Laughter of the Undead Read online

  On my way to my first block English, I noticed Storming talking to Hannah, his ex-girlfriend, as he shoved his puffy jacket into his locker. This annoyed me for some reason.

  I never liked Hannah. She was a cheerleader like Kimberly, but she didn’t have the same mean streak, just no brain. Plus, she like, says like, like every other, like, word. Which, trust me, can get, like, really irritating, really fast.

  They’d been broken up for about a month now, and I only knew because everyone knew. Connor Storming's and Hannah’s private lives were public knowledge and for some reason, the two of them breaking up was a massive deal. They’d been dating pretty much as long as anyone remembers Connor existing, which started right after he abandoned me, but a great many girls were overly excited by Storming’s single status. As in there had been plotting to get in his pants. It had died down a bit over this last week, Storming apparently completely oblivious to the fact that he was being discussed by the majority of the female population, and at least some of the male population, like the best pig at the fair that everyone wanted a piece of.

  I glanced down at the book in my hand, vaguely disgusted that it had been defiled by the hands of someone who couldn’t tell the difference between Shakespeare and Jane Austen.

  Looking down in such a crowded hallway was a horrible idea, proven when I ran smack into someone and fell on my butt, the book falling once again on the floor.

  I cursed, blinking in surprise. Why was today so bad? First Connor, then Kimberly, now . . .

  I looked up at the darkly clad figure and he glanced down at me.

  “Uh . . .” I muttered, my face heating and a little jolt of fear coursing through me as I recognized who I'd just run into.

  “Oh, sorry,” he muttered and knelt to offer me a hand and pick up my book, which sat with the pages crinkling against the floor.

  “Man,” I said as he handed it to me. He turned it over and grimaced at the bent pages.

  “Sorry,” he said again. He had an oddly rough voice for a teenager, gravelly and deep, “bent pages are the worst.”

  “Um, yeah.” I wasn’t meeting his eyes.

  I knew him. Well, I didn’t know him, but I could put a name to a face. And a story to a name. Levi Graves. He was honestly one of the most terrifying people I’d ever met. Maybe it was the way he held himself or the odd sense of danger behind the roughness in his voice, or all the stories people told about him that made everyone afraid. He wore all dark colors, his lightest article of clothing a deep purplish-brown aviator jacket with a collar lined in faux fur. Levi’s face had about a million piercings— one in his eyebrow, on the side of his nose, on either corner of his lip, and up both his ears. He wore makeup, too. Not like some of his friends, with the black lipstick and dark eyeshadow, but subtle eyeliner and enough concealer and foundation on his face to make it a smooth canvas, erasing any blemish from scar to freckle. Though he couldn’t have been more than a year or two older than me, he was somehow on a totally different level. Monumentally more mature, like he’d seen and done things you shouldn’t as a kid. Things that make you not a kid anymore.

  But he was offering to help me up, and while I was a little nervous to touch him, I didn’t want to be nervous to touch him or be afraid of him just because of what other people said.

  Levi noticed my hesitation and his face hardened more, even though it hadn’t had many expressions before. I grimaced internally, took his hand a little firmly as if to make up for it, and allowed him to yank me to my feet.

  “Sorry,” Levi said for the third time, letting go of my hand and taking a step away. The split the crowd had formed around us widened in his wake. “I should have paid attention to where I was going.”

  “It was my fault.” I flashed a smile and looked in his face long enough to find that, when you met his eyes, he wasn’t so scary. His face softened and he smiled in a way that told me he didn’t smile a lot, a tight-lipped, forced grin that didn’t reach his eyes. But it was still a smile. His eyes were hazel, a little pouchy, and he had a nice face when it wasn’t twisted into a scowl, even if it did have the lip rings, and the way he tilted his head made the freckles on his ears catch the fluorescent lighting. Maybe he wasn’t some vampire lord of darkness. I smiled again and walked away.

