A Living Dead Love Story Series (34 page)

We're looking at another random club picture of Stamp with the Val chick hiding playfully behind him. Her small, pale hand is clutching the sleeve of his black-and-white-striped hoodie, and Dane has blown it up as far as he can without all the little pixel thingies showing up.

“Maybe the concealer is gray and her flesh is pale,” I counter, mad because if we don't put this Is-Val-a-Sentinel controversy to rest soon, I'm going to start looking into ways to unzombiefy myself—permanently.

“Yeah, that sounds reasonable.” He scoffs in that I've-been-a-zombie-longer-than-you way that always irks me for some reason. “What human in her right mind wants her skin to look like ours?”

“Speak for yourself,” I huff, standing from the twin bed next to his computer, since he's been hogging the desk chair all week. “While you've been obsessing over Val and her potential zombieness, I've been hitting the tanning booths without you, so I think I look pretty normal.”

In fact, though I would never admit this to Dane, I kind of look better than normal. (Zombie normal, that is.) My new zombie skin doesn't hold the tan as long as my human skin once upon a Before Life, but if I go for an hour every other day or so, I at least look less gray and almost, vaguely human.

Enough to take my hoodie down on the way to work the last few days and not tug on my long sleeves till they cover my wrists and fingers all the time. And after one more teeth-whitening session, I might even be able to
smile again. You know, not all the time, but at least more than I do now. Lots more.

Wow, imagine that. Smiling versus biting my lip.

I never thought I'd do that again.

“You looked fine before,” he grunts, finally turning around in his chair and giving me some attention as I linger at his doorway. “I mean, you look fine now, but there was nothing wrong with you before.”

“That's kind of nice of you to say.” I grin but not all the way. “I think.”

“We are what we are,” he says somberly, ruining it. “Tanning beds and teeth whitening and facials and all that stuff—I've been there, tried that, and it's a lot of work. To keep up with, I mean. And expensive. You'll see. Besides, I kind of like the real you.”

“Wait,” I say, ignoring the kind-of comment. “You mean, the old real me or the new real me?”

“Which do you think?”

“I think you dance around the answer too much.”

“The new old you, before you started trying to impress Val for Sunday dinner or whoever you're trying to impress now.”

I shake my head and slip from the room, leaving him in rueful silence. This is all getting too funky. With Dane and Stamp under the same roof, I mean. It's too much. I know he wants to keep us all safe, but I need to move out. Seriously.

It's too much like marriage up in here. Family. Nine
to five. Like my mom and dad used to be once upon a time, and look how that turned out. Mom taking off with the yoga instructor. Dad working 70 hours a week to get over it. Me rubbing graves after school.

But this is even worse because we're kids, really. And we're still figuring it all out. Between us, I mean. The moody silences and giddy rushes and slamming doors and dancing in the middle of the night—when we're not exercising, that is. And Stamp coming in at all hours, and Dane resenting it, and me hating it. Ugghh. Just … I can do soap opera on my own.

I drift into the living room, which still looks like a living room in case Val ever makes it for dinner, which Stamp keeps promising she will even though Dane and I both know that, no, she won't.

Which is kind of okay with me because, frankly, I don't know if the million-dollar spaghetti I froze from the other night will taste as fresh. Not that I care. I won't be eating any of it. Still, if he cares about her that much—and, of course, if she's not a Sentinel trying to trick us—I'd like her to at least enjoy the food.

Stamp has already come and gone for the morning, despite the hour. He likes to stay away from the apartment as much as possible, coming home late and leaving early to drift through the local mall or go from coffee shop to coffee shop, testing how far and how fast he can blend with the Normals.

I have to admit, even with my latest efforts at playing
it human, Stamp has me beat. Dane, too. Maybe it's because Stamp's newer. He's certainly been a zombie for a much shorter time than Dane has. Whatever the reasons, he's just more Normal-looking.

Dane says that happens sometimes. Just like there are tall zombies and short zombies, boy zombies and girl zombies, there are some real zombie-ass-looking zombies and then there are zombies who look more like, you know, the human people they once were.

