Laughter of the Undead Read online

  They were moving faster now that they saw I was unarmed and unprotected by the thick fabric. They were smarter than I thought. The first one pulled me back, and I shook my arm and pushed away at its face, sticking my fingers into its eye sockets. It didn’t seem to even notice. Another grabbed my arm in both hands and pulled it to its mouth. I yanked back, not managing to loosen its grip but keeping the oddly white teeth from digging into me. A third grabbed my hair, yanking it so every follicle screamed in protest, pulling my head back, exposing my neck to the chomping teeth and raking claws. It was going to try to bite my neck and I couldn’t help but see my mom, limp and dead in the bathroom, half of her neck eaten away.

  “Levi!” I screamed before a fourth fell on me, sending me completely to my back in the snow, the air and ground so cold I hurt too much to shiver. I tried to flail, scrunching my shoulders on either side of my head so it would be harder for the things to bite my neck, but it only made the pain in my scalp worse. They were biting my legs and my feet and my chest, and it hurt like hell, but the fabric of my jeans was protecting the teeth from touching actual flesh.

  And for a moment, I forgot they had taken my jacket and I thought I was safe, so focused on keeping them away from my neck, that I forgot about my bare arms.

  Forgot until one bit me.

  I screamed, the pain giving me enough strength to shove it away.

  BANG!

  The screaming pain on my scalp vanished as the thing pulling on my hair died with a final giggle as a bullet from Levi’s gun collided with it.

  “Took you long enough!” I snapped, wriggling away from the nails digging into me and the teeth biting uselessly at fabric.

  Gaining my strength again I ripped my arm away from the one that had bitten me, blood dripping out of the wound and landing in my face. I bucked again, punching the monster on top of me as hard as I could with my injured arm.

  My glasses were gone, lost somewhere in the moving and the cold and the pain, and I didn’t notice till now that the world was all a blur and mash of colors.

  I heard a smack as a dark-clad figure that must have been Levi kicked the other monster hard in the head, its neck snapping back and staying there. The laughter emanating from its mouth stuttered like a scratched CD playing the same sound over and over. Levi shot the undead in the head and then shot the other one that, done with me, had reached its arms toward Levi.

  I closed my eyes and rolled over forcefully to get away from the two that were still holding me down. Opening my eyes again, I saw that I lay alongside the man with the fork in his eye, discernible by the glint in the sun on the metal. I could see the color of the window breaker. Thank god it was red otherwise I would have missed it. I grabbed it and yanked. It wouldn’t budge, still lodged into the side of his head. One of the two corpses behind me grabbed my leg and started to drag me back through the snow toward it. I refused to let go of the weapon, tugging on it even as I was tugged.

  I could feel the fingernails through my jeans. Digging into the fabric and my skin. With a sound of desperation, I gave the window breaker a final yank at the same time two more hands gripped my other leg and pulled twice as hard.

  The tiny hammer ripped out of his skull with a disgusting squelch. As I slid backward I rolled onto my back and brought the weapon down as hard as I could on the first object that remotely resembled a head. That laughter died. The hammer pulled out easily this time and I swung the window breaker around making contact with the other laughing object’s head.

  More shots rang through the air and I wondered for a moment what Levi was even doing while I tried not to get eaten alive, but he was probably killing the few that hadn’t attacked me. But Levi had a gun, and I had a tool meant for breaking a quarter-inch of glass and no vision.

  But with that final blow, the laughter stopped.

  Still and the lying in the snow, I collapsed and stared at the gray sky that I could barely make out, and gave a sigh of relief.

  The black shape came into my view. It offered a peach-colored object that I guessed was a hand.

  I extended my good arm and grabbed it, allowing Levi to pull me to my feet.

  “Need these?” In his hand, he held what vaguely resembled glasses and it took a moment of consideration to not lean two inches away from his hand to actually tell what they were. I took them. Miraculously they were still intact.

  I put them on and the world came back to instant focus.

  “Wow.” I blinked at him. “Did you know you have a face?”

