Laughter of the Undead Read online

  “Later, prostitute,” I said, waving as I grabbed my backpack from the floor. Darren’s friends laughed again and punched at each other to get the ball from Darren.

  “See ya, concubine.”

  I really didn’t like basketball.

  I loved to swim, though. I loved being in the water.

  However, I didn’t love the smell of chlorine, and it slammed into me when I opened the door to the indoor pool. My eyes immediately started to water and I resisted the urge to cough. They clean the pool every other Sunday and the chlorine was always overwhelming the next day.

  I dumped my stuff in my usual locker and went into the bathroom to change into the school-approved swim trunks.

  When I went back to the lockers, I was still mostly alone save for two other kids, freshmen who had been on swim teams since they were four years old and would probably be the next Michael Phelps. They saw themselves as monumentally better than everyone around them and they resented me because, after them, I had the fastest freestyle time. Which is apparently a crime.

  “Sup, Storming.” The taller of the two, Carter, I thought, nodded to me when I walked in, and the other one snickered. I didn’t respond and headed back to my locker by the door to the bathroom, top row three over.

  My locker, which was now full of stuff that wasn't mine.

  “Whoops, sorry, forgot that was yours . . . cause it doesn’t have your name on it . . . ” said the one who wasn’t Carter. I clenched my jaw, rolling my eyes so hard it hurt. It will have my name on it, I thought, in your blood if you don’t stuff your pie-hole.

  I grabbed my bag from where they had discarded it on the floor and moved to the other side of the room, stuffing my things into another locker. I ground my teeth to keep from grumbling out loud and retrieved my swim cap from my backpack.

  I brushed past the two jerk-wads and entered the pool room. The smell was a little less overwhelming now that I had been in the low exposure gas chamber that was the locker room.

  It was still early enough that the usual kids were only just starting to filter in, but I didn’t want to talk to anyone, still fuming about the Phelps wannabes. So, instead, I tucked my hair into the cap, yanked the goggles over my eyes, and threw myself into the deep end.

  It felt amazing. Ten feet under the water, I smiled up at the flickering fluorescent light above me. Before my own buoyancy could drag me back to the surface amongst other human beings, I floated over to the bottom of the stairs so I could hold myself here for another long moment.

  This is what I loved about the swim, those couple of moments where I could be alone in the water. Under the water, no voices, just the silence and pressure in my ears.

  But of course, I couldn’t breathe underwater, so I could only last a few seconds before my heart started pounding and I pushed myself up for air.

  When I broke the surface at first, ringing and the sound of my own gasps for air filled my ears. I lazily swam over to the edge and pulled my goggles down around my neck. Only then I saw that I hung onto the wall right at the feet of three giggling girls.

  “Oh, sorry,” I muttered, pushing back farther into the water, “didn’t see you.”

  “That’s okay,” one of them actually tittered. My face must have burned because they all found this hilarious for some reason.

  I pulled myself away along the wall and climbed out, uncomfortable because they were still staring. And giggling.

  “Dude, if I were you, I’d be preening.” It was Darren, and he draped an arm around my shoulder, careful to keep his body away so I didn’t get his clothes soaked. He winked at the girls.

  “Well, yeah, you’re a prostitute. Attention pays your bills.” I laughed and ducked out from under his arm. “Shouldn’t you be going to class or something?”

  “Probably,” he said, winking.

  “Go to class, man,” I muttered, face flushing as I realized the girls weren’t laughing at me in a rude way, and they weren’t ogling my face. I had an overwhelming urge to get back in the water.

  Darren laughed and, reading my mind, shoved me back in the pool before sauntering off.

  I sputtered, “Asshole!”

  “Love you, babe!” he called as he disappeared. One of the three girls waved at me, a twiddling-fingers kind of wave that made me want to run away. Instead, I pulled my goggles back onto my eyes and dove underwater again. When I resurfaced, he was the first thing I saw. Levi, dressed in solid black from head to toe. Levi Graves, the Dark Lord, the Grave, and Death himself, was tall and thin with hair so black it looked blue in the fluorescent light. Levi Graves was the same Dark Lord that had given Sam the black eye and gotten them both suspended. And I was apparently his bitch. For more than the way he dressed and the crowd he preferred, Levi walked around with the title “King of the Goths” over his head.

