Passing Strange

  “Hey,” he said. “What are you doing?”

  Not “How are you, this is Pete” or “You might not remember me, but…” I knew it was him the moment he spoke. That sort of self-assurance is hard to mistake.

  “Hi, Pete,” I said. “I didn’t think you were going to call.”

  His voice was a low, dark presence through the tiny cellphone speaker.

  “Now why wouldn’t I call you?” he said.

  “I don’t know.” Because they upped your meds? Because you are an insane, murderous freak?

  “Can I come see you?” No footsie, no flirting, right to the point. Just straight ahead and damn the torpedoes—that was my experience with Pete.

  “I’m at work,” I replied, all giggly, but trying not to overdo it.

  “So quit.”

  “I can’t quit, Pete!”

  “Why not?”

  Um, well, I…

  “I’m saving to get a place of my own,” I said, actually stammering. “Well, with a roommate or two. I need this job.”

  “I want to take you for a drive.”

  “A drive?”

  “Yeah, a drive. I got a new car this summer and I want to see how you look in it.”

  Bold, bold. “I can’t just leave.”

  “You live with your parents now?”

  “’Fraid so.”

  “What time do you get out?”

  “Four o’clock. When Tamara gets here.”

  “I’ll see you then. Better call Tamara and tell her not to be late. Meet me out front.”

  I simulated a sigh, like I was weighing this as a major life decision.

  “What?” he said.

  “Nothing. Okay, four o’clock.” Then, “I’d really like to see you, Pete.”

  “Great. Later.”

  And that was how I began dating Pete Martinsburg.

  Of course, I wasn’t really dating him dating him. I was spying on him.

  After Pete hung up I was feeling a little excited but also a little blue, as in blue-foggy blue. I went into the back room to open some freight. The box cutters that we use are six-inch-long metal rectangles, about an inch wide, that are coated with yellow rubber. You push at the back of the rectangle to unsheathe the blade, which is the corner of a razor held in place by a metal band. Opening my very first box, which turned out to be full of zombie skin products, I accidentally slashed right across the underside of my forearm about halfway between my elbow and my wrist. The cut was long and deep, and in the twenty seconds I stood there staring at it with what I’m sure was a stunned look on my face, it began to well up with blackish-green fluid.

  I think it was an accident.

  I wasn’t going to let a lethal cut spoil my date with Pete. I went into the bathroom, washed away the zombie blood (so much like caterpillar guts—good thing I’m pretty on the outside, because I’m nothing but gross on the inside) as best I could, and then used half a dozen bandages to try and press the edges of my skin together. I took my sleeves down and hoped for the best.

  The whole point was that I was going to Solve the Mystery. I was going to Uncover Evidence. I was going to Blow the Lid off the Great Anti-Zombie Conspiracy. I was going to help bring Pete Martinsburg and his coconspirators to justice.

  But things, as they tend to do, got out of hand.

  Craig let me leave my shift fifteen minutes early. Ten of those minutes I spent in the bathroom trying to look alive. I’d already called my father to let him know that he didn’t need to pick me up because I was going out with friends. If I were alive, there would have been about three dozen follow-up questions—the who, what, where, when, and why of it all. Instead he told me to be careful, and to have fun.

  Pete was waiting for me outside, leaning against a gleaming red sports car that was parked at the curb right by the front entrance. There was sand and salt and snow all over the roads, but his car was sparkly clean, the low purr of the engine like that of a just-fed cat. It was close to dusk but he was still wearing sunglasses, and I could see my reflection in their silver-mirrored surface.

  “I left it running for you,” he said, “so you’d be warm.”

  “Nice,” I said, indicating the car but still looking at him.

  “C’mon,” he said.

  He opened the door for me, just like a gentleman, and let his hand linger on the small of my back as he guided me expertly into his car.

  “It still smells new,” I said, running my hand along the seat. I caught traces of cologne on top of the scent of leather.

