Chapter 16

“1 or 2 sandwiches?” Ethan texts back as I work my Crackberry.

I sigh; we’ve been at this for 10 minutes and I could care less about lunch.

“Roger,” I ask impatiently. “1 or 2 sandwiches?”

He looks almost apologetic as he says, “Would 2 be all right?”

I smile and text back, “Better make it three.”

Tara and Fiona are in the corner testing the video equipment, which we’ve whittled down from five cameras to just two, which Roger and Tara will have to hold manually since Fiona is to be the star of the show and Alex has bailed on us.

In between coordinating the zombie costumes with the Drama Department, Roger bookmarks the live feed sites he plans on uploading the content to as it happens, using a laptop he keeps across his ample lap.

I’m busy watching the screen fill up with response codes and time zones as he coordinates this very technical part of the effort.

When I finally look away from the screen and find him looking at me.

Without flinching he asks, conversationally, “So, how does one become a… zombie?”

I sigh.

“Roger…” I groan playfully, but his chubby, almost serene face is deadly serious. “Seriously, dude, it’s not like in the movies, okay. You’re not going to want to recreate this with your little friends after this is all…”

“I’m not that guy,” he says quietly, but seriously.

This close, his eyes are a washed out, friendly hazel.

His ruddy, pink cheeks are covered with stubble the same color as his light brown hair.

I can tell, beneath the extra 100-pounds or so, there is a masculinity very few people ever see, or would even suspect.

“I’m not that guy you think I am,” he insists, quietly but insistently. “I mean, sure, the computers, the games, the movies, the Star Wars club, yeah, sure, it’s fine to pass the time but I’m interested in this in a serious way, Lucy. I mean, I’m seriously interested, like Tara said, in a historical, in a scientific way. Listen, I’m the last guy who wants to be a zombie. I enjoy French fries too much, and breathing, and… warmth.”

He smiles, to show no disrespect. “I just, I mean, I’ve seen a million zombie movies, every one ever made, in fact, and they never say anything. The zombies in them, I mean.”

“Except ‘brains,’ right?” I joke, making a harsh snorting noise that comes from staying away from humans too long; from being too excited to speak to one now.

At least, about this very personal topic.

“That, yeah,” he smiles.

And opens his mouth to say more, to ask more, but then closes it, and shuts his laptop cover, and sits back; preparing to listen, instead.

And because he’s worked so hard, and the plan seems to be coming together, and because we have time before we can actually implement it, I say, “We talk.”

And then I add, “To one another, anyway.”

“But you talk in class, right? You have to, to get a grade, to pass Mrs. Helmsmeyer’s Social Studies final oral report, right? You talk to humans.”

“We talk at humans,” I correct. “It’s just too dangerous to talk to humans, to get to know them, to interact. I mean, witness what happened with Alex. That was stupid; I let my guard down. I won’t be doing that again anytime soon.”

He shakes his head. “It just seems a waste, is all, going through eternity only talking to your own kind.”

I shrug. “Maybe, but… it’s easier that way.”

“You don’t break the ‘8 Unbreakable Zombie Laws’ that way,” he says, using a spooky movie announcer’s voice.

I smile and say, “You got it. But the laws aren’t in place for us; they’re in place for… you guys.”

He makes a quizzical face, his large eyes growing larger.

I say, “For instance, ‘Law # 6: Thou Shalt Not Date a Mortal.’ That’s so we don’t start dating some sweet guy, get all hot and heavy with him, give him a little love bite on the throat and – bam – instant zombie. So to—”

“Hold up, hold up, hold up,” he insists, sitting up, excited now, pink face now a red face, strong deep voice now an excited geek voice. “So you can turn humans into zombies? Just like vampires?”

“No, not just like vampires but, yes, I could bite you – right now – and, after you pass out for an hour or so, you’d wake up—”

“Just like you!” he says hopefully.

“Not quite, Roger. You’d be what we call a ‘zombie light,’ kind of like a half-zombie, at least until we got some brains into you.”

He frowns and jokes, “So I guess this means we won’t be hooking up after we put on our little show in the gym after school today?”

“That’s gross,” says Fiona from the other corner of the room before I have the chance to answer him myself.

“Hey,” says Roger defensively, “stranger things have happened.”

“No,” Fiona corrects, “it’s gross that she has to eat brains to stay alive.”