  Whatever you wanted to call him, he was terrifying. Pale as snow with eyes somewhere between a brownish-gold and green. Not particularly frightening features, but it wasn’t his face that made people afraid. He wasn’t the most extravagant goth at our school, or the biggest, or the loudest, but he somehow was still the scariest. Levi Graves was made of all angles and sharp edges and a perpetual icy calm, with intensely dark-lined eyes and a narrow mouth that curved downward as if the world itself pissed him off. Levi normally gave off a general air of “mess with me and lose an arm”.

  As thin as he was, though, it was apparent that the guy could throw a punch, judging solely from Sam’s still-swollen eye. They were roughly the same height, but Sam was thicker, with wide shoulders and arms like tree trunks, yet it was Levi that came out mostly unscathed.

  The girls stopped giggling and shuffled away to jump into the water, away from Levi despite the fact that they’d have to be in the water with him in a second anyway.

  I’d never held much of a conversation with him other than “hey, you dropped this” or “move your ass, Storming,” which he had growled at me one time when I stood in his way in the locker room. Levi scared me, but he was also just a teenager. A lot of people, those girls included, kind of treated him like he was an evil overlord among us.

  Other than the bruises he left on my friend, for reasons Sam probably deserved, I’d never actually seen Levi do anything to hurt anyone. I’d heard things, with varying levels of believability and horror. He’d been expelled X number of times, or he’d killed a kid, or been a major drug dealer, or been part of a gang. Who knew how many were true, but there were more rumors about Levi than he would have had time to live up to in eighteen or nineteen years.

  As the girls swam across the pool like a swarm of frightened frogs, I stayed where I was in the middle of the deep end, treading water and watching as Levi glared after them before he shouldered his bag and slammed into the locker room.

  I was the first out of the showers when the block ended, and I was dressed by the time the bell rang. My hair was still wet, but it would dry soon enough. I hefted my backpack and left the chlorine-soaked room, going through the gym and into the hall, relishing fresh air for the first time in an hour and a half.

  Continuing on with my monotonous and thus far uneventful school day, I ignored the gossip in the halls about who dated who, including a snippet of my own supposedly tragic break-up with Hannah. It hadn’t been tragic, rather sad and pathetic that it had taken me so long. But according to the not-so-conspiratorial whispers of random girl number twelve in the hallway, I was “heartbroken” about Hannah's cheating and, apparently, planning to confront Brad about it. Well, first I needed to have to confront myself for making such ludicrous plans. Brad hadn’t cheated on me, Hannah had. He’d broken the bro-code maybe, but we weren’t really bros. I didn’t particularly like him. She wasn’t a possession he’d taken— she’d gone to him, and she could stay with him for all I cared. They’d make a great couple. Hannah and I had been dating on and off for four years. The only reason it took such blatant cheating for me to break up with her was the fact that it had taken me this long to realize I wasn
’t the little dweeb I was in middle school and I didn’t need Hannah for self-confidence anymore.

  On most days I would not play video games on my phone in my biology class, but this cold, snowy, dismal day was an exception. Besides, today Mr. Erving had decided to show a documentary about lemurs for some reason, and there were enough kids in the class that a couple here and there could be on their phones without him noticing. Awarding myself for my many days of good behavior, I decided to be one of those kids.

  Also because Frizzy Dawson glared at me like I’d ruined her morning by sitting with her. Her eyes bore into the side of my head, and I feared that if I looked at her she might stab me to death. She was only one seat over, on the other side of a girl I didn’t recognize, and the lasers shooting out of Frizzy’s eyes were too strong to be drowned out by the narrator and his lemurs alone.

  I kept my eyes on my game and my headphones plugged in.

  “Hey, Connor.” Darren hissed, kicking me in the leg to get my attention. I pulled myself out of my zombie hunting and turned to him, cocking an eyebrow. “What?”

