The gates scrape down the flanks of the Benz, ruining her paint job. Then we’re past, and I see the gates swinging closed. I shift into reverse and complete the work of shutting them, grinding zees beneath my tires.
This is where Sammy comes in. He rides the gates closed, then lashes them together with chain and padlock. It should hold until the grown-ups get the bar back on.He lands on the car roof with a thump, and I wince a little. I hope he doesn’t start bouncing.
I shift back into gear and push ahead again. Not too fast, with one passenger on the roof and another on the hood. Not with a hundred zees pressing against us, still trying to get at the gates.
The road is worse than it looked from inside, broken down by rain and kudzu. We bump along at a shambling pace, and I notice that some of the zees are following.
They stare in through the windows at me, rotten hands sliding against the glass.
What if we were wrong, and suddenly they want to eat us?
But they aren’t trying to get Kalyn. They don’t even look at her, just keep plodding alongside the car like mourners following a hearse.
Another shot rings out, and a zee head splatters across the right backseat window.
“Shit!” Sammy cries, rolling from the roof onto the hood. “They’re trying to save us!”
“Morons,” Kalyn says, ducking low.
More booms rumble behind us, and the back windshield splinters.
“Stay down, Jun!” I shout, wondering if they’re shooting at us.
Maybe they’ve figured out somehow what we’ve become. Sammy and I got food poisoning at the same time, and Dr. Bill can’t have missed that all four of us have dark circles under our eyes.
Then a hail of gunfire erupts, fully automatic, like the air ripping itself in half, and the back window shatters completely. They are shooting at us!
Because we’ve changed? Or because they’d rather have us dead than eaten alive, or turning into zees and shuffling back to haunt the wire.
But then it gets much stranger. Through the splinters of back window glass, I see fireworks winking out behind me. Humans are dying back there… .
They’re shooting at each other now.
It’s Alma—I can feel her blazing, stopping the other grown-ups from stopping us.
Or it’s all just mayhem, caused by the gates opening for the first time in four years.
A few zees slipping through has shattered everyone’s fragile sanity, and they’re spilling precious bullets like it was the old days. Back when every moving thing was a target.
We’ve made a mess, it seems.
But the sheltering crowd of zees presses closer around the Benz, taking our hits for us. If one falls, another takes its place.
We bump painfully along the broken highway, the gunfire fading behind us minute by endless minute.
And after a while the night is silent again.
8.
Kalyn is sitting up on the roof, her heels banging on the front window. Sammy sits beside her, his sneakers dangling across my view. I can hardly see the road, and I can’t tell what they’re doing up there.
They better not be kissing.
A piece of jumbled asphalt bangs against the underside of the floorboard, but the Benz keeps rolling. The zees, of course, keep shambling.
We drive for a while.
The road should get better, sooner or later. Maybe not in this swamp, or anywhere in rainy Mississippi. But we’ll find deserts eventually, with roads lying flat and empty in the sun.
It occurs to me that a map might have been useful. Where did they sell maps back in the before? Gas stations? Bookstores? I can’t remember.
Sammy’s face appears, hanging upside down against the front windshield. He taps the glass.
I roll down my window.
“You guys should see this!” he yells.
“See what?” Jun asks.
“Just come up here. Both of you. I’ll drive!”
I doubt he knows how, but I’m happy to switch places. I put the Benz into park, the zees shambling to a halt around us. They hardly notice when I open the door and step out. They’re waiting patiently, still staring straight ahead.
Jun scrambles over the seat and comes out my door, sheltering himself from the zees behind me.
Sammy doesn’t bother to touch the ground, just crawls in through the passengerside window. So I lift Jun up, shut the door, and then climb on top of the car.
Kalyn is standing there in her long black dress, so we stand beside her.
The moonlit road behind us is full of zees.
Thousands of them choke the narrow road between the trees, the line stretching back to the gates, at least two miles. Most are still pressing ahead, like they haven’t gotten the word yet that we’ve stopped. The floodlights at the farm gates have snapped on, showing the zees back there still flowing after us.
