I always pay cash. Every year. It takes me awhile to save up, grabbing stray pennies on the ground here, a crumpled dollar bill there, but I do it. Every year, by the end of October, I do it. I keep it all in a big pickle jar in the back of the crypt, like my mom used to in her bedroom closet.
You know, before the outbreak.
I don’t even have to hide it.
The others grumble about money being useless to a zombie, but I don’t care. Most of them are stupid anyway, and not just stupid in that slow, shuffling zombie way but born stupid, before they were turned. “Mouth breathers,” I call them, even though they can’t breathe.
I stand on top of the drug store roof, crouched low, looking out across the town. Nightshade is a small town, especially from above, where it looks like a map laid out across some big, giant desk. There’s Main Street, with the drug store, the post office, the movie theater, the men’s shop, the women’s shop, the ice cream parlor, the diner.
Pine Street cuts across just past the bowling alley, and there are a few car garages, a body shop or two to the left, and to the right a few more restaurants, the Burger Barn with the drive-thru, and beyond that the houses start.
It’s late now, just after 4 AM (or does that make it early?), but since I don’t need to sleep it never really matters what time it is. My mom took me to Vegas once, before. We stayed at a casino and even though I was underage she’d slip me quarters now and then to feed to the slot machines.
I remember sitting there, looking around, wondering what time of day it was. There were no windows, no clocks, and it got to be a game to put my cell phone away and guess what time it was.
One time, we sat and played until 3 a.m. and I could have kept going all night long. They kept bringing us free sodas and my brain was all off from the long flight and, it just felt like the middle of the day all the time. The Afterlife is a lot like Vegas. Sure, there are windows and doors but you don’t really care what time of day or night it is anymore.
I look out over the town and watch the jack o’ lanterns flicker on porches a street or two away. Black and orange lights blink around the window in the men’s shop and there’s a witch who keeps bobbing, endlessly, silently, in the window of the fabric store. Someone must have forgotten to turn her off on the way out the door.
I smile, my skin tight and cold. October 30 is like Christmas Eve for me, and I guess that makes Halloween just like Christmas. It’s the one night, the only night, I can walk around Nightshade freely, nobody stopping me, running from me, threatening me, calling the cops on me or straight up pulling a gun on me.
I pry the air conditioning vent off the uneven, bumpy roof and slide it to the side. The crawlspace just below is dark and damp but, compared to where I live, it might as well be a living room. I balance myself on a small landing while I pry loose the same ceiling tile I did last year. I know because I marked it on my way out with a little pumpkin sticker.
Just beneath is a high shelf stocked with paper towels and toilet paper, which makes for a soft landing as I slide down and land on my rump. It’s a small leap to the floor and then, I’m in.
The store feels familiar, like visiting Santa Claus at the mall every Christmas. I only break in once a year, and it’s always Halloween Eve, so I guess it’s kinda the same thing, more or less.
It’s a small drug store, not like a brand name unless you consider Schmidt’s Wholesale Prescriptions and Sundries a Fortune 500 company. There’s an aisle for diapers and toilet paper, one for sunscreen and athlete’s foot gel, one for aspirin and cold medicines, one for greeting cards and fold-up canes and, aside from the cash register up front and the pharmacy window in the back, that’s pretty much it.
Except, except, for every October Mr. Schmidt makes room in the front of the store for one aisle of the cheese-ball-iest, corniest costumes on the planet, plus a few cardboard displays full of tubes of fake blood and those cheap plastic spider webs.
Oh, and a full length mirror so the kiddies unlucky enough to have to get their costumes at Schmidts Pharmacy can see themselves as they try on the Bumble Bee or the Fairy Princess or the Captain USA, or even the Clown.
I look in it now, another annual event. I try to avoid mirrors at all costs, and there isn’t one back in the crypt, so it’s quite a shock to see the gray pallor, the stubbly hair that never grew back, the yellow eyes and teeth to match. I look away, quickly, and focus on this year’s Schmidt Pharmacy Costume Collection.
The rack is mostly full, even though it’s the night before Halloween, because you’d have to be completely and utterly clueless – or desperate – to come here to get a costume. That, or your parents got a flat tire on the way to Value Mart over in Bramble Wood. Or maybe you’re staying with your grandparents and they still think clown costumes are totally cutting edge.
It doesn’t matter to me, though; I get the same thing every year anyway: cheap plastic hockey mask, a tube of fake blood, gray zombie hand gloves and a bright red wig.
