Zombie Baseball Beatdown

  Sammy was waving and calling out. His dad—

  “Dang,” I said. “His dad is chasing him, too. His dad’s already a zombie.”

  “Sammy’ll never make it if we don’t stop,” Joe sighed. “I hate to say it, but I think maybe we ought to show pity on the sucker.”

  I looked from Joe to Miguel, not knowing how to feel.

  Sammy had definitely been terrible to us since forever. Sammy had acted like we weren’t even people. He’d told us we didn’t belong. I thought about all the things he’d called us over the years, and all the crummy things he’d done. When his dad did terrible things to Miguel and his family, Sammy had gloated about it.

  I didn’t like Sammy at all.

  I sighed. “Slow down, Miguel.”

  Miguel glanced over. “Are you kidding?”

  “No. I guess not.”

  Miguel’s face hardened. “Nope. I’m not doing it.”

  “Come on, Miguel. You’re better than he is. We’re all better than he is. Even on our worst day, we’re better than Sammy. Don’t play it the way he would.”

  For a second, I wasn’t sure that I could get through, but then Miguel let out his breath slowly and took his foot off the gas. You could see Sammy’s relief as we slowed and he managed to catch up to us.

  “Roll down the window,” I said. “But keep moving.”

  Sammy caught up to the window, clutching its edge. “Thank you thank you thank you—”

  He saw who was driving and recoiled.

  I grinned at him. “You sure you want to get in the truck?” I asked.

  “Yes! Just lemme in! My dad’s a zombie!”

  “Yeah, well, he kind of brought that on himself,” Miguel said.

  The zombies were gaining on us.

  “You sorry for all the things you said to us?” I asked.

  Sammy was nodding like a dashboard bobblehead. “Yeah! Yeah! I’m sorry!”

  “Tell me you love Mexicans!”

  “I love Mexicans!”

  “Tell me you love immigrants!”

  “I love immigrants!”

  I looked at Joe and Miguel. “You think he’s telling the truth? Or you think he’s just trying to get a ride?”

  Joe looked at me with a sparkle in his eye. “I dunno. I don’t really buy it.”

  “Me, either,” Miguel said.

  I looked at Sammy. “Sorry, man. They don’t believe you.”

  “Please!” he said. “Pleasepleasepleasepleaseplease.”

  He was pathetic.

  When he’d been on top, he’d treated us like dirt. Now that he was on the bottom, he’d turned into jelly. No spine at all. Just a rich kid who lived the good life and then one day looked around and found out that he needed other people to stay alive after all.

  “You get one chance,” I said to him, and then I shouted over my shoulder to the kids in the back, “Let him up!”

  “Are we sure about this?” Miguel asked. “He really is bad news.”

  “Maybe he learned a lesson,” I said.

  “Maybe he didn’t.”

  “So we’ll watch him,” I said. “If he doesn’t straighten up, we can always toss him back to the zombies later. No reason we have to keep putting up with bad behavior. Not anymore.”

  The rest of the team was hauling Sammy up into the truck bed. We gunned the engine and headed for the open road, zooming through cornfields, headed for where, I didn’t know.

  Who knew what kind of life we’d find? Who knew how far the zombie apocalypse was spreading?

  But I was glad I had my friends with me, and a team behind me, and whatever happened, I figured that between all of us working together, we’d get it sorted out.

  EPILOGUE

  “You mean we can’t talk about this to anyone?”

  We were all sitting in a big old conference room in a big old skyscraper in big old Chicago. We had a view of other huge skyscrapers, and if you put your face to the glass, you could see down all the way to the cars, little tiny toys below.

  But I wasn’t looking at the view.

  I was sitting at the table with my mom and dad, Miguel, Joe, Joe’s mom, and our lawyer. And across the table from us sat Lawrence Maximillian, the cold-blooded lizard lawyer of Milrow Meat Solutions.

  And he was smiling.

  Maximillian looked at me over his little rectangular glasses. “Rabi, you’re in possession of proprietary company information. It’s not yours to share. It never was.”

  “But you guys were breaking the rules! This whole thing only happened because you were doing bad things with your cows! All those zombie outbreaks? They had to call out the National Guard in six different towns!”

