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  Garrett Evans, the school thug, looking even more thuggish now with his haunted eyes and sunken cheeks and wary, angry expression as he paces, back and forth, in the corner of the cage.

  Angela Chase, that smartass Goth from the wrong side of the tracks.

  They all linger now, hollow-eyed and hungry behind the cage bars, watching anxiously as I wipe brain juice from my scruffy chin.

  The guards are circling in around me now, eager to control me, to corral me, with their cattle prods. The ones with the electrified ends. They use them to keep us in line, but they only need to use them once. One shock with that thing, and I’ll go where they tell me from here to eternity.

  Creed waves them off before they guide me back into my cage and says, “Conner, I think it’s time you come with me.”

  I look at his soiled lab coat and vague expression and ask, “W-w-what? Why?”

  Usually we just go back to our cages and, once the Fugs and the Thugs are gone, they let us out so we can go back to our rooms, which are really just these cubicle areas with sleeping bags and build-them-yourself bookshelves.

  “It’s time, Conner.”

  I’m following him past the other cages, careful to avoid the arms of the Thugs as they reach out with their ragged claws and empty eyes. But even so, they don’t reach eagerly, as if I might turn my half-zombie rage on them and tear an arm off and yank it through the bars. As I pass, I flick a glance at the Drugs cage, noticing how the other half-humans have inched toward my side to watch me go.

  I know they don’t care, per se. It’s not exactly as we were friends before the infestation, and we haven’t exactly gotten chummy since being caged together for the last few weeks. No, they want to know what happens to me so they can figure out what’s going to happen to them.

  Creed is thick and stocky in his lab coat, which is a size too small to begin with. His sneakers, too white, squeak on the cold, cement floor of the warehouse. We walk through the double doors and, instead of turning left toward the old storage area where our cubicles are, turn right toward a suite of cheap, plywood office doors I’ve never seen before.

  Creed opens one and beckons me inside. Before I follow him in, I turn to watch half a dozen guards station themselves outside the door. Figures. Even with a stun gun in each pocket and a walkie-talkie on his belt, Dr. Creed never has liked being alone with any of us.

  The space is a conference room of some sorts, with cheap panel walls and a long, oval table in the middle of the room. Near as I can tell, this was some kind of sporting goods factory, once upon a time. Before sitting down, Creed walks toward a camera in the corner of the room and fiddles with it until a red light glows over the eye piece and he’s sure it’s centered on me.

  Then he sits down across from the chair I’ve chosen.

  Creed is in his fifties, fat and balding, but solid, like maybe he could do some damage if he had to. I never thought of things that way before, but ever since catching the Z-disease, I think of everything that way. Could he kill me? Could I kill him?

  His face is always red, or at least reddish, and it’s even more so now.

  “What’s that for?” I ask, nodding toward the camera while trying not to stare at the stun gun he’s plopped on the table in front of him.

  “The government wants me to tape this,” he sighs, fixing his thinning hair.

  “What government? Wants to tape what? Why?” I grunt, vocal chords dying even as I waste a few of my last heartbeats getting ticked off at Creed and his stupid antics.

  “This is their study, Conner,” he says breathlessly, as if he’s just happy to be a part of something bigger than himself. “They want proof that it’s working.”

  I inch forward and pound my fist on the table. Big as it is, it’s cheap and flimsy, like the room, like the warehouse, like the paneling on the walls, like Creed’s cardboard-stiff lab coat.

  “That. What’s. Working?” I grunt, announcing every word with a thrash of my yellowing teeth and another pound on the table.

  Subtly, achingly slowly, the stun gun vibrates a little closer to me with each fist pound.

  “That Project Z is working, of course,” he says, eyeing me intently. So intently even I forget about the stun gun for a blip.

  Before I can ask, he leans back in his desk chair and says, with satisfaction, “Let me break it down for you, kid. That infestation a few weeks back? Never happened.”

  His words freeze in mid-air so it’s almost like I can watch them fall and crash my world. He extends the pause by picking something from his teeth.

