“Sorry,” he says.
I walk over and inspect the tubing running in tight coils all the way around the back of the thing.
He sees me looking and I stupidly say “Roger” while he’s looking at them and, eager to please, he reaches out to yank them loose and has barely touched them before he drops to the floor like a double-sack of extra large potatoes.
“Tara?” I ask, but she’s already at my side, stepping over Roger with a slight smile on her face and wedging two dull sneakers against the bottom of the fridge as she yanks, and yanks, and yanks until the copper coiling finally wrenches free in her hands.
I have her lay them down on the ground, away from where Roger is snoozing, and find a meat cleaver.
By the time Roger is sitting back up, rubbing his head and asking, “Hey, how’d that fridge get all the way out there?” I have hacked the coil loops up into five long strips, about the length of a sawed off shotgun each.
In a tool box under the sink I find a half-empty spool of thick, black duct tape and have Tara wind a two-foot strip along the bottom of each copper spike.
When she’s done, we each have two pretty lethal – at least temporarily – weapons.
I bend the duct tape portion of mine into short “u” shapes; they kind of look like the curved part of an umbrella, you know, where your hand goes.
Tara and Roger watch carefully and then he helps her, then himself, do the same.
“Hitch one to your belt loops,” I say, showing them, “and hide another in here somewhere… just in case. Roger, be careful to—” but by the time I try to warn him about holding it from the duct tape side, he has already grabbed the tip and, boom, down he goes – again!
Tara looks at him with equal parts amusement and alarm and asks, “How long is he going to be this… stupid?”
I snort, “Enjoy it while it lasts, Tara. There’s nothing worse than a know-it-all zombie.”
She smiles over her shoulder while hiding her extra copper dagger in the freezer.
I smile and, while her back is turned, smash a slatted wooden butcher’s block into bits.
“Whoa,” she says, turning around with one hand over her heart. “Warn somebody next time, will ya?”
I shrug and start whittling down thigh-bone length boards into sharp, lethal steaks.
She joins me, sitting close by my side and asks, “I thought you said only copper could hurt a zombie?”
“This isn’t for the zombies, Tara,” I say soberly, watching Roger’s sneaker twitch back to life from across the room. “This is for the vampires.”
“Oh,” she whispers, dread filling her gentle, tiny face. “I almost forgot about them.”
* * * * *
Chapter 21
Speak of the devil.
“Alex,” she says, stake in hand, but before she can dash up to meet him I yank her back – hard – on her collar and she literally sits back down; hard.
“Ouch!” she says, a sincerely wounded look in her dewy brown eyes, but I shush her with a sincere case of zombie eyes and either she trusts me enough to go with it or is simply scared enough to pretend.
Either way I stand and, with the back of one foot, shove her back, back, back across the slick, white tile floor of the kitchen until she and Roger are clumped together, rubbing their heads, like a pair of human bowling pins after one dazzling pickup spare.
I have a stake in one belt loop, my copper dagger in the other as I swing through the kitchen doors and out into the cafeteria proper.
It’s like a bad high school Drama class version of the Gunfight at the OK Corral, starring zombies.
Well, starring one zombie and whatever Alex currently is (and I have my sneaking suspicions I already know the answer to that one).
For his part, Alex is swaggering across the clean linoleum floor, his hands looping lazily around each end of the black and white scarf I’d used to keep the door locked.
(Well, so much for that.)
“Hey Lucy,” he says seductively, or at least his version of what he thinks must be seductively, playfully stretching my name out to way too many syllables for my taste.
Now?
Now he chooses to come on to me?
After what Piper has (obviously) done to him?
Already I can see the slugs working through his veins, the twin sets of fangs teasing his soft red lips apart and the yellowness blazing out of his once incredibly sincere green eyes.
His curls seem less curly now, more masculine, his once lanky frame now purposeful and sleek, like in addition to opening up his veins and sucking his blood Piper has returned the favor with a double injection of Grade-A testosterone.
“Keep away, Alex,” I say and he looks… surprised.
I don’t know if it’s simply because Piper didn’t tell him I’d be able to see beneath his skin once he turned completely (although that seems pretty unlikely), or because he thought I’d still have a baby crush on him once he joined the ranks of the Living Dead.
He keeps walking, ignoring me, just like a vampire would.
“Now hold on,” he says, streaming forward instead of keeping back, his hands up, palms out, their flat white skin like a hand-sized canvas on which all I see are a hundred tiny little slugs squirming around. “I thought you’d be happy I came crawling back.”
“Slithering is more like it,” I hiss – hiss, I tell you – as I slip the freshly-sharpened wooden stake from my belt loop and hold it menacingly at my side.
“What?” he asks incredulously, eyeing the sharp stake with a wet tongue across his dry lips. “Is that… for… moi?”
