Passing Strange

  “I’m going to see the Rev,” he said, liking the way his voice echoed in the tiled room. No one else dared to call the Right Reverend Nathan Mathers anything less than “the Reverend.” Half the time kids walked away, praying, when they heard Pete refer to him as the “Rev.”

  “I jutht met with him,” Dorman said. He had a slight lisp, just enough to make Pete want to smash his face in. “I’m going away again. Back home.”

  “That’s good, right?” Pete forgot where the kid was from. Some southern backwater where he had it pretty easy because everybody hated zombies there.

  “Yes,” Dorman said. Yeth. What a freak. A skinny, fleshless creep. There was absolutely no muscle tone on his skeletal frame.

  “What are you going home for?” Pete asked, leaning his head back into the spray. The temperature might be off, but at least they had good water pressure.

  “I’m not supposed to talk about it,” he said.

  Pete laughed. “No? We’re pals, aren’t we, Dorman?” he said.

  “I’m thupposed to go hunting,” he said, blushing under Pete’s stare. He didn’t say it like he was bragging, though, which caught Pete’s attention. He almost sounded like it was something shameful.

  All of the kids in the dorm bragged about killing zombies, and Pete could tell that most of them were full of crap. The kid that cried at night claimed to have personally “sent six demons back to hell,” and a few of the other bed wetters made their encounters with zombiekind sound like dire ninja battles, complete with Norris-esque roundhouse kicking and lethal karate chops that launched zombie heads from zombie shoulders. Pete didn’t believe any of them.

  “Really? So you’re going out to reterm yourself some deadheads, huh?”

  He looked at Pete then, and it was like the water coming out of the showerhead had dropped a few degrees in temperature.

  “Yes,” Dorman said. “Yes. I like hunting the dead.” The kid wasn’t lisping anymore, Pete noticed.

  Dorman’s eyes were as empty as any zombie’s Pete had ever seen. And his skin as gray. If it wasn’t for the fluidity of his movement and his speech, Dorman could be one of the demons he pretended to hunt.

  “I like hunting them,” he said. His voice didn’t seem to resonate the same way Pete’s did in the room. “I really do.”

  The shower washed away a thin sheen of soap suds, revealing four blue-black lines, hash marks, etched into the sallow gray flesh of his shoulder.

  A dreamy, beatific look blossomed on Dorman’s face as he looked up at the sputtering nozzle and started humming a tuneless song to himself.

  Once clean and out of the shower, away from the weirdo in the flip-flops, Pete dressed quickly for his meeting with the Reverend. When he got to the long corridor that led to the office, Pete stepped up his pace.

  The Reverend’s desk was in the corner of the room, his back to a large open window that made him hard to see clearly in the wash of sunlight that streamed through. A large ink drawing of an angel treading on a thick serpent was on the wall to the right of the desk. The angel’s expression was impassive as he poised to stab the serpent with a long thin spear.

  “Peter,” the Reverend said. “Please sit. Are you well?”

  “I’m fine, sir.” Pete took a chair in front of the big desk.

  “Your time here is at an end, Peter,” he said. “You’re going home. For now.”

  “What?” Pete said, his voice almost a cry as he half came out of his seat. “I just got here! What do you mean I’m going home?”

  “Peter,” the Reverend said, his voice stern. “Your emotions.”

  Pete slumped back, fighting his frustration. In the three weeks he’d been on campus, he’d met personally with the Reverend six times, and each time the Reverend spoke at length on the necessity of mastering one’s emotions. Pete inhaled deeply before speaking.

  “I don’t love the idea of going back, sir. I’m not happy in Oakvale, living with my mother’s jerk of a husband, and…”

  “Peter,” the Reverend said, the features of his face all but obliterated in the light streaming from the high window.

  “You don’t write like you’ve mastered your emotions,” Pete replied, too quickly.

  The Reverend looked at him over his steepled fingers for a long moment before replying.

  “Explain what you mean by that statement,” the Reverend said, the outline of his robes and his dark eyes the only things visible in the wash of light.

