Passing Strange (3 page)

Soon, everyone but me was in the water, and most of my friends were already
under
the water. I was the only one left on the beach, but I didn’t mind. I was having fun, like a new mother watching toddlers splash around a kiddie pool.

And then they started coming out of the water. I think Tommy might have been the first.

But he wasn’t a zombie anymore. No one that came out of the water was a zombie anymore. I remember seeing Popeye and noticing that all the awful things he’d done to his body had healed. I saw someone I didn’t recognize and then realized it was George—but George restored! He was actually really cute!

Everyone walked by me and headed back into the forest or jungle or whatever it was until I was the only one on the beach, and I thought, well, here I go. I’m going into the water so I can be healed and whole and won’t that be wonderful, and I took one step and thought I could feel wet sand squishing through my toes, and when I looked up again there you were.

The one I love.

You were so beautiful and strong and clean-looking, the water glistening in your hair. The sight of you stopped me in my tracks.

I haven’t laid eyes on you since I killed myself. I never got the chance to tell you the things I wanted to say. In what passes for “life,” I had no idea how you would react to me.

But in my dream you were smiling. And you spread your arms.

I looked at you and you started to speak and then I woke up.

M
AYBE I SHOULD HAVE BEEN
happy—everything in the dream had been so nice, and just the idea that I
could
dream was nice—but instead I was very, very sad.

Once again I didn’t get the chance to say all the things I needed to say. Once again I’d been so close to you, and now you were gone.

A moment later, I realized that I was lying on my bed with my shirt ripped open and my black bra exposed. I got another blouse from my closet, and while buttoning it up I started sifting through the dream, looking for meaning. I’m not as witchy as the Weird Sisters, maybe, but I’ve always believed in signs and portents. And what else could the first zombie dream be but a cryptic message to be deciphered?

I felt like crying. I’d have
been
crying if my stupid body worked the way it was supposed to.

I tried to remember as much as I could about the dream, about the parts of the dream that weren’t you. I thought about the ocean water, how incredibly blue it was, as if it were being lit from below as well as above. How it healed everyone who had stepped into it, and how I didn’t get the chance, but of course as soon as I thought that, I thought about you and how you stepped out of that healing water, and I wasn’t sure but it might have been a you I’d never seen before—you as you might be today, three years older than you were when I died. But then I wondered how that could be; since then I haven’t seen you anywhere but in my mind’s eye.

I happened to walk by my vanity at that moment and glanced at myself in the mirror. That’s a testament to the ability of dreams to transport you from all your worldly cares—I’d completely forgotten that my face was a shattered ruin.

But that isn’t what I saw in the mirror. What I saw was my eyes, which had gone from diamond clear to a brilliant blue, like two sapphires filled with sunlight.

“Like two sapphires filled with sunlight.”

Do you remember when you said that to me?

I remember everything about that day. We’d ridden our bicycles to the edge of the woods of a forest very much like the one where I spend most of my time now, the Oxoboxo. We took off our shoes and socks and followed the grassy path that led into the forest and the lake.

We were holding hands, and walking, and talking, and everything we said seemed to be silly and important at the same time. I remember one of us saying—and it really is hard for me to remember who said what because we were so simpatico, so in tune with one another’s thoughts—something about how different the woods would be if the skunks were as plentiful as the squirrels, and there seemed to be great wisdom in this observation, even though we were both laughing.

We’d been friends for so long—sort of like Adam and Phoebe, in a way—it was so natural to be together, whispering, laughing. And then hand in hand went to arm in arm, and then we were walking more slowly and you moved your arm around my waist. We were walking toward the lake—a different lake, a different state—and the sun had just begun to set, and the old cliché about a handful of coins being scattered across the surface of the water, glinting in the sun, came to mind. We’d stopped talking, but then we sort of laughed at our silence and sat down on a rock outcropping that overlooked the shore. We were serious but lighthearted, too. There was a sailboat tacking in the light wind that seemed determined to entwine our hair. Sitting beside you, I compared our late-summer tans—yours far deeper, the color of fresh honey—and you pressed your thigh against mine to prove it. School would begin in a few days, and I was scared. I didn’t want it to begin, but mostly I just didn’t want the summer to end.

“Don’t worry,” you said. “We can do this. We’ll be fine.” And I believed you. You alone knew me. You were the only one who knew what I was like, about the blue fog of depression that could sometimes drop between me and the rest of the world. You couldn’t make the fog disappear—no one could—but you could always find me when I was lost within.

