Reanimated Readz (7 page)

The mom scoffs, but Brandy perks up. “Joining you?”

“Private EyeZ could use another detective.” I nod. “Or two,” I say, smiling at her mom. “I mean, it’d be even better if I had a female detective to go where a guy can’t.”

“Or a zombie can’t,” her mother reminds me.

I nod again. “And it wouldn’t hurt if that female detective knew her way around a shotgun or two.”

Brandy looks at her mom for approval, and Mrs. Hutchins shrugs indifferently. I seize the opportunity, imagine my lonely office filled with the likes—the life force—of Brandy Hutchins a few days a week.

“I can’t pay much, but….” I fish the hundred-dollar bills out of my pocket and slide them across the desk. “The sign-on bonus isn’t too bad.”

A Reanimated Readz Story

By

Rusty Fischer

“Yeah, Tanner, but you can’t say that. Out loud. To anyone else but me. You know that, right?”

“Why not?” I ask. “He can’t. I mean, it’s a proven fact: zombies can’t read, so….”

“Because of people
like
him, Tanner. I’m not quite sure why you’re not getting that yet. People. Like. The. Zombie. You’re not going to get elected by putting him down. Period. You have to remember the zombie vote.”

Remember it? How can I forget it?

Unsteady on my heels, which I’m not really used to wearing, I inch past Brody to the heavy violet curtains that currently cover the stage. (Why are all high school auditorium curtains purple? Tell me!
Why
?) If you angle yourself just right, and Brody’s not trying to weasel in right next to you, which he usually is because he’s that kind of guy, you can see through a slit in the last curtain out to the auditorium.

“It’s standing room only,” I say, turning back to him.

Brody is tall, angular, sharp, and even more so in his tailored navy blazer and pleated khaki slacks. He rolls his big brown eyes and says, “It’s the last debate before the election tomorrow. What’d you think everyone was gonna do? Stay home and knit?”

Kinda, I think but don’t say.

There is a drink station set up backstage, just for the candidates. It looks a lot like what a fancy hotel might have at a continental breakfast. Coffee, sugar cubes, Red Bull, mineral water in blue bottles—that kind of thing.

I’m not really thirsty, but they never give anything away at crummy Hillcrest High so I saunter over and grab a long silver can of fancy-looking iced coffee from a big metal bowl filled with crushed ice.

“That’s gonna make you wanna pee,” Brody reminds me, clutching his clipboard to his chest and wagging a finger.

“I won’t drink it all,” I say, hating the fact that I have to explain anything, to anyone, period—about peeing or otherwise. “Or maybe I will,” I add as an aside.

Brody catches it, like he catches
everything
. “I’ll chalk that up to nerves, Tanner B. Simpson.”

I roll my eyes and return to the slit in the curtain. The crowd is getting restless. I wish the administration would get started already. Every minute they spend waiting—and blaming us—is one more minute the candidates for class president will have to spend working really, really hard to get them back.

You don’t cram twelve hundred students into an auditorium at the end of the day and then not get up on stage and tell jokes or toss beads into the crowd or something to keep them occupied.

Don’t the clowns who run this school know
anything
about crowd control?

“All the zombies showed,” Brody points out unnecessarily, inching a long finger into the fold of curtain and sliding it open an extra half-inch so we can both see the bad news at the same time. “That’s not good.”

“Well, this is the first year they’ve been allowed to have a candidate,” I remind him—not that he needs it. “Of course they showed.”

He frowns, peppering me with his minty breath. “I just thought, you know, since it always takes them so long to get to the bus, they’d let them go early like usual.”

I nod, picturing a zombie-free gym for the debate. “That would have been nice.”

I follow his gaze to the back half of the auditorium, top upper left. The zombies sit together, wearing their mandatory green jackets with yellow stripes down the sleeves.

