Laughter of the Undead Read online

  “You’re good,” he said, releasing my hair and collar.

  “Check my neck,” Levi said to me, not Connor. When I pulled away from the faux fur lining of his aviator jacket, all I saw was smooth skin and a long thin scar that disappeared into his hairline and under the neck of his shirt. No bug and I didn’t ask about the scar.

  “Maybe they’re not on living humans,” Connor said hopefully.

  “We’re still going to check you.”

  Connor looked nervous but nodded. Reluctantly, he turned and pulled up the bit of hair that gently curled at the nape of his neck. Levi took a step closer and pulled down his collar.

  There, clinging to the back of Connor’s neck, was a green beetle.

  Six

  Connor

  March 4th - 3:19 p.m.

  I knew when they gasped that the thing on that girl’s neck, that scarab, was on me. The thing may have turned her and all those people, that probably made Darren become a laughing corpse.

  “Well, Shit-Biscuit,” my voice wavered, even when I tried to keep it light. I turned back to them, hand going to the back of my neck, rubbing over the hard shell. Now that I knew it was there, I could feel it pinching the skin at the base of my neck. I looked up at them, thinking to myself over and over “brave face, keep the brave face, Storming”.

  “What do we do?”

  They stared at me blank-faced. Izzy’s mouth was slightly open, eyes filled with horror, a speck of blood from the dead girl on her cheek, and Levi’s expression was, as always, unreadably grim. But something told me he felt the same thing Izzy and I did.

  Scared. With perfectly good reason, considering sanity had just fallen through the floor. But also scared for me. Normally, the things I was afraid of were a lot less dangerous to anyone but me. Like the things that made my palms itch and throat close up, can’t hurt anyone but me.

  This was the wrong kind of fear.

  They didn’t answer my question. They couldn’t answer my question. We had no idea what to do.

  Well, I had an idea. Not one that I liked, but one preferable to turning into a puppet-mastered cannibal and eating the only other two living people currently in the vicinity.

  I had to gather my courage before asking the question. “Will you kill me?” I rasped, my voice audibly shaking.

  “Not so fast,” Izzy put her hands up, eyes filling with panic. “Maybe it can pull off? Like the other one did?” It was a question more than a statement.

  “But you saw how deep the beetle’s legs were in that girl’s neck. If the arms are like that in his neck, then it could kill him,” Levi said.

  “What other option do we have?” Izzy snapped, then covered her face in her hands and took a shaky breath.

  “Honestly,” I said, resisting the urge to touch the cold, hard shell again, the stinging pinch starting to become unbearable, “I’d rather not die, but if it keeps me from turning into . . . ” I gestured at the dead girl on the floor and continued, “ . . . something like her, I’d rather die.”

  “So we try it?” Levi asked, raising an eyebrow at me. “You’re sure? Even if you . . . ”

  “Die? If I die by beetle at least I won’t have tried to eat anyone I care about. If I die, it’s because I made the choice. Right?”

  I searched both their eyes. I don’t know what Levi was thinking, but he gave a single sharp nod. After a long deep breath, Izzy nodded too.

  “I can do it,” Izzy said, her voice steadier than I would have expected. I started to nod in agreement, but Levi put a hand on her shoulder.

  “Wait. I should. If . . . it happens, you’re going to blame yourself. I’ll do it.” Levi turned his golden eyes from her to me, and for the first time, I found emotions there, all of them broiled together. “That okay, man?”

  I swallowed and nodded. He was right. She’d probably blame herself. I would have blamed myself. Besides, if I did, you know, die in a couple of seconds, I’d rather no blame games be played. I’d rather Levi just do it.

  Levi took a step toward me and I started to turn, but then I froze, a thought I should have had all along gripping me. I grabbed his shoulder, making sure he met my eyes before hissing, “If I die right now, you and Izzy get to my house and tell my parents I love them and tell my brother I love him and I’m sorry. They’ll know what to do.”

  His gaze didn’t leave mine as he nodded. “I know. I will.”

  “Okay.” The word came out on a breath and I spun around so I faced the row of lockers instead of either of them. “Okay. Do it.”

