Laughter of the Undead Page 13

  “I should have said it this morning . . . I- I love you, Dad,” I managed, but it was such a quiet and broken sound that escaped my mouth that I couldn’t even hear it properly. I slid his wedding ring off his finger. It was a simple gold band, but it was his. And it meant more than its worth. It meant so much.

  No words would come out of my mouth. My throat closed up and a hard sob escaped me, but I took a shaky breath as I turned to my mom.

  I took her wedding ring too. I closed her hand, then I closed her eyes.

  If I stared at her for another second I would throw up.

  I stood and stepped back. Levi glanced at me like he understood and stepped in past me. He hooked his arms under my dad’s armpits and Izzy carried his feet.

  I gazed down at my hand. The rings sat side-by-side in my palm, gleaming and untouched by blood. I closed them in my fist and closed my eyes for a long moment, taking a breath before sliding them into my jeans pocket.

  It was my turn.

  My mom had always been small. I knew she was small growing up, but now that I was bigger my mom was tiny. She used to call me her little giant. And the thought of those words almost broke me again. Damn it. I felt so fragile.

  I picked her up. It wasn’t hard. She was light. I was strong. Her head lolled back, but I positioned it so she was leaning on my chest instead, more like she was sleeping, as long as I ignored the blood on her shirt and wound on her neck.

  Together, the three of us, struggling under my parents’ weight, trudged through the snow to our greenhouse. Even through the blizzard, the tiny glass-paned house was apparent. It was about the size of a small cottage, and over the years, my mom meticulously filled it with flower pots and vegetable flats.

  Inside was warm and the air thick with the smell of flowers and peppers and soil. Izzy stood agape, and even Levi’s face showed some level of awe. I didn’t admire it though. I’d been in here every day since I was twelve. I knew it was impressive. The front half of the interior was draped with hanging plants, the pots dripping leaves on vines and blocking the view of the back of the greenhouse. Four rows of tables held the other pots, the soil spurting stems where vegetables grew. On one side of the door was a bench, old and iron with a little bit of rust and a lot of peeling white paint. On the other side of the door were piles of bags of soil meant to fill in the hole dug for the apple tree Mom wanted, stored here until spring.

  The apple tree that would never happen. I lay my mom down on the bench closest to the door. With a grunt, Izzy and Levi almost dropped my father there as well. I glared at them and Izzy shot me a sad, sheepish expression. I scowled and turned away. The heaters made the small space stuffy and warm while outside was frigidly cold.

  I hefted one of the fifty-pound bags of topsoil over my shoulder and shoved through the door and back into the cold, leaving Levi and Izzy by the entrance.

  There it was. The pit, big enough for them. For both of them. Deep, too. It had to be deep for an apple tree. I stared down at it for a long moment before I threw the bag at the ground, letting it land with a loud thump, the snow spurting up around it.

  I went back for another bag, no longer acknowledging Levi and Izzy. I had no idea what they were doing and didn’t care either.

  Walking back through those plants a second time, I finally let the tears I had been holding in for hours spill over and down my face.

  One bag— My parents were dead. Both murdered by some unknown, undistinguished force that turned people into monsters. And now they were going to miss every moment in my life from here on out. My eighteenth birthday. My marriage. They would miss it all. And I would miss them for all of it. They were supposed to be there for me, but now they couldn’t be. Ever again.

  Two bags— My best friend was dead. Killed by some boy who thought it was a good idea to bring a gun to school. Who thought he had more right to live than Darren? Killed by me. I had stupidly run to try to help, but in doing so I had killed my best friend.

  Three bags— I killed that girl too. When I didn’t say “Evan is the greatest” loud enough. Their deaths were my fault. Whether I pulled the trigger or not, what I did had killed them. My stupid irrational need to be a hero. My stupid irrational brain and stupid irrational instincts. I got people killed.

  Four bags— The world was collapsing in on itself.

