The Dead (a Lot) Trilogy (Book 1): Wicked Dead Read online

  My father shook his head. “I . . . I’m not sure.”

  “So is she alive?” my mother asked.

  “Um, yeah,” I said, echoing my mom. “Is she living? Do we need to hold a mirror to her mouth to see if she’s breathing? And if not, is she . . .” I choked on the word. It was so bizarre to even think about. “Is she changing?”

  “Into what?” my father said. See, adults can be so stupid some times. You have to be on top of them every second of the day or they’ll slip into dementia or something equally as heinous.

  I swallowed and it made a weird, froggy sound.

  “Into a zombie,” I said.

  “How? She hasn’t been bitten. We’re immune.”

  “Don’t ask me. You’re the doctor.”

  My mother wiped dark blood away from Trudy’s face. The flow was slowing down, but it was still there. I felt bad for ever thinking anything bad about Trudy Aiken. She could have handed us over to Cheryl The It. By now, she could have been in a nice, plush government facility where they may or may not have fed her to poxers to see how long obese people take to change.

  She could have been eating pizza, pizza, pizza.

  Instead she was here.

  “Doug?” my mom said to my dad. “Could she really be changing?”

  Before he had a chance to answer, Trina came over and crouched down next to us. “So next time we plan a family outing, could we go to Disney or something? Frankly, I’m not having any fun.”

  “Amen to that,” I said and we both automatically high-fived each other.

  “Doug?” my mom said again, her eyes bright with a fresh sheen of tears. He didn’t answer her. He didn’t move at all. My sister and I didn’t either. None of us could bear to utter a sound as we watched a bubble of blood form at the end of my mom’s nostril, burst, and dribble scarlet horror down her face.

  12

  AWFUL CAN’T BEGIN to describe what happened next. I think I’ll always have nightmares about the blood. My mom had what my dad called a ‘petit-mal’ seizure. Her eyes rolled up into her head and she fell back against the hard floor.

  “Molly,” my dad gasped, but his words were drowned out by a disgusting gurgling sound. Lanky Randy Stephens—the guy with the weird voice who everyone thought was probably gay—literally puked blood all over Eddie with the fake hair, but it didn’t matter because Eddie was already covered in his own gore.

  Felice LeFleur passed out when she realized fresh blood was dripping from her ears, too. Finally, Nedra Stein got sick. She knew what was going to happen so she took one of the quilts and huddled in a corner away from everyone else. Bleeding from several orifices is never a lady-like thing to do, but Nedra handled herself like a debutante.

  They were the seven—my mom, Trudy Aiken, Eddie with the fake hair, Felice LeFleur, Nedra Stein, Randy Stephens . . . and . . . um . . . Tattoo Guy, who was no longer with us.

  They were the ones that had been locked up at Site 37. My dad had been kept there, too, but Diana needed him, so he never got the special cookies and milk, or the preventative influenza shots, or the pills that my mom and the others were told were vitamins to keep them from getting Necropoxy.

  He was safe, but the rest of them weren’t. They were lied to and experimented on and others were even killed, like poor Mrs. Bijur. I saw it with my own eyes.

  So now, all in the space of a few short hours, Swifty’s Country Store in Hollowton, Massachusetts had turned into a very scary sick ward.

  Aunt Ella made sure Krystal was tucked under a quilt and fast asleep. She then lit a fire with the birch logs on display in front of the wood burning stove. Bullseye solemnly went outside with Newfie to collect more wood. Trina and Prianka lit oil lamps that were on sale for $19.95 with a complimentary bottle of lamp oil. Jimmy silently rolled back and forth between each of the sick ones, putting wet paper towels on their heads and making sure we were completely wrong and none of them were turning into poxers.

  That would be bad. That would be really, really bad.

  Sanjay, with Andrew on his shoulder, walked quietly through the sick people waving his small hand over a vanilla-flavored candle he took from one of the gift displays. He kept murmuring words that no doubt came from the box of books he had taken from Aunt Ella’s house.

