Laughter of the Undead Read online

  “First aid?” I asked, eyebrows raised, putting my injured arm on the table. “For this?”

  “Well, it’s not like we can go to a hospital. They’re all dead, and I have to try something more than slapping on a bandaid and saying good luck.”

  “Yeah, I don’t think that would work too well,” Izzy muttered, appearing in the doorway, a stack of Tommy’s book in her arms. She sat in the chair beside him, setting the books on the table in front of him. “Do you wanna read something, Tommy?”

  Eyes still wide and teary, Tommy nodded and reached for one of those books about the kid that does all the stuff to get himself in trouble, including running down the street naked.

  Last time Tommy had read that he had ended up running around the house in just his diaper.

  I used to read it to him just to annoy Mom because it was funny as hell, but it also made him do all the other bad stuff the kid did.

  But right then I didn’t care. I let him open it up, mentally preparing myself to deal with screaming naked toddler, and turned back to Levi.

  While Tommy read, muttering to himself, Izzy came around the table to stand beside me. “Can I borrow a phone?”

  Levi nodded as if his mind was elsewhere and fished into his pocket, pulling out the touch screen and logging it in for her, seeming to know why she wanted it.

  Izzy snorted and turned the screen toward me. “What the heck, Levi?”

  I laughed at Levi’s phone’s home screen, which depicted a skeleton with a mustache and top hat.

  “Guys,” Levi rolled his eyes, “focus.”

  Still snickering, Izzy started typing something into the screen. “What am I even searching for? How not to die from a zombie bite?”

  “Please don’t.”

  “Fine. Treating human bite wounds. Oh, look, first option.” She cleared her throat and started reading in an authoritative-sounding falsetto that made both Levi and me laugh. “Clean the wound with mild soap and water. Rinse for several minutes under running water. Apply antibiotic ointment to prevent infection. Watch for signs of infection such as redness, pain, swelling, or pus. If you see them, get medical help right away. Well, Connor, for that last part blood-covered I’d say you’re screwed, but we can try the rest.”

  “I think it’s already infected,” I muttered, closing my eyes as my forearm throbbed at me. “I feel sick.”

  “You look sick,” Izzy agreed.

  “That’s the next problem.” Levi stood, going to the sink to cover a washcloth in water and hand soap. Once the kitchen smelled like the vanilla stuff Mom always bought in bulk. And by bulk, I mean, like, by the gallon. He came back and sat in his own chair.

  I coughed as he brought the cloth to my arm. “God, I'm going to smell like vanilla death bomb for months.”

  He rolled his eyes and dabbed at the raw wounds. I hissed, pushing down a scream. The pain before, while throbbing and constant, had dulled after the shower, but the soap pressing against bare nerves sent a sharp, searing pain up and down my arm.

  I gasped and gripped the seat under me, digging my stumpy nails into the wood, eyes squeezed shut tighter than was comfortable.

  Levi glanced at me and read the pain etched in my face. “Sorry, man.”

  I didn’t say anything, but I was grateful when Izzy squeezed my shoulder comfortingly.

  I took a shaky breath. “You’re good.”

  It must have been less than convincing, but neither of them said anything, and when Levi took the washcloth away and Izzy hooked an arm under my armpit to help me stand. My legs were stronger now, despite the pain that had decided it really liked my arm.

  We followed the directions and rinsed the wound off in the running water for a couple of minutes, bracing my hip against the counter. Of course, like everything else, it hurt like hell, and the water pressure broke any kind of scab that might have started forming, my blood swirling down the drain.

  “I’m melting,” I cried, the sides of my mouth twitching. “Melting!”

  “Yeah, and your little dog too. You’re stupid.”

  Honestly, being stupid was as much to make myself feel better as it was for Izzy’s benefit. She and Levi again helped me back to the seat following whatever steps Izzy read off to him from his phone.

  Finally, I cleared my throat. “Well, guys, I'm not going to eat you it seems.”

