Laughter of the Undead Read online

  I swallowed hard and stumbled away from the both of them, overflowing with horror that ran down my forehead in the form of sweat. My heart pounded so hard it hurt the inside of my chest, but it wasn’t loud enough to drown out the laughter that popped up from the dead bodies on the floor.

  So I ran.

  I ran past the bodies and past the kids still running, just like me, and screaming, and past the laughter surrounding me.

  When I crossed a hall intersection, a spray of bullets exploded over my head and I fell on my face, my heart leaping too far up my throat for me to scream. I blinked wide-eyed at the dead boy next to me and scrambled forward at a crawl until I was out of view of whoever had shot at me, got on my feet, and ran again.

  I needed to get where no one could find me, the thought running over and over in my head until, turning another corner, I saw my solution.

  I wanted to beeline for it, but a particularly close scream caught my attention. I ran instead to do an idiotic thing, unable to ignore it after knowing, or even just thinking, there was something I could do. A boy cowered against a wall, covering his head with his arms while three dead people grasped at his arms and hair, giggling. I should have run, but I couldn’t, so instead, I kicked at them. I yanked on the back of one's shirt, pulling it away from him hard. He stared at me stupidly and I yanked him to his feet.

  “What do you think you’re doing!” I bellowed in his face. “Come on!”

  I went to pull him with me toward the salvation I’d found, but one of the things I’d kicked in the face had his ankle. He screamed, curling against me as the thing— I couldn’t tell who it had been before it died, its face all but shot away, one arm missing— tried to sink its human-looking, braces-covered teeth into his leg.

  I yanked him back too hard and he fell. Even though I’d successfully freed him from the thing’s reach, when he landed on the hard tile, his wrist snapped with an audible crack that set my teeth on edge.

  I pulled him to his feet, not realizing how limp he’d gone. I shook him, but he didn’t respond. I kicked at the monster again, shaking the kid and shouting at him, but he’d gone still.

  And then he started to giggle.

  What the shit?

  When I realized how perfectly his laugh blended with the things on the ground and saw the blankness behind his eyes, I dropped him next to his friend, who had been trying to eat him, and ran.

  A maintenance closet was my salvation, left open when the janitor had been shot taking out his trolley to sweep the floors. He was still slumped across it, his arm hooked around the broomstick, hand trailing in the gray mop-water. Sickness roiled in my stomach from guilt and horror as I pushed him and his trolley away.

  I barely took the time to check the room before I went in and slammed the door behind me, plunging myself into darkness.

  I took a step back, staring at the door cloaked in new darkness, and sat, my back against a wall, accidentally knocking some brooms with my elbow.

  I caught them before they hit the ground, heart in my throat from a noise way more terrifying than it should have been.

  “You’re dreaming,” I whispered to myself, pressing my head against the no doubt germ-covered wall behind me. But germs were the least of my problems, weren’t they?

  But I wasn’t dreaming. This wasn’t what dreaming felt like. I couldn’t be asleep. It was too real and more than even my damaged mind could ever construct.

  This was real, I was grounded, and I could still hear laughing. Hear the dead kids laughing, that boy I’d tried to save and that girl in the too-big pink shirt, all laughing as if they were glad this was happening.

  Glad to watch the world collapse.

  Suddenly, the door handle rattled. I tried not to scream and pressed myself even harder into the wall, holding my breath until the door opened.

  Two

  Izzy

  March 4th - 7:08 a.m.

  Snow-covered the toes of my rain boots, the red ones I liked to wear despite the weather. They made me feel unique.

  Though I was un-unique in the fact that I was freezing. Everyone was freezing. Snowstorms tended to do that.

  Cold air followed me up the bus steps, and I sacrificed my hold on the rail for the warmth my pockets provided.

  I smiled at Mr. Carver, trying not to shiver in my slightly-too-thin coat.

  “Morning, Izzy,” he said, as tired as I felt.

  “Good morning, Mr. Carver,” I chattered, blinking snowflakes off my eyelashes.

