Eat, Brains, Love (7 page)

Harlene looked mournfully at an empty paper coffee cup. “You've got no idea.”

“Hey.” I hummed a few bars of the song that was still stuck in my head. “That sound familiar?”

Harlene shook her head. “Not a good time for that, Sweet Pea.”

The next kid Jamison showed in was nearly as big as him: he was the kind of guy who looked like he'd gotten his first gym membership sometime around kindergarten. Someone had thrown a blanket around his shoulders, probably to hide his blood-spattered white T-shirt.

“Chazz Slade,” said Harlene. “Have a seat.”

Chazz squeezed his bulk into the little desk, remaining slightly doubled over. He was holding his stomach and looked pale, with dark circles around his eyes. I really hoped he wouldn't vomit. That guy could probably hold gallons of gross cafeteria food.

“So,” began Harlene, “I understand you were dating Amanda Blake.”

Chazz nodded dumbly, keeping his eyes focused on the scratched surface of the desk in front of him. I realized Harlene had said that more for my benefit; it would be harder to massage our lie into someone like Chazz who had a more intimate understanding of our runaway zombie bimbo. Also—not to sound catty or anything—but after seeing Amanda, it totally made sense that this guy would be her boyfriend.

“We're soul mates,” Chazz mumbled.

I had to contain a snort at the way the big lug so casually played the soul-mate card. Chazz sure didn't look like the type to get all poetic.

“I see,” replied Harlene. “So you weren't aware of her relationship with Jake Stephens?”

“Who? What the fuck, lady?” Chazz clutched himself tighter and, as he did, his stomach let loose a seismic rumble. A thick vein on his neck throbbed. “Ugh—I need to go, I'm gonna be sick.”

Chazz wasn't taking this well; convincing him that his high school sweetheart had made a death pact with some
other
guy was going to be a tough sell.

Harlene glanced at me. “Just another moment, Mr. Slade. We need to discuss Amanda.”

I probed Chazz's mind. I expected to find anger and confusion, maybe some stifled feelings of inadequacy or the urge to go punch a smaller person in the face—you know, typical emotions for a cheating-girlfriend situation. Instead, I found a cold place. A mind rapidly going numb.

While most minds are labyrinthine, Chazz's mind only had room for two thoughts just then: fight it and eat them.

Oh my god. He was one of them. Right on the verge of full undead mode.

“Harlene!” was all I managed to scream before Chazz lunged across the desk. Harlene was just quick enough to get her arm up, Chazz's teeth sinking into her forearm instead of her throat. He tore off a chunk of flesh, and Harlene fell backward in her chair.

Chazz tossed his head back, gulping down the bite he'd taken out of Harlene. The throbbing vein in his neck had turned black under his suddenly paper-white skin. He'd gone full zombie. His eyes were sunken in his head, dark and empty.

And staring right at me.

I heard Harlene shouting for Jamison, but even though he was just in the hallway outside, I knew he'd be too late. Chazz would tear me apart before Jamison had even unholstered his gun. Two zombie massacres in one school on the same day? At least I'd be part of some NCD record.

As Chazz lumbered toward me, I acted instinctively. I wasn't even sure what I was doing—probably like those moms you read about who lift cars off their babies. I reached into his mind as hard as I could, ignoring the cold and clammy feeling touching that dead organ sent shooting through me, and basically just thrashed around. Like groping for a light switch in a dark room. When my astral fingers came up against something, I yanked with all my mental might.

Chazz collapsed to the floor inches in front of me, unconscious, just as Jamison burst through the door with his gun drawn. Mere seconds had passed since Chazz had bitten Harlene.

I felt dizzy, like I'd gotten up too fast, and then white spots flashed across my vision and my head started aching like I was being stabbed repeatedly in the brain. I fell to the floor next to Harlene, who was clutching the wound on her arm, blood squeezing through her fingers.

“What did you do?” she wheezed. Her words sounded like they were coming from underground and I couldn't make my mouth form an answer, even though that answer would have been “not a freaking clue.”

Jamison peered curiously down at Chazz's body, then cocked his pistol. He looked to Harlene. “Should I?”

“That won't be necessary.”

The voice came from the doorway. At first, I thought I must be hallucinating, some weird side effect of whatever telepathic mojo I'd just worked on Chazz. But then I saw Tom, holding a tray of coffees and looking more nervous than he had facing certain death that afternoon, standing right next to Mr. Bow Tie. Whoa. I hadn't seen him since training, didn't think he was even the kind of NCD bigwig to leave Washington. If he was here, we must really be in crisis mode.

