Zombies ‘R’ Us
This is the first five chapters of a young adult novel that I am getting close to finishing. Anyone who might read and comment would be appreciated.
by Greg Ellstrom
One
I woke up that morning at least ten minutes late. God, I hate morning. My friggin’ alarm hadn’t gone off, and my mom had only called me once before she left for work. So I tumbled out of bed, happy that I had gone to sleep with my jeans and sneakers still on and only had to put on a fresh t-shirt.
In the bathroom, I looked at myself in the mirror. God, I looked like a friggin’ zombie. It was my own fault for stayin’ up to two in the friggin’ morning playing Resident Evil on my XBox.
My phone beeped in my pocket. I pulled it out and clicked it on. It was a text message from my best friend Walt. It said: “u suk!” I laughed and texted back “u 2 u mudda.” That would get him laughing. Then I brushed my teeth so I wouldn’t have halitosis and attempted to comb my hair. That, of course, was a friggin’ joke. My hair was a pile of brown, out of control curls. What the heck! My girlfriend Marty liked it that way.
Let me tell you about Marty. Seeing her is the one good thing about getting up. She is so hot! She has long reddish-blond hair and dark eyes and a wide smile that melts me every time I see her. Her body was made for lowride jeans and halter tops, even though she hardly ever wore those kinds of clothes. Because, you see, my Marty, full name Martha Wright, is a lady, and always dresses like one, and talks like one, and acts like one. She doesn’t like me to say friggin’, even.
2
My phone, beeped and I grabbed it off the top of the toilet. It was a text from Marty which said, “i luv u.” “me 2 u,” I texted back. How did I. . . how did Jake O’Toole get so lucky to have such a girlfriend? I checked myself out in the mirror again and shook my head. I don’t know how ‘cause I looked like a friggin’ zombie.
My mom had left 5 bucks, a bagel, and a note on the kitchen counter for me. The note said: “I had to leave early this morning, honey. Big sales meeting to get ready for. I hope you woke up in time to make it to school. Love, Mom.” I read the note, scarfed down the bagel, jammed the five into my pocket, and headed out the door.
I walk to school. It’s only like a quarter of a mile, and as my sneakers beat their way down the sidewalk, I thought about my mom. She’s friggin’ fantastic. She works like 50 hours a week selling insurance to people who probably don’t want it, but she never complains. Not much anyway. And she takes great care of me and hardly ever treats me like a kid. My dad left about 5 years ago when I was only 12. Did you ever hear of a “Dear John” letter? They were like from World War II or something. When a soldier got a letter from his wife or girlfriend saying that she was leaving him, it was called a “Dear John.” Well, my dad was in the Army Reserves, and he fell in love with his friggin’ sergeant. Can you believe that? At least the sergeant was a woman. Anyway, my mom got a Dear John phone call from Dad when he was at summer reserve training. He married his sergeant, too. He’s deployed now, and I worry a lot about him, but he really pisses me off.
I strode into the high school lobby and all my friends were leaning against the wall waiting for me. Walt Carlson, whose been my best buddy since like second grade,
3
was holding hands with his girlfriend Carly Thomas. Walt’s about 6’1” which is like 3 inches taller than me, but I outweigh him. Walt’s really skinny and dresses like a skater. Baggy pants, baggy hoodies, and a chain from his belt to his wallet. I don’t dress like that. I just dress kind of. . .normal. T-shirts and jeans, like I said before.
Carly is really cute. She’s tiny, like 4’11” or something, which makes her look really weird standing next to stretched out Walt. She has dark hair, which she wears short and cut kind of raggedy. She usually wears really dark red lipstick. I think she’d like to wear black lipstick and be a goth, but being a goth is nowhere in the little hick town where we live.
“Hey, man,” I said.
“Hey,” Walt said, and we pounded fists.
“Hi Carly,” I said, and she smiled. She has a really sweet smile. Then I turned to Marty.
She looked amazing. She looked like she was a private school girl or something, wearing a short plaid skirt with a white blouse, and a short blue jacket kind of thing. The only thing that blew off the private school picture was her feet. No knee socks and saddle shoes for my girl. She had on flip-flops covered with rhinestones and her toenails were painted day-glo pink. Like I said before, Marty is a lady. And smokin’!!
