What We Kill Read online

  Praise for Howard Odentz’s

  Dead (A Lot)

  “A fun and witty zombie apocalypse narrative that will bring a smile to your face as you discover (or remember) how the teenage mind operates in times of difficulty. The dialog is clever and the characters are realistic.”

  —ScaredStiffReviews.com

  “Right out of the gate, the plot is fast-paced and action packed (like any good zombie book should be) and infused with some great humor. It’s a fun and entertaining ride and I was sad when it [came] to the end.”

  —BookandCoffeeAddict.com

  “Howard Odentz does an impeccable job writing about this world turned dead.”

  —BeautysLibrary.com

  What We Kill

  by

  Howard Odentz

  Bell Bridge Books

  Copyright

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons (living or dead), events or locations is entirely coincidental.

  Bell Bridge Books

  PO BOX 300921

  Memphis, TN 38130

  Ebook ISBN: 978-1-61194-821-9

  Print ISBN: 978-1-61194-836-3

  Bell Bridge Books is an Imprint of BelleBooks, Inc.

  Copyright © 2017 by Howard Odentz

  Published in the United States of America.

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review.

  We at BelleBooks enjoy hearing from readers.

  Visit our websites

  BelleBooks.com

  BellBridgeBooks.com

  ImaJinnBooks.com

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  Cover design: Debra Dixon

  Interior design: Hank Smith

  Photo/Art credits:

  Woods (manipulated) © Smileus | Dreamstime.com

  :Ewkw:01:

  Dedication

  For David

  1

  IT STARTS LIKE THIS.

  2

  “WEST? ARE YOU awake? Weston?” A far off voice calls my name but I’m nestled in clouds. I don’t want to open my eyes.

  “Holy Christ,” Anders gasps. Anders Stephenson is my best friend. I’ve always known him. He lives across the street in the persimmon-colored house. I only know the name of the paint because his mother goes out of her way to tell everyone she used a fancy color.

  Mrs. Stephenson is typical Meadowfield.

  “What . . . what’s happening?” I hear someone else cry. That’s Marcy Cole. Marcy is beautiful. She has curly auburn hair and blue eyes. She also has a thing for Anders that’s been brewing since the third grade. As cool as we all are, I don’t think that Marcy and Anders are ever going to happen. When we graduate next spring, Marcy is going to be a mess. Anders wants to take a year off and go visit relatives in Norway. I’m hoping I’m in college by then. I don’t want to be left behind to pick up little Marcy pieces.

  That puzzle is a little too abstract for me.

  “Earth to Weston Kahn. Earth to Weston Kahn,” Robbie Myers says. “Come in Weston Kahn.” Myers is my other best friend. Me, Anders, Marcy and Myers have all grown up in sight of each other on gently sloping Primrose Lane. Myers is kind of a mess in a nerdy way. If I were to point fingers, I’d point them at his mother, but we all have our little issues.

  No one is perfect, even in a town as perfect as Meadowfield.

  “What the hell?” cries Anders. I slit open my eyes so little that they might as well not be open at all.

  The sun is shining overhead, fractured in a zillion pieces.

  Branches.

  We’re in the woods.

  “Shit,” Anders cries again but this time he sounds almost hysterical.

  “Oh my God,” gasps Marcy. Her voice is husky. “Is that blood?”

  What does she mean, blood? Where’s blood? Who’s bleeding?

  “West?” It’s Myers again. His black hair and Chiclet teeth momentarily blot out the sky. He’s leaning over me and his hot breath is assaulting my nostrils. “I think . . . oh no . . . I think Weston might be dead.”

  I take a deep breath. “Shut up, Myers,” I murmur. “I’m not dead.” I open my eyes a little more. Only then do I realize that my arm is stinging. The more sleep falls away, the more insistent the pain becomes. I squeeze my eyes shut and feel tears dripping down my cheeks.

  “It is blood.” Marcy chokes out, and this time she starts to sob.

  There is so much promise in letting myself slip away again, but I know that I can’t. Something’s not right. As a matter of fact, something is very, very wrong.

  I sigh, reach up and push Myers away. “Move,” I tell him through a mouth that might as well be filled with cold oatmeal, and struggle to get to my elbows because my arm really does hurt.

  “Sorry,” says Myers. “I thought you were dead.” He leans back on his bony knees. There’s something weird about how Myers looks, other than his scrawniness and his dorky tee-shirt that says ‘Master Baiter’ with a picture of a worm on a hook, but I can’t quite put my finger on it. My head is all full of cotton. Besides, any thoughts of Myers fade away as soon as my eyes begin to focus.

  We are in the woods, and everything is all too familiar. This is Prince Richard’s Maze, the stretch of forest at the edge of Meadowfield that towers over the highway and the Connecticut River beyond. My fingers dig into the ground and October leaves crunch beneath my hands.

  Marcy is still crying and Myers starts to cry, too. I hate when he does that. No wonder he gets picked on so much at school.

  “Why is there blood?” Marcy blubbers, and this time Myers joins her.

  He says, “Anders, there’s so much. What . . . what did you do?”