  “You seen the Grave this morning?” he muttered.

  I let out a hard sigh through my nose. “Don’t call him that.”

  He rolled his eyes at me. “Me neither. He wasn’t with his vampire cult this morning. Think he skipped?”

  “He was in swim class. Why would you skip after suspension?” I hissed back. “What does it matter anyway?”

  Darren rolled his eyes, a move normally admitting his defeat, but he still wouldn’t leave me alone, every couple minutes tossing a scrap of paper at my head that said something along the lines of “what up, ho” or “speak to me, concubine”.

  I subtly flipped him off.

  I suppose the next piece of paper was meant for me too, but for someone who’s on the basketball team, Darren’s aim sucked. He overshot. The crumpled paper landed one table over, right in front of a girl neither of us knew, the one between Frizzy and me.

  I exchanged “oh shit” looks with Darren as she opened it, an expression of horror and disgust crossing over her face, the glare on Frizzy's face deepening.

  I had no idea what Darren had written on the note, but by the girl’s and Frizzy’s faces, I didn’t want to know.

  The girl turned to look at me. I tried widening my eyes to convey “I’m so sorry” but she just flipped me off.

  “I’m sorry,” I hissed, but the girl huffed and turned away, done with me, crossing her arms over her chest. I caught Frizzy’s eyes. She shook her head at me like she’d read what the note said too, and, assuming it came from me, was disgusted. Because she needed to hate me more than she already did. On the other side of me, Darren subtly cracked up.

  What the hell had he written? It had to be worse than “what up, ho.”

  I put my phone away after that, feeling insanely guilty as I watched the last twenty minutes of the documentary, which should have given me the ability to tell you a lot about lemurs but all I learned is that most lemurs don’t like to “move it, move it”.

  When the bell finally rang, I swiveled in my seat to glare at Darren. He exploded with laughter, clearly having been holding it in.

  “What the hell did that note say?”

  He put up a hand, short of breath, and made an ‘I’m-laughing-so-hard-I-can’t-breathe’ motion. I rolled my eyes, standing. I glanced over my shoulder to catch both the girl and Frizzy glaring back at me.

  The girl stalked out of the room and I hurried to gather my things so I could follow her and apologize. Darren followed me, still laughing.

  Catching up with her halfway down the hall, I opened my mouth to explain the situation to the girl when my voice froze. A piercing scream tore down the corridor. Terror caught in my throat. I couldn’t breathe for a millisecond. Possibilities of what that scream could mean zipped through my brain too fast for me to recognize any of them and all I registered was BAD. Screaming was a bad thing and something you should avoid.

  Teachers stuck their heads out of classrooms and students froze as we all heard it, a BANG, like a giant balloon popping.

  Some of the teachers made beckoning motions to the kids in the halls, and students stumbled into classrooms, but I didn’t.

  The hall emptied again, leaving me alone, still standing frozen. Darren yanked on my arm viciously, saying my name over and over, but I wasn’t listening.

  I don’t know why I did it, why I didn’t go back into a classroom with everyone else, but some kind of extra instinct told my legs to move but in the wrong direction.

  My backpack fell from where it was slung sloppily over my shoulder and I started to run in the direction of the scream.

  “Wait, Connor!” one of the teachers called, trying to grab me as I darted past. But there was a reason I’d become such a good football player and his hand completely missed me. “Darren, Isabella, no!”

  I looked back over my shoulder and saw that Darren, and for some reason, Frizzy had followed me.

  Darren caught up and grabbed my arm, yanking me to a halt. “What in the name of all things holy are you doing, man?”

  I glanced at Izzy, but she still stood by the door Mr. Erving held open slightly as he said something to her. She shook her head and Mr. Erving sighed and slammed the classroom door, a clear message that the three of us were on our own.

  “I have to . . .” I started, but then someone else screamed. I tried to pull away, but Darren’s grip clenched iron on my bicep. “ . . . help, Darren. I gotta help.”

