Generation Dead (24 page)

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"See what I mean?" Thorny said. "This is an eternity." "The shifts go by a lot faster," Adam said, "when you aren't with me."

Tommy's smile was reflexive, but it only reached one side of his face. He got up and stretched, and Adam thought he could hear vertebrae snap and pop into place along his spine.

"You stretch?" Thorny spoke through a bite of crunchy granola. Maybe it was his chewing that Adam heard. "What does that do?"

"It...helps," Tommy said.

"How?" Thorny asked, and Adam turned toward him. "No, seriously. How can it help? You don't have to get the blood flowing, right? And ..."

His question died on his lips as Duke Davidson walked in and slapped Thorny's feet off of his desk, almost sending him crashing to the floor. Adam thought that old Duke moved pretty quickly for a guy who looked like an older, less pleasant version of the differently biotic students in his class.

"Don't you three have something to do?" the man said, his words like the cracking of a whip.

"Um, we're watching the monitors," Thorny said. Duke looked at him, his bloodhound eyes causing Thorny to shrink back in his chair and swallow an unchewed hunk of granola bar.

Adam figured ole Duke for an ex-cop. Either that or an ex-con; he'd read somewhere that a lot of former prisoners of the state ended up in security. For such a tall, spider-limbed fellow, he thought that Duke carried himself with what Master

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Griffin called "centered balance"--a way of movement that was economical and always enabled the prepared to act quickly to whatever came their way.

"Watching the monitors," Duke said, leaning forward. "Why don't you do a trash sweep?"

Thorny was about to answer that they'd already taken out the trash, but Adam cut him off before his insolence got them even more chores.

"Yes, sir," he said. "We'll get that done."

He led Tommy and Thorny out into the hallway.

"Let's go to the lab," he said.

"What?" Thorny said, quickening his step to catch up. "What did I do?"

Adam noticed that Tommy didn't have any trouble matching his own stride. "Nothing, Thorny. You didn't do anything."

"Except show a lack of...ambition," Tommy said.

Adam continued to find Tommy's sense of humor amusing; it was so quiet and wry. So
deadpan
, he thought, smiling to himself.

"What?" Thorny, clueless, asked.

"Forget it. Let's get going."

"I hate the lab."

"Why?" Tommy asked.

"They ...
do
stuff there." He lowered his voice. Adam would have found Thorny's comment funny if he hadn't looked scared when he spoke. "Experiments."

"Well, this is a scientific facility. At least on paper," Adam said.

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"Yeah, but there's more than that." "What... do you mean?"

The smaller boy looked at each of his companions in turn, and then at the ceiling as though searching for hidden cameras or microphones. His voice dropped to a dry whisper.

"I heard Alish and Angela talking about Sylvia and Kevin, about taking 'samples' from them." He ran his hand through his thick mop of hair. "What
kind
of samples, I wonder?"

"Come on," Adam said, although in a sense it didn't surprise him. How else were they going to learn about the dead?

"No, really," Thorny said, "I heard them. He said he couldn't figure out why some of the zombies could walk and talk better than the others."

"He hasn't... stuck me ... with any needles," Tommy said.

"It isn't your shift in the lab," Thorny said. He grew quiet as Margi turned into their hallway, coming toward them with a huge stack of papers.

"Yet," Thorny whispered.

"Hi, boys," Margi said. "I get to make copies."

"Lucky you," Adam said, thinking that she looked a little happier than the grainy Margi he'd watched on the monitor screens. He suspected it had more to do with her getting out of lab duty than it did with seeing them.

"That's a big ...stack ...you have there," Tommy said.

Margi's eyes narrowed at him, and she picked up her pace.

"Was that a joke?" Adam asked. "Was that you being funny?"

"What... did ... I... say?"

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"I don't get it," Thorny said.

But Tommy did, a moment later. Adam could almost see the realization creeping into his eyes. He thought that he'd witnessed the closest a zombie ever came to blushing, and it lightened his mood as they continued on their way.

But his mood darkened again when they reached the door of the lab and it was locked. It was the one room in the facility their key cards could not open.

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***

CHAPTER NINETEEN

P
HOEBE LIKED EVEN MELLOW music played loud, so she was wearing her headphones as she read Tommy's words on the screen. She was listening to a This Mortal Coil album, one she'd copied out of the vast collection that Colette's older brother had amassed before going off to war. When she heard the violins, it felt as though the bows were being drawn over the strings that attached her brain stem to her spine. She shuddered with the sensation, thinking of Tommy and Colette and everything she was feeling.

She tapped idly on the down arrow, scrolling through the page. The skin of her bare arms was a spectral white, smooth and luminous in the dark room. Like Karen's, she thought.

We make deals with the devil every day, metaphorically. I know

there are those who would say that some sort of deal with the

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devil was made for our very existence here. But the deal I made with one of the many devils in my life was a literal one.

I have written extensively of my reasons for going out for the football team here at Oakvale High. I would not have achieved any of my goals had I not gotten a chance to actually play, and the coach refused to put me in. He was being pressured internally from the school administration, and also getting flak from the media and the few political figures sympathetic to our concerns. But my devil was stubborn, and he refused to bend under the pressure. So by half time I hadn't played a minute of the game. And I would not have been able to play the three minutes and thirty-three seconds of game time I did, if not for what I said to him in the locker room during halftime.

