Laughter of the Undead Read online

  Gently pushing Tommy’s head onto the seat, I scooted closer to the door.

  “Wait here,” I told them, gripping the cold metal handle in my just as cold fingers. “I might be a while, but just chill. I will be back.”

  “Chill,” Connor snickered, “in a storm like this, you would think that might be easy.”

  I rolled my eyes at him. “Just stay in the car till I come back.”

  They exchanged glances before nodding. Quickly, I opened the car door and stepped out into the swirling snow.

  The snow was less thick on my driveway, but I still kept my footsteps tentative, for fear of slipping. Because slipping and landing on my butt in full view of Mr. Fifteen Million Degrees Kelvin and Death himself at the same time would just be mortifying.

  As I climbed my steps in the snow, I dug in my jeans pocket for the key I knew had to be there. When I reached the door, I fished it out and, hands shivering, inserted it into the key slot. It took a minute of jostling before the handle would turn and I could swing the door open.

  Like I must have done a million other times, I stepped into my house and slammed the door shut behind me. Wiping my feet on the carpet, I unzipped my jacket and flung it onto an ottoman by the door, ignoring the fact that when the snowflakes still flecking the coat melted, the leather seat would wet get.

  As usual, it was dead silent in my house. On force of habit, I switched the television on low volume just to serve as background noise.

  It wasn’t working. No connection blinked again and again on the black screen, but the cable box was on. I thought about the storm and the severe lack of people and wondered just how far into the end the rest of the world had gone because we hadn’t turned the news back on since that first night. We should have, but we were scared. I was scared of what it would tell me. But it didn’t look like it was even working now, and it wasn’t a good thing.

  Above the TV was a picture of my sister and me as toddlers. Someone had put us in matching outfits. Little me did not look too happy about it and seemed to be attempting to pull out the huge bow attached in her overly curly hair. Baby Olive gave the camera a toothy grin showing the few that had grown in, her eyes all squinty with the enormity of her smile. We didn’t look anything alike in that picture. We shared a face and hair color, but the wildly curly texture of my dark brown hair came from my dad. I looked at that mixture of Asian and white that my sister had escaped. Both my parents were visible in my face.

  Pulling my eyes away from the old photo, I passed through the sliding doors into the hall that held mine and my sister's room. Her room was empty of all the decorations we’d grown up with except the posters on the walls and her dressers. She’d gone to school way far away, not because she disliked us, but because she wanted to do stuff on her own. Olive never got to be alone growing up. My dad was a truck driver and my mom went home often, but even when they were both gone she still had me. Now that Olive was off at school, I was alone all the time.

  I missed her. I never had friends growing up, besides Connor, and we all know how that turned out. Olive had been my best friend. I complained to her about pretty much everyone else and she listened. It had sucked when she moved away and said she was going to stay over the summer. She and her boyfriend, Magnus, had got an apartment near school that was mostly cheaper than flying back and forth. I hadn’t talked to her face-to-face in months.

  I wished that she was here, and that Mom wasn’t in Taiwan, and that Dad had answered his friggin' phone.

  I sighed and forced myself to walk past her room to my own.

  The bag was easy to pack. I didn’t care what I wore as long as it fit me, and the moment I had my own clothes in my hand, I shed the things Connor had given me and put on my own clean clothes. It felt nice, but not as nice as I’d hoped. At least they weren’t bloody.

  I still felt like I was covered in blood. I had since I stabbed that thing, and while I tried not to think about it, the stupid phantom smell of rot and copper crept back into my nostrils and made me want to cry again.

  I ran a hand over the fabric on my arm. Clean, no blood, I reminded myself.

  I took the other things I knew I needed and shoved them into the bag, not bothering to pack neatly. I wasn’t leaving forever. I couldn’t be leaving forever.

  I took the last of the groceries from the kitchen too, just in case.

  All the clocks in the house blinked at 12:00, indicating that the power had gone out here too.