We hadn’t looked at each other in some time, I realized. We’d looked at our dusty legs and our tans and bare feet, but not at each other. I turned toward you then, and you said my eyes were sapphires filled with sunlight, and then I knew. I could see it in your eyes. I could see it; it was more than just sunlight, and it was like I could see myself, reflected. I leaned forward, or maybe you did, and our lips brushed, and we pulled back, together, as though to make sure it was okay, and it was. And then I was pressing my lips to yours and our mouths opened, and I couldn’t imagine that what we had would ever go away.

But it did. It went away as if it had never been there at all.

We’d stayed at the lake until the sun had gone down, and I was terrified as we walked back through the forest in the darkness. We were only a mile or two in, and I clung to you the whole way, shrieking every time some unseen animal scampered through the underbrush. But we made it out to where our bicycles and our shoes lay, and we were unharmed, if not unchanged. We embraced once we were there, safe, and we kissed once again before we rode home.

Somehow, the sunlight all drained away.

We were together for almost the rest of the summer, but the closer we came to the start of school, the more scared I became. I wouldn’t let you come near me once school began, and when you called me at night I’d try to convince you that we’d made a mistake.

I think—I know—that I was also trying to convince myself. Then one day at lunch I made it clear to you that you needed to give me space. And you were finally convinced.

Before long, you were with someone new.

And I know why. Now I know why, although then I was nothing but devastated, in the grip of a devastation so complete that I couldn’t think clearly. I was so stupid, a coward. We’d been friends for so long, and for things to change…What would people think? What would people say? I realize now that it must have been just as hard for you to go through what we did.

Harder, maybe. You stayed alive.

I blinked, and my blue eyes were gone. Maybe they’d never been there after all. But as I looked more closely at my reflection I noticed other changes that didn’t go away when I blinked or turned my head.

My face wasn’t as lopsided as it had been—as though the bones that had been shattered had started to knit back together. The bullet hole looked like it had begun to close up, but when I brought my fingers to my cheeks I could feel a bump just below the skin where the hole was. I pushed lightly and—this is another gross part, I’m sorry—I could see a flat gray lump, like a small pebble. Somehow the bullet had worked its way up to the surface of my skin.

I leaned over the sink and pressed at the edges, squeezing slightly. A few seconds later I could feel part of the bullet protruding from my cheek, and then I brushed it and it clattered onto the basin with a small tinkling sound.

The bullet was so small. I pinched it between my thumb and forefinger, then flicked it across my room.

The hole in my face looked smaller, even after pressing the bullet out. It was no bigger than a nostril. I probed around the wound gently with my fingertips, and though there was still a slight sensation of looseness between my bones, the sickening movement beneath the surface of my skin was gone. The hole was centered on my cheekbone, which the night before had felt like small shards of pottery in a thick plastic bag. Today the bone felt solid, with maybe a slightly tenuous anchor to the rest of my face, but solid, nonetheless.

I was healing.

My body was repairing itself, and at an incredible rate. This was no hallucination. I had the slug to prove it.

I stared at my reflection—vanity, vanity. I imagined—was I imagining it?—that there was a slight itchy sensation under my skin, as though my cells were reattaching themselves to each other.

Zombies don’t heal. Tak’s cheek never healed. Tommy still has an open wound where he’d been shot with an arrow. The burns that Melissa received after her death have never gone away. Why was I healing? The type of wound didn’t factor into things, either—when Adam wears a T-shirt, you can see a raised bump on his chest from the bullet that killed him. I’d read hundreds of e-mails and posts that zombie kids have sent to Tommy’s site, mysocalledundeath.com, and I’ve never once heard anyone mention that they had the ability to heal.

I wanted to call my dead friends and ask them if they had experienced this, but I was scared. I’ve always been one of the “fast” zombies—I can move and talk in a way that lets me pass for human—and I’ve always been conscious that my ability might make others feel bad. Traditionally biotic people hated me because I was dead; what if differently biotic people started to hate me because I was, well, coming alive?

I went upstairs and turned on the television and surfed over to CNN. I still had no idea what made the police react so violently. There was some talk-show type thing on, so I went into the kitchen and took a handful of spices out of the spice rack. I went back to the couch, unscrewed the caps, and sniffed them one at a time. The cumin and the coriander I could smell, but not the nutmeg. Is there something about nutmeg that is scent-invisible to zombies, or is this a Karen-specific thing? Anyhow, my advice to zombiekind everywhere is to keep practicing your sense of smell. I’m convinced it’s one of the keys to life.

