I Was A Teenage Zombie

(c)2010 by Edward R. Morris Jr. All Rights Reserved

GRADUATION

by edward morris



1.)
JOHN RAYMOND, Gr.#10, LINCOLN HIGH
HOMEROOM 30
ID #6510229

People say some strange things.

I keep these notebooks of mine, here, mostly full of the strange things that people say, and only realize fully the second it’s come out of their mouths and everyone around them just kind of looks. Some of them eventually bust up laughing. Some eventually shudder.

But at first, there’s just that silence. Until one person blurts out, “Write that down.”

I’m writing this down now. But I swear to God, I never said a word when I found Bucky Haggerty.

I just wrenched open the door on the Men’s Room at the other end of the mess that used to be Biology Hall. I come in, and I just start getting talked at, like we’d just gotten out of class together.

Like it was class, and the stench was just those damn foetal sharks or foetal pigs or whatever foetuses we were supposed to do whatever with ...

I stumbled into that bathroom, and this dead thing on the floor starts yarking at me like we used to debate the whole way out the door to class and along to the next one. Bucky always wanted me to be on the Speech Team so we could do Ex Tempore Debate. Me and the bloated, half-alive toadstool on the floor, the stretched sausage skin one gluon thick, around…

Around… Oh, I couldn’t look. This was going to get debased. Real fast. “You bring me my pills?” Buck asked me crossly, there on the floor, just before he exploded. (I don’t know who he thought I was.) “I'm goalie tonight. I don’t get 'em before I go out, I'm gonna be barkin'…”

I still don’t know how to say what happened next. Bucky broke like an egg. Like he was all hollow inside, and whatever he became had grown there.

I never saw my neighbor from three doors down blow up before. Not Bucky, who once gave me seven stitches when he whacked me in the head with a cast on his arm when we were about ten. I sent his head through a bathroom door when I tripped him the next day. Glorious times. One week suspension. But now…

Oh, I was fucked-up about this. Until the black stuff got on my skin.

I told you, he split open like a pod. The black stuff burned. The first thing I reached for was the soap dispenser. Not even thinking, I stepped over some of Bucky, and slathered myself with soap and hot water so fast I didn’t realize I was ripping off my black button-down shirt, I was checking my ratty Levis’ and no black, no seed spore dust that stank like mold, none… None…

But that didn't stop me screaming. There was a bag of something that looked vaguely janitorial under the sink, something called VO BAN and I didn't understand what it was until I was dumping it all over me and I smelled the same smell that means someone puked their guts out in the hall.

I didn't. I was past that point. Nothing left to come up but a burp. I spit high and hard at the wall and scrubbed the chemically-treated sawdust off me as fast as I could still yell and cuss.

Oh, that water was scathingly hot, hotter than it ever got for me when I was washing my hands in this shithole for real, in between classes, gagging on the cigarette smoke and wishing it was a good home grown doob like at my cousins’.

I wondered if my cousins were still alive, after the weird thing happened. I hoped they were. Denny had a cool shotgun his Dad, my Uncle Walt, let him take hunting, and Dave owed me five bucks.

It was hard to keep a hold on my mind, in here, at first. These notebooks helped. They're not quote books any more. Now the blank pages, and all these pencil stubs I have from the library, are a kind of salvation.

(This is kind of censored, from the way I'm experiencing it. I write it down the following night. Just warning anyone who reads this, in case you think I had the notebook in my hand when any of this shit went down. Never thought about having to do it this way, but whatever. Makes my head hurt to ponder that. Mr. Piper the English teacher once called that 'artifice.' Just going to keep cranking mine out to keep sane.)

Anyway, I still had to think like this place was the whole world. Like this house of a thousand corpses was the whole world. I couldn't think about the cousins, or the fam, or anything else that was happening on planet Not Now.

