Besides, I’m probably the last person—sorry, the last
reanimated
person—Brandy would ever think was checking up on her. And, if you hadn’t noticed, she’s not exactly the brightest bulb in the box.
“It’s all right, I guess. I wish more people from school would stop by. Everybody’s so busy these days. You remember Ryan Fletcher?”
I perk up. Maybe she’s going to tell me they’re dating and I’ll earn my money while still taking the next two days off. “Yeah?”
“He got a job with the Reanimation Patrol. First in our class to get hired under the new law. He’s pretty stoked. Didn’t you guys used to pal around?”
I think of Ryan and his short blond hair that always stayed spiky, even under his helmet. “Sure, before…well, before.”
Her eyes get a little sad, and I think maybe she’s not so slow after all. “Yeah, you and Ryan and Brock and Jim Phillips used to be pretty tight.” She flicks her eyes my way. “Before, I mean.”
“Kind of like you and Amy Brennerman,” I remind her. Amy is a reanimated person, too. I see her from time to time at the County Brain Bank, where we stand in line to get our twice-weekly feeding.
Sad eyes again. She gets up, takes the rag with her. “I miss Amy,” she says in a small voice.
I finish my Slushee, wait for her to say something about Brock. She doesn’t.
“Well,” I say, getting up and tossing my half-finished drink in the trash. “Thanks for the Slushee. Good luck with cheerleading.”
But she’s snickering, laughing, and I pause at the door to look down at my flannel shirt to see if I’ve spilled some blue juice from the drink.
“What’s so funny?” I ask.
She makes a squishy face and says, “I just got your joke from earlier. About the brain freeze. I didn’t know zombies could be so…funny.”
***
Brandy lives in a run-down apartment building near the Beaver Falls water tower. There’s a patch of oak trees across the street, and I’ve been sitting in one for about two hours when she finally rides up on a rusty blue bike that I can hear squeaking for two city blocks.
She locks it to the gate outside her front door, then goes inside. She’s still in her uniform from work, and the ride home in that polyester can’t have been too comfortable. The kitchen window is open, and I hear her laugh at something her mother says. Her mom’s at the sink, washing a pan from dinner, and I can see a fresh beer bottle on the windowsill. By my count, it’s number three of the evening.
They sit at a little table in the dining room, which also seems to function as the living room, since a flickering TV is not three or four feet away on an end table, and the mom watches while Brandy eats some type of yellow casserole with potato chips crumbled on top. She washes it down with iced tea, and I’d bet my spiffy new three hundred-dollar bills it’s sweet versus un-sweet.
They both disappear from view for a minute, then Mom goes to the fridge for beer number four, and Brandy pops up in a bedroom window upstairs. It’s dark now, the lights are on, and I watch as Brandy slips out of her uniform. She wears a black bra and pink panties and is pretty much spilling out of both. Hubba-hubba.
There’s no window in the bathroom—not that I would have watched her anyway. Seriously. For real. I mean it. Come on—but when she comes back into her bedroom, her hair is up in a towel, and she’s wearing a ratty yellow robe you know she’s had since three Christmases ago.
I keep waiting for Brock to show up and take her out. It’s Saturday, after all, but when she slips into a pink baby-doll T-shirt that says “It’s all about me” and a pair of sweatpants cut off at the knees, I figure she’s in for the night.
So what are those cars I hear approaching?
Sure, it’s not exactly four in the morning but it’s a little late for pickup truck traffic on this side of town. As far as I can tell, there’s not much near the water tower but this apartment complex, a scruffy public park, and a body shop that’s closed for the night. I turn in my tree, leaves scattering in my wake, and spot a familiar four-wheeler complete with spotlights on the roof. They shine right into my eyes.
I raise a hand to cover them and lose my grip on the branch, falling onto the hood of the car that’s just pulled up to the tree, blocking any easy escape. I land with a thud, denting the shiny blue hood, and tumble over—and off—onto the ground. It doesn’t hurt, but it looks stupid and…what the hell?
“Get him, Ryan!” Brock shouts from his truck, pretty face turned pretty ugly as his beady eyes narrow and his full lips grow thin.
“I am, Brock! Hold on a sec!”
Ryan Fletcher steps out of his car in a rent-a-cop uniform. I’m still sitting on the ground and I notice the magnetic signs on his door panel.
Official Representative of the Reanimation Patrol
.
Yeah, very official.
