Special Dead Read online

  It took Dr. Romero five agonizing minutes to outline everything they couldn’t do: leave the room without escort, be in the halls when classes changed, use sharp objects, get within arm’s reach of non-zombies, touch the big red button on the wall....

  Their fire drill procedure was pretty simple: stay put until everyone else was out of the building, then follow Mr. Benson, who would come up to lead them.

  When she finished she didn’t ask for questions, but Kyle raised his hand anyway. She favored him with a cool glare.

  “What?”

  “So what happens to us if we swear?”

  Ani tried not to roll her eyes as her mother answered.

  “Our options for discipline are limited, Kyle. Just remember that Doctor Banerjee and I control every aspect of your life and have gone out of our way to make it as pleasant as possible. That doesn’t have to continue. Any other questions?” Her tone made it clear that she wouldn’t be taking any more questions. She looked at Mr. Foster. “They’re all yours. Good luck. Call if you need me.”

  She walked out of the room.

  Kyle muttered, “Your mom’s a bitch.”

  Yeah, but she’s my bitch.

  The door locked with a clang. Mr. Foster giggled.

  It was going to be a long year.

  * * *

  Sarah talked through a bite of mashed potatoes. “Is it just me or is Kyle more obnoxious than normal?”

  Ani smirked. “I don’t think it’s professional for an administrator to talk about students in that way, Mom.”

  “Do you think it’s because he’s back in school?” She washed down another bite of potatoes with a sip of Diet Coke.

  No, I think it’s because his dad’s a drunken redneck and his mom’s a meth-head with a negative IQ. Plant corn, get corn. “Maybe. He was a bully before prom, and now he’s an outcast. He’s probably feeling self-conscious. It’s not like we’re conspicuous or anything. The helmets were a rude surprise.”

  Her mom shoved a spear of asparagus into her mouth, then scraped the rest of the food into the garbage. “It was part of the deal, sweetie.” She put her plate in the sink.

  Their little apartment in the lab wasn’t much, but at least it was private space. Sort of private. Ani did her best to ignore the security cameras that covered every inch of every room.

  “How’d it go at the doctor’s today, Mom?”

  “I’d rather not talk about it.”

  Ani bit her lip. “That’s not the deal.” No secrets.

  Sarah sighed. “The new medicine is awesome, but it makes me so tired. I feel like such a grouch all the time because I don’t have the energy to both get my job done and be nice.”

  And this is different from normal, how?

  “Between Doctor Banerjee and the new superintendent and school board, I get a mountain of paperwork every day, but it doesn’t seem to matter how fast I get it done. There’s always more.” She collapsed onto the sofa and put her feet on the coffee table. “Still, it beats the alternative.”

  Ani got up from the table and sat at the upright piano. She missed her baby grand, but there was no room for it in the tiny apartment. “Alternative?” She coaxed a few bars from the keys, piano dolce.

  “What’s that?” Sarah asked.

  “Giazotto’s Adagio in G Minor. I’m adapting it to piano.”

  “I thought it sounded familiar.” She raised her voice as she went into the bedroom. “So anyway, being dead.”

  “What?”

  “Being dead is the other alternative. I don’t mean dead like you, I mean dead.”

  A year earlier, when Ani woke in Dr. Banerjee’s lab, strapped to a table and reeking like the decomposing corpse she was, she had assumed that she was in Arizona and that her mother was dead from cancer. She’d never been happier to be wrong or to hear her mother’s voice.

  The miracle remission was almost complete, and her mother showed little sign of the exhaustion that had plagued her the previous year. Ani wasn’t sure if there was a God that loved her or if she was just the luckiest person to ever contract ZV; she just knew that she didn’t deserve a second chance and was happy to have it.

  Sarah’s voice startled her. “Penny for your thoughts?”

  “Oh, I was just daydreaming,” Ani hollered over the piano.

  “About?”

  Never one to let things go, are you, Mom?

  Ani pressed Middle C and held it, gathering her thoughts. “Mike, mostly. The others, the ones who didn’t make it.” Not Mike. Don’t talk about Mike. “Mr. Cummings and Mrs. Weller. How are they doing, anyway?”