“ ‘She’ has a name,” Roger corrects back, his voice an octave lower, his eyes a shade darker.

“What?” I ask of Fiona, who has her arms crossed over her small chest. “You’ve never eaten a chicken liver? Never eaten a hot dog? Both are full of internal organs and, what’s a brain but an internal organ?”

“Yeah, but… I don’t eat liver raw. You eat like… like… an animal.”

“We’re all animals,” says Tara quietly, inching her chair away from Fiona as if to avoid guilt by association.

I stifle a smile and say, “Listen, Fiona, we can debate brains versus liver and animal versus human and human versus zombie all day long but, trust me, when the vampires come for you, and they will, there will be no debate. Talk about animals! Those jerks are stone cold killers and they will eat you up and suck you dry and not think twice about it. Ever.”

Tara shakes her head, small lips trembling in a big way. “I just, I… can’t believe it. I can’t believe there are really vampires; that there are really… zombies.”

“I’m sorry, Tara,” I tell her, trying on an uncomfortable smile as the stress of the day – about what’s still to come – finally settles on my shoulders like a hoodie made out of granite. “I really am but, vampires and zombies do exist and now that you know about us, well, things have changed. For all of you.”

She opens her mouth to say something, to maybe ask something, and the door opens.

Immediately I tense, flying out of my seat, shoving Roger’s chair clear across the floor so that he and Fiona and Tara will be clustered; all the better to defend your lives, my dears.

Turning I see Ethan at the door, his arms full of food, his face a mask of concern.

Well, concern and something else.

He walks in quickly, shutting the door behind him and tossing the food down almost distastefully on an empty computer workstation.

As Roger quickly divvies it up and starts eating I pull Ethan to the side and say, “Where’s Dana?”

Ethan avoids my eyes and says in a way that manages to sound somewhat judgmental, “We’re not supposed to be seen together, remember?”

I swat away his weak excuse and say, “The cat’s out of the bag, Ethan, in case you hadn’t noticed?”

I use my hand to take in the whole room, as Roger and Tara and, of course Fiona, look back at him with absolutely no surprise in their eyes whatsoever.

“What, you told them?” he asks, stepping back from me, toward the door.

I watch his eyes change, watch them darken, and I know he’s turning the page on me, even as we speak.

That, like Dana, he’s distancing himself from me.

So when the time comes, when the Sentinels interrogate him – and they will – he can say, “It was all her, sir; it was all Lucy’s idea!”

It doesn’t sound like Ethan, at least, not the Ethan I know and could (secretly) love, but right about now it sure looks like the new Ethan; the self-protective Ethan.

So to salvage the situation, to bring it into perspective for him, to try to show him I’m not selling him – or Dana or any of us – out I say, “Ethan, they’re helping us. We’ve got it all planned out, a way to make it so the whole school, the whole town, thinks this was one big joke and make it so the Sentinels—”

“What plan, Lucy? You can’t just plan something without telling Dana and I about it. You can’t just tell civilians about us, trusting them to keep our secret. We’re a team, Lucy, and we work like a team. Your allegiance is to us, always, forever, not… them.”

The way he says “them” it’s like humans are cockroaches; bugs to be squashed under foot.

I’m not the only one who senses it.

Looking around the AV Club I can literally see the faces of these kids change; from high expectations of meeting another new zombie (one like me) to dread, to fear (like they’ve suddenly tuned into a zombie movie on late night TV they can’t turn off).

They’re not alone.

I take a step back, involuntarily, as if a quick blast from a hot furnace has leapt out too far and threatened to singe me.

“I k-k-know, Ethan,” I stammer, unused to this kind of stubbornness, “and… I’m sorry, really but it was an emergency. But if you just listen, if you can just trust me until after school, we’ll have this all fixed. It’s my fault Fiona touched me, it’s my fault she figured it out, that she put two and two together, I just want to make it right.”

Ethan’s eyes are empty; empty of anything we may have ever felt about each other, for each other, with each other.

The friend he’s been, the constant companion, the savior, the buddy, I see all that receding with the grimace that curls across the bottom of his admittedly scary face.

“It’s too late for diplomacy, Lucy; it’s too late for your little human geeks to ‘save the day’ with whatever hare-brained scheme you four have cooked up while you’ve been hiding out here all day—”