  Maximillian looked at me. “Don’t be hysterical. They were small towns. In any case, you signed nondisclosure agreements.”

  Our lawyer cleared his throat. “Those agreements were signed without anything approaching full consent. The boys are minors.”

  “I should sue you for even coming close to my kid,” my dad said.

  “Consider your position very carefully,” Maximillian said. “Going to trial is risky business. If I end up seeing you in court, I’ll crush you with court costs. And if I win, I will take away everything that you have earned or ever will earn.”

  “But we didn’t do anything wrong!” Joe’s mom protested.

  “No?” Maximillian’s eyebrows rose. He started ticking points off on his fingers. “You left young children unattended. Said children trespassed. Said children stole from a meatpacking facility—”

  “You mean the cow head that wouldn’t die,” Miguel interjected.

  “—They assaulted a Milrow employee—”

  “Mr. Cocoran was trying to eat our brains!” Joe protested.

  Maximillian was still ticking off charges. “So: theft, trespassing, assault. Not to mention the fact that your children were roaming free in a meat-processing facility, a very dangerous environment. I’ll bet I can bury you on child endangerment and neglect alone. By the time I’m done, I might even have custody of your children.”

  My mom had had enough. “Our boys were driving around in a pickup for a week, fighting creatures that came from your meatpacking plant. I’d be happy to see you in court!”

  “Don’t be so eager for a trial, Mrs. Chatterjee. I’ve never lost a major case, and, frankly, we can afford to drag something like this out for years. And consider this: If by some chance you finally win some minor complaint against us, well, Milrow Meat Solutions will simply file for bankruptcy. The day after that, another company will buy our facilities and hire our personnel, and we’ll all go right back to our jobs. You’ll change nothing. You can’t kill a company like Milrow, and you can’t hurt us. But in the meantime, we can hurt you a great deal.”

  My parents were starting to look ill at the threats, but I wasn’t going to roll over to Larry Max this time. “We’ve still got the videos that Joe took. All those zombie cows? All your cleanup squad workers chopping up the cows and sending them out for people to eat? We have proof!”

  Maximillian smiled. “Sadly, taking secret videos on a farm is terribly illegal. There are civil and criminal penalties. Fines. Jail time. You can’t just waltz onto a farm and take videos of things you’re not supposed to see. We’ve worked hard to pass farm-protection laws in many states, for just these sorts of criminal intrusions.”

  “You’re not a farm!”

  “Just because Milrow Meat Solutions is large doesn’t mean it doesn’t deserve to be protected from activists and troublemakers.”

  “You broke the law!” I said.

  “Actually, there are very few laws that have been broken. Accidents happen, that’s all. It’s a sad thing when accidents happen, but that’s all this was.”

  “You sold bad meat to people.”

  “Well, it’s possible that a rogue executive like Mr. Riggoni is probably liable for unethical decisions.” Maximillian grinned. “But he’ll be in a cage for life, muttering for brains. I don’t see how
you could punish him any more.”

  “But it was your cleanup squad who put all the meat in the trucks and shipped it out. Somebody at Milrow ordered that. Maybe you, even.”

  Maximillian spread his hands, still smiling. “I can only tell you what our internal investigations have concluded: no evidence of conspiracy or criminal neglect. The USDA and FDA have already addressed the safety concerns related to beef feed, growth hormones, antibiotic use, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, and they’re fully satisfied that we meet national health and safety guidelines for beef production. Milrow Meat Solutions has fired the responsible personnel, and there is a voluntary, ongoing, and thorough internal review of our food-safety practices. We have already determined who the main culprits were, but unfortunately the majority of the lawbreakers were removed across the border by Immigration and Customs Enforcement just before the outbreak, so certain legal remedies are not available.”

  Maximillian used big words, and he talked like he was a real person, but if you read between the lines, it was pure evil that he was saying. And you could tell that he knew it, and didn’t care.

  “You mean people like Miguel’s aunt and uncle,” I said. “You’re trying to blame the regular workers.”