  Her mom came out of the bedroom wearing her jogging suit. “Not too bad. Their grievance is sort of tracking Romero versus Ohneka Falls through the courts. I think they have a hearing or something next week with the arbitration panel.”

  “So they might be coming back?”

  “I hardly think they’ll be welcome, but the lab will cover the additional expense and the District might not have a leg to stand on. They were infected in the line of work, after all.” Chaperoning the prom. “So yeah, I think they might be coming back.” Good save. “So, what about Mike?” Damn.

  “It was so sad watching him in school today, trying to add three-digit integers. He’s just so...dumb.” Because I ate a chunk of his frontal lobe.

  Sarah bent down and touched her toes. She wasn’t as limber as she had been a year ago, before Mike’s dad had moved on to a younger woman. “These new regeneratives are pretty impressive. Once we cure you guys, he’ll probably gain back most of his neural functionality.”

  Ani closed her eyes. “I hope so.” She put her hands on the keys and started to play. It wasn’t ready to record yet, not even for YouTube, much less to go through the bother of writing it down.

  “Back in a bit, honey,” her mom said as she left.

  Chapter

  2

  The next day there weren’t quite as many protesters, but the creepy cultists were still on the sidewalk outside Wegmans. A fender bender in front of them delayed the bus a few minutes, so they got to school in the middle of the announcements. As they lurched and clanked their way through the school, Ani took the opportunity to peer into some of the other classrooms. They were half empty. All of them.

  “Where is everybody?” Lydia asked.

  “My dad says attendance is down almost sixty percent,” Samantha said. Sam’s dad was on the school board and was one of the most vocal opponents of the ZV mainstreaming program. According to Sam, it wasn’t that he didn’t love his daughter, he just felt that it was too risky to let the living and the dead socialize.

  The dead. The Special Dead. Ani had heard the term the day before when Principal Leoni said it. Adults always talked about teenagers as if they weren’t even standing there, but now it was worse. Miss Bell had called them “the corpses” when she was taking attendance, but even that was better than Mr. Gursslin. Mr. Gursslin sneered, crossed himself, and slammed the door when they went by.

  * * *

  Ani was trying to figure out what a derivative was when the period-change bell rang. Her precalculus book looked like it was written in English, and it sounded like English when you read it out loud, but it was written in some kind of sadistic, torturous code she couldn’t decipher. Mr. Foster was useless. Since Ani was ahead of everyone but Devon and Sam in every subject, her formal “education” consisted of “peer–modeling” and tutoring her classmates.

  I’m never going to pass the finals. She sighed. What a cheery freaking thought for the second day of school.

  When the fourth-period bell rang, Mr. Foster looked up from Teah’s desk. “Okay, kids, it’s yard time.”

  Everyone looked at him.

  “Yard time?” Joe asked.

  “You can’t do traditional physical education, so the school decided to give you forty minutes outside every day. In the yard.” He giggled. “Yard time.”

  Huh.

  They sat there, eight kids in utter stillness, not
even breathing.

  “How do we get down there?” Devon looked from Mr. Foster to the barred door.

  Mr. Benson’s arrival answered her question. He clapped his hands several times before the door had finished creaking open. “Let’s go, kids. I don’t have all day.”

  Teah snorted as they stood. “Isn’t this what you do all day?”

  He glared at her. “Single file, no monkey business. Mr. Clark, you take up the rear.”

  Kyle grinned. “That’s what she—”

  “Don’t,” Sam said. “I’ll have to kill you. Again.”

  “Oh, yeah!” Joe said. He laughed. “You were the one who bit Kyle, weren’t you?”

  “After Mike got Steve and Steve got me,” Sam said as they filed out of the room. Steve hadn’t made it.

  “Um,” Lydia said. “Did they ever figure out how it all started?”

  “No,” Ani lied. “They think maybe Dylan”—who Mom turned into a zombie to use for medical experiments—“infected somebody before he died.” Before Mom blew his head off. “No one’s sure how he lasted so long without treatment.” Ani looked at Mike, who smiled at her.