Yeah, but I don't know. Maybe I'm just imagining it all or remembering his prezombie self too strongly to ever see him as anything other than alive. But it certainly doesn't hurt him with the ladies. Of all those pictures on his phone, every one was full of adoring human lady flesh.

I walk through the empty living room to grab the morning paper from the front porch, wondering what it would be like to stroll through the world so confidently that you don't just pass as a Normal but you're actually physically attractive to Normals as well.

The locks—all three of them—sound stiff, and I quickly open the door to the chilly dawn. I bend to grab the paper from the cheesy, scratchy welcome mat we bought at the dollar store when we first moved in. It's faded fast and the
O
and
M
are pretty much missing, but we're too cheap or lazy to replace it. I shake the dew off the paper's plastic wrap and carry the news inside, triple-locking the door behind me as I go.

The stationary bike is in my room—has been since the night Val didn't show—and I open the paper and unfold it onto the flimsy black reading tray Dane drilled in place between the handlebars weeks ago.

If you're thinking it's some big romantic gesture he did for me, don't. He just wanted to be able to set his game player on it after the hunk of junk ran out of juice.

Still, it works for the paper as well. I pedal as I read the national front-page headlines. It's about 20 minutes before I finally get to the local section. Then I stop.

Stop pedaling. Stop reading.

And if I could, I'd stop breathing.

“Uh, Dane?” I say sternly to the thin bedroom wall. “Can you come in here for a minute?”

“What'd you do? Break the pedal off again?” I hear the chair creak and his sneakers whisper on the cheap shag rug as he walks into my room.

“Maddy?” he says when he sees my face. “What's up?”

“Does this building look familiar to you?” I point with a trembling finger to the picture of the large gray structure, the one with the faded blue trim, on the front of the local section.

“Wait, hold up. Is that our place?”

I nod.

He leans in behind me, skin luxuriantly cold against the back of my neck.

Actually, it's Building D. We're Building C. But the picture is definitely of The Socialite, our ironically
named cheap-ass, skid row apartment complex.

“What happened?” he says.

But I know he's just a few words away from figuring out, so I zip it until he does.

“Oh.” He walks away to lean on the chin-up bar in the corner. And again: “Oh.”

I stop pedaling. I didn't even realize my legs were still going without my brain attached. I turn toward him. “Oh? One of our neighbors goes missing from one building over, and that's all you have to say? Oh?”

He shrugs, shoulders firm in a V-neck T-shirt from his never-ending supply. I'm convinced he was a main shareholder of the Hanes Corp. in his Before Life. “We're not in Barracuda Bay anymore, Maddy. This is the big city. Stuff like that happens.”

I nod, because, yeah, I'm not stupid. But if that's the case, then why is he avoiding my eyeballs so hard?

“Okay, well, so it's okay for you to obsess about Val's fake concealer smudge and stare at it for hours on end, but I can't even discuss an actual neighbor going missing in the last few days without you rolling your eyes at me?”

He shrugs again.

I read the most alarming passage aloud, just to get his attention:

Mrs. Ortega explains that her teenage son, Rudy, went out early Sunday evening to grab some milk and bananas from the bodega across the street and never returned.

The Ortega family drove around for hours that night, searching in vain, before reporting Rudy missing early the next morning.

“This isn't like him at all,” said Mrs. Ortega when asked for a quote. “He has his cell phone on him constantly, even to run a simple errand just across the street. If he could, he would call. I think that means he can't.”

Local authorities say that—

“Sounds like Rudy just doesn't want to be found,” Dane says.

I toss the paper back onto the wobbly black tray.

“And if I was a human teen living in this dump, I'd run away too.” He grunts.

“That's not funny.”

He nods, meeting my gaze for a moment before quickly looking away again.

“Think about it. This all went down on Sunday night. This Sunday night. Million-dollar-spaghetti Sunday night? Val-standing-us-up Sunday night? I went to that bodega to pick up some fresh cream probably just a few hours before that kid went missing. That's not making your limbs go tingly or anything?”

