Better Off Undead

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  About the Author

  Copyright Page

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  This book is dedicated to the young people who would like to change the world. Remember these words of Margaret Mead: “Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world; indeed, it’s the only thing that ever has.”

  WHAT A WORLD, WHAT A WORLD!

  —THE WICKED WITCH OF THE WEST IN THE WIZARD OF OZ

  THERE IS A CRACK IN EVERYTHING.

  THAT’S HOW THE LIGHT GETS IN.

  —LEONARD COHEN, “ANTHEM”

  SOMETIME IN THE NOT-SO-DISTANT FUTURE …

  MIRROR, MIRROR

  Mirror, mirror, on the wall. Who’s the deadest of them all?

  There I was, lying on my bed on another sticky summer afternoon, examining my reflection in a hand mirror. I pondered the first day of seventh grade, just four days away, and gazed at my decomposing face.

  It wasn’t too bad, considering I was dead. When you took into account that minor detail and then compared me to all the other dead people in the world, hey, I was doing all right. Better than all right! Go ahead: Dig up a grave, stick the corpse in a wicker chair next to me, and then compare and contrast. Do a Venn diagram for all I care. I’ll win that beauty contest eight days a week, twice on Sunday.

  That’s me, Adrian Lazarus: way hotter than most dead people.

  Compared to living folks, the ones who aren’t full-on zombies, maybe I don’t look so great. Mine is a face only a mother could love, though I was beginning to have my doubts about that. After all, how could she? The whole zombie thing had been tough on Mom. She hadn’t bargained for a zombie with bad breath, body odor, and a hunger for braaaaains. Just kidding about the dietary issues. I’m pretty satisfied with an undercooked hamburger and greasy fries. Not super hungry these days.

  A fly touched down on the windowsill near my bare feet. It lifted off again like a barnstorming pilot, performed a few dives, loop-the-loops, and barrel rolls over my exposed flesh. It buzzed my face before squeezing out a hole in the window screen. Probably just an advance scout for the coming swarm. It would tell the other flies they hit the jackpot. That’s one of the downsides of zombie life. Ha, there’s a phrase, zombie life: an oxymoron, like plastic glass and jumbo shrimp and cafeteria food. I attract flies. They follow me in black clouds like I’m the Pied Piper. Kneel down before me, for I am the true Lord of the Flies!

  I was basking in my misery when the door opened. As usual, my little brother, Dane, was itching to enter my inner sanctum. As if the closed door meant nothing, and the words KEEP OUT! signaled an open invitation. Dane poked his chubby-cheeked, pug-nosed face into the room. His head was seemingly squished from forehead to chin so that it resembled an old, soft orange. To me, Dane’s smooth, dark, elastic cheeks made him look like a living garden gnome, hideous and adorable at the same time.

  Dane was four years old. And unlike his big brother, very much alive.

  “Hi,” Dane said. “What are you doing?”

  I was doing exactly nothing, but I told him I was reading a comic book. A believable lie, since I often flipped through comic books and graphic novels. There were a few comics scattered by my pillow. Reading was doing something, a way of being alone and yet totally (amazingly) connected to something else, some faraway place called anywhere but here, which is where I longed to be. Without turning around, I grabbed a comic book and held it up for Dane.

  “See,” I said, swiveling my head, back still to him.

  “The Sandman,” Dane murmured with awe. He stepped into the room, emboldened. Dane wore red shorts held up by an elastic waistband. He had on his favorite T-shirt—the one with a picture of the Scarecrow from The Wizard of Oz. Inspired by his favorite movie character, Dane often stumbled around the house, pratfalling like the boneless, brainless man of straw, windmilling his stubby arms, humming the tune from the movie.

  If I only had a brain.

  Concern creased Dane’s face. “Can I come in?” he asked, already in.

  I shrugged. All I wanted was to be left alone. But Dane needed to be near, I knew. Even a dope like me can see when he’s loved. It’s better than nothing, by a lot.

  “Where’s Mom? Yoga class? Work?” I asked.