  I hated my first class. I hated the smell of the air freshener. It reeked like the walls were made of gingerbread and it was so strong and such a warm smell that it made the room so humid it was a little hard to breathe for the first few minutes. I hated the fact that I sat in front of another of my least favorite people, Sam Goodard. Or Sam Terrible-ard, Sam Horrible-person-ard, Sam Major-jerk-ard. Either way, he was one of the few who followed Kimberly’s example and refused to leave me alone.

  Last but certainly not least, I hate Mrs. Flynn. She deserves a place on my least favorite people list. She walked in with the bell, red heels shining at the end of chicken-thin legs and red lipstick flashing on a wrinkly, old, withered face that's been forced into a permanent sneer. Red was Mrs. Flynn’s favorite color, and she always wore it in excess, not realizing that it was in no way her color.

  She dropped her red purse onto her desk, covered in red pens and red bound notebooks. She smiled up at the class with teeth too white and smothered in her lipstick as if she’d eaten a herd of small children for breakfast. Given Mrs. Flynn's general disposition, she probably had.

  “Good morning,” she wheezed in a voice that had to have been a result of smoking for the past thirty years.

  Most of the kids ignored her, some waved, some said “hi”, but most snored into their arms on the desks. I didn’t say anything. I wanted to dive back into my book and pretend Mrs. Flynn didn’t exist. But she didn’t like me reading during class, although this was English, and she let everyone else play on their phones.

  “How was your weekend?” she asked to a few half-hearted “good”s, “great”s, and snores. I rolled my eyes and rested my chin in my palm, imagining how nice it would be to pull out my book and find my place from where I’d lost it when I bumped into the Lord of Doom and Destruction in the hallway.

  But I knew I couldn’t. I knew how this class went, boring and horrible and always starting with the same gross mispronunciation of my wrong name. I’ve been going by Izzy, short for Isabella, basically my whole life, but my first name is Li Huan, the same as my mom’s mom. They call me Izzy so it doesn’t get confusing, also because people like Mrs. Flynn exist.

  “Leh Hoo-an?” she says, taking roll. You’d think after two months of the same conversation she would have figured out that I go by my middle name and have never once in my life gone by Leh Hoo-an. Sometimes I go by Li Huan at home, but my mom can actually say my name.

  “I go by Izzy, Mrs. Flynn,” I said, trying not to sound too exasperated

  “Hmmm . . . right. Did you read to page 150 last night?” Her voice was filled with a sneer. I resisted the urge to sneer back.

  “Um,” I dug in my backpack for the copy of To Kill A Mockingbird.

  Behind me, I heard a particular boy who never did anything mutter, “little miss perfect ain’t so perfect.”

  I yanked the book out and, perhaps a little too loudly, responded, “Yes, ma’am, I finished it.”

  Sam Needs-to-shut-up-ard scoffed behind me.

  Mrs. Flynn raised a painted eyebrow, “Oh?’”

  For some reason, she always had a hard time accepting that I was and always had been an overachiever, especially when it came to reading. Mrs. Flynn held a personal vendetta against me, although I’m pretty sure to this day that I was one of the best students she’d ever had, not like her class was hard. I guess she didn’t like me because I found her class easy. I was always the first kid she asked about reading homework. I’d actually finished the book about two weeks ago, but she always asked me. Same question. Every morning.

  “What about you, Sam?” she asked, moving to the moron behind me.

  He made a face that somehow conveyed his hesitation.

  I
resisted the urge to laugh.

  “You have been out for a week, Mr. Goodard, and you haven’t read any of it?” Mrs. Flynn asked, raising her eyebrows.

  I zoned out after that, as first block passed in a blur. The class wasn’t hard enough. It’s a stupid sentiment because everyone wants easy classes, but I want to be prepared. All A’s in high school may get me into the college I want, but an easy A won’t help me next year. I got into Yale, the school of my dreams, and I was ready to go, right then. I was tired of reading To Kill a Mocking Bird. I wanted to go to college, where they gave you books that actually mattered. I was tired of reading books about important things all written by old white people. I wanted to read Passing and The Color Purple and learn without the filter of high school and Mrs. Flynn’s narrow-mindedness. I didn’t have friends here. The students were all like mouth-breathing Sam Goodard behind me who couldn’t read twenty pages in a week.