  I stopped as I passed him, bracing my hand on the seat front ahead of me, and scanned the rows upon rows of kids with puffed out cheeks as the bus started its gentle, jarring roll forward.

  All the seats were full, leaving only two places I could sit. My only remaining choices were two of the greatest evils: Darren Liles and Samuel Goodard, or as I like to call him, Not-So-Goodard.

  Each one was a distinct representation of people I had an overwhelming urge to not sit with. Especially Sam, our school’s number two football player, and number three on my least favorite person list.

  He hadn’t been here all last week, and while I don’t talk to anyone, I listen well enough to figure out why. Sam had picked a fight with the world’s most terrifying person, Levi Graves, and had come out the other side nearly a week later with a bruised face and scabbed-over split in his lip.

  When the pair saw me and my dilemma of having no options other than sitting with one of them, they exchanged disgusted glances, and as if they had telepathically communicated, Darren stood and darted to sit beside Sam before Mr. Carver saw.

  At least I got to sit by myself. If I had to sit with Sam, I might’ve imploded.

  I’d been glad for his absence.

  Well, he was back now, and Not-So-Goodard stuck his leg out across Liles's to trip me, meaning he desperately wanted to be a butt.

  I hopped over it and made it to my seat without falling on my face. Score one for Izzy. Resisting the urge to stick my tongue out at him, my childlike version of the bird, I swung my messenger bag over my shoulder, dropping it into the seat with a dull thud, and fell beside it. I flipped open my bag and pulled out Pride and Prejudice.

  It took me a minute to bring myself to a reading mindset, but as soon as I was, I opened it up to my old red, overused bookmark and started to read.

  A few minutes passed in peace until we stopped again and the ultimate evil got on.

  Connor Storming.

  Connor Storming’s eyes are stormy, much like his name, and his hair is black,

  much like his soul.

  He wore a coat which more or less engulfed him, and when he pulled the ridiculous fur-lined hood down, his dark face was flecked with snow and tinged with the red of cold.

  The ultimate evil stopped by the two lesser evils and said something I couldn’t hear as the bus started again.

  “Sorry, dude,” I hear Darren say, “Sam was the last seat open besides Frizzy.”

  Frizzy, my wonderful nickname, which I hate with all my heart. The only thing I hate more than my nickname is Connor Storming.

  He had convinced himself, and everyone else, that he is not a jerk. Everyone thought he was amazing. Mostly because he plays football and basketball, which I’m not even sure is possible but he does it anyway.

  Half the girls in school think he’s hotter than the sun, but he can’t be hotter than the sun because then he would be 15 million degrees Kelvin, and dead and out of my life . . . and now I’m off track.

  In simple terms: I don’t like him because he’s a jerk.

  But I do have a more personal reason for disliking him. Connor used to be my best friend. We did everything together— built snowmen, played pirates in the creek, read comic books together, everything best friends do when they’re little. But in sixth grade, something happened.

  It could have been something I did or something that happened to him, I don't know, but he cut me out of his life entirely and we were never friends again. I doubt he remembered or cared
now that he was Mr. Tall-Dark-and-Perfect and I was still chubby little Frizzy.

  What made this even more annoying was that his stupid face was actually incredibly attractive. All the girls I heard in the bathroom swooning about how incredible it was to look at Connor Storming weren’t wrong. He was super tall, like six foot three tall, towering over me and most of the other kids he walked past. He had an amazing combination of black hair that today was so perfectly messy he must have spent hours with a bottle of hair gel. He had one brilliantly blue-gray eye, and another brown one so dark it was almost black, and a bronze skin tone which made his blue eye sparkle. He had thick but not bushy eyebrows and ridiculously long black eyelashes that any girl would envy. Every part of his face fit together to make the amazingness that was Connor Storming.

  Which ticked me off.

  From years of being his best friend, I knew he had mostly Native American heritage. His grandfather had been born on one of the reservations in the West.

