23
Any Grave Will Do

LATER THAT DAY, sketch pad in hand, satchel over my shoulder, feeling desperately in need of a little grave rubbing therapy, I come across Scurvy toiling earnestly at the cemetery gates. He’s pruning some bushes, looking ruddy with his sleeves rolled up and his gardening gloves on.

Blinking against the late afternoon sun, he asks, “What’s got you smiling?”

I shake my head, taking in the strong scent of his clean sweat, his health, his …normality. “I shouldn’t be smiling about anything with the day I’ve had, but sometimes you just gotta laugh to keep from crying, right?”

“Ain’t that the truth?” He says it earnestly, like maybe a guy named Scurvy would know all about it.

I stand there beside him and dig around in my satchel until I find the little freezer Baggie full of oatmeal cookies I made after school and hand them over.

“Ah.” He slips off a glove and digs into them straightaway. “If only I wasn’t married and 11 years older than you and you weren’t the coroner’s daughter,” he says jokingly.

I wave him off over my shoulder and scuttle deeper into the graveyard, leaving behind the sound of Scurvy’s headstone teeth chewing on warm cookies.

I’ve gotten here early because I don’t want to be caught in the cemetery after dark. Not anymore, not with Bones and Dahlia on my case and this whole zombie and Zerker Truce thing resting in the balance. And it makes me feel better to think Scurvy will still be here even after I’m done with my latest grave rubbing. Okay, okay, so maybe I should have told Dane and Chloe about it; maybe I should have let them know where I was going to be, but you know what? I’m already dead. What’s the worst that could happen? I’ll die again?

I try to put the zombies, and especially the Zerkers, out of my mind for a minute. I attempt to forget how much Hazel and Ms. Haskins and pretty much everybody else at school hate my new “lifestyle choice.” Instead, looking for exactly the right grave to rub to forget all my troubles, I think of Stamp. The way his face looked when I told him no, the way it practically fell, like all the life had gone out of him. I’ve never had anyone look at me that way before; chances are I never will again.

I think so hard I find myself in front of a not particularly cool headstone, with no real flourishes or distinguishing characteristics, but I’m so eager to start the process, so anxious to lay down my satchel and fondle my tools, so quick to be calm, that I don’t really care.

I’m too sad to visit any of the girls from our Home Ec class; sadder still now that I know the real reason behind the Curse and how close I came to becoming Victim Number 4. I mean, Dane said the Zerkers liked to stalk their prey, to toy with it awhile and make sure the victim’s brain was in fear overdrive before chowing down.

Is that what they were doing the last few days, tripping me in Home Ec? Following me to the graveyard? Stalking me, putting my brain in a frenzy? I think of Amy and Sally and Missy and what might have been happening to them in the days before they died. Was Bones shadowing them all around town? Was Dahlia giving them the evil eye up until the day they died? I shiver at the thought and try to blink their happy, sad, smiling, or crying faces away, glad I chose to stay far from their graves today.

So I sit at the generic grave. I empty my satchel and take out the brush, and the brushing feels good; so good I clean that headstone like it’s probably never been cleaned before. (No offense to Scurvy, of course.)

Then I rip out a sheet of onionskin, tape it up tight, grab a perfectly new charcoal pencil, and start rubbing, just …rubbing, the sound of black charcoal dust on white paper, the scratch of the onionskin against the stone, the rushing, rushing back and forth and soon I’m in my place; the special place rubbings take me, where no one or nothing can get me—not even in a cemetery.

Scurvy stumbles over when I’m halfway through my rubbing, his shovel dragging business end down in the dirt, stray twigs, and grass. I look at my watch and realize I’ve already been at it for over an hour by now. One blissful hour with no Stamp, no Elders, no Dane or Chloe or Hazel or Goth or preppy or Bones.

“What’s up, Scurv?” I say, happy to see him. Happy, at this point, to see anyone with a pulse.

He shakes his head. “I dunno, Maddy. I don’t feel so hot.”

He’s standing over my gravestone now, looking red in the face but white in the throat, like a candy cane mixture of freezing and hot skin. He drops the shovel and wipes his brow. Some sweat drops on my rubbing, ruining it completely.

“Eewwww, Scurvy. Are you okay? You don’t look so good.”

