Zombie Read online

  I’d been hiding the knot with my sport coat all morning. I refuse to answer and hope he lets it go and leaves me alone—ZSC #2: Keep quiet. I thought I’d be able to get away with it. I know what he’s going to say but there’s no avoiding it, so I turn around.

  “Limp Dick?” he asks, slapping his forehead. “Fuck me. That’s a Limp Dick.”

  Hey now, hey now—Prof Knot in the house.

  The third and final knot—the Limp Dick—is self-explanatory. The Limp Dick has no loop, but instead folds in an impulsive movement from the cross-over to the tunnel and funnels through, dangling down limp-like. Self-explanatory. Limp Dick.

  “Mom wouldn’t care about my knot,” I say.

  “You’re right. She wouldn’t. When’s the last time you saw her?” Dad slips the car into drive, his foot still on the brake. He makes a fist and punches the dent in the dashboard in slow motion with a sound effect of an explosion on impact. “Jeremy. After school. You and me. Necktie refresher course.”

  “You’re such a loser,” I say.

  “I’m not the one rocking a Limp Dick,” he says.

  “Dad,” I say, “where did you go last night?”

  “Spent the night at Liza’s.” He smiles. “Don’t worry so much.”

  “I don’t believe you.”

  “Yes, you do.” Then, raising his hands, he says, “Have a good day, son.”

  I raise mine too as our hands turn into fists and we bang them together like boxers tapping gloves before a fight.

  2

  The Byron Hall Catholic High School for Boys—nicknamed The Hall—is made up of five hallways. There is no second floor. The school has not changed a lick since Jackson graduated four years ago.

  On an aerial sketch of the school, like an architect’s layout, like the kind Mom used to spread out on the dining room table, The Hall would look like the number eight on a solar-powered calculator. Three mini horizontal hallways—one at the top, one in the middle, and one at the bottom of the school. Two long vertical hallways on the sides—one with even classroom numbers, one with odd. Each lined with lockers for 1,300 students, lockers so skinny and tight they would barely hold a broom.

  According to Jackson, the cafeteria is called the cafe and sits past the mini hallway at the top of the school. Jackson told me that Dad said the cafe reminded him a lot of the Marine chow halls at Fort Drum in New York where he was stationed before being deployed to Vietnam. Simple room to describe, really—blue-jay-blue tiled walls; eggshell white linoleum floors; long, boring, brown tables seating six evenly spaced across an L shape. A sign on the wall reads: FIRE OCCUPANCY 585. I wonder what would happen if all 1,300 kids had a free period at the same time.

  When I got my course schedule and locker assignment a few weeks ago, Jackson volunteered to drive me up to his old stomping ground, a phrase he likes to use like some kind of old man. He escorted me around like some big dick hotshot, head held high, walking with a swaggerly limp. He even got all dressed up—khaki pants, white button-down shirt, plaid sport coat with an all blue tie in a Windsor knot. Tool. It was nice, though, to get acquainted with the layout of the school, showing me all of the hallways, which were empty as fuck except for custodians pushing mops around and some people in the front office. No brothers. No students. He showed me my locker at the end of the even hallway near the cafe and had me practice the combo. He told me to always make sure my lock snapped shut. One of the things the upperclassmen like to do, apparently, is find someone’s lock undone and put it on backwards. Before we left, he pointed to the vending machines in the corner of the cafe and said, “I fucked some girl once at a dance over by the vending machines. Fuck central.”

  Great—fuck central.

  At my locker, I look around and wait until I feel invisible. I slip off my shoe, pull out a piece of paper with my combination and quickly apply the three numbers in perfect left-right-left order. The lock snaps open like a broken jaw. I slip the paper back inside my shoe and my shoe back on my foot and the lock back on the locker. I wonder if I’m the only student with a combination cheat sheet in his shoe and a back-up sheet in his bedroom. My backup is in my closet with my other secrets. I dump the contents of my book bag into my locker and pick out my books for the day. Western Civilization. Algebra. Christian Awareness. English Literature. My locker rattles shut with a good kick. I twist a couple of times to scramble the combination.

  I’ve already forgotten the numbers.