  “She’s on the phone, talking to somebody about periodic rate caps,” Dane explained, without a flicker of comprehension as to what he was saying. He could join the club. I didn’t know what periodic rate caps were, either. That was Mom’s work. Flipping houses, skimming a percentage off the top, moving on like a shark in bloody waters. Buying and selling.

  After my father went overseas with Corporate to fight in the Water Wars, and kept reenlisting, Mom reinvented herself. Today she’s a successful real estate agent. I couldn’t walk three blocks in town without seeing her face beaming out from a FOR SALE sign: ROSIE LAZARUS, AN AGENT YOU CAN TRUST.

  Dane reached into his pocket and produced two sour-apple candies. My little brother knew the way to my heart—through the gap in my rotten teeth and down into the cavities. He offered both to me.

  I took one, told him to keep one for himself, pulled on the twisted ends of the crinkly wrapper, and popped the hard candy into my mouth. I grunted “thanks” and returned to my horrible mirror.

  I sighed. “I might run away.” I could see Dane standing behind me now, reflected in the mirror, pressing closer. I felt his sticky fingers on my back, heard the hard candy rattling against his teeth.

  “Don’t go to California, it’s on fire,” Dane said.

  After years of drought, wildfires had started up and kept spreading. Nobody was running away to California anymore. “Not all of it,” I said.

  “Oh,” he said, blinking. Dane considered the news in silence. “Can I have your room?”

  “Dane!”

  His head pivoted on his shoulders as he eyed the walls and sloped ceiling, redecorating in his imagination. He’d probably fill it with Legos. Dane caught my eye in the mirror’s reflection. “Mom would be mad if you ran away.”

  Maybe mad, I thought. Or relieved. “You hungry?”

  The sweet boy with fat cheeks and loose curls nodded. Yes, he was hungry. Dane was always hungry.

  I sat up and put my feet on the carpet for the first time in hours. My toes were numb, like dull weights, lead sinkers on a fishing line. No nerve endings. I could take an ax and chop them off, from big toe to little toe, and never feel a thing. Pop ’em off like grapes from the stem.

  Dane took my cold, clammy hand. “Come,” he said, and tugged, dragging me from my dark room into the light.

  HOW I DIED

  I guess you’d like to know how I died. That’s the first question anybody asks a zombie. Don’t feel bad, it’s only natural. People are curious creatures, like ferrets or cats or whatever. I don’t know—I’m not an animal expert.

  “How’d you die?” they ask, leaning in a little, eager for the gory details. They hope to hear about a horrendous, bone-crunching accident with a wood chipper. The bloodier, the bette
r. But I’m like: Seriously? Enough already. I’m dead. A medical marvel, a deviation from the norm, the world’s ultimate outsider. Aren’t the facts enough? Now I’ve got to entertain you with bloody stories, too?

  Well, sorry to disappoint. How I died isn’t all that dramatic. What I really want to tell you is how I survived. Seventh grade, that is. Plus the unraveling planet, I guess. You know, the superflu and diminishing species, the melting ice caps and rising seas, the killer wasps and strangled lakes. But, okay, enough of that. First let’s get the death-and-reanimated-corpse stuff out of the way.

  I don’t mean to get super sensitive about it, but I’ve got feelings, too, even if my nerve endings don’t fire correctly. I’m not a carnival sideshow freak performing for your entertainment. Here’s the deal: I was on my bike, sneezing from a pollen attack, when I took a sloppy turn around a corner and got hit by some random car moving too fast. I flew twenty feet in the air, cartwheeling head over shoe, and landed like a sack of laundry. Lights out. No, I wasn’t wearing a helmet at the time—and you can spare me the lecture. I know. Believe me, I know. I’d like to say that I learned my lesson and now, like a good citizen, wear a helmet everywhere I go, but that’s not true. I’m already dead, so it’s not like a little head trauma’s going to do much damage. You want to rekill a zombie, you’re going to have to do better than that. It requires a precise, powerful blow to the—wait. I’m not telling you.