  The face he probably knew he had frowned at me.

  “You were just kind of a fuzzy white person-like thing before I put glasses on, so thank you.”

  He made another confused expression, but nodded anyway, turning back to the bodies we had left littered in the snow. “No problem”

  “I’m amazed they aren’t broken,” I said, pulling the blood-covered hammer from the snow, choosing to ignore the fact that my hands were also covered in the black blood. “Can you imagine being in one of those glasses commercials and come in with broken glasses, ‘Mom I broke my glasses fighting zombies again?’”

  Pain twinged through my arm again, but I ignored it at first, trying to continue my joke tirade, but gasped when the pain slammed into me at the same time that I remembered I was cold. The heat of the moment had warmed me and distracted me enough that they hadn’t seemed important.

  The blood wasn’t just from the creatures. It was fresh and red and streaming down from the bite marks ringed into my skin below the crook of my arm.

  “Damn,” I hissed, dropping the axe into the snow and clutching over the wound to try and staunch the bleeding, but it did nothing, seeping through my fingers and staining my hand.

  “Shit, Connor.” His eyes fell to my hand and the blood dripping onto the snow. “It got you. One of them got you.”

  “Yeah,” I grunted, wanting to sound joking, but there wasn’t enough of me that wasn’t hurting to muster a joking tone. “A little bit.”

  “Why are you bleeding so much?” Levi wondered, voice pitching on the verge of panic.

  My vision swam and my balance wavered. Everything turned fuzzy as my vision doubled. I tried to say something to Levi, tell him I needed to sit down, but my breath caught in my throat and it took me a second to remember how to breathe. I wanted to sit down, but as I tried, my legs turned to water and I was on my knees in the snow.

  “Connor?” Levi knelt beside me, turning me to face him. I clutched at my arm, but I couldn’t make my hand stay clenched.

  The ground under my feet tilted, and I knew as my vision tunneled that I was seconds away from fainting. I must have lost more blood than I thought, and having noticed the wound, my flight instincts were kicking in.

  I opened my mouth to tell Levi to catch me, but the world went black before I could.

  March 6th - 11:03 a.m.

  I was home.

  I don’t know how it happened, but I knew it before I opened my eyes. I knew it from the warmth and the feeling of my own couch and the smell of the cinnamon air freshener that you could only smell for a few moments before it faded again.

  I was home.

  I opened eyes that felt like they’d been glued together and pushed myself up with a groan, blinking around until I saw Izzy sitting cross-legged in the chair by my feet. Well, it must have been Izzy, judging by the pink of her blouse and brown fluffs of her hair.

  I shook my head. “Hi,” I managed to croak. I cleared my throat, “What . . . happened?”

  A crack of white in the tan blob that was Izzy’s face told me she was grinning. She rushed at me, throwing her arms around my neck in a hug. “You’re okay! You’re alive!”

  “Yep. I’m 98.4 percent sure I am alive. And now you’re squishing me.”

  “Only 98.4?” She laughed and sat back.

  Pain, hot and sharp and everywhere, engulfed me. I groaned, having to put a hand down on the couch to try and keep from falling.

  Maybe I wasn’t so su
re about that 1.6 percent.

  I lowered myself back against the arm of the couch wincing with every movement, curling in on myself.

  “What’s wrong?” she asked, worry etched in her voice.

  “Ow” was all I said. Understatement of the damn century.

  “There is no way I hurt you that much by hugging you.”

  “No,” I wheezed, the pain squeezing my chest. “I just . . . feel horrible.”

  I looked down at my arm, where one of the things had bitten me. It was wrapped in a blood-soaked shirt. It throbbed violently.

  Izzy followed my gaze. “Sorry, it was the first thing I managed to pull out of my bag.”

  “You guys are so loud,” Levi moaned. I hadn’t noticed him in the chair closest to the head of the couch, but I glanced at him now as he sat forward, rubbing a hand over his hair.

  “Can I have my glasses back?” I pushed myself back into a sitting position, a small but severe headache forming over my left eye. I squeezed my eyes shut and rubbed my temple.