  A Brother I haven’t seen yet—a small, Asian man, wearing a long black tunic and thick black hair slicked back—paces along the back of the cafe, his hands behind his back, watching the boys at the tables, waiting for something to happen. I imagine him to be some kind of drill instructor, ready to scream at kids to get to class on time.

  Outside of the cafe is an overhang with metal picnic benches where kids chill and eat lunch and congregate like felons on the prison yard and tell stories that are most certainly all lies—stories that mainly consist of fucking girls and drugs and sometimes school work, but mostly fucking girls and drugs. They, the boys, the young men, they all look exactly the same, unified, like an army—an academic siege!—with their neckties and wrinkled sport coats, all crushed together, like a rat king. Then I hear what Jackson calls the hotness—sweet, honey-like voices—slow and smooth and sexy. Baby, are they sexy.

  A group of four girls in short plaid skirts and white short sleeve, button-down shirts pass the cafe windows and sit at one of the metal picnic benches. A gaggle of dudes swarm the girls, sharks to chum. The guys wear super baggy pants and speak in this faux-gangsta accent like they thug life, yo, like they’re from the projects, which is funny because they’re probably all from the wealthiest suburbs just outside of the city, living in mini-mansions owned by parents who run PR firms and are politicians. It’s that kind of school. Retards.

  The girls know what they’re doing, how they’re sitting, showing some serious leg, sitting side by side, hips cocked, the ends of the skirts pulling up past midthigh. My God their skin looks smooth like a baby’s ass, so smooth you want to lick it—the three white girls with this 2% milk sheen and the black girl a dark chocolate dream. The black girl might just be a super model—I mean she is thin and tall with an incredibly angular face in a beautiful way and her big, bold eyes might as well be singing me a song. It’d be hard to execute any of the five zombie survival rules with these girls.

  The hallways swell inside with dudes stopping, pressing, and pushing each other to see the girls, like it was their first time. Once guys find a clear line of vision, they freeze and hold. There has to be a name for this. Is there a word for it? Can I call it something? Hotnified? Yes. Yup. That’s it. We’re hotnified. We’re hotnified, watching the girls.

  My dangerous daydream continues, the girls white-pantied and strutting around in slow motion to a rock ‘n’ roll soundtrack, when the small, Asian Brother sprints across the cafe, bullet-like, and hurls himself through the double doors to the outside area. I expect to see him do some kind of back flip or combo leg-swipe kick or crazy mid-air jujitsu. Instead, it looks more like hand-to-hand combat. He grabs boys by their collars and elbows and flings them away from the sexy, girl zombies come to infect and devour the Byron Hall Boys. The boys laugh and slide their bags onto their backs and go back inside the building. The girls are unphased, unmoved, and extend their hands to the Asian Brother as an introduction.

  I push my way through the crowd of horny high school perverts, their faces pressed to the doors and windows, practically licking the glass, the fucks. I edge my way to the front of these boner boys and head outside, pulled in like some kind of sexual riptide.

  The air is dead outside, breezeless, hot and heavy with humidity, like the girls brought all of this hot, sexy air with them. I sit at a bench and, smooth as all hell, stoop to tie both shoes that are already double-knotted. The girls, still undressed in my head, circle the Brother. Seeing girls in short skirts pass by makes my pecker shiver for sure, so I can only imag
ine how the entire school of horny bastards feels.

  “Ladies, you must leave,” the small, Asian Brother says. “No girls on school.” He shakes his head. “Three thirty, then you return.” He taps the face of his watch. “Then girls on campus.”

  “What’s your name, Brother?” a girl asks, a tan girl with dark, red hair. She looks over at me and without even thinking or anything I raise my fucking hand and wave to her with a big old goof-ball smile on my face. She doesn’t smile back. Fuck me.

  “I am Brother Lee,” he says.

  “We’re looking for the drama department,” the girl with dark, red hair says. She hands him a stack of papers. “We are members of the drama club at Prudence High, Brother Lee, and are working on the Byron Hall Fall drama, but we need to turn these in before auditions.”

  “You bring after school,” Brother Lee says. “I’m no mailman.” Brother Lee crosses his arms over his chest. “I look like mailman to you?”

  “No, Brother,” the super model says, “you don’t look like a mailman at all. They have better uniforms.” She smiles at him.

  “I don’t think this is funny,” he says.