  “I like things to be clean,” he said, watching my legs as I tucked the hem of my skirt out of the doorway so he could seal me inside. I don’t blame him—we can all agree I have great legs.

  He got in and drove off. Casually, as if he enjoyed the feel of the machine, and not like some knuckleheads do with their first four-wheel toy, peeling out and leaving an inch-thick streak of rubber on the pavement. He turned the radio on but didn’t blare the music as one of those commercial alternative bands with three words in their name came on. They were singing about something that seemed vaguely related to the life I’d left behind. We drove like that for awhile, not saying anything until he asked me if I was warm enough, his hand already on the temperature control.

  Such a funny question! Warm enough for what? Well, sure, I’m warm enough!

  Karen’s rules of flirting, Number seventeen: In order to appear both mysterious and exciting, avoid direct answers to the questions your target asks. Instead, answer ones the target hasn’t asked.

  “It’s so nice in here,” I said, trailing the fingertips of my left hand along my shoulder strap and stroking the armrest with my right.

  “Yeah,” he said, glancing over at me. And when I say “glancing at me” I actually mean my face—not my chest or my legs. I suppose I should be making him out to be the totally loathsome creep I know him to be, but in the interest of truth in advertising and full disclosure, I can’t do that. He was forward, sure, and maybe just a little aggressive, but in a way that was flattering and not stalker-y or gorilla-like at all. I know the difference; I’ve been with a lot of gorillas. He repulsed me, obviously, but not because of the way he was acting.

  “So,” I said, “where are we going?”

  “Does it matter?”

  “Not really.”

  We were both pros at this, I could tell. It was sort of like a complicated dance where your partner knows all of your moves.

  A car cut him off on the highway and he didn’t even get angry. The other times I’d watched him—in school, or that time in the woods—you could almost see the anger, like a snake slithering beneath his skin. With me in the car he was calm, relaxed.

  “I thought we’d go to Lake Oxoboxo. Have you ever been there?”

  “Yes,” I said, and debated adding “many times,” which would have made him think I was, um, promiscuous. The lake—like secluded lakes all over the country—is our town’s make-out spot.

  “I like it there,” he said, managing to make it sound like it was the lakeside ambiance he craved and not the opportunity to paw me in the backseat. “You said you went to school at Winford?”

  “Yes,” I said, and I wondered if I should steer him away from the lake—not because I was afraid he was going to try to jump my bones (although the odds of that did seem likely), but because most of my friends were hiding inside of it.

  “You guys always beat us in football,” he said. “Except this year.”

  “I haven’t been to any games since I quit school,” I told him.

  “Were you a cheerleader?”

  “Nope, not me.”

  “Huh,” he said, glancing at me. “I’m still trying to figure out where I’ve seen you before.”

  “One of the games, probably,” I told him. “I used to go.”

  We arrived at the lake. Pete pulled into a small dirt lot near the boat launch, next to a few snow-dusted picnic tables in front of the beach.

  “You weren’t Gino Manetti??
?s girlfriend, were you?” he asked.

  I shook my head, trying not to panic. What if he knew all the other players, studied their stats or whatever. “No. I used to go out with Jordan.” There were hundreds of Jordans in Winford, right?

  “Huh. We beat Winford this year, though. Last game I’ll ever play.”

  Pete kept the engine running, killing his headlights. The frozen lake was a luminescent blue in the darkness; the moon swallowed up by the clouds. I felt like I was stepping out onto that ice, with my next question.

  “That’s the game that zombie played in, isn’t it?”

  Pete nodded. He was looking out at the lake, not at me. “Tommy Williams played one series of downs,” he said. “What a hero.”

  “You didn’t have to, like, shower with him, did you?”

  This was me being all spy-girl. I wasn’t actually commenting on Tommy’s hygiene; he’s quite clean and uses the full line of Z products. Pete thought it was funny, anyhow.

  “No. Thank God.”

  “I’d hate to have one of them in the shower. In the locker room. Ick.”

  “They snuck him out the door when the game was still going on, afraid people would attack him or something. People threw rotten fruit at us during the game.”