When the government passed the Reanimation Reform School Act last year, and the zombies were allowed back into school, the bill came with all these restrictions. The green jackets were one. Supposedly, it’s to help teachers spot the dead from the living. You know, as if the gray skin and yellow teeth and glazed expressions and shuffling feet weren’t enough.

I shut the curtain and pace some more. Brody follows me, pace for pace, a head taller and with those giant cricket legs of his, slowing down to keep up.

I hear footsteps, slow and heavy, and grunt. Brody stops at my side and says, “Be nice, Tanner.”

“Hi, Tanner,” says Calvin, my opponent for senior class president at Hillcrest High. “Good luck.”

He sticks out a hand, and I know I should shake it because Brody and Principal Jenner and Calvin’s campaign manager, Sylvia Hecker, are all watching me to see if I’ll take it, but I just…hate…touching them, you know?

I look down at his hand then up at Brody, who gives me six inches of eyebrows and four shades of judgmental, then back down to Calvin’s hand.

“Thanks,” I say, brushing fingers with him slightly to keep the icy-cold feel of his dead, gray flesh down to a minimum. “Good luck.”

He shrugs. They do that a lot. “I don’t really need it,” he says, slowly, the way they talk. His skin is taut around his high cheekbones, his eyes not quite black, but a smidge more than gray.

I’m about to say something snarky, even though Brody is shooting me daggers from two paces, when Calvin finally finishes his sentence. “I know I have no chance of winning against someone like you anyway, Tanner.”

I’m still wondering if this is some kind of political trick when Sylvia steps in, clipboard in tow. What’s with campaign managers and their clipboards these days? Have they never heard of tablets?

“Don’t be so humble, Calvin,” she smarms in her smarmy way. “You have every right to be here and, as our polling indicates, you’re neck and neck.”

Yeah, that’s the problem. There are one hundred twenty-nine zombies attending Hillcrest High and just over a thousand humans—and I’m neck and neck with the zombie? What’s wrong with this picture?

“I wouldn’t say neck and neck exactly, Sylvia,” Brody pipes up.

“Me either,” Calvin agrees. “Besides,” he adds in that hoarse, halting voice of his, “it’s not so important to win.”

We all look at him as if he’s speaking gibberish. “Well,” I can’t help blurting out, “if you don’t care about winning, then…why are you running?”

He looks at me and smiles. I try not to wince at his yellow teeth, but it’s hard—real hard. “I just thought it would be nice to show my friends they belong.”

Brody blinks twice and starts to practically applaud him, and I kick his shin. Sylvia brushes back her long red hair and then uses the same hand to rub Calvin’s shoulder protectively. Standing just off to the side, Principal Jenner clears his throat, gives me a kind of thumbs-up behind Sylvia’s back, and approaches the curtain.

“Now remember, gang,” he says. He calls everybody “gang,” even when it’s just one or two of us. “The moderator will ask the questions, and Tanner, you’ll have two minutes to respond. Calvin, since by law you are allowed twice as long to do pretty much everything, you’ll have four minutes. Once the moderator’s questions are done, I’ll open the podium to the audience for the last fifteen minutes of the debate. Got it?”

I nod nervously. The moderator’s questions don’t bother me so much; I’ve been preparing for this for weeks, maybe even months. It’s my fellow students that scare the hell out of me.

Calvin stands next to me. I can feel the cold creeping off his skin, just like I can feel his eyes searching for mine. Staring straight at Principal Jenner’s back, I ignore him.

The curtains open and Principal Jenner walks to the middle of the stage, just as we’d rehearsed yesterday after school. The crowd applauds politely as he introduces us.

I walk out first, striding carefully in the black heels I wore to prom last year. I have on my favorite gray slacks and the white blouse mom got me, the one with the stiff collar to show off my pearl earrings. My hair is back, making my rectangular reading glasses the centerpiece of my face. I don’t really need them, but Brody said they made me look “presidential.”

Again, there is scattered applause and a big cheer from my besties on the cheerleading squad and, of course, my bros on the football team. But they’re only so loud, and there’s only so many of them. By the time I’ve reached my own microphone to the left of Mr. Jenner, the crowd is silent.