“Hi, Marty,” I said and kissed her gently on the lips.
“Hi, Jacob,” she smiled back and looked into my bloodshot eyes. “How late were you up last night?”
“Two.”
4
“Playing videogames?”
“Yeh.”
“You’re crazy,” she said, but in a real nice way, and she smiled.
“I’m friggin’ addicted.”
“Don’t say friggin’,” she scolded me, again with a smile.
“Oh, right. I forgot about the friggin’ ban.”
Her eyes widened. God, her eyes were gorgeous.
“That’s the ban on saying ‘friggin’,’ I mean.”
“Hi, Jake,” Kaitlyn said. She had pushed her backpack up against the lobby wall and was sitting on it. Kaitlyn is Marty’s little sister. She’s just a freshman, and the rest of us are juniors, but we let her hang out with us anyway. She’s pretty, too, with reddish blonde hair like Marty’s and a nice body for a 14 year old. But her eyes are always kind of frightened and kind of sad. For some reason Kaitlyn is a little troubled by the world. That’s another reason we let her hang out with us.
“Hi, Kait,” I smiled down at her. “Happy Tuesday.” Then I turned and looked at the rest of the mob pouring into the lobby of Carriageville High School. “We better hit our lockers,” I said and took Marty’s hand. Together the five of us moved through the crowd. In school there’s safety in numbers. It was us against the world.
Two
Marty and I have 3rd period study hall, so we go to the library/media center to study, because you can’t get any studying done in study hall. Also, in the library we can sit across from each other, and Marty can stretch out her long legs and rest her feet on my lap. Enough said about that!
I do all my studying in school. I avoid doing schoolwork at home at all cost. Right now I’m third in my class of 127 students. Not bad for a non-studier. I’m lucky. I have a sticky brain. Most everything we learn in class sticks there waiting to be unstuck when test time comes.
I was doing my chemistry, which was really simple because it was only the third week of school, and chemistry made me think about what I had mentioned before. Not Marty’s feet on my lap. That’s body chemistry for sure, but rather about how I felt like my friends and I were 5 against the world.
The chemistry of our school is pretty simple. Although it’s a little school in a hick town, you need to be part of a group, a human chemical compound. Your friends are like the elements or the atoms or whatever. You work together with your friends to keep the reactions under control. If you don’t have friends to help you keep things under control, life in a high school can really suck.
As I was thinking about that stuff, Bob Krauss came in the door. Friggin’ great! If I continued to think chemically, then Bob was a big fat electron who bounces all around, bumping into the reactions that are going on in school and messing them up. I mean he’s the epitome of bully. Pretty good word, huh? I read somewhere that the worst high school bullies weren’t jocks anymore, but on-line cyber-bullies. Well Bob’s a throwback then. He’s one big, mean S.O.B., who thinks he’s my friend because we’re both on the wrestling team. He isn’t my friend. I quickly looked down at my chem notes, but I knew he’d seen us. He lumbered over to our table.
“Hey, Jake,” he said, towering over us. Bob is like 6’2” and weighs over 275 pounds. I know his weight for sure, because he wrestles the 275 lb. weight class on our team, and he’s always suckin’ weight before matches. He was talking to me, but looking at Marty’s chest. Marty didn’t even raise her eyes as he towered above us.
“Hey, Flop,” I said. “Flop” was the nickname which Bob allowed people to use. Behind his back, people called him Blob and Slob. Very quietly.
“I forgot my lunch money. Can I borrow 2 bucks?”
“Nope,” I said.
“How come?
“Because you never friggin’ pay me back.”
Marty glared at me.
“Come on. I gotta eat lunch.”
“Forget it, Flop.”
“How about you, Marty?” Flop leered. “Will you loan me two bucks?”
“No, Bob,” Marty said without looking up.
“Yer little sister’s hot.” He continued to leer.
Marty slowly raised her eyes. They were deep, deep brown and intense. “Stay away from Kaitlyn, Flop,” she said, her teeth set tightly.
