My Zombie Hamster (11 page)

1:43 a.m
. This is beyond a joke now. I wonder if someone slipped me some coffee at suppertime.

2:24 a.m
. Should I just give up? Just get up, maybe put in some hours on Runespell? Or catch up on some reading?

3:37 a.m
. Eyes feel like they are too big for my head. And raspy. I can hear them moving in my skull.

Tomorrow—
today
—is
not
going to be fun.

SATURDAY, JANUARY 18

8:00 p.m
. So here we are, at the end of our first day of camping. (Or the Zombie Acclimatization Program, as Dallas informed us it was now called—ZAP! for short. Not bad. Dallas claims he came up with it himself. Which is fine. Even though it does clash with my own acronyms for the Zee-Zees.)

Anyway, we’re all alive and well. A bit cold, but it
is
winter, after all. And Dallas made sure we all had these portable heaters and luxury tents and everything. We’ve even got a huge fire going in the middle of the campsite, with all the tents circled around it.

It’s not that bad, actually. I don’t know why Dad
always said camping was so terrible. Admittedly, the stories he told about his times in the woods were quite worrying. I wasn’t sure if it was the wet seeping up through the floor of the tent, the wind that cut through the material and stopped you from getting to sleep, or the snakes, or the bears, or the mosquitoes. I think it was just a combination of all of the above, to be honest, and every time I brought up camping he always had a new story to tell about how horrible it was.

Now that I look back on it, I reckon Dad was just too lazy and made all that stuff up. Unless he and Granddad were the unluckiest campers in the entire history of the world.

But I should fill you in on everything.

The day started at five in the morning.

I’ll just pause here and let you absorb that.
Five
in the
morning
. I didn’t even know such a time existed.

I moaned and groaned when the alarm went off, partly because I had only fallen asleep about an hour previously. I pretended to be unconscious, but my dad eventually stumbled into the room, pulled my duvet off, grabbed my foot, and dragged me onto the floor.

“Your mom says to get up,” he mumbled, and then he picked the duvet up and collapsed onto my bed, curling up and going right back to sleep.

I don’t think Mom is used to being up so early, either, because she gave me a mug of coffee. I drank it down, thinking she had done it on purpose to give me a boost. It tasted horrible. At least, it did to start with. But my mom likes a lot of sugar in her drinks, so the sweetness soon got rid of the taste, and it actually wasn’t that bad.

A few minutes later my teeth were chattering. And not from the cold. My heart was thumping heavily in my chest. I was convinced I was having a heart attack. I couldn’t keep still. My arms were twitching slightly, and my head felt like it was doing somersaults.

The school bus arrived a few minutes later. Mom gave me a long hug and told me to stay with Dallas at all times, and at the first sign of trouble I was to climb up a tree and wait. I reminded her that the whole thing was a pointless sham anyway, but she still told me to be careful.

I was the last pickup, so I had to sit at the front of the bus, right behind the driver. Aren, Charlie, and Calvin all sat a couple of rows behind me.

The driver smelled of garlic. He
always
smelled of garlic. I think he keeps it in his pocket or something. The word around school is that he’s afraid of vampires. (I hesitate to put this in the journal, but here it is: there have been a few news reports lately about sightings of vampires and werewolves.)

Seriously.

Not here, but farther north, and over in Europe, which is, like, pretty far away. Aren also told me his family had heard rumors of these weird vampires in North Africa. His parents seemed to think they were real, but come on. What are the chances of us having zombies
and
vampires
and
werewolves existing in the real world?

The bus soon arrived at the town gates. We filed out to find Dallas already waiting for us, along with three men and two women, all of them dressed in camouflage gear. They were driving those open-top jeeps you always see in movies, the kind that usually have machine guns attached to the back. (And this despite the freezing weather. Looking cool is hard work.)

These didn’t have machine guns, although Calvin swore he saw one hidden in the back under
some tarp. But Calvin sees a lot of things. Hears a lot of things as well. So we never know when to believe him. We’ve all just decided it’s best to disbelieve everything. It’s easier that way.

Dallas was standing by the wall. He typed a combination into an electronic keypad, and the huge gates shuddered and started opening outward, drifts of snow falling to the ground.

“Right!” he shouted. “You kids awake?”

There were a few mumbles.

“I
said
, are you kids awake!?” he shouted.

“Yes!”