  Pete’s nerve faltered, and his reply was weak and stammering. He thought he sounded like Dorman. Something about looking into Reverend Mathers’s eyes, which were dark and penetrating, made him acutely aware that being in his presence was a rare gift.

  “Well,” he began, “I just meant that…that your feelings are pretty clear when it comes to the undead scourge.”

  “And how would you describe my ‘feelings?’” His eyes flashed with a baleful fire as he said the final word. Pete glanced quickly at the snake-destroying angel, but found no help there; its bland expression suggested that the divine being had mastered its emotions at the dawn of creation.

  “You…you write very…passionately …about the real meaning of the zom…of the undead scourge, and what should be done about it.”

  “Which is?”

  “‘The undead need to be driven out of the material plane,’” Pete said, “‘by force and by fire. And the way behind them must be sealed by prayer and righteousness.’”

  If the Reverend was pleased by Pete’s ability to quote word for word from his works, he didn’t show it. He unlaced his fingers and leaned forward on his desk, rendering the deep lines of his face visible as he spoke.

  “You are confusing displaying emotion with creating emotion,” he said. “I write the way I do in The Undead Plague not to purge myself of any ‘feelings,’ but to cause others to feel.”

  He paused for a moment, then leaned back and let the light streaming from the window obliterate his features. “You also confuse ‘feeling’ with ‘fact.’ The undead are a certain sign of the apocalypse. The Bible is incontrovertible on that matter, and feelings have nothing to do with it. This is why we must do everything in our power to get our message across, as our society is so steeped in sin that they permit abominations to walk among them, to mingle with them, rather than obey the Lord’s commands and do what they should be doing. Which is destroying the abominations.”

  He kept fading in and out of the light; the effect was almost hypnotic.

  “If I employ emotionally charged language with my readers, it is only because I am concerned for their lives and their immortal souls. Unfortunately, people have a tendency to respond more rapidly and more appropriately when frightened or angry than they do if shown care or concern. Fear and hate are stronger motivators than love. And, you’ll find that people respond more to feeling than fact.”

  He leaned forward again, the features of his face once again solidifying out of the curtain of light.

  “That is why I write the way I do.”

  His eyes seemed to be boring into Pete’s head.

  “Am I making myself clear on this point, Peter?”

  “Yes,” Pete said. “Yes, sir.”

  “Good.” The Reverend did not look overly pleased, because even pleasure was considered an emotion that should be suppressed. “As to why it’s time for you to return home to Oakvale. As you know, the undead have been driven underground by the actions of you and Mr. Davidson. It is now illegal in the state of Connecticut to be undead in public and unaccompanied by a legal guardian. We believe that the Oakvale undead are in hiding, and that they never left the town. One was reterminated in Winford the night of yours and Mr. Davidson’s excursion. Another has been given sanctuary by the local Catholic church.”

  Pete thought he detected a slight twitch of the lip, a slight sneer, on the Reverend’s face as he imparted this last bit of information.

  “And then there’s the leader of the demons, Tommy Williams. He has gone to Washin
gton where he seeks to trick the American government into believing that he and his rotting kind are an oppressed people, deserving succor instead of destruction.”

  “Shouldn’t I go to Washington?” Pete said. “If that’s where Williams is.” He hadn’t been to Washington since an eighth-grade field trip.

  The Reverend shook his head. “No. We have other plans for the Williams demon. I want you to go back to your hometown. You have unfinished business there.”

  “Unfinished business” made him think of the girl from Wild Thingz!, Christie. Maybe it wouldn’t be such a bad thing to go home again. There were a few scores he wanted to settle.

  “What do you want me to do?”

  “I want you to find them,” the Reverend said, allowing a controlled smile to grace his lips. “The ones that got away. I want you to find them and dig them out of their holes.”

  CHAPTER SIX

  SEEING PHOEBE, ADAM, and Margi a few days after being shot full of holes (a.k.a. the Swiss Cheese Incident) was one of the happiest days I’ve had since returning from death. I was all James Bond-y about it; I had Margi drive to a super-secret location on Oxoboxo Cross Road to pick me up, and then I had her drive to the parking lot of a local fast food restaurant. I was crazy paranoid by this time, of course, seeing white vans everywhere, imagining Men in Black–type, anti-zombie goons looking high and low for me.