Eventually there was a news update that had a brief segment on zombie murders. They ran the clips on the lawyer who we supposedly killed—Gus Guttridge. There were very grainy clips of the Guttridge home and some “zombies” removing lumpy forms that viewers were supposed to think were the corpses of the Guttridge family. One of the “zombies” looked a lot like Tak, if you didn’t know that Tak hitches on his left side and not his right like the big faker in the video is doing. One of the other fakes does this weird arms-out-in-front walk, along with not bending his knees at all. The faces are completely frozen, and I can only guess that they’re masks, the kind of thing that people who assume we all look alike would wear if they were going to pretend to be us.

The newscaster, looking grave, ha-ha, said that one living impaired person was taken into custody, and others were wanted for questioning. I guess they didn’t think they should mention that the cops fired about a hundred bullets at us.

As mad as I was over the coverage, or rather the lack of coverage, I was happy that the report only mentioned one zombie in custody. Poor George. I was very sorry that they’d caught him, but I was also glad that the other Sons of Romero (or, as I think of them, the Beastie Boys) managed to get away. I hoped that they weren’t as, well, hole-y as I was.

I touched my face again. Already the hole seemed a little smaller than it had been a few minutes ago. My friends don’t heal; all of the Sons of Romero, except Tayshawn, bear some scar, some visible reminder that they are no longer among the living. George has wounds that no living person could endure. Tak’s cheek and skinless knuckles mark him as dead, and Popeye creates “bodifications”—new wounds and scars he thinks of as artistic statements—that further distance him from the living.

I switched off the television and stared at my reflection in the flat black glass. The televisual replay of my near-redeath experience—or maybe my nap!—reminded me that I wasn’t without responsibilities.

I was supposed to work that night. Nearly get reterminated one day; the next, start worrying that you’re going to miss your shift at the mall. I thought about calling in sick—which was hilarious—but decided to text Tamara instead, to see if maybe she could switch shifts with me.

My father bought me a cell phone about six months after I died. He paid for it and paid the monthly bill up until last month, when I started working. We didn’t make a big deal about it or anything. I’d gotten him to open up an account for me at a local bank, so I could use an ATM card instead of having to walk in all the time and try to pass as human. It was tough enough doing it at the mall every shift—I don’t know if I would have gotten away with it if Wild Thingz! wasn’t an alternative store. Anyhow, one day I handed my father two twenties and told him it was for the cell-phone bill that month. He took the money without saying anything, but I think he was pleased.

When I was done texting Tamara, I called my favorite breather. She said hello on the first ring, her voice a stuttering whisper as she said my name in the form of a question.

“Hi, Phoebe,” I replied, whispering, myself. “Can you talk?”

“I think so,” she said. “I’m on the bus. With Adam.” Even through the “cellusphere,” I could hear the little hitch in her voice when she spoke again—not a zombie hitch, which is caused by having to concentrate on moving the air through your body and getting your tongue in the right position, but a human hitch. You know—an emotional one.

“Karen,” she said, “I’m so happy to hear your voice!” She was, too. It warmed my dead bones, it really did.

“Awww,” I said. She and Adam are so cute. I’m more than a little jealous. They are they first two people I kissed since dying.

“Phoebe, I wanted you to know I’m all right. Just peachy.”

“Karen, where are you? Are you really all right? Tak said you’d been killed! He was over at Adam’s, and he took him…”

“Phoebe…”

“Out to the Oxoboxo, and he wanted Adam with him, and this morning on the news they said you killed…”

“Phoebe.”

“That horrible lawyer, the one that got Martinsburg free. And his whole family! Karen, I know it can’t…”

“Phoebe!” It was like talking to Margi, really, but with more logic and a softer voice. “Slow down! All will be revealed. But start with Tak, please. He’s okay?”

“He’s fine. Well, not fine, really. He’d been shot a couple times. And he went…”

And she told me where he went. I was going to ask a series of clarifying questions: what do you mean, what are you saying, what what what. But for some reason, a chill—a metaphorical one, of course—ran down my spine. The “cellusphere” was probably the least secure of all methods of communication, ever.

“Phoebe,” I said. “Forget I asked. We’ll talk about that stuff later, okay? Is there anything else you can tell me that’s public knowledge?”