All Good Children - Catherine Austen [45]
Mom knocks on my bedroom door.
“Shouldn’t you be asleep?” I ask. “Don’t you have to get up at three?”
She sits on the edge of my bed, wiping her eyes. I pause the movie. “Xavier could never fake being a zombie,” I say. “He talks too much. They’d dose him again right away.”
She sniffles and pats my hand. She’s tired, her eyes baggy black, her lips stretched thin. Her hair is frizzy, and it’s been too long since she had it cut. “Your hands are so young,” she says. “They look brand-new.”
I can’t smile at her, but I squeeze her fingers. “Thanks, Mom.”
“For what, honey?”
“For saving me and Dallas.”
“Oh, baby.” She leans her head and shoulder into me. “I should have taken you home.”
I shudder at the memory of her wheeling the tray into class. “When you walked into detention, I thought it was some kind of punishment. For the way I am.”
“I thought you’d know why I was there. I couldn’t lose you, Max.”
“You wouldn’t lose me. I’d just be a zombie.”
She smiles. “That’s a funny thing to call them. Zombies are corpses that crawl out of their graves and eat people’s brains.”
“No way.”
She laughs. “Yes. They eat people alive. They’re not calm at all.”
“That’s crazy.”
“You should call them something else.”
“What do you call your patients?”
She stiffens and pulls her hand away.
I don’t take it back. I don’t want to make it easy for her. “We could call them robots,” I say. “Or mindless slaves.”
“It’s not like that, Max.”
“Yes it is.” I unpause the movie and watch skinny people in shapeless uniforms hide from giant cameras. “What if they do everyone? The whole country?”
“Don’t be silly,” Mom says.
“Remember that airport guard who frisked me? I bet she was a zombie. I bet they’ll do the nurses eventually. One day you’ll come home from work and you’ll be one of them.”
“Who would even notice?”
I want to smack her face for asking that. “I would.”
She leans into me again. Her hair is dry and stale as dust.
“I love you, Mom,” I whisper.
“I love you too, Max.”
Tyler Wilkins stops on the sidewalk where I linger outside Ally’s old school watching the zombies. “Hello, Maxwell. Aren’t you going to class?” He looks at the schoolyard and frowns. “There’s something strange about that. We spoke of it before.” He winces and holds a hand to his chest. “I’m getting a cold.” He smiles at me without malice.
“You don’t seem yourself,” I say.
“I don’t feel right,” he admits. He checks his watch. “We should be going.” There’s something in his eyes, some rule-following gleam, that makes me keep up.
I don’t talk much the rest of the way. He asks strange questions like, “How’s your family?” and “Did you have a healthy breakfast?” He rubs his forehead and chest every few minutes, stumbles more than once, doesn’t smoke or swear. He ditches me on the school grounds and heads inside.
Dallas pulls me to the fence and whispers, “My dad interrogated me last night! Mom said he’d been waiting since he heard I had detention. He checked my blood pressure and reflexes.” He stops talking when Bay walks near, doesn’t make eye contact, doesn’t wave. After Bay moves on, he continues in a whisper. “He gave me a list of rules to memorize. I made a joke and he recorded it. Then he said, ‘You’re going to do so well from now on, son.’” He shakes his head, leans in close. “Like he’s proud of me now that I’m a zombie.”
I nod. “They all know about it.”
“Why? Why would they turn us into zombies?”
“I don’t know. But Mom says zombies are actually undead creatures like werewolves who hunger for people’s brains, so we should call them something else.”
“Werewolves aren’t undead,” Dallas says. “They’re just cursed.”
“Well, zombies are undead. They crawl out of their graves half-rotted and go looking for brains to eat.”
“No way. I thought they were hypnotized people who did some evil guy’s bidding.”
“Zombies don’t do anybody’s bidding. They drag around after brains.”
Dallas snorts. “So what are we supposed to call them?”
I shrug.