Darlings of Paranormal Romance (Anthology) (128 page)

Of course, my words were spoken in
what we Zombies affectionately call “Slopar,” so he did not
understand me. To him, it sounded like lots of moaning and noises,
but I continued anyway, as I determined what part of the leg was
the meatiest. I normally don't like the drumstick of a man, but I
was feeling particularly hungry today.

In the days before I was completely
transformed, I had heard the news stories about us, saying we were
monsters. They said lots of things but the ones that stood out to
me now were soulless and evil.

"We are people," I continued, as I
sunk my teeth into his thigh, ripping off a piece, despite his
protests. "Just because we are a little dead does not mean we are
any different than you, Neil. Can I call you Neil?"

I was talking through mouthfuls of
him. When he didn't respond, I continued to snack away on what I
assumed, by the build, to be an athletic thigh.

“
Are you a runner, Neil?
You taste like a runner.” Happy with my choice of dinner, I
continued my rant and made myself comfortable on the cement of the
parking lot where we had stopped.

"Like, how they say that we lumber
about in groups with no order, and that is just not true. We
actually lumber around with our friends. The lady right over there,
with only half of her arm, is my favorite person to walk slowly
through an abandoned town with."

I was fairly certain that Neil was
almost dead. The color had drained from his face and the blood had
stopped spewing from the artery in his leg. In case he could still
hear me, I continued to ramble. "There are exceptions. There is
this one guy who has to walk in the back of the mob because he
drags his leg behind him and it slows us down. We dated in middle
school. I tolerate him, but his breath always smelled like cheese
and he called me ‘tart.’ I hated both of those things."

I nudged Neil at my joke, but instead
of laughing, he fell over. I debated staying there while I waited
to see if he would become zombified, as well. Since my body did not
move fast anymore, I figured it could happen before I made it
across the parking lot, so I began my slow march toward my friend,
Rose. She seemed to be enjoying herself, as I could see her happily
eating the brains of a young blond lady.

As I passed by a car window, I caught
a glimpse of my slow moving form and stared for a minute. "Zombie
life does absolutely nothing for my complexion," I yelled, over my
shoulder to Neil, as I took in a gray face with sunken in
eyes.

Continuing on my path to Rose, I
tried to push my appearance from my decaying mind. I wondered if it
was just my imagination that I could hear parts of me rotting. I
remembered my mother always telling me to take care of my
body.

“
Your body is your temple,
Cassie.” She would correct my posture by jerking my shoulders back.
“You should make sure you treat it as such.”

“
If only my mother could
see me now.” I was still talking to Neil, as my progress had not
taken me out of his earshot. “She would really be proud of her baby
girl.”

Of course, my mother was dead, and
she would never be able to see my current state. She had been in
the first round of the infected and they had disposed of her and
hundreds of others before they had a chance to spread the disease.
That is what they called being zombified in the beginning. They
called it a disease.

As I continued to drag myself across
the parking lot, I wondered how things could have been
different.

Chapter 1

The Longest School Day

“
It was the best of times,
it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, and it was the
age of foolishness….” The teacher was reading the beginning of A
Tale of Two Cities while I was attempting to construct a note to my
best friend, Ellen, about how good Brett Nathan’s hair looked that
morning. He was the love of my twelfth grade life. Having just
turned seventeen, I was now a woman. It was time to make my move. I
was getting up the nerve to ask him out, but right now I needed to
tell Ellen how fantastic he looked when he got out of the car that
morning and the sun hit his perfectly shaped coif.

Horror filled me as I felt the paper
slip from beneath the pen I was writing with. I looked up into Ms.
Hamrick’s stern eyes, behind impossibly large glasses, and knew
that my life was over. She was not happy with my note writing, and
I knew for a fact she loved to read notes out loud. I prepared
myself for the embarrassment of my innermost desires being revealed
to a classroom full of Neanderthals.

She pursed her lips, which only made
the fact that she had a hairy upper lip stand out. This woman had
never seen a wax strip or a pair of tweezers in her life. I found
myself momentarily mesmerized by the amount of hair in between her
very unkempt eyebrows. The look of bliss on her face meant I was in
for a big humiliation.

“
Well, Ms. Williams,” here
it came, “while I am sure that Ms. Davis desperately needs to know
that Mr. Nathan is way hotter than Leo, with an ass you could just
cling to; we have a book to read through. Start at the third
paragraph.” She walked back to the front of the classroom, as the
idiots around me erupted into laughter, and I felt my cheeks burn
with embarrassment.

I pulled my dark brown hair around my
face to hide. I was thankful I had opted to wear it down that day.
Too bad it was summer and I was wearing my favorite baby blue tank
top instead of a sweatshirt. I wished the worst things ever on my
teacher as I began to read from the book. I was just thankful Brett
was not in the classroom to hear that display of teenage puppy
love. How ridiculous it sounded when she read it out loud that way.
There was no doubt in my mind it would get to Brett. I felt like
the bathroom would be as good a place as any to eat my lunch
today.

I stumbled through the third
paragraph, my face burning with embarrassment. The smug look on the
teacher’s face made me angry, and I couldn’t wait to get out of
there.

Ellen gave me a sympathetic look when
Ms. Hamrick finally called on someone else to read. I shrunk down
in my seat and willed time to go faster.

I looked at my oversized, white
Fossil watch and saw the time was five until two. One more class
for the day and I could go home and relax with my favorite
book.

When the bell finally rang, I rushed
out of the classroom, to my locker, as fast as I could. Ellen was
there shortly after and I rolled my eyes at her as I slammed the
locker shut. I jammed my hands in my distressed dark jeans and
looked dejected. I was glad I had worn my favorite pair of tennis
shoes, with the pink laces, so I could make a quick get-away if I
saw Brett coming.