  My second class was only different from the first because I didn’t hate it. The teacher was a teacher who was just there, and the class was a class that just existed.

  The only thing of note in the class was the sheer fact that I sat one seat over from Connor Storming, always bored or talking to the lesser of the two evils, Darren Liles.

  It was snowing harder than it had been this morning and wind made a whistling sound against the window. It made the room that was otherwise brightly lit feel dark and tired, a mood that was apparently affecting everyone else as well. No one wanted to work, not even our teacher.

  He put on a documentary instead of giving a lecture.

  As long as we were quiet, we were basically allowed to do whatever we wanted, so most people pulled out their phones and played games or did homework while the movie played in the background. The boys in front of me decided to watch the news, sharing a set of headphones, phone propped up so they could watch.

  "Holy shit, it’s like the zombie apocalypse," one boy whispered.

  The blonde woman on the tiny screen was frantic, talking faster than the subtitles underneath her were picking up. I couldn’t read all the words because the phone sat a little too far away, but I could read some of them, and the ones I read made me nervous— the kind of nervous you get when something bad is happening and there’s nothing you can do about it.

  Monsters, Infection, Rabid, Cannibalism, Death. I knew about the attacks. They were happening everywhere, and they weren’t random like people had originally thought because they all were exactly the same. Something, though no one knew what, was driving people insane and turning them into cannibals. More reports of cannibals had been coming in in the past few weeks than there had been in all of the past hundred years combined. People were literally eating other people alive.

  Particularly paranoid people prepared for the zombie attack and had already started stocking up on food and sealing themselves into bunkers. My mom hadn’t been worried. She said it was simply more zombie hype. I hadn’t been worried at first either, until a man who lived down the street from me went crazy and ate his son’s arm off, then ran into the woods completely naked. At that point, I was a little worried and started carrying a can of ravioli and a water bottle with me at all times. You can never be too careful.

  It was a boring, lulling kind of documentary and I dozed in and out to the monotonous soothing voice of the narrator, only drawn fully back into reality when I heard a tiny gasp from the girl beside me. Only half interested, I peered over right as she slammed a tiny piece of paper down on her desk, glaring at either Connor or Darren, it was hard to tell. Darren laughed, but Storming looked apologetic and horrified.

  Intrigued, I glanced down at the crumpled scrap of paper, reading what it said in the light from the film. It read, “Sup, Slut, think your master would be down with sharing?”

  My eyes widened. Had not a single filter in his brain stopped to think about how bad of a thing that was to say to an actual human person? I found myself glaring at them, too. Gross-minded and rude, that’s what they were.

  When the bell rang, I had nothing to pack up, so I stood before everyone else, filing out of the classroom behind the girl. Connor brushed passed me and I wanted to kick him, still fuming about that note, and it hadn’t even been to me.

  That’s when it happened. Walking out of the class like nothing was any different than ever before, it was the last normal moment of my life.

  Someone screamed. Not the kind of laughing scream that often filled the hallways, but a scream of terror, the kind of scream described as blood-curdling. The kind of scream that froze hearts in chests.

  The scream cut off abruptly, interrupted by an ear-ringing pop like a balloon exploding or a door slamming. But I knew instantly that wasn’t what it was. Someone had been shot.

  My brain must have temporarily shut off, panic making me rigid, and I didn’t remember what happened then, what went on around me, but I remembered some kind of internal alarm telling me exactly what this was. Telling me that I’d heard of this happening before. I knew what the scream meant and what the gunshot meant.

  There was a term for it— school shooting.

  The lockdown alarm hadn’t gone off yet. Why wasn’t it going off?

  I blinked, another scream snapping me back. I was mostly alone in the hall, the only people around me were Connor and Darren. Connor looked how I must have a millisecond before, vacant and terrified. Darren pulled at his arm, trying to elicit a response but getting nothing.

  “Izzy!” I turned to the science teacher hissing at me. “Get them in here. Come on.”

