Delusions of the Dead Read online

  That’s right, we lived under glass. Our little band of survivors was inoculated with the rabies vaccine as soon as we arrived here, so we no longer feared the Infected or the rain that spread the Parasites. Unfortunately there were many who did not have protection. The rabies vaccine is expensive and difficult to mass manufacture. There was nothing fair about it—its price limited it to the wealthy. There was also a large subset that feared the shot and its side effects so they refused it no matter how much money they had. And why would they have to worry? They only had to keep dry and drink purified water to stay safe. Our new town balanced a glass dome on top of its tall towers so people could cross between work and school and home and cars without fear of rain. And by cars I mean golf carts, because our town was not big enough to need cars. No one wanted exhaust pollution sticking to the ceiling—the dome was difficult to clean as it was.

  Instead of homes we had apartment complexes because that was the only way they could fit a lot of people under one dome. There were a few folks loaded enough to have their own place, but their homes were tiny and their gardens even tinier. Ghost was the only person I knew who invested in one. Most of us wanted to be in apartments anyway. There were so few people alive after last year’s parasitic invasion, most survivors found comfort in huddling up with others so they could work on getting back to normal lives.

  We did a good job of it too. Power stations, Cellphone Towers, and Internet servers were the most protected areas in America. We could still text, Facebook, Instagram, Skype, and Tweet, and we were still burdened with junk on TV. We were slow to develop new versions of social media because we were more focused on survival. But still, fashion was back in fashion and the ladies were back to out-dressing each other. People spent more time at the gym, partially out of boredom, and partially as a reaction to living in a fishbowl and being on display all the time. You wouldn’t do well if you tried to hide from society; the natives got scared you’d been infected somehow and would be breaking down your door to make sure you hadn’t joined the living dead.

  We were back at work, we were back at school, we were back at all those little mundane activities that make up a life, and we were all living under the microscope of small town living. It made me long for the days when it was just my family living under the roof of our old Colonial house. The parasitic-controlled corpses burned it and the rest of our neighborhood down, so there’s no going back now.

  The thing that allowed us to get close to a state of normal was nature’s removal of what used to be our biggest threat: the Infected dead. Their bodies started to fall apart in the spring, and summer heat just made them rot faster. It was like KC and Ghost’s book said it would be; as soon as the temperature went above fifty Fahrenheit, the blowflies would go to work liquefying bodies from the inside out. It was something I chose not to watch; I’d seen enough of the dead at and around the Mclean High School Refugee Center. What I learned came mostly through the morbidly curious on Facebook (I skipped the photos posted of the evidence) or the more gossipy marines that were stationed around the perimeter of our newly manufactured town.

  I heard tales of bloated corpses exploding with one step, spewing their putrefied contents far and wide. I heard of skin falling off the decomposing dead in sheets. I heard tales of bones collapsing within their skin because the rotting tendons could no longer hold them together.

  I could hide from those sights, but I couldn’t hide away from the smell. First came the stench of decaying flesh, then the stink of burning flesh as the soldiers blow-torched any corpse they could find. Most were in a state too far gone to pick up, so when they’d find a body, they’d blast it with a flamethrower and then put it out with an extinguisher before it could set anything else on fire. During the first few weeks of spring, I could see plumes of smoke here, there, and everywhere. In my mind, I imagined the earth pockmarked with charred holes where bodies once lay.

  We seemed to have nothing left to fear from the dead. The fires that were once so frequent died down by late summer. We read stories on the web about the Infected going underground, hiding in caves, or heading north for colder climes in a desperate bid to preserve themselves. Trigger-happy hillbillies and government forces picked off most of them. I don’t care what happened or what the government had to do to them to wipe them out. I just want to live my life without ever seeing a zombie again.

  KC

  “The Dumb Luck Club will come to order, led by me, Nemesis, on account of the fact that I pushed our previous president off the roof.”