  “Are you sure nobody saw Adam get in your car?” This was after the hugging and kissing and teary stuff. They were of course wicked glad to see me, but I guarantee I was even more wicked glad to see them. It’s unbelievably nice to have people that care about me.

  “Nobody saw me,” Adam said. I thought he was speaking really, really well now, with fewer of the pauses that made speech so difficult for him in the early days of his return. And moving! He’s getting back that big guy grace he had pre-death. Not many people know this, but Adam is quite a good dancer.

  “Look,” he said. “I’m even…wearing…Johnny’s coat.”

  “A clever disguise,” I said. “What about your other brother? The jerk? Or your stepfather?”

  “Jimmy was out. And the STD—Joe—he’s okay.”

  We passed an actual white van going the other way on one of the back roads, but it was a minivan kind of thing with a ski rack. When I looked back I could see a mounted DVD player playing Wall-E to two car-seated children. “Are you sure he’s okay?”

  “Karen,” Adam said, in that patient, steady way he has. “He’s…okay. Are you…okay?”

  I sighed. “I’m great. I’m really, really great. I feel like I’ve got so much to tell you.”

  “Speaking of disguises, I like the new look, Karen,” the ever fashion-conscious Margi said. “Trying to go incognito?”

  I told her I was. “Absolutely. Getting shot changes your perspective on the world. You know?”

  That wasn’t the only thing that was changing my perspective. Toward the end of my shift, after my encounter with Pete, I peeked under the Band-Aid on my cheek. The hole was gone. I pressed my cheek where the hole had been, but very lightly—I was half afraid that my face would collapse inward like a poked mushroom. Then what would I have done?

  Boss, I have to go home early. My face broke. My skin was a little squishy and maybe a bit discolored and pinkish, but nothing really noticeable. It almost looked like I had a tiny blemish or a freckle.

  “I love your eyes. Did you have blue eyes when you were alive?”

  Adam, bless his heart, grumbled that he liked my zombie eyes better.

  “I did, Margi,” I said, “but these are contacts. And when I was alive my hair wasn’t this dark. It was blond, though—sort of between this color and the, um, zombie platinum.”

  “You look great,” Margi said. “If I died would I get your figure?”

  I laughed; she didn’t.

  “Karen,” Phoebe said, touching my arm. We were in the backseat. “What happened?”

  I told them almost everything. I mentioned getting shot, for example, but didn’t tell them about being hit in the cheek. I told them that I was fine, but I didn’t tell them I could heal. They knew about me passing at my mall job, but I didn’t tell them that I wasn’t quitting anytime soon. I told them about my theory that Pete Martinsburg had something to do with the Guttridge “deaths,” but I didn’t tell them that I’d seen and talked to him.

  I was afraid they’d want to get all involved if I told them my plans to get to the heart of the Guttridge case; form a super-secret crime club, and soon we’d be piling into the Mystery Machine so we could be those lovable meddling kids who ruin the bad guys’ day. But from what I remember of those stories, Scooby-Doo never took three slugs from a policeman’s gun, and Nancy Drew never scratched her way out of a coffin after a case went south. This wasn’t fun and games. This was life and death.

  And I thought of my “conversation” with Pete. I don’t think Nancy Drew would have fully approved of my, um, methods. Karen DeSonne, girl detective, would go it alone.

  We went through the drive-thru so Margi and Phoebe could get coffee. Addicts! The coffee smelled great, though, and the aroma filled the entire car.

  “Have any of you gotten to see Melissa?” I said.

  The girls looked ashamed, the poor dears. I wonder if their parents, their teachers—heck, even their friends—understood how stressful it was for them to have zombie friends, never mind zombie friends who were getting arrested, shot, Tasered, destroyed, etc. The stress of watching someone you love being persecuted is enough to drive a teen to drink or become seriously depressed.