  I roll to one side and wince. My arm stings like a son of a bitch, but it doesn’t even occur to me to look down and find the source of the pain. I’m too busy gawking at Anders.

  There’s blood alright. There’s blood everywhere, but it’s only on him. His blond hair and square jaw are dripping with it. His tall, ropy, basketball frame, covered only in a tee-shirt and jeans, is sloshed in red. Anders looks like Carrie White—not the new one but the old one played by that girl with the stringy hair and the flat face who is older than my mother now.

  Anders is painted in blood.

  Myers and Marcy are crying, and we’re in Prince Richard’s Maze, but I don’t know why.

  “My eye,” Myers suddenly screams. “Where’s my eye?” I know that sounds like a bizarre thing to say, but Myers has a glass eye. I can’t pull my muddied gaze away from Anders because of all the blood, but suddenly I realize why Myers looks weirder than usual. He’s missing his eye. All that’s left is a droopy, crusty hole in his head. He always forgets to clean it out and it’s gross. “Shit,” he cries. “My mother will friggin’ kill me if I lose it again.”

  “What’s happening?” blurts out Anders with his hands held in front of him and the whites of his eyes popping out of his crimson colored face.

  “I don’t know,” I say, then wince. The stinging, burning sensation on my arm becomes so insistent that I simply have to look. I glance down and my eyes grow wide. There is a tiny triangle, way smaller than a penny, burned into my forearm. The skin around its edges is puffy and pale.

  A triangle.

  “Marcy?” whispers Anders. “Marcy?
” I’ve never heard Anders Stephenson sound so small or so weak. He’s not weak at all. He’s our jock buddy. He’s the one who sticks up for us when nobody else does. “Marcy?” he says once more, but his words are barely a whisper.

  “Um, Marcy?” says Myers through his tears. “Where . . . where are your pants?”

  I look back up and see Myers without his eye, Anders covered in blood, and Marcy wearing only a torn top, dirty panties, and no shoes.

  Marcy screams.

  For that matter, so does Myers.

  We’re in some sort of dream. We have to be. I must be dreaming and at any moment I’m going to wake up. If I’m not, there is no reason why the four of us should be in The Maze.

  There’s no reason for so much blood.

  Suddenly, a long, deep wail pierces the forest and we all look up. The otherworldly siren is the Meadowfield fire alarm. The sound cuts through town like a sickly fog horn, unable to be ignored. The alarm blares away for a good thirty seconds, and Myers starts hiccupping in the middle of crying. He’s hyperventilating. Myers is a junior volunteer for the town fire department, but he’s not going to be able to show up for the alarm because he can’t find his eye.

  Anders is covered in blood.

  Marcy’s lost her pants.

  I have a burning triangle on my forearm.

  What’s more, if this isn’t a dream, then I can’t for the life of me remember how we ended up in The Maze.

  Frankly, I don’t even remember last night.

  What the hell is going on?

  3

  “GIVE ME YOUR sweatshirt,” I tell Myers. The gray fleece sleeves are tied around his thin waist because it’s been so warm lately. This October’s schizophrenic weather has made our little corner of the world the poster child for global warming. The temperature has topped 70 degrees most days this past week when the thermometer should really be hovering in the forties.

  “Why?” he sniffs and rubs one dirty arm across his face, which is getting increasingly hard to look at. His fleshy eye socket seems huge even though it’s not. I force myself to ignore the hole. Instead, I tilt my chin toward Marcy, and he silently mouths, ‘Oh.’

  Myers quickly unties the sleeves and tosses his sweatshirt to me. I get up, my head still reeling and my arm burning, and stagger over to Marcy, who is totally lost in a puddle of curly auburn hair and tears. Her hands are trying to cover as much of herself as possible. Even in the early morning light I can see that her cheeks are burning red.

  “Here,” I say, and toss Myers’s sweatshirt in her lap.

  Marcy says something under her breath about how she’s mortified. I try not to roll my eyes. I’m not even sure I have the strength to roll them, anyway. Every square inch of my body aches, and the pain in my arm is searing.

  “You’ll be fine,” I tell her. Being mortified isn’t a permanent condition. Besides, she doesn’t have anything we haven’t seen before, and now there’s a more urgent issue.

  Anders is becoming totally unglued.

  First he starts shaking. Then he climbs to his feet and takes off running with his arms stretched out so maybe he won’t get any more blood on himself.

  “Stop him,” I snap at Myers, which is like telling a Chihuahua to stop a mastiff.

  “Wait, what?” he stammers as he watches Anders barrel through the fall foliage away from us.

  “Damnit,” I cry and try my best to follow after him, still imagining my knees rubbing together as I run, which they don’t do anymore. I know where he’s going but I don’t have time to explain to Myers or Marcy. She’s too busy holding a pity party for herself.

  I dive into the woods after Anders, but he’s fast. Anders has always been fast. He’s always been the captain of this or a varsity player of that. I’m not a jock. People like me aren’t jocks.

  “Anders, you prick. Stop already.” What I really want to say is ‘Anders, you prick. Don’t let anyone see you. If you’re seen covered in blood then we’re all royally screwed.’

