Born Lucky: A YA St. Patrick's Day Story Read online

paint. “You have to,” I say, voice cracking with emotion.

  He pauses, holding up a finger. We stand, quietly, listening for drunks or a Reanimation Patrol or hunters or all three, but nothing. Not yet. “No, I don’t,” he says at last, walking as quickly as he can toward the door he let me in earlier.

  We walk inside and he bolts it again: click, click, click, click, click, click. When he’s done, he yanks off his wig, tossing it to the ground. I do, too. It’s hot and itchy and gross and I never want to see the thing again.

  He paces, using his long sleeves to smear the last of the paint from his skin. “So this was all a plot,” he says, huffing. “The whole time. There was no getting to know me, no wanting me to experience what life was like after curfew. You were just… using… me.”

  “Yeah, I was.”

  He pauses in his endless loop around his living quarters, looks me in the eye and says, “You suck, by the way.”

  I stop, short, gasping like he’s just punched me. Then, I realize, he’s right; I do suck. Big time. “But I’m desperate,” I say.

  “For what?” he asks, throwing his hands up in front of him and, so help me God, when he does it, he looks almost… human.

  “For what you have,” I say, inching closer. “For what you can do for me.”

  “The only thing I can do for you is kill you,” he growls, lowering his hands. Just then, gray skin covering his taut body, gray eyes boring into me, a dead smile on his dead lips, he seems on the verge of doing just that.

  And suddenly I realize what I’ve come here for. It becomes real to me. This whole last year, watching his every move as he cleaned the hallways, the bathrooms, the locker rooms of Nightshade, waiting for tonight, when I could lure him into town, show him my sad life, and make him feel bad for me, now… it’s here.

  And I’m not sure if I’m ready.

  “Is that what you want?” he asks when I’m silent for too long.

  “Yes,” I murmur. “No, I mean, I don’t want it, but it’s the only way to...”

  We’re face to face, him a few inches taller, me looking up into his eyes. “To what?” he asks, cold voice crackling.

  “To find my brother.”

  He steps back, one step, two, and shakes his head. “Now I get it,” he says, sagging down into his beach chair. “He’s undead, isn’t he? Like me. And you think, if I help you, you can find him, get him back, get your life back.”

  I cock my head to the side. “I don’t want my life back,” I say. “I don’t have a life. That’s what tonight was about, Calvin. To show you what my life is like, so you won’t feel bad when I ask you to… to…”

  He stands, quickly for a zombie, and grabs my throat. “To what?” he asks, loud, in my ear, breath cold on my skin as he drags me a few feet across the room. “To bite you? To turn you? And then what? You change your mind, halfway through? You regret it, every day of your afterlife? And I have to re-live with that for the rest of my days. No thanks…”

  He shoves me away, hard, so that I fall against the hat rack where his Z.E.D. jumpsuit hangs. “He’s in the Z-Zone,” I confess, voice shaky. “They… they took him there, before the Reanimation Reunification Pact. I need to find him, and you and I both know I can’t go there like this.”

  The Z-Zone. For zombies only. A former National Park, now littered with the undead, lost and forgotten, a No Man’s Land for the Undead, a suicide pact for the living.

  “You’re not going there at all.”

  “I have to, Calvin. I must! I can’t live like this, alone, until I die. No family, no friends. This isn’t a life, it’s a death sentence!”

  “You don’t want this,” he insists, pacing now, clenching and unclenching his fists at his side. “This is no life, either.”

  “But at least I’ll have Brandon,” I say. “At least we’ll have each other. He’s alone, he needs me.”

  “If he’s been in the Z-Zone that long, Mandy, he doesn’t need anybody.”

  “He needs me, he’s… he’s my little brother. I owe him that much.”

  “He’s undead, Mandy. Like me. YOU don’t owe him, you don’t owe anybody anything except to live out your life while you can.”

  I shake my head, inching toward him. “We can go… we can go together. You can find your girlfriend, the cheerleaders. She’s there, too, right?”

  “Do you know how big the Z-Zone is?” he asks. “It would take forever to find them.”

  “Lucky for you, you have forever.”

  “But you don’t,” he adds, pausing in his own footsteps.

  I stop, too. Stop chasing him. We’re a few feet apart, the cold oozing off of him. I wonder, how it will feel, being that cold all the time. Or if I’ll even notice after a few hundred years.

  “Not yet,” I say.

  He shakes his head, but I know he’s close. “What are you going to do, Calvin? Go back to school tomorrow, wipe out our toilets? Mop our floors?”

  He shrugs. “It’s what I do. It’s better than the Z-Zone.”

  “You don’t believe that,” I say, taking a step toward him. He holds up a hand, but I ignore it. “Then don’t come with me, I don’t care, just give me this gift, and I’ll be out of your hair.”

  “It’s not a gift,” he says, but he’s taken his hand down. “It’s a curse.”

  “So is living all alone,” I say, and I don’t really realize how true that is until I say the actual words. He seems to hear it, in my voice, the deadpan, the dread, the fear, the sadness, the crackle of tears hiding just beyond my emotions. “It’s not even living, Calvin. Not even a little.”

  He shakes his head. “Don’t ask me to do this, Mandy.”

  “Don’t make me ask you.”

  “God,” he says, looking away. “God,” he says again, but deeper this time, harder, and when he looks back, there are flecks of yellow in his eyes, and his mouth is open, gray lips peeling back from yellow teeth, lips quivering.

  “Oh,” I say, as he leaps at me, biting into my shoulder, tearing into the flesh. His teeth are cold, raw and sharp against my bone as I cry out, crumpling to the floor.

  He stops, wiping blood off his lips, turning from me. Already I can feel the coldness move through me, but something else, too… a sizzle, flickering in each cell, like Pop Rocks in my veins, like the rush of soda foam when you first open the can.

  “You’ll sleep now,” he says, standing over me. When… when did he turn around? When did he walk back to me? “For a day, maybe more. Then, I’ll feed you, and we’ll go to the Z-Zone. Together.”

  I nod, looking up at him, so handsome, so gray. Will I look like that? Gray, like him? Lean, wiry… not quite human?

  Will I look like… me?

  The lights flicker, or maybe it’s just in my head because he just stands there, watching me, not looking away. Now they dim, the room growing darker and darker with every blink of my heavy, heavy eyelids. The cold seeps in, like a blanket oozing over every limb, covering me in a deep, wet chill.

  He mumbles something, or maybe he says it clearly but I’m lost because I’m going down, down, down and can’t hear it so well but it sounds like, “Happy St. Patrick’s Day.”

  And it’s the last thing I hear as a human, and the first thing I hear as a zombie…

  * * * * *

  About the Author

  Rusty Fischer is the author of over a dozen YA paranormal novels, including Zombies Don’t Cry, Zombies Don’t Forgive, Vamplayers and Ushers, Inc. Visit him at www.rushingtheseason.com to learn more and read tons of FREE YA holiday paranormal stories just like this one!