  “Whoa, Nemesis, that’s cold. Even for you,” I said. But secretly I wished I could do what she did and just say whatever was on my mind. And it was good to see her, even if it was on a screen instead of in person. I would have liked to have seen all the original survivors from the Mclean High School Refugee Center. We weren’t going to include my little sister Jesse and her friend Sarah, or my mother or Mr. Cromwell because we didn’t want to self-censor our conversation. But it still felt weird to meet as a club without Kaboom or Linus….or Ghost. The thought of Ghost hurt my gut, so I quickly brushed the past aside and set my mind on the present.

  I could see that Nemesis was her usual stylish self. She didn’t look like an eighteen year old in her sharp grey suit and contrasting lacy black camisole; she looked like she was on her way to a corporate takeover of Victoria Secret. I squinted at my screen to see if everyone else looked the same. I know I had changed, so I wanted to see if anyone else had. A quick look told me no.

  There was Doom in the top left box, looking disheveled and small in a sweater two sizes too big for his ninety-eight-pound frame. His shiny black emo-hair was swept over his left eye like a pirate patch. He looked like he was going to start shaking at any moment like one of those accessory dogs with un-spellable names.

  Mouse was right next to him. She and Doom had been adopted by a nice couple after they were rescued. Mouse was wearing an unremarkable don’t-look-at-me t-shirt and jeans combo. Her height and hair color matched Doom’s, but her classic Snow-White good looks prevented her from looking like his sister. She had the same haunted stare she developed in the refugee center, something that most survivors wore in those days. Grief had turned into a spectator sport after The Lost Day, like some sick I-suffer-more-than-you competition, but the kind that Mouse bore was the real thing.

  I glanced over at my brother and thought that he hadn’t changed much either. Then I noticed that, apart from his ironic Mclean High School hoodie and strategically torn jeans, Houston had bulked up. Since when did my brother start lifting weights? Then I followed the line of his sight to Nemesis, and I could see the incentive to his new bodybuilding hobby.

  I looked at my own faint reflection in the screen and wondered if they would notice how different I appeared. Gone were the yoga pants and shapeless T-shirts. Gone were the unisex sneakers. I had turned stylish and steampunk. I didn’t need to dig too deep for my change, I had spent a lot of time in front of a camera promoting Notes From A Necrophobe, and I wanted to look good. It’s not like my reclusive coauthor was going to do it. At first I wore what I was told to by the agents. They surveyed our readers and asked them what they thought I looked like, and their crowdsourcing came back with a Goth version of Indiana Jones. I thought I would hate giving up comfort for fashion, but I liked how the outfits made me feel. Those knee-high leather boots made me powerful instead of helpless and hopeless. My fitted waistcoats made me stand out from the others, like I was someone in charge. And that’s how people looked at me, like I was in control. And why not? I had lived through the unlivable; I looked like a female action hero, and I liked it.

  I didn’t have to wonder for long if anyone had noticed, because Nemesis asked, “Where on earth did you get your outfit? Was there an End of Season Sale at the Marvel Comics store?”

  “No,” I replied with a smirk. “I got it from the End of the World sale at the Chuck Norris Brass Knuckle Boutique. And I had to kill two salespeople just to get to it.”

  “And you call me cold,” she said with a touch of admiration. “Besides, I saw you wear that same outfit on your blog last week.”

  “Nemesis is a stalker!” piped up Doom.

  “I’m not a stalker,” Nemesis said in her snottiest voice. “I’m an amateur sociologist.”

  Mouse cracked a seldom-seen smile at this, so I tried to bring her out of her shell and into the conversation with, “Hey, Mouse, how’s the new parents working out?”

  “Uh, fine. A little over attentive.”

  Doom chimed in, “They’re helicopter parents. But it’s nice to be part of a family again.”

  Mouse sighed. “The only problem is, they keep confusing us with the son and daughter they lost to the RBs.”

  Houston raised an eyebrow at this. “The RBs?”

  “Recycled Bodies. You know, those Parasites that recycled the dead so they can rocket to the top of the food chain. Don’t they use that term at your compound? Sarah’s the one who came up with it in the first place, and she’s your neighbor.” Nemesis seemed surprised at our ignorance.