Flop giggled, a moronic sort of bear-giggle, and wandered off. Marty continued to follow him with her intense eyes. “Drop dead, Flop,” she whispered and went back to studying.
I just watched her for a couple minutes. God, I loved her. She was so friggin’ cool!
Three
Lunch! I love lunch, and my mom knows it, which was why she left me 5 bucks every morning. That day I had two slices of pepperoni pizza, a large pile of french fries, an ice cream sandwich, and three milks. At school cafeteria prices, my total came in well under my 5 dollar maximum.
I was sitting with Marty in 6th period lunch. She had brought her own sandwich, but bought a plate of french fries for herself. I mean I love her, but I wasn’t going to share my fries.
“What kind of sandwich?” I asked.
“Lettuce,” she nodded, demurely chewing the first bite.
“A lettuce sandwich and mega-french fries?”
“Kind of schizophrenic, huh?” she smiled and dipped a fry into a cup of ketchup.
Like I said before, Marty has a great body, but she’s not one of these twig-sized, anorexic, bones-poking-out-of-her-cheeks, high fashion model kind of girls. Marty has just the right amount of flesh on her. Like me, she likes to eat.
She looked at my food-covered tray and shook her head. “You eat so much!”
“And don’t gain a pound. I’m one lucky dude. Great metabolism.”
“Don’t say dude,” she smiled.
“I’ll put it on the list with ‘friggin’,” I said then noticed that Marty wasn’t looking at me. She was looking across the cafeteria. My eyes turned to follow hers. At the end of the row of tables, a new kid was standing. When you go to a school with only about 500 kids, you can pick a new kid out right away. The new kid was looking around in a kind of shy way, and you could tell he didn’t know where he should sit.
“It’s so sad. . .being new and not having any friends,” she said.
“He looks like he’s Mexican,” I offered, watching the kid try to figure out where he’d be welcome.
“Latino,” Marty replied, still watching the new guy. “I think that’s what Mexican-American people like to be called. We should ask him to sit with. . .,” Marty started. “Oh.” Then the kid moved from his spot where he’d been looking like the deer in the headlights and headed to an empty table across the room. Marty watched him all the way. “I saw him talking to Kaitlyn after second this morning,” she said.
“Really?” I raised my eyes from my feast.
“Kaitlyn was smiling.”
“Hey,” I said. “That’s unusual.”
“I know,” Marty answered and bit her lip.
Marty and I talk about everything. I mean almost everything. Real personal stuff, but for some reason I’d never felt right about asking about Kaitlyn and how come her little sis was so scared and so down a lot of the time. I decided that was the time to ask.
“How come Kait’s that way?” I asked.
“What do you mean?”
“You know. Kind of sad all the time. Kind of afraid of stuff. Hardly ever smiling.”
“She smiles at you,” Marty said. “She really likes you. She says she trusts your eyes?”
“That’s good to know.”
“Watch out for her. O.K., Jake?” Marty said, a french fry poised before her lips.
“Always,” I said.
We stuffed ourselves for another minute or so, until I said, “So, how come Kait is the way she is?”
Marty looked toward the ceiling, her eyes getting a little misty. Woops, I thought. “Not now,” she said and her voice sounded a little squeaky. “I’ll tell you some time.”
Four
Even thought it isn’t wrestling season, Walt and I work out after school 2 or 3 days a week. At least Tuesday and Thursday, anyway. If we don’t show ourselves in the gym or the weight room once in awhile out of season, Bozo goes nuts and makes our lives miserable.
‘ Bozo is our wrestling coach, and his real name is Laverne Bonzo if you can believe that. He’s old, like in his middle 50’s and he’s a retro P.E. teacher, and not retro in a good way. Bozo is the kind of P.E. teacher who’s in all those old movies. The kind of guy with the buzz cut and the gym pants with stripes on the sides and the special coaching shoes. And he’s psychotic about calisthenics, won’t let us refer to gym as physical education, and refuses to let any of his classes do the cool stuff the young P.E. teachers do like swing dancing and cross country skiing.
