Laughter of the Undead Read online

  "You’d never shoot your own father," he snarled.

  "And you’d never beat your own son," I replied calmly.

  I could feel the anger emanating off him. I backed away, opening the door to my room and stepping in, without taking my eyes off him.

  Twelve

  Izzy

  March 5th - 1:02 p.m.

  “We should find food.”

  I looked up from the woodwork on the table. Connor had finished cleaning everything he’d dirtied for the ninth time. Now he stood braced against the counter’s edge, staring into the too clean dishes in the sink.

  Beside me, Tommy didn’t hear or care, too absorbed in his own crayons and coloring book pages.

  I glanced at him and then back to his brother.

  “Don’t we have food?”

  Connor was chewing on his lip when I stood and approached him. He looked not at me, but through me. “Yeah. For now. But we’ll need more.” He swallowed. “That and I want to go to the police station.”

  I frowned, leaning my hip against the counter and tried to meet his eyes, but they were always an inch in the wrong direction.

  Connor didn’t say anything, and jumped when I repeated his name, “Connor?”

  His Adam’s apple bobbed as he swallowed. He swallowed down whatever was keeping his eyes elsewhere.

  “Please?”

  I wanted to remind Connor of the storm, remind him that we had to wait for Levi, remind him that they hadn’t come to save us back at school and no one had picked up the phone. But I couldn’t argue, not with the lost expression etched on his face. I could tell from those eyes that this was the only thing he could even think to do. I’d sat at the kitchen table, for who knows how long, watching him scrub and re-scrub the same four dishes, watching him to make sure he didn’t hurt himself.

  Once Levi left, Connor’s weirdly forced cheeriness vanished, as if even trying to be cheerful had drained him. He didn’t say anything as he turned back to the kitchen and started cleaning.

  I was worried, and still scared for him. I knew that going would be something to bring him out of his own head.

  I nodded slowly. “All right, I’ll go get dressed.”

  “Connor, you can’t drive.”

  He made a face at the dashboard, barely glancing at me. “Yes, I can.”

  “You said you don’t have your permit!”

  “I . . . read the book,” he snapped but didn’t sound entirely certain himself. “And Dad took me driving in a parking lot once.”

  “And how’d that go?”

  “I may or may not have turned the car off in the middle of the road when another car pulled into the lot.”

  “We’re going to die,” I muttered, pinching the bridge of my nose. “I should do it.”

  “Can you drive?”

  “Certainly better than you. I’ve had my license since I was sixteen, and I’m older than you, so have the right to drive by default.”

  “You’re not older than me,” he frowned.

  “June 12th to your March 20th. Nine months and eight days. I remember because while you rubbed in my face that you were taller, I rubbed in your face that I was older.”

  “I’m still taller,” he grumbled.

  “And I’m still older. You’re still seventeen. Absolute child.”

  He stuck his tongue out at me but sighed, giving in, and we switched seats.

  “Connor, “ I said, sitting in the front seat for a long moment before starting the car, realizing something was wrong, “where is your brother?”

  He opened his mouth and closed it again. “I told him to meet us at the car.”

  I smacked his arm. “Are you an idiot? You can’t tell a four-year-old to meet you at the car. You have to bring him to the car.”

  His mouth made an O shape. “Right . . . ”

  I gave him a look and he put up his hands as if in surrender.

  “I’ve never had to take care of him for more than a couple hours at a time. I’m trying.”

  When he came back several minutes later, Tommy didn’t appear too happy about being pulled away from whatever it was that he had been doing. He flailed and squirmed in Connor’s arms, jacket more burrito-ed around him than actually put on.

  As I watched trying not to laugh, Connor nearly dropped the toddler when he kicked out, pushing on Connor’s face.

  “Hold still, you gremlin!” Connor snapped.

  Putting Tommy in the car seat wasn’t much easier. Giving him one of the random toys lying on the floor in the back seat satisfied him, but it only led to another problem. The seat itself.

  “Why are there so many damn buckles?” Connor muttered, trying to plug things together that didn’t even look like they should go together.

  “You’ve never buckled him in?”

  Connor shook his head and with the way he looked at me, I could read that was my parents' job in his eyes.

  I nodded, unbuckling myself and going around the back into the snow to try and help. Turns out I wasn’t much help, but with both of us working at it and finally a comment from Tommy on which one was the main buckle, we finally got him in to the point where he probably wouldn’t die.

  After another few minutes of fussing from Connor, he climbed in and I started the car. I hadn’t driven a lot, but I’d done it a couple of times in order to go grocery shopping, so I was definitely road ready.

  My driving wasn’t as perfect as Levi’s, but I got us out of the driveway and onto the road.

  There weren’t any other cars on the road somehow and almost none in the driveways.

  “Where are they?” I muttered. “It’s been like a day since anyone even started taking this stuff seriously.”

  “That’s why we’re going to the police.”

  I glanced at him, carefully swerving around a Jeep someone had left parked in the road, going almost too slow.

  “I don’t know what else to do, Izzy. I was keeping Tommy company and the newscast broke into this weird kids show and said that if you’ve learned anything about the laughing cannibal things, report it to the police.”

