That left only Adam Layman and Thornton Harrowwood, who were no doubt getting suited up to head out to practice with lunkhead Stavis.
Williams was a missed opportunity, Pete thought. The idea that he and Stavis had had the chance to put the hurt on him and failed to do so still rankled. And he'd tried. Every touch that Williams got, every time Williams lined up for a block or to cover, Pete hit him with everything he had. No matter what he and Stavis threw at him, Williams got up again like it was no big deal.
Pete had heard that the zombie was off the team. He was glad about it, sure, but it would have been much more satisfying
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had the zombie left with broken bones that had no hope of healing.
Big talk, Martinsburg.
That's what Coach had said to him, and the words still rang in his head like a shout in an empty gymnasium.
"Big talk, Martinsburg. I hear you yapping all the time about what a big deal you are, all these girls you've supposedly made. Big man."
Pete had been hanging around the locker room after their first post-zombie game. Most of the other players had already shuffled off to the bus, but Pete was holding forth with Stavis and Harris. He'd been feeling pretty good about himself; he'd gotten a sack, another interception, and made a few key back-field tackles. He'd only been burned on one play, really, but even giving that one up, they'd beat the far weaker Waterford team by three touchdowns.
Something he said must have set Konrathy off, because he'd ordered the rest of the kids off to the bus but told Pete to join him in the hall. Pete thought about it, the tone Coach had taken with him, and he felt the muscles jump along his arms. A week later and he was still angry.
"Yeah, you're a regular god to the rest of these dumbasses-- morons like Stavis who don't know any better. But Layman doesn't buy your line of crap anymore, does he? And that dead kid, he never did buy it, either."
Pete was glad that Coach had ordered the rest of the team onto the bus so that they weren't around to watch him getting chewed on. He was also glad that they weren't there to hear how
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his voice cracked when he tried to answer. "Coach," he had said, "at least we ran him off the team."
Konrathy gave him a look like Pete was something to be scraped off his cleat. "You ran off nothing. He quit on his own terms. I had hoped that Stavis at least could get the job done, but he was a wash, too."
Pete was humiliated. He'd wanted to tell Coach that he'd been a coward for caving in to Kimchi in the first place, and that he'd been a coward again for not scrubbing Williams from the team. Konrathy had no right to fault him for not obliterating the zombie. At least he tried. What did Coach do, except make hand signals?
Pete walked under a huge handmade banner announcing the upcoming homecoming game against the Ballouville Wildcats, and the homecoming dance that followed.
"You're all talk, Martinsburg," Coach had said. "I've heard you crow about teaching those dead kids a lesson. All you've taught them so far is a lesson in how big a coward you are."
Damn, Pete thought, draining his energy drink in one swallow. He slammed the lid of the trunk of his car, and there she was, the zombie chick with the short skirt, slipping into the woods across the lot.
He sent the bottle bouncing off the hood of some loser's Impala.
Here's some new info for you, he thought, heading for the break in the trees.
He could feel his fury like a tight bubble within his chest as he entered the woods, tendrils of anger coursing through his
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veins. His fists were clenched and his mouth was dry. What right did this dead slut have walking around the woods in skimpy skirts and kneesocks while Julie lay still in her grave in some California cemetery? Why did she have a face like a porcelain doll, with pure white skin, while Julie was rotting somewhere beneath the earth?
Pete stifled a cough by pressing his fist to his lips. He wasn't sure what he was going to do; it was like a curtain of red fog had fallen across his vision, and it would not dissipate, no matter how many times he blinked. All he knew was that this zombie had no right to be wandering around these woods.
No right at all.
The path was wide enough to admit a small car or a pair of bicycles riding side by side, and it wound like an uncoiling snake after a sharp downward slope. Leaves crunched underfoot as he began walking. He thought about his last trip into these woods, when Williams had summoned his zombie friends from graves hidden within the forest. He stopped at the edge of the forest to watch her walk away.
He watched her plaid skirt twitch left and right. She was wearing headphones, the cord of which was plugged into something hidden within her small gray backpack. With her white kneesocks and patent leather, her boldness infuriated him. Where was she going? Off to some secret zombie lair in the woods, or some undead ritual on the shores of the Oxoboxo?
The dead girl was fast for a zombie. She cleared the slope and was a fair distance ahead on the curving path, just
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approaching a copse of thin birch trees whose branches leaned over and cut part of the path from view. The branches obscured her from the waist up, but Pete caught a glimpse of smooth white legs. He waited until she disappeared from his view before running. He figured that he would close the gap between them by the time he cleared the birches. There was no way that a zombie could outrun him; he was one of the fastest athletes in the whole school.
I'll catch her in no time, he thought as he began to sprint. Once beyond the birches, the path stretched out in front of him, long and straight.
The girl was gone.
Pete was beginning to tire of hide-and-seek. He peered around a thick clot of brush and then looked behind the remnants of a low stone wall. There she was, lying on the mildewed and mossy ground, leaves and crawling things twined in her hair, the flesh of her face rotting away, and one lidless eye fixing him with a cold empty gaze. He stumbled back because it wasn't the zombie lying there, it was Julie, Julie in the kneesocks, scuffed patent leathers, and a skirt too short for decency; it was Julie waiting for him behind trees and in dark corners.
