Enter the Zombie Read online

  I was in some sort of building with several labs on each floor. I guess they had a kitchen so people could cook meals for the workers. I saw several signs, but they weren’t in English. I found the plant-growth area in a huge room halfway down a hall on the first floor.

  As I was walking into the room, I heard voices behind me.

  10

  Back in a Flash

  I ducked down behind a large carton and waited as two guards came down the hall and went through the room. I wasn’t worried. One of the advantages of being dead is that people never sense that I’m around. I could stare right at the guards, and they’d never get that twitchy feeling of being watched.

  But only one of them was a guard. He was in some sort of uniform. The other was dressed in a lab coat. They were both wearing gas masks strapped around their heads, so I could only see a little bit of their faces. The guy in the suit was bald, with a fat neck. Even through the gas mask, I could see he had beady little eyes that reminded me of an evil cartoon snake. The guard had a crew cut. His eyes didn’t remind me of anything.

  The bald guy pointed to a glass case and said something in another language. There was a plant inside the case. The guard opened the case and took out the plant. I guess it was poisonous. It’s a good thing BUM had sent me on the mission, and not someone who’d be hurt by poison.

  As they left, I glared at the guy in the lab coat. He was probably the one who’d given RABID the corpse flower. Maybe I could sneak up behind them and rip off his gas mask. That would teach him a lesson.

  But it would also get me caught and ruin the mission. I’d have to settle for destroying his plants. I unwrapped the device. It looked like the kind of power supply that comes with a laptop computer or a video game system, but bigger. I needed to do one thing before I plugged it in.

  I scanned the tables. I didn’t have any trouble finding it.

  It was small and dull, like a dead piece of meat.

  “So this is it…,” I said. The corpse flower. It didn’t look like much. Abigail had told me there were actually two other plants also called corpse flowers. But they weren’t as rare, and they couldn’t help turn someone into a zombie.

  There were other flowers in the room. Some of them looked pretty dangerous. A couple had spikes or sharp needles. There was even some agony vera. I remembered it from the encyclopedia article. Weird. I hadn’t expected to ever run into it. But now that I had, I figured I’d keep seeing it all over the place.

  The plants weren’t all ugly. One flower, with silver petals, almost seemed to glow. I thought about bringing that one home for my mom. But she wasn’t really good at watering plants. It was kinder to have it die quickly here than slowly in our family room. I reached out and touched it. The blossom withered beneath my fingers, like it had been scorched. I guess Mom wasn’t the worst plant killer in the family.

  I plugged in the device and watched it for a moment. I couldn’t see anything, but I heard a quiet hum, like in the power supply from Dad’s old train set. It was working. I’d done my job. I headed back to the storage room by the kitchen.

  Sure enough, there was a large chute on the back wall. I lifted the door and crawled inside. The instant I’d slipped in as far as my waist, I found myself plunging through some sort of tube. A moment later, I shot out of the chute right above a river. I hit the water at an angle and let myself go down. The current wasn’t bad. I started swimming. The bank wasn’t all that far, but I don’t think anyone who needed to breathe could have made it.

  I got out and looked back. I could see a building across the river. There were guards on the roof. I guess that’s why Mr. Murphy had told me to stay under the water until I reached the other side.

  I climbed the bank and found myself next to a road. Mr. Murphy was just fifty yards away, standing by a car.

  “All done?” he asked when I reached him.

  “All done.”

  “Excellent.”

  “Hey, wait! It’s morning!” I spun around as it hit me that it wasn’t dark outside. The sun was above the horizon. I’d never get home in time. Mom would be totally panicked when she didn’t find me in my bed. She’d probably already called the police. I was going to get grounded for life—which I guess meant forever.

  “Relax,” Mr. Murphy said. “The sun isn’t rising. It’s setting.”

  “What!” That was even worse.

  Mr. Murphy laughed. “We’re rather far from New Jersey. It’s still dark back home.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “See for yourself.” He held up his watch. According to the dial, it was three thirty in the morning. I guess he left it on eastern time.

  Instead of going anywhere, he sat down on the bank and handed me a pair of binoculars. “We have plenty of time. You should observe the results of your efforts.”

  I watched the building. Nothing happened for a couple of minutes. Then I noticed the guards on the roof start scurrying around, like there was an emergency but they weren’t sure what to do about it. I saw several of them talking on two-way radios. I scanned the rest of the building and saw more guards running out the door. The guards on the roof climbed down a ladder. There was a bit of a glow behind several of the windows.

  “I think things are heating up,” I said.

  “I think so. We’d better get going. Our transport should be arriving very soon.”

