Laughter of the Undead Read online

  Darren had finally managed to sit himself up. His head drifted around lazily, still emitting the crazy laughter, eyes dead. When his gaze locked on me and Izzy, the laughter lowered into an ominous chuckle which gurgled in the back of his throat as he clumsily got to his feet.

  When he straightened, he had to search around for us again. I think he saw us, maybe he smelled us or something, but his eyes were unfocused and directed more at our feet than at us. His huge, lurching step that nearly sent him off-balance was determinately toward us.

  He shook his head like a dog shedding water, then took a more deliberate lurch, then another. His steps got shorter and more precise as he went. That black substance poured out of his mouth, staining the remaining white of his shirt and mixing with the red of his blood.

  Again, Izzy tugged on my arm, this time more urgently. "We need to go," she hissed, her voice on the verge of sing-song. I nodded.

  We ran.

  And it was suddenly like we were part of a sea, a hundred bodies pressing against us on all sides moving in a hundred directions. A shot rang out. Collectively, the hall ducked, screamed, and then ran again, more terrified. Bodies pressed against me and I couldn’t do anything but breathe, grip Izzy’s hand, and try to run. As we ran to nowhere, panicked like everyone else, the crowd started to thin. Not much, but enough that we could see them. Sprinkled on the floor in the hallway, limp like Darren had been, were the bodies.

  And, like Darren, most of them weren’t lying still. They were twitching and moving like broken puppets in pools of their own blood. Blood that was turning black. Blood that was on the shoes of everyone running and smeared over the linoleum.

  I could hear the laughter above the screaming.

  I recognized faces.

  People I had talked to every day who weren’t people anymore.

  I wanted to scream, but my breath caught in my throat. Izzy gripped my hand tighter and pulled me down the hall in a run. I didn’t resist.

  I kept my eyes forward, averting my gaze from the lifeless faces and jerking bodies, and the blood.

  There was so much blood.

  I focused on running faster, away from the monsters, until I was pulling her along.

  We heard more and more laughter as we ran. I caught a brief glimpse of Evan, the first shooter, lying with a gun in his hand, having blown his own brains out, blood and skull and . . . brain splattered on lockers I had once hated for a totally different reason.

  My stomach convulsed, but I shoved the bile back down my throat with a forceful swallow and just ran faster.

  “Wait, wait, wait,” Izzy hissed, stopping so fast that her hand almost yanked me off my feet as my legs tried to keep running. She pulled me across the hall to a closet that my half-panicked eyes were barely able to read was a maintenance closet.

  Before she had the chance, I grabbed the door handle, heart in my throat because I expected it to be locked and that any second those bodies would attack me. Attack us.

  But the door handle turned in my hand. I yanked it open and the two of us practically fell into the space.

  It’s amazing how much trust you can put in someone just because they’re there. Because if you didn’t trust someone, then you would fall apart.

  I was about to fall apart and the only thing keeping me together was the hand of someone who I never would have dreamed of touching an hour ago. But now I gripped her hand for dear life, for sanity, and for any kind of composure that might matter after my breakdown.

  I’d held her hand before. As a little kid, we held hands all the time, because when you’re little that’s what you do. The vague familiarity was a lifeline, a link to normal, to the real world that had just been shattered. It was a memory that had been buried so far back in my mind that it took the dead laughing to bring it back.

  She held my hand just as tightly as we stood panting in the absolute darkness. The laughter outside the door grew louder as more bodies came back to life.

  "Zombies," I whispered, my voice cracking. I couldn’t see, my eyes yet to adjust to the darkness. Panic began to creep up my throat, making my palms itch, until the little light that bled under the door illuminated the room just enough for me to make out Izzy’s outline and the rough silhouettes of the objects littered throughout the room

  "No," Izzy breathed, "zombies are raised by necromancers. Don’t call them zombies. That’s just too far from reality."

  I stopped for a moment and suppressed a laugh that would have been fake anyway. “But he died. Then got back up. That doesn’t happen. There’s no such thing as living dead.”

