Passing Strange (29 page)

G
UTTRIDGE LOOKED LIKE A
different man when they led him away from the lake house in handcuffs. He’d shaved off his thick beard and lost about twenty pounds. But Pete thought his eyes were especially different. They met the camera only once, by accident, and what they revealed was a man lost to the world. They didn’t show his wife or children on camera, but she was quoted as saying, “It was wrong, what he did. I knew it was wrong, but he’s still my husband.”

Alholowicz made a statement to the press; his partner didn’t appear. He talked about having received credible evidence regarding a conspiracy to implicate zombies in a number of crimes, but he didn’t say what crimes and he didn’t reveal either his sources or who the zombies suspects were. He said that they were still on the lookout for other conspirators—his word.

When asked about specific incidents, such as the grave desecrations in Winford Cemetery, he replied that they had testimony from a participant that Guttridge was involved, and that no undead Americans were thought to have participated in the crimes. He had to pause for a moment when a reporter asked him what, specifically, Guttridge and the other “conspirators” would be charged with.

“Vandalism and grave desecration can both carry a substantial punishment,” he said after a moment. “As well as a number of other infractions that the courts will have to decide upon with regards to the conspiracy against the undead. Kidnapping is a possibility, too.”

Pete reached for his lemonade, halting as a ragged fissure opened up on his wrist, zippering across to reveal viscous oily fluid and gray-black flesh. His whole arm was shaking as he brought the glass to his lips.

He’d missed the question, but Alholowicz was saying something about it being illegal to beat your dog or murder an illegal immigrant. He refused to comment on the follow-up question, which was about Tommy Williams and his efforts in the nation’s capital to call attention to what the reporter called “the plight of differently biotic Americans.”

“So are you saying that we have nothing to fear from the undead population?”

Alholowicz shook his head. “Since forming the Undead Crimes Task Force a few months ago, we have gathered no evidence that zombies have been involved in any violent crimes, except as victims.”

“That being said, do you believe that zombies represent a threat to our society?”

“I believe that zombies are just like us. Just like our children,” he said. “Except that they are dead.”

Pete watched as another wound opened above the crook of his elbow, the skin separating to reveal a slab of muscle the color of an uncooked chicken breast.

The questions devolved from there, with Alholowicz repeatedly informing the public that he was neither a medical doctor nor a politician. There was no mention of Karen. There was no mention of the theft of her body, and there was no mention of the role Pete played in any of it.

The coverage switched to Washington, where a reporter was conducting a man-in-the-street type interview with a young girl. A young zombie girl.

“How do I…feel…about…his arrest?” she said. “Vindicated, I…guess. Vindicated. We’re here in…Washington…to show…the nation…that we can be…productive…members of…society. We’re here…to ask for…a chance.”

His cell phone rang. Pete fished it out of his pocket with a hand that was now unscarred, although the skin all around was the pale, blue-tinted skin of the undead.

“Peter,” the Reverend said. “How are you, my boy?”

Pete swallowed. He felt as if he couldn’t breathe, as if the holes had opened up again in his lungs, the lines across his throat.

“I’m…I’m fine. I did what you told me…to do.”

“Have you seen the news?”

“I was just…watching it now.”

He heard the Reverend chuckle.

“I think the dead will soon be up from the underground, if you will forgive my pun.”

“I’m sorry, sir. If I hadn’t…”

The Reverend cut him off. “Nonsense, my boy. Don’t waste time with recrimination. You may have accelerated our timetable in an unforeseen manner, but all is well.” He continued after a slight pause. “When the dead are out of hiding, they’re easier to find.”

“But Duke…”

“Duke was well aware of the risks. Don’t worry about Mr. Davidson. He will be well taken care of.”

Pete licked his dry lips. He worked to force air through his throat. “Can I come back now, sir?” he said. “I’d really like to come back.”

“Not yet, my son,” was the reply. Pete’s heart sank to his shoes. “We’ve got another plan to try, now that Mr. Davidson has been removed from the board. He sends his regards, by the way. And bears you no ill will. You did what needed doing. There was no sense in everyone going to jail.”

“Sir, I’d like to come back. I’m…I’m really not dealing with this very well.”

“Take heart, Peter,” the Reverend said, soothingly. “You can’t come here. But would you feel any better if I said I was coming to join you?”