I was going to find a way out, or at least a weapon that was worth a shit. It would have been easier at home. Mickey and I love to make clubs and concrete-filled baseball bats and all sorts of other fiendish things, down in that basement full of Dad's old tools that were all we had left of him after he got killed at the locomotive shops, and no one to carp at us about what not to use them for---

Couldn't think about that. I'd beat Mickey's ass later at cards. I would. Just after we'd smoke a doob on the back porch and Mom acted like she doesn't know.

A lot of people already died there. A lot more were on their way. A lot of them were my friends. And then there was Bucky. Was. Bucky. Over there, and there, and a bit there, and…

And I found myself standing there naked, taking the disaster version of what Mom would call a whore’s bath. Mom. Jesus. Mom. I’d been in there five days, hiding, and I’d lost it a long time before but Mom, Mom and Annie, and Mickey who calls me Double-O Chode and steals all the laces out of my shoes for his own use. Mickey with the pornopticon under his bed and the lousy right hook.

My Mom and big sister and little brother, who might or might not be waiting back home.... or might be waiting someplace else, with Dad. I was alive, inflamed, in that awful urinal-puck smell and foam and broiling heat that I had to roaringly slather voluntarily up and down my torso, along my neck, in my face, my eyes.

Some time ten years later, I found the taps and turned them off.

And nothing happened to me, after I backed up, and ran haltingly in search of some kind of a towel. When I found one, I yanked the rack that it hung on, and hefted the bare metal pipe in my hand. It felt right. First thing in a while that did.

I wondered if any other lockers had cigarettes in them. I wondered if I’d ever see the sun again, or what things had degenerated to outside. There was too much to wonder at one time, but I knew better than to try and sleep.

I could sleep forever in the Lincoln High basement, sleep forever curled up on one of the Port-a-Pit cushions the pole vaulters used in Track, pull a tarp around myself and hide from the light. But Sleep produced monsters. No, seriously.

That fact, that bare-wired fact, was true the week before, and true then, too. The other things, the rabid things, they hate the light, but they love the dark someone thinks they have a corner on when they go try to hide in it. Oh, how they do.

Oh, how they did. I’ve tried so many times to sleep. Sleep. What? I was thinking about sleep, and I almost…

Damn it. The best I can do is a kind of walking nap. I’ve run into several walls. Even then, I’ll flush one of those nasty-smelling things out from a locker or wherever… Wherever I’m near, they come a-chompin’, bony fingers scuttering around the door with the limp, dead sense of tentacles.

The first time I ran into two of them in the hall, I screamed so loudly into their faces that the whole world went up and up and up and the fire flared so bright I didn’t even realize I still had my lighter or Misty Evans’ can of what she always called Aqua Helmet hair spray from what I hadn’t even realized was her locker, Number 209 and the fire…fire…was … following the gas back into the can, I ---

Fuck. Makes my heart pound to even remember.

I ended up lobbing that can at the two partially-smoldering things that had come up from the basement to tell me how I tasted. They were covered in foam and vomit. One of them was my keyboarding teacher. The other was some dude in a leather jacket, a big biker I never met.

His beard went up first. My keyboarding teacher’s head kind of didn’t all make it when the hairspray can exploded like a frag grenade in an old war movie. The smell was beyond anything I could describe on the best day of Piper's class.

But I’m not bit. Bucky was rotting, when he found me. Some kind of jungle rot that maybe the crumblees get, after they get past a certain point of …well, dead, really. Can I even say it? Can I even allow myself to rise above this shit-town blindness and say what's right in front of my eyes?

There were four of us, when it happened. Four dudes Mr. Petrella sent down from Third Hour Phys Ed to get an empty cart that he used to store the volleyball equipment.

We never did get to play volleyball, or see how fast we could get the cart going with two of us riding it on the way back. Mikey Whitmire made it about as far as the cafeteria. He was the Doubting Thomas of the bunch ( even after what I believe was a school-wide, deliberate rout by way of the office, one that spread out in a kind of V-shape over the whole building and campus. Or at least that's my best guess now. With what I've seen.)