  “Lax hiring practices on senior executive Riggoni’s part resulted in unforeseen manufacturing difficulties, and rogue employee decision making. I think that’s the line we’ll be taking.”

  Which meant that they really were going to blame a bunch of innocent people for something that some rich dude in a skyscraper had decided would make some extra money.

  I stood up. “You suck. You all suck. It was your fault, and you know it. You’re the ones who put all the weird stuff in the cow food, and gave them the weird shots, and left all those cows out there in those feedlots, getting sick. Miguel’s uncle saw all kinds of nasty things—”

  “All perfectly acceptable, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture—”

  “—and now you want to lay this on someone else and cover it all up, and call it an E. coli outbreak. There’s some rich guy in Des Moines, or Chicago, or Omaha, or New York City, or something, and he’s sitting back and making all kinds of money while he throws good people out of America and feeds us all his bad meat.”

  Phew. That was some kind of major speech. I looked around the table. My friends were nodding. Even our parents were nodding.

  Joe said, “We’ve already decided. We’re going to upload the whole video from the inside of your meatpacking plant, and then everyone’s going to know what you guys were doing. We’re going to let people see what they think of the way you make meat in Delbe.”

  Maximillian said, “Alas. We’ve already closed the plant. It should have been closed down years ago. It was much too small, anyway. We’ve got bigger, better, state-of-the-art beef-processing facilities now.” He leaned forward. “And let me tell you, if you distribute that video, don’t forget it’s been illegally obtained. We will, of course, sue, and the full force of this corporation will take your money, your homes, everything.…”

  Miguel crossed his arms, not looking impressed. “So, what if I do it?” he asked. “What are you going to take from me that you haven’t taken already? You already sicced ICE on my mom, my dad, my aunt, my uncle. I don’t even have a home. I’m living at Rabi’s house now, and don’t even know if I get to stay. How about I pay you back for all that?”

  For the first time, fear flickered in Maximillian’s eyes. “Miguel,” he said soothingly. “I thought we had an arrangement. I know you want to stay in this country.…”

  “I want my family back,” Miguel said. “And I want them to be citizens.”

  “Miguel…”

  “And me, too. I want full citizenship.”

  “ICE is notoriously difficult—”

  “ICE never raids unless you ask for it. ICE does whatever you big-money guys want. You told us before that you have senators in your pocket. So? What’s it going to be?”

  “All right, all right.” Maximillian caved. “We’ll work something out.”

  Miguel shook his head. “Nope. I was just fooling with you. No deals. Not with you guys. Not anymore. You don’t make me roll over. Never again. I’m not taking a single thing from your dirty hands.”

  And the way he said it, he was ice-cold. Stronger than I’d ever seen him. He’d always been stand-up, but now, it was like he owned Lawrence Maximillian. There wasn’t a bit of fear in Miguel.

  And Maximillian was suddenly terrified, because he’d run into the first person in his life who couldn’t be bought.

  Miguel was without question the most heroic guy I had ever met. I wanted to stand up and cheer. Even when it would have been easier for him, he wasn’t going to let up. Even if we were all covering for ourselves, and afraid, he was willing to go the full distance. Even if it got him deported to Mexico, he was going to do it.

  Except, I really didn’t want my best friend to get kicked out of the country, and it looked like that was about to happen.

  I started thinking furiously, trying to come up with some way to get Miguel to just take the deal. Let it go. But I knew he wouldn’t. Miguel was too ethical for his own good. And then it hit me.

  “Miguel.” I pulled him aside, whispering, “I got an idea.”

  “What’s that?”

  “I got an idea. Something that gets your parents back.”

  “I don’t care. I’m bringing Milrow down. That’s what I want. I’m not making a deal with those devils.”

  “Yeah, I know. I agree. But, listen, we don’t need the pictures or the video. We got something else.”

  “What’s that?”

  “A story.”

  He gave me a puzzled look. “A story? What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “Look. As soon as that video goes up, what’s Milrow going to do? They’re going to say it’s fake. They’re going to sue anyone who puts it up. They’ll make people take it down. Maybe some people will see it, but Maximillian and his goons will make it seem like it’s stupid movie footage. Not the real thing.”