Last year it came to $15.79, and I left $16, but this year it comes to almost $18. I brought $19, because you never know, and there’s no sense taking home the change, so I leave it all on the counter, under a Halloween Town snow globe for a paperweight by the register. I bag it all up in one of the free trick or treat bags Mr. Schmidt always gives away to anyone who spends over five bucks in October, and drag it all up onto the roof with me.
I smile, and stand, and look out over the town. The sun is vaguely rising now, and Mr. Schmidt will be here soon. I open the bag and slide the mask out. I drizzle fake blood all over it, and my plain white T-shirt underneath my baggy black hoodie. I dribble the last of it on the bib of my overalls, then dump the empty tube back in the bag.
The mask feels slick and cool on my face, the wig tight and scratchy on my head. I slide on the gloves, smirking that these are what Normals think a zombie’s hand looks like; they’re ugly and thick and gray, with black veins up each finger and black nails on each fingertip, but it keeps the humans from scoping out my actual zombie hands.
When I’m ready, I climb down off the roof using the same fire escape I climbed up. The roads are still deserted but the sun is threatening. I linger at the edge of the park, inching toward the side closest to Nightshade High School. There’s a bench in the park, near a fountain, under a shade tree. I sit there, calmly, waiting for the first school bus to arrive.
It hisses to a stop an hour later, and nearly half the students who get off the bus are dressed just like me. Okay, switch out the hockey mask for a gorilla mask, a red wig for a blond one, a hoodie for a lab coat, a sexy Cinderella costume for the overalls, and it’s pretty much the same thing.
I smile beneath the mask, and wait for the inevitable slackers to show up in the park. Even when I went to school there, the fountain was a regular hangout for the smokers, the stoners or the outcasts. Four kids show up, half of them in costume.
They stand around, close to me, but not next to me and eventually one of them, a girl dressed like a sexy nurse, nods in my general direction. She’s smoking, big puffs like maybe she isn’t inhaling, and she inches closer, offering me one. I take it, fumbling with my zombie gloves.
She laughs a little, chirpy laugh.
She has a bad dye job and chubby cheeks and large, green eyes. Her nails are bitten to the quick as she lights my cigarette. There are little holes around the mouth of the hockey mask and I slip the cigarette through, taking a big puff and letting the smoke ooze through the holes.
She nods and says in a kind of husky, sexy voice, “I like your costume. The red hair really makes it.”
I hand her back the cigarette. “I like yours.”
Her eyes get big at the sound of my voice, the only zombie trait I can’t hide with a mask or fake blood. “Whoa, how long have you been smoking, dude?”
I chuckle and mumble, “Long enough.”
I knew it was a mistake to talk. The vocal chords, they get tough like beef jerky, dried like leather moccasins. A
few years ago, sure, I sounded okay but now I sound like I’ve been swallowing razor blades and Jack Daniels for twenty years straight.
“Chris, right? You sit behind me in homeroom.” I don’t know what she’s talking about, but I nod anyway, enjoy the sound of her hoarse-sexy voice.
“Whatever.” I chuckle and shrug and she nods like maybe it doesn’t matter, or maybe she thinks I’m high, or she’s high or… whatever. The others drift in and out and I just sit there as little groups of two and three come and go.
It’s the closest I get to actually going to school, which is something I never thought I’d want to do again but, once a year, it’s kind of nice to slip in under the radar and hear the slam of lockers, the sharpening of pencils, the scrape of chalk.
A bell rings across the street, loud enough to hear in the stillness of near dawn. I straggle over, the chick in the nurse’s outfit a few paces ahead. She’s got on fishnet stockings and high heel flip flops that make her unsteady on her legs. She clings to a tall guy in an Army coat and a President Nixon mask, and when they peel to the left, I go to the right.
I stumble around the crowded hallways, smiling beneath my mask, daring someone to stop me and make me take it off. But that’s the thing about Halloween in Nightshade; there are so many kids in costume, there would be an uprising if we all had to unmask.
Besides, I know all the exits if some puffy Home Ec teacher tries to go all authoritarian on me. Another bell rings and the crowds disperse into random groupings in random classrooms. I wander into the gym since I figure no way is Coach Wannamaker going to make us change into gym shorts and shoot hoops today of all days, but then I remember: they got Coach during the first outbreak.
Or, wait… was it the second?
Some new guy is there, young and studly, a flat screen TV on one of those roll-around shelves you get from the library. Everyone kind of smiles and shuffles in and sits down in the bleachers, two or three to a row, being cool, and the dude doesn’t say anything. Well, other than “Happy Halloween.” Then he pushes play, the screen goes blue, then black and we see the TV version of some cheesy scary movie.