“
Ms. Hamrick is a mean old
witch.” I was angry and taking it out on the teacher was the best
thing I knew to do.

“
She is, and that was
beyond embarrassing.” Ellen lowered her voice to a whisper. “You
wrote me about his butt.” She tilted her head and we both giggled
at her statement.

I sighed loudly and hoped like hell
people would just forget about it, and then something amazing
happened. An announcement, from the principal, came over the
speakers telling everyone to get into a classroom and lock the
doors. The school would be on lockdown until further notice. Ellen
and I locked eyes, standing still for a minute, not sure what we
should do.

Panic ensued, and there was talk of a
shooter in the building, or some type of wild animal; no one knew
what was going on. Of course, Ms. Hamrick’s classroom was the one
we were closest to, so we all got ushered inside.

I was horrified to see that not only
were most of the kids I had just experienced the single most
humiliating moment of my life with were there, but so was Brett. He
must have been caught in the group of students Ms. Hamrick pushed
into her classroom. He caught me staring at him and flashed an
adorable smile. His teeth could be the stars of a tooth paste
commercial. Getting out of my head, I pulled my gaze away from him,
knowing I had stared too long. I thought the day could not possibly
get any worse, but I could never predict how wrong I was about
that.

I checked my watch and it was almost
three o’clock. An hour had gone by and we still hadn’t heard
anything from the principal. We were all supposed to be quiet and
Ellen and I were writing notes back and forth to pass the
time.

I
squinted at her chicken scratch across the page.
Brett is in here.

I wrote
her back.
Duh, I am not blind; I see
that.

Just then, a guy caught my eye
outside the classroom window. The blinds had been pulled shut, but
I could see him through the cracks on the side. He looked bloody
and his movements seemed slow. He reminded me of an ant that had
just been stepped on, the way he jerked almost as if it were
painful to move.

I stared for a minute before I drew
attention to him, trying to figure out what he was doing. I raised
my hand and watched Ms. Hamrick look at me and look back down. Why
was she acting like that?

I nudged Ellen. “Look, something is
wrong with that man.”

The clothes he wore looked torn and
his shirt was hanging open. I wondered if he had come from the
street and been in some kind of accident. His skin was a little
gray-looking and his cheeks were sunken in like he had been hungry
for a while.

Putting my hand back down, I watched
him walking slowly towards the classroom. The look on his face was
scary and his eyes stared straight ahead. I couldn’t be sure, but I
didn’t think I saw him blink. He kept coming at the same steady
pace like it was difficult for him to walk.

He didn’t stop when he got to the
window; he pressed his face up against it and opened his mouth
wide, revealing blood inside. There was definitely something wrong
with this guy, and I was scared. He started to bang on the window
of the classroom, and I began to scream.

Chapter 2

Mayhem

"What in the devil?" Ms. Hamrick was
looking at the man now, and so was the rest of the classroom. The
other girls in the class were now screaming and everyone was
scrambling to get to the back of the classroom.

The man continued to beat on the
glass and press his face to it. Finally, he pulled his arm back far
enough that he punched straight through it. This caused even more
screams, and one of the loudest came from Ms. Hamrick. The glass
ripped through his skin and the blood was pouring onto the floor.
He didn’t seem to notice.

She reached over to the blackboard
and came back with the yardstick she sometimes tapped loudly on her
desk when she thought we were not paying attention. She made a
half-hearted attempt to push the man's arm back out the window, but
he pulled it and her toward the broken glass.

I watched in horror as her arm was
sliced open and the man pulled it towards his mouth. I couldn’t
tell if he was trying to bite her, but that is what it looked like.
Suddenly, his head exploded and pieces of it flew all over Ms.
Hamrick, who stood frozen, still holding onto the yardstick which
was covered in blood, and caused me to clamp a hand over my
mouth.

"What the hell?" I murmured the words
everyone was thinking, as the students all started talking at
once.

Men were walking towards the
classroom with their guns held up. They looked like a makeshift
SWAT team. The classroom was silent; everyone was trying to figure
out what they had just witnessed. A guy in dark glasses held a
radio to his lips.

"The walker has been eliminated,
checking the damage now," one of the officers said. He walked up to
the window and looked in at a scared Ms. Hamrick. "Were you bitten,
Ma'am?"

Ms. Hamrick looked at the cut on her
arm and she looked back at us, huddled in the back corner of the
classroom. "No, the window just cut me."

I looked at her then, because I had
been sure I saw her arm go into the crazy man's mouth. I had heard
on the news about people going crazy on a drug called “bath salts”
and biting people's face off. I wondered if the situation here was
similar. Maybe I hadn't seen him bite her.

"Ellen, did that man bite
her?”

I leaned close to my friend, who had
a tight grip on my arm, her brown eyes terrified as she turned them
to me. "I thought so, but it happened so fast."

Finally, Ellen let go of the death
grip she had on my arm.

The men moved around the front of the
school and entered the building. I could hear their footsteps as
they ran through the school. They came into our classroom to check
out Ms. Hamrick's injury. They looked at all of us, stopping at
each one of us and staring into our eyes. One of the boys that sat
in the back of the class spoke up first. "What was wrong with that
man?"

The guy with the gun rubbed his hand
over his face and opened his mouth to answer. He was interrupted by
someone screaming and all the men ran quickly from the
room.

A few brave souls, including me, went
to the door to see what was going on. As I looked around the
corner, I saw the school's guidance counselor, Ms. Peters, running
down the hall. Her dress was torn and she looked really scared.
Behind her, our principal was running, but he looked different. His
graying skin reminded me of the man whose head was now in pieces in
our classroom.