  “Magic mend in candle light, sickness flee into the night,” he whispered in front of each of them, over and over again, from one to the next to the next.

  He was eerie. Everything was eerie.

  My father knelt over my mother with his head in his hands. Trina and I went and stood beside him and looked down at my mom. She was so pale. Most of the blood had been wiped away, but she barely looked alive. Cold tears dripped from my sister’s eyes.

  “Diana did this to them,” she seethed with venom in her voice.

  My father just shook his head. “I should have known,” he gulped. “Of course they were performing tests on them. How could they not?”

  I put my hand on his shoulder, which wasn’t a typical thing for me to do. Then again, nothing this past week was typical.

  “Dad, we need medicine, don’t we? Some medical junk? I don’t think paper towels and Sanjay’s magic is going to cut it.”

  “We’re doomed,” he said. “It’s all over.”

  Yikes. That made Trina really mad. “It’s not all over,” she barked. “I’m sorry this is happening, I really am, but it’s not all over. It’s never all over. Now’s not the time to curl into a ball, Dad.”

  “Trina,” I hissed at her.

  “No,” my dad said. “Your sister’s right. Every now and then it’s good to cry—to curl into a ball for a moment. Then you suck it up and move on. That’s what I taught you both. I’m not going back on that now.”

  “So?” I said.

  “So we need medicine, supplies, anything we can get our hands on, and we need it now.”

  Aunt Ella came up to us, looked down at my mom, and shook her head.

  “I know where we are,” she said. “On a map I mean. We might look like we’re in the middle of nowhere, but we’re ten miles away from Guilford. It’s not like Greenfield. It’s small—smaller than Purgatory Chasm. And it’s spread out. I know there’s a pharmacy there somewhere.”

  “Then we’ll go,” I said. “Dad, you give us a list of what you need and we’ll go.”

  The look of terror on his face was painful to see.

  “NO,” he practically yelled as he got to his feet. “I just got you back. You’re not going anywhere.”

  “Yes we are,” said Trina.

  “No you’re not,” he screamed again. Nedra Stein moaned and gurgled. I wanted to cover my ears and blot out everything.

  “Stop it,” I snapped. “Just stop it.” I turned to my dad. “Listen,” I said. “Mom needs you. These people need you.”

  “But what if you get attacked?” he cried. “There are zombies or poxers or whatever you call them out there. All they want to do is eat you.” He stopped himself, like he just realized the words coming out of his mouth were absurd—like he never thought in a million years he would have strung those particular syllables together into such a bizarre sentence.

  Not ever.

  Prianka stomped up to us. “I’m going,” she said to me. “It doesn’t make any sense for you or Trina to go. Bad people are looking for you out there.”

  “Bad people could find us here,” Trina and I both said in unison.

  “But your family is here.”

  I reached out and grabbed her hand. “Remember last night on the steps at Aunt Ella’s house? Remember what I said?” I told her that she wasn’t alone. Her parents had been visiting India when Necropoxy hit. It never occurred to me that she would probably never see them again. I remembered every word I said—’I have parents, so now you have parents. I have
a family, so now you have family.’ Late last night, in the darkness, on that porch, I said that I had her and she had me. “I meant every word.”

  Then Jimmy was there. “I’m useful, guys. I think I pretty much proved that getting out of Site 37. If Trina’s going, I’m going.”

  Bullseye was standing in the doorway with a pile of wood and Newfie at his side. He had a scowl on his face like he had been thinking too hard about something.

  “You’re leaving?” he said to us. The wood fell to the ground. Newfie tucked his tail between his legs, narrowly missing getting bonked on the head by a log.

  “No they’re not,” said my father.

  “Yes we are,” I said. “Some of us or all of us—we have to go.”

  “What about me?” Bullseye said sullenly.

  “What about you?” I said. I genuinely meant it. What about him? He was with us. We were a family just like I told Prianka we were. Maybe I was missing something. Without a word, Bullseye turned and stormed out the back door.

