24
And So It Begins
LATER, AT DANE and Chloe’s trailer, they’re cleaning my wounds and bandaging them and wrapping them tight. It’s not that they hurt, exactly (zombies don’t feel pain, remember); it’s just kind of hard to explain gaping wounds to your teachers and friends the next day in school, you know? “Oh, that? That’s …nothing. I was just shaving my …ears, see …and the razor blade slipped and cut out a big chunk of my throat. What? You’re saying that never happens to you?”
“They got to him, Maddy,” Chloe says. “They bit him, maybe an hour before you got there; that’s about all it takes to turn them.”
I can’t believe it. I can’t believe I can be giving a guy I’ve known for years—years—oatmeal cookies and a smile one minute and the next he’s ready to rip off my head and snack on my brains.
“But then, why was he so nice to me when I first got there? We had a conversation, for Pete’s sake. He even ate some of the cookies I gave him, made a joke—flirted! I mean, one minute he’s Scurvy; the next he’s a …a …Zerker.”
“It’s called the whiteout phase,” Dane explains. “A kind of no-man’s land between being a Normal and skipping being a zombie and then becoming a Zerker. They’ve been bitten, sure, but sometimes they don’t feel it; sometimes they don’t even remember it. So they go on thinking they’re Normal because, well, why wouldn’t they? Meanwhile, inside their body, their heart is slowly shutting down, their lungs are giving out, and the circuits are all switching over to electricity only. It takes about 30, 45 minutes to take effect. Then another 10 or 15 minutes or so to switch into full Zerker mode.”
Chloe adds, “They must have been following you, Maddy. They know you dig the rubbings; that’s where they found you the first time they threatened you, back when this all started and you were merely some Normal they wanted to suck the brains out of. So when they saw the satchel and the pad this afternoon, they knew where you were going. They headed down to the cemetery, bit Scurvy first thing. They knew how long it took you to do the rubbings. They knew Scurvy would turn long before you finished. And, let’s face it, they were right.”
I’m leaning against a counter in their tiny kitchen, my hands trembling, blood on my hands, when Dane says, “You should probably wash up.”
I look down at myself and see why. Gheez, and I drove this way? With blood splatters on my clothes and gore on my hands? What if I’d been stopped by a cop? As the water runs over my hands, turning red to pink and washing the last of Scurvy down the drain, Dane sidles up behind me and says, quietly, almost apologetically, “You did the right thing, you know.”
“I thought only Zerkers killed humans,” I say, looking out the tiny window above the sink into the tiny patch of lawn they call their backyard.
He turns me around forcefully, yet gently. “You were defending yourself, Maddy. And remember, it was Zerkers who turned your friend.”
My hands are dripping onto his shoes. He grabs a nearby dishtowel and gently, very gently, dries them off for me.
“That’s just it,” I say, snatching the rag from his hand and finishing the job myself. “He was my friend. He looked out for me, and you and I both know the only reason they bit him in the first place was because of me. So how do you live with that?”
Dane nods. Then opens his mouth to say something, probably some Dad-like platitude that I’m ready to bust him for the minute it comes out of his mouth, but I guess he thinks twice about it; I’ll give him that much.
I hear a wooden chair scrape against clean linoleum, and Chloe joins us at the sink. This many people, in this tiny kitchen, it’s like wedging three freshmen in a locker.
“If it helps any, Maddy,” Chloe says, “he wasn’t your friend anymore. The minute they bit him, he stopped being Scurvy.”
I nod, glad for once that I can’t cry because it’s not very ladylike blubbering in a tiny kitchen in a green double-wide trailer.
Then she clears her throat and looks at Dane. “We should probably go see about the …body.”