Passing Strange (6 page)

“Shouldn’t I go to Washington?” Pete said. “If that’s where Williams is.” He hadn’t been to Washington since an eighth-grade field trip.

The Reverend shook his head. “No. We have other plans for the Williams demon. I want you to go back to your hometown. You have unfinished business there.”

“Unfinished business” made him think of the girl from Wild Thingz!, Christie. Maybe it wouldn’t be such a bad thing to go home again. There were a few scores he wanted to settle.

“What do you want me to do?”

“I want you to find them,” the Reverend said, allowing a controlled smile to grace his lips. “The ones that got away. I want you to find them and dig them out of their holes.”

S
EEING PHOEBE, ADAM,
and Margi a few days after being shot full of holes (a.k.a. the Swiss Cheese Incident) was one of the happiest days I’ve had since returning from death. I was all James Bond-y about it; I had Margi drive to a super-secret location on Oxoboxo Cross Road to pick me up, and then I had her drive to the parking lot of a local fast food restaurant. I was crazy paranoid by this time, of course, seeing white vans everywhere, imagining
Men in Black
–type, anti-zombie goons looking high and low for me.

“Are you sure nobody saw Adam get in your car?” This was after the hugging and kissing and teary stuff. They were of course wicked glad to see me, but I guarantee I was even more wicked glad to see them. It’s unbelievably nice to have people that care about me.

“Nobody saw me,” Adam said. I thought he was speaking really, really well now, with fewer of the pauses that made speech so difficult for him in the early days of his return. And moving! He’s getting back that big guy grace he had pre-death. Not many people know this, but Adam is quite a good dancer.

“Look,” he said. “I’m even…wearing…Johnny’s coat.”

“A clever disguise,” I said. “What about your other brother? The jerk? Or your stepfather?”

“Jimmy was out. And the STD—Joe—he’s okay.”

We passed an actual white van going the other way on one of the back roads, but it was a minivan kind of thing with a ski rack. When I looked back I could see a mounted DVD player playing
Wall-E
to two car-seated children. “Are you sure he’s okay?”

“Karen,” Adam said, in that patient, steady way he has. “He’s…okay. Are you…okay?”

I sighed. “I’m great. I’m really, really great. I feel like I’ve got so much to tell you.”

“Speaking of disguises, I like the new look, Karen,” the ever fashion-conscious Margi said. “Trying to go incognito?”

I told her I was. “Absolutely. Getting shot changes your perspective on the world. You know?”

That wasn’t the only thing that was changing my perspective. Toward the end of my shift, after my encounter with Pete, I peeked under the Band-Aid on my cheek. The hole was gone. I pressed my cheek where the hole had been, but very lightly—I was half afraid that my face would collapse inward like a poked mushroom. Then what would I have done?

Boss, I have to go home early. My face broke.
My skin was a little squishy and maybe a bit discolored and pinkish, but nothing really noticeable. It almost looked like I had a tiny blemish or a freckle.

“I love your eyes. Did you have blue eyes when you were alive?”

Adam, bless his heart, grumbled that he liked my zombie eyes better.

“I did, Margi,” I said, “but these are contacts. And when I was alive my hair wasn’t this dark. It was blond, though—sort of between this color and the, um, zombie platinum.”

“You look great,” Margi said. “If I died would I get your figure?”

I laughed; she didn’t.

“Karen,” Phoebe said, touching my arm. We were in the backseat. “What happened?”

I told them almost everything. I mentioned getting shot, for example, but didn’t tell them about being hit in the cheek. I told them that I was fine, but I didn’t tell them I could heal. They knew about me passing at my mall job, but I didn’t tell them that I wasn’t quitting anytime soon. I told them about my theory that Pete Martinsburg had something to do with the Guttridge “deaths,” but I didn’t tell them that I’d seen and talked to him.

I was afraid they’d want to get all involved if I told them my plans to get to the heart of the Guttridge case; form a super-secret crime club, and soon we’d be piling into the Mystery Machine so we could be those lovable meddling kids who ruin the bad guys’ day. But from what I remember of those stories, Scooby-Doo never took three slugs from a policeman’s gun, and Nancy Drew never scratched her way out of a coffin after a case went south. This wasn’t fun and games. This was life and death.

And I thought of my “conversation” with Pete. I don’t think Nancy Drew would have fully approved of my, um, methods. Karen DeSonne, girl detective, would go it alone.

We went through the drive-thru so Margi and Phoebe could get coffee. Addicts! The coffee smelled great, though, and the aroma filled the entire car.