  “Hide is the H-word you want. What’s wrong with you? That’s not our job.”

  “You didn’t have to follow,” I snapped and yanked my arm away from him, turning on my heel.

  Was this stupid? Yes, mind-bogglingly so. Who knew what was going on out there? Something inside me told me I had to try and help somehow, whatever was the matter. So I kept running, forcing my legs to carry me toward the cry instead of away from it, like every bone in my body screamed at me to do.

  If the guy had a gun, maybe . . . I don’t know, maybe I thought I could throw myself at him, give someone else a chance to get away. Maybe I thought I could talk them out of becoming a murderer. I knew there was nothing I could do from inside a classroom, but maybe I stood a chance of helping. I didn’t want people to get hurt.

  Besides, a room in the midst of a lockdown sounds like hell. They turn the lights off and make everyone huddle together, and you have to be completely silent. I’m certain I’d have an attack. That dark and that quiet . . .

  It was my only option, to try to help. Do something, or lock myself in a room where I would definitely have a panic attack and never ever forgive myself.

  So, stupidly, I chose to do something.

  11:32 a.m.

  I couldn’t help it. I cried like a baby. Like a big baby. But could you blame me? My best friend just died, right in front of my eyes, and now people were shooting at each other and getting shot.

  Getting shot like Darren.

  I knelt in his blood. I was covered in his blood. I could feel it on my jeans, soaked through the knees and down my shins. Blood on my hands. His blood, my best friend’s blood, covering him and me and everything.

  And then there were the tears. I knew about the blood, but I didn’t care when I covered my eyes on instinct, smearing the red over my face. It burned. Just knowing it was there and why it was there burned and only made me cry harder.

  I wanted him alive. I didn’t want my last memory of him to be this blood-stained mess. This gray skin where it had been brown. Eyes with nothing behind them. Darren’s eyes. He’d always had so much life and now . . .

  When the arm came, I thought for a moment it was the boy with the gun come to choke me to death, and for a second I thought, “Why not?” Why should I get to live but not Darren? But then the arm became a comfort, squeezing my shoulder and pulling me against them like a half hug. I collapsed into them. I didn’t realize how much I’d needed to touch someone alive. Though I’ll admit I was a
little surprised to hear Izzy’s voice saying, "Come on, we need to move," as if she was speaking to a small child.

  I turned away, still trying to hide my tears and blood-stained face, and muttered, "Wait, I . . . ”

  I couldn’t leave his eyes open like that, blank, staring at the ceiling. At nothing. I needed to close them.

  That’s when he started to laugh.

  Not his laugh, not the laugh I knew so well, but one that sounded fake, forced out between his lips. He laughed on and on, stopping only for his body to convulse in a semblance of breathing. His lifeless eyes remained fixed on the ceiling. Because they were just that— lifeless. He wasn’t laughing because he was alive. He wasn’t going to sit up and say “sike, ho” and laugh at the tears on my face. Because Darren was dead, and the thing laughing wasn’t him.

  Darren’s body jerked, his midsection lifting itself from the ground as if trying to sit him up without using his arms. He moved like someone tied a string around his middle and yanked on it.

  I scrambled to my feet, skidding a little in his blood, and back-peddled from Darren's moving dead body until my back met a bank of lockers. I glanced at the body of the blonde girl, afraid she would start doing the same thing, but she was as still as, well, the dead.

  The red blossom in the center of the corpse-puppet formerly known as Darren had changed. It took me a second to place the difference, but then the crimson soaking his white tee wasn’t crimson anymore. The center, from where the bullet had passed through him, had started to bloom black. Blacker than black. Midnight poured out of his bullet wound and he was laughing about it.

  For a moment we had been alone. Me and Izzy and my best friend’s dead body. But slowly the chaos from everywhere else had come upon us. All around us, everywhere, there were gunshots and screaming and people running in every direction, so it was impossible to tell where anything came from. But all that faded. It vanished into the background and the running bodies passed in a blur as the screaming echoed like a muffled roar. All I could do was stare at what had been Darren.