Zombie Next Year: A YA New Year’s Eve Story Read online

Zombie Next Year:

  A YA New Year’s Eve Story

  By Rusty Fischer, author of Zombies Don’t Cry

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  Zombie Next Year

  Rusty Fischer

  Copyright 2013 by Rusty Fischer

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  This is a work of fiction. All of the names, characters, places and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or, if real, are used fictitiously.

  Cover credit: © katalinks – Fotolia.com

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  Author’s Note:

  The following is a FREE short story edited by the author himself. If you see any glaring mistakes, I apologize and hope you don’t take it out on my poor characters, who had nothing to do with their author’s bad grammar!

  Happy reading… and happy holidays!

  Enjoy!

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  Zombie Next Year:

  A YA New Year’s Eve Story

  The band is still playing. I can’t tell if they’re being romantic, crazy, sentimental or just plain stupid. It’s like those guys who kept playing on the deck of the Titanic as it was sinking.

  I mean, what the hell were they thinking?

  The TV monitors were already on when the outbreak started. They’d brought them into the gym special, just so we could watch the ball drop from the top of the local bank. Now all they keep showing are the zombies everywhere.

  Every.

  Where.

  All.

  Over.

  The.

  Place.

  They tore through the marketplace where everybody was waiting to watch the ball drop. They tore through the shops and stores, still open late selling champagne and flowers and confetti and horn blowers to all the last minute shoppers. They tore along the banks of the river, where folks were settling in for the big fireworks show at midnight. They tore through the streets and the houses and the garages and the sheds, pulling drivers out of cars and breaking down doors and climbing through shattered windows and doing what… they… do.

  Now they can’t wait to tear through the rest of us. The last of us.

  The last of the living…

  The helicopters hover overhead as they film our school gym, which is pretty much live on every station at this point. And not just local, anymore, either. GNN has picked it up. And MSGBC. The other networks, too, all over the country, probably the world by now, as the zombies crowd outside the doors.

  Outside our doors. Just across the gym floor.

  They’ve swarmed through everyplace else in town, so we’re the only live meat left in all of little Nightshade, North Carolina. Outside of town, the army has crawled in, blocking off roads and mowing the zombies down with their special new zombie guns.

  But here, in the middle of town, we’re pretty much the only walking brains left around. And they all know it. Every last zombie must be out there, trying to get in.

  To get US.

  I can see them now, up on the TV monitors, staring over Phil’s shoulder as the music plays; there aren’t just hundreds of them anymore, there are thousands. They’re backed up for blocks, all bottlenecked at the gym doors, like they know we’re inside.

  It’s like those lines that form just before Value Mart opens up at 4 AM for Black Friday shoppers. It stretches, and stretches, thick and moving, as one, as they shuffle and mumble, arms outstretched.

  There’s no getting past them anymore, that much is clear. There’s nowhere to go, now that we’re locked in. And nowhere to hide once they get inside. And they will get inside, no doubt. It’s just a matter of time.

  Which means we’re cooked, every last one of us still inside the gym.

  And we’re probably the only people left alive in Nightshade, which is sad, because… that’s just temporary. As soon as those chains break, as soon as the first zombie gets inside, or maybe the second or the third, that’s it, we’re done.

  Every last one of us.

  Life as we know it will be over. And the Afterlife will begin.

  There are only a few dozen of us left in the gym by now. When the principal stopped the band from playing “Auld Lang Syne” to announce the latest outbreak, most everyone split.

  Including Chad Chalmers, my date for the night.

  Phil Brody could have split with them, but he waited for me to come out of the bathroom. Why, I have no idea. I mean, we hardly know each other. He’s a senior on the debate team and I’m a junior trombonist for the marching band.

  But there he was, standing just outside the girls room, a bottle of champagne in his hand.

  “I’ve got good news and bad news,” he’d said, voice a little shaky as he tried to be brave. “Which do you want to hear first?”

  “Bad news?” I frowned, still looking around for Chad.

  “Okay, well… the bad news is, the gym is completely surrounded by zombies and both our dates deserted us.”

  I hadn’t believed him then, about either piece of bad news, but then he showed me the TVs. And when I scanned the gym, sure enough, Chad was gone.

  So was Phil’s date for the evening, Sasha Leone.

  “And the good news?” Suddenly I was the one trying to sound brave.

  He handed me a bottle of champagne. “More bubbly for us!”

  By then everyone who was going to get out already had, and the rest had decided to stay behind, chaining the doors shut and locking them tight. The band, who was all older, broke out a case of champagne they’d been storing backstage for their own personal use come midnight. And we’d been downing them ever since.

  That was over an hour ago, and the band is still playing.

  “Auld lang syne.”

  Over and over and over again.

  Only, since this is probably the last night they’ll ever get the chance to play it, they keep switching it up on us. Fast. Slow. Jazzy. Reggae style. Bossa nova, whatever.

  Right now they’re doing a long, slow country version and, for my money, it’s the best so far.

  Phil has a bottle of champagne in one hand, and we keep passing it back and forth. We’re not so much dancing as kind of just rocking from side to side, really close to each other, face to face, keeping one eye on the TV monitors all over the gym, and the other on the gym doors.

  They keep bulging in, and you can hear them out there, the zombies I mean, growling, hungry, ugly, mean and fierce. You can smell them, too, rotting and bloody, like a Dempsey dumpster full of wet copper.

  “I always thought I’d be freaking out if I wound up in one of these situations,” Phil says, a little glassy eyed from the bubbly. His red hair is cut short for the occasion, and he looks nice – if a little ironic – in his baggy blue tuxedo.

  “What, dancing with a total stranger during a zombie outbreak?”

  He smiles, less glassy eyed now, more intense as he dances a little closer. “You’re not a total stranger,” he says, putting the champagne bottle down on the table next to us. “I mean, we had detention together that one time.”

  I chuckle. He’s just a smidge shorter than me, so I can put my arms over his shoulders and get real close, which I’ve always wanted to do.

  I mean, not in real life, and not necessarily with Phil, just in general. I’ve seen girls do it in movies and it always looked cool. In real life, it’s even cooler.

  “And we were in the science fair that one time,” I remind him.

  His face crumples a little, eyes narrowing suspiciously. “You… you were in the Science Fair?”

  I snort. “Hell no, but they made us walk through it during science class, so… technically we were in t
he same place together during the Science Fair, which totally counts…”

  My voice trails off and, behind us, the gym doors rattle, the zombie noises getting louder, the door bulging, bulging, until I look away.

  Phil looks over my shoulder at them and a little more color drains from his face. Then he turns back to me. “Whatever happens,” he says, “I’m glad… I’m glad we’re spending our last night on earth together.”

  I shake my head. “Why? I mean… why did you wait for me like that? Why not run off with your date and MY date and the rest of them?”

  He looks at the door, the chains clanging, the zombies groaning. “For one, I was scared of going out there…” We chuckle, because… no duh. Then he looks back to me and says, “For another, I figured this would be the last chance I ever got to tell you how I feel about you.”

  I blink a couple of times, because… what else can I do? “I didn’t… I didn’t even know you knew me, Phil.”

  “I know you,” he said. “I just, if you’re dating a guy like Chad Chalmers, I didn’t think you’d want to know a dude like me.”

  “Me?” I chuckle, taking one arm off his shoulder to reach for some more champagne. “How about you and Sasha What’s Her