  Levi’s hand stalled in applying the disinfectant gunk from a tiny bottle. “What do you mean?”

  “I got bit and I didn’t change into a . . . thing.” I shrugged, trying to seem nonchalant.

  “That’s not . . . ” Izzy trailed off, setting Levi’s phone face down on the table. “That isn’t what triggers it. It can’t be. That girl back at school, she wasn’t bitten by anything. She was shot.”

  “I thought we’d figured out that the bug caused it. Isn’t that what’s happened with everything else?”

  Izzy growled. “I wish there was a way to find out more about what’s going on. About other people with the bug, and why doesn’t anyone else notice the bug.”

  “There’s always the news.” Levi pointed out.

  “Who wants to watch the news?” I grimaced, “that just tells us more of what we know: The world is falling apart.”

  “Maybe, but we don’t know how bad it is.”

  “You saw those things,” I hissed through my teeth as Levi wiped the water and blood from my arm incredibly gently with a washcloth. “That’s how bad it is.”

  “But that’s just in our area.” Levi didn’t look up at me as he applied a disinfectant wipe to the bites. “After the school shooting, all the undead kids had disappeared by the time we tried to leave. They could have gone out, hurt other people and made more zombies. That’s still just in our area, though. In other places, they wouldn’t have had such a bad outbreak of the Undeads. How many other schools do you think got shot?”

  I thought about what he said. If our assumption was correct, these Undeads were caused by some kind of pain. They weren’t really Undeads at all. Just people turned into mindless animals. Like their souls had been drained out, leaving just the carnivore.

  “But then there’s the other thing.” Levi continued, not looking at her but angling his question at Izzy, pulling a tube from the box, then committing to it, opened it, putting some onto his finger rubbing it softly against the wound, so gently that it almost didn’t hurt. “When you pointed out that bug, I hadn’t seen it until the moment you showed it to us.”

  “Yeah,” I agreed, brow furrowed in thought, unable to take my eyes away from Levi’s hands on my arm. “I remember looking at her but not seeing a thing. And it was bright green, how could we have missed it? I didn’t see it until you pointed, and then it just popped into being there.”

  Izzy frowned and rested her chin on her arms.

  “I’m not sure. I think you are both just blonde.”

  “Blonde?”

  She frowned and muttered something in a language that was not English. “Blind, that’s the word.” Izzy rubbed her eyes and sighed. “Maybe it’s my magical girl powers.”

  Levi rolled his eyes, pressing a cotton ball to the wound in my arm, and wrapped gauze around the whole thing. “There has to be another explanation.”

  “Obviously. There’s no way she actually used magical girl powers, Levi.” This earned me a flat glare. “But even if there is,” I winced as he pulled the gauze into a tight knot, “there is no way we can find out. We aren’t scientists. We can speculate all day, but we still don’t know anything for sure. Everything will still just be guesses.”

  It took me a moment to realize but Levi still had his hands on my arm, gently enough that I don’t think he noticed. I pulled my arm away from Levi, bending my elbow, to make sure I still had circulation. He put the used supplies back into the box, and set it on the counter.

  “I still say the news is the best option if we want to know what’s happening with the zombies,” he repeated.

  “Stop saying that,” I muttered.r />
  Levi raised a single eyebrow in my direction. “The news?”

  “No.” I shook my head. “Zombies. They aren’t zombies. They’re these walking, controlled, cannibals, but they aren’t zombies. As Izzy said, zombies are brought back from the dead by necromancers and eat brains. That isn’t what these things are.”

  “Controlled cannibals,” Izzy muttered thoughtfully. Her gaze fixed somewhere over my shoulder. “They’re controlled by the stupid bug.” Her gaze refocused and she looked at me. “Why not just call them ‘bugs’? That’s what they are, it’s like they are the bugs. And it’s better than saying zombies.”

  I pursed my lips. “I dunno. We could just call them Things. Like with a capital T?”

