. She has laughing eyes, buckteeth, and a spray of freckles across her nose that stand out even in black-and-white.

Every clipping, tied to every string, is about a local kid who's gone missing. One a month, apparently, since we moved to The Socialite. I count the strings, touching them gently. None of them go too far from where Dane and I live. A few miles at the most.

I don't know how freaked out I should be, but I'm pretty. Freaked out, that is.

Yeah, I know every neighborhood has its strange goings-on, its disappearances and violence, but five in five months? It's not like we're in a war zone or something. Sure, we're not living on Rodeo Drive, but we're still in the United States.

I could understand one or two, but even that would be pushing it. Five?

“So now you know,” Dane says from the doorway, drying his hands with a dish towel. “Why we went through the whole survey-taker charade. Why we had to start tailing Stamp. Why I pressed Val so hard tonight.”

I let the newspaper clippings slide off the map I'm clutching and back into the drawer, where they settle with a rustle, a straggle of red string hanging over the open drawer.

“You think she knows about this?”

He shrugs. “Not knows, exactly, but I think she's involved, yes.”

“How?” I drop the map as if it's poisonous. “Why?”

“Look at the pattern,” he says patiently, sitting on his bed next to me so close I can still smell the cologne he wore to impress Val. “We're the red dot, and all the missing people are the black dots. See the dates? Every month, a new kid goes missing. And never farther than a few miles from right where we're standing. One month gets her closer to the next month and, with each kid, she's closing in on us. It's like she's working her way in, warning us we're next. Or maybe Stamp's next. I dunno yet.”

I shake my head violently. “I get all that. I meant, how could you keep this from me? Why would you?”

He seems taken aback by the question, his eyes pleading. “Isn't it obvious?” Then quietly, “I guess I didn't want to scare you.”

I snort. “Oh, ‘cause I'm some kind of shrinking violet or something? ‘Cause it's your job to protect not just Stamp but me too?”

I stand, clenching my fists, circling him like Val might be circling us. “Who made you the gatekeeper of what I should and shouldn't know? This is my safety we're talking about here too, okay? I mean, you saw me freak out about one person going missing. You don't think it would have helped me to know that four, no, five people have gone missing?”

He sits there passively, watching me fuss, waiting for me to burn myself out. When I finally do, he says, “Not until I found out why.”

“And how were you going to do that? No, wait. Here's what I really want to know. When were you going to do that? Tomorrow? Next week? Next month? Next year? When it was too late?”

“I've been trying. It's hard with—well, I can't seem to shake you.” He knows he's done it but can't take it back.

I feel my eyes get big but not nearly as big as my mouth. “Oh, so now it's my fault you haven't been able to investigate all these missing people. Well, if you'd just told me about them, I could have helped you instead of you having to shake me!”

I storm from his room, grabbing my kit out of the tiny closet by the front door. The hollow door shakes behind me as it slams, and I feel bad as I triple-lock it. It's barely 2:00 a.m. Outside there is still a little chill in the
March air. As I walk away, I notice a couple of the neighbors have dressed up their doors for St. Patrick's Day.

I stride past Dane's car, the night sky lit up in its usual yellow glow of my zombie vision. I walk through the parking lot, hearing night noises in my wake: a TV blaring some horrible commercial through an open window; house music thumping against a thin wall; a cat scratching at a sliding glass door screen, meowing desperately to be let in.

I straighten the messenger bag over my shoulder. It's new, since I left my old one behind, and I haven't been using it much. It never fit quite right, but what do you expect for three bucks on clearance at the Family Value Mart?

It's light blue with pink trim. Not exactly grave-rubbing appropriate but, again, the price was right. There's some pop star's face on the front that I guess I'm supposed to know because her name isn't printed anywhere on it. I guess all of Dane's smooth jazz has kept me off the pop charts for the last few months. Besides, Hazel was the one who always kept me current on trends, be it lip gloss or sandals or pop stars. Without her, I'm kinda lost. In more ways than one.

Dane thinks these bags were cheap because they ran a few thousand of them off without the chick's name. I just think they were trying to be artsy and failed. Whatever. They should have cared less about the starlet and more about the bag and how it hangs too low and jangles too loud.

I take the sidewalk to the right, walk a few blocks until I'm in the little cemetery behind the big church. It's a Catholic church, the Church of the Resurrection, which is nice. They always have the best guests, as Dad always called them. It was one of the reasons I asked Dane to choose The Socialite as our new home: the cemetery just down the road.

It doesn't have a name, which kind of sucks. I always feel like a cemetery should have a really good name, you know? The Doomsday Acre. Fields of Gloom. Orphanage Alley. I dunno, something Gothic and cool like that. Plus I like to sign each of my grave rubbings and date it and put the name of the cemetery there too. I don't know why.

I had to leave my whole library of rubbings at home when we left Barracuda Bay, so I'm starting over and not real sentimental about such things anymore. Still, some habits are hard to break.

There's a small gate to get in, and it creaks, so I just step over it. Duh. I guess the Catholics are more trusting than most cemetery folks. Then again, most Normals aren't as excited by cemeteries anymore. I used to be, but don't go by me. I was never a normal Normal anyway.

I stroll through the graveyard, letting the heat from Dane's comments roll off me in waves. I know what he meant. We do spend way too much time together. I get that. But even though I'm a tomboy and one of the Living
Dead doesn't mean I don't have feelings.

He says he can't shake me.
Shake
me? You shake someone you want to get rid of, like a cop on your tail or some stalker chick who can't take no for an answer or a piece of gum on your shoe. You don't shake somebody you care about, someone you're supposed to actually love, even if you've seen them 24 hours straight every day for months.

I'm so upset I'm deep in the graveyard before I realize it. I look back and can't see the gate or the road from here. Even so, I don't feel scared. I mean, if there are Sentinels or even Zerkers in the area, they wouldn't want just one of us. It's the whole banquet they're looking for, not just the appetizer.

Besides, Dane will be along soon to apologize. And nowadays I'm scarier than most thugs who'd be out this time of night.

A medium-sized gravestone is calling my name. It's graced with a bulging, moss-covered gargoyle right in the middle. I sit in front of it, sliding off my bag and digging inside for a paintbrush I bought at the dollar store. I gently brush off the moss until the stone is clean and dry. Then I take a smaller brush to weed out the cracks, sending dirt and bugs and little moss boogers flying everywhere.

I pause by the owner's name: Jace Hawkins, b. 1917, d. 1934.

Seventeen. Just like me. Seventeen forever. Just like me. Jace. Boy or girl? That name could go either way. Jace. It sounds so Civil War, so Southern.

I picture Jace in overalls, barefooted, fishing in a stream, a bowl haircut, a freckled nose. Then again, Jace could have been one of those frilly Southern belles. Sheesh, back then, they married you off at 15 or 16. Jace could have had a kid! What did him/her in?

I let these thoughts fill my mind as I gently tape a poster board—sized sheet of onion skin across Jace's gravestone, using strips of gray duct tape to fold the edges around the side and keep them secure.

I grip a piece of fresh charcoal and gently, gently rub the gargoyle from Jace's headstone onto the onion skin. The charcoal rasps against the paper, revealing an ornate forehead, then lonely eyes, a sharp nose, and fanged teeth.

Then I go and ruin it, pressing too hard. The thin paper tears, and I have to start again. It's after I'm through taping the crinkly paper back to the headstone that I hear the footsteps.

Dane.

But no. The footsteps are too heavy, and there's one pair too many. And they sound ugly.

I realize I'm alone in a graveyard in the middle of the night, and I think fleetingly,
Of course there are two pairs of footsteps: Stamp and Dane. Duh.