Reanimated Readz (3 page)

She eyes me warily, porcelain skin dotted with flecks of blood and brain stem juice. She looks prettier, with those dark eyes.

“I guess I deserve this,” she grumbles. Her voice is gray and grim.

I smile. Now she sounds like me, like all of us. “I’d say we’re even,” I grumble back, pocketing the stun gun.

I bend down to tighten my shoelaces. When I look up, she hasn’t moved. I finish, stand, and walk past the van.

“Where are you going?” she asks, the hint of desperation in her throat.

“I’m going to start walking toward the Free Zone. It’s just over that hill, give or take a few miles.”

“W-w-what about me?” she asks, but I can tell by the crunch of gravel that she’s following me.

“Like I said, Julia. We’re even. You do what you want from now on. I just wanted to make sure you wouldn’t do it with a pulse.”

The grass of the picnic area crunches beneath my feet, and keeps crunching even when I pause to tear a thin branch off the nearest tree.

I use the branch as a walking stick and strike out for the Free Zone. She follows, not closely, but just to my left. I smile. Maybe that’s all I wanted, after all. To get, to have Julia back. I would have never bitten her if she’d played nice, but maybe in the back of my mind, when she called to interview me, I knew she wouldn’t be nice.

Maybe, the whole time, I knew she would do this to me. And I knew I could beat her, for once, at her own game.

And I knew that, when I did, we’d be together forever.

And now we are, for better or worse.

And I’m glad she’s just a little behind and to the left, so she won’t see me smile for the first time since Mr. Croft showed up at my family’s door….

A Reanimated Readz Story

By

Rusty Fischer

There are three cages. Cage 1, Cage 2, and Cage…well, you figure it out. Cage 1 is full of the rowdy, rough–and-tumble, real zombies. We call them the Thugs because, well, that’s how they act.

They’re still vaguely human. They can talk, mostly, and dress themselves—though not well, judging by their tendency to wear their shirts inside out, the tag in front, and read the instructions on a can of brains—but you wouldn’t want to cross their path in the middle of the night without being in a shark cage, let’s just put it that way.

Cage 2 has the Fugs. We call them that because well, they’re fugly. Most are homeless, probably. Some just got out of prison, more than likely. Others are skanked-out, skeevy drug addicts fresh off the corner.

They pick them up on the street, I suppose, clean ’em up, put ’em in the standard fug pajamas—thin and white with blue stripes—and stick ’em in Cage 2.

Me? I’m in Cage 3. We call ourselves the Drugs, because that’s what we take: drugs. I don’t know what they are, the drugs we take. They’re supposed to stave off the infection that wiped out the rest of our town so we don’t end up in Cage 1 with the Thugs.

It means, okay, technically we’re still the living dead but we’re more living than dead. Our hearts still beat, a little—we still have to breathe, a little. You cut us, we still bleed. The drugs aren’t supposed to stop us from becoming full-fledged zombies like the Thugs, but just delay it.

I’m not sure how well they work. I’ve been here two weeks, give or take, since Faraway Falls got infected, and I feel like crap frozen over. Look like it, too. There’s no mirror in the cage but back in my room there is, and man, I’m waiting for Hollywood to call me up any minute. We’re talking gray skin, black eyes, hollow cheeks. I must have lost twenty pounds since I’ve been here.

The buzzer rings, and the Thugs go wild. That’s what they do, stupid Thugs. Shaking the bars of their cages, rattling the rest of our bones, drooling and mewling in that way they do because they know that blood is about to be spilled.

There are four of them in their cage, each more disgusting and depraved than the rest. I shudder to think that, one day, I’ll be like them, too. But not now. Now I’m still conscious and coherent and can at least put my shirt on right side in.

And the Fugs, well, they just kind of cower. Knowing what’s coming next. What’s coming? Me. I’m next. I look at the rest of the Drugs in the cage—kids like me, really. Classmates from my old school: the jock, the actual thug, and the Goth chick.