  A cold hand rested on my shoulder and then squeezed it comfortingly. I closed my eyes and took a deep breath.

  I felt him grab the bug, other hand on the side of my neck as if to brace me. A sharp stabbing pain spiked through me, starting from the base of my neck and spreading like fire out to the rest of me, and the world collapsed in on itself, plunging me into blackness.

  Which is a dramatic way to say I fainted. As embarrassing as it is to admit, I am a faint-y person. I always have been. It happens when I get hurt to a certain extent or have an especially bad panic attack.

  And as usual, I only knew I fainted because I woke up.

  I coughed and slowly came back to reality. There was a hand on my chest and another on my arm, the hard floor under me. Breathing hard, my eyes fluttered open and I blinked rapidly. Both Levi and Izzy were leaning over me. My head throbbed like I had slammed it onto the ground. I felt clammy and flighty.

  “Am I dead?” I asked, moaning and covering my face with my free arm. Izzy put a hand to her mouth, replacing a sob with a giggle.

  “Unless we're dead too, you are very much alive,” she said. I sighed and sat up, rubbing the back of my neck. For some reason, every part of my body ached, maybe from the fall.

  The bug. I stiffened, hand flying to the back of my neck where it had been. It was gone. No feelers or gaping hole or blood pouring down the back of my shirt. Just a row of tiny pinpricks where it must have latched on. My hand came away barely bloody.

  “What happened?”

  Levi uncurled his hand that had been squeezed shut so tightly that his already pale knuckles had turned the color of bone. The beetle in his hand was a little bluer than the one on the girl and a little smaller, but it was the same thing, the same beetle.

  “It wasn’t deep in your neck at all. That one was embedded in her. This one was just clawed into the first layer of skin.”

  I couldn’t stomach it anymore and turned my eyes to the ground. “Thank you.”

  I caught his boney-shouldered shrug out of the corner of my eye before he stood. “Thank you” could not cover what he had just done for me, but my brain still felt rattled and every muscle hurt too much to try and come up with something to do it justice.

  “You going to be ok, man?” he asked.

  I nodded shakily, still dizzy. “Yeah, I just passed out. No big deal.”

  “Hey, Connor,” Izzy’s voice was small by my shoulder where she hadn’t moved from. “Can I hug you?”

  I’d barely started to nod when she buried her face in my shoulder. “You can’t die. We’re all getting out of here. All three of us.”

  I put the arm not holding me up around her shoulder. “Yeah, yeah we are,” I replied as I hugged her back for a long moment. Sudden laughter caused us both to jump. Izzy pulled away quickly and I retracted my arm. Levi hadn’t even flinched. I stood by my theory of him being inhuman, possibly a vampire.

  The not-undead-sorta-dead-not-person-beetle-possessed-creature-thing wasn’t anywhere near us at the moment, probably several halls away, but without exchanging so much as glances, the three of us rose simultaneously. I stumbled a little, my limbs feeling heavier than lead and sore all over.

  “Your locker, Storming,” Izzy said, her eyes nervously darting around, “which one is it?”

  Without saying anything, I lead the other two to my locker and tried too quickly to open it only to fumble at the dial. When nothing happened, I frowned, took a deep
breath, and tried again slower.

  It popped open and my huge jacket fell out at my feet.

  “Is that a coat or a tent?” Levi asked. I rolled my eyes and started to shut my locker when a thought struck me.

  “Okay, guys, hear me out,” I reached in and pulled out the duffle bag that rarely left my locker. I opened it wide enough to pull out what was inside. “I have these.”

  Both frowned at me.

  I always kept a bat in my locker, in a duffel bag, along with a spare bike chain for the days that I was able to ride my bike to school. On Tuesdays, it was my job to pick up Tommy and lately I’d taken him to the park to play toddler baseball for a few hours.

  Now they were just weapons, something we could use to defend ourselves.

  “Why?”

