A Living Dead Love Story Series (72 page)

In the end, I pick up the shoe, because blood is blood and a good Florida rainstorm might wash it away. Even a good case of sprinklers could make it just another rust-colored smear on some yuppy's drive to work. But a shoe is hard to hide and just gets people talking.

I bring it home with me, cutting across backyards and houses to double-time it to the house on Lumpfish Lane.

I put the shoe under the kitchen sink, just in case. I don't know why. I don't want anyone finding it, but I can't quite bring myself to throw it away either.

I climb up the stairs, suddenly sad and lonely and ashamed and in need of some company.

Stamp is there, standing guard, just like I thought.

“See anything?” I ask a little too loudly.

His eyes get big at the sudden noise. “Nope,” he answers, kidlike. “You?”

I shake my head, feeling it's less of a lie than actually saying no.

“Should I keep looking?”

I reach for his hand and drag him away from the window. “No, we've done enough for one night.”

We stand in the middle of the room, hand in hand.

“So what now?”

I smile and lead him downstairs. “Let's put our feet in the pool. You like that, right?”

He nods and follows me onto the deck.

H
ow'd it go?”
Lucy is waiting for me on a bench outside the library. She's facing the back door to the office as I walk out, admiring my new student ID.

Madie Swift

11
th
grade

Transfer

B-Lunch

Next to my vital signs is my ghoulish picture, shaved head, pale face, thin lips, drawn eyes.

I hand it to Lucy as she rises, smoothing out the green-and-blue gingham pleats in her skirt.

“I think they took pity on me. Maybe they think I'm dying or something.”

She shrugs, handing the ID back. “You look edgy; that's all. Maybe if you would've let me put on a little blush, some eyeliner, it wouldn't look so bad.”

“Been there,” I say, thinking of Hazel and the clown makeup she applied my first morning as one of the reanimated. “Tried that. Epic fail.”

She studies me critically, fixing the lapel of my maroon school jacket. “A little lip gloss.” She fumes. “Something. I mean, I didn't go to all this trouble just so you could stumble around like something out of a haunted house.”

“Maybe I'll just scare the Zerkers away,” I huff, shaking off the guilt from last night.

We walk toward our lockers. “I'm pretty stoked Tony was able to slip your school records into the central computer like that.”

“Tony?” I stop at a bulletin board outside the guidance counselor's office.

“My brother,” she explains, joining me.

“Not for nothing,” I complain, “but they weren't exactly themselves in there this morning.” I point to the latest Missing poster, stapled next to the first two. “Emlyn James,” it says, next to the yearbook photo of the pretty chestnut blonde the Zerkers bushwhacked while she was out jogging last night. Maybe it's just me, but in the picture her eyes are quietly judging me. “I think this latest missing kid has them more than slightly distracted.”

“I heard about that,” Lucy says in that intense voice of hers.

I turn, looking down at her. “Did you know her? Emlyn, I mean?”

She shrugs and tugs me away from the bulletin board, toward the commons area, where the slamming of lockers and squeaking of shoes gives me déjà vu all over again. “She was on the school newspaper, I think, but we didn't hang out, if that's what you're asking.”

The halls are full and not full. By that, I mean they're so wide that even with a few hundred kids all getting ready for homeroom, it still looks half empty.

The lockers are alternating blocks of green and blue, the school colors.

Lucy stops at a blue block and points to the green block one row over. “You're down there, I think.”

I walk until I find the locker on my school schedule, fiddle with the combination, and open it up. I open Lucy's loaner backpack, which is maroon and pretty sweet, and dump some notebooks, extra pens, and cute locker magnets on the top shelf. If the Zerkers are already out snatching joggers off the street before midnight, I doubt I'll be here long enough to hang any candid snapshots on my locker door, if you know what I mean.

Lucy walks up.

I smile. “Thanks again for taking me back-to-school shopping this morning.”

“How's the uniform fit?” She tugs at the safety pin keeping my gingham skirt around my waist.