  I threw my bags onto the couch, rubbing my hand over the fabric of the shirt sleeve again.

  The picture smiled at me from the mantel, and though I was coming back, I was coming back, I took the picture out of the frame and folded it gently before putting it in my jacket pocket. My hand brushed my cell phone and after a deep breath, I pulled it out and flipped it open. I hadn’t called again because just like watching the news, I was scared of what I would find.

  I shouldn’t have. Ignorance is better than knowledge sometimes.

  The robot lady on the line told me as I tried to call my mom that international communication had been disabled due to unforeseen complications.

  I shook my head, swallowing hard, and dialed Olive’s number.

  So much relief ran through me when she answered that I thought I was going to start sobbing.

  “Izzy?” she asked, and there was so much relief and worry in her own voice that I sank to my knees, leaning on the coffee table to keep from falling over.

  “Yeah,” my voice cracked and I swallowed, “yeah, it’s me.”

  “You weren’t kidding,” she said quietly, “They’re here. The . . . things. I was at lunch with Mag, and . . . a waitress tripped. She hit her head on the table and went really limp, so people thought she was unconscious and a bunch of people rushed over to her, but then she started cackling, biting and scratching at the people around her, and they started laughing. I didn’t see what happened 'cause then I grabbed Magnus and ran. We’ve been in the apartment ever since. God, Izzy, you went through this on your own?”

  “I wasn’t alone,” I rasped.

  And her own voice cracked. “They’re everywhere, Izzy.”

  The power went out again. Olive was alive, for now.

  But she was all I knew for certain. Mom was in another country where I couldn’t contact her and dad . . . I didn’t know. Once I hung up with Olive, I called him, but no matter what, he wouldn’t answer, so I just sat there in the dark.

  I wondered what Connor and Levi thought I was doing.

  I ran a hand over my sleeve again and even as I touched the fabric that I knew was clean, my hand came away sticky and cold and covered with the black blood. I could smell it, the sickly sweet coppery smell.

  Standing, I threw my phone at the couch with the rest of my stuff and stripped my clothes off right there in the living room, not even worrying about the curtains, which were always closed, and ran back to the bathroom, turning the water on in the shower, even though without power the water would be freezing.

  I stood, shivering in the dark, letting the freezing water wipe away what my brain had convinced me was dead blood. I ran a hand over my arm. Nothing but frigid water.

  I brought the same hand to my mouth a stifle a sob.

  “I am Li Huan Isabella Dawson,” I whispered to the darkness. It was something I did when I felt lost or lonely and needed something to ground me. I needed to remind myself that I mattered. “I’m eighteen. I've never gotten below a B in my life. I have a sister named Olive, and my parents are Lin Huan and Daniel Dawson, and my friends are . . . ”

  I’d never said that part before. The rest of it was drilled into my brain, I said it so much, but . . . I didn’t have friends, until now.

  Could I say they were my friends? Sure, I’d thought it, wanted to think it, but how long had I even known them? Connor had pushed me away years ago. And Levi. The first time I’d talked to Levi had been, what? Two days ago? But what else could I call them? We were friends, weren’t we?

&nb
sp; You don’t hug someone while they’re crying, or fight and get over it, or play board games or watch movies or disagree over where the bread is if you aren’t friends. Do you? You don’t grab someone’s elbow to keep them from falling and tell them everything is going to be okay or hold someone’s hand when they need it if you aren’t friends. You don’t.

  They were my friends.

  They had to be, and if they weren’t, they were because the world was ending and two best friends were what I really, really needed right now.

  “Are Connor Storming and Levi Graves,” I finished, the phantom blood fading.

  Twenty

  Connor

  March 6th - 7:01 a.m.

  Sleep pulled at my eyelids. Honestly, I was surprised I was still awake, even with the images that popped into my head every time I closed my eyes. I needed sleep and I knew that, but last night it just would not come. Hours of staring out the window at the snow and closing my eyes just to throw them back open again when I saw Darren come back to life or my mother’s corpse lying on the floor, eyes lifeless, fixed to some point in the distance had left me on the verge of collapse all morning.