  We drove down the road, ending up at a landing strip. It wasn’t even an airport—just a cleared area. Something had already landed. Something awesome.

  “We’re going in that?”

  “Yes.”

  “Cool. Will it explode?”

  “Hardly. It isn’t from BUM. We’re getting a ride from the air force. And you’re persistently annoying.”

  “That’s just one of my many useful skills.” I turned my attention back to our ride. It was some sort of jet. I’d never seen one like it before, but I had a feeling it might not be something the air force told people about. It was very flat and very black. It wouldn’t have been out of place launching from the belly of a spaceship.

  “So, any time you want a jet, you just ask for it? That’s awesome.” I wondered what Mookie would think about that.

  “Not when I want one,” Mr. Murphy said. “When I need one. And, yes, BUM has total instant access to whatever transportation we need. If necessary, I could have us cruising off the coast in a nuclear submarine on a moment’s notice.”

  We took our seats behind the pilot. He handed me an oxygen mask. I was about to tell him I didn’t need one, when Mr. Murphy said, “Thank you,” and slipped it over my head.

  Mr. Murphy didn’t say anything, but I could read the words in his stare. Nobody needs to know you don’t breathe. Right. There was no reason to let the pilot know my secret. All he needed to know was that he was taking us somewhere.

  And he took us somewhere, for sure. Fast. Superfast. When we left the landing strip, the jet didn’t take off. It took up. Straight up. Then it shot forward.

  When we landed, Mr. Murphy led me to another car. “Any chance you could get Mookie a jet ride?” I asked.

  He snorted, but didn’t even bother to answer. After we got in the car, he said, “Fix your face.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  He flipped down my sun visor and pointed to the mirror on the back of it. “You look like one of those ancient Hollywood stars who’s had too much plastic surgery.”

  I checked out my reflection. Yeesh. I guess the g-forces from flying had smushed my skin toward my ears. I put my hands on the sides of my face and moved everything back to where it belonged.

  “Better?” I asked.

  “Definitely. Though your plasticity might come in handy. You could become a master of disguise. Or disgust.” He cackled way too loudly at his own joke and almost missed the next turn.

  I pushed gently against my nose. It moved to the side. I straightened it, sat back, and tried not to think about how I was slowly turning into a pile of gooey flesh
wrapped around strong bones. The Play-Doh kid. Yeah, that would be just wonderful.

  Mr. Murphy drove pretty fast again. After a while, I started recognizing the roads. He was driving me home.

  I settled back in my seat. “That was a very cool jet.”

  “Yes, it was. There are some advantages to being a spy.”

  Since he was sharing information, I figured I’d ask the one thing I’d been wondering about since he’d first recruited me. “When will I meet other agents?”

  “You’ve met some of us,” Mr. Murphy said.

  “No. I mean agents like me. Other kids who’ve had useful misadventures.”

  “When you need to,” Mr. Murphy said. “Right now, there’s no need.”

  “But we’re sort of in the same club,” I said. “It would be nice to get together.”

  “Nathan, this isn’t a social activity. I didn’t recruit you so you could find someone to play checkers with or trade baseball cards. We’re fighting the bad guys.”

  “I don’t see how it would hurt,” I said.

  “Forget it. That’s not happening until there’s a reason for it. Look how much trouble we had the last time I didn’t follow proper procedures.”

  I let it drop. I could sort of understand what he was talking about. Thanks to one little slip, he’d been kidnapped by RABID last winter, and beaten up pretty badly. That could have turned out a lot worse. Still, I thought it would be good to meet kids who’d been doing this for longer than I had. They could probably give me some useful tips. And maybe some new ways to annoy Mr. Murphy. I guess that would have to wait.

  I got home just before sunrise. Right now, my insomnia—or, as Mookie liked to call it, my inzomnia—didn’t bother me at all.

  There were plenty of times when I wished I could sleep. It was one of the things I missed about being alive. But if I needed sleep, I’d probably feel exhausted after staying up all night carrying out the mission. I’d be too tired to enjoy the feeling of success. So tonight, inzomnia was a good thing. It helped me be a spy.

  * * *

  Sunday afternoon, I met up with my friends at Abigail’s place.

  “I haven’t found a single thing about the anima flower on the Internet,” Abigail said.

  “That’s not good. So it isn’t real?” I was glad I hadn’t gotten my hopes up about a cure.

  “I didn’t say that. Not everything is on the Internet. There are some books I can check. There are all sorts of old newspapers and magazines that aren’t on the Internet.”

  “Then how can you search them?” I asked.

  “They have indexes,” Abigail said.

  “On the Internet?” Mookie asked.

