My Zombie Hamster (12 page)

9:00 a.m
. So. First night slept in the wild.

How was it?
I hear you ask. Well, it was pretty uncomfortable, thank you. The ground was lumpy no matter what position I tried to lie in. It was freezing cold despite our portable heaters, and Calvin, we all discovered, talked in his sleep. Really talked. Full-on conversations with someone called Binky.

We asked him the next morning who Binky was, and he looked confused and said the only Binky he knew of was Binky the clown, the mass-murdering children’s entertainer in a horror novel he swiped from his dad’s room.

I thought back to some of those conversations we overheard.

“I can’t do it,” Calvin had said. “Binky, don’t make me. They’re my friends.”

And “What hammer, Binky? You put one in my bag? Why would you do that?”

And, of course, how could I forget, “Who’s annoying you, Binky? Matt?” A pause, while Calvin must have been listening to his dear friend Binky, the murderous clown. “How can you even suggest that, Binky? I couldn’t do that!”

Needless to say, we’ve all been a lot nicer to Calvin today.

He’s been smiling a lot, though, which leads me to suspect some foul play. But I really don’t think it’s worth the risk finding out the truth, do you?

11:00 a.m
. We’ve all been wondering when Dallas was going to try to scare us with his “deadbeat attack.” He told us that today we were going to learn about “defensive circles,” “minimizing our footprint,” and other things that sounded like incredibly hard work. But we all assumed this is when his crew (who we hadn’t seen since they left the camp yesterday) would stumble into our midst doing their best zombie impersonations.

In the meantime, Dallas was having a bit of
a hard time with our families back in Edenvale. When he confiscated all our phones yesterday, our updates to our families suddenly went silent. All at the same time.

You can imagine what they thought had happened. Dallas’s phone, which he only switched on this morning, has been bombarded with increasingly worried and then panicked calls from our parents.

Dallas gave our phones back in disgust, and ten seconds later all twenty of us were seated in a circle around the fire, heads bowed, updating our social networks and letting our families know we hadn’t been devoured by deadbeats.

Hmm.
Devoured by Deadbeats
. Cool name for a movie. Must remember that.

Anyway, it was while we all had our heads down that the “attack” came.

None of us noticed at first. I was checking out the movie sites, trying to find news on the latest
Star Wars
films. Charlie was on my right. She told me she was getting in touch with her comrades in the Undead Liberation Front, but I saw her phone. She was reading up on celebrity gossip. Calvin was playing Tetris, and Aren was actually
catching up on his homework. I’m not kidding. That guy is an overachiever of note. If he’s not careful he’s going to overheat his brain. Kids our age aren’t meant to do that amount of work. Scientific fact.

So anyway, I was just about to click on a juicy bit of info about who was going to play the young Han Solo when I heard a low moan behind me.

I glanced over my shoulder and saw that a “deadbeat” had entered the camp and was shuffling directly toward us.

How typical! Dallas launches into his fake lesson just when he gives us our phones back! I wonder if he thought this was symbolic of something.

Well, I for one wasn’t going to be distracted. He was going to take our phones away again in ten minutes. It wasn’t fair of him to try to distract us now.

There was another moan from up ahead. A second deadbeat had entered the camp. I gave this one more than a quick look, because even I had to admit they’d done a good job with the makeup. It looked as if half its face had rotted away. Bone and sinew showed through the skin on its arms.

Not bad. Not bad at all. I swiped my finger across my phone screen, held it up, and took a photo.

None of the others had noticed yet. I nudged Charlie and nodded toward the zombies. She looked up and frowned.

“No,” she said. “No way. He’s only just given us our phones.”

You see? Me and Charlie, we’re on the same wavelength. That’s why we’re best buds.

More of Dallas’s crew, dressed up in zombie makeup, shuffled out of the trees. I remember thinking there were more fake zombies than there should be, but I just figured Dallas had more people hiding out in the forest and roped them in to scare us.

It wasn’t working, though. We were all too engrossed in our phones. Heads bowed, concentrating, while a circle of deadbeats slowly closed in on us, groaning and moaning.

One of the deadbeats got close and grabbed Charlie’s arm. She was yanked backward off her log, crying out in surprise. I whirled around and saw that this guy was really taking this joke thing seriously and was about to clamp his teeth down on Charlie’s hand.

That’s when I noticed a few different things. First, I could see through the guy’s rib cage. Like,
actually see right through it. He was between Charlie and me, but I could see her angry face through the yellowing bones. He had no skin, no internal organs.

My brain did a few rapid recalculations of the situation just as Kilgore Dallas entered the clearing, returning from his angry walk. He froze, a look of utter astonishment on his face.

That’s when I realized this wasn’t a joke. This was a real deadbeat attack.