“Have any of you gotten to see Melissa?” I said.

The girls looked ashamed, the poor dears. I wonder if their parents, their teachers—heck, even their friends—understood how stressful it was for them to have zombie friends, never mind zombie friends who were getting arrested, shot, Tasered, destroyed, etc. The stress of watching someone you love being persecuted is enough to drive a teen to drink or become seriously depressed.

“I called her,” Phoebe said after a moment of silence. “At St. Jude’s. It took a while for me to get through because the priest there, Father Fitzpatrick, has been swamped with reporters and media types. But he put her on and I told her that we loved her and that we were thinking about her.”

Phoebe. You’ve got to love her. I certainly do.

“Father Fitzpatrick thanked me,” she said. “He said that Melissa drew a big smiley face on her whiteboard, and that my call meant a lot to her. To both of them.”

“That’s great,” I told them.

“She’s the…only other…one of us…I know of who is still in town,” Adam said. Like I said, his speech is so much better. There were pauses, but nothing like when he first died.

“Well, that makes two of you,” I said. “Like Margi said, I’m going incognito.”

“You aren’t going back to school?” Phoebe said, and she had that militant streak in her eyes again. I think she had visions of me and Adam doing the whole social-protest thing, the demand-equal-education trip, but that’s not for me.

“Nope. Besides, Phoebe,” I said, all wide-eyed and fake innocent, “isn’t that illegal now?” I could see Adam scrunching low in the shotgun seat, trying to hide his smile.

“So you’re quitting Wild Thingz! too?”

Quick as a bunny, smart as a fox. “Um, no.”

“Karen,” Phoebe said. I wonder if she knows how cute she sounds when she gets all den mother-y. “What do you think will happen if you get caught?”

“Well, Phoebe,” I said. “I suppose they would destroy me.”

My flippant remark was met with a silence as cold and silent as a tombstone. Adam cleared his throat.

“I’m serious, Karen!” Phoebe said. She might have been choking up a little. “I’m worried about you. Hasn’t there been enough tragedy already?”

I took her hand in mine. “Phoebe, sweetie. We’re fighting for our lives. There’s going to be more tragedy before we’re through. A lot more.”

She was trying not to cry as she squeezed my hands. “Why? Why do you have to do it?”

Phoebe knows that I killed myself. I could have told her that I’m fully aware that what I did was the most grievous sin a person could commit, and that clearing my people of the crimes they were accused of would go a long way toward helping me feel as if I’ve atoned for that sin, but I didn’t.

I could have told her that when I took my own life I left someone behind, someone very special to me, and there was something inside me that made me want to do something good on this earth before I could see that special someone again. But I didn’t.

“A couple reasons. But I can’t tell you what they are, Phoebe.”

And I couldn’t! If I told them that passing at the mall might give me an edge in exposing Martinsburg and his role in the frame-up of our people, they’d never stand for it. And if I told them what I had done—that I’d actually
flirted
with him—you can believe that they’d never let me out of their sights again. In fact they’d probably tie me up, throw me in the trunk, and drop me off at the Hunter Foundation for intensive study. They knew Pete. They knew that he was a threat. They knew what he was already responsible for. Including them would have put them directly into the line of fire.

“You’re breaking the law,” Phoebe said. “Like you said. It is no longer legal for a zombie to be without a legal guardian in public.”

I could have pointed out that Adam was breaking the same law, but I didn’t think that would help anything. She was grasping at straws, and she knew it. Instead, I tried a joke, which probably helped even less.

“I’m committing a crime against nature just walking around. What’s the difference?”

She sighed and looked out the window. A living family of four was exiting their SUV, the father gently lifting a little boy from his car seat. They were all smiles as they headed toward the restaurant, the girl skipping ahead. The silence in Margi’s car grew.

“Speaking of illegal,” Margi said, eventually. “Do they really not know that you’re a zombie at Wild Thingz!?”

“They really don’t know. I’ve got them completely hoodwinked.”

“Are you sure? That seems sort of implausible.”

Margi really is the cutest thing in the world. I can’t watch her drink coffee and not wish with all my might that I was alive enough to enjoy it the way she does. She holds the cup in both hands, forming a cradle with her black-and-pink-nailed fingers, and she sort of hunches over it with an expression of total reverence on her face, like she’s honoring the Spirit of the Bean or something. And she always inhales the steam and scent before she leans farther to take a sip.

Ahh, life!