  “Why do we even need a name for them?” Levi paused in cleaning off the table.

  “Because I don’t want to call them zombies, because they aren’t zombies, and calling them that makes all this shit feel like we’re trapped in some horror movie.”

  He just looked at me. “All right, fine.”

  “I don’t think we should call them bugs, though,” I continued, “the things that used to be people are just the puppets, the bugs are more like the puppet masters.”

  Izzy snickered.

  “What?”

  “Puppetmaster is a book by Heinlein written in the fifties, I think. It about these blob aliens that attach to people’s back and control their heads. Just laughing because if that doesn’t sound like what’s happening right now, then I’m a catfish.”

  Levi frowned at her. “I don’t even want to know where you got that phrase.”

  “We could just call them dead people.” I shrugged. “Even though they . . . aren’t actually dead, but whatever.”

  Izzy shook her head. “No . . . they’re not dead, they’re . . . they’re just people who aren’t people anymore. They’re . . . ”

  “Half here, half gone,” Levi muttered.

  I sighed, dropping my head onto the table, pressing one cheek against the wood with my arms in my lap. “This is an incredibly depressing conversation.”

  “Well,” Izzy said, crossing her arms over her chest and leaning back in her chair, “I don’t know about you guys, but I'm calling them the half-gone.”

  Levi pulled uncertainly at his lip ring and shrugged.

  Twenty-One

  Izzy

  Connor didn’t die. Which was a good thing.

  The days blurred together. He got sicker that night, his fever so bad he couldn’t walk for three days. The infection wasn’t something we could do much about, other than clean, but luckily, the infection left with his fever.

  It had been a terrifying three days, doubly so, because it seemed like the herd of what we had decided, after too much debating, to call “half-gones” was going to come back every night, though they never did.

  We lived in constant fear of outside and constant fear of what it would mean if we didn’t. The food Connor and I had gotten on our trip to the Food Dude would last us a while yet, but a while could be anywhere from another week to another three. Some days, no one was hungry. Especially on the days we watched the news.

  We limited TV days because the only thing ever on TV was the news.

  And it was always bad news.

  The world was ending, and we watched it on a flat-screen.

  At least, we did until the electricity stopped working. We knew it would with the power flickering, and no one else left in the entire town.

  Still, we were surprised when the lights never came back.

  We started using birthday candles and decorative candles that adorned the mantel for light. But those couldn’t last forever either.

  Everything seemed hopeless.

  Occasionally either Levi and I drew far enough into ourselves that Connor would notice, and help somehow like he had tried so hard those first days. He’d drag us all into a board game, or into reading something altogether, or spur of the moment cookie making with what little supplies we had.

  It mostly worked, forcing myself to laugh normally led eventually to actual laughter, and for a minute, everything would be fine.

  But when Connor broke, because we were all breaking every once in a while, neither Levi or I knew what to do or how to help. Neither of us could muster that false enthusiasm that was so contagious the way he could. So when it was Connor that drew into himself, the house got sadder. At first, we tried to give him space, but when that proved counterproductive, Levi or I or both of us would just sit near him. I’d often hold his hand or lean my head on his shoulder.

  That helped more than anything, the physical contact.

  The days became harder and harder to distinguish, with no schedule, and no deadlines, and no foreseeable purpose other than mindless survival.

  In moments of boredom, Levi would teach me some of the sign language he’d learned for his friend, Alec, the one that had died, and I’d teach him bits of Chinese, starting with curse words.

  As close as I got to Levi, I still knew almost next to nothing about him or his past or his family. In moments of babbling, he must have learned my entire life story. I knew exactly three things about Levi’s life before this house: he hated his dad, he was gay, and Alec had been his best friend.

  Connor took part in these lessons too. He was better at Chinese than Levi. He was way worse at sign language than me.

