Notes from a Necrophobe Read online

  RENEE

  I settle back in my seat and relax a bit when I see that all that’s left of Catherine is a puddle of bleach. Well, that and the bits of her still stuck to the undercarriage of my car. I can’t believe I was stupid enough to venture out as if the invasion never happened. As far as I can tell, no one else is foolish enough to leave the safety of their home, especially not to pay a casual friend a visit. I did everything those government infomercials warned me not to do.

  “I’m still learning,” I tell myself. I think back to the last time I left home. The Internet and phone lines were down so we couldn’t order more food. I was looking for an excuse to get away, and the kids wanted something more than the MREs the government sporadically drops off. I had a minivan, a misplaced sense of optimism, and a desperate need to get out of the house and do something normal for a change, so I did the most normal thing I could think of: I went shopping.

  I suppose leaving the kids home alone in a post-apocalyptic world meant I finally earned that elusive “Worst Mother of the Year” award, but my consuming need to be free seemed to override all thoughts to the contrary. I’m a more practical than panicked type of person. I would have taken the kids with me if I thought they would have had a better chance in the car than at home, but I knew better. Before I left I drummed it into the kids’ heads how they could survive on their own. I knew they would be safe as long as they stayed behind locked doors and windows with Naked standing guard, and I felt I would be safe as long as I stayed in the car ahead of any roving packs of Infected. I wouldn’t have to worry about the Infected for long anyway because I’d be protected as soon as I passed through the fortified gates at Giant’s Grocery with their sniper-patrolled extra-thick walls.

  I could actually feel myself relax on the drive over. The mind can invent some great delusions when it wants to, except my daydreams no longer consisted of trips to exotic places or swimming with sharks. My daydreams contained snippets of life before the dead walked the streets: going to the library to work on my book, meeting friends for brunch, walking the dog along the Potomac, going to parties or dinners or concerts with my husband, and lots and lots of shopping. I drove along pretending that I was on one of my fun shopping trips. I could keep up that illusion as long as I ignored the new barbed wire fences around the McMansions or the once-groomed gardens now covered in weeds, or the military fortifications that had sprung up where the cutesy boutiques and cafés once stood.

  I felt a need to block out the tall sturdy gates and manned towers as I approached Giant’s Grocery, but whether I liked it or not, I still had to pass through all that security just to get to the parking lot. I could block out all of these unwelcome changes to our new life because once inside the store, things were similar to the old life. It was so much easier to pretend here, where things were pretty much the same. Well, mostly the same, apart from the extra aisles carrying nonperishable food, half the store being dedicated to bottled water, the absence of shoppers, and the guns. That’s right, my local supermarket sells weapons. That’s not normal. Even less normal was me buying one.

  I headed back home feeling smug and satisfied, like I used to when all the laundry and ironing was done and the house was clean. I carried on feeling smug and satisfied as I drove well ahead of any wandering Infected that hadn’t been picked off by the gunfire. I held my breath, however, as I entered the area not covered by snipers—the Dead Zone.

  This drive home felt different from the drive to the store. The sense that something dangerous was close kept my daydreams at bay and made me extra-aware of what was going on around me. Good thing too, because soon I could hear them, then I could smell them, and then I could see them emerge from the woods at the sound of my minivan chugging its way down the street. One of the asinine thoughts that cover up the rational ones popped uninvited into my head: I should have bought a quiet little Toyota Prius! If they had made their slogan “Too silent to wake the dead” I might have bought one before this all went down.

  My stomach turned cold when I felt a hand brush against the trunk, but I was too fast for it to gain any traction. I turned around to see if it was anyone I knew. I looked back a little too long.

  There were teenagers gathered like bowling pins in the street, and I struck them straight on. Most of them seemed to either fly away or slip under the wheels of the minivan. One of them went right up onto my hood, splatting pus and ooze and black blood all over the front of the car. I didn’t even think about what to do. I just reacted. First I sped up, and then I braked hard in an attempt to get rid of my horrific hood ornament. I peeled out of the zombie jamboree, my heart racing, my limbs trembling the whole drive back. I found myself fighting the rising tide of nausea at the thought of hitting a bunch of kids. I wished I had one of those airline sick bags on me because I didn’t dare risk stopping the car and opening a window to throw up. I could hardly wait to get home so I could afford to lose it.

  I could see the kids’ heads appear in the top bedroom window as soon as I pulled into our driveway. They were making a broad sweep over the front lawn and street with their eyes, making sure there was nothing waiting for a chance to shamble into our garage. Their faces registered their surprise at the sploge left behind by the hood-splat corpse, but their shock was quickly replaced with the relief of me making it home. Their thumbs up told me I was clear to hit the button and pull into the garage. I carefully parked inside and exhaled in relief as the garage door closed behind me. I reached for the handle to my door, ready to fling it open and retch all over the floor.

  But just as I touched the handle, I heard it: The sound of something fleshy scrapping against metal. I froze. I must have dragged one of those things home under my car! I was alone in the garage with one of the undead…but not for long.