  “There was no such thing as airplanes until there were,” she said. Then as an afterthought, she added with a laugh, “I’m alone in a closet holding hands with Connor Storming. Every girl’s dream."

  I wanted to comment on this particular observation, but I was cut off when a sound from the darkness turned my veins to ice.

  Coming from somewhere beyond where the tiny strip of light leaking in under the door illuminated, something laughed.

  Four

  Levi

  March 4th - 11:47 a.m.

  I nearly screamed when the door opened. The few minutes I’d sat alone in the dark made me wary of every sound and jumpy at even my own breaths when they came louder than I anticipated.

  So when the laughter that drifted in from under the door changed to a creaking squeal as the door opened, I thought I would pass out from the deafening beating of my heart high in my throat.

  The room filled with heavy breathing as the door shut gently again. I balled my fist, ready to fight off whatever it was, whether the thing in the room with me was one of those things or one of the people with guns.

  I realized that the new addition to the room wasn’t one but two people when a fear-pitched male voice said what I had been trying not to. "Zombies."

  His voice sounded familiar, but the door opening and letting in the light had re-blinded me to the dark and I couldn’t make out any faces yet, my eyes still needing time to readjust.

  A girl’s voice responded, but it wasn’t one I recognized. “I’m alone in a closet holding hands with Connor Storming. Every girl’s dream."

  That’s why I knew the voice. Because I knew Connor Storming.

  I was in a closet with Connor Storming.

  I couldn’t help it, for the sheer ridiculousness of being trapped in a tiny room with him of all people made me laugh.

  It wasn’t a sound I liked. Not because I have anything against my own laugh, but because the instant I heard the sound coming from my mouth, I thought of the things in the hallway, the girl with the pink shirt and the boy with braces. Laughter meant you were dead.

  Connor Storming had the same thought.

  A strangled half gasp, half scream erupted from him.

  "Jeez, calm down." I rolled my eyes, though in the solid black of the room it was more for my benefit than theirs. "I’m not one of those things. I was laughing at the cute little couple moment."

  "It’s not like that," Connor defended. "Who are you anyway?"

  Connor Storming was possibly our school's best football player, and as a result, he was possibly our biggest asshole. Except he wasn’t in actuality an asshole, just normally gave off the vibe of being as dumb as you’d expect a football player like him to be. I’d never actually seen him do the things his friends and the other football players did, where they’d pick on someone to the point of tears, or bully lunch money out of someone smaller than them, or goad me into beating the living daylights out of them. Connor Storming usually just stood there, silent and observing, or giving a half-hearted “guys wait . . . ”

  He wasn’t an asshole, but he never had the balls to stop anyone else from being one.

  Even so, I had no reason to like him, only reasons to dislike him, the foremost being his friendship with the boy who got me suspended.

  I sighed hard through my nose. “Depends on who you are.”

  He grumbled something under his breath, but t
he girl cleared her throat. “I’m Izzy. Do we know you?”

  She sounded as if she were trying hard to keep her voice, barely more than a whisper, from shaking. I didn’t recognize her voice or her name, so I had no reason to be a dick any more than I already had. I patted my pockets for the lighter I’d had. I didn’t smoke, not anymore, but most of my friends did, even Alec on occasion, and I always kept one on me for their sake.

  I lit it, the tiny flickering light blinding me and both of them for an instant. I extended my arm a little so the fire would be closer to the center of the room.

  “Levi Graves,” I said, then realized who exactly I was and wondered if they’d noticed who had the guns. I cleared my throat to clarify. “I don’t have a gun.”

  The two were leaning against the door, trembling and huddled together. It definitely was Connor Storming, with his unnecessarily attractive face and rumpled black hair, but he wasn’t how I’d always seen him. Connor Storming was always smiling, with some false attempt at friendliness, and he was always put together in an intentional way like he tried incredibly hard. But now . . . Connor looked nothing like that. He looked, more than anything, like he was scared. He was covered in blood. It was smeared on his face and soaked into his jeans and shirt.