What really pisses Bozo off is that all gym classes are co-ed. He’d like it the old way so he could just beat on guys. So if you’re in Bozo’s class, you know the guys are going to be doing guy stuff on one side of the gym and the girls are going to be hittiing around a badminton birdie on the other side of the gym.
Bozo’s something of a perv, too. He loves to hand the girls the badminton birdie and say, “here’s the shuttlecock, ladies.” He just loves saying the cock part to them. Bozo doesn’t laugh very often, and never at jokes that kids make, except one day in gym class, Flop said to him, “Hey, coach, let’s play basketball. We’ll play shirts and skins, and the girls will be skins.” Bozo roared with laughter at that.
So why do I wrestle for a coach whose a perverted, throwback loser? For one thing, I’m good at it. And though practice is really friggin’ hard, the matches are friggin’ hard but fun. But mostly it’s because of what I said before. You really need something to define yourself in our school. Something to be part of. Something to make you a little different from the rest of the zombies walking around. So Walt and I are wrestlers.
That afternoon, Walt and I said good-bye to the girls, then went out and jogged a couple of miles on the track. Then we came into the weight room and worked free weights for half an hour. Finally, we went into the gym, threw a mat down onto the floor, and practiced takedowns and escapes and reversals and stuff. Walt wrestles 160, and I wrestle 171., so were pretty well-matched. I’m more compact and maybe a little stronger, but Walt’s got me on lankiness and agility. We knew if Bozo happened to peek in, he’d be thrilled as heck to see us wrestling, and it’s always good to be on Bozo’s good side.
But instead of Bozo peeking in, I looked up from the mat to see the new kid watching us from the door. Walt had me in some kind of scissors hold which would probably be illegal in a match, and I said, “O.K. Let me up”
“I’m too much for ya, huh?” Walt grunted happily and farted just to be obnoxious.
“Geez, let me out,” I moaned, and he relaxed, and I rolled away. “You smell like a friggin’ sewer, Carlson.”
“Yeh, I know,” Walt grinned.
I got to my feet, wiped the sweat from my brow, and walked toward the kid at the door. “Hey,” I said. “How ya doin’?”
“Hey,” the kid said back and nodded. He was a good-sized guy. Probably about 6 foot and 190 pounds. He had a dark complexion, really black hair that fell over his eyebrows, and eyes that were even darker than Marty’s. He looked like he was a Latino, if that’s the right word, just like Marty had said.
I wiped my sweaty palms on my sweatpants and offered him my hand. “I’m Jake,” I said.
He thought about that for a second, then half-smiled, and offered his hand back to me. “Carl. . .I’m Carl,” he sort of stuttered.
I pointed to Walt who was still sitting on the mat, waving his arms at us, trying to fan his obnoxious fart fumes in our direction. “That disgusting pig is named Walt.”
“Hey,” Walt said.
“Hey,” Carl replied.
“You wrestle?” I asked.
He thought about that for another second. “No. I box a little.”
“Cool,” Walt offered.
“You’re new here.” I didn’t ask. It was a statement.
“New today.”
“Sucks being new?”
“It’s a bitch.”
“How come you wandered into the gym?” Walt wondered, still at his spot on the mat.
“I had to stay after to do some stuff in the counseling center,” Carl explained, “and when I got done I had missed the 3:00 bus, so I had to hang around until the 4:00 bus.”
Walt laughed. “There isn’t a 4:00 bus.”
“What? Some kid in the lobby told me there was a late bus at 4:00.”
“Some kid in the lobby was playin’ with you?” I explained. “The late bus doesn’t come until 5:30.”
“Crap,” Carl grimaced and looked at his watch. “I gotta wait an hour and 40 minutes.”
“Where do you live, Carl?” Walt asked.
“I live out off of Fly Road.”
Walt did a kip to his feet. “We’ll give you a ride home,” he smiled.
And that was the way we met the new kid.
Fivew
“So,” Carl explained, “my dad is Haitian and my mom is Mexican-American. She was born in Texas, and that’s where I live most of the year. Mom’s a bookkeeper in Brownsville. She stays home, but my dad has always been a seasonal farm worker, and he loves to come up North every summer to work, and I come with him, because I can make some money, and it’s too damn hot in Texas. We always go back home right around Labor Day, but my dad got hurt the last week of August.” The three of us were tooling down Fly Road. Walt was driving his black and rust ‘95 Grand Am. I was riding shotgun, and Carl was in the back seat. He was explaining why he was enrolling at Carriageville High, almost 3 weeks after school had started.