“I’m not,” muttered Charlie. “I think this could be considered cruel and unusual punishment in most states.”

“Good,” said Dallas. “Now, what we’re going to do is extremely dangerous. You understand? Extremely dangerous. The only thing stopping you kids from being the main course on a deadbeat buffet is me and my team. Say hello, team.”

The team didn’t say hello. They did chew gum at us, though. I wished I had some gum.

“I need you all to listen to me very carefully. You are to stay close to us at all times. Don’t ever stray away from the group. You’ll all be given one
of these.” He held up some kind of portable siren. “If you get lost, you climb a tree and you turn this on. You can all climb trees, can’t you? You’re kids. That’s what kids do.”

Everyone turned to stare at Calvin. He wasn’t exactly the best of athletes. None of us were, actually, except for Brad Johnson. And he wasn’t even here. But I was sure Calvin would manage to climb a tree if he was being chased by a horde of zombies.

He looked quite worried, so I patted him on the shoulder.

“Don’t worry, Calvin. Just stick with us.”

He nodded, but he was starting to get that panicky look that usually sets him off doing something stupid. I leaned in close.

“Remember, none of this is actually real,” I whispered. “It’s a trick. Remember I told you?”

His face collapsed into grateful relief. By now all of us kids knew this was a setup. That we were never going to be in any real danger. But Dallas and his crew had gone to a lot of effort, so we all agreed to go along with it. It would be cruel not to.

Even so, it was slightly creepy to walk between those gates and out into the snow-covered field.
The Zee-Zees were switched off at night, and there weren’t any zombies around, so it’s not as if we were in any danger. But still, leaving those walls behind, the walls that had protected us our entire lives—I admit to feeling a tiny flutter of fear. (Just a tiny flutter.)

‘Course, it was worse when we got to the woods. Mom had explained that there was some serious fencing around the area we were being led to. We couldn’t see it, though, so it felt like we were walking straight into the zombies’ home turf.

“Nobody step on a twig,” whispered Dallas.

Just as he said this, Calvin stepped on a huge stick. The crack echoed around the forest like a fart in a church.

He flushed red. “Sorry.”

We walked for about forty minutes. The sky was beginning to lighten when Dallas and his crew finally led us into a clearing about twenty yards wide.

“This is where we’re going to camp,” he said. He nodded to his crew, and they all disappeared into the trees.

“They’ll keep the perimeter clear,” said Dallas. “But there is a chance they’ll all get taken down,
so we’re going to set up a secondary perimeter here at the camp.”

For the rest of the morning the forest clearing rang with the tweets and chirps of messages coming and going on everyone’s phones. We were supposed to be surviving in the wild, but I guess no one told the cell phone companies that. Everyone in our group was in touch with their homes, sending worried parents pictures of our camp, of each other, of Calvin falling face-first into the snow. The usual.

Dallas eventually got so fed up with us staring at our phones that he confiscated all of them, sealing them in a plastic case.

“You’ll get them back after you’ve been one with nature,” he said.

The rest of the day was mind-numbingly boring. Chopping wood, lighting fires, cooking bacon and eggs, putting the tents up, that kind of thing. I mean, if this is what it was like in the old days, I have no idea how my parents survived. They’re always telling me they didn’t have the Internet back then. Or cable, or computer games. I mean, what did they actually do with themselves? I enjoy reading as much as my dad, but even I would get bored
with that if it was the only entertainment I had.

Most of us were pretty annoyed with Dallas for taking our phones, so we kind of gave him a hard time. Every time we did something we thought might attract zombies (if this was real, which it wasn’t) we would ask Dallas if it was safe. When he said it was, we’d ask him why, and his explanations were becoming more and more exasperated.

“Because they don’t like the smell of bacon!” he shouted.

“
Everyone
likes the smell of bacon,” I pointed out. “Even vegans like the smell of bacon.”

“No, they don’t. And even if they did, so what? Zombies don’t. Zombies like fresh meat.” That was all we had for amusement, and even that got boring. To be honest, I wasn’t even sure why we were here. Dallas says it’s to teach us about life beyond the wall, but none of us ever goes beyond the wall, so what was the point? And the whole deadbeat attack thing? Another waste of time. It’s not as if we’re going to be given dangerous weapons or anything like that. The whole thing was fake.

We all turned in as soon as night fell, thinking that the quicker we went to sleep, the quicker it would all be over.

SUNDAY, JANUARY 19