  Yup, I was definitely missing something.

  “I got it,” said Jimmy and followed after him. We watched him pump the wheels on his chair with his meaty arms.

  Amidst everything, someone said something. I thought one of the sick people was babbling. I don’t know. Then I heard it again. This time I felt sick to my stomach, mostly because I knew who was talking and what was said.

  “I’ll go,” said old Dorcas Duke as she sucked on the end of her cigarette, her voice low and raspy. “I’ll go.”

  13

  IT WAS FULL DARK outside and the weather was beginning to change. I had felt the shift this morning when we left Aunt Ella’s house. Yesterday had been Wednesday, September twenty-first, the first day of fall and five days after the world died. Needless to say, summer was completely and officially over.

  I looked at Uncle Don’s watch. The time was a little after seven at night. If things were different, I would just be finishing soccer practice and bumming a ride home from Hayden or Judah, or maybe Casey. They already had their licenses. We would be talking about hot girls at school and I would be reminding them that Trina was off conversational limits.

  We would probably even be harping on Prianka Patel and how it sucked she was such a cold fish.

  Instead, I was here.

  “But why you?” demanded Prianka for like the millionth time.

  “Because she’s my mother,” I said.

  “So why can’t Trina go?”

  I almost said ‘because she’s a girl’ but I think Prianka would have reached down and broken off a vital part of me. She had a habit of going for the jugular and I wasn’t interested in taking her moodiness for a test drive.

  “Because she’s my sister,” I said. That was an excuse that Prianka could understand. “Listen, I’ll be fine. It’s just me and Smokey the Bear,” I told her, meaning Dorcas. The old bus-driver had already helped herself to several packs of cancer sticks from the behind-the-counter display. I’d be driving with the windows open all the way to Guilford and back. “It will only be a couple hours,” I said and put my arms around Prianka. “It’s not like there are a lot of poxers around here, and according to your brother, we’re surrounded by a state forest and the Quabbin Reservoir. This is Hicksville, USA.”

  “What about Diana?” she whispered.

  “What about her? It’s dark out. I’m sure she’s chillin’ for the night, or whatever mad scientists do.”

  “As soon as you put on your headlights, it’s not going to be dark anymore.”

  True enough. If someone was using a helicopter, our headlights would be the only light in a sea of black. Damn Prianka and her superior brain.

  “What do you think?” I laughed. “She’s going to be flying around in her mini-copter at night? Somehow I doubt it.” I didn’t doubt it, though. Not for a second.

  In the end, I knew Prianka was just really mad at me for volunteering to go, but I needed to be the one. I couldn’t lose my mom—not after I tried so hard to get her back. Besides, the thought of Trina on a road trip in poxer-land with Dorcas Duke was too much to bear.

  No. It had to be me. I knew it as soon as Dorcas volunteered.

  I was confident that Jimmy could have co-piloted the trip in my place, but even after everything he had done to prove himself as handicapable, I think Dorcas was still having a rough time wrapping her head around the wheels. What can I say? You can’t teach an old dog new tricks, and Dorcas was a really, really old dog. Besides, Trina would have flipped out.

  Bullseye was too young. Prianka had Sanjay. Aunt Ella needed to be there for Krystal if something happened to my mom and everyone else was sick and getting sicker.

  That just left me and Trina. We couldn’t ask my dad to decide. How could a parent choose something like that? So we made the decision easy and chose for him.

  “One of us has to go with her,” I whispered to Trina after Dorcas volunteered. “You know that, don’t you?”

  She quickly glanced around the room then back to me. Her eyes met mine. “I’m tougher than you,” she said.

  “I know. That’s why they need you here. I don’t have it in me to protect them like you do. But I do have it in me to be a weasel. I can sneak in and sneak out of a pharmacy without a poxer ever even knowing I’m there.”