“So far, so good.”

She looks almost cheerful, a rarity. Her hair is clean and straight, her face not very made up but young and healthy. I'm suddenly jealous of her aliveness. We're standing there inspecting each other, BFF style, when a trio of girls walk by.

I smell anger and then fear. They're angry;
Lucy's
afraid.

She kind of shrinks back, and I turn just as one of them yanks the books out of her hands. They tumble to the floor, and Lucy scrambles to her knees to pick them up.

Mean girls. Already. Okay, I get it.

The one in the middle's in charge: red hair, alabaster skin, tall, curvy, flawless, smiling for miles.

Next to her a girl with mocha skin and straightened hair puts her hands on her hips, licks her lips.

The blonde who shoved Lucy's books to the ground examines her fingers. “I think I chipped a nail.”

They laugh and laugh as I inch forward.

From the ground, still on one knee, carefully shuffling her homework to avoid standing, Lucy hisses, “No, Maddy, it's not worth it.”

I turn to her and grin. “Trust me. It's
so
worth it.”

The redhead reaches out a warm hand. “Nice look,” she says and ruffles the close-cropped hair on my cold head. She jerks back as if she might get scabies. “What'd they do, let you off the cancer ward for the day?”

Her BFFs echo her laughter.

I step toward her, hands at my sides. I've got to give her credit: she doesn't even falter. “That's the best you got?” I growl. “Cancer jokes? So lame.”

Finally she squints. “Watch who you're calling lame, Schindler's List.”

I shake my head and grab her tie, yanking her down to her knees. She hits the tile floor with a quick thwick-thwack of kneecaps on the shiny floor. She grunts, palms on the tiles. I shove my foot into the small of her back so that she's lying facedown in seconds flat.

I gently kneel next to her, eyeing her friends already backing away, as I whisper into her bright-pink ear. “Let's just skip the two months of emotional bullying and cut to the chase, okay, Ginger? Just 'cause I'm new here doesn't mean I haven't seen your kind before. From now on, Lucy and I are off limits, okay?”

“Bitch,” she hisses, trying to get up.

I shove her back down with—no lie—my chill, gray pinky. “Try and get up again, and I'll use my whole hand.”

She shakes her head but doesn't move.

“Say it with me, Ginger: Lucy and I are off limits.”

“Screw you, trash!”

Quick like, I push a finger against her side, pressing, pressing, until I can feel a rib starting to give way under my fingernail.

She does too. I can hear it in her voice, feel it in the way she goes still, no longer resisting with every ounce of her strength.

“Okay, okay,” she grunts. “From now on, you and Lucy are off limits. Fine, whatever, just let me—”

I hoist her up midsentence and spin her around so she can see the rest of the students, staring, openmouthed, eyes laughing at her. Her friends are nowhere to be seen.

“Now go find your friends. They're probably in the bathroom, changing their thongs.”

Lucy shakes her head as I help her up next. “Wow,” she says.

“You're welcome.”

“No, I mean, wow, how stupid. I thought you wanted to pass here. All you've done is make a huge spectacle and an even bigger enemy on your first day. Not even in your first ten minutes!”

Her face looks angry, but her eyes are grateful.

“Like I said,” I grunt, “you're welcome, Lucy.” But I know, even as I turn and stomp off, she's right.

She catches up to me and walks me to my homeroom, straightening her skirt the whole way there. I think, because her legs are so short, she has a thing about her skirt, like a fixation. I wish I could tell her she's beautiful, human and flawless, warm and full of bloody cells, so quit sweating the small stuff. But Normals don't think that way. I know I never did.

We pause just outside of Mrs. Fillibuster's room. “Don't get me wrong,” she says, moving toward her own homeroom just down the hall. “It's not that I'm not grateful. It's just . . . you know how this works. They won't come back at you. They'll target me when you're not around. What am I supposed to do then?”

“Fight back,” I say. “She's weak now, wounded, embarrassed. She won't want to risk being shown up again.”