Mr. Bow Tie strode into the room, the heels of his fancy loafers sounding like thunder to me as they crossed the floor. He spared a brief glance for Harlene, then crouched over Chazz's body. He laid a hand on Chazz's head, as if trying to feel the brain beneath.

“Hm,” he said, then turned and knelt in front of me. Everyone in the room was quiet, watching, as the big, scary boss from Washington handed me his handkerchief. “Your nose is bleeding.”

Unlike Harlene's, Mr. Bow Tie's voice was totally clear, cutting precisely through the layers of fuzz suffocating my brain. I took the hanky and pressed it to my face. So much for never getting a nosebleed.

Mr. Bow Tie patted my shoulder. It was a gesture of approval, like you might pat a dog after it successfully rolls over. Come to think of it, I felt like rolling over right then and just sleeping for days. He started to stand up but then looked back at me, a thin smile on his lips.

“‘The Way You Look Tonight,'” Mr. Bow Tie said. “That's the song.”

I felt pretty out of it, but I can say with some certainty that I wasn't humming.

JAKE

I WOKE UP IN MY OWN BED. IT'D ALL BEEN A REALLY heinous dream. Everything was fine and I'd definitely never eaten a person. The end.

And then I realized that this wasn't my bed. My bed at home—my comfortable, amazing bed where I should have been waking up with a full agenda of video games and comic books to look forward to—did not smell like old-lady arthritis cream. My room didn't have a giant yellow water stain shaped like Abraham Lincoln spread across its ceiling. There wasn't a stern-looking, black-and-white picture of a turn-of-the-century dude holding a pitchfork hanging on my bedroom wall.

This was the mortician's mother's room.

So it all really happened.

Things got a little weird last night. I mean, socially weird. Not to be confused with the much weirder events of the afternoon.

After the whole rush of no longer being gut-shot (me) or hideously disfigured (Amanda) wore off, the reality set in that we didn't really know each other and, holy shit, we're fugitives holed up in a funeral home. One minute Amanda's playing records and the next minute it's too quiet, we've got nothing to say to each other, and there's a pile of recently gobbled body parts that we're both struggling to ignore.

Luckily, it turns out the undead still need to sleep. Which is all right with me because sleeping happens to be one of my favorite activities.

Also, eating. But that's sort of ruined for me now.

We explored the house in awkward silence, just talking to agree on sleeping arrangements and which one of us would get to shower first (her, of course). I'd offered Amanda the mom's bedroom, being all chivalrous and junk, but she said the idea of sleeping in someone else's bed grossed her out. We'd both decided the mortician's room was out of the question, neither of us wanting to sleep in the same bed as the guy who handled dead people. Kinda stupid when you consider our clothes were stiff and crusty with other people's gore.

When Amanda went off to shower, I picked out some clothes from the mortician's closet. He was wider and taller than me but they'd have to do: a musty white T-shirt, a faded brown flannel, and some bright blue jeans that looked like the kind my dad would buy.

I found a bottle of coconut air freshener and sprayed the shit out of my new outfit. There was a washing machine in the basement, but after the mess we'd made downstairs, neither of us was eager to go back.

While I was giving the mortician's clothes a coating of tropical scent, Amanda poked her head into the bedroom. Her blonde hair was still wet from the shower and she'd found a faded, flower-print dress in the old lady's stuff. It fit her better than the mortician's clothes would fit me. It would probably look like a polite little church dress on the mortician's withered mom, but on Amanda it became some retro-chic thing that a free-spirited college girl might wear. It still smelled funny, though. I could tell even surrounded in my own personal coconut fog. Everything in here smelled stale, and I hoped I didn't develop some kind of brain disorder where I forever associated hot chicks with the smell of mothballs.

I offered her the can of air freshener.

She wrinkled her nose. “I think that's actually making it worse.”

I sniffed my new outfit. Whatever. I liked it. Coconut was definitely preferable to the lingering formaldehyde smell.

“So,” continued Amanda, “about tomorrow.”

“Yeah?”

“You're going to be here, right?”

“As opposed to . . .”

“Taking off in the middle of the night.”

“Why would I do that?”