I think of how Stamp always calls that bodega the Culturally Confused Convenience Store because of the Latin music and the Asian shrine and the variety of crazy ingredients it sells. I think of how the guy behind the counter knows when I need a phone card or just a bottle of Gargantuan Grape soda. I picture Rudy in there, wandering around, looking for bananas and milk. Maybe we were
even there at the same time and I never noticed.

Dane shrugs, starts to say something, must know I'm going to verbally spank him for it, and wisely keeps his mouth shut.

“So hold up. You don't think it's even the least bit fishy? A local teen going missing in the same complex as a trio of zombies? Are you forgetting the Curse of Third Period Home Ec?”

He snorts. “I'm not forgetting it, but one kid going missing is hardly a curse.”

I can't tell if he's so obsessed lately with unmasking Val that he's not hearing me or if, more likely, he doesn't want me to worry. And yet, it's all too creepily familiar to ignore.

I can't help but picture my BFF, Hazel, sitting in Home Ec, endlessly twisting one long, red lock of hair around her finger, sounding as alarmed then as I do now. I blew her off. “There's no curse,” I said. “You're imagining things,” I said. “Grow up,” I said.

Who was I trying to protect all those many mortal months ago?

Hazel? Or myself?

And look at what happened to us then! One zombie—sorry, Zerker—infestation later, and here we are. Cursed. Forever. No more Hazel, no more Chloe, and the bodies are still piling up. Or, in this case, being hidden away.

I quickly discovered what few people know: not
just what it's like to be undead but that there are two kinds of undead. Us, the good guys, the zombie zombies who choose to live among the Normals, eat medically donated or ethically acquired brains, and avoid violence. And the bad guys: the Zerkers.

The Zerkers are the ones who can't or won't control themselves, who eat brains, flesh, bones, whatever they can devour, only try to pass when it suits their needs, and do everything they can to make a regular zombie's life hell on earth.

The Zerkers are the reason the Sentinels exist in the first place. They're why zombies need cops: guys in uniform who enforce the laws and keep the world safe, not from zombies but from Zerkers. And if it weren't for Zerkers, Dane and Stamp and I wouldn't be here right now. We'd still be passing for Normals back in Barracuda Bay, wearing lots of makeup and Goth clothes. Maybe sticking out a little but basically fitting in.

Instead, the Zerkers decided to mess with us, break the Zerker-Zombie truce, and back us into a corner. If we hadn't stopped them at that Fall Formal, by now they would have turned half of Barracuda Bay, maybe all of it. But try getting the Sentinels to understand that.

Okay, okay, so maybe Dane's right. Maybe one kid from our apartment complex going missing—skipping town, fleeing to the nearest
American Idol
audition, or whatever—isn't exactly the same thing as the Zerkers
picking off my Barracuda Bay High classmates one by one. But still, it's enough to make me pick the paper up, fold it tightly, and save it just in case.

I turn to find Dane studying me from across the room. It's not a big room and more cluttered now than ever with the three exercise machines we moved in. His dark eyes are even more piercing than usual, which is saying something.

“What's going on?” I say quietly.

We've been circling each other so carefully, between Stamp's feelings and work and Val being a Sentinel or not, that I'm hungry to just talk to him.

He opens his mouth but stops. Finally, he says, “I don't know,” and he doesn't look away.

“So what should we do? You always said to be packed and ready at a moment's notice.”

I look toward my closet, where a single backpack has everything a good zombie could need for a fast getaway: leggings, socks, sneakers, hoodie, shades—all black—switchblade, Swiss Army knife, umbrella, three cans of cat food with brain as the main ingredient …

You know, all the essentials.

He follows my gaze, then looks at me.

So I say, “Is this ‘in case'?”

He shrugs again, velvety muscles rippling beneath his tight shirt as the sunrise glows through the barely open blinds behind my head. “I don't think I'm ready to
pick up stakes and skip town after all we've done to fit in here, but I do think it's time to get more serious about Stamp.”

“How do you mean? ‘Cause I've been thinking and, well, I know this sounds petty and all, but I totally think we should ground him, straight up. That would do it.”