Wait for it: a scary… zombie… movie. Wow, the irony is so ironic I’m going to have an art attack. (Get it? Movie? Art? Art attack? Whatever…)
The other kids groan, because they’ve probably seen it a dozen times by now, but it must have come out after I joined the ranks of the undead because I’ve never seen it. Haven’t seen any TV, actually, since I went to live with the others in the catacombs under the Nightshade Memorial Cemetery.
I sit at attention, eyes wide, watching the cheesy blond actress battle the gooey green zombie. I know it’s stupid even as I’m thinking it’s the best thing I’ve ever seen. Make that, best thing I’ve ever done. A zombie, watching a zombie movie, on Halloween, surrounded by Normals with their beating hearts and soft, warm skin and working lungs and flowing blood veins.
I remember the last movie I saw as a living kid: Motorcycle Werewolf Chain Gang # 6. It was at the Odeon Theater in Brinksville, North Carolina, two towns over. I’d snuck out of the house with Emily Morgenstern, my partner in junior Chem Lab. God, she had the longest legs and the funniest laugh, a killer combination if ever there was one.
I borrowed my Mom’s car, actually pushed it down the street for two houses before starting it up so she wouldn’t hear the engine and wake up and come looking for me. Emily was waiting at the bus stop in front of her apartment building and we drove, giggling the whole way.
I borrowed some peach wine from the back of the cabinet where Mom kept the brandy she drank every Christmas Eve, but neither of us drank too much because we had school the next day, cuz that’s the kind of nerds we were.
I held her hand during the previews but once the movie started we both kind of forgot that we’d come there to make out in private. I kissed her, sure, once or twice during the boring parts, but neither of us were into that. Somehow, that made me like her even more; that she’d rather watch some cheesy werewolf biker gang movie than make out with me.
The screen went black right at the good part, the final showdown between the werewolf biker gang and the human biker gang with the silver motorcycles. Not just silver, mind you, but made of silver. The crowd went “aaaaahhhh” until the back doors burst open and six zombies shuffled in.
When I saw them, I told myself I’d protect Emily. Doing everything I could to keep her alive as long as it took. But by the time I turned to tell her everything would be all right, she’d already bolted out the nearest emergency exit.
They caught up to me as I tried to follow, and that’s the last thing I remember, looking at a lump of gum stuck to the bottom of my movie seat, until I came to, gnawing on some poor schmuck’s shin three aisles over, his blood tasting like the popcorn he’d probably eaten only a few minutes before.
I was lucky it was only the first outbreak, before the cops got wise, before there were axe handles – attached to real axe blades – installed next to every fire alarm, lamppost, stop sign and mailbox in the city.
In every city.
I stumbled through town, amidst the rubble, the fires, the fire trucks, the shotgun blasts, until I got home. Mom was there. Or, at least, what was left of her. The cops showed up then; some neighbor had reported me. I ran, or shuffled, until I got away. I was stronger, then, or at least I had more energy.
Somehow I made it out of town, found the few remaining zombies who didn’t get mowed down, chopped into pieces or rounded up in Nightshade Memorial and that’s pretty much been my life for the last few years.
Except, of course, for every Halloween.
And now here I am, surrounded by the living, watching the last few minutes of a cheesy zombie invasion movie and wishing it didn’t make me smile so hard.
The bell rings and everyone flees down the bleachers with their heavy feet, but I stay to watch the end. The new Coach looks at me as I stand, awkwardly, from the bleachers and stumble even more awkwardly down from the third row.
“Happy Halloween,” he says, cheerful.
I nod and wave, too afraid to reveal my voice to an adult, who might know better than a fake nurse what a real zombie sounds like.
I shuffle from class to class, sitting in the back, nodding toward the other kids in costumes, shrugging when someone tries to figure out who I am. It just feels good, being among the living, surrounded by flesh and blood, the warm room instead of the cold crypt, the fluorescent lights instead of the moonlit sky.
I spend twenty minutes staring at the bulletin board in one room, covered in fall leaves displaying math problems. It’s just so… retro, like something your third grade teacher would put up with pride. I’m so far from that world where math matters, where school matters, it’s hard to believe teachers still do things like cut out fall leaves from red and orange and brown construction paper, write out long division problems on them and then staple them to a bulletin board.
I’m outside of a Home Ec room when the last bell of the day rings. I step in, shutting the door behind me. The ovens are off and everyone is just sitting around, doing crossword puzzles while the teacher plays a radio station she thinks us kids will like.