  “I saw. That was pretty terrible.”

  He looked at me with a weird smile on his face, as though he suspected that I’d been one of the fruit hurlers.

  “Williams is in D.C. right now,” he said. “Trying to get government aid for zombies. There’s talk about him organizing a protest march or a rally or something like that, and people are actually coming out of the woodwork to support him.”

  He drummed his fingers on the steering wheel.

  “All because of my bad aim,” he said. Then, “You want to take a walk?”

  “Sure.”

  We exited his car, and I pretended to hug myself against the cold. Pete was wearing a thick ski jacket, and I was wearing a heavy coat, hat, and gloves. I looked like a proper little snow bunny, except that my breath wasn’t visible when I exhaled the way it would be if I were a, um, breather.

  “I grew up in this town,” Pete said, as we walked down to the short dock. “Back before there were any zombies.”

  He didn’t just say zombies, though. He made the term a little more colorful.

  “Your school was one of the first to enroll dead kids, wasn’t it?” As if I didn’t know. That was why my parents had moved to Oakvale one summer after our first move to a remote town in Maine.

  “Yeah. And then they started that stupid zombie-love class, which was like leaving out a piece of raw meat and waiting for the flies. Corpsicles from all over started coming to Oakvale.”

  I was trying to think of something to say when he abruptly changed subjects.

  “So,” he said. “What’s your deal?”

  “My deal?”

  “Yeah. How come you dropped out of school?”

  I shrugged. “Oh, I don’t know.”

  “Grades?”

  I licked my lips. “Let’s say discipline problems.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Yes. I’m very undisciplined.”

  I was dancing again. He was obviously intrigued by my discipline problems, but I didn’t want to have to create some elaborate story about how I was a candidate for reform school or anything.

  Not that I didn’t have the material. I could have just told him about the months that led up to my suicide.

  “So you were aiming at him?” I said. I figured he wouldn’t have brought it up in the first place if he didn’t want to talk about it. “The zombie?”

  He stood on the edge of the dock, looking out over the lake. If he thought my segue was strange, he didn’t react.

  “He was trying to get it on with a living girl. How repugnant is that?”

  “Pretty repugnant,” I said, thinking how different his version of the story was from the one I’d heard.

  “More zombies were coming. When I saw that I shot Layman instead of the zombie, I lost my head. He used to be one of my best friends. Layman, I mean.”

  “I didn’t know that.”

  “Yeah. But he pretty much chose being friends with the walking corpses instead of me. Still, I wasn’t happy about shooting him, you know?”

  We left the dock and walked along the short beach toward the woods, the frosted sand crunching under our feet.

  It must have been freezing but Pete was too cool to show that temperature could affect him.

  “After I shot him I just took off through the woods. TC—he’s this guy I used to hang out with—we got separated. I was attacked by a bunch of zombies. A freakin’ horde—seven or eight of them, at least. Some of them had knives. This one guy had really long hair and only half a face.”

  He pointed to his scar. I thought it was weird that I could heal bullet holes but he’d have that scar forever.

  “He gave me this.”

  “Oh,” I said, hoping that my eyes looked wet and sympathetic. Tak never talked about his rendezvous, but I’d always had the impression that he was alone when he caught up to Pete in the woods. Neither George or Popeye was staying at the Haunted House then, and Tayshawn hadn’t allied himself with Tak yet. But being attacked by a ravenous horde of zombies sounds more impressive, doesn’t it?

  “He said they were going to kill me. And they tried like hell, but I managed to overpower the one that cut me.”

  Yeah, right.

  “It gave me enough time to get away. Corpsicles aren’t very fast.”

  I looked at the tree line, pretending to be terrified.

  “You don’t think there are any zombies there now, do you? In the woods?”

  “Nah. Not with all the new laws, and with the police looking for them. They’ll arrest any corpsicle that doesn’t have a legal guardian. I figure they’ve all burrowed back into their graves. Or someone else’s grave, whatever.”