Pete swore and rubbed his eyes, his rage morphing into another feeling entirely. Maybe if there weren't any zombies, he could leave Julie where she belonged, dead and buried. He cursed again, and when he turned, the dead girl--Karen--was fifteen feet away from him, standing beneath the shading veil of the birch branches, her hands clasped behind her back.
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The dead girl stared at him through lowered eyes--eyes whose blankness creeped him out. They were like diamonds without the sparkle. She did not blink.
"You were following me," she said.
Pete nodded, feeling a muscle twitch in his jaw. He wondered if this freak had put the image of poor Julie in his head.
"Why," she said, "were you following me?"
He didn't answer. She didn't look frightened, but what little he knew about zombies suggested that they weren't the greatest at expressing themselves. He could charge her and knock her down before her cold dead lips could speak another word.
"Did you ...want... to hurt me? Is that it?"
He nodded. He took one cautious step forward, as if she were a deer that was about to bolt, or a dog that was about to bite.
"Yeah," he said, his voice a low, soft whisper. "I do." She lifted her head after a slow nod. "Like you tried to hurt Tommy."
She'd colored her lips a soft peach hue, and he thought he saw a ghost of a smile there. He couldn't tell if she was mocking him or flirting with him.
"Like I tried to hurt Tommy."
She made a sound like a sigh. "Will that make you feel...better?" she asked. "If you could ...hurt me?"
"Oh yeah," he said, taking another step. There was a fallen branch on the side of the path, and he broke it over his knee. He was left with a sharp, jagged point of new wood at the end of a three foot section of branch. "I really think it would."
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She nodded,
her spooky diamond eyes never leaving his. "Then hurt me," she whispered.
He laughed and moved forward, holding the stake level with the point of the V formed by the collar of her white blouse.
"But use a rock," she said, nodding at the stone wall. "We aren't vampires."
Pete paused and considered the option.
"It's a start," he said, choking up on his grip.
Her peach lips parted as if she were about to reply, but then she nodded and undid the third button of her blouse.
"Go ahead," she told him.
She's really going to let me do it, he thought. The sick bitch.
He took his time, but was almost to her when he heard a noise behind him that raised the hair on his neck with its tone and volume--he imagined it was like the bellow of a large, prehistoric animal.
He turned and saw two figures at a distance on the path. One of them was the big black zombie, making the noise again--Pete realized he was shouting the dead girl's name. He was moving as fast as his dead legs could carry him, which wasn't very. His right leg seemed locked at the knee, and the left twitched out in a violent spasm with every step. The overall effect was like watching an old drunk trying to evade the police while at the same time having a heart attack.
The other one, though, Pete thought, the other one was scary.
He was moving just fine, an Asian-looking kid with long
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black hair, black jeans, and a black leather jacket. He was almost running. And he was smiling, which was weird, because zombies rarely smiled, especially not with their teeth.
"Hurry," the dead girl said, and he whirled, intent on doing her right then, and not taking his time like he'd wanted to. But then he saw in her pale dead face that it wasn't her zombie pals she was warning.
"You're last," he said, tossing the stick away. He forced himself to walk, not run, back down the path toward the school parking lot.
"Is it just me," Thorny said, leaning back in his chair as he unwrapped a chocolate-chip granola bar, "or is this the longest shift of all time?"
"It's just you," Adam replied. He was staring at the four monitors that cycled real-time images from the dozen or so security cameras throughout the foundation. Periodically, monitor four would blink in the lab where Alish was explaining something or other to Kevin and Margi in their white lab coats emblazoned with the Hunter Foundation logo--a big gold HF on a black shield. Adam thought it looked like something you'd see on a yacht cap. Tommy sat next to him in the blue work shirt that both he and Thorny wore, the emblem sewn above the left pocket. Adam had been trying to figure out if Tommy blinked when the monitors flashed and switched cameras.
"No, seriously," Thorny said, putting his feet up on Duke Davidson's desk. "We've been here, what? Four hours?"
"Three."
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"See what I mean?" Thorny said. "This is an eternity." "The shifts go by a lot faster," Adam said, "when you aren't with me."
Tommy's smile was reflexive, but it only reached one side of his face. He got up and stretched, and Adam thought he could hear vertebrae snap and pop into place along his spine.
"You stretch?" Thorny spoke through a bite of crunchy granola. Maybe it was his chewing that Adam heard. "What does that do?"
"It...helps," Tommy said.
"How?" Thorny asked, and Adam turned toward him. "No, seriously. How can it help? You don't have to get the blood flowing, right? And ..."
His question died on his lips as Duke Davidson walked in and slapped Thorny's feet off of his desk, almost sending him crashing to the floor. Adam thought that old Duke moved pretty quickly for a guy who looked like an older, less pleasant version of the differently biotic students in his class.
"Don't you three have something to do?" the man said, his words like the cracking of a whip.
"Um, we're watching the monitors," Thorny said. Duke looked at him, his bloodhound eyes causing Thorny to shrink back in his chair and swallow an unchewed hunk of granola bar.