  That’s another curious aspect to my condition. Zombies do not want to get killed a second time. You might assume that we wouldn’t care. But it’s not true. By the way, you might notice that I write we when speaking of zombies, plural. That’s just a wild guess. Or maybe a faint hope. For the record, I have no proof that there are other zombies. I might be the only one. A true one-of-a-kind original. I’ve come to realize something about people: No matter who they are, no matter what their lives are like, everybody wants to hold on to what they’ve got—even if it’s nothing much. Even the guy shivering in a cardboard box under the train tracks, or the grandmother clinging to life support in a hospital oxygen tent. We’re all grateful for each gasp of breath, despite everything.

  Everybody knows it really could be worse.

  Even a zombie like me.

  (Later on, it was math with Mrs. Chen that nearly did me in, bored to death while I tried to solve inequalities in one variable. My answer to math is: What difference does it make to the rest of my life on the planet?)

  As for why I reanimated, sitting up in the ambulance with a panicked jolt, nobody knows. Stuff happens. I didn’t even realize that I was dead at first, but it became obvious by the way the EMTs reared away from me as if they’d seen a ghost.

  No, jerkwads, not a ghost. A zombie, yes; but not a ghost. Ack, thud. We almost needed to call an ambulance … for the ambulance!

  That was the first hint I wasn’t alive anymore. Blood no longer pumped through my veins. No heartbeat. I was as undead as a toenail, and not really thrilled about it.

  Needless to say, my parents freaked, but there, I already said it. They’re still married but worlds apart—Dad has so moved on, deployed in Africa, a mercenary soldier working for Corporate—but for this they came together via the Interwebs for a few troublesome, confusing days. You could say I’m a disappointment to my parents. Sour-faced, pulsing with pimples, my skin black and blue, an inconvenient monster.

  My body wasn’t too messed up in the accident. It was a clean kill, as the local bow hunters like to say. Some internal bleeding, a bump on the noggin, and a broken ankle that still gives me trouble. I’m a cliché that way, the foot-dragging zombie, limping along.

  I don’t have many friends. But you guessed that, right? I mean, I have precisely one: Zander. His full name is Zander Donnelly, and he is so out there, so deep into his own weird zone, I don’t think he even realized I had crossed over to the realm of the undead. The great thing about Zander is, I don’t think he’d care either way.

  DRINK PLENTY OF FLUIDS

  I was a busy guy during the first week of my death. Sort of the opposite of what you’d imagine, right? You’d assume it would be quiet, even relaxing, being dead and all. But not in my unlife. There was a lot to do.

  For the first few days after the accident, I was seen by every medical expert in the area, even people from the FBI and mysterious others flashing U.S. government badges. All day long they wandered into my hospital room to marvel at the new patient. They looked at me and frowned, clucked and murmured, and said helpful things like, “Hmmm, interesting, interesting.” I was a fascinating case, a puzzlement. I was tested, probed, poked, prodded, scanned, questioned, measured, charted, and MRI’d until, finally, the folks in their white coats shrugged with a mixture of defeat and boredom. After three sleep-interrupted nights of liquids dripping and machines beeping, I was told to go home. Something about insurance costs. There was nothing to be done. After that, I was assigned to the primary care of Dr. Noah Halpert. He was some hotshot specialist flown in from who-knows-where. And so we visited his pristine office for regular checkups at the K & K MediCorp building. As far as I could tell, I was his only patient.

  On the day when my bad news got worse, I played with the controls of a leatherette recliner of the type normally found in a dentist’s office. My mother fiddled with her new watch computer, setting up the connection with my dad, who was still deployed at an unspecified location somewhere on the African continent. Dad couldn’t give us details on his work assignments—it was hush-hush—and we’d often go months without a word. Even so, he was supportive about my situation. Dad said he wanted to come home immediately, but, well, the Corporation couldn’t let him go just yet. He was a second lieutenant in a privatized army outsourced by the government, and Corporate depended on him. Skype was Dad’s way of being there, a grim-faced, square-jawed head on a computer screen.