And then he puts his hands on his chest in the universal, not to mention totally icky, “for moi” gesture and even if he hadn’t just been made into a vampire I would have lost all kinds of respect for him right there.
(Although I have to admit, I still might have gone to the Fall Formal with him. Might; just… maybe. I don’t know; get back to me on that one.)
“You and whoever else you brought as backup,” I spit, halfway across the unbelievably large cafeteria by now, fully expecting Piper and Bianca and, heck, maybe even Ethan and Dana to show up any minute and pound, tear, bite and grind me into a living dead pulp.
He looks around the empty cafeteria and says, “I didn’t bring anybody, Lucy. Why would I? I’m the good guy, remember? I’m here to help!”
His voice is the same, but I can’t help hearing the slight… liquid… sound each word makes as it slithers past his rapidly growing fangs.
It’s not quite wet; that’s not quite the word.
It’s not like a lisp, so much, as a… slither.
I’m not sure if I can hear it because that’s how it actually sounds, or just seeing the words ooze past his fang-puffy lips makes me think they’d sound that way but, either way, gross.
Just… gross.
“You had your chance, Alex,” I say with real resignation in my voice because, let’s face it, two periods ago this guy was the bomb. “And you blew it.”
Finally he stops, just shy of the middle of the room.
All around us are the tables and chairs we’ve sat in for three long years.
Rows and rows of them; dozens of tables, hundreds of chairs.
I’ve never been an innocent, not with my history, but I look at those rows and rows of tables, imagine them filled with hundreds of living, breathing kids and think back to how much simpler life was before the powers that be at Barracuda Bay decided to upgrade the C-wing girls bathroom paper towel dispensers.
Alex isn’t thinking along those terms.
I can see behind his glowing yellow eyes that he’s up to something; that he’s playing me, one way or the other.
As if on cue his still incredibly handsome face shifts from a beautiful mask of supreme confidence to just another mask – though equally beautiful – of extreme apology.
“I know I blew it, Lucy,” he says, not looking at me; not daring to look me in the e
ye. “I’m… sorry.”
And now the word “sorry” actually sounds painful coming from his lips, like it’s killing him to say it.
“No you’re not,” I say, taking a step forward so that I’m in striking range. “You’re not sorry at all.”
This close I can almost hear the blood slugs traveling beneath his skin; it’s like standing next to a human beehive.
I am tense and flexed because, while it doesn’t happen every day, to fight a vampire is to fight rage up close and even for someone who can’t technically die it’s never quite fun (and far from safe).
I look at what remains of the humanity in him, the purposeful tear in his faded blue jeans, the peace sign some (other) girl drew on his battered sneakers, his stubby fingernails, the faded rugby shirt and it makes me sad that he’s gone.
That the Alex I knew, that his parents knew, that his friends and buddies and nephews and grandparents and neighbors knew is gone; gone forever.
But that’s just it: this is meat talking to me right here, this is just fangs with a body, really; nothing more, nothing less.
The Alex I knew, the sweet, curly-haired kid who would whisper in my ear in Chorus and drive me all kinds of crazy, who would text silly messages all period long, who would forget I was there and stare dreamily out the window, thinking of something – or someone – else is little more than a memory now.
Alex Foster was gone the minute he stormed out of the AV Club.
Was it my fault he left so angrily?
Was it my fault his only recourse was to join the other side, to be seduced by Piper and her beauty, her wiles, her… fangs?
After all, I was the one he was disgusted with.
I was the one he thought had lied to him.
If he had stayed in that room, if I could have had, I dunno, five short minutes to explain my side of the story, maybe the old Alex would still be here.
But the new Alex isn’t having it, and I can’t let the sweet, innocent, playful boy he used to be lure me into being tricked by the thuggish, predatory and very, very dangerous vampire that he is right now.
As if to show me just how dangerous he thinks he is, Alex shrugs bluntly, looks up, smiles and kind of snaps open his mouth, kind of like a human Pez dispenser, to push his shiny new fangs forward.
It doesn’t look entirely natural.
Don’t get me wrong; if I was mortal I’d be staining the cafeteria tiles yellow right about now but I know he’s only as much a vampire as Roger is a zombie and, frankly, the move just looks… lame.
“Boring,” I say, careful to stifle a fake yawn with my very real stake. “That all you got?”
He shrugs, looks uncertain and, for one moment – for just one stinkin’ moment – I actually believe he’s come all by himself.
“Yup,” he says, then gives it away by glancing, ever-so-briefly, up; up toward the ceiling tiles.
And that’s when I know; when I know that, as goofy as Alex’s attempts to seduce, trick or frankly crack me the heck up have been, he’s succeeded in stalling for time, he’s lured me into a place I should have never gone in the first place and I know I have to snap back; snap back and RUN!
