Best New Zombie Tales (Vol. 2) Read online

  I didn’t know what she meant by ‘not too late’ but I wanted it to be true. “Okay. But you better hurry.”

  She took off like a dog after a rabbit. Ryan and I were left staring at my kid brother.

  “She said…she said…” Ryan faltered.

  Straighten him out. “Yeah.” I didn’t want to look at Ryan any more, because I wanted to punch him and break his nose. Even if it didn’t help. I didn’t really want to look at Dylan either, but, I thought, what if Carrie’s right and we can save him?

  Kneeling next to him, I turned Dylan gingerly onto his back. His arm flopped stupidly. I tried to put it right, but I twisted it around the wrong way and the skin stretched grotesquely. Ryan tried to help but he was all jittery and flappy-hands and I slapped him out of the way.

  I took a deep breath before pulling up Dylan’s shirt to see where the ribs were sticking out of his skin. It was horrible and fascinating. As I pushed at the bones, trying to get them back in place, there was a squishy noise, then a grindy one, and I was nearly sick.

  My hands were covered in blood, which I wiped off on my shirt.

  Dylan was still dead.

  I was starting to realize I was sad about that. Even after he’d nicked my skateboard and glued his Transformers onto it. Even after he’d drawn aliens all over my training bra with a biro. Little brothers are a pest, but he was still my brother and he wasn’t all bad. Sometimes he was nice.

  I tried to remember a time when he’d been nice.

  Nothing had come to mind when a creak and a shower of dust heralded Carrie’s return. Her eyes were glittery bright as she came in, a stuffed-full beach bag over her shoulder and an ancient leather-bound book clutched to her stomach.

  I looked past her. “Where’s the ambulance?”

  “No ambulance,” she said with a breathless grin, “I’ve got this.” She brandished the book.

  That was something new. Carrie was never caught with books on her person. She gives hell to Treece Muldoon for reading. Treece Muldoon reads all the time, big fat books with no pictures in them. I always want to borrow them off her except for the facts that a) that would put me in the book-geek camp with Treece Muldoon and I don’t want that kind of social death and b) my Mum hates Mrs. Muldoon for something that happened back in the day which she won’t discuss, and she’d ground me forever if I tried to make friends with ‘that Muldoon kid’. Mum didn’t like me having anything to do with Carrie either, because of the same back in the day blow up. Normally that wasn’t a hardship, though I did sometimes wonder what our mothers had been up to at university that caused them to not talk for twenty years.

  “That book’s going to save my brother?” I snarled at Carrie.

  “Yep. It’ll bring him back to life.”

  I should have asked ‘how’ but I was desperate. “Are you sure?”

  “No probs, Amy, it’s full of spells,” Carrie assured me with the same kind of expansive confidence Vincent Ha once employed before falling flat on his face off the gymnastics horse. Oh, so many problems, actually. But what else could I do?

  Carrie upended the bag, and pots, knives and a handful of herbs from her dad’s garden tumbled onto the dodgy wooden floor. Kneeling in the middle of the debris, she opened the old book and thumbed through it.

  “I’ll need some dirt,” she said, “Get some dirt, Ryan.”

  Ryan had been looking at her like he was sleeping with his eyes open. When he didn’t move, Carrie cast a hard look at him. “Ryan. Get me some dirt from outside. Now. Or else.”

  Ryan scrambled to the rickety opening and came back with pebble-strewn dirt cradled in his two palms. She directed him to put it in a pot. Then she rolled the herbs around in Dylan’s blood and put them in the pot. After that, she took a knife, held it against her palm, then thought better of it and made a cut up her forearm. It was short and didn’t seem deep, but blood dripped freely from the wound into the pot too. The rest of the blood on her arm she mopped up with another handful of herbs, and threw that into the mix as well.

  “I didn’t have some of the stuff the book says,” she explained, “Like wolfsbane and stuff, so I got parsley and rosemary from Mum’s garden.”

  “Will that…work?” I asked, thinking it probably wouldn’t.

  “Yeah, sure. No probs. It’s all in the words, see?”