Pete felt his adrenaline returning, and a flush of excitement touched his heart. He knew that he was supposed to beat back the overly positive emotions as well as the negative ones, but he didn’t. He’d felt so drained over the past few weeks, the Reverend’s words were like a balm on his soul.

“Really? You’re really going to come to Oakvale?”

“We have work to do, my son,” he said. “The Lord’s work.”

Pete closed his eyes, muttering a brief prayer of thanks. When he opened them, Williams was on camera, surrounded by the living and the dead. Some had signs demanding equal rights for zombies; most were smiling. Tommy wore a more serious expression, and was saying something about Prop 77. Pete turned down the volume of the set, even though Tommy’s words were not touching him.

“Tell me what I should do,” he whispered.

N
EITHER ADAM NOR PHOEBE
so much as batted an eyelash when I told them I was gay. I don’t know why their acceptance surprised me so much; I’d kissed Phoebe, after all, so if anyone had a clue, it would have been her. And let’s face it, Adam would have to try really, really hard to bat an eyelash.

No, it was the secret about what I was trying to do while passing as a beating heart that upset them. And who could blame them?

But my friends stood by me. They stood by me and they are with me still, even though I am going far away.

When I died the first time, I was so sick, my sky had fallen. I couldn’t see any way out but the one I took. I was bad and sad for a long time even before I watched Monica walking away, hand in hand with some boy. It felt like I’d already died, so when I went ahead and took the pills and drifted away, it was easy.

What I did in the prison wasn’t like that at all. I wanted to live; I wanted to be alive. I wanted to come back all the way and feel everything again—the joys, the pain. I wanted to be able to taste, really taste strawberries, and feel silk against my skin, and smell the forest after it rains.

Really, I don’t think that I ever felt so alive as when I was fighting for the things I believed in, as when I could give people like Colette and Melissa and Jacinta and Kevin and Mal and all of my dead friends a little hope. As when I tried to expose the crimes of Pete Martinsburg and his One Life cronies.

As when I helped my trad friends become a little more grateful for their own lives. I think I did that. I think the second time around I made the world just a little bit of a better place. Maybe that was my purpose in coming back, if Tommy’s mother is right and we really are here for a purpose. It’s the life that matters, so much more so than the death.

I went to see Phoebe at her house before I left.

“Hi,” I said when she opened the door. Mmmm, coffee. The warm smell permeated Phoebe’s kitchen. “Still mad at me?”

“What?” she said, holding the door open for me to come in. “For risking your life, you mean? With the lunatic that killed my boyfriend?”

“Um, yeah,” I said. Maybe visiting her wasn’t such a great idea after all.

“You tried to warn me, I guess,” she said after a long pause, “that he was going to hurt me. But I think you cut it pretty close.”

I nodded.

She was wearing one of her long flowy skirts today, with a soft gray sweater. She brushed her hair out of her brilliant green eyes, and I had to turn away.

“Phoebe,” I said, looking at the floor. Phoebe was back to wearing boots. “I couldn’t…live…if something had happened to you.”

I glanced up at her through strands of hair that were back to being ultra-light blond. Phoebe couldn’t look at me, either.

“Karen…”

“I know,” I said. “I’m sorry.”

We spent a few minutes listening to the bass-heavy gothpunk music coming from the living room, until Phoebe broke the stretching silence.

“I am mad at you, Karen,” she said. “But not because of the risk. I’m mad because you didn’t let me know. I’m mad because you wouldn’t let me help you.”

“I know. But I just couldn’t, Phoebe.” We’d stopped inspecting the floor. “Adam never would have allowed it.”

“So we wouldn’t have told him. You think I tell Adam everything?”

We looked at each other, both of us realizing at the same time what she’d just said. We cracked up.

“What’s so funny?” a voice said from the other room. Margi came into the room, her eyes going wide when she saw me.

“Oh hi, Karen,” Normally very huggy, it was clear she didn’t know how to react to me. “I thought you were Adam.”

“Yeah, I get that a lot,” I said. She didn’t even smile as she folded her arms across her chest.

“I didn’t want to come out here in case he and Pheeble were, you know, kissing.”

“Margi!”

“Sorry,” Margi said, clearly not.

“Doesn’t Karen look great, Margi?” Phoebe said, probably trying to distract me from Margi’s weirdness. “Look at her. She’s healing.”

“Yes, I am. Even the really nasty cuts are mostly gone now.”

