Reanimated Readz (10 page)

I inch closer to Sam and lower my voice a few octaves. “We have to go now, Sam,” I whisper, calmly, slowly, hoping Spike isn’t listening too hard, or is smarter than I give him credit for.

He cocks his head, but I wonder if he really understands, or if it’s just because I’m saying his name so much and standing so close. “You and I, Sam, we’re going in there….”

I point to the Z-Zone, a dark and meandering wood that used to be a national park on the edge of town. The sun is nearly set now, the hills casting shadows. It must look sinister even to one of the living dead.

He grunts and shakes his head a little, or it could be just a twitch.

Either way, his nostrils flare a tiny bit and even though I know there’s no air coming out of them anymore, I can sense the panic in his chest. The fear, if there is such a thing for a zombie, of the unknown.

“It’s okay, Sam. It’s okay,” I insist, using the same calm, even tone I used to use when I was feeding the stray cat who showed up on our back porch one day and hung around for a few weeks last year. “I’m going with you. It’s you, it’s me, nothing’s going to change—”

“No humans allowed,” Spike offers, still leaning just inside the door to the guard shack. “That’s why it’s called the Z-Zone, Emma. That’s why—”

“Kill!” I order. It’s the sixth, and final, command.

“Wait! W-w-what?” Spike sputters.

I ignore him. “Sam! Kill!”

Sam hesitates, at first. I’ve never had to issue this command before. At least, not on a live person. And those deserted dime-store mannequins with strips of meat wrapped around their throats back home didn’t count.

His eyes, once so blue, now so dark, cloud with fear and misunderstanding. His chin trembles. He wants to shake his head, but can’t quite seem to remember what that meant.

“Kill!” I order as Spike reaches for his walkie-talkie. He thinks I mean him.

Sam shakes his head, but opens his mouth.

I can’t yell at him anymore; he’ll just back down. I take his hand, so cold in mine, so strange and pale. “It’s okay, Sam,” I say with a smile, offering my throat, baring it up for him to take between his teeth. “Kill!”

And his mouth opens wide, and he reaches in, toward me, sniffing my throat, gaze flickering across it, uncertain, until he smells the life on my breath, hears the blood pumping in my veins and when he’s just close enough, when his hand clenches mine and he draws me in, I know that it’s over. I know that, in one or two bites, we’ll never have to be apart again.

But it isn’t over. It’s just beginning.

Something inside of Sam, something buried deep, forces him to push me away, to push me down. His strength is incredible, almost unstoppable. I’ve seen flashes of it before, when strangers threaten us or he gets too close to live meat, like that one time he literally tore up three fence posts to get to the cows beyond the barbed wire before the farmer showed up—with a shotgun.

And even then he wasn’t afraid.

But now I take the full brunt of it, flying across the gravel staging area and landing with some kind of thud-crack-whap sound against Spike’s Jeep.

I’m momentarily dazed, too shocked to panic, the air knocked out of my chest so I can’t scream. And I want to scream. Because I see what’s happening, and screaming may be the only way to stop it.

By the time I do, it’s too late. “Sam! No! Stop!”

But Spike’s shoulder is getting the brunt of it, blood flying, skin stuck to Sam’s face, Spike’s mouth open in a silent, ghastly scream.

I stand, but something is stopping me from reaching my feet quickly. I look down to see my leg bent at an awkward angle beneath me. I know, even before the blood flow returns and the pain starts, that it’s broken, or sprained or worse.

I cry, red hot tears staining my cheeks as I crawl forward, hands trembling in the dirt and gravel, as Spike slumps to the ground in front of the tiny guard shack. His eyes are open, his mouth is open, his shoulder is torn open. Only his future is closed, sealed off forever.

Sam grunts, ignoring me as he stumbles into, and then over, the yellow and black striped guardrail Spike kept fiddling with while we talked. He lands on his butt in the Z-Zone, looking left and right as the sirens wail in response to Spike’s fallen, squawking walkie-talkie.

The sirens, or maybe Sam, bring the first of the undead. Squalid things, wiry and lean and more green than gray. They look at Sam hungrily, until they stop short and realize…he’s one of them.

There is a moment there, only one, maybe two, where Sam and I lock eyes, where his eyes bulge and he realizes what he’s done, that we’re done, that we’ll never see each other again.

And then it’s gone, like so many of the stolen moments we’ve had in the last three months. The half-smiles, the awkward glances, the misinterpreted gestures, the grins that could just be gas, the nudges that could have just been Sam bumping into me, ’cause he’s awkward like that.

But this glance, this look, this exchange, I believe.

I have to. What else to do I have left?

Finally he stands, grunts, growls, and joins the living dead, stumbling off, shuffling deeper, deeper into the Z-Zone until the last I see of him is him tearing away the red and black flannel shirt I made him wear that morning.

It flutters to the ground, an afterthought, unnecessary and something left better behind him. Like me.

A former public school teacher, Rusty Fischer has written for such educational magazines as Learning, The Mailbox and Teaching K-8. Now a full-time freelance writer, Rusty is the author of several YA supernatural novels for Decadent Publishing, including Ushers, Inc. and Panty Raid at Zombie High, as well as the Reanimated Readz series of 99-cent zombie short stories. You can read more about his current and upcoming projects, and download FREE zombie stories, at
zombiesdontblog.blogspot.com