“Because they're looking for two of us,” explained Amanda. “And you think it might be easier to get away on your own.”

“I don't think that. I'm not even sure what we're getting away from.” I held up my change of clothes. “I hadn't thought about much beyond the air freshener.”

“Okay,” said Amanda. “Good.”

“Wait. Did you think that? About bailing?”

“I thought about it,” she admitted, shrugging. “But I decided it'd be better if we stick together.”

So Amanda had considered ditching me—crawling out the bathroom window, maybe hot-wiring another car and leaving me to figure this zombie thing out by myself. Not cool. Although, I guess those are the kind of self-preservation decisions popular girls make all the time.

A look of hurt must have shown on my face, because Amanda sheepishly looked elsewhere.

“Sorry. I didn't think about it for long,” she insisted.

“It's okay.”

“We'll figure it out in the morning.” Amanda lingered in the doorway, like she was scrounging for something reassuring to say. I cleared my throat and busied myself with rummaging through the mortician's closet. I didn't really feel equipped to discuss the future with Amanda Blake and she must've felt something similar because she crept downstairs while my head was still buried in smelly clothes.

Now morning was here, and shit was just as confusing as yesterday.

 

Downstairs, I passed by the funeral parlor where the display model coffin was open, a blanket hanging out of it.

“Uh, did you sleep in the coffin?” I asked, walking into the living room where Amanda was sitting on the couch, watching the news.

“It was the only place in here that didn't smell funky,” she replied. “I didn't close the lid.”

“Oh, well, as long as you didn't close the lid, I guess that makes it totally normal.”

“I think normal stopped applying to us around lunch period yesterday, Jake.”

“Well, whatever. It does make me rethink my whole vampire theory. Did you feel particularly
drawn
to the coffin?”

But Amanda's face had gone pale. She shushed me and pointed to the TV. There we were, on-screen. Amanda's glamorous senior photo, taken next to a gentle waterfall, her blonde hair practically freaking glowing, next to my cheapie yearbook photo taken in front of those green screens with the neon laser background, looking sort of baked and like I'd just been forced to take off my winter hat. I awkwardly ran my fingers through my mop of hair, as if doing so could magically improve the me on the TV screen. The news guy was talking about the carnage at RRHS but I didn't pay much attention to that. I was more focused on the headline beneath our pictures.

SCHOOL SHOOTERS IN CUSTODY
.

“Not a word of that's true,” I said.

“No shit,” said Amanda.

I thought about those psychos in the black SUV. How they didn't show us any badges or even try to arrest us before opening fire. How the squirrelly girl in the backseat didn't seem all that surprised to see me walking around with a hole in my stomach.

“They want people to think we're caught,” I said.

“And to think we used guns,” added Amanda. “Instead of, like, teeth.”

“Conspiracy?”

“Total conspiracy.”

I flopped down on the couch next to Amanda. “Everyone thinks we're arrested.
My parents
think I'm arrested.”

“My mom's probably trying to sell her story as we speak. She's always wanted me to be famous, now's her big chance.”

I gave her a screwed-up look, because that was a seriously screwed-up thing to think.

“No way,” I said. “I don't care how many cars you've stolen—which is an awesome skill, by the way, can you teach me?—there's no way your mom, or
anyone
, would try to cash in on her own daughter's murderous rampage.”

“Yeah, well, you don't know my mom,” she replied. “She's nice enough, I guess, but she's still a little mad I never became a child star.”

We fell silent, the enormity of it all sinking in. Yesterday, my biggest problem had been an oral presentation. Today, I was an enemy of the state.

On the screen, our images were replaced by those of twenty or so of our classmates. Amanda quickly turned off the TV, and we both pretended we hadn't noticed the death toll of yesterday's rampage. I sort of never wanted to think about it. I wanted to pretend that it was something I hadn't done. It wasn't me—it was Zombie-Jake, and me and that guy weren't on speaking terms.

Amanda grabbed a plate of peanut butter toast off the coffee table, one piece missing a tiny bite. She held it out to me.

“Try this,” she ordered.

I took a bite. It was cold, with a ton of peanut butter, probably to cover up that she'd burned the bread.

“Mmm,” I said, not sure why Amanda was looking at me so expectantly. “You're really good at making toast?”

She rolled her eyes, shaking her head. “Do you feel anything?”

“Um. Grateful?”

“How about less hungry?”