Adam figured ole Duke for an ex-cop. Either that or an ex-con; he'd read somewhere that a lot of former prisoners of the state ended up in security. For such a tall, spider-limbed fellow, he thought that Duke carried himself with what Master
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Griffin called "centered balance"--a way of movement that was economical and always enabled the prepared to act quickly to whatever came their way.
"Watching the monitors," Duke said, leaning forward. "Why don't you do a trash sweep?"
Thorny was about to answer that they'd already taken out the trash, but Adam cut him off before his insolence got them even more chores.
"Yes, sir," he said. "We'll get that done."
He led Tommy and Thorny out into the hallway.
"Let's go to the lab," he said.
"What?" Thorny said, quickening his step to catch up. "What did I do?"
Adam noticed that Tommy didn't have any trouble matching his own stride. "Nothing, Thorny. You didn't do anything."
"Except show a lack of...ambition," Tommy said.
Adam continued to find Tommy's sense of humor amusing; it was so quiet and wry. So deadpan , he thought, smiling to himself.
"What?" Thorny, clueless, asked.
"Forget it. Let's get going."
"I hate the lab."
"Why?" Tommy asked.
"They ... do stuff there." He lowered his voice. Adam would have found Thorny's comment funny if he hadn't looked scared when he spoke. "Experiments."
"Well, this is a scientific facility. At least on paper," Adam said.
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"Yeah, but there's more than that." "What... do you mean?"
The smaller boy looked at each of his companions in turn, and then at the ceiling as though searching for hidden cameras or microphones. His voice dropped to a dry whisper.
"I heard Alish and Angela talking about Sylvia and Kevin, about taking 'samples' from them." He ran his hand through his thick mop of hair. "What kind of samples, I wonder?"
"Come on," Adam said, although in a sense it didn't surprise him. How else were they going to learn about the dead?
"No, really," Thorny said, "I heard them. He said he couldn't figure out why some of the zombies could walk and talk better than the others."
"He hasn't... stuck me ... with any needles," Tommy said.
"It isn't your shift in the lab," Thorny said. He grew quiet as Margi turned into their hallway, coming toward them with a huge stack of papers.
"Yet," Thorny whispered.
"Hi, boys," Margi said. "I get to make copies."
"Lucky you," Adam said, thinking that she looked a little happier than the grainy Margi he'd watched on the monitor screens. He suspected it had more to do with her getting out of lab duty than it did with seeing them.
"That's a big ...stack ...you have there," Tommy said.
Margi's eyes narrowed at him, and she picked up her pace.
"Was that a joke?" Adam asked. "Was that you being funny?"
"What... did ... I... say?"
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"I don't get it," Thorny said.
But Tommy did, a moment later. Adam could almost see the realization creeping into his eyes. He thought that he'd witnessed the closest a zombie ever came to blushing, and it lightened his mood as they continued on their way.
But his mood darkened again when they reached the door of the lab and it was locked. It was the one room in the facility their key cards could not open.
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***
CHAPTER NINETEEN
P HOEBE LIKED EVEN MELLOW music played loud, so she was wearing her headphones as she read Tommy's words on the screen. She was listening to a This Mortal Coil album, one she'd copied out of the vast collection that Colette's older brother had amassed before going off to war. When she heard the violins, it felt as though the bows were being drawn over the strings that attached her brain stem to her spine. She shuddered with the sensation, thinking of Tommy and Colette and everything she was feeli
ng.
She tapped idly on the down arrow, scrolling through the page. The skin of her bare arms was a spectral white, smooth and luminous in the dark room. Like Karen's, she thought.
We make deals with the devil every day, metaphorically. I know
there are those who would say that some sort of deal with the
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devil was made for our very existence here. But the deal I made with one of the many devils in my life was a literal one.
I have written extensively of my reasons for going out for the football team here at Oakvale High. I would not have achieved any of my goals had I not gotten a chance to actually play, and the coach refused to put me in. He was being pressured internally from the school administration, and also getting flak from the media and the few political figures sympathetic to our concerns. But my devil was stubborn, and he refused to bend under the pressure. So by half time I hadn't played a minute of the game. And I would not have been able to play the three minutes and thirty-three seconds of game time I did, if not for what I said to him in the locker room during halftime.
I wish I could tell you what I'm sure many of you would like to hear --that I threatened him, that I frightened him with the promise of an undead horde visiting him in the night. But I didn't. I offered to quit.
Phoebe leaned forward and read the line a second time, but read the same. I offered to quit .
"What?" Coach said. He could barely stand to look at me.
"I will quit the team if you play me today. Put me in for a series of plays."
His expression was like that of a distrustful dog being offered a piece of meat.
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"You 'll quit?"
I nodded. "All of this goes away. The whole circus. And if anyone asks why I quit, your name won't come up."
He looked at me for a minute, his face full of hate. He didn't answer, and when he walked past me, he made sure that we did not touch.
He put me in, and I played. But real life is not like the movies. The team did not rally around the undead misfit, nor did my spectacular play inspire a sweeping change of attitude. The kid I tackled pretty much fell down because he was so scared of me --and I can't blame him.