  She took the knife and stirred the blood, dirt and herbs together. Then she dipped her hand in a couple of times and wiped it over the obvious injuries at Dylan’s arm and ribs. Another dip she wiped over his eyes and mouth. Satisfied, she scrubbed her hand clean on her jeans and bent over the book. After studying it for a minute, chewing her lower lip, she kneeled high over the book and stuck her hands straight in front of her so they were held above Dylan’s body. She looked like a magician at a kid’s party trying to make the rabbit appear.

  When Carrie spoke it was strange and stumbling. She kept looking back at the book to see where she was up to.

  I went through my Harry Potter phase like everyone else and I recognize Latin when I see it, even if I don’t know what it means. Or how to pronounce it. I was pretty sure that Carrie didn’t know how to pronounce it either, but she rushed through it, wiggling her fingers in the air over Dylan from time to time for good measure.

  When she finished she dusted her hands together, all very ‘my work here is done’ and sat back on her haunches to stare at my dead kid brother expectantly.

  In my head, I started working out what I was going to tell mum about this whole awful mess.

  And that’s when Dylan sat up. He blinked slowly. Carrie grinned at him.

  “Hey! Dylan! Dill!”

  Dylan’s head turned slowly to face her.

  “How you feeling, Dill?”

  I hated her using that nickname. That’s what I called him, but he was my brother and I was allowed. He may be a dill, but he was, you know, my dill.

  Dylan didn’t answer. He just blinked, then slowly raised his hands to rub the blood and dirt out of his eyes. His busted arm was still bent, but it seemed to be working okay. His ribs moved weirdly under his skin but at least stayed under it.

  His skin was really pale and his eyes looked peculiar. “Dylan?” I asked tentatively. He turned his head to me and blinked some more, but didn’t say anything. “You okay?”

  “He’s fine,” declared Carrie triumphantly, “Just give him a minute. He’s been dead for a bit, remember?” She was dumping all her stuff back into the beach bag. That done, she stood, scooped up the book against her chest, and headed for the opening. “Come on, Ryan.”

  Ryan stumbled along behind her, glancing back once to look at Dylan, and then at me. It can be taken that Ryan, pretty much, is a follower and not a leader. He is also an idiot.

  I got up but Dylan remained on the ground, looking stunned, pale and grubby. I had to help him up in the end and lead him out of the old house, onto the street and into a tram. He sat staring, drooling a little, all the way home, and that’s when I realized that Carrie hadn’t really brought him back to life. She’d just made him into a zombie.

  Still, I thought maybe we could get away with it for a while, until I got a better idea. Where there’s one incantation there should be another, I guessed. And anyway, zombie films were kind of cool. Maybe having a zombie brother for a little while, until I could get him fixed, wouldn’t be so bad.

  Mum was waiting when we got home. She took one look at Dylan then glared at me.

  “He was mucking about at the pool,” I said, forgetting that Dylan was obviously not wearing his bathers. Mum’s steely glare made me babble some more. “A couple of the kids dared him to do something stupid and he did it before I could stop him. He fell off the wall. He’s okay, I think. Banged his head a bit. He’ll be okay, he’s just a bit woozy.”

  Mum gave me more of the steely look, said “I’ll speak to you later, young lady” and took Dylan off to the bathroom.

  So. I was neck deep in trouble anyway. While Mum cleaned Dylan up, I put my b
loodstained clothes in the washing machine and wondered what to do next.

  Mum grounded me for a week for taking off to the pool without Dylan and not looking out for him when he followed. She grounded him too, for being stupid enough to follow on his own, but it’s not like he was noticing his confinement. He stared at the TV most days, or at the wall, whichever was closest.

  Then Mum decided a better punishment was to make me take Dylan everywhere with me. When I complained she said, “You should have thought of that before you let your little brother get hurt.”

  * * *

  That leaves me here, at the cinema, with feelings of guilt and resentment…a slowly rotting kid brother.

  I’m not sure Mum realizes that Dylan been zombified. She’s an archivist at the museum and spends a lot of her time with her head in dusty artifacts and databases. She hasn’t said anything. She just looks at Dylan really intently. The day after it happened she took him to the doctor, but when I asked what the diagnosis was Mum just said, “That doctor doesn’t know anything” and wouldn’t talk about it.