  “I called her,” Phoebe said after a moment of silence. “At St. Jude’s. It took a while for me to get through because the priest there, Father Fitzpatrick, has been swamped with reporters and media types. But he put her on and I told her that we loved her and that we were thinking about her.”

  Phoebe. You’ve got to love her. I certainly do.

  “Father Fitzpatrick thanked me,” she said. “He said that Melissa drew a big smiley face on her whiteboard, and that my call meant a lot to her. To both of them.”

  “That’s great,” I told them.

  “She’s the…only other…one of us…I know of who is still in town,” Adam said. Like I said, his speech is so much better. There were pauses, but nothing like when he first died.

  “Well, that makes two of you,” I said. “Like Margi said, I’m going incognito.”

  “You aren’t going back to school?” Phoebe said, and she had that militant streak in her eyes again. I think she had visions of me and Adam doing the whole social-protest thing, the demand-equal-education trip, but that’s not for me.

  “Nope. Besides, Phoebe,” I said, all wide-eyed and fake innocent, “isn’t that illegal now?” I could see Adam scrunching low in the shotgun seat, trying to hide his smile.

  “So you’re quitting Wild Thingz! too?”

  Quick as a bunny, smart as a fox. “Um, no.”

  “Karen,” Phoebe said. I wonder if she knows how cute she sounds when she gets all den mother-y. “What do you think will happen if you get caught?”

  “Well, Phoebe,” I said. “I suppose they would destroy me.”

  My flippant remark was met with a silence as cold and silent as a tombstone. Adam cleared his throat.

  “I’m serious, Karen!” Phoebe said. She might have been choking up a little. “I’m worried about you. Hasn’t there been enough tragedy already?”

  I took her hand in mine. “Phoebe, sweetie. We’re fighting for our lives. There’s going to be more tragedy before we’re through. A lot more.”

  She was trying not to cry as she squeezed my hands. “Why? Why do you have to do it?”

  Phoebe knows that I killed myself. I could have told her that I’m fully aware that what I did was the most grievous sin a person could commit, and that clearing my people of the crimes they were accused of would go a long way toward helping me feel as if I’ve atoned for that sin, but I didn’t.

  I could have told h
er that when I took my own life I left someone behind, someone very special to me, and there was something inside me that made me want to do something good on this earth before I could see that special someone again. But I didn’t.

  “A couple reasons. But I can’t tell you what they are, Phoebe.”

  And I couldn’t! If I told them that passing at the mall might give me an edge in exposing Martinsburg and his role in the frame-up of our people, they’d never stand for it. And if I told them what I had done—that I’d actually flirted with him—you can believe that they’d never let me out of their sights again. In fact they’d probably tie me up, throw me in the trunk, and drop me off at the Hunter Foundation for intensive study. They knew Pete. They knew that he was a threat. They knew what he was already responsible for. Including them would have put them directly into the line of fire.

  “You’re breaking the law,” Phoebe said. “Like you said. It is no longer legal for a zombie to be without a legal guardian in public.”

  I could have pointed out that Adam was breaking the same law, but I didn’t think that would help anything. She was grasping at straws, and she knew it. Instead, I tried a joke, which probably helped even less.

  “I’m committing a crime against nature just walking around. What’s the difference?”

  She sighed and looked out the window. A living family of four was exiting their SUV, the father gently lifting a little boy from his car seat. They were all smiles as they headed toward the restaurant, the girl skipping ahead. The silence in Margi’s car grew.

  “Speaking of illegal,” Margi said, eventually. “Do they really not know that you’re a zombie at Wild Thingz!?”

  “They really don’t know. I’ve got them completely hoodwinked.”

  “Are you sure? That seems sort of implausible.”

  Margi really is the cutest thing in the world. I can’t watch her drink coffee and not wish with all my might that I was alive enough to enjoy it the way she does. She holds the cup in both hands, forming a cradle with her black-and-pink-nailed fingers, and she sort of hunches over it with an expression of total reverence on her face, like she’s honoring the Spirit of the Bean or something. And she always inhales the steam and scent before she leans farther to take a sip.