  Uncomfortably, I let my mind flicker back to that first day. I remember sitting in Chorus, the mood electric as the monitor at the front of the room flickered to life and scenes of the infestation filled the screen. We all watched, aware that the time for morning announcements was long over. The screen seemed blood-drenched, or at least the streets did. Empty-eyed monsters lurched ever forward, chewing on our neighbors’ limbs. Then an image of the news announcer, screaming, as zombies ate him in front of our eyes.

  The teacher, cutting it off instantly, corralled us all into the gym. Names were called one after the other over the loudspeakers as kids left and never came back. Not alphabetically, but constantly, until only a dozen or so of us remained.

  A van came for us then. It was big and gray. The school nurse said one word, “Containment,” as if that explained everything. As if we needed to be contained. But I felt good or, at least, regular. Like I always felt.

  I looked around the motley crew and wondered, “Why us?”

  But I couldn’t wonder long. The van came, men in white coats, Dr. Creed out in front, big and burly and snapping that stun gun. They bundled us up in the back and the minute stupid Chip Wailing asked where we were going, out come the hypodermic needles. We all got stuck and that’s the last thing I remember. Until I woke up here.

  “B-b-but I saw it,” I stammer, inching forward in my chair just a smidge. “I watched it happen, on TV that morning. We all did, and then…and then….”

  Creed smiles as the possibilities, the alternate realities, continue to wash over me in waves. “And then what, Conner?”

  He’s leaning back so far in his chair now, he’s so satisfied with himself, the stun gun is closer to me than it is to him. I want it, badly. Want to stun the life out of him, if that’s even possible—and surely it is.

  But my need to know the truth, at least for now, is suddenly stronger than my need to kill.

  “The infestation? You said, you s-s-said, you told us it killed everybody, wiped out the whole town of Faraway Falls. That we were the only survivors….”

  As I’m talking, he reaches over and grabs a blue plastic binder off the bookshelf behind him. It’s thick and even in the briefest of moments before he opens it, I can see these words printed in white on the front cover: PROJECT Z. Highest Clearance. Instructor Protocol for Handling Unruly Participants.

  “It was all in the script, Conner,” he says, grinning, shaking his head, caressing the pages of the big, fat notebook fondly as if perhaps he’d written was what printed there himself. “We tell you the whole town is infested, get you here for a few weeks, isolate you, feed you nothing and let you out of the cages with a couple of homeless bums, then see what happens.”

  My stomach feels warm, warmer than it has in weeks. My head spins, bile rising in my throat as blood, maybe even the last of it, pounds in my ears. I swallow back the warm juices in my throat, literally, just so I can hear what comes out of his mouth next.

  Creed looks past me, either not seeing or just ignoring the sweat that’s popped out on my forehead, the gurgling in my throat, the green pallor of my waxy skin.

  “The funny thing is,” he goes on, clueless, “when they told me what had happened in past studies, in other towns where they’d tried out Project Z, I called BS on the whole thing. ‘No way,’ I said. ‘No way are you going to get young, sane, red-blooded American kids to eat each other just because you tell them they’re zo
mbies.’”

  He looks at me, disgust slathered all over his fat, red face. “Guess the joke’s on me, huh, Conner?”

  “But the drugs,” I croak. “The injections twice a day?”

  “Placebos, Conner. Sugar-water mixed with some antidepressants to slow your blood pressure and a healthy dose of diuretics to shed water weight. How else do you think you lose twenty pounds in a couple of weeks?”

  “The teachers,” I sputter, bile sour on my lips, blood pounding between my ears. “Our teachers, t-t-they showed us the video, the zombies, the—”

  “We told them it was a drill, Conner. Ever since that outbreak over in Gallup Gorge, folks see zombies around every corner. We had them do the drill, load everyone in the cafeteria, called them back to their classes and that was that. Drill over.”

  “But there were seven, eight of us in that van that first day? You can’t just…just…kidnap eight kids and expect nobody to notice?”