  Five bags— "Mommy, I’m scared of the dark. Things want to get me." “Sweetheart, you can always come to me when you’re scared. Always.” “Dad, I did it. We won the championship for the first time this year.” “Good going, Connor! Be my little sportsman. You’re the best quarterback that the team has ever had.” “Mom, I’m taller than you now, so you can’t call me little anymore.” “Fine then, you’re my little giant.” "I love you, Mommy." "I love you too, sweetheart. Go to sleep and I’ll sing you a song."

  I knew I walked faster and faster, in and out, into the cold and back into the warmth until I felt sick from the changing temperature and my arms started to sag, dragging my shoulders down with the crushing weight of everything. The sweat rolled down my forehead, mixing with the tears that spilled over my cheeks and stung as if they were freezing to my face.

  When they were all there, piled by the hole, I didn’t stop long enough to think.

  I kicked the bag nearest to me. Kicked it again and again until my foot ached, but I didn’t know what else to do with all the emotions boiling inside me.

  It wasn’t angry kicking. It was kicking for the sake of kicking.

  I sank to the ground, knees in the soil, and pressed my forehead to the snow and screamed. I screamed until my throat hurt and I couldn’t scream anymore.

  And then I cried. I’ve always hated crying. It hurts, in my face and my eyes and my chest and my throat. It hurts. Everything hurt so much.

  Why was this happening? Why was the world ending and why did it have to take my family with it? What was I supposed to do without them? What was Tommy going to do?

  I cried until I couldn’t anymore, and then I stayed like I was. Kneeling with my face down, tears spilling down my nose, breathing too hard and too shakily, breaths like ice shards in my chest. I stayed that way, just breathing. Breathing and trying to breathe and listening to the wailing winds. There was no coming back from this. No foreseeable future anymore. I was supposed to graduate in a few months and my parents were supposed to be there. I was supposed to go to college and figure out what I wanted to do with my life, and they were supposed to help me.

  Now . . . if the world ended I could never go to college. I could never graduate. And even if the world wasn’t ending, even if this was brief and in a week or two I was expected to go back to school and pretend like everything was normal . . . how could I? My parents were dead. I’d watched people get shot in the head. I’d watched people die and get back up and eat each other alive.

  Everything was different and it would always be different.

  I don’t know how long I laid with my face buried in the snow and I don’t know how long I cried, but eventually, my face went numb and the intense pain had blunted to a dull roaring ache.

  “Connor . . . ” the voice was gentle though it had to shout over the wind and snow, and seconds later accompanied by a hand on my shoulder. “Connor, will you talk to me now?”

  Izzy.

  Slowly, I flattened my hands on the soil and pushed myself up onto my knees, staring into the pit. Izzy’s hand was still on my shoulder. I covered it with my own.

  “Yeah,” my voice came out a hollow croak, “Yeah, I’ll talk to you.”

  Izzy dropped to her knees beside me, squeezing my shoulder and following my eye line, “I’m so sorry.”

  I swallowed and nodded numbly. “Nothing was your fault. It’s my fault you’re here. So much is my fault.”

  Her hand tightened on my shoulder. “Connor, I’m probably alive because I’m here. Nothing we did differently could have saved any lives.”

  “Darren— ”

  “Chose to follow you.”

&nb
sp; I focused on her frowning.

  Izzy shrugged, “Everything that happened to Darren was because he chose to follow. You didn’t tell him to come with you. And you didn’t decide when he lost it. If he had stayed, if I had stayed, we would have been locked in that room, probably to just end up getting killed by a shooter or one of those things. The girl in the hallway was supposed to be in the classroom. We’d be like her. Nothing here is your fault, and saving the world isn’t your responsibility. Your only responsibility now is to be here— so be here, for your brother.”

  Izzy was right. I nodded again, this time with more conviction and pushed myself to my feet.

  I glowered at the pit again, knowing it wouldn’t be long before my parents would lie in that pit, and my only memory to hold onto would be the mound of dirt that marked their graves and the two rings that burned like ice in my pocket.

  My arms were coated in a thin layer of dirt from carrying the cloth bags and my jeans were soaked through and snow-caked from the knee down. Both were mud-brown and blood rusty red, but I couldn’t make myself care.