“Get up, Randall,” he says, his voice at once recognizable yet strange. There is a look in his eyes, the same look Brock gave me in my office earlier that day. It’s a look I’ve seen pretty much daily since I got infected last year: fear mixed with anger mixed with rage, plus a little sadness and familiarity thrown in as well. But more with the anger and the rage.
“Fine, fine, Ryan, but…you have no reason to arrest me.”
“Sure, he does.” Brock spits, getting out of his truck. “You were out here, peeping on my girlfriend. Look, you still have the binoculars around your throat.”
“Because you paid me to!” I say. “I’ve got your money in my back pocket, fingerprints all over it.”
Brock doesn’t even miss a beat. It’s as if he’s had this planned all along. “Yeah, creep. I admit it: I paid you to stay
away
from her.”
I look from Brock to Ryan, waiting for one of them to crack a smile, help me up, and buy me a beer. Yeah, like that’s going to happen.
“Is…is…that true, Randall?”
The voice is startling, and unexpected. I turn—we all turn—to see Brandy standing on her front porch, shotgun in hand, pointed right at me.
“Of course it isn’t,” I insist.
She shakes her head, black curls spilling over the shoulders of her baby-doll T-shirt. “Now it all makes sense.” Her voice is sad, her eyes duller than usual, her expression placid, as if she’s used to being disappointed. “That’s why you showed up today, at the Bagel Barn, right out of the blue.”
“No! Honest, Brandy, that’s not it.”
“Get him, Brandy!” Brock shouts, inching forward. “Get that no-good zombie! You know you want to!”
Brock’s voice shocks us all. It’s high-pitched and hysterical, a voice that says merely arresting a zombie isn’t going to be good enough. I wish I hadn’t heard voices like it several times over the last year, but it happens.
All that sadness and fear, all that pent-up rage and survivor’s guilt, just comes spilling out all of a sudden. On the street, in the Slushee line, at the bank, random strangers will just explode for no reason, simply because there’s a zombie in their midst and they’ve had enough of playing polite.
I get it. I understand. It’s the cost of living among the living, I guess.
“Get up!” Brock says, kicking my feet.
“Brock.” Ryan steps forward and waves a hand to get him to back up a bit. “Careful, bro. We have to do this right. Laws are laws, even if they’re zombie laws.”
Sure, he’s saying the right words, but his voice isn’t much more than a sneer.
“He’s stalking Brandy, Ryan. What else do you need to know?”
Brandy looks from me to Brock. Her face does that slow processing thing like it did at the Bagel Barn after I made my “brains” joke.
“But why tonight, Brock?” she asks, shotgun still aimed squarely at my head. “I haven’t seen Randall since they kicked him out of school a few months back. Why all of a sudden is he showing up at my work, and then…in the tree outside my bedroom? On the same night you happen to show up with one of the Reanimation Patrol dudes. Hi, Ryan, by the way.”
“Hi, Brandy.”
“I came by earlier, to check on you,” Brock lies. “And…and…I saw Randall up in the tree.”
Brandy’s moving a little faster now. “So you left and went to get Ryan? That’s your first thought as a boyfriend? Not to warn me, not to sneak me and Mom out the back door? To go get your football buddy and come back an hour or so later.”
Suddenly, she aims the shotgun down an inch. It’s still in blowing-a-hole-through-the-nearest-zombie range, but at least this way I’ll be able to keep my nose.
I wait for Ryan to put two and two together—he was in Honors classes, before I left school for good—but from the way he avoids Brandy’s eyes, I can tell: he’s in on it. Has been from the minute Brock walked in my door, three bills in his pocket, so new they barely looked folded.
They probably had this planned from the get-go. For whatever reason, Brock wanted me gone and ever since the plague passed and zombies who’d lived past their “violent stage” were proven harmless, this was his only way—his only legal way—of doing it.
“Why, Brock?” I ask. I figure he owes me that much, an explanation at least. “Why me? Why now?”
“Why any of you?” he says, face going all weasely again as he stands there, beady-eyed and nostrils flaring. “You zombies got my mother, my brother, my grammy. Why
not
you, Randall? Why
not
now?”
Brandy pouts and lowers her gun another inch. “They got my dad, too, Brock. And they got Randall’s parents, too. Both of them. And his little sister, right, Randall? And Ryan’s brother, too. They got a lot of us, Brock. They
were
a lot of us. This here shotgun’s the same one I used to put my dad down. And don’t think I won’t put you down, too.”