  When I was little, I spent a lot of my time at Connor’s, and I’d met his grandfather, who had told me to call him Grandpa Anoki, the same name Connor called him. He would sit in the old rocking chair in Connor’s living room, the two of us at his feet, and tell us both wild stories about how the raven stole the sun to make daytime.

  “Grandpa, can you tell the one about the butterfly?” Connor would beg, tugging on his grandfather’s pant leg. “Izzy’s never heard that one.”

  Connor was the spitting image of his father, and his father was the spitting image of Connor’s grandfather. The only difference was the age lines and his hair. Grandpa Anoki dressed like he was always just coming back from an interview. He wore his hair long and pure white, held back in a ponytail by a studded black leather hair wrap, and he always absentmindedly fingered the large pendant held around his neck by a leather cord necklace he always wore.

  He’d raise a wrinkled eyebrow at me, “You haven’t?”

  I had, multiple times, but I liked Grandpa Anoki’s voice and I liked the story. He smiled like he knew and would tell it again anyway.

  We’d sit like that for hours, Connor and I listening intently to all the wild stories from his culture until Mrs. Storming would tell us to let him rest and make us pancakes for dinner before sending us to bed upstairs.

  We used to have sleepovers all the time, because when you’re six and seven it doesn’t matter, considering it was before you even learn what cooties are.

  Connor and I would sleep in his bed with our heads at opposite ends, often pressing the soles of our feet together and talking well after his mother turned off the light.

  Sometimes we’d even get out of bed and go by the nightlight in the corner to read comics. We liked to assign each other parts and do the voices of the characters.

  Toward the end of our friendship, as we got older, Connor lost interest in the stories, wanting more and more to play other games and not sit by his grandfather’s feet. But I never did. I probably still could listen to that old man talk. The sleepovers stopped, too, because they had to, and slowly everything else started to drop off as we reached middle school.

  I loathed Connor, and I didn’t loathe a great many people or even use the word loathe often at all. I disliked all the football players I’d met because they all have the same particular mean streak and are cut from the same cookie dough. But I have a particular aversion to Connor. It is hard, though, because some part of my brain always wants to remember who he was and forget who he’s become.

  Did I mention “who he’s become” also involved him being incredibly hot, and in a way incredibly hard not to notice?

  “You know the drill, man,” was Sam’s answer. Then he said something which made a lot less sense. “We look out for each other unless we decide to be shellfish.”

  Shellfish? Apparently, they’re shrimp now, I thought, which gave me a strange image of the three of them with shrimp bodies and their own heads.

  He obviously hadn’t said anything about shellfish, but I had to push down a giggle anyway.

  I knew Storming would have to sit with me. Every other seat on the bus already had two people, and unless he wanted to sit in Liles’s lap, which I kind of wanted to see, he would have to find somewhere open. Not that he had to search far.

  It was only a couple more seconds till I heard, “Um, can I sit here?”

  In the seat behind me, I could hear the girls giggling. I had to resist the urge to roll my eyes.

  “I’ll trade with you, Frizzy,” one girl whispered between the wall and the seat. I ignored her.

  “Uh-huh,” I answered as if lost deep in my book, which I would not be able to concentrate on with Mr. 15 Million Degrees Kelvin sitting next to me and two ditzos giggling in my ear the whole way to school. Storming sat on the farthest edge of the seat as if to get as far away from me as possible, his backpack in his lap.

  After a minute or two of awkward silence, and quiet Connor-fawning from the seat behind me, he started shaking one of his legs, a nervous tick he probably wasn’t even aware of. He’d always done it and I knew from years of experience he was about to try and do something he wasn’t entirely sure he wanted to do. I guessed he wanted to start a conversation and was debating it heavily in his own head.

  I guessed right.

  “So, what are you reading?” he asked. I didn’t reply but gave Connor a look that made him shift in his seat so awkwardly I almost felt sorry for him, but then that was interrupted by a bitter thought. That’s what you get for expecting everyone to love you.

  He turned away and I turned back to my book again and actually tried to read, throwing myself at Liz Bennett and her Mr. Darcy problems.