  Thankfully, we know The Maze. We’ve played in these woods for years, even after the town put up the ‘No Loitering’ sign and hung a chain across the entrance so that desperate, horny men wouldn’t park their cars inside at night.

  Finally, I burst through the brush onto one of the well-worn paths. Although I’m really groggy, I’m pretty sure this one is Little Loop. Big Loop is wider and goes all the way out to the bald patch that looms over the highway. We used to watch fireworks there with our families on the Fourth of July. Little Loop only goes as far as Turner Pond.

  A few yards in front of me I find Anders’ bloody tee-shirt in a ball on the ground. I scoop it up and keep following Little Loop. About a hundred feet farther down are his bloody jeans.

  From somewhere up ahead I hear a splash.

  When I finally catch up to him with my lungs burning deep inside, I find Anders chest deep in Turner Pond, naked, except for his socks and underwear. He’s scrubbing at himself with his fingernails, probably doing more harm than good.

  “Get it off me,” he keeps wailing over and over like he’s being sucked dry by a leech.

  “Stop it,” I cry. I want to wade into the water after him, but I’m not the kind of guy who does stuff like that. Anders is the one who does stuff like that.

  Not now, though. Now he’s just a mess.

  “Get it off me,” he screams again. “Get it off me.”

  Suddenly, Myers is at my side, eyeless and a little clueless. I think his head is all filled with pudding like mine. Seconds later, there’s a blur and a spray of water.

  Marcy has run right into the pond and splashes her way out to Anders.

  “Anders,” she cries and grabs him by both shoulders. “Anders, STOP.”

  Just like that, Anders falls to pieces right in Marcy’s arms. She’s probably dreamt about this happening every night for years, but not like this.

  Never like this.

  Anders sobs like only a guy can sob when something truly awful has happened. He sobs like guys only do once in their lifetimes.

  Marcy pulls Anders to her and buries her beautiful, curly head in his collar bone. He wraps his arms around her and holds on tight like if he lets go, he’ll plummet to the bottom of Turner Pond and then keep on going, sinking into the muck, and the filth, and the secrets way down deep.

  “Shhh,” she whispers to him. “It will be okay. Honest. Everything will be okay.”

  Meanwhile, back on shore, Myers stares at Anders and Marcy in the water with his mouth hanging open. “Some things you can’t ever unsee,” he murmurs, his face slowly going pale.

  “Really?” I say to him. “Seriously?”

  He slowly nods his bobble head up and down on his turkey neck, with his black hair and his “Master Baiter” tee-shirt.

  “That’s the best I got,” he says. Then, like a total douche, he quickly reaches up and rubs his good eye with his fist. “Wait,” he stutters. “I think my other eye just went blind.”

  4

  MEADOWFIELD ONCE appeared in a joke book about preppies as one of the hundred most desirable suburbs in the country, but that was decades ago. Still, our town—along with Longmeadow, Littleham, and a few other places where there are enclaves of McMansions—is prime real estate in Western Massachusetts.

  Everyone here wears plaid and untucked oxford shirts. Most families own golden retrievers, big black labs, or hypoallergenic designer dogs.

  Some of us are Jewish, like me and Myers, but being Jewish these days has turned from a religion to just another reason to get gifts at the holidays like all our non-Jewish friends.

  Most of our parents have been divorced at least once, and they all think they’re cool by telling us if we’re going to drink or get stoned, we should do it at home. They won’t judge.

  Parents lie.
r />   We all go to college after we graduate high school unless there’s some fancy-ass reason not to, like Anders has about going to Norway for a year.

  We all perform community service and think of our grades in terms of percentiles.

  Bad things don’t ever happen in places like Meadowfield, or at least that’s what everyone likes to think, but it isn’t true.

  Bad things are happening right now.

  The four of us sit next to Turner Pond in the morning chill, all shivering. Marcy has put on Myers’ sweatshirt, but now her panties are soaked from the pond. Anders is curled in a ball, mostly naked except for his wet underwear and socks. His splotchy sneakers are almost buried in dead leaves at the water’s edge. He won’t put on his bloody clothes. He won’t even look at them.

  His head is in Marcy’s lap, and he’s staring into space like it’s a tangible thing. Behind his vacant gaze is complete darkness, and I’m afraid for my friend.

  Marcy keeps rubbing his back, her face empty, too. Meanwhile, Myers can’t stop staring at them, and I want to say something really juvenile like ‘take a picture, it will last longer,’ but I don’t because there’s a dense fog in my head, and I’m not entirely sure any of this is real.

  Finally, Myers reaches up and wipes his droopy socket.

  “I have to find my eye,” he murmurs like he’s already been yelled at for losing it by his mother.

  “Needle. Haystack,” I say. “It’s probably in the woods, and if it’s in the woods, it’s gone.”

  “Pffft. All gone,” Anders whispers, not moving his head from Marcy’s lap. Goose bumps pop up on my arm. I’m almost positive he’s not talking about Myers’ eye at all. He’s talking about something else, like childhood or innocence.

  “Shhh,” says Marcy and runs her fingers through Anders’ blond hair. Unless there’s something I don’t know about, this is the first time she’s ever had access to it. “Sorry,” she whispers to Myers about his eye but all our words fall on deaf ears.