I shouted a warning to everyone and lunged forward, shoving the deadbeat who was about to bite down on Charlie. Its grip was so tight, and my shove so hard, its arm ripped right out of the socket. I looked at Charlie in horror. The zombie arm was still attached to her wrist. She shook her hand, but the thing wouldn’t let go.

She got to her feet just as another deadbeat arrived.

Charlie then used the arm that was clamped around her wrist as a makeshift club, smacking it against the deadbeat who was stumbling toward her. It was one of the coolest things I’ve ever seen.

The zombie spun in a circle and fell to the
ground. Charlie yanked the arm off and threw it away.

Dallas was now running through the camp with a baseball bat.

“Up the trees!” he shouted. “Remember the drill!”

The others had finally twigged that this wasn’t a joke. That it was the real thing. They were scrambling for the trees, dodging around the slow-moving deadbeats, and pulling each other up through the branches to safety.

Except for Calvin.

He was engrossed in his game and taking no notice of all the commotion. Charlie, Aren, and I were already climbing an old, twisted oak tree, but we saw him sitting there and shared a look. Then we sighed, dropped back to the snow, and sprinted toward him.

Aren grabbed his phone, Charlie slapped him on the head, and I pulled him to his feet.

“Hey!” he shouted. “What’s the big idea …”

He trailed off as the situation finally sank into his brain.

By this time, Dallas’s crew had arrived. They and Dallas were running around the clearing
dealing with the deadbeats in violent and fascinating ways. Our classmates were peering down from the branches, those who still had their phones using them to record the events. Deadbeats were still stumbling around, searching for anything with a pulse.

That included us.

Three were heading in our direction. We ran back to our tree and helped Calvin up into the branches. He finally made it to safety, and Charlie, Aren, and I hauled ourselves up after him. Then we turned around to watch the battle below us.

It was over in a matter of minutes.

Dallas’s crew stood in the clearing, looking around at the deadbeats lying on the forest floor. None of his crew had been injured. Not a surprise. They were pretty good at what they did.

“You kids stay where you are,” called Dallas. “We’re going to scout around.”

So we had to stay up in the trees for the next hour. Luckily for us, Aren was still holding Calvin’s phone, so we all took turns playing games until Dallas came back and told us we were going home early.

So, not a totally terrible day.

MONDAY, JANUARY 20

Everyone who was on the trip is now considered something of a hero. When word got out about what happened things went a bit crazy. I thought actual steam was going to bust out of Mom’s ears, she was so angry. Even Dad, who is a pretty laid-back guy, was furious. He looked at me strangely and then had to go for a walk to calm down.

I found out later that he marched to city hall and gave the mayor and Kilgore Dallas a piece of his mind. Apparently, he shouted at them. My dad never shouts.

I feel a bit bad for Dallas, though. It wasn’t really his fault. It turns out that the contractors the mayor paid to put up the fence were the cheapest
he could find. Plus, he didn’t tell them the fence was supposed to keep deadbeats out, so they just stuck anything up, thinking it was for squirrels or something.

But nobody called out the mayor on this. Well, a few people tried, but then his offices said they didn’t have time to deal with that because there were more important things to worry about. The pet crisis was getting worse, they said, and more than two hundred pets were missing. I had no idea it was so many. The mayor issued a proclamation saying that all pets were to be kept indoors until they could figure out what was going on.

I knew what was going on.

Anti-Snuffles, that’s what. He had a lot to answer for.

TUESDAY, JANUARY 21

Still doing my detention at school. Mom was going to cut it back to a few days, considering what happened, but I told her not to. It made her look even tougher, and I got more sympathy from my classmates.

One of those people giving me more sympathy is Erin Deacon. She’s in my class and is—well, she’s, um, she’s beautiful. I’ve liked Erin since she moved here last year. She used to live in New York City, but when the deadbeats broke through the wall around the city her parents decided to move somewhere safer.

She’s really cool, knows a lot about the world, and her stories of the day the deadbeats got into
New York are amazing. The National Guard out on the streets. Running battles. Helicopters strafing the ground. It sounds like something in a Michael Bay movie.

Anyway, she passed me a note after class broke up. It said, “I think you’re really brave. XX.”

XX. Hmm. Is that vague or not? I mean, it’s not definitive, is it? She might sign all her notes like that. And she didn’t say “I think you’re amazingly good looking,” or even “I think you’re cute.” No, it was “I think you’re brave.”

Is she just being nice? I don’t have anyone I can ask. Nobody knows I like Erin. I can’t tell Charlie. She’ll just make fun of me. Calvin—well, I’m not even sure he knows the female species exists. There’s Aren, but I once heard him talking about how love was nothing more than a—let me see if I can remember—a “biological imperative, a chemical command meant to ensure the future of the species.”

Yeah, I’m not sure any of them would understand.

WEDNESDAY, JANUARY 22