A Living Dead Love Story Series (42 page)

“Where's Stamp?” Dane barks so loudly that the
dancing Normals outside the Zerker circle actually stop to check us out.

Wendy, the doomed nursing student, hisses at Val's entourage. They promptly scatter, and she turns to me with a self-assured smile.

And I promise myself that, before the night is over, I will wipe it off for her, innocent victim or no.

“Stamp who?” Val presses in as the circle of her Zerker friends tightens around us. “I don't see anybody there, do you?”

I see Dane's fist tighten, his eyes narrow to slits, but I know what he's thinking: Too many witnesses.

“Give us Stamp back!” I'm standing toe to toe with Val now. I poke her stupid boa with every syllable: “Give. Him. Back.”

She stands, intractable, and pokes me back. Hard. “Come. And. Get. Him.”

Just then rough hands pull us apart, and I'm tossed into the bar. I hear a scream—a loud, girly, civilian scream—as the strobe lights flicker and the music blares. I turn to find Val gone but her friends shoving me every which way.

But not all of them. Wendy is here. And the Rudy dude from one building over.

So where are the rest?

A couple of others surround Dane.

He tackles one, twirling to avoid the hands of another.

I turn and hear a whack, feeling Wendy's palm on my face right before I'm sitting, stunned, on the floor. Vaguely, in the background, I hear the stomping.

Normals running.

Rudy stumbles forward.

I feel bad, but it's him or me. And really, all that matters now is Stamp. I lash out, the bottom of my shoe connecting with his knee.

He comes down hard on the other foot.

We're face-to-face.

My palm slams his nose upward. Something snaps, and Zerker goo oozes from Rudy's shattered nostrils. I'm yanked away before I can see him fall.

Wendy hoists me up under the bar.

My head cracks the electric neon. Bulbs burst, and fuzzy white powder fills the air. I scramble to still her hands.

She shoves a finger into my ear, probably hoping it's my eye.

I grab her thumb and wrench her down to the floor with me.

Chaos is all around us. Normals run and shout, “Security! Security!”

Wendy snarls as she struggles to rise.

I plant my sneaker on her throat and press down. “Where. Is. Stamp?” I treat her throat like a gas pedal with each word.

She shakes her head, trembling violently, one gray eye and one yellow eye pleading now that a fake contact has
obviously been knocked out. When I lift my foot, she spins around, shoving me against the bottom of the bar with both hands. She spits through black goo between her teeth, “Wouldn't you like to know?”

She is rank, her one eye glowing yellow now that we're face-to-face, and I know … I know she's gone. Zerker gone. Like Bones and Dahlia were when I first met them back in Barracuda Bay. Like my favorite teacher, Ms. Haskins, after they got to her. Like half the football team and the entire cheer squad.

Nobody home but rage now. Hard, cold, Zerker rage.

I lift my feet against her chest and kick out, shoving her halfway across the floor. It's nearly empty now. Most of the Normals are gone. Spilled drinks and wet cocktail trays are the only things littering the floor.

I turn to find Dane wrestling with Rudy, the bigger Zerker seconds away from gnawing on Dane's beautiful, glistening skull.

I'm too far away to stop him. I find a bottle that's fallen off the bar and launch it their way.

It lands with a thud against Rudy's temple, but he doesn't even flinch. Dane does, though, grabbing it with a free hand, breaking it against the bar like something out of
Road House,
and shoving the pointy end right under Rudy's exposed throat. Most Zerkers are so strong and old and leathery and tough, it's like trying to jab your way through a rhinoceros' hide. But Rudy is a young Zerker, meaning fresh. The broken bottle slides
into his throat so far that half of Dane's hand goes missing, then pops out the other side of Rudy's skull, bits of brain and gore sticking to the jagged edge as goo gushes like an oil well from the back of Rudy's head. The guy keels over, pawing at the bottle top sticking out of his throat as Dane inches away. Rudy dies—again—with a confused look in his yellow eyes, hands reaching out to us as what's left of his brain short-circuits from the inside out.

“Poor Rudy.” I frown, looking around the deserted club.

