A Living Dead Love Story Series (77 page)

In the dark kitchen: no dishes, no forks, no knives. Just a counter full of greasy wrappers from Burger Barn and lots of crumpled soda cans.
Energy
drinks, mostly, their overly tall cans empty and crunched.

Like this place belongs to a teenager. Living alone. On permanent spring break.

I walk upstairs and turn halfway up.

She's still in the doorway, looking at the floor.

My voice is a mix between disappointed and more disappointed. “You coming?”

She looks up, a pained expression on her face.

“There's Zerkers out there, remember?” I remind her.

She steps in quickly, shutting the door behind her, leaning against it with her back to squeeze it all the way shut. Suddenly, I feel kind of stupid about breaking the lock that way.

The rooms are empty, all of them, except the one with the light on upstairs. There's a sleeping bag on the floor, a big shiny laptop open next to it, the screen blue, in sleep mode. There's a little dorm fridge humming in the corner, some random magazines scattered about, more zombie books, a few cell phones—the cheap, disposable kind you get in gas stations and charge with cash.

I stand in the middle, my sneaker nudging a book called
Living with the Living Dead
.

I turn to her very slowly. “What gives?”

She follows me into the room, slumps against the far wall dramatically. “I knew you'd find out.” She picks lint off one of her velour knees. “I knew you were too smart to fall for it.”

“Fall for what?”

She waves a hand around the room, looks up at me as if she might cry. “All of it. The stupid zombie books. Me living right next door. Really? Right next door? Not two doors down, even? Being able to hack into the school system like that dude from Facebook or whatever. The driver's license. The school schedule. Just all of it.”

I try not to wince. I kind of actually
did
buy all that stuff. Man, am I unprepared for being Vanished. “You mean, no dad who owns a Chinese restaurant? No brother who can hack into school computers?”

She smirks. “What? Do you fall for every Asian stereotype?”

“You're the one who kept showing up with Chinese food, saying it was from your dad's place, jackass! You're the one who told me your brother hacked into the school board, got me a driver's
license
, whatever.”

She looks at me, nonplussed. Her elbows rest on her knees, her palms up. “I never thought you'd believe me. I kept waiting for you to call BS on me every time I spun another lie.”

“Then why'd you say it?”

“They
told
me to say it. It's only my third assignment. What do I know? I thought maybe you understood the code or whatever.”

“What assignment? Who's
they
?”

“The Keepers.” When all I can do is blink and keep my jaw from hitting the floor, she adds, almost sheepishly, “I'm a Sleeper.”

Now it's my turn to slump to the floor, resting an arm on her humming black dorm fridge as I lean against it. “I can't with all this living dead James Bond crap anymore. The hell is a Sleeper?”

She looks at me as if I should already know, then looks away, then back. “Don't you know? What, is this your first assignment too?”

“I'm not on assignment, Lucy, remember? I'm Vanished. I shouldn't even be here.”

She looks at me, blinking.

Then I remember she asked me a question. “And, no, I don't know what a Sleeper is. Nobody tells me anything, apparently. I'm like the Rodney Dangerfield of Sentinel City.”

“Sleepers are like civilian sympathizers with the Keepers. Like secret agents. Undercover. You know, kids like me go to school and sniff around, but grown-ups work in hospitals or police departments or whatever, where they can look for evidence of Zerkers.”

I shake my head, not because I don't believe her but because in all that time I was training with the Keepers, nobody said a word about Sleepers. Not one. “So you don't really go to Seagull Shores Prep School?”

She gives me bitch-please face. “I don't go to
any
school. I'm nineteen.”

I look at her differently. She could be nineteen. Then again, she could be sixteen. Or twenty. With her baby-doll T-shirts and hipster messenger bag and goofy barrettes and knee socks, how should I know how old she is?

I shake my head.

The dorm fridge vibrates against my rib cage. Every few minutes there's a clink like the fan is on its way out or something, and it shoots out a musty smell.

“But why? How? In what universe would you and Vera ever be in the same room together?”

