Dead (A Lot) Read online

  Right around midnight, I got the first and last text from Dad. ‘We are ok but can’t get home. Get to Aunt Ella’s any way you can. Do what you have to do. Please respond.’

  Trina and I stared at the little screen and read the message over and over again. Aunt Ella lived up in the Berkshires near the Vermont border. She had a farm and a lot of land.

  “Do you even know what town she lives in?” Trina asked.

  “I only know she lives off of the Mohawk Trail. That’s about it.”

  “Me, too,” she said. “I remember you go to the coffee shop, turn right, and pass a million apple trees. After that I’m clueless.”

  I texted Dad back.

  ‘Freaked but ok here. What town?’

  We waited for a response, but nothing ever came.

  “Why Aunt Ella’s?” Trina finally asked.

  “I don’t know. It’s not like we go there a lot. I guess it’s because it’s about half way between us and where they are in Vermont. Also, there aren’t many people around up there. Maybe they think we’ll be safe.”

  “Safe? My boyfriend just turned into a zombie along with everyone else in our neighborhood. For all I know, everyone in town’s a corpse, and you’ve screwed us into our basement. I’m really not feeling the safety here, Tripp.” Her voice began to waver.

  “Listen,” I said, mostly because I was feeling about as unsafe as she was. “I’m really tired. Should we take shifts or something?”

  Trina ripped open a bag of chips. “You’ve got two hours.” Trina ate when she got stressed. Even though I wasn’t hungry I reached my hand out so she’d toss a few chips over to me before she ate them all.

  “Trina,” I said. “What are we going to do?”

  “Live,” she said without skipping a beat, which is exactly what I would have said if she had asked me first.

  “Live,” I repeated. “I can live with that.”

  4

  TWO HOURS OF dreamless sleep later the pounding started. Trina shook me awake and put her finger to her mouth. Someone or something was pounding rhythmically on the front door upstairs—slowly and methodically—like my guitar teacher’s metronome.

  “We can’t stay here,” I whispered.

  “We can’t go out there.”

  “We’re going to have to go out there.”

  Trina bit at her lip. “My shift is up,” she said. “Let me sleep for a couple hours.” She curled up in a blanket but couldn’t stop looking at the spot on the edge of the ceiling, just about underneath where the pounding was coming from.

  I nodded and crawled to my feet to take my shift.

  Trina never slept. Around 3:30 or so, the pounding stopped only to be followed by the sound of breaking glass. Almost immediately I heard someone moving around over our heads. Sprinkles stared at the ceiling and tilted her head from side to side.

  “Some watchdog you are,” I muttered.

  “Crap,” Trina whispered.

  “Capital C.”

  “Any bright ideas?”

  “Yeah,” I said. “We’re going to Aunt Ella’s to see Mom and Dad and figure everything out from there.” I hoisted my dad’s electric screwdriver and started working on the screws I used to penny us in The Putter Room. “And we may have to kill a zombie in our house.”

  “Already dead,” she said.

  I grimaced and continued unscrewing screws knowing full well the sound was going to attract the thing upstairs.

  About a half hour in, whatever was upstairs realized the sound it was hearing was coming from the basement. Trina gasped when she heard the clunk of heavy feet coming down the staircase. I figured it was useless to be quiet and hope that the thing would go away, so I kept on unscrewing the screws, letting them fall to the floor at my feet.

  About three quarters of an hour in, something started to bang on the other side of the door. We both jumped. Hell, it’s not like we weren’t expecting something like that to happen, but when it finally did, we completely slid over into Stephen King land.

  “The door’s latched right?” Trina stammered. “It’s latched. Please say it’s latched.” She was clutching my dad’s crowbar with white knuckled fists.

  “How’s girl softball been doing?” I asked and motioned for her to stand to the left of the door.

  I continued unscrewing until all the screws were out. Carefully, I reached for the latch.

  “Are you crazy?” she hissed.