  “Hey, we can use these,” I protested, “and we have to get out of here. We all know that this kind of thing has been going on for weeks. This is the biggest attack I’ve heard of so far, but to everyone else, this is just another news story. We don’t actually know if the rest of the world has gone upside down yet. This isn’t all happening at once. I know that, but I still think we better arm ourselves against the threat. I mean, I know these aren’t brooms and this ruins the Broom Squad.”

  “Right,” Levi said, “then I guess I’ll take the chain, not that I understand how you can kill shit with a chain. But if we find more than one, I want a gun too. I hate them, but it is a better alternative to Bruce Lee whipping zombies with a chain.”

  Without saying anything, Izzy extended her hand and I gave her the bat. We held eye contact for a long moment as she took it and held it against her chest like a teddy bear and not a weapon of mass destruction.

  I nodded, “Come on.”

  The hall we’d been in had been mostly cadaver-free, save for the girl we’d killed, who left a pool of blood that had mixed with the blood already staining me when I'd collapsed so close to her. It had dried on my jeans hours ago and now I could feel the drying sticky blood of that girl all over my back and on the elbows of my gray shirt.

  The hall we turned into wasn’t much better.

  On the bright side, there was only one body, though I’m not sure how bright any dead body would be.

  But most importantly, it wasn’t moving.

  It was one of the shooters. I didn’t recognize him at first glance, but he was wearing a t-shirt that read Bring on the Storm. That was the school merchandising slogan from last year. I remembered it because it meant me. Storm, for Storming. The year before, I had made a touchdown in a football game that had won us the State Championship. Some of the teachers and other players had gotten so pumped up about it that they made t-shirts just for me and sold them at the school stop shop. I still had one that I never wore because of how embarrassing I found it.

  But this kid wasn’t wearing it to honor me. It was worn to mock me. Because under the gray letters of the white shirt, he had written in black sharpie.

  “Every storm comes to an end,” Izzy muttered, reading it aloud. The spoken words somehow stabbed me more so than just the written.

  “Wow,” Levi said in a flat voice, “that’s dramatic”

  I took a step back, stomach-churning. All the bravery from a second before vanishing. Me. He’d wanted to kill me.

  That thought circled around my head. If I hadn’t rushed toward that first scream, I might have run straight into another shooter out for . . . me. For the other kids like me. For their bad guys. Because wasn’t I one? Didn’t I sit back and let Sam and . . . Darren say whatever they wanted about whoever they wanted? Watched and heard about and knew about Darren and Sam and others doing things to people they shouldn’t, flushing heads in toilets and taking money from kids who couldn’t fend them off. Stereotypical and assholish. And that’s the side I’d been on.

  The bad guys.

  “Cameron,” Levi muttered after I must have stumbled back. “I knew him. He hated a lot of people, but you . . . I know he hated you. What did you do?”

  "Nothing," I said simply. I had known kids that would dump people in trash cans, but I’d always refused to participate. I would always just walk away. I knew I should have done something, but I never did. The kid, Cameron, might have wanted me dead for just watching something like that happen to him, but wouldn’t he have hated the ones that had actually done it?

  Then I remembered.

  "Oh," I said in a small voice.

  "What?"

  “I . . . I know why he hated me.”

  I hadn’t always been this person. The person I had become was popular and well-liked, with a cheerleader for a girlfriend and a reputation for being able to throw balls and run fast. I was tall, muscled, and considered attractive.

  But I hadn’t always been this version of Connor Storming. I had once been the version of Connor Storming that grew up with Izzy Dawson. That Connor was a no one and was treated like it.

  Cameron, the Cameron lying dead at our feet, had been one of those people who reminded me every day that I was no one. He always found me when I was alone and for years would hurt me in the best way he could, sometimes through words and sometimes by beating the shit out of me.

  That had changed when everything else changed. The end of sixth grade was when I'd started down the path of becoming who I am today, and Cameron had learned that he couldn’t pick on me anymore.

  I didn’t do it, but in his eyes, it must have been my fault. My new friends had caught him trying to do just that to me, and now that I had become one of them, Cameron, who had always been a bully, learned what it felt like to have his head shoved in a toilet.