“Nothing’s wrong, just a bunch of sick people,” he chortled airily through his big nose as his little close-set eyes led his big yuck-yucking redneck ass on down the hall, and his white-boy fro was bristling like it was standing on end no matter what he said.

Then, just like that, there was just this arm, this arm, half-covered in skin, that reached out of the back room where the lunch ladies live, and yanked him inside.

Not even a scream. Just part of a yawp of surprise. Like, “WHUP---” The rest we heard sounded a little more a la carte. He didn't make any more noises. Well, parts of him did, but not controlled by the brain.

Mikey was in my keyboarding class, too. That's right about what I was thinking when us four became we three. When the lights started going out all over the school. When the sounds started, breaking glass and awful things that shouldn’t be happening in a school rang out everywhere. I could have sworn I heard a pistol outside, just one shot, then nothing at all.

Inside, we walked past Room 34 and Mr. Johnson looked up with the face of Mr. Hyde as he paddled, paddled, paddled away at a young, naked ass that was all I could see. I didn’t stop . I wasn’t qualified. Batman didn’t go to school here any more.

In the half-dark, Wobby Roomert’s eyes looked like blue LED’s. He was wearing a red t-shirt that told me to Dare To Keep My Kids Off Drugs. “I think it’s a plague from God,” he started up. I punched him in the arm. “Some God, who would do this. Some God.”

Wobby looked at me, lower lip quivering. “You’re not helping at all, Raymond. Communist.”

“Awp, do you even know what a Communist is---“

Then,

THWIPP. I ducked around the corner, as the pheromone trail and wash of rot parted my hair, danced across my neck like a dirty broken fingernail with someone else’s tissue under it.

It felt like there was a hole in the air, when Wobby got pinched. It happened so fast, I could still feel the place where he was.

Wobby was a big boy. Wobby squeaked when the two crawling things got him cold by his untied shoelace, and dragged him down into the gym by his ankles. I heard them eating him like Alpo, down in the sick and muck and abbatoir where part of my gym class still was. The ones who weren’t lurching and shambling after me in the dark.

I didn’t see where Steve Diehl ran off to, fourth in our party. Steve was smart. He was in track. I hope he made it. I do.

I heard his running footsteps fade to nothing on the tile, out over the halls and far away. They took a long, long time to fade. They didn't have much competition. Much.

#

I'm okay now. I'm really okay. Found a broom closet. Candles. The janitor used to smoke dope back here. I can smell it. There's... part of a sniped Marlboro King, say Hallelujah, maybe three inches down from the filter...

Better. But still the same. Still. S-o-c-k-s, as Seňora Eisler used to say in Spanish class. Eso si que es. It is what it is, and can't nobody do nothin'. They’re not dying, or infected, or irradiated, or whatever.

They’re walking dead. It’s Last Times now, like Dad used to talk about when he got on his Bible kicks, the End of Days. Not the end of the world, just the End of Days. I stopped remembering what day it was the last time I saw the sun. Anything goes.

Anything goes, now. Last Times. Somehow, I have to keep remembering that.

Somehow, I can get out. If I just find a big enough stick. For now, the pipe feels right in my hand. I sit and wait for the noises to stop, so I can move again, forage again, pretend like I’m doing something.

#

When I grunted and puffed back out into the hall, after that, I made it ten feet and then squinted. My glasses were the first and only part of me to go, but in the murky depths of the corridor the sign stood out like the Holy Grail, my two new favorite words,

SCHOOL NURSE

#
2.)

YETZIRAH FARRELL, Gr.10 LINCOLN HIGH
HOMEROOM SIXTEEN
ID#6520675

I was sharpening the scalpel when John came stumbling in. I had a knee on his nuts and one of his arms behind his back before he could bellow the Safe Word,

“JESUS FUCKIN CHRIST YETZI I’M ALIVE I’M NOT BIT IT’S ME IT’S COOL---“

“Oscar performance. I think we definitely need to go home today. Let me just write us a note.”

