Passing Strange

• Chapter One
  
• Chapter Two
  
• Chapter Three
  
• Chapter Four
  
• Chapter Five
  
• Chapter Six
  
• Chapter Seven
  
• Chapter Eight
  
• Chapter Nine
  
• Chapter Ten
  
• Chapter Eleven
  
• Chapter Twelve
  
• Chapter Thirteen
  
• Chapter Fourteen
  
• Chapter Fifteen
  
• Chapter Sixteen
  
• Chapter Seventeen
  
• Chapter Eighteen
  
• Chapter Nineteen
  
• Chapter Twenty
  
• Chapter Twenty-One
  
• Chapter Twenty-Two
  
• Chapter Twenty-Three
  
• Chapter Twenty-Four
  
• Chapter Twenty-Five
  
• Chapter Twenty-Six
  
• Chapter Twenty-Seven
  
• Chapter Twenty-Eight
  
• Chapter Twenty-Nine
  
• Chapter Thirty
  
• Chapter Thirty-One
  
• Chapter Thirty-Two
  
• Chapter Thirty-Three
  
• Chapter Thirty-Four
  
• Chapter Thirty-Five
  
• Chapter Thirty-Six
  
• Chapter Thirty-Seven
  
• Chapter Thirty-Eight
  
• Chapter Thirty-Nine
  
• Chapter Forty
  
• About the Author
  
• Bonus Material
  

ALSO BY DANIEL WATERS

Generation Dead

Kiss of Life

For my parents, Jeff and Elaine

I
DON’T WANT TO DIE
, I thought. Not again.

I was on my knees. The man with the gun was saying something, but my head was a nest of buzzing wasps, their wings vibrating against the inside of my skull. White light filled my eyes, and the pitch of the man’s screaming rose to match the humming in my brain.

We can be killed. “Reterminated.” My friend Evan was reterminated not all that long ago.

No one knows why we started coming back, or why only teens have a chance of returning. There are theories of course—mold spores, bovine growth hormones in the food, you name it—but no real answers. Conventional wisdom states that suicides don’t come back, but I’m unliving proof that isn’t the case.

When I was alive I wanted to be dead, and so I committed suicide. Now that I was dead, all I wanted was to feel alive again.

I guess the irony struck me in a funny way. Maybe I laughed, I don’t know. Laughing takes effort for my people. I must have moved, though, because the shrill man shot me. Bullet Number Three. I’d already been shot in the back and in the face. I couldn’t feel the new shot, not as pain, anyhow, but as a vague dull pressure that was there and then it wasn’t. I actually saw the bullet pass out of my body high on the chest, just below my collarbone.

A spray of dark fluid hit the asphalt, and for a crazy moment I thought of my little sister, Kaitlyn, blowing grape juice through her sippy straw. The wasps in my head scattered, as though they were escaping through the hole the bullet had made in my body. I started to think again. How did it come to this?

We—the Sons (and Daughter) of Romero—Takayuki, Popeye, and Tayshawn—and I—had been setting up an art installation on the lawn of St. Jude’s Cathedral when the police arrived. Popeye had this grand idea that was going to be his greatest “artwork” yet. We were going to put some raggy-looking figures—the meek, the poor, the zombies—on the lawn of St. Jude’s, a little ways away from the manger scene. The zombie figures would be these forlorn, wretched-looking creatures, all tattered and bent, and they’d be in darkness, away from the bright lights and warm colors of the manger. One of them, its neck bent, would be looking over at the manger, at the kings and animals and the Holy Family. It was supposed to represent a couple of things, in Popeye’s mind—the dissociation we zombies feel from religion, and the longing many of us have to rejoin that community.

I’ve kind of felt that way myself for a long time—I was brought up Catholic—so it made sense for me to participate. I wasn’t sure why my friend Takayuki helped, though. Tak’s feelings are more extreme. He doesn’t think we’ve been rejected by a church or a religion. Tak thinks we’ve been rejected by God.

“I told you not to move!” the policeman yelled, his words coherent, now. I couldn’t see him through the light he was shining in my face, but I imagined that the gun was shaking in his hands. Adrenaline and fear would be twin rivers raging in his bloodstream. “Put your hands on your head!”