“It’s amazing, Karen,” Phoebe said. “You should go to the Hunter Foundation so they can figure it out. Imagine if all zombies could heal like that?”

I thought of Tayshawn, whose reward for helping me was a compound fracture. I thought of Melissa.

“I will, Phoebe,” I told her. “But first I’ve got to go back home for a while. Back to Iowa. I need to talk to Monica.”

“Monica,” she said. “Is she…”

Her voice trailed off. It was kind of cute.

“She is.”

“Well, hurry back. You’ve got a gift, you know.”

“What’s it like?” Margi said from the doorway. She was peering at me intently.

“What’s what like? Healing?”

“No,” she said. “Being gay.”

Phoebe’s mouth dropped open a little before she turned from Margi to look at me.

“What?” Margi said. “Did I say something wrong?”

Then we were both cracking up again.

The hardest part was saying good-bye to Kaitlyn. Tiny hands can grip really tightly if letting go might mean forever. I don’t know how my parents handled my prison escapade with her, but it was clear it had made an impact.

“I’ll be back, sweetie,” I whispered to her. “I’ll be back.”

And I thought I would be. Not everything goes the way I expect it to, though—obviously!

“Take me,” she said. “Take me.”

My tear ducts are working again. But being able to cry makes me happy. I can taste and I can smell and I can feel my skin. It all makes me happy.

“I can’t, sweetie. But I promise I won’t be gone long this time.”

My wounds—all of the visible ones, anyway—were gone. As worried as I was about everyone, the one I worried the most about was Tak. I was sorry that he wouldn’t let me kiss him good-bye when Phoebe brought me home that day. He let me hug him, and maybe, just maybe, I felt his lips brush my cheek as we embraced. We told each other to be careful, and then he went away.

My return home was just as tearful. My mother—when my mother saw me, she shrieked. I thought the worst, but then her arms were around me, and my father’s, and they both told me that they loved me and that they never wanted to lose me again. Which made it very, very hard when I told them that they needed to let me go away.

I sat down with my parents and explained to them what I wanted to do. I told them why. I told them things they didn’t know before, and this time my mother didn’t slap me—she sat with me and held my hand, tears in her eyes. I told them I needed to see you and apologize, because if I didn’t tell you how sorry I was, I’d live out the rest of my days not as a zombie but a ghost. A ghost haunting myself. I told them that my atonement would never be complete unless I could look you in the eye and tell you how sorry I was.

They listened, and when I was finished they agreed completely. Dad even offered to go with me, but of course I told him that I needed to do this alone. I asked if I could take the car, and they did not hesitate in their answer, which was yes. I left that evening.

I wonder how you’ve changed. I died at sixteen and I thought that meant that I’d be sixteen forever, but the way my body is changing I can’t say that for certain. The scars are all healed, even the one on my shoulder that I’ve had since I was a kid. A living kid. My skin is smooth and white. My eyes still look like diamonds, although Tak swears they were blue when he found me in the ambulance. Who knows what they’ll look like when I see you again?

You’ll be eighteen now. Probably you’ve applied to colleges; probably you’ve gone to at least one prom. Maybe you’re seeing someone. Maybe you’re seeing another girl.

When we were younger we used to talk about everything we would do together in the distant, far-flung future. You’d wanted to go to school somewhere on the East Coast, to Boston or New York, and I could picture you there, a wild, primal girl in khaki shorts and earth-toned tops, walking the concrete paths in your sandaled feet. I’d tell you, without thinking about what I was saying, that New York would be great. Maybe I could model there, maybe I could waitress, maybe I could act. I wanted to follow you, wherever you went, and romantic notions of a possible life together—because such things were possible in the big city, weren’t they?—filled my head when we talked about life after high school. After what happened at Wild Thingz! I’ll probably never be able to get a job again. I was getting sick of all the black and the icon-laden T-shirts, anyway. All snakes and skulls.

Maybe I’ll open my own store, something that caters to undead Americans who don’t want to look like mall goths; something upscale. “Cerements,” I’ll call it.

You’ll still be beautiful, of course. Your skin will still be a warm amber hue, and your smile will still light up a room, or even a darkening forest.

I have butterflies in my stomach thinking about it.

Do friends often fall in love? I know it happens with girls and boys, like Phoebe and Adam. I have to wonder if there’s as much pain when it happens for them, if there is as much the sense of one thing ending before another can begin.