I kind of stand there, tasting the hostility in the air, trying to ignore it.

Then Principal Jenner announces Calvin, and
boom
! The rafters start shaking. Kids are standing, the zombies are pounding their feet and pumping their cold gray fists into the air. The entire upper left hand corner of the auditorium is a sea of green sleeves with yellow stripes, all waving as fast as they can go.

The lights from above are bright, but I steal a glance past Mr. Jenner to Calvin as he approaches the microphone, and he looks bashful as usual, though of course he can’t blush.

I’m lucky he still has to wear the green jacket with yellow stripes, even in a presidential debate, because if he’d been allowed to wear something natty like a black suit with a white shirt, all Men-in-Black style, I’d be dust already.

Or that tan suit with the brown shirt, like he wore to our chorus recital last year. Oomph, look out. I’d have to concede right here.
Careful, Tanner, careful. He’s a zombie, remember
?

I’m asked the first question. The moderator is Mrs. Halston, the librarian, and suddenly I wish I hadn’t called her “Mrs. Halitosis” that one time she asked me for a library pass in front of my girls, because I can sense the hostility before she even opens her mouth.

Mrs. Halston is a thin woman in a pink suit, to match her pink lipstick and pink nails. She leans into the microphone in front of her and says, “Tanner, can you tell us why you decided to enter the race so late in the game?”

I blink my eyes and clear my throat. Then I blink my eyes again. I wasn’t really expecting a question like that. World peace, the power of social media, politics—those, I was prepared for.

I clear my throat again and say, “I entered the race well before the deadline, Mrs. Halston. Several days before final applications were due, in fact.”

I smile to the scattered applause from the jock-block in the middle of the stands, trying not to notice that my friends are the only ones applauding. Or, for that matter, not openly sneering at me.

Mrs. Halitosis gives her trademark pink lipstick a workout by smiling from ear to ear. “Actually, Tanner, I have your application right here…” —she pulls it off the cafeteria table she’s sitting at for dramatic effect— “and it’s dated the same day as the deadline for applications. Would you care to explain that?”

I sneak a peek at Brody in the wings, and he’s shaking his head in the universal expression for
PLEASE don’t go off on her! Please, PLEASE, please don’t go off on her
!

So I don’t. I don’t tell her it’s a stupid question. I don’t tell her I don’t see the point. I don’t tell her her breath stinks and everyone knows it. Instead I say, “I fail to see what that question has to do with my candidacy, Mrs. Halston. A deadline is a deadline, right? Why have them if they don’t count?”

She smiles sweetly. “I think voters need to know whether or not their class president will do things ahead of time, or simply by the deadline, don’t you, Tanner?”

Hoots and whistles greet Mrs. Halston’s statement. I try to find out where they’re coming from, but the lights are bright and by the time I think I’ve found the culprits, they’re silent again.

I’m about to ask something clever like, “Is there a question in there somewhere?” when the buzzer to her right rings. She smiles and turns to Calvin, who gets the next question. “Calvin, how do you feel about running against your…ex-girlfriend?”

I gasp, standing too close to the microphone. It echoes through the auditorium as the crowd waits anxiously to hear Calvin’s reply—and waits and waits. Like I said, zombies never do things quickly.

As my heart beats double-time beneath my silk blouse, the crowd grows still and silent. You can hear a pin drop by the time Calvin speaks.

“I love it,” he replies, turning to me and not Mrs. Halston. “This way, I still get to spend time with her.”

Before the applause starts, there is a smattering of “aaaahhhsss,” some of them coming from the middle of the jock-block. I try to keep my smile plastered on, but it’s hard, especially when I sneak a peek at Calvin, who is looking at me with those gray eyes of his.

He’s wearing the same hurt but understanding expression as he did when I broke up with him a few months back, and my heart does the same flip-flop then as it did now.