The commands seemed contradictory, but I did my best to comply. I’d covered my face with my hands, acting on some primal survival instinct that kicked in and urged me to hide my true nature from the world. I dropped my hands and raised my chin, letting the white light bathe my ruined face. I didn’t take any satisfaction in the policeman’s horrified gasp. My friend Tak—he has a section of his cheek missing, so when he brushes his long hair back you can see his teeth and everything; it’s pretty gross—loved to get a rise out of the beating hearts with his visible zombie-isms. Not me. I liked to get a rise out of them in other ways. I’m quite attractive for a dead girl.

Was
attractive, anyhow. When I exposed my face, the cop flinched like he was looking at still-quivering roadkill.

I think I was hit by the very first bullet the cops fired—and they fired quite a few. Why they singled me out as Zombie Enemy Number One is a mystery, especially when you have scary old Tak and Popeye all in leather, like extras from
The Matrix
, and you’ve got George—poor George, the most zombified of all zombies—trundling down the hill right
at
them.

Regardless, it was me that got it first. That one I could almost feel: a short slap in the face, much like the one my mother gave me when I told her who I was in love with.

Some slap. I went over backward and wrecked most of Popeye’s diorama as I went down.

Time stopped for a moment when I hit the ground. I saw Popeye moving off to my right; I thought I could see another pair of bullets suspended above me, frozen in mid-flight, but then I blinked and they were gone. I guess the world really was going all Matrix-y! I realized what had happened and what was still happening, and the first thing I did?

I touched my face.

What a vain little tramp I am.

The bullet had struck my cheek about an inch and a half below my eye. I pushed against my cheekbone and there was a sickening moment where my face gave, and it was like pressing against a rubber bag filled with sand or broken shells. I could hear my bones rasp against each other as I pushed, and I jerked my hand back after finding the hole the bullet made with the tip of my index finger. My fingers were wet with a bluish fluid. Zombie blood, I guess. Yuck.

So much for leaving a pretty corpse.

I can’t say if the police followed appropriate procedure or not. I know they’re supposed to identify themselves first, which they did (as though the wailing sirens and flashing lights weren’t enough of a clue), but beyond that it seems like their response to us was a little…excessive. I don’t really think that the Winford police are trigger-happy gunmen eager to draw down on shoplifters and jaywalkers, but who knows what training they’ve received with regard to the living dead? Maybe zombies show up next to rabid dogs and multiple murderers in their policing manuals, and maybe it isn’t considered deadly force if the target is already dead.

More than anything else, I think they were just scared.

I stared at my bluish fingers for a long moment. Tak was yelling to me from somewhere, and I saw Tayshawn running away, but it was hard to see because my left eye wasn’t sitting right anymore, so when I started running again I did so without looking back. I went about ten yards and got hit again, high on my back. There was a spray of bluish fluid. The impact, and the shock of seeing part of my body
outside
my body, made me lose my balance, and I pitched forward on my face.

I took my time getting up, and to be honest there was a moment where I thought it would be a lot easier—and a lot better—if I just let the stupid cops catch me and that would be the end of it. But then time sort of slowed down again and I started thinking about all the people who depended on me—Phoebe, Tommy, Adam, Sylvia, Colette, Tak and the boys, my parents, Katy—I didn’t think about anyone else. The thing about depression is, all you can think about is the pain. The pain grows and pulses and becomes so large, it blots out any thoughts of friends or family. Eventually it can grow so large, it even blots out your self.

But now, in that moment, I was thinking of the people I knew and loved. I was thinking how sad they’d be if I was retermed.

The death of a loved one is one of the few things that can create a pain similar to depression in the non-depressed. I didn’t want anyone to be sad—I
don’t
want anyone to be sad—and then I realized how sad I’d be, if
everyone
was sad. The worst, absolute worst, thing about coming back from death was when my father asked me why.
Why, Karen, why did you do it?
And when I tried to put it into words, it sounded like the most awful, most self-serving answer ever—because in a way, it was.