“What happened to your dad?” I asked.
“He got tossed off a tractor and broke his pelvis.”
“Ouch,” Walt said.
“He’s all screwed up, and there’s no way he can drive 2,000 miles home in our pickup. So Mr. Siracci, who owns the farm we work on, is letting us stay in one of his trailers until dad is well enough to drive back to Texas.. Mr. Siracci is a good guy, and he feels bad about dad getting hurt.”
“So you’re not like an illegal alien or something?” Walt asked.
“No,” Carl laughed. “I’m legal man. I was born in the U.S.”
“God, Carlson, you are a moron,” I said, and Carl laughed some more in the back seat.
“I wouldn’t have started school at all,” he went on, “but my mom has been bitching at me over the phone for the last two weeks. My aunt, too. Gotta get your education. Gotta get your education.”
I turned around and looked at the new kid. “How long before you’ll head back to Texas do you think?”
Carl shrugged. “Maybe a month.”
“You can hang with us until then,” I said.
Carl smiled and nodded. “Thanks, you guys.”
“You met Kait today.”
Carl looked puzzled.
“Kaitlyn Wright,” I went on. “About 5’ 4”. Big brown eyes. Reddish blond hair.”
“Oh, yeh.” Carl grinned. “Kaitlyn. She’s sweet.”
I liked the fact that he called Kait sweet, not hot or smokin’ or sexy or something. “She’s my girlfriend Marty’s little sister. Marty saw you guys talking together.”
Poor Carl looked puzzled again.
“I’d seen you before just now in the gym,” I explained. “Marty and I saw you at lunch today.”
“God, I was really lookin’ like the new kid then.”
“You were a babe in the woods,” I laughed.
“Turn at the next right,” Carl said and pointed at the windshield.
Walt slowed, turned right, and we headed down a bumpy dirt road. Not too far down it, we came upon an old double wide trailer, sitting up on cinderblocks.
“Home sweet home,” Carl said, and Walt pulled up in front.
Walt’s Grand Am is a 2 door so I popped my door and leaned forward so Carl could get out. Walt was leaning out his window and looking the other way. As Carl climbed out, Walt turned and said, “what’s that water down there?”
I turned and looked and saw that at the bottom of a path that wound down a hill covered with scrub brush was what looked like a big pond.
“That’s the quarry,” Carl said from outside the car. “Haven’t you guys ever been down to the quarry.”
“The quarry,” I said, “I heard about it, but never knew exactly where it was.”
“In Carriageville, going to the quarry is like getting into a car with a stranger ,” Walt explained. “From the time you can understand what your mom’s talkin’ about, you’re told to not to go near it, ‘cause you’ll drown.”
“Plus it’s not like we hang out in cow pastures 5 miles from the village,” I added.
“It’s a cool place,” Carl shrugged. “Wanna see it?”
“Damn straight I do,” Walt said and climbed out of the car, and I followed. Then we both followed Carl down the hillside. It wasn’t very far to the quarry. Maybe 200 yards, and when we got there, what we saw was pretty awesome. The old quarry was about a quarter mile across and surrounded by rocky outcroppings. The water was almost black and looked cold and really deep. But the most awesome thing we saw was the absolutely naked lady standing on one of the rocky points. She was tall and built, with long-black hair, and like I said, as naked as a friggin’ newborn. Then she dove into the water. She hardly made any splash going in.
“Holy crap,” Walt said.
“That’s my Tante,” Carl smiled.
“What?”
“Mi tia . . .I mean my aunt. . .my Tante Marie.”
“She’s amazing,” Walt said softly.
The three of us kept staring at the quarry. In a couple seconds, Carl’s aunt’s head broke the surface. She glared, and the three of us spun around and hurried up the hill.
“She’s a bruja,” Carl went on as we headed toward the trailer.
“What?” I asked.
“She’s a bruja. . .a witch!”