  “Really?” I said, trying to shudder. “Really, that’s what you think?”

  “Yeah. But I’m going to find them. I’m going to find them and burn them out of their holes.”

  The vehemence and conviction in his voice was frightening, but it also got me very angry. I might be a good little actress, but those were my friends he was talking about.

  “Is that why you came back to Oakvale?”

  “Yeah. And I’ve got something else planned. Something the Reverend is going to love.”

  “What?”

  Maybe I sounded too eager, because he looked at me, smiling. Smiling like a wolf, I thought. “How do I know I can trust you?”

  I looked up at him. “You can trust me.” I whispered. I left my lips slightly parted.

  “Sure,” he said, laughing. He put his arm around my shoulder. “You’re shivering. Let’s get out of here.”

  He drove me home—or a few streets away from home, because I told him my father couldn’t know I was with him—without making a move or anything, which seems ludicrous, considering how hot I am. He asked me if I was okay walking the rest of the way, and when I said I was, he nodded, and for a moment I thought he was just going to drive off, but then he asked if we could get together tomorrow night.

  And I said yes.

  CHAPTER NINE

  THIS MIGHT BE THE hottest chick that I’ve ever been with, Pete thought.

  Perfect skin, perfect figure. Maybe it only took a few weeks among the gorgons, to cement the idea in his head that Christie was something special, but he thought it was more than that. She was even hotter than his sisters’ friends, the ones he used to go with in California, there was a little something different in the way she walked.

  She was funny, too, whereas most of the girls he knew were brain-dead.

  “You smell nice,” he’d told her when she climbed, oh-so-slowly, like a cat, into his car.

  “Thanks,” she said. “It’s Lady Z.”

  “Lady Z? That zombie stuff?”

  The way she’d looked at him, her blue eyes seemingl
y sparkling from within, was like a caffeine spike to the blood.

  “You don’t like that zombie stuff, I take it?”

  “Not a big fan, no.”

  “Do you still like me?” she’d said.

  “Oh, yeah.”

  And he did. Hot, smart but not smart-assed, and natural. That was something that was different about her than most of the girls from school; she was very natural, very real. Without pretense.

  But mostly, she was hot. It had taken a great deal of effort not to put the moves on her the other night.

  He chuckled to himself. If the Reverend only knew how good he was getting at so-called “emotional mastery”!

  She was so hot he wanted to show her off, so he took her over to his old haunt, the fast food restaurant where all his friends used to hang out. The parking lot was full of cars, and there was a loose group of teens, six or seven of them, having loud fun beside a pair of humming muscle cars.

  Pete watched the guys watching Christie as she got out of his car.

  “Friends of yours?” she said. She knew they were watching her, but she didn’t seem bothered or threatened by it. He liked that.

  “Maybe,” he said. “Used to be.”

  They went inside and he ordered three cheeseburgers, large fries, and a soda. He asked Christie what she wanted and she said a hot fudge sundae.

  “Ice cream?” he asked, getting his wallet out of his jacket. “On a night like this?”

  “I like sweet things.”

  Oh, man, Pete thought.

  He took the tray and led her to a corner booth, taking the seat facing the wall so she could see and be seen.

  “So,” he said, unwrapping the first cheeseburger, “tell me all about Christie.”

  She laughed, and he took a big bite of his burger.

  “Not much to tell. I’m seventeen, I live with my parents and little sister. I quit school to go work and have fun.”

  “Bold move,” Pete said after swallowing. He drew on his straw. “Did you grow up here?”

  She shook her head, and he watched the light catch in her hair. “No, we’re from Iowa. We moved here a couple years ago.”

  “You and all the zombies,” he said. “Iowa, huh?”

  “Iowa.”

  She seemed to be watching him eat very closely, but not like she was grossed out by him or anything. More like she was interested. Pete knew a girl like that in California; she was always bringing him cookies and all sorts of other junk that she’d made for him to eat. She wasn’t one of the more attractive girls that hung around, so he figured she was trying to make up for it by feeding him or something.