  Please don’t remember what I did to you. Please. For a hundred reasons, don’t.

  “That kid was a freak,” Devon said.

  “My mom said it would’ve been a lot worse,” Joe said, “if the army and Doctor Banerjee’s team weren’t already in the area because of Dylan.”

  “Yeah,” Kyle said. “Because twenty-six dead and ten zombies is just fucking awesome.”

  “Language, Kyle,” Miss Pulver said.

  “Sorry, Miss Pulver.”

  Kate Jackson rounded the corner and stared at them, eyes wide behind hipster glasses. Ani froze. Devon’s former minion, Kate was now a senior and captain of the soccer team. She’d really grown up, and the boys’ varsity jacket she wore almost kept her tiny white dress from being indecent. There’s no way that skirt’s past her fingertips.

  “Hi, Kate,” Devon said. It was weird seeing Devon as the tentative one.

  Kate stepped back, her lip curled in a sneer. “Get away from me, freak.” She turned and half-ran down the hall.

  Devon stood there, mouth open, until Teah grabbed her arm.

  “C’mon, let’s go.”

  Their shackles jangled on the stairs. When the group got to the bottom, a black-haired boy Ani didn’t recognize gaped at them from next to the drinking fountain. He wore jeans, a black T-shirt, and a silver ankh on a chain around his neck. He put his palms together, closed his eyes, and gave them a small bow. “Welcome back, sacred friends,” he said in a high, prepubescent voice. And then he stayed like that, eyes closed, half bowed, while they passed. He couldn’t have been more than thirteen.

  “Some of the new kids are f...” Kyle looked at Miss Pulver, “freaking weird.” Miss Pulver nodded her approval.

  Mr. Benson led them out a steel door that Ani didn’t remember from before. The “yard” was about the size of a soccer field, closed off from the rest of the campus by a chain-link fence topped with barbed wire. It abutted the main fence about ten feet from the sidewalk on Mechanic Street. The sky was overcast, but it was still warm. As soon as they were all out, Mr. Benson cleared his throat.

  “The fence is twenty thousand volts. More than enough to cook a zombie. So don’t touch it. Just like at the lab, the snipers aren’t trained to wound, so behave.” He stepped inside and closed the door. Ani heard a loud click. There was no handle on the outside.

  Mike lay down on the turf next to a half-inflated kickball. Joe sat next to him. The insects in the grass scattered in blind, mindless panic.

  Kyle found a stick and started scratching it against the brick wall. Ani made a mental note to make sure he didn’t try to smuggle it inside.

  “So,” Sam said, “we just, like, hang out?”

  Devon snorted.

  Ani sat against the wall, closed her eyes, and kept working on her music. Well, this is physically educational.

  * * *

  Joe tried to help Mike with addition, ticking off numbers on his fingers.

  Devon’s face twisted in a mask of rage behind her math textbook. “This is bullshit,” she whispered. “I’m not learning anything.”

  Ani could only nod in agreement. “I know. How do they expect to teach eight kids six different subjects all at the same time?”

  “It doesn’t help,” Devon said through teeth clamped down on her bite guard, “that our teacher is just out of diapers and thinks we’re going to eat him. Tee-hee.”

  Sam snorted. “Will you two shut up? I’m supposed to be in AP English, not reading the Lord of the Goddamned Flies again.” Ani wondered if it’d be possible to smuggle in books they actually wanted to read. Probably not.

  “Miss Kickbush?” Mr. Foster asked. “Do you have something you want to share with the class?”

  Sam grabbed the sides of her helmet with both hands, as if trying to pull out her hair. “No, Mr. Foster. If I have something to share, you’ll know it.”

  Mr. Foster giggled. That titter was skyrocketing up Ani’s list of least favorite sounds. In a day and a half it had passed “dogs howling” and was set to overtake “little girls on fire” in a matter of moments.

  “Well,” he said, “can you help Teah with her questions?”

  Sam banged her head on the desk, causing a crayon mass-suicide. Still face down, she said, “I’d be delighted to.”