“That's easy for you to say,” she whispers, walking out of range. “You don't feel pain.”

She has a point. Maybe it was stupid. But I couldn't help it. Sometimes I forget the rage inside. Just because I'm not a Zerker, just because I've never been bitten, doesn't mean I don't feel the sometimes uncontrollable, undead fury of being threatened, even if by a Normal.

Besides, am I going to pass up the chance now that I'm finally strong enough to bully the bully? Not likely.

I turn around, about to walk into homeroom, when I suddenly smell it.

Zombie. Not Zerker flesh; zombie flesh, like my own. There, coming toward me, blonde and fresh-looking, swinging her almost Normal hips, is a familiar face.

“Courtney?”

M
addy?”

I step out of the classroom, ignoring the big human eyes watching the drama in the doorway. Screw it, Normals; I've got bigger zombies to fry.

I grab Courtney's arm and drag her down the commons to the first girls' room I see. Inside, I do the whole push-every-stall-door-open thing, and before I even press the last one, I smell smoke.

It's locked, and when the smokers hear me rattling the door, they cough out, “Chill. We'll be done in a—”

I snap it open with one good yank and say, “You're done
now
.”

But even a shaved, tie-loosened, sleeves-rolled-up chick like me isn't enough to interrupt these nicotine freaks. Two of them, both nearly identical with straight black hair, pigtails, glossy maroon lipstick and skull earrings (so not edgy). They stare at me, dull eyed.

The one with the cigarette starts to speak, but I reach out, grab the smoke by the lit end first, and snuff it out between my cold, dead finger and thumb. Suddenly, with no cancer stick to distract them, they take to staring at me. I guess that's enough to do the trick, and they scram, inching past the broken door lying crooked on its hinges, a corner touching the floor.

The minute they're gone I look back to find Courtney leaning casually against the sink.

“Go block that door,” I tell her.

She looks at me as if I've just gone Zerker. “Block it yourself.”

I cock my head.

She stares at me, not moving an inch.

But I do. I take two steps forward and watch her flinch just a bit. That makes me smile. “Look, Courtney, this isn't Sentinel City, okay? And even if it were, you're just Sentinel Support, so I'd lose the 'tude unless you want me to do to your face what I did to that chick's cigarette.”

She smirks.

Just as with Ginger out in the hallway, the rage bubbles up, threatening to spill over any second.

“Big talk for someone who just got Vanished, Maddy.” She's still leaning there, blonde hair limp and long, face pale and drawn, but still so humanlike it makes me envious for the days back in Barracuda Bay, when I was fresh and young. Did Dane want me then only because I was newly undead?

Is that his type?

Behind her is a mirror, water stained and
brightly
lit. I catch my face, hair, skin, eyes in the reflection, and even I'm scared of me. But Courtney's not. At least not yet.

“Yeah, I got Vanished, and you know what that makes me? The kind of zombie who has zero cares to give about a wannabe Sentinel like you. What else are they gonna do to me? Double Vanish me? Rekill me?”

She starts to creep back a little because I'm moving closer. “As far as the Council of Elders is concerned, I don't exist. As far as the Sentinels are concerned, I don't exist. The Keepers? I might as well be a Zerker.”

Now we're about two feet apart, so close I can smell the nauseating perfume she's saturated her school uniform with. “So if everyone I've ever cared about thinks I'm a Zerker, what makes you think I care about doing insanely violent things to you right now?”

She makes a move, not toward me, but to the side—the wrong side, away from the bathroom door.

I sling her back to the other side, one handed, the way you'll see fighters do when one guy is trying to get out of the corner of the ring he's being pummeled into.

“Stop,” she shouts.

It's so unexpected, I do. “I'll stop,” I add, watching her there, between the sink and the exit, “when you block that door and tell me what the hell you're doing here—”

Just then the door flings open, and I roll my eyes, about to give her major now-you've-done-it face, when a guy walks in.

Not just any guy, either.

The
guy.