  “I never thought I’d say this,” Connor muttered one day when the three of us sat at the kitchen table with Tommy while I tried to help them with Chinese characters and writing them properly, “but I almost miss school.”

  Levi shrugged, “I miss what school meant. I don’t miss most of the people.”

  I frowned. “What did school mean?”

  Levi set down his pencil and cupped his chin in his hands. “School meant getting away.”

  We were straying into new territory. Connor remained oblivious and kept rewriting his name in Chinese, but I set down my own pencil and frowned at Levi, “What do you mean?”

  Levi sighed, “High school meant college, which meant getting as far away from here as possible.”

  Now Connor stopped and looked up at him. “Did you know where you were going?”

  Levi sighed, “Not far enough. I didn’t have the money to go too far. Alec and I were going to community college down the road, but we were going to get jobs and eventually go farther. Out of the state. That got me through dealing with all the assholes at school and the teachers that hated me.” Levi took a long breath, “What about you? Where were you guys going?”

  “I just got accepted to the University of Connecticut,” Connor told the table. “They wanted me to come play football. I wouldn’t be too far from home and I could still figure out what I want to do. What was it you were going to study, Levi?”

  Levi chewed on his lip rings. “Well, I wasn’t sure, but I wanted to do special needs education. Be an aid. I mean, I know sign language,” he shrugged, “or maybe just education.”

  Connor wrinkled his nose. “Really? You wanted to do education?”

  Levi shrugged, “I want to help kids with shit at home turn out better than I did.”

  I nudged him with my foot, “I like how you turned out.”

  He gave me a grateful half-smile. “What about you, Izzy? Where were you going?”

  “I,” I said, taking a deep breath, “was going to Yale.”

  “Yale?”

  It was my turn to shrug. “I didn’t have friends, so I never had anything better to do than homework, and study, and take practice entrance tests.”

  Given all that had been going on, I hadn’t had the time to even think about what I was losing in terms of college. Even though college had only been a few months out, it still felt like a distant, unimaginable goal. Now it wasn’t even a possibility. I hadn’t even thought about what I’d lost.

  “Holy shit, Izzy,” Connor laughed, “Yale. Do you know what you were going to study?”

  I shrugged again, “English, I guess. All I've ever
liked to do is read and talk about books, and you can get a degree in that.”

  They laughed and after a moment, I did too.

  That was a better moment, but there were many, many worse ones.

  A half-gone got in one night. I’m still not sure how, but Levi was the first to hear it, laughing as it limped into the house. He’d shouted for us to wake up.

  “Guys! There’s a fucking half-gone in the living room!”

  Connor and I both stumbled out of our respective rooms, bleary-eyed as Levi threw his shoes at the creature limping toward him.

  “How did it get in?” I snapped, shivering in my bare feet at the wind from the open front door blasting in through the house. Well, that answered my question.

  Connor was still half asleep and just blinked dumbly. “Did it open the door?”

  “Hell if I know,” Levi yelled, scrambling away as he ran out of shoes to throw. “Just close the fucking door and help me kill this thing.”

  I pushed past Connor and down the stairs. There were a few other half-gone wandering around in the early morning light, but none of them had made it into our yard. I slammed the door closed.

  “It must have leaned on the handle in just the right way or something,” I called over my shoulder.

  I turned, looking around for something to fight the stupid thing off with and nearly screamed when I found it inches from my face.

  I did scream as it swept an arm at me, that I successfully managed to dodge, and duck under, pushing it instead back against the wall, trying to buy myself time to find something to kill it with.

  One of the remotes smacked into its head.

  “Levi!” I snapped. “That is not helping!”

  The half-gone smelled horrible. Rotten and dead. I gagged, ducking another swipe.

  Levi appeared over its shoulder and slammed what looked like the tiny brass cross from the mantel by the TV over its head. The laughter caught and faltered for a second, but it wasn’t dead.

  It whirled on Levi, and Levi swung the cross again but missed its head entirely, only angering the thing further, and took a step back.