  “How the hell else do you think we’re going to get out of here? Besides, they’re slow. You saw them. They’re slow and really stupid.” My hand caressed the latch. “So are we cool?”

  “Just do it already.”

  I unlatched the door, grasped the knob, and pulled.

  Chuck Peterson fell through the doorway, dangling eyeball and all. As he did, Trina swung the crowbar and struck him square in the shoulder. He went sprawling across The Putter Room, and Trina and I ran out, trailed by our soon-to-be-deceased poodle.

  We dashed up the basement stairs and locked the door behind us. I was scared out of my mind. Trina glued herself to me like a shadow while I crept through the house to see if there were any others lurking about. But there weren’t. One of the windows next to the front door had shattered. Out front, the sun was rising, and I could see a couple of bodies lying on the street that I doubted would ever be mobile again.

  The school bus yellow Hummer glowed in the break of dawn.

  “We’re taking Chuck’s car,” I said.

  “I don’t think he’ll mind.”

  “I don’t think he has a mind to mind. Where are his keys?”

  Trina looked at me with blank eyes. “In his pocket,” she said.

  “In his pocket,” I repeated. “The one attached to the jeans he’s wearing?”

  “That would be correct.”

  “Crap,” I said. “Crap, crap, crap, crap, crap.”

  “He’s slow and stupid, remember? I’m going to grab a few things, then we’re out of here. You get his keys.” She was off and running before I even had a chance to protest.

  “That’s just great,” I muttered. “That’s just freaking great.”

  Less than thirty minutes later, she had two duffle bags filled and crammed into Chuck’s Hummer. She also had the crowbar she used to bean him with. We agreed that I would open up the basement door and wait for mindless Chuck to come bumbling up the stairs. Once he did, I would do what I needed to do, with whatever I could find to do it with, to get his keys so we could get out of there.

  In retrospect, both of us really did forget about Sprinkles.

  When Chuck finally noodled out how to get up the stairs and started staggering after me in a demented game of Duck, Duck, Dead around the kitchen island, I should have done more to save her.

  After all, she was family. Operative word: was.

  Good dog, Sprinkles. Good dog.

  SO THAT’S HOW the zombie apocalypse started, just after dawn on the eighteenth of September, our junior year of high school. Summer hadn’t yet worn off, and the chill of a Massachusetts autumn seemed a long way off.

  When I started Chuck’s Hummer that morning and slowly backed out of the driveway, I saw two things. One was the chewed remains of a little boy’s arm lying on our front lawn. The second was Chuck staggering out through the broken window next to our front door.

  Trina sniffed and gripped the crowbar just a little bit tighter. I think it’s safe to say they broke up.

  5

  WE SAW NO ONE anywhere—no one alive that is. There were loads of Necropoxers. That’s what the guy on the radio called them. We had Necropoxers aplenty, but nobody breathing.

  After we pulled out of the driveway and I got used to Chuck’s wheels, I drove slowly down the street while Trina turned on the radio. There was
nothing but static on our regular stations.

  She went all the way through the FM channels twice. There was nothing, so she switched to AM. Somewhere around 760 she landed on someone talking.

  I pulled over to the side of the road right outside our development and listened.

  The D.J. said his name was Jimmy James, and he sounded tired. He explained that the ‘poxers’ started popping up all over the place sometime late yesterday afternoon. By the time the electricity failed, they were already out in force.

  Jimmy James explained that he had switched the station’s power to their back-up generator and would continue broadcasting as long as he could. He didn’t know how long that was going to be. He was locked in the sound booth, and the sound booth was surrounded by the evil-dead.

  The Necropoxer name came from one of the people who called in to the station. Unlike Trina, Jimmy James had his cell and power cord with him when everything started to happen. He kept urging anyone alive with juice in their cell to call in and report on what they were seeing. He had his phone on speaker so listeners could hear what the callers were saying. In between calls, he repeated what he knew.