  “But if the call back at school didn’t work, that means something is terribly wrong. We could be walking into a dead zone.”

  When he didn’t say anything for a moment, I pulled my eyes away from the road to glance at him. He had his mismatched eyes fixed on the dashboard in front of him, again filled with that lost look, and I couldn’t help but sigh.

  “We’ll go anyway. It makes sense.”

  I bit my lip, glancing in the rearview mirror at Tommy, who sat engulfed in the view out the window.

  “What are we even going to say, Connor?”

  “We can tell them about school. And about the bug. And about . . . ”

  He didn’t have to finish.

  So I kept driving and we didn’t talk. Tommy started humming from his car set, playing with one of the toys.

  Our grocery store, which was our first stop, wasn’t a big name place, the only big-name stores like Walmart were farther out and in the next town over. Our store was called “The Food Dude,” though most people called it simply “Jackson’s” after the owner who everyone knew by first name. It wasn’t tiny but it wasn’t huge and the outside looked pretty sketchy, the gray building unpainted and, instead of paying for a real sign, Jackson had just written the name on a giant sheet of something and attached it to the side of the building over the door.

  Outsiders almost never shopped there, the store presenting more like a place where you’d to buy drugs than baby food, but once you got inside it was simply a grocery store, fluorescent lights, and row upon row of food and everything else you could think of. It was a perfectly normal store.

  Well, normally. Right now it was one hundred percent empty, even though the radio still played distant music.

  “Holy . . . ” Connor muttered as he set Tommy in one of the carts. He stopped himself from cursing when I turned my eyes pointedly to his brother. He grimaced but continued. “This
is creepy as all get out.”

  I turned back to the empty aisles. “Where is everyone?” It was a question we’d already asked, but I still wondered, still felt like this emptiness everywhere was the worst omen yet.

  I shook my head and together the three of us trudged through the snow and through the door, Connor pushing Tommy in the cart.

  “Do you think Jackson’s here?” Connor muttered.

  “I feel like actually finding someone here could be more terrifying than being alone. But he must be. The lights are still on.”

  Connor made another face. “Oh well, let’s just find food and get out of here.”

  Turns out finding food and getting out of here was going to be a hell of a lot harder than we thought. We knew this store. We’d both grown up shopping here and we knew where everything was, but both of us were so frazzled that we couldn’t find anything. We went to the frozen meat, which was actually still frozen, trying to find bread.

  “This is stupid,” Connor muttered, kicking at the freezers. “I could have sworn the bread was on the far right.”

  “No,” I said, trying to stay calm, “it’s on the left side, by the bakery.”

  We were both wrong.

  “Damn freaking hell,” Connor snapped, scowling. I put a hand on his shoulder and he took a deep breath. “Sorry.”

  I shot him a tired smile and ruffled Tommy’s hair, who was frowning at Connor in confusion. When I touched him, he turned to me.

  “Can we get gummies, Zie Zie?”

  I glanced at Connor. “Zie Zie?”

  “He can’t figure out how to say Izzy,” Connor said and straightened more than usual, running a hand through his already all-over-the-place black hair. “Yeah, bud, we can get gummies.”

  Then we heard it.

  I tried to make a sound in surprise but it caught in my throat, coming out as “sh . . . ” as the laughter floated over from the other side of the store.

  Connor nodded, clearly thinking I was shushing him, and put a finger to his lips, looking pointedly at Tommy. On some level, I think Tommy understood how serious we were because he started sucking on his knuckles nervously.

  “Let’s take the food and get out of here,” I hissed. The cart was full enough to last us a little longer than what was already at the house. Lots of bread and some random Tommy requests plus hot cheese puffs, which I love. Connor took some other things, cases of water and buckets, and I knew enough to figure out what he was doing. He was preparing for the worst like people do in storms. Storms like what was happening outside. But what we had to deal with was worse than a storm. I grabbed batteries, ready to throw them in the cart, but stopped when I took in what all was there. For all the world it looked like we were preparing for the Apocalypse. Because we were.

  “If we’re quiet, we should be okay.”

  He nodded. I started quietly toward the end of the aisle, peering around the corner before I motioned to Connor, who started pushing the cart forward ever so slowly, the wheels making a cringingly loud sound against the tile.

  “Can we get— ”

  “Tommy,” Connor hissed, cutting off his brother, who had started asking a question at full four-year-old volume.

  The laughter changed and Connor cursed. I didn’t bother reprimanding him but started at a greater speed into the front of the store.

  There, all the way at the other end, was a man in flannel, and I knew instantly it was Jackson. Well, it had been Jackson. Now he was a creature. I motioned violently to Connor to hurry up. Jackson hadn’t spotted us, wandering repeatedly into a wall.

  Watching Connor try to walk quickly while pushing a cart and trying to be quiet was almost comically impossible. I went ahead to the doors so I could hold them and we could run through, hopefully managing to avoid all contact with the thing.

  I shivered when I opened the door, letting the winds wash over me as I leaned my back against the door to keep it open.

  But Connor wasn’t there. I scowled and looked back into the store only to find him trying to get the cart to turn into one of the empty checkout lines.

