Generation Dead (27 page)

259

your parents know what you are doing. This isn't fair to them."

Tommy made a noise in the backseat like he was trying to clear his throat. It was a horrible noise, one that Phoebe never wanted to hear again.

"You're right," she said. "I'll tell them."

Faith reached across the seat and patted Phoebe's hand, her touch warm on Phoebe's skin.

"I know you will, honey," she said. "You're a brave girl. There aren't many girls your age who would befriend a living dead boy."

Phoebe returned her smile, but she didn't feel very brave. Tommy was brave. Karen was brave. Adam was brave because he risked getting kicked off the football team for Tommy.

"Mom," came a dry, froglike voice from the back, "I'm not living dead. I'm a zombie."

"Oh you," she said. "You know I don't like that word."

"Zzzzzzzombie," he replied.

Phoebe turned and caught him smiling while his mother laughed.

"I'll pick you up at ten," Faith said, and then she drove away, leaving them at the big neon mouth of the Winford Mall. Phoebe felt even less brave standing there on the sidewalk with Tommy. A woman walked by them, clutching her plastic bag close to her. "Winford Mall" was written in a bold cursive script in pink neon above the doors. Phoebe looked at the letters and frowned.

260

"We could go," Tommy said, "if you want." He reached for the cell phone on his belt.

Phoebe shook her head, wiping the damp palms of her hands on the sides of her black jeans. She then held her hand out to Tommy.

"No," she said, "we've got a movie to see."

He looked at her for a long moment, the neon making bright streaks of pink and orange on the flat glossy surface of his eyes.

He took her hand and they went into the mall.

There were strange looks directed their way the moment they entered. A kid in a Patriots jersey turned to his friend and said, loud enough for them to hear, "Hey, check it out!
Dawn of the Dead
!"

His quick-witted buddy chimed in with, "Yeah, but he hasn't eaten her yet."

They shared a raucous laugh, and Phoebe flushed, but she grasped Tommy's hand more tightly as he tried to step away, his fists clenched.

"Don't," she whispered. They walked on.

Dawn of the Dead
notwithstanding, Phoebe knew that actual dead people rarely entered the malls. One didn't see the differently biotic hanging out at the bowling alley or shooting the breeze outside Starbucks. They had no need to go to a restaurant, and apart from Tommy Williams, very few had been seen participating in or observing sporting events. Zombies, for the most part, were homebodies--the few of them who were allowed to stay at home.

261

They walked down the hall, past a chain restaurant and a jewelry store into an open atrium, where they could look over a chest-high railing onto the level below. A cluster of small, frail birch trees grew from a hole recessed into the white tile floor. The crown of the birch tree was about even with the edge of the railing, the thin branches sporting small, dark leaves. As they approached the rail, a small brown bird flew from somewhere in the rafters and alighted on a nearby branch.

"A sparrow," Phoebe said. "Poor thing."

"I know ...how she feels." Beyond Tommy's shoulder, Phoebe saw an older woman standing outside Pretty Nails, frowning at them. Tommy turned just as the woman gestured.

"Did she just throw the evil eye at us?" he asked.

"I think so," Phoebe said. "Or something worse."

Phoebe looked around her. Was she just imagining it, or was everyone staring at them?

Maybe it was all in her head.

Either way, it was a long walk to the theater on the other end of the mall.

They walked past a Wild Thingz! store on the way to the theater, and Phoebe pointed at a small display in the front window that had the
Zombie Power
! and the
Some of My Best Friends are Dead
T-shirts, along with a couple of caps, bandannas, and armbands bearing similar Slydellco. slogans. There were also a few bottles and tubes arranged as part of the display. Phoebe started laughing when she realized what they were.

"Oh my God," she said. "Zombie hygiene products!" There were shampoos, skin balm, and two different toothpastes.

262

Her favorite was a body spray that had a large silver Z on a cylindrical black bottle. The fine print read:
For the active undead male.

"Maybe I should get some," Tommy said, smiling. "I'm pretty ...active."

"I'm sorry," Phoebe said, still laughing. "I don't know why I think it's so funny."

They went in among the racks of T-shirts and goth gear, Phoebe's mood improving as M.T. Graves's voice wailed from the store speakers. They asked the clerk if they could have a sample of Z. The clerk did a double take at them. She could have been Margi's stunt double except her spikes were purple and she had a wide silver ring through her nose to go along with the bangles and circlets of leather on her arm.

"Oh, wow," she said, smiling. "A real live zombie! Wow, I've been hoping one of you guys would come in, yeah." She explained they didn't have samples but Tommy was free to "take a whiff from the display bottle in the window. He took her up on the offer and asked Phoebe what she thought.

She inhaled the air around him. The scent was mostly spicy but with a strong hint of something citrusy. Lime, maybe.

"I love that stuff," Purple-Margi said. "I bought my boyfriend a bottle. Jason wears it all the time."

"Thank you," Tommy said, turning to Phoebe. "How does it smell?"

"I like it," she said. He bought a bottle.

The clerk's friendliness toward them lifted some of Phoebe's paranoia, as did the idea of undead hygiene products. But the more she thought about it, the more it creeped her out.

263

Okay, so the dead didn't sweat anymore, and obviously they weren't rotting or there would be some real problems. Maybe odor-causing bacteria couldn't live off their skin, or something.

"Mom said I had to take you to a ...chick flick," he said, and she realized that they were at the theater.

"Mmmm.
Strays and Surfboards
or
Mr. Mayhem
," Phoebe said.

"
Strays
it is."

Tommy paid for the tickets and bought her a tub of popcorn and a soda. Faith had warned Phoebe in the car that he was going to be paying for the whole thing and not to cause a scene because "you could be causing enough of a scene already." The freckled kid manning the popcorn station looked like he was swallowing a frog when Phoebe turned and asked Tommy if he enjoyed liquid butter substitute on his popcorn.