  The caller wouldn’t identify himself which made me think he was a government whistle blower. He called the disease Necropoxy. It was airborne, and less than one percent of the population was genetically immune to the airborne version, but no one was immune to the bite.

  Let’s hear it for us one percenters—Whoo Hoo!

  Necropoxy was actually a parasitic disease. As soon as it found its human host, it went right to the brain and started multiplying at a freakish rate. Within a very short amount of time the host body filled with parasites. What’s worse was that Necropoxers wouldn’t decompose and fall apart in a few weeks. They were actually human bags filled with living organisms. They weren’t even going to rot as long as the host bodies kept feeding the parasites.

  What they fed on was meat.

  We were meat.

  On the radio, Jimmy James fielded a call. “Where you from?”

  “Littleham,” she said. “Near Springfield.”

  “That’s here,” Trina whispered.

  “I know,” I whispered back. “Why are we whispering?”

  “Shhh. I want to hear.”

  Jimmy James kept the caller talking. “Are you safe?” he asked.

  “Not really,” she said, fear infesting her quiet words. “I don’t think any of us are safe. I’m in the coffee shop I work in. I was supposed to close up last night. Thank God I had the key to lock the door.”

  “So where are you now? You must have power if you’re reaching me.”

  “On the floor behind the register,” she said. “I found an old battery radio next to the sink, but my cell phone is almost dead. These things keep walking by the window, but I don’t think they know I’m here. And I’ve had like a gallon of coffee.”

  I pulled Chuck’s Hummer out into the street and headed for the Mug N’ Muffin in the center of town. That’s the coffee shop that she was talking about.

  “What’s your name?” asked Jimmy. He was trying to keep her calm.

  “Prianka,” she said. “Prianka Patel.”

  “Prianka Patel!” I almost drove right off the road. “I hate Prianka Patel.”

  Okay, it’s not like I hated her in that I wanted her to get eaten by zombies for real, but I’m sure in one of the many hate fantasies I had about her, being eaten by zombies had probably crossed my mind.

  Year after year, Prianka Patel was in almost every one of my classes, and year after year she made it her personal mission to be just a tiny bit better than me in practically everything. If I got a 95 on a quiz, she got a 96. If I got an A on a paper, she showed off an A plus. What’s even worse was that she was pretty—pretty in that exotic, dark haired, foreign sort of way that you can’t even make fun of without other guys looking at you like you’re crazy. Pretty like . . . ugh . . . what was I thinking? I hated Prianka Patel.

  “Hate is just another four letter word for love,” said Trina.

  “Shut up. She’s a self-righteous know-it-all.”

  “Maybe. But we need some extra smarts right now.”

  I didn’t say anything. Instead I focused my attention on the new world in front of us. The Necropoxers were wandering and eating. Every second or third one that we saw was gnawing on a piece of bloody something. I hoped they were eating each other, but I wasn’t sure that was the case.

  Another thing I noticed was that they were getting faster.

  The Chuck-shuffle that we both saw last night seemed to be replaced by a chaotic stagger. We were watching the parasites infest people right before our eyes. The more the infestation took hold, the faster they were getting, and the faster they were getting, the hungrier they were getting.

  We drove down Mountain Road and turned left on Main Street. The Mug N’ Muffin was down a block to the left, right across the street from the bank. There were like a dozen poxers wandering back in forth in front of the entrance. A van had turned over in the middle of the road, and there was a bloody smear on the tar.

  I pulled out my phone and punched in the phone number to the radio station. Then I turned down the radio and waited for him to answer.

  “You’ve reached WHZZ, and this is Jimmy James. Who are you, and how you holding up?”

  “My name’s Tripp Light,” I said. “I’m with my sister, Trina, in Littleham. If Prianka can hear this, we’re coming to get her.”

  “How cool is that,” he said in a voice that was slowly turning to gravel. “Hear that, folks? Chivalry ain’t dead, although the white horse our man Tripp’s riding in on might be if he’s not fast enough.”