“What the fuck?” I ask.
“They’re following us,” Jun says.
“No kidding. But where did they all come from? There weren’t this many at the gate!”
Kalyn nods. “There weren’t. So they must be coming from along the wire. It’s like they’re all on one long piece of string, and we’re pulling it.”
I see what she means. The wire must be five miles around. So if all the zees that have showed up over the last four years follow us, there’ll be tens of thousands in the line. A parade of zombies.
“But why?” Jun asks.
“Yeah, really,” I say. “They don’t want to eat us. So why?”
Kalyn doesn’t answer, and we stand there silently until Sammy manages to get the car in gear. We stagger for a moment, then squat there on the roof, still facing backward.
The Benz makes its slow way along the broken road, bumping even worse now that Sammy’s driving. The swamp trees grow denser, brushing our heads with cool fingers now and then. The shadows of moonlit leaves flicker across our zombie hosts.
Finally we lose sight of the farm, the last glimmer of floodlights disappearing around a bend. But the zees don’t turn around.
“Why are they following us?” Jun asks again.
Kalyn says, “Maybe they were bored too.”
“Bored?” I say. “They’re zees, Kalyn. All they do is stand around.”
“Yeah, but they were watching, too. All day. So they must know that nothing was happening back there. Those drills, those fucking dessert points, all those people going bad like beans in a dented can.” Behind Jun’s back she takes my hand. “It’s death back there, tornado or not. But the zees have us now.”
She turns around and sits, dangling her feet against the front windshield again.
Jun and I join her, facing the empty, broken road ahead.
I wonder if she’s right.
It’s their planet, after all. The six billion have all the real estate, except for a few little patches that are slowly dying. Maybe they want to do something with it but don’t have any ideas.
They aren’t strong on ideas, the zees.
Sitting there gets annoying fast, with Sammy smacking into every bump like the waste of gravity he is. So I stand up on the roof again, figuring my knees are better shock absorbers than my butt. I put my hands out for balance and spread my feet a little bit apart, like I’m surfing in extremely slow motion, the parade of zombies in my wake.
And then I realize that Kalyn’s right, and everyone else was wrong—from the government scientists in the early days to the know-it-all radio stations who faded out one by one. The six billion didn’t really die. Their lights are still burning around us, however dimly. I mean, just look at them.
Maybe they’re not as mindless as we thought, or so dedicated to turning every last human into one of them. Like Kalyn says, they were just bored, waiting for something better to happen.
And that better thing is us.
“Princess Prettypants”
Holly: Unicorns exist in pop culture as bubble-gum colored, riding over rainbows, full of sparkles and stars. They have been made into stickers, posters, and adorable toys. Unicorns of this type are often used as symbols of pure happiness, hope, and awesomesauce.
You might see this kind of unicorn on the T-shirts of hipsters, in ironic animated videos, and as an antidote to unpleasantness on blogs.
Meg Cabot’s “Princess Prettypants” is a fantastic and hilarious send-up of a unicorn of this type, dropped into the very real world. It also features one of my favorite explanations for why unicorns have recently come back from extinction.
Justine: Once again Team Unicorn cannot hide its shame. Little known fact:
Meg Cabot is a zombie lover and would have much preferred to be on Team Zombie, but Holly was getting desperate for Team Unicorn members so Meg succumbed to pleading and bribery and joined Team Wrong, er, I mean, Team Unicorn.
The result is yet another anti-unicorn story. Which even the ringleader of Team Unicorn admits is a send-up of the dread rainbow-farting unicorn. It seems churlish to mention that Team Zombie has won this contest hands down. So I’ll just say that my pity for Team Unicorn continues to grow.
Holly: It is sad to me that Team Zombie is apparently without any love of irony.