“Me?” Brock asks. I look up and, sure enough, she’s got the gun pointed at Brock now. I try to hide my smile, fail, then stop trying.
“Brandy,” Ryan urges, putting on his best Official Representative of the Reanimation Patrol voice. “Put it down.”
“I will just as soon as you’re off my property, Ryan. And you, too, Brock. Go. I’m not in any danger. And if I am,” she hoists the shotgun just a little too high, “I’ll take care of it my own damn self—”
Brock sees what I do—the shotgun no longer pointed at his head—and launches himself over me and into Brandy, line-driving her into the front yard and toppling a garden gnome on her mom’s pathetic little postage-stamp yard. She lands with an ugly
oomph
sound. Something snaps, and I don’t think it’s this year’s crop of okra.
“Now, Ryan!” Brock screams in that high, nasal, panicky voice. “Get him!”
Ryan inches forward, pulling a Taser from his gun belt. The Reanimation Patrol is full of kids, mostly. Guys and a few girls my age, Ryan’s age, who lost somebody we loved in the 2018 Infestation and are looking to settle the score. Of course, they wouldn’t accept me. Reanimation Patrol is humans only.
They don’t let them have real guns, anymore, on account of what happened with one of the Patrollers out in Reno. Found a nest of zombies, unloaded his pistol, reloaded, unloaded it again and kept shooting until the blood dried.
That’s just it: zombies don’t bleed. It was a bunch of kids in zombie masks, camping out, scaring each other on a dare. Ever since then, it’s been Tasers.
But the end game is the same for me. If Ryan tases me, I’m out. Done, over. Not dead, but I might as well be. While I’m zonked out from the overdose of electrodes, they’ll take me to Containment, sentence me, and in a year I’ll be just one of the dozens of zombies executed every March 12th, the anniversary of the Beaver Falls Plague.
I can’t let that happen. Not when I haven’t done anything wrong. I go to stand and Ryan inches closer, zapping a little trigger on the side of his weapon so I can see—so that I can almost feel—the electricity pop between the two pinpoint chargers at the top.
I flinch and fall back down, scrambling away. This isn’t how this gig was supposed to go at all.
He closes in, flicking the trigger, and every time, the spit of sparks lights up his pale blue eyes. They’re happy. Brock is up now, foot on Brandy’s throat, cheering Ryan on from the sidelines like the cheerleader Brandy was so proud of becoming.
“Come on, dude,” he cries, like this is some kind of pep rally before the big game. “Let’s do this. What are you waiting for—?”
A shot rings out, shattering Brock’s headlight. The yard goes a little darker and I turn, still scrambling, figuring Brandy got off a round after all. But it’s not Brandy. Her mom, curlers, slippers, housecoat, and all, fills the doorway. Smoke from a single shotgun barrel curls into the dark night sky.
“What the hell?” Ryan asks, dropping the Taser instinctively.
I leap forward and pick it up before he can change his mind, or realize what he’s done.
“What, you didn’t see the sign?” Brandy’s mom asks, pointing over her shoulder to the yard, where a cheap plastic sign says the same thing as Ryan’s door frame: Official Representative of the Reanimation Patrol.
I grin. I thought it was just there as a precaution, kind of like one of those “This is house is secured by video monitoring” signs when you know good and well it isn’t.
“Section 9.872 of the Reanimated Patrol Code says that when zombies and humans are both in danger at the same time, it’s appropriate—and legal—to defend human and/or reanimated persons alike. So step off, sonny. The real cops are on the way.”
Ryan looks physically hurt by the betrayal. “But…but…” he sputters. “We’re on the same side.”
Brandy’s mom clucks, using the smoking end of her shotgun to nudge Brock away from her daughter. “You and I may both be human, kid, but we’re far from being on the same side.”
I get up, help Brandy get up, and thank her mom.
She smirks, a twenty-year-older version of Brandy. “Don’t thank me ’til they’re gone, kid.”
Later, when they’ve left, when the cops have come and gone, when I’ve filed a report and am sitting at Brandy’s kitchen table, the scent of a thousand cheesy casseroles filling the air, I thank her again.
“You’re not very good at this private detective thing, are you kid?” she asks.
Brandy smacks her shoulder playfully from the next chair over. I shake my head, suddenly getting an idea. “You know, come to think of it, I could use some backup from time to time. How about you and Brandy joining me?”