  “What in the name of all that is holy are you doing?” I hissed, glancing back at the thing that had once been the Food Dude’s owner.

  Connor glanced at me. “We haven’t paid yet.”

  If I rolled my eyes any harder I would have severed my ocular nerve and my eyes would have fallen out of my head. “What are you talking about? Get your butt over here.”

  He opened his mouth as if to say something but I interrupted him. “There’s no one here, you moron!”

  Connor did the O mouth thing and pushed the cart in my direction instead.

  The thing had heard us and while he may have been intrigued, he hadn’t started in our direction and we made it outside into the storm before the thing even started moving.

  We darted into the parking lot, freezing the moment we stepped outside of the building and threw the stuff into the trunk, buckled Tommy in and climbed in the car, driving off. We left the cart in the lot.

  I drove too fast, heart hammering. “What the heck!” I snapped, driving over the lines of parking spaces and ignoring the speed bumps. “Why would you even try to pay for it? There was a thing there and it could have hurt us. Including Tommy! Did you even bring money? What were you thinking?”

  Connor put his hands on the back of his neck leaning forward in his seat like he was trying to fold himself in half. I glanced at him, and finally managed to slow us down before I killed all three of us. He pulled his hands from his neck over his hair, rubbing his face before sitting up.

  “Sorry. You’re right. Obviously.”

  When I spoke, my voice was gentler. “Then what were you doing?”

  I heard it, but I didn’t turn when his breath caught in his throat and he sobbed, only once, but it hurt my own heart to hear, and I wanted to help, but didn’t know how, so I kept on driving us out of the parking lot and back onto the road.

  “Connor?” I said softly as if asking a question and prompting him to keep talking.

  The breath he took was deep and shaky. “I'm trying to make myself think things are normal. I don’t want this change, I want . . . ” his voice broke again, and he had to cover his mouth for a moment, taking another breath before he continued. “I’m trying so hard to act . . . right, that I did the wrong thing.” He laughed, a dry laugh that didn’t actually harbor humor. “It’s what I always end up doing, isn’t it?”

  Thirteen

  Levi

  March 5th - 3:50 p.m.

  My room was tiny.

  While it was barely big enough for my bed, a dresser, and six square feet of carpet, I’d made the most of it. Posters of my favorite bands and movies and anime served as wallpaper for my unpainted walls. My closet door was a mirror and magnets from over the years were stuck there, holding up accomplishments that my dad refused to put on the refrigerator.

  I dropped the gun by the door as I stared. I hadn’t been here in more than a week.

  After I’d gotten suspended for the fight, I’d decided to avoid the wrath of my dad and stay at Alec’s. Mrs. Fisher was the contact number that I gave to the school. I didn’t want them calling my dad for some things, and they, for one reason or another, never questioned it.

  Mrs. Fisher knew what my father was like and knew how he treated me, so she didn’t mind. She became my surrogate mother and acted like it.

  I’d given her the papers saying I’d been suspended to sign, and she had grounded me, saying I couldn’t use any electronics the entire week, and had even taken my phone away, telling Alec not to let me watch TV. Just like a real mom would have.

  Dad would have either beaten me or not given a shit. There was no in-between.

  Alec still let me watch TV, but he told me not to tell his mom or else he would have gotten grounded too.

  But here I was.

  Back home by my own choice.

  I took a step toward the mirror, having somehow missed the pictures pinned there.


  Report cards, the English award from fifth grade, things like that. There were some pictures of me and Alec too, and pictures of my mom.

  My favorite was the one with the day of her graduation, not only because it was my last memory of her, but because she was so happy. Flaming red hair and golden hazel eyes in a pale face, grinning, five-year-old Levi holding out her diploma and grinning too.

  I moved my eyes from her face to my own in the mirror. I’d always been a copy of my mom, but I’d dyed my hair black years ago to dampen that resemblance. It hurt, finding your dead mom in every mirror.

  Under the picture was a report card from when I was little, seven or eight maybe. All A’s, and that was probably why it was up there. Like most report cards, it had my full name. Graves, Leviathan James.

  I’ve never been overly fond of my name. But I don’t hate it. It’s one no one else can say they have, plus it was from my mom. My dad never showed up when I was born— and why would he? I’ve always gotten the impression that their relationship wasn’t always exactly consensual. All the more reason to hate him.

  I was never a part of his plan or anyone’s plan. But, against everything, Daisy Graves had decided to keep me. Despite the fact that I would always be a reminder of the worst day in her life. I’ll never understand why.

  So my mom named me on her own, giving me Dad’s name for a middle name, Leviathan for a first, and her own name as a last.

  I remember one time asking her about my name. It was a few months before she graduated, and I was in kindergarten.

  I’d walked into her room while she sat on her bed, doing her calculus homework. I remember it was calculus, because it had Calculus written in big pink letters on the notebook next to her homework, and Daisy Graves penned in under it.

  I’d been crying and crawled into her lap without warning her. I remember her jumping.

  “What’s the matter, Levi?” she asked, turning me to face her, wiping some of the tears from my face.