  “So? It’s all we got. And I’m going to use it.”

  “I’m saying we got something better. And Milrow won’t be able to do a single thing about it. We’ve just got to make sure the lawyers draw up the agreements in the right way. We’ll agree that we won’t ever release the videos, in return for Milrow getting your family back into the country, and getting you citizenship.”

  “No! Then we’re giving up—”

  “And we won’t talk to the press, and we won’t go on TV.…”

  “I won’t do that!”

  “Will you listen to me? We got something better. We got a story, right? Just a story. A harmless little story about some kids who were playing baseball one day, and then there were these strange cows, and then their hometown started to go weird. I bet a lot of people would like hearing a crazy story like that.” I shrugged. “Especially if it’s just a story. Milrow won’t be able to do anything about a story, right?”

  Miguel had started smiling.

  “You with me?” I asked.

  “Oh yeah. One hundred percent.”

  We came back to the table. “We’ll do your deal, Maximillian. We’re all in.”

  * * *

  The thing I realized while we were talking at the lawyer’s table was that Milrow Meat Solutions would sue us to death for telling the truth. They’d sue for showing videos of the truth. They’d make all kinds of trouble about the truth. They really could take away our house and all that kind of stuff, but there was one way, maybe, they couldn’t.

  And that’s if we made the whole thing up.

  So here you’ve got this book in your hands, and I’m telling you—straight up and down—that I made this whole story up. The zombies and Milrow and everything in it. I made up the names and the places and everything. Any resemblance to real people, real things, or real events is purely coincidental—I think that’s how the lawyers like to say it.

  I’m
telling you that there wasn’t a zombie uprising, and my friends and I didn’t beat them down with baseball bats. And, of course, Milrow Meat Solutions didn’t cut corners and stuff their cows with all kinds of weird drugs and nasty feed. And for sure, they didn’t sweep their zombie scandal under the rug and call it an E. coli scare.

  None of that. Nope. Didn’t happen.

  This is fiction, right? Just a scary story with some thrills and chills. I swear to you that Bart the Zombie Cow Head isn’t hanging on the wall in Joe’s room, mooing in the dark, while Joe reads his comics with a flashlight.

  But, you know what else?

  Sometimes, truth is even stranger than fiction.

  Oops. My lawyers just told me I can’t say that.

  So maybe I’ll just say instead that grown-ups tell us all kinds of things. They tell us what’s true and what’s not; and they tell us they’re responsible, even when they’re out to lunch; and they tell us how things are safe when a lot of times they aren’t; but most of all, they tell you what never ever happens, because it would be impossible.

  But you know how a pitcher pretends he’s going to throw a fastball, and then he switches up and throws a curve instead?

  At the end of the day, it’s up to us to not get fooled by the things grown-ups throw at us. And it’s up to you, right now, to read between the lines. And sometimes, it’s up to all of us to take the zombies down.

  If we all stick together, it’s possible. We don’t have to let the bad guys win. Working together, we can do anything.

  That’s the real truth.

  Your friend always,

  Rabi

  Rabindranath Chatterjee-Jones

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  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  I’d very much like to thank Holly Black and Cassie Claire for letting me tag along on a retreat to Mexico, and for giving me the time and space away from the regular world to dream up Rabi’s. I also have to thank Holly for repeated inspiration when I stalled out and didn’t know where to go next; her support was critical and helped me keep faith as I hacked through my initial draft. I’d particularly like to thank Jobim for getting this idea started; without him, I never would have considered writing about zombies. Andrea Spooner, my fabulous editor, was instrumental in making this book sharper, smarter, and more fun. For help with baseball authenticity, Gary Russell and Jason Nicholoff were instrumental. I also owe Rob Ziegler for some early all-American inspiration. Many thanks to Anu Bandopadhay for her help with Bengali, and Juan Diego Gomez and Jennie Chavez for help with my terrible Spanish. I’d also like to thank Greg VanEekhout for help with comics knowledge, and Sarah Prineas for help with Iowa cornfields, and a heck of a lot of wisdom along the way, not just on this book, but on all of them.