  Teah looked up from her worksheet. “What’d I do?”

  * * *

  At the lab, Ani stepped off the bus and let Mr. Benson unlock her mouth guard. It felt good to take off their helmets. As Mr. Benson unlocked Sam’s, her hair fell in blonde rivulets to her shoulders.

  “That’s so not fair,” Lydia said.

  Kyle hissed, and Joe nudged Lydia with his elbow. Grinning, Joe said, “And what’s fair?”

  They’d made a deal almost a year before: being dead was hard enough without constant whining about it. Nobody was supposed to complain that anything was unfair.

  Lydia rolled her eyes. “A four-letter ‘eff’ word.” She jutted an accusing finger at Sam. “But look at her hair!”

  Lydia was right. Sam’s hair looked almost perfect right out of the helmet. The rest of them wore wigs, except the boys, who claimed not to care. Even so, there was no point complaining about “fair” when you were one of ten people on the planet unlucky enough to be the walking dead.

  Sam smiled. “It’s only a matter of time, Lydia. One of these days we’ll have a cure, and no one will have to go through this ever again.”

  Joe chuckled. “It’s not like we chose to be this way. If I had to choose a monster, I’d be Godzilla.”

  Ani tried not to smile, and failed. “Sparkly vampire, Joe. That’s where it’s at.”

  A blue Audi four-seater screeched to a halt next to the bus. Sarah Romero had bought the car seven years before, when she was still a practicing surgeon, and liked it enough to keep paying for repairs instead of getting a new one. She got out, stretched, and waved. Mike waved back.

  “I got them from here, Frank,” she said. Mr. Benson gave her a curt nod and walked off without another word. Ani had the impression he didn’t much like his job. “Okay, kids, homework first, free time until nine, and then bath time.”

  Nobody bothered to complain. Every night from 9:00 pm until 6:00 am they soaked in the “bath”—a noxious mix of formaldehyde, regeneratives, and ice. At least now they had their own rooms so they could listen to their own music. Kyle liked alt-punk and thrash metal, Devon preferred silence, and Lydia liked pop and dubstep. Ani’s tastes meshed with Lydia’s, but Ani also liked classical music, which Lydia hated.

  Her mother tapped her shoulder, shattering her reverie. “You okay, sweetie?”

  “Yeah. Just thinking.” They stepped toward the lab and Ani’s thoughts turned to the ride to school. “What’s up with the weirdos outside Wegmans? The ones all in black? I think we met one of them in school today.”


  “Yeah, those guys are creepy,” Lydia said, hugging herself.

  “Since the injunction allowed you kids to come back to school, a lot of people moved out of town, but others have been trickling in. A weird group. They started some kind of pagan church up on Vine Street.”

  Devon raised an eyebrow. “Are they dangerous?”

  Kyle snorted. “What’s going to be dangerous to us?”

  Joe grinned. “Nothing would be dangerous to me if I were Godzilla! RAWR!” He clawed the air and stomped around in a circle. Mike laughed and clapped his hands.

  “All right, guys. Homework time.” Sarah pointed toward the lab door. Joe stomped in that direction, Mike and Kyle at his heels. A final roar and they were inside.

  “Boys,” Teah said.

  “Men are no smarter,” Sarah said. “Just bigger.” She followed the boys inside.

  Teah’s voice dropped to a conspiratorial whisper. “Bill’s coming to visit next week.”

  “Is he on leave?” Devon asked.

  Teah flashed her eyes. “Not exactly.” Ani and Sam exchanged looks.

  “And how ‘exactly’ is he going to visit?” Devon pulled off her blonde wig, ran her hand over her puckered scalp, and put it back on.

  Teah pouted. “We just want to see each other, you know, through the fence? It’s been a year.” The whine in her voice put Ani’s teeth on edge.

  “Just don’t do anything stupid,” Ani said. Ani knew first-hand that zombism didn’t suppress hormonal stupidity. Bill going AWOL from the army to see his dead girlfriend was already stupid. Anything beyond that was a bonus prize.