  I glanced back at Connor and Darren still in the hall, arguing, Connor’s bag discarded on the floor.

  “I have to help!”

  What surprised me most about that statement was the fact that it had come from Connor. That’s why I ended up following. If Connor Storming would risk his life to try to help, then so would I. I don’t know what Connor thought he was going to be able to do if there really was someone with a gun down the hall, but I followed anyway. Something wanted me to. I wanted to help, too, badly enough to risk myself, but the desire to not be one-upped in the good person contest by Connor Storming helped me decide to do something I would have shied away from otherwise.

  So I followed, running down the hall on the heels of Connor Storming and Darren Liles.

  I didn’t have to go far before I realized how stupid I was to think I could do anything.

  It was a dead body.

  Darren, Connor, and I turned a corner and nearly tripped over it.

  I would have added to the screaming, but it caught in my chest and all the sensation ran out of my arms and face.

  A dead body. A dead person. A girl. A pretty blonde cheerleader I recognized. I recognized her because I saw her stupid face every day, and every day I wished I didn’t. Kimberly Haymen lay dead on the ground. Oh God, a real human who I remembered being alive was dead.

  In front of me, Connor stumbled back into Darren, who let out a half scream and fell onto his ass on the tile. Kimberly had been shot. Blood covered the tile, pooling out from the red and black hole in the center of her forehead.

  “Con—” a voice started but cut off when there was an explosion of sound that must have been a gun going off.

  I forced myself to look up.

  There was a boy in the hall, brown hair and thick glasses with a gun in his hand. When my eyes met his, he scowled.

  “Get over here!” he snapped, his voice warbling, gesturing with the gun to the kids huddled in a row against the lockers. He was keeping them there.

  I’d been too focused on the dead body and not throwing up to notice. I obeyed his command, putting my hands on the back of my head, cursing myself. What the hell was I supposed to do against someone with a gun? I followed Darren and Connor, my knees shaking violently, Darren’s lip wobbling. I lowered myself to my knees next to him. He was shaking harder than I was. Had I just gotten myself killed?

  The boy keeping us all in line cleared his throat, a small trembling sound sq
ueaked out in a fear-manufactured falsetto. “Who’s next?”

  Kneeling on the hard, unforgiving tile beside Darren Liles, I clenched my fists behind my neck, regretting most of my life choices, including making the decision to try and mirror Connor’s bravery. Hah! Bravery. More like idiocy, because now we were all going to die by the hands of some self-pitying jerk-off with a gun. Everyone gets bullied. It’s no excuse to kill people.

  I mean, it wasn’t really Connor’s fault. I chose to follow him out of my own pride, and Darren chose to follow him, too.

  At that moment, kneeling on the tile, held at gunpoint, I probably should have been a little more freaked out and whimpering like Darren and the rest of the kids around us, but it felt too unreal. I hadn’t convinced myself this was actually happening yet. I was reading a book that I'd gotten way to immersed in. A book about a school shooting. That made more sense than the idea that this was an actual murderer holding an actual gun. That doesn’t happen. Yeah, but it does, all the time. Only, I never thought it would happen to me.

  The boy with the gun paced in front of the twelve of us lined against the lockers, muttering to himself, “They said this would be easy. They said it would be fun.” He paused for a moment and stared at the dead girl, then shook his head and continued, “They said they deserved it. They should have started by now.”

  I didn’t know who “they” were, but the words “They should have started by now” sent a shard of ice through my rib cage.

  “It’s not only him.” The realization struck me so hard I didn’t realize that I’d said it out loud until Darren’s head swiveled to me.

  His voice caught as he croaked, “What?”

  The shooter heard him. His head whipped around so fast I swear I heard something snap. “What did you say? Don’t talk. You can’t talk. I’m in charge! I win,” he laughed, hinging on hysteria. “Hah! I win. You all have to listen to me! Even Connor Storming!”

  I saw Connor tense in my peripheral vision and the boy with the gun leaned down so his face was just inches from Connor’s. “Hey! Hey, Connor. Say 'Evan is the greatest'.”