  “Sarah came up with the term IZs for ‘Intelligent Zombies’. I’ve not heard of RBs yet. I bet you came up with that term,” I said. “You know we’ve got fast food chains up and running again, right? Aren’t you afraid of Arby’s suing you for defamation?”

  Houston didn’t want anyone picking on Nemesis, so he quickly said, “Oh, yeah, now I remember. Sarah also came up with that after we were rescued. The residents of New Arlington do their best not to bring them up. They seem to think that if we don’t think or talk about them, they’ll disappear and they can forget all about the past year.”

  “Is it working?” asked Doom.

  “I don’t agree with it, but yeah, it seems to be working. I hav
en’t seen or smelled one of those things in weeks. But if we forget the last year ever happened, then we’ll forget about all those people we lost.” Houston looked at the ground while the rest of us retreated into our pasts.

  Nemesis was the first to break us out of our collective spell. “Damn, Houston, who invited the Grim Reaper to our conversation?”

  We all smiled slightly at this, but Doom turned us back to his world by asking, “I got a fortune cookie yesterday that didn’t have a fortune in it. Does that mean I have no future?”

  “Doom! Really.” We couldn’t help but roll our eyes. Mouse playfully punched her new brother on the shoulder…lightly. It wouldn’t take much to push him over. Doom earned his name by constantly reminding us that we were all going to die and how many ways we could go about doing it. You couldn’t get upset with him. He was just a product of his environment. Before the invasion, he was homeschooled in conspiracy theories by the ultimate Doomsday Prepper parents.

  “Anyway,” continued Mouse, “I was told that their daughter loved Jell-O and I didn’t want to offend them, so I said I liked it too. They took that to mean, ‘This is my absolute favorite food of all time and if you ever stop making it I will shrivel up and die.’ So they made a big Jell-O bowl for me the next night. I ate it all to be polite. They took that to mean that I didn’t think there was enough, so they made even more the next meal. I swear the portions of Jell-O are getting bigger every night.”

  Doom started laughing at her, so she punched him again. He kept on laughing. “Serves you right. If you spoke your mind like I do, you wouldn’t have this problem.”

  “Yeah, well you won’t be laughing when I die from a fatal overdose of that semisolid stuff.” Mouse said. “And I’ll put it in my will that you were secretly jealous of my Jell-O habit and want a boatload of it at my wake.”

  Doom’s not great on social cues and didn’t get that she was kidding, so he gave her a sour look. Mouse’s attempt at levity didn’t work, because he started in on his usual conspiracy theories. Except that this time, they actually made sense. “I don’t think there will be a lot of people at that funeral once the mass exodus finishes.”

  “The ‘mass exodus’?” I ask.

  “Don’t tell me you haven’t noticed.” I wait for Mouse and Nemesis to tell Doom to shut up and start making sense, but instead they looked back at Houston and I, waiting for our reaction.

  “Do you mean the movement of people from North to South?” asks Houston.

  “Yeah. Have you noticed which kind are moving South and which kind are staying North?” Doom asked. Houston and I looked at each other, not sure of what to say. We did notice a lot of people moving, but the ones that were leaving were the ones we didn’t know because they didn’t go to school with us or hang around us or….oh.

  Doom’s too impatient to wait for our answer. “Oh come on! The ones not protected by Rabies shots have been moving South where it’s too hot for an RB to survive, the RBs have moved North where its cold enough for them to survive, and it’s guys like us who stick it out in the compounds in the middle.”

  “Why haven’t I seen something about this on the Internet?” I think I knew the answer to this before Nemesis gave it:

  “Because the government has been restricting as much information as it can.”

  “Didn’t you hear some of the rumors before the press was gagged?” asked Mouse. “Didn’t you hear about the murders? The mass suicides? The disappearances?”