  “Here.”

  I took my glasses from her and reveled in the magic of vision.

  “Glad you’re awake,” Levi said to me, still sounding groggy. “We really thought you were gone for a minute.” I looked to the ground, not sure what to say. Another wave of pain washed over me and I moaned, doubling over.

  “Is he okay?” Levi asked, getting to his feet.

  “I’m good,” I croaked, giving a thumbs up, even as I looked at the swimming ground between my feet, taking deep shuddering breaths and trying to relieve the pain and nausea.

  “Come on.” Levi put one hand on my shoulder.

  Without straightening, I looked up at him.

  “We need to get you cleaned up and your arm still needs to be taken care of.”

  I nodded, swallowing and stood, wincing at the sharp pains that spiked their way up my legs. My knees buckled, but I caught myself.

  “Are you okay?” Izzy grabbed my arm to keep me from falling.

  “I don’t know. I feel sick,” I groaned. Izzy put my arm around her shoulder allowing me to lean my weight onto her, though she almost buckled under it until Levi took my other arm and most of my weight. I tried to put as much on my own feet, but my legs didn’t want to work.

  “Which room?” Izzy said through her teeth, my weight making her unsteady.

  Levi looked me over. “Bathroom. Let’s get the blood off you first.”

  “Yeah,” I groaned, gripping his shoulder tighter, and trying to take more weight off of myself as the three of us started our unsteady hobble to the bathroom. The bathroom where my parents had died. My stomach did something weird inside of me, more so than before, but I swallowed down the feeling and closed my eyes as they set me on the toilet with the lid down.

  Levi made a shooing motion to Izzy as if to ask her to leave, but she just looked at him with raised eyebrows and he sighed, “Fine, get the first aid kit out and put it on the kitchen table.”

  As she disappeared he knelt down in front of me to untie my shoes and work them and my socks off my feet.

  “Shirt?”

  It hurt to lift my arms over my head, so I bent forward wadding the back of my shirt so I could pull it off that way, but it still hurt like hell and I had to pause for a moment to catch my breath. Levi took pity on me and helped me take it off.

  I leaned back to undo my jeans, pushing them down so I sat naked save for my Superman boxers, which would have been awkward in any other situation if it wasn’t for the feeling of being seconds away from vomiting over the bathroom.

  But I still managed to laugh as he took my arm and helped me stand just enough to sit again in the tub. “Imagine any other circumstance with you stripping me in a bathroom.”

  He rolled his eyes.

  “Now that was a weird thing to hear.” Izzy appeared over Levi’s shoulder as he sat himself on the edge of the tub, turning on the water and the showerhead, holding it in his hand to spray his palm and check the temperature.

  “We were just talking about being naked,” I said to Izzy, earning a full blast spray in the face. “Hey!”

  “Oops,” Levi deadpanned.

  They left me to clean myself off, Levi saying he’d bring me dry, not blood-covered or soaking wet clothes.

  It took more effort than it should have to stand, but the warm water made the pain ebb a little. It helped clear my head. Why did I feel so horrible? I normally felt ill after I fainted, but this was worse than usual. I unwrapped Izzy’s shirt that was binding the wound and glared at the bite marks. I’d read somewhere that all human bites become infected, but what were we supposed to do if I got sick from an infection? There was no way to deal with that.

  I scrubbed at my face and arms with a washcloth, careful not to touch the ring of bite marks gouged into my forearm. It was swollen, and with the blood washed off it became obvious that my skin had darkened and purpled. It looked gross.

  We can figure this out when you have pants on. The black blood, the blood that had gotten on me from the things I’d killed, didn’t want to come off. The blood that was my own washed away from my skin almost the moment that the water hit it, but I had to scrub and scrub at the shit that had come from the veins of the non-living things.

  When I found myself reasonably clean, I turned off the water, and nearly fell out of the shower while I tried to grab a towel. Luckily I caught my balance on the toilet and was able to cover my junk before knocking on the door to see if Levi had brought me clothes.