  She touches his arm and says, “They are our parental permission slips. We need to give them to Father Vincent Gibbs.”

  “You wait to last minute,” Brother Lee says, shaking his head in disapproval, but even Brother Lee is powerless against the plaid skirt and teenage shaved legs. “Follow me. No walking.” He rushes down the sidewalk toward the lecture hall building, herding them away from the rest of us, like cattle away from a cliff; although in this scenario the girls seem more like the cliff and the rest of us the cattle.

  The girls march single file past Brother Lee, who follows quickly behind them. The girl with the dark red hair looks at me over her shoulder again, but still without a smile, not at all like in the movies, like in those rom-coms—the movies where two souls are destined to be together and love one another and get married but for an hour and a half they keep missing each other, either by chance or fate, or by some kind of bullshit, until one rainy or sunny or snowy day their lives crash together and they see each other for the very first time. The girl passes by the boy and smiles over her shoulder and the boy returns the smile, maybe adding a wave, but she doesn’t see the wave because the guy that she’s with is her boyfriend who distracts her. The smile is what I’m really talking about here, the smile that says they will meet up again soon. Then, the girl falls out of love with her fuckneck boyfriend just as the boy is about to settle for some plain girl who is good enough for him, when in the nick of time the boy and the girl wind up at a public park feeding birds, or at a library browsing books in the same section, or strolling through a grocery store in the produce section—his hands squeezing cantaloupe melons as she digs her way through a bin of avocadoes—and they see each other again, but this time it will be the last time they see each other like strangers and the first time they see each other as friends.

  Yeah, this girl that I like doesn’t look at me like that in the slightest. This girl looks at me like she thinks I’m just another pervert, like she knows I undressed her, got her completely naked in my head.

  Brother Lee escorts the girls to the lecture hall building as they disappear.

  I walk back into the even hallway of the school by the cafe and realize I am still smiling and when I stop smiling it makes me feel sad for some reason. Because she never smiled back.

  3

  Byron Hall is prime zombie real estate—one hallway in every direction. No second floor. No basement that I’m aware of. Just a series of interconnected hallways. I can picture the undead, brain- and flesh-eating hoards clambering over each other, coming at me, crashing through doors and windows, swinging their arms around in a jerky motion, regurgitating goo. This school would be a perfect place to set an ambush, actually, if I were a zombie. Plenty of food in a concentrated area with few available exits and a low ratio of hero opportunities.

  An axe sleeps behind a clear glass panel, the word FIRE printed across the glass in red. I make a mental note of its location—by the cafe, next to the patio, on the wall—for defense. Just in case of a siege. No, Armageddon.

  The same two Christian Brothers and a fat furry blue jay roam the halls now, making their way from the front entrance toward the cafe. So far I have been able to avoid the Brothers and mascot. And Brother Lee for that matter, who has resumed his post in the cafe, pacing along the all, hands behind his back.

  A group of bulked-up boys, six of them, dressed in plaid, punch and slap each other in the arm and neck like a bunch of fucking morons, in a my-dick-is-bigger-than-yours kind of way. They are the Plaids. The other kids in the hall instinctively move out of their way, clearing a path so as not to draw any unnecessary or added attention. I expect to be picked up and slammed into a locker. I’ve seen what they do to underclassman, but they pass by like they don’t even see me.

  A white kid with one gigantic pimple in the middle of his forehead, like a Muslim or Hindu or whoever wears the religious red dots on their foreheads, approaches me as I reenter the school and tries to sell me an elevator pass. He wears a Half-Windsor. His pimple looks like it could erupt any second. Sound the sirens. Mandatory evacuation. Stat.

  “You don’t have one?” he says, all worried for my well-being.

  “Nope.”

  “My God. It’s a good thing you ran into me then. This your lucky day.”

  “I didn’t run into you. You tapped me on the shoulder.”

  “You like to run your mouth like my bitch ex-girlfriend.” He opens his hand like a puppet and quacks it at me. “One left. Twenty bucks and it’s all yours.” He dangles a scrap of paper with the words elivater pass printed in red ink.

  “The school is a giant hallway,” I say. “Byron Hall,” I say, still maintaining Zombie Survival Code #1: Avoid eye contact. “There are no elevators. Go find yourself another monkey.”