She looks away, talking to the wall. “When Zerkers attack someplace, when they infest a town like, say, Seagull Shores, what do you think happens? Afterward, I mean. Once the dust settles and the fires go out and the soldiers or whoever leave. What do you think happens then?”

I look at her thoughtfully, trying to form an answer. I should know, I suppose. It did happen to my town. But I ran so fast and so far that I never stuck around to find out what happened to those who survived.

The most I saw of what happened to Barracuda Bay after we killed the last Zerker was in my rearview mirror. I guess I fast-forwarded through the part she's talking about. Beyond my dad and a couple of my friends' parents, a teacher or two, I never really wondered what happened to folks who lost kids or brothers or sisters or moms or dads.

When I don't answer, she stares at me with cold eyes and starts speaking with a voice to match. “Say your whole family gets wiped out and you're seventeen and you're wandering around town in some clothes the Salvation Army gave you, wondering where you're going to sleep that night, and some chick in blue cargo pants comes up to you and gives you a bag of hot, greasy Burger Barn and money for a hotel room and new clothes. Suppose she sticks around all week, checking in on you, feeding you, and one thing leads to another and, well, you do the math.”

I picture Lucy as she describes it: wearing sweatpants and a flannel shirt, maybe, thrift shop stuff like I stole for Stamp and me. Dirty and hungry, dazed and confused, wandering around. No home, no car, no money.

My voice sounds loud after staying silent so long. “So Vera, like, recruited you?”

I think of me, sitting in Sentinel City that first night, Vera sitting across from me, a file as thick as a phone book between us. She knew everything about what happened in Barracuda Bay and afterward in Orlando. Pictures, files, phone calls, bank records, pay stubs, the works. Why would it be any different if she wanted to recruit a Normal on the outside?

“That happened to you, Lucy? Your family? Zerkers?”

She nods. I think of the few missions Dane has been on since becoming a Sentinel. He never says much, but I know of a few semi-infestations that have happened since we've been in Sentinel City. There was that cluster in Tennessee back in January. And something in Georgia. That one even made the news.

“When?” I ask her. “Where?”

“It was a few years ago, up in Tallahassee.”

I wrack my brain. I was still a Normal then, two years ago. “You mean that train full of hazardous waste that ran off the tracks?”

She chuckles. “Yeah, that's what they told everyone. Kind of like the way they told everyone what happened in Barracuda Bay was a school fire, right?”

I nod. She has a point. Vera always said the Sentinels were the muscle stopping Zerker infestations but the Keepers were the brains of the outfit. Maybe this is what she meant.

I look at her, chin up. “But it wasn't hazardous waste?”

“It was Zerkers. My dad was a professor at a community college up there, a feeder school for FSU. He taught graphic design. My mom was head of the nursing school there. My brother was on the lacrosse team. It was a real family affair, except for me. I was still in high school.”

“What happened?”

“Kids had gone missing at the college.” She pauses to collect her thoughts.

I blink twice, remembering Hazel and the Curse of Third Period Home Ec.

“Nothing like what's going on now, nothing so fast like this, but enough that Mom and Dad would talk about it at dinner, you know? Anyway, one day during classes, I guess somebody pulled the fire alarm. Everyone was in the halls, going outside, when they just started . . . feasting.

“It was the afternoon. I used to ride my bike up after school. Dad had a class break around then, and he'd take me for ice cream. My brother might stop in, sometimes with a new girlfriend. Mom was usually too busy with department meetings and such, but every once in a while she'd surprise us.”

Her eyes go a little blank as she stares at the wall just to the left of me. “I heard the screaming from a block away and sirens coming. I got close enough to see Dad's car in the staff parking lot, and then a bunch of bloody people started chasing me. People but not people. Like the people we saw tonight. I was on my bike, so I could outrun them, but if I'd gotten off or fallen, we'd be having a very different discussion right now. Or maybe none at all.”

We both chuckle dryly, and I doubt she even realizes she's doing it.