“Gee, being a zombie doesn’t make a whole lot of sense, either, Margi. But I’m going with it.”

She laughed, maybe for Phoebe’s benefit, then sipped. Cute as a button.

“Aren’t you afraid the police might still be after you?” Phoebe asked.

“Nah. They’re looking for Tak and the Sons of Romero.”

I wasn’t really sure about that last point. But three cheers for optimism, right?

“Hey,” I said. “What about our fair-haired boy? How’s Tommy?”

Phoebe told me that his travels had gone well and that he was in Washington, D.C., at the moment trying to rally support for a sort of undead bill of rights. Being undead had not yet been criminalized at the nation’s capital, and zombies were arriving there “in droves.”

“You mean ‘hordes,’ don’t you? Isn’t a group of zombies a horde? Like a flock of sheep or a murder of crows?”

“A gaggle…of geese,” Adam said from the front. I think he was trying to help me lighten the mood. “A google…of giraffes.”

“You made that one up,” I said.

“Tommy’s taking a huge risk,” Phoebe said, ignoring our banter. “But he thinks it’s worth the risk. Or will be, if he succeeds.”

Maybe she was trying to tell me she understood what I had to do, even if she didn’t agree with it. Or maybe she was trying to convince herself; I wasn’t sure.

That fire was in her eyes again, that grim, steely resolve. I don’t know why it still surprised me. One of the first times I ever saw Phoebe, she was wrestling with one of those football players while they attacked Tommy in the woods.

But I think I could understand how she felt. In their own individual ways, all of her dead friends were risking their lives.

We all got together again a week or so before Christmas, keeping an appointment we’d made with the Hunters to check in on Sylvia. When we’d last seen Sylvia, she was going through some horrific “augmentation” process that was supposed to leave her restored, but instead seemed to have her—literally—in pieces, like an unassembled doll. We went to the Hunter Foundation expecting the worst, but were pleasantly surprised when Sylvia herself met us at the door, looking better than ever. Looking, in fact, almost human.

“Happy…birthday.” She greeted us under the watchful yet angelic gazes of Angela and Alish. “Sorry. I’ve been…OD’ing…on Christmas…specials…all week.”

I think we were actually stunned into silence by her happy return, watching her move, walk and talk far better than she ever had as a pre-augmentation zombie. We were so used to negative outcomes that I don’t think any of us—myself, Margi, Phoebe, or Adam—had even dreamed that she would be better off after the procedure. Margi offered her a bed at her house, as she once had with Colette, but Sylvia said that she was going to stay on at the Foundation and help the Hunters with their studies.

“This is…my chance…to make a difference,” she said. “Like…Tommy.”

Like Tommy. Like Colette, like DeCayce. Even like Tak, in his own way. Leaving her I was all the more determined that I, too, would make a difference by proving that my friends weren’t murderers.

I had Margi drop me off at the edge of the Oxoboxo woods, against the protests of my friends. It was late, it was dangerous, etc. I told them not to worry and that I was probably safer in the woods than I was at my family’s home, even, because who knew how long it would be before breathers started banging down doors and dragging zombies out into the street?

This really didn’t help my case any, but Margi pulled over and let me out.

“Kisses, kisses,” I said, stepping out onto the shoulder. Snow-covered leaves crackled beneath my feet.

“Be careful, Karen,” Phoebe said.

“Don’t you worry,” I told her. “Because I’m not. Worried, I mean.”

Hugs, hugs. I turned to watch Margi waving as she swung the car around, and also Adam and Phoebe in the back seat, Adam bending his head low to kiss Phoebe. It was just a quick kiss, a stolen peck taken when you thought the eyes of the world were on something else. But what I saw was the kiss that brought us—me and the one I loved—together. Something about the way he kissed her so brought back that moment.

The beautiful couple, boy and girl, in a close embrace, about to kiss.

One kiss to grant life, one kiss to take it away.

All our kisses were stolen moments like theirs. All our kisses were secrets: they were secrets that I couldn’t reveal to the waking world. I was too afraid to make those secrets public, and the one I love waited for me and waited for me, but my fear overcame me and we said good-bye. I tried to move on, but the blue fog washed over me, and all I had to cling to were my secrets.

My secrets weren’t enough to protect me, though, and the blue fog filled me.

And I took my own life.

I watched my friends kissing. They weren’t supposed to be together, either, I thought. Living girl and dead boy. They aren’t supposed to be together, but they’re facing the world, hand in hand. Looking at them filled me with shame.