I wasn’t even out of Connecticut when I heard a clip of Tommy Williams giving a speech, his voice clear and confident and strong. There was iron in his voice.

“Today…marks the beginning…of a new era…for the differ
ently biotic…”

Smiling, I listened to his voice for a few minutes before switching the station. I wanted music, not words.

I drove the long way around the city I used to dream about, picturing us cooking together in some one-room flat. I wasn’t in a rush. I had hundreds of miles to go, but I don’t sleep and I don’t get tired, even if I seem a little more “human” with each passing day. My reflexes and reaction times are actually pretty good, my vision twenty-twenty. And once I got out of the Northeast I could pretty much point my car west and go in a straight line, and eventually I’d get to you. You’d think that I’d already had enough time to myself to last a lifetime—several lifetimes, actually—but my thoughts were new and different as I drove across the country. Maybe it was the motion—forward progress—that fired once-dead synapses in my brain. So much of zombie “life” is stasis.

I tried to envision our reunion. I pictured it as one of warm tears and a warmer embrace, as something more than a fleeting moment in time.

Dad’s car was excellent on gas, and I tried to visit a station every time the needle dipped below a third of a tank. I stopped at a highway rest stop in Maryland, and when I operated the pump no one noticed me except for boys and girls my own age and lonely truck drivers. I had a smile for everyone; I could still blend, mostly. I was dressed, for me, very plainly. Jeans, sneakers, a puffy blue coat with a matching scarf and hat. But my hair was blonder than blond again, and I didn’t get my contacts replaced. Another state or so and I wouldn’t need the cold weather gear any more, not even to maintain my disguise. Spring was making its way east as I traveled west.

Maybe I’d spend cherry blossom season with Tommy, I thought. If you had no forgiveness in your heart for me—and I had no right to expect that you would—then maybe I could offer penance through public service; by working to make the world a better place for my people. Or maybe I could just drive back to Oakvale, trying to pretend that I was chasing the winter away.

What if there was no embrace? What if all I found was the hatred due me?

There was only one close call in my entire journey. There was a lonely service station somewhere in the Midwest where I had to show a frisky biker just how dead I was. There were other, less risky ways to get out of the situation, I suppose, but if there is anything that my second life—and third, if you are counting! I’m like a cat!—has taught me is that I am sick of pretending to be something and someone I am not.

Either way, my tactic worked, and I guessed correctly that Mr. Hawg Wyld would not be seeking the assistance of the local authorities with regard to the willowy blond girl who’d frightened him so.

I should start a “scared straight” program, ha ha.

I arrived in the town where we’d grown up, to the light of a proverbial rosy-fingered dawn. I was close to you, very close. I realized this and I very nearly turned the car around and drove back.

The blue fog is never going to go away entirely. And now that I’m coming back, now that I’ve passed through death and zombiehood and started to become, well, something else entirely, maybe it will come back stronger than ever before, just like my body. That’s just something that me, and whoever is around me, is going to have to deal with. I hope it’s you.

The radio told me that today is Friday. I drove to the school where you’d be, and wondered how my death had changed you. Did you become sad and withdrawn? Or was there a certain feeling of relief, because now you could hide if you wanted? You could keep dating the boys you dated, and our kiss and what it represented could be a short forgotten footnote in the journal of your life. Maybe coming here was a mistake.

I could feel the edges of my consciousness growing hazy as I left the schoolyard. I drove to the lake where we’d shared our first and only kiss, but I didn’t go into the woods surrounding it. We’d been through there, emerging from darkness once, and I didn’t think I was ready to go back there alone. I then drove to my old house, where I died. An unfamiliar car was parked in the driveway, and there was a young sapling planted in the front yard, surrounded by last year’s faded cedar mulch. I could picture my ghost looking down from the bathroom window at the sapling and smiling, waiting patiently for the new leaves to bud. Then I drove to the cemetery where I was to have been buried, and I walked along the white gravel paths searching for a stone that bore my name. Not finding one, I got back in the car. My hands were shaking, so I held tightly to the wheel. Coming back to life isn’t an easy thing to do.

I drove away and thought I was heading back toward the highway, but instead the road led to your door.

I pulled into your driveway and got out of the car. Your mother wasn’t home. She’d be at work, I realized, and the thought of you each coming home to an empty house made me feel sad. There was a swing on your porch, but I sat on the steps instead. I leaned against the newel and closed my eyes.