  “My white horse is a Hummer,” I said. “It’s plenty fast, and right now I think we’re all up for a little game of zombie bowling.”

  “You go, man,” said Jimmy James. “You go.”

  Trina reached over and put on her seatbelt then braced herself with one hand on the dash and the other gripping the handle above the window.

  “Prianka friggin Patel,” I hissed through clenched teeth and floored the Hummer.

  I hit the first poxer square in the chest. She was our age, but I don’t think I recognized her from school. She flew straight back like she was being pulled really fast by an invisible rope and landed about thirty feet away and missing some key parts.

  The poxers all turned toward us and moved a little too quickly toward our car.

  “Back up, back up, back up,” Trina screamed in my ear. I did, just slowly enough that they could follow us without losing interest.

  When we were about two hundred feet away, I suddenly threw the car in drive and slammed on the pedal. I can’t say what I did wasn’t pretty sick, because it was. There was dark blood and bodies everywhere, but I didn’t care. My eyes were fixed on the front door of the Mug N’ Muffin and Prianka Patel, key in hand, waiting behind the glass door.

  In seconds we were there. She stuck the key in the lock, opened the door, and made a dash for our Hummer. Out of nowhere, a poxer was on her. This one was a little girl about seven or eight. Without skipping a beat, Prianka whirled around and did some sort of weird, sideways, high kick square in the little poxer’s teeth. She went sprawling.

  Prianka yanked open the back door and hopped inside.

  “Don’t tell me, you’re a black belt, too,” I said, purposefully running over the little poxer as I pulled the Hummer out on to the road. The squashing sound was almost satisfying.

  “I have to get home,” she blurted out.

  “Well, gee. Hi, Tripp. Hi, Trina. Thanks for saving my ass even though I’m a narcissistic know-it-all and . . .”

  “Tripp!” Trina snapped and punched me in the arm.

  It didn’t hurt as much as the sting I felt in the pit of my stomach when Prianka st
arted sobbing in the back seat.

  An old lady poxer lurched in front of the Hummer, and I winged her as we sped by. Trina watched apathetically as she pinwheeled off the road and into some bushes. She turned around to face Prianka.

  “Pri,” she said. “You live on Dwight, right?”

  I saw her nod through the rear view mirror. Her makeup was smudged and dripping down her face, and there were serious bags under her eyes.

  She didn’t say anything more, but that’s where we went—Dwight Street.

  6

  LITTLEHAM, MASSACHUSETTS, population of about 6,200 according to the sign on the road into town, had now, at best, a population hovering somewhere around sixty and dropping by the hour. Of those sixty, my guess was that most of them would be bitten. The ones who didn’t get bitten would probably do something really dumb like take pills or accidently crash their cars.

  Or fall down wells.

  We were essentially on our own.

  Dwight Street ran behind the Littleham Country Club. As we slowly drove down the street, I saw some figures way out on one of the greens that were poxers for sure. They were stumbling aimlessly around. I ignored them and pulled into the Patel’s driveway.

  “That’ll be five dollars please. Don’t forget the tip.”

  Trina shot me a shut-up glance. Prianka just sat in the back seat, unable or unwilling to move.

  Finally Trina turned around, put her hand on Prianka’s knee, and said, “Do you think anyone is still alive?”

  Prianka sucked on her lip and fresh tears spilled from her blackened eyes. “My parents are away,” she said. “Someone in there is supposed to be watching my brother, Sanjay.”

  A brother? Ugh. Wasn’t it bad enough that there was one Patel in town? There had to be two?

  “How old is he?” asked Trina.

  “Ten. He’s ten,” she said. Her hands touched the handle of the door. Through the rearview mirror I could see her stare out the window, mentally calculating how far we were from the car to the house.

  “I don’t think there are any of those things around.” I offered, but she didn’t move.