I kissed him full on the mouth. That shut him up enough to help me help him patch up the cuts all over his poor battered body, clean them and dress them, and hang him with hot packs and ice packs like a weird YMCA Resusci-Christmas tree.

We were just friends. This would not change. We would be just friends after this. As far as I was concerned, this was wartime, and John was nice. I was so glad he was alive I would have railed him right there if he didn’t look so tired.

But he did. So I didn’t. We didn’t. So say what you want. It was something better than all that stupid, sticky sweaty nonsense that, as I believe Billy Shakes tells us, will come when it come.

It was something better than that, Diary, those first few days we hid out there and lived on the food in his backpack, and the nurse’s fridge (mostly cookies and juice from the Blood Drive, but there were two bag lunches and a bottle of something that smelled suspiciously like what my old hippie dad calls “garbage-wine.” Probably juice that had gone over. I left that alone.)

I have been John’s nurse, just like Mom is, possibly was and till I know I can’t say. I was John’s nurse, and he was mine.

He never laid a finger on me, and we still healed each other by all the talking, talking, talking we did in those two little rooms.

Healed, oh, God, since Mr. Myelnikov the Art Teacher went fucko bazoo and started chewing on his own arm, can you even believe it, his own arm, and his eyes were all the way back in his head and his skin was starting to cyanose in places where it wasn’t translucent white, and …
And since I ran. Since I put my head down and ran and clocked two of them in the head with books. I don’t watch the track boys throw discus for my health, although it does help…

I felled two of the ones that aren’t really there any more, even when they’re about to bite.

And I got in here, and I’ve been holed up in here ever God damn since reading the God damn Physician’s Desk Reference and Highlights magazine and I needed…

Diary, I needed John’s big goofy carcass snoring on that cot. I needed his voice. He was the whole human race to me, since he beat on the door for ten minutes and I found what I did with the School Nurse’s scalpel after I took it out of the split in the ex-School Nurse’s gray roast chicken forehead and kicked the frail dead thing in the ribs and broke its sternum with the heel of my Doc Marten boot.

Every boy in this school wants to fuck me sideways, but that never made me a sissy la-la girl. No, I went looking for the spores after Johnny told me, after I picked off the little white bits where he said he washed the black stuff off. There was nothing there but dead skin. His lights were on, upstairs. He felt fine.

I needed my friend. I needed him very much, just then, sitting there with the blinds drawn and duct-taped on the little cots that always meant to me that I was going home early with some sort of awful flu.

Except now we were well, and everyone outside was sick.
I may be a while till we next talk, Diary. Got a lot on my mind. But do stick around. You're already helping.

#

JOHN

She lay naked beside me that night, small and warm and tan and naked, with her long straight black hair falling between her warm shoulder blades. The curves of her ribs felt deceptively thin.

Yetzi smelled like the first day of summer, bright and alive and electric, and sharp. Like the first real day when everyone out on the street after dark is half-lit and it’s warm and music drifts from open windows.

I could feel her sigh with pleasure and curl up closer when I held her. And I couldn’t have gotten it up then if my own life were at stake.

Because it was. At stake. Hell of a way to wilt a hardon. My arms and hands wouldn't stop trembling, even when I laid on them. I was fully clothed. I had the pipe at my right hand, and at my good left...

Well, see, High School administrators never want anything thrown away. They figured out a while back that these things were maybe not all that safe for kids to be around, but they're still too cheap to part with them. In the back storeroom we jimmied open with my towel-rack sword (after which Yetzi dubbed me King of Lincoln High with the bent, mangled thing) …

I found the old paper-cutter, and unscrewed the heavy-handled blade from the scored green chopping block. Swinging it from the handle like a bo-ken in Aikido class. I sunk it three inches deep into the side of the nearest table.