  “Fucking freshman.” He lowers his sad piece of paper and waits, scanning the crowd, before approaching some other unsuspecting kid. Poor bastards. Both of them—the douchecloset trying to make a buck and the newbie boy lost in a wilderness of cheap cologne and plaid apparel.

  Sometimes you only need to use the first Zombie Survival Code to get out of a jam, but other times you need to combine Codes. For example, ZSC #1 mixed with ZSC #2: Keep quiet. It’s all about the eyes. People underestimate how frightening it can be to engage in a conversation with a person who’s actively avoiding eye contact. That’s the thing about zombies, the undead don’t use eyes like humans. Zombies’ eyes are cross hairs on some high-powered rifle, or lasers on a heat-seeking missile. Their eyes don’t engage but seek with the ultimate intention to destroy and devour.

  Two Christian Brothers flank me in the hallway—the same two at the top of the circle earlier. The giant blue jay still stands beside the Brothers too. The blue jay’s head is humongous and bobbles around. Kids pass by and punch the blue jay’s tail. Blue feathers flutter everywhere.

  “Welcome to Byron Hall,” one Brother says. “I’m Brother Bill and this is Brother Fred.”

  “And this is our school mascot—Byron the Blue Jay,” Brother Fred says.

  The blue jay raises a wing. More feathers. It covers its beak with a wing and laughs—the fuck. I wish I was in the zombie samurai movie Versus. I’d smash its fat, furry blue jay head in with my book bag full of summer reading I didn’t bother with. I’d say things in Chinese or Japanese or Korean and my subtitles would be in yellow beneath me for all to see. I’d make those sounds that they make—aye-cha and oye-oh. I’d be a motherfucking kung fu black belt badass. For sure.

  “What’s your name?” Brother Bill asks.

  “Jeremy Barker,” I say, extending my hand.

  Brother Bill shakes my hand, his tunic swaying over his shoes like a skirt.

  “You must be Jackson Barker’s little brother,” Brother Fred says.

  “My word,” Brother Bill says. “Can’t be.” Brother Bil
l holds his hands up in surrender. “That’s really dating me. I don’t like to think about our legacy students.” He laughs. “Are you getting used to wearing a sport coat and tie?”

  The words Limp Dick scream in my head. I refrain from telling them my father’s philosophy on knots. Sometimes people don’t need to know everything that you know. Like how this building would be the worst possible place to fortify against a Zombie Apocalypse. How they need to build levels and create smaller spaces. Like in the remake of Dawn. Watch Dawn, then schedule a meeting with me to discuss zombie security and preventative zombie architecture. A second level. A fortified basement with a secret elevator to the roof for helicopter evac. More axes. I could tell them this. But I don’t. Instead, I stick to the zombie basics. ZSC #1: Avoid eye contact. ZSC #2: Keep damn quiet.

  “I bet you’re really excited to be following in your brother’s footsteps. I mean, you must know this place like the back of your hand?” Brother Fred says, his hands behind his back.

  “What’s Jackson doing now?” Brother Bill asks.

  Avert eyes.

  “I bet he’s graduated from college. Probably has a good job.” Brother Fred puffs his chest out a bit, proud to have been a part of a success story, of a solid tradition of excellence that is The Hall.

  Quiet.

  “We won’t keep you,” Brother Bill says, finally.

  They walk off together with the fucking blue jay behind them. The Brothers latch onto another kid in the crowd, asking him questions, following him down the hallway and around the corner out of sight. The fat bitch blue jay follows, leaving everything behind him bluer.

  Sometimes being silent is the easiest thing in the world.

  The hallway is crammed with kids, pushing each other against lockers, pulling on wrinkled sport coats, combing their freshly gelled hair, tying last-minute knots before class. Kids roam in packs of plaid shirts with striped ties, plaid sport coats with solid ties. It hurts to look at for too long. Some sport coats look two sizes too big, like they were blindly grabbed off the rack, while others should be behind glass in a Ye-Olde-fifties museum. Pants don’t fit like pants should fit—at the waist. Instead, they hang down to the ass, a hand at the crotch to hold them up or a wide, waddling stance. I’d never be able to pull it off. And Dad would probably kill me before I left the house.