"I used to love liquid . .. butter substitute," he said. Phoebe laughed. Tommy didn't seem to mind when she forgot about him being dead.

There weren't any dead characters in the movie, a light romantic comedy about a woman dogcatcher who kept impounding the adorably incorrigible chocolate Lab puppy of a guy who designed surfboards.

Phoebe thought the movie was boring, and the idea of sitting in the dark next to Tommy and eating popcorn began to strike her as patently absurd. If you had your life to live over again, Phoebe Kendall, she thought--you'd probably spend it watching the madcap antics of Ruffles the dog and patiently await the release of
Strays and Surfboards II.

The movie's obligatory bedroom scene brought memories

264

of lying on the dusty floor of the Haunted House in pitch-black darkness, for some odd reason. Phoebe was thankful they played the scene for laughs; Ruffles leaped up on the bed during the festivities, and surfer boy smashed a lamp trying to evict the loveable scamp.

Phoebe glanced at Tommy during the scene. He stared ahead, unblinking, as the dead were prone to do, and she wondered what either of them was doing there.

They went back into the too-bright light of the mall around nine o'clock. The few people who had been in the theater stumbled blearily into the foyer, lurching not unlike the more traditional zombies of movie history.

"Did you like ...the movie?" Tommy asked.

"The dog was cute," Phoebe said.

He murmured agreement, a long sustained sound. "Me ...neither."

"Tommy," she said, "is this like football for you?"

Tommy cocked his head to the side, just like Ruffles had when he saw the dogcatcher lying on his spot of the surfer's bed in that awful movie.

"What... do you mean?"

"I mean, being with me. You joined the football team so you could prove a point, not because you had any great love for the game. Is that what being with me is like?"

They walked past a clothing store. There were fewer people in the mall at this hour and, it seemed, less attention coming their way. Maybe night people were just more accepting of the differently biotic.

265

"Who said," he replied after a moment, "that I don't like football?"

He was joking, surely. Or was he? It was hard to read the humor of differently biotic people, much like it was hard to read real meaning in e-mails sent late at night. He was about to say more but then saw something in the next store and nodded in that direction.

Phoebe followed the line of his vision toward the bookstore, where Margi was reading a book from a stack set on a display table near the front. She saw them at the same time they saw her.

"Hey guys," she said, putting the book down and trying as best she could to be casual--which was one thing that Margi never was. Normal for her would have been to chatter nonstop.

Phoebe looked at the title that Margi had been leafing through.
And the Graves Give Up Their Dead,
by Reverend Nathan Mathers.

"Mathers?" she said. "Good reading, Margi?" She scanned the back cover copy and began to read it aloud: '"In this thought-provoking and controversial book from one of the nation's preeminent experts on the living impaired phenomenon, Reverend Nathan Mathers draws equally from ancient theological texts and today's headlines. Mathers offers a solid argument that the existence of the living impaired is a warning sign of the coming Apocalypse, and he outlines what Christians must do to prepare themselves for the event.'"

"Well, I'm sold," Tommy said, but Phoebe was waiting for Margi to say something.

266

She didn't, for a while. Instead she flicked her pink spikes out of her eyes and avoided eye contact with Phoebe. "I think there's a lot of fear," she said.

"This is ...progress," Tommy said, looking over the rest of the wares on the display table. "Look, there's a few of ...Slydell's books. "
The Dead Have
...
No Life
,'" he read. '"
What Parents Need
...
to Know About Their Undead
...
Youth.
' My mom ...has that one."

"You aren't really quitting the class, are you, Margi?" Phoebe asked her.

Margi looked away. Phoebe was more nervous asking her that question than she was walking hand in hand with a zombie.

"I need to, Phoebe," Margi whispered, so that Tommy couldn't hear. Not that he would have; he was already turning pages in a book some lawyer had written:
Civil Law and the Dead
. "1 can't take this."

"
This
?" Phoebe said, bordering on shrill. "Margi, I...."

"I gotta go," Margi said. She mumbled something about having to meet her mom. Phoebe didn't try to stop her.

"Tommy?" she said.

"Hm?" he said, taking his nose out of the book to respond. "Did Margi...leave?"

"Yeah," she said, and Tommy put the book down.

He looked at her for a moment. "Mom said I should get you ... a milk shake. Mom says ...you like ...milk shakes."

"I love milk shakes," she said, wishing that he were easier to read.

They went to the Honeybee Dairy, one of the last

267

non-chain storefronts in the mall. Honeybee Dairy was just about Phoebe's favorite restaurant; she'd spent many a time having burgers and shakes with Adam and Margi at the original one in Oakvale.

Colette, too. Colette used to go with them.

They sat down at the long counter on shiny silver bucket stools that were cushioned with red vinyl. They chose the counter because it was empty. A few of the booths had customers: a quartet of rowdy teens, a young couple Phoebe recognized from the movie theater, a trio of blue-haired ladies. All eyes seemed to follow them as they sat down.

"I wish I could help you ...with Margi," Tommy said. "I can ...understand ...what she is feeling."

"Can you?" Phoebe said, but what she thought was, Can Colette?

He said that he could. "I've heard it from people ... on my Web site. The dead ...lived once ...but the living ...have not yet died."

"You speak of the dead as though they are all the same," she said. "Is it really that way? You're still different people, right?"

"But bound ... by common experience."

"Really? Did all of you see ...experience, whatever ...the same thing when you died?"

He started to answer, but then stopped. Phoebe thought that maybe this common experience wasn't really so common. How could it be when Karen could practically run a marathon and win a beauty pageant, and Sylvia needed a ten-minute head start to make it up a flight of stairs?