  I wasn’t sure that was entirely true, but the fact of the matter was I was going to say whatever I needed to say to make sure I went with Dorcas and not Trina. If anything ever happened to my sister, I would never be able to forgive myself. Trina was part of me, you know? She was my sister—my twin. I couldn’t let anything happen to her. I just plain wouldn’t allow it.

  “And if you don’t come back?”

  “Not happening,” I said. “I’m too annoying not to come back.” She didn’t have a snappy comeback. Good. “So, I’m going with Dorcas, right?”

  Trina was quiet for a moment. Finally, she dropped her head and slowly nodded. “Fine,” she whispered. “But just so you know, you really, really suck.”

  I smiled. “I love you, too, sis.”

  We told Dad our plan. His face was a mask of worry. My mother looked horrible and so did the others from Site 37. He didn’t have a choice and he knew it.

  Aunt Ella put a hand on my dad’s shoulder. “He’s more capable than you think,” she said and hit her chest with her fist. “Strong like bull, ya?” My father smiled. I guess it was a brother-sister thing from when they were kids.

  “Strong like bull-tatti,” muttered Prianka. Swearing in Hindi definitely had its uses.

  I put two thumbs up in the air. “Thanks for the vote of confidence, Pri.” She didn’t say anything, but the look in her eyes wasn’t contempt—it was flat out worry. I felt a pang deep in my gut, a little like butterflies.

  Emotions suck.

  Finally, my father, pale as a ghost, took a new notepad with a pine tree design printed on it off a spinner rack, then swiped a pen with a moose eraser on top. He quickly wrote out a list of things he needed from a pharmacy. Some of the stuff I couldn’t even pronounce, but he told me it would all be there.

  “Most of these things are behind the counter in the back,” he said. “Also, look through the cabinets. If you find one that’s locked, you have to open it. That’s where the important drugs are kept.”

  “So bring a gun, right?”

  “Yes,” he said. His words came out thick like molasses. “Bring a gun with you.”

  Aunt Ella wrote out directions for us with her own moose pen and handed them to me. “Can you read my chicken scratches?” she asked. They really were a bunch of scribbles, but I got the gist of where we were headed. All we had to do was go back out to the main road we had been on that morning, and follow it for another ten miles. We’d come to a covered bridge. Go through it, make a right, and the minisc
ule town of Guilford would be right in front of us.

  “Don’t blink or you’ll miss it,” she said.

  I swallowed. Somehow the idea of having my eyes closed, even for a split second, seemed like a dream—one that I would never, ever have again.

  14

  “I’M DRIVING,” DORCAS croaked with her cigarette hanging out of her mouth.

  “Okay,” I said with a blank face. The cranky old biddy announced her intentions with such certainty and authority that I wasn’t about to question her. She started to head toward the bus.

  “Um . . . Dorcas? Mrs. Duke? Aren’t we going to take the minivan?”

  “That toy?” she grumbled.

  “Well, yeah. We sort of have to conserve gas and all. Besides, the van is quieter. I think we need to be quiet. Don’t you?”

  She took a long drag on her cigarette. “Fine,” she spat. “We’ll do it your way.” Dorcas blew a great cloud of cancerous exhaust out of her mouth. I watched the smoke drift away into the night.

  I didn’t mean that it was my way or the highway. I was just suggesting that the minivan might be less conspicuous. After all, we were trying to be, you know, stealthy. Somehow, Dorcas Duke made me feel like a wise-ass or something, which in general I was, but not to an old lady. You have to draw the line somewhere.

  “And don’t call me Mrs. Duke,” she snapped. “That’s my mother.”

  Yeah, right—if her mother was made of dust.

  Dorcas was ancient. She had about a million years on Diana. Diana was old but well put together, like an over-the-hill actress who now did commercials on TV for adult diapers—but Dorcas? Dorcas was like a petrified sour grape.

  She wore flannel and man pants. She definitely didn’t have that soft, rosy-cheeked grandmotherly look. Instead, she was just sort of yellow with sallow, craggy skin and wrinkles that were covered with even more wrinkles. Even her teeth were yellow, probably because of decades of nicotine abuse.