  I ran a hand through my dirt-coated hair and wiped at my face with my sleeve.

  "Where’d Levi go?" I asked, not raising my voice above a whisper.

  "He went back about a half-hour ago to make sure Tommy was still asleep. He said he would stay in case your brother woke up," she said.

  Half an hour ago? How long had I been out here? It only felt as if a few minutes had passed, no more. The bags weren’t that heavy and the trip back and forth was so short that it should have taken maybe ten minutes. I had no sense of how long my breakdown had lasted, but half an hour?

  "How long?" I muttered.

  "It’s been almost . . . ” she trailed off, “an hour and a half since we came out here," she whispered. I stared back down at the hole and took a deep, shaking breath.

  “How?”

  “We left you alone for a while, but when you started . . . when you started to scream, we came back here, but we couldn’t get you to say anything, and eventually, we gave up. I said I’d sit with you, and Levi went back to check on your brother.”

  I heaved a heavy breath, “Sorry. You didn’t have to stay out here with me.”

  "I did. I was worried that you might . . . do something dumb,” she paused and nudged me with her shoulder. “Well, dumber than usual."

  I half chuckled, then my face fell again.

  "We can bury them now," I managed, my voice hardly more than a hoarse whisper.

  Levi and Izzy had wrapped my parents' bodies in burlap sacks that had originally contained soil, much like the ones I’d dragged into the snow outside. When I saw them, the human-shaped bags that I knew would never see the light of day again, I felt my throat swell and eyes throb with tears again, but I pushed it back.

  I had to bury both my parents at once and I had no stone to mark their grave.

  Ten

  Izzy

  March 4th - 10:01 p.m.

  Connor did all the lifting. I wasn’t able to help much, if at all. We lay his father down first, then his mother beside him, taking great lengths to position them in what Connor thought would be a comfortable position for their eternity.

  It took him over an hour to rip open all the bags and fill the grave with the dirt. It was slow work until the bodies were gone under the earth as if Connor didn’t want to cover them.

  This time he didn’t stop but worked without rest, slow working while the bodies were visible but once you couldn’t make out anything of their figures, Connor sped up. When the grave was filled, he got on his hands and knees and smoothed down the soil.

  "Tomorrow," he panted, "I’ll have to find something to mark their grave with."

  "Tomorrow," I agreed, then grabbed his arm and helped him to his feet. "But now you need to rest."

  He nodded without responding, so I picked his shirt up off the ground and gently led him back to the entrance of the greenhouse.

  It was beautiful. Vegetables grew on a large plot of ground in one corner, surrounded on all sides by bright blossoms of flowers I couldn’t name. His mother must have loved this garden. She had poured her heart into it.

  He saw me admiring and almost smiled, taking the shirt I proffered to him.

  "Dad made it," he said, answering an unasked question.

  “How’s it warm?”

  "The roof is made of solar panels,” Connor said, pulling his shirt back over his head, reading my thoughts, his voice gave me the impression of wanting desperately to change the mood between us and possibly the mood in his own head. Zipping up his jacket, he continued. “They charge the lights and these fan heater things over there somewhere.” He motioned to the back. “It’s got that special glass. I don’t know all of the details.”

  I stared at him as he stared at the greenhouse.

  We shed our coats just inside the back door, stomping the snow off our boots and shaking it out of our hair. Connor looked attractive while doing so. I got my fingers caught in a tangle of knots.

  Levi sat on the couch with the news on, Tommy by his feet, rolling that little train back and forth repeatedly. He didn’t notice us come in, continuing to make the little “choo-choo” sounds, not minding that Levi was totally ignoring him.

  Connor and I sat on either side of Levi without a word.