  I explained as much to Izzy and Levi.

  Izzy frowned. “But you didn’t do anything.”

  I shook my head. “Exactly, I did nothing. I let it happen. I knew how it felt, but I always let it happen.”

  Levi frowned at me, but not as if he were angry. It was more as if he were trying to figure me out. Izzy shook her head and continued, “Why you? Why pick you to blame?”

  “Because he thought he’d found an easy target,” Levi answered for me. “An easy target to take out his own anger from being picked on. He didn’t expect people to defend you and he hates you because he never had anyone to defend him.”

  I frowned at Levi, wanting to ask him what that even meant, but Izzy interrupted, waving her arms. “Okay, okay, wait. Back up. This happened in sixth grade?”

  I nodded, not wanting to meet her eyes. Sixth grade had been when I cut her off. “Yeah, after winter break.”

  “After winter break you . . . ” her voice wavered the tiniest bit, “that’s when you . . . changed.”

  That was the only way to put it. I had changed. Three weeks and a broken wrist gave way to the metamorphosis that made me who I am now. It’s not a change I'm proud of, because that change meant I’d become one of my tormentors and that I lost my best friend.

  “Yeah. Yeah, it was.”

  She studied me for a long moment before replying. “It’s so hard to connect you with the Connor that I was friends with. You just disappeared one day, right in the middle of your awkward phase, and then boom . . . ” she gestured at me, “that.”

  I wasn’t sure how to take this, or what “that” was supposed to mean, but Izzy wasn’t done.

  “Why?”

  “Guys,” Levi tried to cut in, “this isn’t the time for a discussion like this. There are pe-”

  “Why what?” I interrupted him, not breaking eye contact with Izzy.

  “Why did you suddenly pretend like I didn’t exist? What happened?” Her tone was demanding, and I wanted to answer. I wanted to be her friend again because I hadn’t had a friend like her since. The people who I had called friends this morning, I knew damn well they were all douchebags. Yet, I had put up with it for years for the same reason I had started trying to forget about Izzy. Darren was my friend and he always would be, douche that he was, but as much as he was the best friend I'd had, our friendship started on a lie.

 
; “I thought I had to.”

  “Wha-”

  “Focus!” Levi snapped, “This is seriously not the time for your dramatic teen movie moment. Connor, get the damn gun and let’s get the hell out of here.”

  The conversation wasn’t over. I had a lot to explain to Izzy, and now that there was nothing stopping me, I would. But not right now.

  “Right. Sorry.”

  Cameron's hand still held the gun. He must have shot himself in the mouth. His arm lay limp by his head, the gun clenched in his fist. The tile floor was spattered with Cameron’s blood. At least the back of his skull faced away from us. I knew I wouldn’t have been able to handle the sight of the ripped, shattered, and bloody back of his head. I nearly threw up as I reached to unwind his fingers from around the handle of the gun. It was a pistol. I wasn’t sure what kind, but I did know enough to release the magazine. There was only one bullet left out of the fourteen it should have been able to hold. Thirteen bullets shot. How many had he killed before he used the last one on himself?

  I checked his pockets to find a single spare magazine that was still full. I tucked it into my own pocket and stood to release the safety of the gun.

  "How’d you know what to do with that thing?" Izzy asked, voice tipping toward accusatory.

  "My dad taught me when I was younger. He always said guns should be outlawed, but since they’re not I might as well know how to use one in an emergency."

  Levi grunted, “I hate guns. My dad has one. And my dad— ”

  "Hey! Over there!" came a loud voice from down the hallway followed by a gunshot that ricocheted over our heads. We all ducked on instinct. Two boys and a girl, all dressed entirely in black, came toward us, all three carrying guns.

  I wasn’t sure what else to do, so I kept mine somewhere between lowered and raised, keeping my fingers out of the guard so I didn’t blow off my own foot by accident.

  "Y’all human?" asked the girl, a shotgun cocked over one shoulder.

  "If we weren’t, we’d be laughing," growled Levi.

  "No way!" said the lighter of the two boys. "Levi? Is that you? Glad you made it out alive."