“Poor Rudy? Dude almost turned me Zerker!”

I shrug, looking for any signs of Stamp. “You would have pulled out of it.”

“Not without that flying bottle trick.” His eyes are all gooey and grateful. I think I like it better when they're hard and black. “Here!” He finds a service exit under a blinking red sign and steps over several damp wooden crates as we find ourselves in some back alley. There is no one left: none of the Zerkers Val turned, no Val, certainly no Stamp.

There are voices around the corner, hundreds of club kids squawking and texting and complaining to the Spartans' bouncers at the same time. Then sirens in the distance.

Dane says, “Come on,” even though I'm two steps ahead of him.

In the club's lot we see the empty space where just a few minutes earlier Stamp's Jeep was parked.

We skirt the crowd, taking another back alley to reach the car in the back of the Cuban restaurant.

“Witch!” Dane opens the driver's door so roughly the hinges crack. It's not even his own car!

“So what was that?” I say.

He tears out of the parking lot, over the curb, and into the street.

Cops pour in from the other direction.

“A setup,” he seethes, speeding through stop signs and past shocked pedestrians. “I should have known better than to follow just Stamp. I should have been following Val.”

“Well, how? We didn't even know where she lived until recently.”

“Exactly my point.” He slams his large palms against the shiny steering wheel and stops short of running over a big blue mailbox on the next corner. “I've gotten lazy, letting Stamp run around town at all hours, not even knowing who he's hanging out with. I should have been following him weeks ago.”

“You said you wanted to trust him.”

Dane turns on two wheels at a nearby corner and roars onto the interstate, passing cars at an unsafe rate of speed and trajectory.

“Yeah, well, look where trust got us,” he says. “Stamp's missing and I don't even know who took him.”

“Val took him.”

“I mean, I don't even know who Val is. That's my point.”

“She's a Zerker. And she outsmarted us. All those
kids missing for months now. And we were totally stumped.”

“I was stumped,” he says, focusing on not killing us in downtown traffic. “I should have told you about those kids, about Rudy and Wendy. I should have made you come with me to check them out. I was stupid. I thought after what we'd been through, it would be the Sentinels coming after us, not the Zerkers.”

I grit my teeth and hold on as he flies from the highway, dipping into the same industrial neighborhood we've been staking out.

“There's his Jeep,” I blurt as Dane screeches to a halt in front of Val's warehouse loft, nearly sending me flying through the windshield.

The neighborhood is deserted at this hour.

We get out of the car, the engine still running, and carefully approach the silent warehouse.

“Looks dark,” I say.

“See what I mean? We've been set up.”

“But why? What's her game? She could have taken Stamp anytime over the last few weeks. Why tonight? Why now?”

He tries the warehouse door, yanking it six ways to Sunday and ringing the bell half a dozen times.

No one's in there. We both know it. We're just trying to do what we can to avoid getting back in our car and driving away.

Away without Stamp.

Dane turns to me, his jaw flexing and dark eyes flashing in the beam of a random street lamp. “I don't think it's Stamp she wants.”

“Then who?”

He shakes his head, walking toward Stamp's Jeep. “I don't know. That's my—Shit!”

“What's your shit? I thought you said we couldn't—Oh, shit!”

We see the note on Stamp's windshield at about the same time. It's written in some trampy red lipstick and takes up most of the glass. It says:

If you ever want to see Stamp alive again, be at Splash Zone by 3 a.m.

Val

P.S. Bring your swim trunks!

“Splash Zone?” Dane strips the gears in poor Chuck's car as he backs away from the warehouse and throttles toward the interstate.

“It's that cheap-ass water park on International Drive by the outlet mall,” I say.

“You mean … the one with the sharks?”

S
plash Zone is
deserted at this hour, but the stadium lights surrounding the two-acre water park are all on. It's on the butt end of International Drive, one of the tackiest and most popular tourist strips on the planet, and at three in the morning the only things open are a few random truck stops with an attached diner or two. All are a few blocks away, and nobody eating there is exactly Splash Zone material, if you know what I mean.

It costs eight bucks to park, but the four guard stations are closed.

