The Aftermath: A YA Zombie Story Read online

pretty sore after all that note taking – and squints at me.

  “How’d YOU get out?” His voice is vaguely accusatory, like he’d rather ask, “Why did you get out?” Or even, “Why didn’t you stay behind and help save about a hundred of your fellow classmates?”

  Or maybe that’s just me, and the questions I’ll be asking myself for, oh, the next 70 or 80 years or so.

  I show him the bandage around my sprained ankle, the scrapes all over my arms. “I dove out the window, just like everyone else who survived…”

  He nods and thanks me, shoving everything off the fold up table and into a messenger bag.

  I look up at him, expecting a smile on his way by, or a handshake or a quick “thank you,” just to be polite or something. Nothing. He walks past my Mom and I without a backward glance.

  “Don’t you want to hear the rest?” I ask, watching him pause in his tracks. Just beyond him, lounging in a kind of temporary cubicle midway down the length of the big truck, are a couple of soldiers.

  I watch them perk up as I raise my voice. But it’s not the volume that has them on high alert, so much as the tone. The deep, scratchy tone that is as cold as my skin. The tone they’ve heard so often today, from so many of the… others.

  Preppy Boy doesn’t notice. Not yet. But he is inching his way back, hurrying now, suddenly all smiles. “What… rest?” he asks, slipping back behind the table, his eyes greedy behind those smudged glasses.

  I look at Mom, eyes still big and shiny, a fresh tissue in her hand. “I can’t…” I turn to the soldiers and say, “Can you… can you get her out of here? I don’t…” I turn back to Mom, reaching over to squeeze her knee. “I don’t want you to hear this part.”

  She looks at me, eyes wise and sad. “Sure, baby,” she says, touching my hand, flinching suddenly at the temperature. “But when you’re through, I’m right outside. We’ll run by the drug store, huh? Get you some cold medicine. I think… I think you’re coming down with something.”

  I nod, gritting my teeth to keep my chin from quivering, fighting back the tears. She seems to sense it, and pauses, clutching her big purse to her big bosom. “And then… when we get home later, we’ll make popcorn and watch something funny, okay?”

  I nod, knowing there will never be a later, I’ll never eat another kernel of popcorn and nothing will seem funny ever again.

  The soldiers are there now, behind her, helping her along, gentle with her, but fast, too. One stays behind as they shuffle her out the door and down the steps. Away from me. Away forever.

  “Sir,” says the last soldier, extending a gloved hand to the reporter. “I think… I think it’s best if you come with me now.”

  “Why?” he looks up at the soldier, a little impatient and a lot clueless. “I’m sitting on the scoop of my life here, pal, so if you…”

  The soldier looks at me, not smiling, but kind of saying, “It’s up to you what I should do with this clown.”

  I nod, growing colder by the moment. Colder… and hungrier.

  “You… you should probably stay, just in case.” I look at the gun in his holster. “And… that should probably be out. I don’t… I don’t know what comes next.”

  He nods, like maybe he forgot all about the holster, and points the gun at me. Or, at least, near me. “I do,” he says, almost comfortingly. “I know what comes next. I’ll be ready.”

  I nod. At least one of us will.

  “What… what’s going on?” asks Preppy Boy, waving to get my attention, like I’m the waitress at some greasy spoon.

  The soldier kicks his chair, scooting it over an inch. Preppy Boy’s cheeks flush red as he looks up at him, snarling quietly. “She’s trying to tell you something,” the soldier barks, gun in his hand. “She doesn’t… she doesn’t have much time. So you should probably listen.”

  That’s when it dawns on him. He turns back to me, pushing his glasses up with a finger on each side and suddenly I think, “Oh, so that’s why they have smudges there.”

  “You mean…” he stammers. “You… you’re a…?”

  “It’s probably better if you don’t say it,” I sigh, feeling slightly hungry. But not too much. After all, I’ve already fed or I wouldn’t be able to sit here, talking to him like this. “I feel guilty enough, after everything I did back in the office.”

  “But… How? I mean, the soldiers, the decontamination, the inspection? How did you make it through all that?”

  I shrug, hearing my hospital scrubs creak. “What looked like a scrape might have been a bite, or two. And that decontamination, well, it only really works if you haven’t fed yet.”

  “Fed?” he asks.

  “You know,” I smile, recalling my first taste. Back there, in the front office. Poor Ms. Bascomb, she tasted so… fresh. “If you haven’t eaten a human brain already.”

  “Then… you have?” He reaches for his tape recorder but I still him with a cold, graying hand on his forearm.

  “There isn’t time for that, anymore,” I say, and he yanks his arm away, quick, like you will from a lit burner on the stove.

  “But how… how can you sit here? Like this? And talk, and think, and… control yourself?”

  I flick my eyes to the soldier, now standing behind Preppy Boy. “You can ask him later, once you’re safe. For now, I just thought, I thought you’d like to know what it’s like, from one of us…”

  He nods, suddenly attentive. I smile.

  “Us?” he asks.

  “You know,” I groan, voice sounding hoarse and cold, even to myself. “One of the living dead…”

  * * * * *

  About the Author

  Rusty Fischer is the author of over a dozen zombie novels, including Zombies Don’t Cry, Zombies Don’t Forgive, The Girl Who Could talk to Zombies and Panty Raid at Zombie High! Visit him at www.zombiesdontblog.blogspot.com to learn more and read tons of FREE zombie stories and poems just like this one!

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