  I could feel the shaking of the walls and hear the rumbling on the stairs as the kids thundered their way down to see all the goodies I brought home. I rolled the window down two inches and screamed myself raw “Don’t open the door! Don’t open the door! Do not open that door!” I shouted my warning over and over again, hoping and praying that they heard me before it was too late.

  The door opened. The door slammed shut. Muffled crying and frantic barking could be heard on the other side. Now it was just me and the ghoul. I rolled the window back up just as it finished dragging itself out from under the car. It pulled itself up by the wing mirror and pressed its squishy face against my window, probing for an open space with its swollen fingers. I dived into the back seat, tearing open bags looking for what felt like my best friend in the world right now. Once I found it, I wasted no time in loading it. I rolled the window back down an inch, shoved the barrel into the gap, turned my face away, and fired.

  With trembling hands I called Homeland Security. My headless companion was ready for pickup.

  HOUSTON

  I’m glad KC got out. Things are so much quieter when she’s not here to fight with Jesse. I’m worried about them, but that doesn’t mean I don’t appreciate the calm. I feel weird even saying that to myself, because life in general is so much quieter than it was before. This time last year I would have been pushed out of my comfort zone into the violently overcrowded hallways of Mclean High school. Today those hallways are still crowded, but now it’s with refugees. Its halls are crammed with those who’ve lost their homes to fire, infestation, or were just too vulnerable to live in. These were the people rescued by tanks and army helicopters. I remember seeing the skies filled with them in the early days and I saw quite a few of them headed in the direction of my old high school.

  KC’s a social butterfly, into her parties and her friends and misses her old life like crazy. I’m cool with our current situation. I’m also cool with being home schooled. I don’t miss the teachers whose expressions I could never read. I don’t miss trying to look people in the eye and failing again and again. I don’t miss trying to get through the day without being noticed.

  I now have an excuse for not having a memorable seventeenth
birthday party because nobody’s having birthday parties anymore. My birthday would have been crap even without the Invasion. A lot of my friends went with the last girl I broke up with, so I wouldn’t have been able to scratch together enough guys to hang out with at a concert or a movie and I would have had to make excuses for why my birthday was so lame. So what? Nobody’s having fun now.

  My mom used to be pretty laid back before the Invasion. She said KC and I were precocious and took care of ourselves and that Jesse was her only childlike child. She just kind of left me and KC to get on with things because we did well enough in school without her help. Now that we’re homeschooled, she’s turned into a Tiger Mom. She says she wants us to be in the top of the leagues when life gets back to normal so we can get accepted into some heavily-fortified ivy-league school, but I think it has more to do with her having nothing else to do. I turn back to my computer to see if I can get something accomplished so she won’t pitch a fit when she gets back. That’s the only uncool thing about high school online; Mom can see everything, especially what I haven’t done.

  When we were first attacked we stayed home like everyone else. Mom tried to shelter us against what was going on, thinking that this would blow over and our childhood would be spared. She treated the first few weeks like a snow day that soon morphed into a snow week and then a snow month. KC and Jesse wanted to go back to school and friends so badly they chose to believe Mom when she said, “Just hold on—I’m sure it will be safe to go out soon.” Well I know anxiety well enough to sense it in someone’s voice. And even though I can’t read an expression, I can see fear when it hides behind someone’s eyes. In my mom’s eyes that fear is omnipresent.

  So after about a month of us sheltering at home, the government decided that it may never be safe for anyone to venture out again and turned the whole country on to online learning. It left the field wide open for cheating, but it was better than nothing. And it wasn’t just school that went completely online. You could get what you wanted on the Internet before the war, but soon it became the only way to get anything. Malls and supermarkets basically turned into Amazon-style warehouses, transferring their storefront bling into multi-media advertising and armored delivery vehicles. So shopping carries on despite a few casualties. In my ex-girlfriend’s opinion, the biggest casualty is fashion. She goes on and on about it in her Facebook posts and on her blog. “Why not just let yourself go? Who cares what you are wearing when nobody’s around to see you? Who’s going to know that you’ve been in the same sweatpants for a week if you don’t leave your home in the first place?” Reading this makes me feel like I’ve dodged a bullet. It makes me glad we broke up.

  Mom’s not worried about fashion; she’s worried that everyone’s going to get out of shape. All outdoor activities are suspended, health clubs are also filled with refugees, and nobody can tell how fat you are getting when you’re behind closed doors. It’s a toxic combination for the nation’s health. We have TV, we have our food delivered and we’re depressed. The government requires each channel to have a daily “fitness hour,” but I doubt anyone but my mom is following it.

  Mom’s taking longer than I thought she would. Has she decided to stay and chat with Gemma’s mom? I pick a few tunes on the guitar to get my mind off of them being gone, but it doesn’t help. Going back to my assignments doesn’t help either, so I do what I do when I can’t concentrate on school: I turn to Facebook. I don’t mind socializing as long as it’s online. I used to use apps like Snapchat or Tumblr or Instagram or sometimes even Formspring. The government does what it can to keep the Internet going, but for some reason the only social apps that work these days are Facebook and Twitter, and I almost never go on Twitter.