  The room was filled with glass surfaces and glittering utensils. I kept catching my reflection staring at the strange surroundings like a startled woodland creature. Chapped-lipped, sore-faced, hideous: zombie me. I missed the identity of my dark skin in our mostly white town. I used to be the black kid, but not anymore. Race, religion, politics—“zombie” trumped them all. After another routine examination—reflexes, none; eyesight, failing; sense of smell, gone; etc.—Dr. Halpert looked at me, his mustache drooping and his eyes flickering with indecision. He parked heavily on a stool and rolled close to me, leaning in. “Adrian,” he began, raising his palms as a sign of surrender. “As doctors, we like to think we have all the answers. We possess all this expensive equipment, years of scientific research…” His voice trailed off, losing steam. He sighed, checked my mother with a glance, looked hopelessly at my father’s image on the laptop screen. “But there’s so much we don’t know. That’s just a fact.”

  I watched him, gave a nod. At least he was honest.

  “By every measure we currently employ, medically speaking, you should be dead,” Dr. Halpert said.

  My throat felt dry. My tongue seemed to swell. I tried to swallow.

  “You don’t have a heartbeat,” Dr. Halpert stated. “Yet here we are. We have tested you in every conceivable manner. And the fact is”—he ran his thumb and index finger down his thick mustache—“the fact is…” He repeated himself, struggling to find the words. “We just … don’t … know … diddly.”

  “But, Doctor—” my mother interjected.

  “Oh, we have theories. We could sit around and speculate all day long. It might be this, it might be that. An exotic strain of virus. Ebola this, superflu that, cancer-causing agents in the water table, the fallout from fracking, too many genetically engineered foods, a new strain of dengue fever, or just plain bad luck. All I know, Adrian, is that you are—”

  “A freak,” I said.

  “No, no, no,” Dr. Halpert said. “A miracle! And as a man of science, it kills me to say that. I don’t believe in miracles, Adrian. I believe in facts, hard data, research. We simply don’t understand how you are walking a
round today, much less why. Talking. Seeing. Thinking. And, seemingly, living. It makes no scientific sense. When it comes to your case, Adrian, we might as well be in the Dark Ages, applying leeches and burning incense.”

  “Is it … contagious?” asked my mother, inching away ever so slightly.

  “Not at all,” the doctor replied. “It’s certainly not an airborne virus or anything of that nature. Of course, I wouldn’t let him bite you, ha-ha-ha!” He turned to me, smiling broadly. “You’re not going to bite your mother, are you, Adrian? Of course not!”

  I joked, “Yeah, no, I just had a big lunch.”

  More laughter, ho-ho-ho, even my dad thought it was a laugh riot. Mom, however, didn’t seem amused. Her mouth laughed, but her eyes didn’t get the joke. Mom’s cell buzzed with an incoming message. She checked it, frowned. She was missing work for this appointment.

  Dr. Halpert looked at me and waited. I didn’t know what to say. I rarely did. My thoughts refused to organize themselves; the words wouldn’t cohere. My mind was a buzz, a beehive, a blur, a whir. I stared at him, blinking, thinking, coming up empty.

  My father broke the silence. “Well, that’s not a very satisfactory answer, is it, Doctor?”

  Dr. Halpert shook his head. “No, it isn’t,” he admitted.

  “So what now?” my father asked.

  Dr. Halpert glanced at me and then back to the computer image of his inquisitor. “Summer’s almost over. School starts in another week or so. Middle school, I guess.”

  “You think he can go to school?” my mother chimed in, shock registering in her voice. “You think it’s all right?”

  “Life goes on,” the doctor replied. He scratched his cheek with nervous fingers, tugged at his white lab coat. Perhaps Dr. Halpert recognized the irony of his own words—this crazy situation—so he quickly added, “I mean, Mr. and Mrs. Lazarus, I don’t see the harm in it. Admittedly, Adrian’s is an unusual case. Bizarre, truly. No one has an explanation for what’s happened to your son. By everything we know, there’s simply no way on earth your boy should be sitting in my office having this conversation. There’s no heartbeat! He’s dried up, blood doesn’t course through his arteries. He’s a zom—”