  The girl whose hand he held as if for dear life was not someone I knew, but someone I recognized. She was the small, pudgy Asian girl I’d encountered earlier that morning, even exchanged a word or two with, when she’d been so engrossed in her book that she slammed into me in the hall. There was blood on the knees of her leggings too. What the hell had happened to them?

  The girl, Izzy apparently, cleared her throat yet again. “We don’t either.”

  I let the light go out. “Good.”

  I left it at that, at a loss for words that could do justice to our situation, and let the thick blanket of silence fall again.

  I needed something to do with my hands so they wouldn’t twitch in my lap. I thought about flicking the lighter, but that would only blind me, so I settled with pulling on my lip ring and staring into the solid blackness in front of me where I knew Connor Storming and the small girl to be.

  Finally, after too long of silence to be comfortable, the girl whispered, “What do you think they are?”

  The question could have been aimed at either Connor or me or both of us, but I answered anyway. “No idea. But for now, we’d better focus on staying alive.”

  As if on cue, something slammed into the closet door with a sickly thud followed by clips of maniacal laughter. I tucked my arms tighter around myself.

  “Let’s just try and stay quiet, hope it’ll die down,” Connor’s voice sounded gentler and more scared than I had ever heard it. But he was right. Staying alive meant staying quiet.

  So we did.

  I’m not sure how long we sat there in utter silence save for our breathing. It was horrible. There was nothing but darkness so all my eyes showed me over and over again was Molly falling to the floor, her blood spattering the tile. All I could think about was how her death was my fault, and how I couldn’t save that boy in the hallway, and how everyone I loved could be dead or a monster. My phone was dead. I had no way of finding out if Alec and Mrs. Fisher were alive, or if this was even happening anywhere other than here.

  Eventually, after what must have been hours into my spiral of panic and worry, my stomach started to growl.

  I glanced at my wristwatch and pressed the button to light up the screen, the blue nearly blinding me. It read 11:04.

  Had it really been only six and a half hours since Alec had blasted Phantom of the Opera inches from my head? Six hours since the world had made sense, and everything had been one cycle of classes and homework and home, all a means to an end? Everything made sense. Everything was real. Now, nothing is real. And it had only been six hours. Both a lifetime and a heartbeat ago. But it was a lifetime ago. When zombies were a fairy tale and people stayed dead.

  "Either of you got anything to eat?" I finally asked, hunger getting the better of me. "I’m starving."

  "I thought you only drank blood," Connor muttered in a voice somewhere between moody and joking.

  "But of course," I snarked back. "Come over here and I’ll drain you dry."

  "Shut up, both of you," the girl snapped. There was rustling as she moved around in the dark. The clank of a can against tile was followed by a click as the tiny room was flooded with bright white light.

  Once my eyes adjusted, I saw a small flashlight sitting up on its end, but after the hours of darkness, it burned my eyes as if a tiny sun was in the room. "I have ravioli. We’ll share a can, but I only have one spoon."

  Both Connor and I grunted in distaste.

  "If you want, I’ll just have it all myself," she suggested haughtily.

  "No!" we said together. My stomach growled again as if telling me to get my shit together and eat something.

  "Yeah," Izzy said with a smirk in her voice, "that’s what I thought. As long as neither of you has deadly diseases, we can share it. And, Connor, I have some water . . . for the blood.”

  Beside me, Connor cleared his throat and nodded, glancing down at his rust-colored hands. A sickly expression crossed his face as if he’d forgotten he was covered in blood. I wondered whose it was. If it was a friend’s or a stranger’s. I guessed friend.

  If it wasn’t his blood, he must have been holding a bloody and bleeding body close to himself and kneeling next to it. Blood covered his knees and his shirt and his hands and his face.

  Izzy poured a tiny pool of water into her own palm, rubbing her hands together until the water turned a ruddy, rusty brown that she wiped on her leggings. She handed the bottle to Connor and he did the same.