  I closed the book and set it in my lap as the bus turned around to the school’s rear where they’d drop us off. I stared out at the kids climbing from their cars in the parking lot, bundled in their coats under a gray sky spitting snow.

  Connor Storming, not surprisingly, was the first off the bus. Eager to get away from me, I’m sure.

  But I took no offense. I’d become used to being ignored, and I acted casually. Not in the way where someone shouts “act natural” and everyone strikes the most unnatural position possible, but the kind where I appeared or hoped I appeared, unfazed.

  Reluctantly, I stood, struggling into the tide of other students streaming off the bus, and rushing through the cold into the heated building.

  As with my usual morning, I lowered my head when passing most people. It wasn’t hard. Most people ignored me or bumped into me without apologizing. I was invisible and always had been.

  Well, invisible to most people.

  "Hey, Frizzy," I heard as I tried to duck around a corner. Before I could make my cinematic-worthy escape, a hand snagged my backpack and yanked me back hard enough that I stumbled.

  Seething, I whirled and shoved an escaped lock of hair away from my face, which was now level with a makeup-covered blonde and grinning cheerleader.

  “What?” I demanded. I knew the face and the makeup plastered on it. Kimberly Haymen was possibly my least favorite person besides Connor Storming. While in all honesty, the worst thing Connor had ever done to me was ignore me, I would literally give a finger to have Kimberly Haymen leave me alone.

  As with Connor, I’d been going to school with her as long as I could remember, and she has never once in my life given me a break.

  She crossed her arms over her considerable chest and leaned one shoulder against her locker. "How’s the book, Frizzy?"

  I fought the urge to roll my eyes. Few people had used that name to my face since middle school. It was a stupid name which wasn’t actually at all clever, no one won any awards for that one, but I knew Kimberly and her group still used it.

  “What do you want, Kimberly?” my voice came out more exasperated than I had meant it too, but I was glad.

  "Aw, Frizzy, I was just wondering . . . "

  Kimberly’s boyfriend, a huge football player whose name I never bothered to learn, appeared over
her shoulder, “Come on, Kim, leave the freshman alone.”

  I’m a senior, I thought, biting the inside of my cheek hard enough to draw blood, though admittedly a small one.

  I’d gotten used to Kimberly and wasn’t scared of her like I had once been, but her boyfriend made me nervous. He could do anything to me and I couldn’t do jack about it. He could football toss me down the hallway and not blink an eye.

  Kimberly pouted, and before I could react, smacked my book out of my hand.

  “Hey!”

  Kimberly snatched it from the ground beneath my feet, handing it over her shoulder to her boyfriend, who started flipping through the pages, raising his eyebrows in fake interest, all feigned niceness gone.

  "This by Shakespeare?" he asked. "Romeo, oh, Romeo, wherefore art thou, Romeo?"

  You could practically hear the uncapitalized letters in his grammar.

  "What did you have for breakfast?" I wondered. "Idiot juice or an extra helping of scrambled moron?"

  He snarled at me and threw my book back at my feet.

  "You’re going to have to stop reading those books," Kimberly said, tutting, her smile a little less huge. "It’ll make your eyesight bad, then you’ll have to get glasses, and glasses will make your pudgy little face even uglier than it already is."

  I snatched my book from the floor, straightening the pages and fighting the way my eyes started to burn. I hated it when Kimberly actually managed to make me cry. It wasn’t often anymore, but today was already bad. I hated Kimberly and her boyfriend, but before I looked back from the bent pages, I took a deep breath through my nose and blinked the burning away.

  "Say whatever you need to make yourself feel better about your boyfriend cheating on you," I said, smiling. I was uncertain if she knew, though I don’t understand how she couldn’t. People talked about people like Kimberly Haymen all the time, and I listened. Well, I’d heard her boyfriend had cheated on her, and now so had she.

  I didn’t wait for Kimberly to react before turning and walking away down the hall as fast as my short legs could carry me.