  Even though Facebook still works, it’s nothing like it was before everything went to hell. Dad used to lecture that things like Facebook and Instagram and Twitter were places where “people stopped living life trying to prove to others they’re doing so.” Or he’d say, “Social media is where people go to be socially competitive.” Not anymore. These days Facebook is a place you go to find the living among the dead.

  I go through the same ritual I go through every day: I trawl through the friends whose pages have no activity. I try to ignore what it means when a friend’s account has been inactive, and I keep poking them like you’d poke a dead bird on the sidewalk with a stick. Nope, still nothing new on Anne or Braden or John or Erika or Mary’s sites. The past few weeks have been worrying because more and more of my friends’ accounts have been winking out. All I can do is hope they are in a refugee center and not dead. It’s a feeble thought, because a lot of my friends are scattered between different refugee centers, and they have Internet time slots allotted so they can keep in touch with friends and family. Yesterday I even got a warning from Ben; he’s in the Mclean Staybridge Suits Refugee Center, and he said I should stuff some valuables like candy and Nintendo DSi games in my split kit (as in “Take your kit and split!” which sounds much better than the CDC’s “seventy-two-hour kit” or “bug-out bags”) to trade for other contraband in case I ever end up in a refugee center. I wasn’t even aware people had Nintendo DSs anymore.

  Unfortunately, Ben has real school; there are too many people and too few computers in a refugee center to make online school possible. The teachers are barely qualified, but you work with what you’ve got because the government has had little luck hiring anyone willing to live in a place where you can’t get away from your students.

  I find my thoughts drifting back to Mclean High School. For some reason I start wondering what’s happened to the Rock. Nobody knows where the Rock came from, everyone assumes it’s always been there and they just decided to build the school around it. It’s a local landmark and sits on the grass island that forms a circle in front of the Kiss-‘N-Ride entrance of the school. The cool thing about the rock, other than the fact that it’s as big as a shed, is that it gets painted every week. I used to think it was the seniors that did it, but my friends told me that you had to earn the right to paint it, so different clubs and groups decorated it. For example, when the tennis team won a tournament they painted it luminous yellow—the same color of their tennis balls. When the soccer team won a hard match against our main rival, Langley, they covered it in black-and-white hexagons to make it look like a soccer ball, tho’ all they did was make it look deflated and misshapen. When the cheerleaders scored a trophy they painted it white and covered it in their names, scrawling them with big bubble letters in a bid to outdo each other and claim all the attention. When no one won anything, they let the glee club paint it. They always made it look like a rainbow had thrown up all over it.

  So who’s painting it now? I heard that the grounds have been cleared all around the school and that huge guarded barricades now surround it, which means as long as it’s not raining, people can still go out and paint it. But do the refugees know the rules of the Rock? Do they realize they have to earn the right to paint it, or do the guards just let anybody scribble graffiti on it? And what would one do these days to earn the right to paint the Rock? Does the honor go to the one who saved the most people? To the one who has the best-packed split kit? The best escape story? The Zombie-Kill-Of-The-Week? Or do they let the person with the biggest loss paint out their sorrows like some creepy consolation prize? “Sorry about your family…but here you go, you’ve earned the right to paint the Rock.”

  My phone buzzes. The hourly “We’re okay,” text my mother sends whenever she has to go out has come through. I let out the breath I didn’t realize I’d been holding, but catch it again when I hear the Bring-Out-Your-Dead Pickup Truck whoosh its way up our street. Who is it for this time? It hasn’t been to our neighborhood in weeks.

  It’s going in the direction my mother just went.

  JESSE

  I hear the Pickup Truck, going up our street. I’m not supposed to look out the windows, but I’ve been so booooored for so long…hours and hours and days and weeks. It’s cool to see anything new, eve
n if it is just a government cleanup crew.

  They think I’m too dumb to know what’s going on just ‘cause I’m nine. They don’t know that I can sneak so so so quietly downstairs and not make any floorboards creak, not even once, and breathe real quiet and watch TV with them from the stairs. I used to do this to watch their movies they said were too grownup for me. I mean, so what? Whatever. They almost always turned out to be either too boring or…okay, never mind, some of those movies were way scary. Now I sneak downstairs to watch the news so I can find out why I can’t go to school anymore or go outside. I used to be able to watch TV when everything went bad ‘cause my mom seemed too shocked at what was on it to care who was watching. She also didn’t want me out of her sight. But it didn’t take long before she realized that what was on the news was scarier than any monster flick out there and that I should be out of the room whenever they had it on. I think that just makes things worse, ‘cause all this not-knowing leaves me worried and confused about what’s going on.

  All I know is that I should be throwing water balloons with Regina and Amman, or I should be riding my bike around, or I should be playing capture the flag with the kids on our street, or I should be burying KC’s shoes in the yard and blaming it on the dog. But instead, I’m stuck inside because of the parasites. Mom said if I go out, one of the Infected would bite me and I’d get sick right away and there was nothing they could do about it. I’d just die. And even though I would die, my body would come back…just my body. My mind and my soul would shoot up to Heaven, but my body would keep making people on Earth sick, maybe even my own family.