I wish I could tell you what I'm sure many of you would like to hear
--that I threatened him, that I frightened him with the promise of an undead horde visiting him in the night. But I didn't. I offered to quit.

Phoebe leaned forward and read the line a second time, but read the same.
I offered to quit
.

"What?" Coach said. He could barely stand to look at me.

"I will quit the team if you play me today. Put me in for a series of plays."

His expression was like that of a distrustful dog being offered a piece of meat.

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"You
'll quit?"

I nodded. "All of this goes away. The whole circus. And if anyone asks why I quit, your name won't come up."

He looked at me for a minute, his face full of hate. He didn't answer, and when he walked past me, he made sure that we did not touch.

He put me in, and I played. But real life is not like the movies. The team did not rally around the undead misfit, nor did my spectacular play inspire a sweeping change of attitude. The kid I tackled pretty much fell down because he was so scared of me
--and I can't blame him.

Certain attempts to exploit us aside, some of Mr. Sly dell's concepts ring true. Transformation is usually a result of radical action, and in today's world, a dead kid playing a team sport is a radical action. What Slydell leaves out is that much radical action leads to violent reaction, and that violence simmered around school the day of the game.

I was never afraid during the game. The protestors could have thrown hand grenades and nail bombs, and I would not have been afraid for myself. I'm already dead.

But I was afraid for my friends who have not experienced what I have. And I was afraid for the other living people who were there, the ones who have compassion mixed in with their fear. I would not want those people hurt just so that I could prove a point by playing football. That would certainly have happened if I'd stayed on the team; the violence simmering through the bleachers would have boiled over at some point, and people would have been hurt.

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I
know many of you will think that backing out was wrong, that I had a chance to battle with the demon and I blinked. I won't argue, but I will say that I did what I set out to do, which was to plant a seed. I did not want to water that seed with the blood of the living.

Phoebe leaned back and stretched. She rested her fingers lightly on the keyboard. There were a few replies posted already, the first of which was a short diatribe from AIIDEAD, who called Tommy a coward and said that only through violence and death will the "blood bags" have an understanding of what it means to be dead in a world made for the living.

Phoebe licked her lips. AIIDEAD missed the point; Tommy's decision made her admire him even more. She started to go through the process of acquiring a blogsite login so she could leave a post, stopping herself twice. She wanted to post her own experience of sitting in the stands watching Tommy and feeling as though she were seated in the eye of a hurricane, a hurricane blowing over the surface of the underworld. But in the end, she didn't do it.

She dreamed of Tommy that night. He was alone on the football field, in his gear but without a helmet, beneath a fat harvest moon. She was in the stands, clapping, but surrounded by angry people who were shouting and booing. A crowd of dead kids stood in the shadows of the Oxoboxo woods. Tommy was looking at her, walking toward her across the field, and then people began throwing food at him. Heads of lettuce, hot dogs, apples, bottles of soda. A tomato hit him just above his

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numbers. Phoebe stood as a few of them began shooting. She had an armful of poetry that fluttered around her like dead leaves as bullets tore into his uniform and passed through his body. He still kept walking. A thrown bottle with a flaming rag stuffed in the neck burst against him, sending flames racing up his side. Bullet holes stitched a line across his chest; he was closer now, and she saw black holes in his cheek, his neck, his thighs. The fire began to melt his skin. He took one step onto the bleachers, and she woke up.

The fourth week of Undead Studies class--Phoebe herself had begun referring to the class that way--began with Tommy relating some of the recent acts of violence that had been committed across the country on differently biotic persons. Phoebe had read most of the stories on Tommy's Web site, but hearing him tell the stories aloud lent them an even more harrowing quality.

"They ran down a girl ... in Memphis," he said. "She was ...thirteen. She ...died ...twice in two ...weeks."

"Terrible," Angela said, shaking her head in sympathy. Phoebe looked around to gauge the reaction of her fellow students; the dead kids were impassive and the living ones seemed to have difficulty looking at anyone or anything except for the floor, as though they in some way had participated in the atrocities that Tommy was describing.

Phoebe felt it, too, the lurking sense of guilt that they were somehow responsible for the crimes.

"There was another report ... of a white van ... in

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Massachusetts. And the murder ... of a zombie."

White vans appeared in many of the reports on the blog. Tommy had a theory that many of the random acts of violence committed against his people weren't so random. Angela, Phoebe noticed, neither approved nor condemned the theory.

"Thank you, Tommy," Angela said, after he described how a zombie with two high-caliber rifle bullets in his head was found in his parents' backyard. "Why do you think these stories never reach the national news?" she asked the group.

"Racism," Thorny said. He'd been shaking like a wet greyhound since sitting down, having pounded two cans of soda from the fridge as soon as he reached the class. He'd told Phoebe and Adam that he was trying to OD on sugar to gain some weight.

"I mean, bioism. Is that a word? What I'm saying is that there are a lot of people out there who hate zombies, so the media isn't reporting everything like they should."

"Maybe," Margi said. She was in a mood today, and Phoebe knew that whenever her friend got that way she could say just about anything. "Or maybe all of these stories are just urban myths."

"What makes you say that, Margi?" Angela asked. Tayshawn, cursed, and Margi looked at him before responding.

"I ... I just mean that it seems really weird that all these zomb ... I mean all these DB people are being killed and no one would do anything about it."

"Why would anyone do anything about it?" Karen asked. "It isn't...illegal... to kill a zombie."