  When Izzy left, closing the car door behind her, neither I nor Levi said anything. We sat staring out opposite windows.

  Levi had the gun. The one Barry had given him, and it lay propped against the seat between his legs. I felt a little on edge with the gun in the car. I’d always been aware of what a gun was and what people used it for, but now, all I could think about was Darren’s dead body and Evan had shot the girl beside me and told me it was my fault. I had used a gun before. My dad had taught me about a year or two before. He said no one should be allowed to have guns unless they were police or soldiers, but he said since they were legal, I should know how to use one. We had never gone hunting or anything, just a shooting range and one time blowing the crap out of some cans set like fifty feet away. That was the extent of my experience with guns. At least that had been until that Evan kid shot Kimberly Haymen in the head.

  But I wasn’t scared Levi would use that gun against me or Tommy asleep in the back seat. I just think that guns will forever make me nervous. More so than they had before.

  “Did you get to sleep?” Levi asked without looking away from the snow outside the window, breaking the silence enough to make me jump.

  “No. Did you?”

  “Yeah. But I had nightmares.”

  I waited for him to say more but he didn’t elaborate. “What about?”

  He cleared his throat and rested his forehead against the glass. “Alec.”

  “Oh.”

  Another minute of wailing wind and silence ticked by.

  “So you didn’t sleep, even after you told me to?” he muttered, now turning away from the window, and finally meeting my eyes.

  I shrugged. “Pretty much.”

  “Hypocrite,” he muttered, almost jokingly. “You can sleep now. I’ll wait for Izzy.”

  “I don’t know if I’ll be able to.”

  “Dude, you look like you’re about to pass out. Just try.”

  I nodded. Stealing one of Tommy’s extra blankets, I wadded it into a ball and pressed it against the window to use as a pillow. I closed my eyes and rested my head on the soft blanket.

  It was only a couple of seconds before I fell asleep.

  It felt like no time had passed when I woke again. If anything, I felt more tired.

  For a moment, I forgot where I was. Then I remembered but couldn’t figure out what woke me. I felt a blast of violently cold air.

  And then I heard it.

  The cackling laughter rose above the howling wind. The driver's side door was open and Levi was gone. So was the gun. My heart tripped over itself as I heard the sound of Levi’s gun and more, angrier laughter. There must be more than one. I threw the blanket back onto Tommy and realized there was an extra draped over me that Levi must have put there. I tossed both behind me.

  I had to help. I had to but what was going to help with? I hid the gun under my bed where Tommy couldn’t find it, and Levi had the only other gun. What was I going to do, beat them with a blanket?

  Desperately, I fumbled open the glove compartment in front of me, not actually expecting to find anything, expecting to have to fight cannibals with breath mints. The only thing in there was some papers for the license of the car, and one of those tiny hammers used to break windows if there’s a crash and you’re trapped inside. I was about to close the compartment again when I realized I could use that. If the only way to kill these stupid things was to destroy the brain, then a hammer would work really friggin' well. I ignored the disgusting images the thought of using the hammer shot through my head, and grabbed it, ripping off the protective plastic.

  I knew I had big hands, but it looked pretty small in my palm, the hammers on either side of the head barely half an inch long, but it was heavy, and with enough swing, it could at least slow them down.

  I glanced back at Tommy in a moment of indecisiveness before climbing out of the car.

  Levi stood in the middle of the road, luring a group of the laughing things away from the house and the car by shouting and shooting bursts of the gun into the air.

  “Come get some Levi, you smelly assholes,” he shouted over the wind.

  As I approached, I counted. Ten. Levi had taken on ten of these monsters by himself. I took a deep breath, gripping the window breaker hard in one hand, ignoring the cold wind that ripped through me and froze my fingers to the red plastic handle.

  If I hadn’t been sure before about pain causing the transition between human and whatever stood before me, I was sure now.