  " . . . continued signs of these attacks have been increasing all over the country," the newsman reported, "the worst so far occurred earlier today at a local high school in Brimington. From the school’s security footage, we gathered that ten students brought guns to school. Thirty-five are thought to have been killed by bullets and more injured than we can say. A majority of the students are missing. The few left, not in classrooms, were extremely disoriented and showing signs of the cannibalistic epidemic. Footage shows many bodies rising back up after being shot, laughing and proceeding to devour their fellow students. Brimington police never arrived at the scene for reasons still unknown, and those alive in the school had to wait hours for U.S. Special Forces.

  “Three suspects, however, have been taken into custody by non-local police forces." Pictures of Kina, Barry, and Garrett appeared on the screen beside the newsman’s head. Mug shots. Kina and Barry’s photos were resigned and regretful, but Garrett was still grinning with that insane fire in his eyes. The eyes of a kid who puts salt on snails and kills birds for fun. “The three teens have confessed everything, including the fact that they were not alone in this horrendous crime. A total of thirteen other teenagers are said to have been in on the plan.”

  It sounded so flat, like facts, numbers in a History book. Just another news report, not the world learning about what had killed so many people I actually knew. It sounded so . . . unreal.

  "That’s right, Jim," said a new newswoman, flashing a grin that was so fake it was pained. "We also have a report of a young man who lost his right arm while visiting his elderly mother. He refused to come on camera but did say that she fell down the last three steps to her house. She remained on the floor until she started laughing hysterically, then, he said, she ate his arm."

  The power went out. We all jumped a little at the sound the TV made as it died, and it took a second for my eyes to adjust. Connor stiffened beside me, his breath catching. I frowned at him, but by the time my eyes adjusted to the dark he looked fine.

  Tommy started to whine, “Why’s it dark? Why’d the TV turn off?”

  Connor leaned down and pulled the little boy into his lap. “It’s all right buddy, it’s just the power.”

  “What’s the power?”

  “It’s the thing that makes the lights turn on and the TV work.”

  “Why?”

  Tommy crossed his arms when Connor didn’t answer. And Connor sighed, wrapping his arms around Tommy’s front.

  “Storm . . . ?” he croaked hopefully.

  I shook my head not wanting to think about the alternative.

  “They didn’t say anything about the bugs,” I muttered, and they nodded.


  “We all saw it.” Levi made eye contact with both of us like he was making sure.

  “Yeah,” Connor muttered. “There’s nothing else that could have caused it. Right?”

  “What’s a bug?” Tommy asked.

  Connor shushed him.

  “I didn’t want to say anything earlier,” I scratched behind one ear, “but he had it. Your dad. I saw it when we were . . . ” I trailed off and knew I didn’t have to say. “It was there. The bug.”

  Levi let out a hard sigh, rubbing a hand over his face, smearing whatever was left of his eyeliner.

  We didn’t say anything for a while and the room fell silent in the darkness until Tommy finally struggled out of his brother’s grip and padded into the kitchen.

  Finally, I sighed and scrubbed my own face. "We should all get some sleep."

  They both nodded and Connor stood to get his brother from the kitchen.

  None of us questioned the fact that we were sleeping over at Connor’s. It was as if so much weird stuff had already happened, adding on another weird thing wasn’t too different.

  Deciding where everyone was going to sleep wasn’t hard. Connor agreed to share his room with Tommy for the time being. Since I was the shortest and smallest, I had to sleep in Tommy’s room on his race car shaped bed. Levi took the guest room. None of us felt comfortable using Connor’s parents' room. Also, none of us wanted to use the downstairs bathroom.

  Connor lent me and Levi unopened toothbrushes, which he dug out of a closet. Levi said he could sleep in his clothes, but upon request, Connor lent me an oversize t-shirt and a pair of old drawstring shorts that he said he hadn’t worn since he was twelve. They were a little big, but with a tug at the drawstring, I kept them from falling down. The shirt was huge though, being Connor’s. It had a vintage print Hulk on it, and I felt a little like Bruce Banner in the Hulk’s clothes, because no matter what I did, I couldn’t keep the sleeves from falling off one shoulder or the other. I’d always been a little on the chubbier side, with thick legs and a round face, but my shoulders were narrow and slopey, and Connor had massively broad shoulders.