We’ve been here, together, in this place, whatever it is, ever since our school got overrun by zombies a few weeks ago. Why we survived and no one else did, well, we’re still trying to figure that out. No one here will tell us.

They nod and step aside. My turn.

I move to the front of the cage and clench, then unclench my fists. I’m cold in my sweatpants and tank top, but wearing more doesn’t make me any less cold. The doctor in charge here says it comes from inside. No sense putting on clothes to cover the outside.

Besides, I was always a little “husky” before, so it’s nice to wear a tank top and not be self-conscious about my moobs and baby-fat belly. Now they’re all gone, replaced by lean, hard muscle.

I roll my head around and listen to the tendons crack in my neck; the Fugs shrink back in their cage. Technically, you’re not supposed to move beyond the square in the middle of the warehouse floor, the crooked one made out of red tape, but I always drift a little bit over toward Cage 2 just to spook the Fugs a smidge.

“Conner,” says Dr. Creed, who’s in charge of our cage. Shoot, he’s pretty much in charge of this whole place. “Play nice.”

I chuckle, watching the nearest Fug pee his pants.

Dr. Creed eyes me warily. “You’re getting a little too good at this, Conner,” he says, scratching his trademark goatee. “I’m going to have to move you in with the Thugs if you get any better.”

He winks. It’s an old joke. Nobody wants to be a Thug, not even the Thugs.

“Maybe if you’d come up with a more humane way of feeding us brains,” I say, bending over at the waist to touch my toes. I hear my spine crack with the effort. You have to be alert, after all. Some of these Fugs are pretty fast. “I wouldn’t have to get so good at this.”

Creed nods toward one of the guards by Cage 1. “I think you
like
being good at this, Conner. I think it suits you.”

As the guard unlocks the cage and reaches in to grab a Fug, I look back at Creed. He takes a step back.

“I think you’re right,” I growl.

I can smell the Fug’s fear from the middle of the square. He’s big, but greasy and fat. Part of the smell isn’t just fear, but the street. Sweat and urine and grease and smoke and booze ooze from his pores as he stumbles next to the guard, trying to stay as close to him as he can—for as long as he can.

His pajamas are ill-fitting and already yellowed under his massive armpits. I crouch low and wait. This guy looks like a runner. He blinks, twice, sweat dripping down the furrows of his—yep, there he goes!

He tosses off the guard and plows through Dr. Creed, racing toward the massive warehouse doors and kicking off the cheap plastic flip-flops they gave him as he goes.

His bare feet slap against the cold concrete floor as he tries to make his escape, either forgetting or unaware of the half-dozen more guards just outside the warehouse door.

I take the shortcut, right past the Thugs’ cage, and catch him just before he reaches the doors. Not that he could get out, anyway. They bolt them every time we have one of these cage matches, but still.

I grab him by the meat of his right arm and kick out his left leg. He lands on his back with a sickening
thwunk-splat
as his fat head hits the warehouse floor and splits wide open. The smell of blood fills my nostrils and I’m on him, instantly. I know we’re supposed to kill them first. That’s the humane way to do it, or so says Dr. Creed.

But I’m hungry. It’s been two days since I’ve fed and I can smell his brain seeping through the crack in the back of his skull like the bulge of a tube inside a popped tire. I kneel on his neck and ignore his greasy, fat hands as they tear at my tank top and pound on my arms.

I reach for the hole in his skull and pry one gray finger in, deeper, deeper, cracking it open even wider and kneeling down until my teeth can find purchase in the thin bone that stands between me and dinner.

Or is it lunch? Breakfast? They’ve blacked out all the windows in the warehouse so it’s hard to tell. He squirms beneath me, punching, kicking, but I barely notice. Besides, as one of the near-dead, I hardly feel the pain of his fists in my neck or his knees in my back.