  “Well,” I said hesitantly, “I did hear a few stories. But the people who told them moved…and I couldn’t find anything in writing to back them up…and everything here seemed fine and…” I quickly ran out of excuses for my willful ignorance. The truth was, I didn’t want to know. I didn’t want to feel worry or concern. I didn’t want to go back to that ever-suspicious person I was at the refugee center. And I was a celebrity, so what did I have to worry about?

  Doom delivered a killer blow to my conscience. “I think if Ghost was here, he’d tell you that you suffer from a reality-resistant strain of bacteria.”

  Tears sprang to my eyes when he said this, and everyone on the link shouted “Doom!” before I waved them away.

  Doom looked apologetic. “KC, I’m sorry. I don’t know why I said that. I haven’t been myself lately.”

  Mouse sucked in her breath as he said this and then growled, “Doom, don’t start…”

  But Doom was off on another tangent and there was no stopping him. “Haven’t you guys felt it too? Ever since we got inoculated I’ve had this buzzing in my head.”

  “What are you talking about?” Houston said. “This better not be another one of your conspiracy theories.”

  “It’s not a theory! I can feel it! It’s there! The colder it gets outside, the stronger I feel it.”

  “You should get checked out,” Nemesis said gently. “You might have a brain tumor…”

  “Are you hearing voices?” Houston asked. I could sense what Houston was thinking: our fragile friend Doom had finally snapped. How could he survive a mass extinction event like the Mclean High School Siege and not the safety of compound life and a loving family?

  “It’s not a brain tumor! And I’m not hearing voices. I’m hearing…feelings. There’s a buzzing in my brain and sometimes it gets so strong it urges me to do things I would never do. Hurt people. For no reason. It really scares me. It makes me want to—”

  And that’s when the screen went blank. We’d been cut off. Houston and I just stood there, frozen in place with one unspoken thought.

  We’d felt that buzzing too.

  JESSE

  At first I believed what people said about us being safe when we first got to our new town. We had a big dome over it so we could walk around outside and the poisonous rain couldn’t get at us. We also had soldiers on watchtowers and walls all around us; not the bad kind who left us to die in the refugee center but the good kind who really wanted to protect us. I felt safe in our apartment with my family all together, I felt safe having a big glass ceiling over my head and I felt safe with my dog Naked by my side, ‘cause she’s a good zombie detector. She’d bark and growl whenever one of those things got close. The only thing she barked and growled at in the first few months here was our black cat Killer. My new friends said that was normal, that dogs and cats weren’t supposed to get along. What they didn’t realize was that Naked and Killer were the best of friends when we were in the refugee center. They even worked together to find Ghost and Dad so they could come rescue us. All I could think of was that Naked needed something to bark and growl at now that there were no more zombies around to hurt us. But all that barking and growling drove Killer outside. Killer didn’t mind this at first since there were lots of people like us who fed him and gave him attention. And I didn’t miss him as much as I thought I would ‘cause he bit me once, and I wasn’t doing nothing to him. KC said not to take it personally; he bit her too, and he even bit Ghost when he leaned in to kiss KC. He was probably jealous. Come to think of it, he bit Dad and Mom and Houston…. Maybe he bit Naked too and that’s why she didn’t like Killer no more.

  Other than that, things were real good. I had my tenth birthday party in the spring and there were loads of new friends there. It didn’t have a theme like my other parties did, but there was cake and balloons and presents and a piñata and music. I’ll never forget how happy I felt that day, not ever. I even liked school! My class wasn’t very big and I got to be with kids my own age like I did before the rain brought the Parasites. I especially liked the dome because after months of being shut up at home and then trapped in a refugee center, I got to run around in the sun. Other people would stay inside when it rained even though the dome was protecting them, but I wasn’t afraid of water no more because I got the rabies shot. If I ever did get rained on or bit by a zombie I would still live. Dorothy and Mr. Cromwell and Sarah got bit when the dead took over the refugee center but they didn’t turn into one of them because they had their jabs, and now I’ve got mine. I’ve got a brand new bike too. The town is super-safe with all the soldiers guarding us, so I got to ride my bike with all the other kids and not worry about a thing.