  A half-week of dragging my increasingly stinky little brother around town and the novelty has definitely worn off. Between his smell and his attempts to bite people none of my friends will hang around with me. I suppose it means I don’t have to find out what would happen if he bit one of them. If bites turn friends into zombies, it’ll completely kill my social life.

  We’re waiting for the tram home when Treece Muldoon comes to the stop. Really, between the books she reads and her bleached hair and the tattoos she draws on her arms with biro, I like Treece. But someone has to be the weirdo and she’s been carrying the standard since the first year of high school. Her mum’s really smart and lectures in ethno-somethingery at the university.

  Treece comes up to us and I try to shuffle away. Being seen socializing with Treece will put the final nail in my credibility coffin.

  “What have you been messing with?” she asks. Her bleached-white hair hangs over her face like a screen. I love her hair, but I’d never be game to do that to my own.

  “Wasn’t me,” I grumble, annoyed that Treece has joined Mum in the ‘blame Amy’ camp, “Carrie and Ryan did it.”

  “Ah,” says Treece knowingly. They’ve probably done stuff to her too. “They shouldn’t mess around like that.”

  “Yeah. They dared him to climb a wall and he fell off.”

  “That too. But I meant the zombie thing.”

  I stare at her. Of course it’s the first conclusion she jumps to; she’s the weirdo who reads all those complicated books.

  “He’s not a zombie,” I say, because I don’t want it getting all over town.

  “Yeah he is. Look at him. He’s got no soul.” She bends to peer into his face.

  So do I. I have to agree that, nope, there does not seem to be a soul in there.

  Dylan snaps his teeth at her and she draws back, laughing. “I’m not the one you’re after,” she tells him. Then she frowns at me. “Carrie did this, huh?”

  “Yeah. She used instructions from this creepy old book she has. I don’t even know if she did it right.”

  Treece’s face pulls into a troubled frown. “Oh.” She grimaces and then looks at me through her hair. “Um. Sorry.”

  “Why are you sorry?”

  “’Cos it’s my fault Carrie’s got that book. It’s my Mum’s. She’s had it since forever. She’s got all sorts of old books about ancient rituals and stuff. It’s usually locked up, but I know where the key is. Anyway, I nicked it and put it in our garage sale last weekend.”

  This annoys me. “Why did you do that?”

  “I was mad at her about not letting me read the Marquis de Sade. So I stole the book and put it in the garage sale. The neighbors were helping us out and sold it before I changed my mind and went to get it back. So it’s sort of my fault, what Carrie did to Dylan.”

  Looks like Dylan’s situation is a collective screw up.

  “Worst thing is,” says Treece, “Mum didn’t even notice the skanky book was missing.” She sighs, then jabs a finger at me. “You shouldn’t have let Carrie use it on Dylan.”

  It’s rough being ticked off by the outcast, especially when she’s right. “What was I supposed to do?” I protest, “Let him die? He’s my kid brother.”

  “I guess,” Treece doesn’t sound convinced. She reaches out to hold her hand under Dylan’s nose and he sniffs her. He makes an odd grunting noise and bares his teeth, but that’s all.

  “Have you seen Carrie or Ryan since this happened?” Treece asks.

  “Nah.” Carrie, the cow, has gone into hiding. I want to get that damned book off her to try something else, but whenever I see her in the distance she takes off. I nearly caught up with Ryan once, but he gave me and Dylan a look of abject terror and shinnied over a ten foot fence and I haven’t seen him since.

  We stand in silence for a little while. Dylan is still sniffing Treece’s hand, like a particularly stupid dog.

  “He’s getting a bit stinky,” says Treece quietly.’

  “He can’t help it!” I’m defensive on his behalf, even though it’s true.

  “I guess not.” Treece screws the toe of her shoe into the dirt thoughtfully. “I’ve read one of my Mum’s other books on zombies. It reckons zombies have to eat brains or they’ll rot and everything falls off and they crawl around without any limbs and stuff.”

  “That’s gross.”

  “Being a zombie generally is.”