  “You weren’t just any old kids, Conner,” he sneers. “Look at who we selected. You, with your dad drunk every night in the trailer park. You think, with his criminal record, he’s going to go running to the cops the first night you don’t come home? And it wasn’t the first night, was it, Conner? You’re looking at nearly sixteen absences this year alone, three suspensions. He probably just figures you’re staying with a friend until the semester’s over.”

  Well, he’s got a point there. Fingers and thumbs would have to start showing up in our mailbox for Dad to think something was wrong. That is, if he’s checked the mail in the last two weeks.

  “But those other kids?” I wail. “Chip Wailing? Garrett and Angela? They’ve got folks, right? You can’t just—”

  “Chip lives with his single mom and five other kids, who all have files with the local cops an inch thick. Chip does, too. We arranged for an officer to stop by and inform Chip’s mom he’d be spending the remainder of the semester in juvie. She didn’t look too surprised. Garrett and Angela are both orphans who stay over at the Meriwether Home for Wayward Boys and Girls. Nobody’s come looking for them and, chances are, no one ever will. And by the time they do, well, Project Z will be over and no one will ever find them. Face it, kid. The government knows what it’s doing. This ain’t the first time they’ve tried out this little experiment. I hear it won’t be the last.”

  I look from Creed to the camera. The red light is staring back at me, unblinking. By the time I turn back to Creed, he’s taken the stun gun off the table. I groan and slump in my chair.

  Whatever hope I had, of the drugs working, of being “rehabilitated,” as Creed called it, of getting out of here, fade into mist. If this was all a setup, a joke, an experiment, then that means…I’m alive. I’ve never been dead. Not even for a day, not even for a minute.

  “But the Thugs?” I bite out, suddenly inspired. “They’re zombies, right? I mean, the government can’t afford actors that good, can they?”

  “The Thugs, as you guys call them, are zombies. Real zombies from the Gallup Gulch outbreak last year. They’re on loan from the Department of Undead Security and, when this experiment is over, they’ll be returned to the DUS until they figure out where to locate the next experiment, the next Project Z.”

  “So there are zombies then?” I ask, almost…hopefully.

  “Yeah,” he chuckles. “There are. Imagine that. Only, you’re not one of them.”

  “The Fugs?”

  He looks at me, momentarily confused. I realize he wouldn’t know the term. It’s slang, our slang. “The homeless people you told us to attack, for their brains?”

  “They’re homeless, like you said. People like you. People nobody would miss if one day they just…disappeared.”

  “W-w-what will happen to them, now?”

  He laughs. Bellows is more like it. “Kid, I just told you you’re human, that you’ve been murdering innocent civilians for over fourteen days and you’re worried about saving the last few stragglers? They’re killing them, as we speak. Chip and Garrett and Angela.

  “And when they’re done with their little meal, when they’ve chewed up the last of the evidence, well that’s when I’ll tell them the same thing I’m telling you, and then I’ll—”

  The bile comes then, hot and green. A projectile stream of brain chunks and blood and shame covers Creed’s face like red-hot slime at some theme park stage show and fills his mouth as he sputters in shock.

  He stands, stumbles, falls back over his chair and I’m on him, chewing and gnawing before he can wipe his eyes clean of my puke. There is no time for stun guns or walkie-talkies now, only my blind, driving rage. I bite a chunk out of his throat and feel the blood gush against my cold, gray skin. I bite off his ear, chomp on his bald spot and chew, chew, until my teeth hit bone. Then I keep chewing.

  I feed on his brains, I eat them down to the stem, until his head is hollow and his eyes are staring, wide and vacant, back up at me. I wipe my mouth, and tear open his lab coat, looking for keys, more weapons, anything.

  Underneath is a uniform with a badge. Not a tin badge, but one sewn onto the pocket of a navy blue shirt. It reads Guard, Culvert County Jail.

  He was no doctor at all, just a lackey with a goatee. I thought his brain tasted dumb! Now I know why. I take the stun guns, one in each hand, and walk toward the conference room door.

  There are six guards outside, but they’re human. I am too, I guess, but they’re real human. Virgins, innocents. Meaning they’ve never tasted brain, never killed a man, so far as I know.