Princess Prettypants
By Meg Cabot
It was Liz Freelander’s seventeenth birthday, and so far it could not have been going worse. It had been her turn in debate, and the critique notes she got back afterward—which were supposed to be anonymous, but of course Liz recognized everyone’s handwriting because she’d been going to school with almost every single person in the class since the first grade—ranged from the banal to the offensive:
Good job! And happy birthday, Kate Higgins, who had the same birthday as Liz, wrote, adding a winking smiley face.
Kate was the most well-liked girl in their grade, revoltingly perky even at eight in the morning when school started, and always screaming the loudest at the Venice High Gondolier pep rallies.
And yet Kate had never asked Liz to come to a single one of her birthday parties, even though she threw one every year in the huge media room in the basement of her parents’ house in town. Everyone else in their entire grade was invited, to dance to Kate’s parents’ incredible sound system, play pinball and air hockey, and more recently to drink themselves to unconsciousness in Kate’s parents’ newly installed outdoor hot tub.
At least three girls had passed out in the hot tub at Kate’s birthday party last year. Liz knew this only because her (now ex-) boyfriend Evan Connor had taken her to the party, not because she’d been personally invited.
Kate obviously just felt Liz would prefer to celebrate her birthday with her own family and friends.
The only problem with that was, with the exception of Alecia and Jeremy—and Evan, of course, but not anymore, because of what had happened in his dorm room last month—Liz had hardly any friends to speak of.
And when Liz opened the next critique note from her debate, she remembered why:
Debate on success of second-wave feminists? Sucked. But don’t worry, you got your two biggest POINTS across: !!! Love them titties!!!
Liz felt her cheeks heat up. What the hell? She looked down at her chest. She was wearing an embroidered top her aunt Jody had bought for her on her last trip to the Adirondacks, where she’d gone last year with her friends from the Society for Creative Anachronisms. It was a very girlie top—like all the other things Aunt Jody gave her as presents, since Aunt Jody seemed to think Liz was still seven years old and fond of all things pink and princess-themed—and Liz wouldn’t have considered wearing it to school if all the rest of her clothes hadn’t been in the wash.
It was pink, and not at all revealing, especially considering the fact that Liz was wearing a bra …… except that, thanks to the brutally cold temperature at which the sadistic staff of Venice High School kept the building in order to lower their electricity bill, Liz could see both her nipples poking out under the soft cotton fabric … … something Douglas “Spank” Waller apparently found objectionable, since he’d seen fit to mention it in his critique.
Liz recognized his handwriting immediately from the notes he’d frequently left on the windshield of Evan’s truck after school last year. The two of them had been on the football team together, and—despite the fact that Evan was a year older and, in Liz’s opinion, light-years more sophisticated and mature—they’d been as thick as thieves. Liz was sorry to say she’d spent more than a few nights cruising around downtown Venice in Evan’s truck with Evan, Spank, and whichever cheerleader Spank had been dating that week, stealing lawn ornaments out of people’s yards, then hiding them in Liz’s barn.
(Although she’d often been bothered by the immorality of this, Evan, a soon-to-be poli-sci major, had argued that this was a socially conscious act. Most lawn ornaments—such as plaster geese wearing frilly aprons and bonnets or yellow raincoats—were hideously ugly, and by removing them from the public eye, Evan felt that he and Liz and Spank were beautifying the community … … an argument that Liz had tried, unsuccessfully, on her friend Jeremy, when he’d found out about her nocturnal activities and expressed disapproval.
“No,” Jeremy had said, shaking his head. “Nice try, Liz. But it’s actually called petty theft.”
After reading Spank Waller’s note, Liz turned in her seat to throw him a look of disgust.
He caught her glance, winked … … then ran his tongue lasciviously around his lips.
Liz had to look away, or risk feeling the tacos and Coke she’d had for lunch in the school cafeteria come back up. She then turned her attention resolutely back to Mrs. Rice. Mrs. Rice was, as every student in the whole school knew, completely unqualified for the job of teaching eleventh-grade debate, since she’d actually been hired to be a PE teacher.