  Pain. All these people had suffered it before they weren’t people anymore. It was easier to see on some than on others. An arm held at an unnatural angle, or a metal fork stabbed into an eye and a shard of glass protruding from the center of a woman’s chest were the worst. The others were subtle. Most of them were bite marks, deep and coated in blood, black and red alike. One or two were almost indiscernible as monsters, and the only way I could tell at all was the lifelessness of their eyes and the jerky way in which they walked.

  But other than the smell of blood and the laughter, what turned my stomach the worst was the way they moved. Still broken and jerky, but smoother than the bodies at school, more controlled, more understanding of how to move. Time must have been a key in the monster’s development.

  I glanced back at the house, wondering where Izzy was and how long I’d been asleep.

  Bullet holes with fairly new patches of blood sprouted out of the back of tattered clothes that told me Levi hadn’t only shot into the sky.

  Black blood. The same blood that had coated Izzy and me after the police station.

  I went unnoticed while Levi distracted them with bullets shot into the air and shouting rude things about their mothers, which almost made me laugh. They didn’t seem to know what to do, and I wondered for a moment why didn’t Levi just shoot them if he was wasting his bullets on the sky. Why not just kill them instead of luring them away?

  But then I had a thought, staring at the very human head a few feet in front of me. Whoever it was had been younger than me, thirteen at the oldest, her black hair braided tight to her skull with the beads in the ends that clacked together when she moved. The hammer in my hand turned frigid. She was a kid. Despite the blood on her jacket from where she’d been bitten and chewed on, she was still a kid, laughing like a maniac but still a kid.

  God, was I supposed to kill her?

  That’s why Levi hadn’t shot them to kill. They were people. Had once been people. It felt wrong to kill them, so wrong I thought my stomach was going to churn until I threw up.

  At school, that first one we’d confronted, that had been life and death, instant with no time to think about it. Same with the thing that wasn’t my dad anymore and the police officers. They’d all tried to hurt, kill and eat us. There had been no time to think, and when there was time to think, locked away in relative
safety, we didn’t want to think about it.

  I knew, I knew, it wasn’t that little girl anymore, that she was gone and the braided head in front of me belonged to something that would try to chew my face off if it got the chance.

  And at that moment, the man with the broken arm got over whatever was keeping him from going closer to Levi, and he lunged, the others suddenly gaining the same courage, and I brought the hammer down . . . literally.

  The weighted metal ripped through her scalp and cut into the top of her skull, the blackness that was the blood-filled inside of her skull stared back at me as I jumped away from her collapsing corpse. I ripped the hammer out of her head as she fell, the snow turning a blackish-crimson. The same color that now coated my skin. I pushed aside the worry about the blood coating my hands.

  “Connor!” Levi’s voice cut over the laughing. “What are you doing?”

  The undead nearest, the man with a fork in his eye lunged at me. I made a strangled noise and the window breaker around, the sharp metal cutting into the crook of his neck where it met the shoulder.

  “Helping you!” I managed as blood spurted out and the thing grunted, stumbling and hitting at me, the fingernails of its hand scraping across my shoulder, but not tearing through the fabric.

  “I had it under control!”

  I thought about yelling something back at him but thought better of it as the creature started moving again. I yanked the window breaker out of the creature’s shoulder and brought the hammer on his head.

  Levi shook his head, and kicked one in the chest, sending it to the ground before shooting it in the head.

  The hammer wouldn’t come out. I yanked on it, but it had stuck, jammed between two shattered pieces of bone, and it ripped out of my hand as fingers closed around my arm, nails digging into my sleeve, its other hand gripping the back of the jacket. I flailed away from it, but it’s grip on my coat held. I wiggled my arms out of the sleeves, letting the thing fall back with my coat in tow, ignoring the frigid air that engulfed my bare arms. I took a step into what I thought was free space, but the next thing I knew more hands were on me, and before I could blink I was swarmed.