  And they’re not desperate, like me.

  I open the door to find them talking to one another, two at a time in their assigned pairs. I stun the first two in the neck, easy as pie. They slump to the floor like pins in a bowling alley.

  I even stun the third before he can react, but the fourth is too quick. As I’m extending the gun to zap his neck, he knocks it out of my hand. It falls to the ground, clattering end over end on lime green floor tiles that seem to go on forever.

  I ignore it and lunge for the fourth guard, even as the fifth and sixth surround me. He is tall, but bony and goes down fast. He scrambles away from me on his back, using his hands like a crab. I follow as his boots kick out, hitting my elbow, my fingers, as I finally grab hold of one of his pant cuffs and yank him onto the tiles for good.

  I scramble on board, holding him down and climbing onto his chest all knees and elbows as I reach for his neck. I bite him, just out of habit, the taste of Creed’s blood still on my lips and he stops fighting, immediately.

  “Stop,” he begs me, sputtering, kicking his legs to squirm away. I let him and slide to the floor as he scampers away. “Just…stop biting me and you can go. Go, I don’t care. I just…don’t…want to be like you.”

  I wipe my lips and shake my head and look up cautiously, waiting for a boot from the fifth guard to cave my head in or the sixth guard to stun me senseless. But they’re both standing there, stock still, frozen in motion, just nodding their heads toward their friend.

  “Leave him be, kid,” they say, Southern accents as thick as their necks. “Just leave us all be and go do what you’re gonna do. We just did what we were told.”

  Their talk may be tough, but their eyes are fearful and wide. One flinches when I sit up a little taller.

  And that’s when I realize: they don’t know. Creed, the government, whoever, didn’t tell them about Project Z. They still think I’m a zombie, a real zombie. I look down at my tank top, stained with blood, with puke, spotted with brain gore and no doubt, they believe I’m the undead.

  Just like I did, until about five minutes ago.

  I stand then, kicking their friend softly and grunting hoarsely so my secret’s still safe with me. “Get him out of here then. Go, before I change my mind.”

  I watch them. One grabs his friend, the other grabs his keys, then they both drag him to the nearest door. The windows are blacked out, just like in the warehouse, but when he opens them I see a blue sky outside, and sunshine
, and green grass and woodsy shrubs.

  They drag their friend outside and one looks at me, horrified, then gladdened and, finally, triumphant. I wonder why until the door slams and I hear the key turn in the lock, shutting me back in darkness, locking me inside.

  I frown and reach for Creed’s keys inside my pocket. They’re still there.

  The warehouse is silent, the inhabitants of the three cages all staring at each other as they surround the grubby red square in the middle of the floor. Even the Thugs are mute, standing stock-still as they watch me enter through the double doors. There are four more guards inside. The last of them, I suppose.

  They make a move for their stun guns and I step forward, quickly, to show them mine. “We can duke it out,” I growl, using my best zombie voice, “or you can run like your friends did. Don’t worry. I won’t tell. But if you stay, just know I’ll bite you just to watch you die….”

  They scurry past, careful to avoid me as they sprint toward the doors. They lock them after they go, but I just smile. At least they tried to do their duty until the bitter end.

  As far as they know, they have locked me in. That should count for something.

  I let the Fugs out first, but they won’t come. I don’t blame them. Their scared eyes shrink in their heads until I step back, open the warehouse doors and say, “You’re free. Go, now, and don’t look back.”

  They still clamor inside, looking to one another. I shrug and turn toward the next cage over. Chip Wailing watches me warily, Garrett Evans picks his nose, and Angela Chase drums her fingers on the steel bars.

  “Took you long enough,” she says, voice as grim as mine.

  “Yeah, where were you for so long?” asks Garrett Evans, studying his booger.

  “Eating Creed’s brain.” I burp, opening the cage door. They eye it, and me, cautiously.

  “Get out. Come on, let’s go,” I urge, yanking Angela out by the arm.

  “Hey,” she shrieks, yanking it back violently. I let her.