  No answer. I scowled. Plopping on the edge of the bathtub to avoid losing my balance again, I opened the door.

  No one.

  “Um, guys!” I shouted, leaning so I could look into the hall. Nothing. I sighed and kicked at my clothes on the floor. They were dry but also covered in the blood that I had spent the last twenty minutes trying to get off of myself.

  “Hello?”

  What the actual hell?

  I stood shakily, holding the towel around my hips, hoping I wouldn’t drop it, and stepped into the hall. “Levi? Izzy?”

  “Come on, guys, now is not the time to go horror movie on me,” I muttered. Bracing myself on the wall, I walked farther into the living room.

  Sobbing.

  I stopped and listened harder, one hand against the wall, the other gripping the towel.

  Someone was crying. Tommy was crying.

  “Guys!” I shouted, and at the top of the stairs, Levi appeared in the doorway to my room.

  “What the hell is going on?”

  Levi looked lost. “Tommy, he woke up crying. Izzy’s in there with him, but he won’t stop, get up here.”

  “Um . . . ” and my “um” seemed to convey that I was naked and couldn’t walk more than ten feet without face planting on the ground.

  Levi made a hold on gesture and disappeared back into my room. A second later he appeared with boxers and a shirt that he tossed down the stairs to me. I grabbed it with my free hand and hobbled back to the bathroom to change as Levi came down the stairs.

  I did fall on my face trying to put my shorts on. I lost my balance and face planted against the door, earning an “are you okay” from Levi, who stood on the other side.

  “I’m fine,” I croaked out. My arms still hurt, and I got my shirt on with a lot of soft cursing.

  Levi helped me up the stairs, and into my room where Tommy was crying and wailing, his face buried in Izzy’s lap. When he saw me Tommy put his arms out as if wanting me to come to him, and I did. I sat on the bed beside Izzy and Tommy crawled into my lap.

  “What is it, bud?” I asked gently. His wailing died down into sniffling as I wiped tears away from his cheeks. “Did you have a bad dream?”

  He shook his head and took deep breaths. “I want Mommy. Where’s Mommy?”

  I felt Levi and Izzy’s eyes turn to me and froze at a loss of what to do. I wanted to scream and punch a wall as frustration coursed through me. Do I keep lying or do I tell him? Would he even understand?


  Before I found my voice, Tommy interrupted me. “Mommy’s not fighting monsters is she?”

  I swallowed. “No, buddy, she’s not.”

  “Are Mommy and Daddy dead?”

  I gulped and Levi put his hand on my shoulder comfortingly as I nodded. “Yes, Tommy, they are.”

  I held Tommy while he cried.

  He was four years old, he cried all the time. When he didn’t get the toy he wanted or when I got dinner first or if I got to stay up later than him. If I learned anything from having a little brother it was that they cried about everything. And before I was allowed to get annoyed with him, to tell him to piss off and later have Mom chew me out from cursing in front of him. I was allowed to mess with him and be a butt because he was my brother, and that’s how brothers are, but now? Now was different. I was all he had, and I had to take that place my parents had held. Something I had always taken for granted.

  And his crying was different. It wasn’t petty this time. These tears came from real pain.

  If I’d been strong enough, I would have carried Tommy down the stairs, but considering my legs could barely carry me, we decided not to risk it, and Levi carried him.

  For once Tommy didn’t protest Levi’s nearness, and made no movement to escape, just keeping his face buried in Levi’s shoulder, arms hanging at his sides.

  Izzy helped me down the stairs. “I'll get a book for Tommy,” she muttered, grunting a little under the weight I leaned on her, “then I'll have to ask the Google if there’s anything we can do to help with your arm.”

  I snickered, “The Google?”

  She gave her best Connor-impaired-shrug.

  She helped me sit in one of the kitchen chairs, before rubbing a hand over Tommy’s hair as he sniffled into Levi’s shoulder and disappearing through the doorway.

  Levi plopped my brother in the chair beside me, before sitting on the other side of me with the first aid kit from the day before in his hand.