“Look who’s talking,” he snaps, eyes yellow and angry.

“What?” I say, blinking the sight away.

“What?” he says, almost whispering now, his eyes suddenly back to being kind—and white. “What did I say? Why are you looking at me like that?”

“Scurvy, this isn’t good. You’re insulting me for no good reason. You’re sweating all over my rubbing. You’re standing way too close to me. Seriously, back. Off! You look like you’re having a heart attack or something.”

Scurvy’s eyes go round and wide and all kinds of yellow, his throat and chest doing that crazy candy cane thing again. “Yeah, well you look like that lady on The Addams Family.”

“Scurvy, that’s enough now. Why are you talking to me like that?”

“I don’t know.” He practically whimpers. He looks at me, eyes white again, almost crying now, and whispers, once more, “I just …don’t …know.”

Then he stumbles again, ripping my onionskin etching in half with his big, dirty, size-12 work boot. The tape holds the onionskin together at the top and sides, but still. Then I see the gash in Scurvy’s neck, right below the collar, bright red and full of pus, bulging, almost throbbing like a cocoon getting ready to spurt out some strange new life form. When he straightens himself, the collar moves again and I see more clearly now; I see it’s a bite mark, and I know. I know that Bones, or Dahlia, or maybe even Bones and Dahlia got to him.

And here I am, alone in the graveyard. No Dane or Chloe to save me this time. How could I have been so stupid? I back away toward his shovel, making sure it’s close enough—just in case. Scurvy looks at me funny, like maybe he’s seeing me for the first time, and now his skin is no longer red, or sweaty or, for that matter, Scurvy’s.

Scurvy is gone; now something hard and gray and leathery and mean is standing there in his place. Yellow eyes burn above licking lips and he looks at me like I’m dinner. Or maybe dessert.

“What are you doing in my graveyard?” His voice is gravelly and strange and no longer Scurvy’s. He is big and muscular anyway, and now he knows no sense of personal space. He keeps inching forward, leaning in, and then stumbling back, so that with every woozy, boozy movement he creeps closer.

And the closer he gets, the more I can see the emptiness that is Scurvy. The folksy 28-year-old I’ve been bribing with apples and oatmeal and peanut butter cookies for the last 3 years is now a brain-thirsty zombie; a Zerker, wanting one thing and one thing only: yes, the dreaded brains. But not just any brains; my brains. By now his arms are already knotty and tense, jerky and slow. His face is pale, dried out, no longer alert; no longer smiling.

Suddenly, those yellow eyes light up and he looks at my head like it’s a piñata. “Brains,” my friend the gravedigger says. Friend …human …no more. “Me …eat …Maddy’s …brains.”

I lean down, grab the shovel, and he lunges at me, barely missing my flesh with his teeth but clawing at my arm just the same with his rock-hard fingernails. I hear the tearing of my new black hoodie and feel his nails break my skin; they’re like claws.

One of his fingers, maybe a thumb, gets stuck in my hoodie, and down we go. He is like two tons of bricks in a pair of jeans, and I hear a whoosh seep out of my mouth. His arms are flailing, his yellow, gnarly, bent teeth chomping against each other—clack, clackety, clack—as he tries to find purchase in my skin.

The shovel went somewhere; as I slam one fist into his head and both knees into his crotch, I use the other hand to root around in the grass. I finally grab hold of the wooden end and yank it around for all it’s worth.

I lash out with the shovel, hearing a thick clank against his knee as he goes down—again. And still he’s coming, scrambling to follow me as I jump up. Bum knee or not, he’s like a runaway train, so I clank the shovel into his shoulder, watching blood spurt out of a fresh wound, but still he comes.

It’s like he’s not even feeling it.

He’s on all fours now, broken, bent, and still I whap him with the shovel, and still he murmurs, groans, shouts, screams, “Eat brains! Brains, eat!”

“Scurvy,” I’m shouting. “Scurvy, stop!”

“Brains!”

I scream and close my eyes and slice the shovel into the wind, and I don’t hear him coming anymore, don’t hear him moving or shouting or anything much at all until …something …rolls against my feet. Then I look and see Scurvy’s head lying there, between my bloody new army boots, and then I hear it all right: the screams—the screams.

My screams.