Yetzi screamed, a weird yodeling bark that stopped fast when it didn’t bounce off dead . She put a hand to her improbable bosom and swallowed something that sounded like her soul. “If. You. Ever. Do that to me again…”

I bowed, swinging the blade well away. “You have my sword, lady, and I fain would fall upon it…”

Yetzi sighed. “Rise, good sir knight, or I shall taunt you a second time. Come help me rummage. Is there anything flammable in here? “

#

So I’m lying on the cot now, with my art-room sword, my mangled pipe, and a girl I always thought was out of my league, naked as the day she was born. And she is still out cold.

I kiss her a second time. On the nose. “Goodnight,” I tell my battle-buddy, glancing at the six or eight Molotov Cocktails we made from isopropyl alcohol bottles and cotton balls. Two on the end are wicked with tampons, which I had to get Yetzi to do. She looked at me funny, like she wanted to laugh, but went right to it .

What? I've never used one. I don't know how they...

Oh, shut up. It’s funny now. It wasn’t then.

All right, I guess it was.
#
YETZI

Diary,

On the first morning of the rest of my life, the sun came clear and cold through the parts of the long window shades that duct tape wouldn't keep down. John had all his clothes on, and he was holding me like I was a little baby, wide awake himself and reading an old pulp magazine he found somewhere, something called NIGHT CRY. I wondered aloud if he'd slept.

John put the luridly-covered magazine down, ran a hand through his natural militant mutant pompadour, and rubbed his poor black-circled eyes. “ 'Bout... five, six hours,” he mumbled. His face was puffy. “Now, I can't claim any of 'em were in a row, but...”

I got up, padded to the nearest of two sinks, found the two hand towels that hadn't been used and began working toward something like a sponge bath. (Can you believe, Diary, that John picked up that magazine again, and turned away? If we ever got the hell out of here, I wanted to warn him, I was swinging around toward not wanting to leave him alone. )

We found some fresh clothes in the Lost and Found box that Mrs. Sutton the Nurse kept in the little wardrobe by her desk as you came in. Black hoodies and jeans. Yeah, the ones from the Reuters photo. We matched.

Well, sort of. In the picture, John is wild of hair and eye, his backpack loaded with bottles like a bandolier full of ammunition. He is still carrying that bent pipe thing he had, the one that looked like a towel rack. (I won't get rid of it. It's resting on two nails, same place it always was. Above the TV in the base-housing apartment the Army gave us, for this strange little while.)

I had my hair tied back half-heartedly, and my big goofy Liv Tyler ears sticking out. God damn it, they had that turkey all over the BBC and CNN when we got TV and wi-fi again. Every damn nosepicker in the blogosphere got to see what I looked like after all that time in the funhouse. I---

#
I never thought I could swing that big cutter-blade of John's, but he dropped it when he started lobbing flaming SoBe bottles full of isopropyl at Contestant #2, there, you see in the picture , the one who's already on fire? (I'm not sure what John's pre-mortem beef was with Mrs. Ohana. She taught Keyboarding, I think. He just kept screaming, “WHY WON'T YOU DIE?!?”)

He dropped the blade. I just saw it. I didn't even think about it. I just picked it up, closed my eyes, took a breath---

And I lunged, and spun, and bore my weight on the balls of my feet when I leapt. Twice.

I put everything I had into the swing. It was a risky move, a hot-dog move that my Ballet teacher would never have approved of, and there's simply no word for it in the dictionary.

But that blade swung the whole way around. At the end of its arc, it hit a locker hard enough to bend the blade into a boomerang shape.

I didn't keep that one. I am denied such male puffery. Every time I think of that shape it made, it hurts my right hand.

You see, in the picture, where I have my boot on the ex-Mr. Petrella's severed head, right as the Army guys are coming around the corner? See their Commanding Officer holding up his hand for them to halt? How they're all biting their lips, holding back the roar of laughter, trying not to look like they want to clap, and cheer?

John's working on getting me to take compliments, but I wish they would have put the thing a few less places, at least, or had some...

Oh, all right, it's a great picture.
#