The hole is bigger now, the one in his head. My fingers and teeth do their work until at last I can tear away a giant chunk of his brain, about the size of a chicken wing, and gnaw it as blood and clear liquid drip onto his pajama shirt.

I watch as his eyes go glassy, a bloody bubble forming between his thinly parted lips as he chokes on one last word. One fist pounds in vain on my left hip as the bubble pops and his lids close and the word dies with him. I chew more slowly now, reaching in with two expert fingers to drag an even bigger chunk of brain out through the ragged hole in his skull.

Only when the Fug is dead, only when his brain is sizzling on the tip of my tongue, its pure electricity filling my cold, almost dead cells, do I hear the roar in the vast warehouse.

It washes over me in waves. The grunting and groaning of the Fugs, the clanking of the bars as they rattle them to and fro, the stamping of their feet. They yell at me, cursing me for taking their friend.

I look up to face the three cages. Only the Drugs I spend most of my time with are silent. They eye me warily and I wonder, idly, if I look quite as bad as them.

Chip Wailing, from my old PE class, with his greasy, dead curls and the cleft in his chin even sharper now that he’s about twenty pounds lighter as a near zombie, still wears his letterman’s jacket, though now the white sleeves are stained with blood from his own cage matches the last few weeks.

Garrett Evans, the school thug, looking even more thuggish now with his haunted eyes and sunken cheeks and wary, angry expression as he paces, back and forth, in the corner of the cage.

Angela Chase, that smartass Goth from the wrong side of the tracks.

They all linger now, hollow-eyed and hungry behind the cage bars, watching anxiously as I wipe brain juice from my scruffy chin.

The guards are circling in around me now, eager to control me, to corral me, with their cattle prods. The ones with the electrified ends. They use them to keep us in line, but they only need to use them once. One shock with that thing, and I’ll go where they tell me from here to eternity.

Creed waves them off before they guide me back into my cage and says, “Conner, I think it’s time you come with me.”

I look at his soiled lab coat and vague expression and ask, “W-w-what? Why?”

Usually we just go back to our cages and, once the Fugs and the Thugs are gone, they let us out so we can go back to our rooms, which are really just these cubicle areas with sleeping bags and build-them-yourself bookshelves.

“It’s time, Conner.”

I’m following him past the other cages, careful to avoid the arms of the Thugs as they reach out with their ragged claws and empty eyes. But even so, they don’t reach eagerly, as if I might turn my half-zombie rage on them and tear an arm off and yank it through the bars. As I pass, I flick a glance at the Drugs cage, noticing how the other half-humans have inched toward my side to watch me go.

I know they don’t care, per se. It’s not exactly as we were friends before the infestation, and we haven’t exactly gotten chummy since being caged together for the last few weeks. No, they want to know what happens to me so they can figure out what’s going to happen to them.

Creed is thick and stocky in his lab coat, which is a size too small to begin with. His sneakers, too white, squeak on the cold, cement floor of the warehouse. We walk through the double doors and, instead of turning left toward the old storage area where our cubicles are, turn right toward a suite of cheap, plywood office doors I’ve never seen before.

Creed opens one and beckons me inside. Before I follow him in, I turn to watch half a dozen guards station themselves outside the door. Figures. Even with a stun gun in each pocket and a walkie-talkie on his belt, Dr. Creed never has liked being alone with any of us.

The space is a conference room of some sorts, with cheap panel walls and a long, oval table in the middle of the room. Near as I can tell, this was some kind of sporting goods factory, once upon a time. Before sitting down, Creed walks toward a camera in the corner of the room and fiddles with it until a red light glows over the eye piece and he’s sure it’s centered on me.

Then he sits down across from the chair I’ve chosen.

Creed is in his fifties, fat and balding, but solid, like maybe he could do some damage if he had to. I never thought of things that way before, but ever since catching the Z-disease, I think of everything that way. Could he kill me? Could I kill him?

His face is always red, or at least reddish, and it’s even more so now.