  We huddled in a circle around the light, passing the can and spoon around, taking one noodle at a time. I normally loved ravioli and would have enjoyed it in any other situation, but I hardly tasted the cold noodles at all, only chewing and swallowing systematically before passing it on. When it came to me the last time, there was none of the ravioli left. I sighed and handed it to Connor.

  “It’s empty.”

  Connor frowned, eyeing the leftover tomato sauce.

  "Hey, Dark Lord," he muttered, poking around the can with the spoon as if a noodle could be hiding.

  "What?"

  "There’s some tomato sauce here in the bottom of the can. It might be enough like blood to sustain you. Because tomato juice is like the blood of a tomato, right?"

  Izzy kind of giggled, but clapped a hand to her mouth. I didn’t have to ask why. Laughing is what those things out there had been doing. Laughter meant something different than it had this morning. Laughter meant you were dead.

  I rolled my eyes, fighting a smile. Normally vampire jokes got on my nerves. It was one of my dad’s favorite jabs. “Damn vampire wannabe, after everything I went through to raise you, you think you can go out of my house like that. Like some . . . insert unspeakable word . . . with goddamn makeup on. You look like you like cock. You like cock? My son, a little gay bitch.”

  That’s what he said to me as I walked out the door over a week ago. I hadn’t been back since, and he hadn’t called me. It normally went like that. I’d be gone for days or weeks at a time and he never cared. It was always the same. Same meaning, different words, every time I saw him, about how I look like a vampire and I look gay because I wear eyeliner and skinny jeans.

  But the way Connor said it was almost nice, like how Alec called me Dark Lord as if it were a friendly joke rather than an actual attack.

  "Hey guys," Izzy stage-whispered, "listen."

  I yanked my thoughts from my dad and did as she said, straining my ears against the ringing hours of utter silence had caused.

  The laughing.

  It was gone. Nothing came from the other side of the door beside the vague light.

  "Where did they all go?" I asked, not expecting an answer.

  "I’m going to open the door," Izzy said. "Turn the light off and put my s
tuff back into my backpack."

  Connor and I moved to do as she said. I grabbed the light, leaving it on long enough for Connor to put the spoon back in her bag and put the empty can in the mop bucket so it wouldn’t spill. Then I turned the light off, plunging the room again into endless blackness. Ever so quietly, Izzy eased the door open. Light flooded in.

  “How’s it look?” I whispered to Izzy, who had a clearer view than either of us, her messy ponytail blocking out all but the light.

  “Like, on a scale of one to Australia, how dangerous are we talking?” Connor added. I raised my eyebrows at him, to which he shrugged. Izzy ignored him, opening the door wider so the two of us could scan the hall as well.

  There were still dead bodies on the ground, but not nearly as many as when we first hid in the closet. Half of those that had remained dead were gnawed on. Some had arms missing. Some had chunks of flesh torn out of their legs or shoulders. I shuddered.

  "So many dead," I managed to choke out, voice rougher than usual. "Some of the people I used to hang out with, they would talk about coming to school with guns and shooting every kid that looked down on them. I always thought it was just big talk, but they were serious. I should have done something."

  “Just because you were friends with them doesn’t make you one of them. It wasn’t your fault. You can’t change how people think,” Izzy glanced at the football player, a little guiltily, but her eyes flicked away again. “Who people see as the bad guys."

  I couldn’t help it. I glanced at Connor, who hours ago would have been one of Izzy’s bad guys in my eyes. Izzy did, too. I didn’t know who she was to Connor, but I did know what kind of girl she probably was and how, like me, she had seen Connor Storming as one of those assholes, too.

  “What?” he protested, though the tightness in his voice suggested that he knew exactly what had crossed our minds.

  "Meaning," Izzy continued, "had you been anywhere else, you would either be dead or one of those . . . things."

  Connor stared at her wide-eyed for a long moment as if all of that was registering.