I back up frantically, sneakers squeaking on the clean cafeteria floor, just as the shower of off-white tiling and (probably) asbestos rains down as Piper and Bianca burst from the ceiling.
* * * * *
Chapter 22
They fall on whisper-soft feet, landing gracefully two steps in front of Alex; one just to his left, one just to his right.
In other words, right where I would have been standing if he hadn’t given it away with those yellow-blue eyes of his.
“How’d you find me?” I ask, creeping back toward the kitchen.
Piper waves a black-veined hand in front of her flaring nostrils and says, “I’d know that putrefying flesh smell anywhere!”
Roger.
I hadn’t wanted to hurt his feelings but, the real reason I’d tossed him in the cooler was to slow the process of decomposition which, unfortunately, is a new zombie’s calling card for the first 24- to 72-hours of his or her existence.
(Hey, we don’t call ‘em “Fresh Meat” for nothing.)
But now that he is up and around, well, there’s no denying Roger has a bad case of zombie-stink-itis.
I’m a few feet ahead of them, just in front of the door that separates the cafeteria proper from the actual kitchen.
Piper and Bianca are watching me carefully, but haven’t moved an inch.
Meanwhile Alex is more than happy to stay in the background, taking their lead.
I blink and dive through the door, slamming it shut with my back to it and screaming, “Roger! Fridge! Here! NOW!”
Roger has ripped open the empty can of meat processed byproduct whatever and is literally licking the insides clean when he hears my orders, drops it on the spot and literally grabs the freezer side of the fridge and tosses it in my direction.
It lands with a tile-crunching thud against the door, jamming it shut just as I hear the scraping of Piper and Bianca’s claws on the other side.
“Tara,” I say as Roger shuffles over. “Run to the walk-in cooler where I’ve got Fiona and hide there.”
She frowns and lifts her stake from her belt.
“But I have a stake?” she says, and if there weren’t vampires threatening to break through the flimsy wooden door at any moment I would have laughed to hear her pitiful voice with that pitiful stake.
“I know, honey, but those are some hungry fierce bloodsuckers out there, honey, and I’m going to need you later, remember? So take your backpack, get in that walk-in and don’t come out until I come to get you, okay?”
She nods, grabs the backpack and an apron to wrap around herself to stay warm and disappears inside the walk-in.
I vaguely hear Fiona complaining but Tara silences her with a quick and forceful, “Shut up, Fiona!”
I smile on instinct but it never quite reaches my eyes.
I turn to Roger and say, “How do you feel?”
“Like I’ve got the world’s worst hangover,” he admits.
I smile.
“Good,” I say, my voice shaking from where the vampires are trying to get in just the other side of the door. “That means your dead body’s purging the toxins from your live body.”
He pats his ample belly and says, “That could take awhile.”
I hook a thumb over my shoulder and say, “Not if these two have anything to say about it.”
His face turns grim and he says, “What should I do?”
I look at his face, already losing some of its puffiness as the Z-disease begins to turn soft, puffy fat into hard, tough, sinewy muscle.
I see the joystick on his shirt, potted meat stains obliterating half of it and say, “Think of every Gameboy zombie you’ve ever killed and—”
“Xbox,” he says, and he’s so serious.
“What?” I say.
“Gameboy is, like, for nerds. I use the X—”
I smack him square in the forehead and say, “In about two minutes those vampires are going to find a way in here. I don’t want to still be arguing about game consoles by then, okay? The point is, pretend Piper and Bianca and, yes, even Alex are nothing more than—”
“Alex?” he asks, his voice falling, his eyes widening. “They already… turned… Alex?”
I shake my head, fighting off my impatience, and try to put myself in his size-12, double-wide sneakers.
This morning he was just another lard butt gamer with a cup holder full of Mountain Dew on the way to school for another day of lounging around the AV Club room and talking Star Wars versus Star Trek with Alex, Fiona and Tara and now he’s a zombie and Alex is a vampire.
I get that, really I do, but he’s going to be just plain dead before he gets a chance to be the Living Dead if we sit here talking about life, the universe and everything all day.
“I know, Roger, I’m sorry, but stay
with me here… the vampires?”
“Okay, okay,” he says, finally slipping a stake from his belt loop and holding it just like you should.
“In the heart?” he asks.
I nod.
“But listen, Roger, that’s just the kill shot. It’s going to be harder than you think to sink that puny little stake in Piper’s rib cage. Remember, she’s been a vampire a lot longer than you’ve been a zombie, so… but the one thing you have on your side is your size. Zombies aren’t delicate. We’re not limber or graceful but a guy like you can freight train it all over those bony broads, right? So smash, grab, pull, yank, tear, chew, whatever; they can’t hurt you.”