  Treece has a point.

  It strikes me that it is not Dylan’s fault he is zombified. I know it’s partly my fault. Maybe it’s partly Treece’s fault. It’s definitely Ryan and Carrie’s fault for taunting him into falling in the first place, and resurrecting him so poorly afterwards.

  It also strikes me that this is not fair on Dylan or Mum and that it’s up to me to set things right.

  “I bet I know what you’re thinking,” says Treece. “You’re thinking that if Dylan eats Ryan and Carrie’s brains, he might improve for a bit. Until we can see if there’s some way to fix him properly.”

  I hear that word ‘we’ and look at her.

  “Well, it’s my fault too,” she says, “I should help sort it out.”

  I should be mad at Treece for letting that book loose in public, but I’m so grateful for her offer of help that I can’t be. After all, she didn’t make Carrie use it.

  “That’d be awesome,” I tell her gratefully.

  There are difficulties, though.

  “Does it have to be brains?” I ask, because the image of cracking open Ryan’s head with a rock is nauseating. I feel slightly less nauseous at the idea of doing it to Carrie, because Carrie really needs to be smacked in the head by someone.

  “Probably,” Treece says. She is chewing her lower lip like she’s not so keen on the idea herself.

  “A chunk out of an arm wouldn’t do it?”

  “We could start with the arms and work up if it doesn’t help.”

  I look at Dylan, who chooses this moment to release a really foul fart. If this is going to be done, it had better be done soon before he gets any deader.

  Treece and I talk about what we should do, and agree that there is no time like the present. Especially after Dylan belches a stink from hell. Another kid joins us at the tram stop, but when Dylan tries to bite him, the kid swears at us and decides to find another tram.

  Treece gives me an encouraging smile, and I notice she has a really nice smile. Even if she’s a bit of a weirdo, she’s not dangerous-weird like Carrie. Treece’s kind of weird, I decide, is one that I could grow to like. Maybe Treece and I can be secret friends and hide it from our parents.

  The first thing I do is call Mum and tell her I’m taking Dylan with me to see some friends. For a minute she sounds suspicious, but then she tells me not to be late home for tea.

  The second thing I do is take Dylan to Treece’s house. Actually, we go to her garage. There are still some boxes left over from the recent g
arage sale, but we ignore those in favor of some rope and straps from suitcases. Treece stuffs them into a backpack along with some long scarves she has grabbed from her room. Then we go back to the derelict house where this all started.

  The thing that has been bothering me is how to get Ryan and Carrie to come here, and how to get them to hold still long enough for Dylan to take his bite.

  Treece reckons she has that covered. She tells Kyle to tell Ryan to tell Carrie that the book she bought is one of a set, and that Treece has the other book, for a price. And that the other book is about vampires. Carrie loves vampire books. She’s read them all and gives them all marks out of five on her blogsite based on the number of deaths, the amount of blood, and the hotness of the vampire.

  She tells Kyle to tell Ryan to tell Carrie to meet us at the old house at six. In summer the sun doesn’t set until eight or nine, so they might not be too suspicious about coming while it’s still light.

  Treece, Dylan and I wait. Treece is by the door. Dylan and I are in one of the dilapidated back rooms of the old pub, shielded by shadows and a giant fold of fallen wallpaper. Between the tears in the paper and holes in the wall we can see the main room.

  Dylan is restless but he isn’t trying to bite anyone. Instead, he is staring at the floor where he died. There are still bloodstains in the wood. He seems to know that someone is coming.

  Carrie is unstable but she’s not stupid. When she shows up, she makes Ryan enter first. That kid really needs to grow a spine. He looks permanently scared these days, his eyes wide and wild and darting all over the place, like he expects things with teeth to come leaping at him from out of the shadows, or out of the sun, or out of wherever he isn’t looking. Carrie has been edgy too, but she laughs through it.

  “You got the book?” Carrie challenges. She’s not holding the zombie book, but I can see the aged-spotted corners of it sticking out of her bag.

  Treece nods and jerks her head sideways, towards the backpack she has left leaning against the wall. Next to the door leading to the room where Dylan and I are hiding. “You got the money?”