So I kept going. I didn’t get up, because I didn’t want to get shot again. Getting shot wasn’t pleasant at all. I crawled as fast as I could for this big thick tree that had a short hedge around it. I stood up when I reached the tree, then started running. I had to run with my hand on my face because the shattered pieces were grating against each other. I ran in an almost straight line, trying to keep the tree between me and the police, who’d stopped shooting. Probably because they were busy with poor George.

I made it off the church property and into the residential section beyond, where rows of old white New England homes stood. A dog barked at me. A screen door slammed. I ran through a yard that had plastic toddler toys strewn about like the remnants of Popeye’s art installation, then slid through a gap in the hedge and into the empty street beyond.

Where this policeman, the one with the bright lights and itchy trigger finger, was waiting for me.

I really didn’t want to die again.

A headshot would do it. That was the one thing all those movies predicted correctly. “Shoot it in the head.”

I drew air into my lungs, even though I don’t have to. My eyes were wide open. The first time I died I’d been unconscious, drifting away from the shores of life on an ocean of pain and sleeping pills. If I had to die again, I wanted to see it coming.

But the cop lowered his gun. It was hard to see in the glare of his headlights and with one eye not sitting properly, but I could tell that he was whispering to himself. He might have even made the sign of the cross.

But that could be my imagination, I thought, because who would make the sign of the cross while holding a gun?

It was so quiet now that the hornets were gone and the sirens were off.

He walked toward me, gun lowered but still at his side. The policeman was about my father’s age; a square, stocky man with a mustache and tired eyes. The hands holding the gun that shot me
were
shaking, after all. I could hear him breathing from twenty feet away. He looked horrified, sick to his stomach.

“I used to be pretty,” I said.

My words had a strange effect on him. If he’d been a sworn enemy of zombies, he probably would have put the next bullet into my brainpan—
shoot it in the head, shoot it in the head
—and that would be the end of me.

But he didn’t shoot.

“Get up,” he said, voice as shaky as his hands. His eyes looked moist.

Still on my knees, I waited. Was he looking for an excuse?

Something that would let him feel justified about his actions when he lay down to sleep at night, or when he was back at the station, regaling everyone with tales of his anti-zombie heroism?

Maybe he could sense what I was thinking, because his voice was whisper soft. “Get up,” he said. “Please.”

I rose, my movements slow and deliberate. I risked putting my hand over my damaged eye socket, because the world didn’t look the way it was supposed to when it wasn’t covered. With my good eye I searched the policeman’s face for intent, not certain what I would find there. Disgust? Pity? Contempt?

“Go on,” he said, waving across the street with his gun hand. “Get out of here.”

I decided that he looked more sad than anything.

Maybe he knew a zombie, I thought. Maybe his wife’s cousin’s friend’s sister was a zombie.

Or maybe he’d just come to the realization that the thing that he’d just fired a bullet into wasn’t a thing at all, but a
per
son
. A dead person, but a person nonetheless.

I felt a little unsteady on my feet, but I also felt something I hadn’t felt in a long time. I felt energized, as if the slugs that had hit me had triggered some inner wellspring of power within.

“Thank you,” I said, facing him. I brought my free hand across my body and covered the hole his bullet had made. I don’t know if I was trying to alleviate his guilt or encourage it.

He didn’t say anything, just gave me the slightest tilt of his chin. A muscle in his jaw flexed, and he swallowed rapidly, his Adam’s apple bobbing up and down the length of his throat.

I became aware of every gesture of his life, every physiological nuance. In the deep rasp of his breathing, the rise and fall of his chest, I was acutely aware of how alive he was.

He didn’t look right at me, but he didn’t turn away, either.

I crossed the street. Sirens kicked in from another part of the city, and I figured that the blaring whine signified that the other cops were on their way to the station with George and whomever else they’d caught. Melissa maybe—she’s a zombie who had taken sanctuary in the church. She’d had the misfortune of coming out just before the shooting started.

I guess not everyone could be as lucky as me.

So much was going through my head. Why had this happened? Why did they start shooting? Why didn’t they just let us surrender?

I quickened my pace but still chose my steps with care.

There was nowhere else to go, so I walked home.