Dane picks one and blasts right past, cracking the black-and-yellow gate arm into splinters. We jostle over speed bumps, our teeth rattling.

“Where the hell is she?” He rounds the thin strip from the guard stations and enters the ginormous parking
area. It looks empty all the way ahead to the huge wave sign announcing Splash Zone Family Water Park. A blinking neon-blue sign beneath it says, Home of the Hourly Shark Feeding!

There are no other cars in the parking lot, but that doesn't mean anything. She could've parked around the back.

“How the hell do we even get in?” Dane says, gunning it across the middle of the lot.

“There.” I point to the entrance gate.

Dane stomps on the gas, forcing me back in my seat, but only for about five seconds. We slide to a stop next to a darkened ticket booth and nearly smash into it. Apparently Dane's worried the brakes too hard this night.

“Why do I feel like I should be wearing a tuxedo and bringing you a corsage?” Dane says as we leap from the car.

We test the first gate and find a linked chain threaded through the rusty metal bars.

“It does feel strangely familiar,” I gush, helping him yank the chain apart. He's always been more limber than me and never more so than in an emergency.

We push the massive, creaking gate open just enough to squeeze through.

I follow Dane inside the park, trying to block out the mental image of Barracuda Bay's Fall Formal and what happened last time someone kidnapped Stamp and focus on what's in front of me.

Splash Zone is a water park—slash—aquarium featuring
the usual slides and gushers and slushers and arcades and penguin-shaped, chocolate-covered ice cream bars. Dane and I kept saying we'd go, we'd surprise Stamp and make a day of it, just the three of us, but we never did.

Now here we are, about three in the morning, and I don't think it's to eat ice cream and ride the water gushers. But Splash Zone isn't just fun and games. It's got live animals, hence the penguin ice cream bars, and flamingos in a pond. But there is also a chance to swim with the dolphins. And, in a special steel tank, there are sharks. Real, live sharks that, as the entrance sign announced, you can feed by hand every hour on the hour.

And maybe it's just the pessimist in me, but I can't imagine this night ending without sharks involved.

The park is built around a giant lake, where fireworks explode at night and ski shows entertain during the day. You know the kind, with girls in bikinis making pyramids out of each other.

Dane and I race around the empty park, but we don't know where to go or what to do or, frankly, who to do it to. There are pink slides where daytime customers can pop out of flamingo mouths. There's a kiddy pool with the water still running. The arcade sign is still blinking, though all the machines are dark.

And no Stamp anywhere. Not even Val tripping us as we pass.

We pause by a concession stand, and I'm glad we don't have heaving lungs drowning out clues of where
Stamp could be. But the silence in the deserted park is deafening.

Until we hear the urgent shuffling.

Dane looks behind him, but there's nothing.

Same with me. I creep away from the pink molded plastic of the concession stand and peer around a corner. Nothing. No one.

The footsteps are closer, closer until finally from behind a dolphin merry-go-round a security guard clomps forth.

I can tell right away—from his askew hat and bloody tie—he's no longer living but freshly reanimated.

“Zerker,” Dane says through gritted teeth as we instinctively crouch together.

The groaning guard sees us—or more than likely smells us—and quickens his shuffling. The thing about Zerkers is they're mean. Especially at first.

Older Zerkers like Bones and Dahlia from back home, or Val now, or even Rudy Ortega and Wendy Schmaltz have had a while to settle into their Zerker tendencies. The frenzy in their brains has calmed, and once they've eaten human flesh, they'll eventually repose into the bad guys they're destined to be.

But for awhile there, say the first 24 hours after they've been bitten, or turned, Zerkers are badass hombres.

Like us, they feel no pain. They don't need to breathe, so they can't run out of steam, and they'll run
on bone stumps if their feet fall off. They're the zombies authors write about and moviemakers portray: hungry, soulless, angry, confused. But mostly hungry. The worst part is, if it wasn't for Zerkers, zombies would have a much easier time. But no, every few months or so, some random Zerker loses it, chomps on the neighbor, starts an infection, and boom—zombies everywhere get a bad rap.