“I just kept pedaling and pedaling, until I was halfway across town and couldn't hear the sirens anymore. Something caught on fire eventually, a car crash or something at the college, but by the time it got put out and I tried to make it back home, home was gone, burned to the ground. I had a little cash—lunch money, pocket change. Some gift certificates left over from my birthday. I ate junk food and slept in the park and found a paper one day with the names of the dead. My whole family was listed there. All three of them. A little while later, I met Vera and she fed me, gave me a place to sleep . . .”

She's still looking toward me but not at me. I wait a beat, then two, until finally her eyes focus and she lasers them in at me. “I've been a Sleeper ever since.”

“I'm sorry, Lucy.”

She doesn't blink. “From what Vera told me, your story's not much better.”

It kind of makes me queasy to think that Vera told a Normal about me but not as queasy as Lucy must feel, all alone in the world, with a cold fish like Vera as her only friend. And I use that term loosely since, once upon a time, I thought she was
my
friend too.

“No, but I still have my dad, you know?”

She does know. I can tell. She nods and smiles, sniffs a little but never cries. It makes me wonder how many times, if ever, she's told that story. She nods, and I don't want her to dwell.

“But what do you do? On these assignments, I mean. Where do you go?”

She shrugs. “Whatever they want, within reason. Since I look so young, mostly I just hang around in high schools, wherever more than a few kids have gone missing in a certain time period.”

“Like here,” I begin, then stop myself midsentence. I cock my head. “But you said people didn't go missing in Seagull Shores until
after
we got here.”

She averts her gaze. “You . . . This was a special case.”

“You followed me?” I ask, feeling more creeped out by the second. “But how?” I picture Stamp and me stumbling through the sagebrush and scrub pines as we trudged down the east coast of Florida. I know I'm about as clueless as a zombie can be, but no way a chick like Lucy could have stayed on our trail the whole time.

She shakes that straight black hair side to side. “Vera followed you, saw where you were heading, and sent me here.”

“Here, to this house?”

“Once they saw you move in next door, yeah. They set me up. Nothing fancy, just an address and a sleeping bag, some spending money, and they enrolled me at school. Just like I did for you. Well, they did for you.”

“I thought I was Vanished. But it turns out I'm just bait.”

I'm not gonna lie; her expression is kind of condescending. I can picture her back in school before Zerkers came into her life, before Vera. She was probably one of those girls I wouldn't have gotten along with anyway. You know the ones: pretty, smart, but totally focused, zero comprehension of sarcasm, and no real sense that everyone else thinks they're entitled, stuck-up biotches.

“You're not bait, Maddy. You're just part of a team.”

“What team?” I huff.

I dunno, for whatever reason, that superior tone of hers has me wanting to shove her head into a dorm fridge right about now. Or better yet, into that wonky fan in the back that keeps making metallic noises every few minutes. Try being a Sleeper without eyelashes, woman!

“The team. You know: you, Vera, me.”

I imagine the bliss of kicking her in the shins.

Suddenly, she's the one schooling me. “How do you think this all works? How do you think a few dozen Sentinels and some Keepers keep a lid on every outbreak, every new zombie alert?”

I hate to admit it, but she's got me there. “I honestly don't know. I guess I just assumed . . . Well, I never stopped to think about it.”

She nods impatiently, as if I've interrupted her mojo or something. “
This
is how. With Sleepers. A coroner here, a sheriff, librarian, federal employee, or reporter there. It's a network of us working with them working with us.”

“But why? Why would humans work with zombies? I mean, look at what happened to your family.”

She blinks, as if this is the stupidest question known to man. I dunno, I'm all befuddled, and maybe it is. “That's exactly why I'm doing this. I'm not as tough as you or a Sentinel like Dane or Courtney—”

“She's not a Sentinel.” Can't anybody keep this straight? “She's Sentinel Support.”

Lucy gives me major WTF face. “Whatever. Jealous much? Either way, I was lost, just sitting there, and Vera mentioned this program, where people like me could help. She knew I'd seen the Zerkers and knew what was up. And more than anything, I didn't want anyone else to go through what I had, losing their whole family like that. So if I can spend the rest of my life looking out for those yellow-eyed beasts, why wouldn't I?”