I had to think about this. I looked down at the piece of toast and realized that I didn't have any urge to eat more. It's not that it was repulsive to me, it's just that I didn't feel the need to eat.

“You just slept like ten hours and you're not hungry,” said Amanda. “Weird, right?”

I took another bite. A denial bite. I didn't feel anything. I ran my hand over my belly, checking for the thunderous tremors that had started my day yesterday. All quiet on the stomach front.

“I'm not the
other
kind of hungry either,” I said. “So that's good, right?”

Amanda nodded. “Me neither. For now.”

“How long do you think we have?”

“I don't know,” she answered. “What're we going to do when it happens again?”

I didn't have an answer to that. I looked back to the TV where just moments ago the faces of our dead classmates had peered out at us. Amanda followed my gaze, hugging herself.

“Shit,” I said. “More reasonable portions?”

 

We found some old pastel-blue suitcases in the back of the old lady's closet. Judging by the wrinkled yellow tags still attached to their handles, the last time they saw any use was in the early '70s for a trip to Hawaii.

We stuffed the choicest clothes into those suitcases, which meant they were mostly empty. It was like raiding a really bad thrift store. We tried to pick stuff that fit us, that wouldn't make us stand out, and that would keep us warm. Amanda insisted I pack sweaters in case we had to sleep in the car.

The car. We found the keys hanging by the back door. It was a beat-up old station wagon, brown, with that classic wood paneling down the sides. Amanda frowned at it, but I figured taking this car was better than her just stealing another random ride. No one would be missing the mortician for a few more days, hopefully. And at least it wasn't the hearse.

The mortician had thirty-five bucks in his wallet. We found another three hundred stuffed in a coffee can on top of the fridge. It would buy us more than enough gas to get out of New Jersey.

After I'd loaded our stuff into the car, I went back inside and found Amanda in the basement, standing in front of the tarp covering the mortician and his mom. It had started to smell a little down there, worse than just the chemical smell the room had started with. Like rotten meat.

“Should we say something?” asked Amanda, looking at me over her shoulder.

I thought about it. We'd eaten these people, slept in their house, and were stealing their stuff. “Sorry?” I ventured.

Amanda nodded. “We're sorry,” she said to the tarp.

 

We headed west on the interstate. I drove and Amanda fiddled with the radio, scanning all the AM stations for that weird radio show her brother had talked about—
Coast-to-Coast AM
. It was the middle of the day, though, and she couldn't find any talk of undead plagues or government cover-ups, just a bunch of loud old dudes screaming about Canadian sleeper agents sneaking into our country to spread socialist propaganda, and old ladies reading passages from books I'd never heard of. Boring stuff.

“I think we should go see him,” said Amanda, flipping over to some lame FM pop station.

“Your brother?”

“Kyle, yeah. He'll know what to do. He goes to school in Michigan.”

“You want to drive to Michigan?”

“We've gotta drive somewhere.”

“You don't think he'll be a little freaked out to have his baby sister, the alleged school shooter, show up at his dorm?”

She shrugged. “More or less freaked out than when I tell him I'm a zombie?”

“Good point,” I admitted. “But don't you think he'll have, like, gone home? To be with your family?”

“My mom's probably already got the ‘for sale' sign in the yard. She won't be hanging around New Jersey.” Amanda paused, thinking. “Your folks won't either.”

“Huh?”

“You think our families will still be welcome in town after what we did? Government cover-up or not, the result is the same, you know.”

Jeez. I hadn't even thought about that. My dad worked at the same office as Mr. DeCarlo. My mom was a cochair on the PTA. And Kelly, she couldn't go back to school with kids whose brothers and sisters I'd eaten. They'd have to move or maybe go into hiding. For the rest of their lives, people would look at my mom and dad, wondering what they'd done to screw me up so bad.

The car shook as I hit the rumble strips on the side of the highway. I'd drifted off the road. Amanda stared at me.

“Jake?”

“This is so fucked,” was all I could say. “We really messed up.”

I groped for a pair of cheap plastic sunglasses the mortician had left on the dashboard and shoved them onto my face. I really, really did not want to cry in front of Amanda Blake.

“I've been thinking about it,” said Amanda, looking out her window. “What we did was awful, but we couldn't control it. And if there are people out there trying to cover it up, then they
did
know
.
About all of this. They know about zombies and they're just, like, letting it happen and cleaning it up afterward.”