  “No, in other books,” Abigail said. “People did research before there was an Internet. And even before there were any computers at all. They looked things up. They found information. It will be fun. I’ll go to the county library after school tomorrow.”

  “I’m still searching for a cure, too,” Mookie said. “I’ll bet I come up with one first.” He stared up at the ceiling, the way Abigail always does when she’s thinking. A moment later, he said, “I got it! This is perfect!”

  “What?” I asked.

  “We’ve been looking at it wrong the whole time.” He threw a smirk in Abigail’s direction.

  “I can’t wait to hear this,” she said.

  “Forget that stupid flower. All we have to do is find a vampire and get him to bite you,” Mookie said. “Then you’ll never die.”

  “I’m already dead,” I said.

  “But you won’t get deader,” Mookie said. “See? It’s perfect. No rotting or anything.”

  “Except, there aren’t any vampires,” Abigail said.

  Mookie tossed her a second smirk. “Just like there aren’t any zombies?”

  “It’s not the same thing,” Abigail said.

  “Of course not,” Mookie said. “One’s a vampire and one’s a zombie.”

  “Great,” Abigail said. “You look for vampires. I’ll keep looking for the anima flower.”

  11

  That Smarts

  Rodney was waiting for me in front of the school Monday morning, when I went to meet up with my friends. I clenched my fists, just in case, but kept my hands at my sides. If I had to defend myself, I figured I could do even more damage without a boxing glove. But even Rodney wasn’t stupid enough to start something on school property.

  “That was a lucky punch,” he said. He poked my shoulder and glared.

  “Yeah, I felt pretty lucky,” I said. That was true. I was lucky my bones had been hardened, and I was lucky I’d been able to catch Rodney by surprise while he was waiting for me to crumple from the low punch.

  “There’s something wrong with you,” he said. “You’re not a normal kid.”

  I shrugged. “I’ve been hearing that for years.”

  He threw a punch at my head, but stopped short. “You didn’t even blink.”

  “I’ve got nerves of steel,” I said.

  “Whatever’s going on, I’m gonna figure it out,” he said. “And then they’ll make us the winners. You cheated. There’s no way you could ever beat me for real. You’re just a big lousy cheater.”

  He walked off. I watched him go join Eddy. That worried me. Rodney wasn’t smart enough to figure anything out by himself. But even though Eddy was nowhere near as smart as Abigail, he still might be able to put things together.

  “Wow,” Mookie said. “Rodney really lives in his own little universe. I guess it’s a Rodneyverse.”

  “He can’t imagine anyone ever beating him at anything,” Abigail said. “That’s typical for a bully. So to him, he just can’t admit you actually won the boxing match fairly. He has to believe you cheated.”

  “I guess if you think about what happened, I really did sort of cheat. But not the way he thinks.” I pulled my shirt collar away from my neck and looked at my shoulder. There was a small dent where Rodney had poked me.

  “And he cheated, too,” Mookie said, “trying to hit you below the belt. That was pretty slimy.”

  “He did more than try,” I said. “I wasn’t standing on my toes because I wanted to be a ballet dancer. But I’ll bet he can convince himself it was okay to do that.” I put my thumb on one side of the dent and my first finger on the other, then stretched my skin until the dent popped out.

  “Absolutely,” Abigail said. “A famous philosopher once said, ‘No one does wrong willingly.’ ”

  “He’d never met Rodney,” Mookie said. “Or Mr. Lomux. Hey, speaking about doing wrong, look who’s coming over.”

  “Now what?” I watched Shawna cross the school lawn. She’d been mean to each of us at some point during the year. But she’d gotten a bit nicer after her horrible experience at the Halloween party, when I’d slipped my snapped-off finger into her glass of orange soda. I know it was a terrible thing to do to, but I’d had no choice.

  Abigail’s words echoed back through my brain: No one does wrong willingly. I guess all of us can find an excuse for just about anything. Maybe that’s why there were groups like RABID out there. They felt they were doing the right thing.

  Shawna opened up her math book and pointed to a page. “We’re having a test this afternoon, and I totally don’t get this. Do you understand it?”

  “Nope. I guess you and I have something in common,” Mookie said. “How do you like that?”

  Shawna let out a little snort of frustration, then pushed the book closer to Abigail. “I was talking to her.”

  Abigail glanced at the page, and then at her watch. “There’s probably enough time before the bell. It’s not difficult if you break it up into small steps. Come on—I think I can help you out.”

  They walked over to a bench near the flagpole and sat down. Abigail pointed to something on the page and talked. Shawna shook her head. Abigail talked some more. Shawna shook her head again. Abigail talked even more. Shawna nodded. It was a slow nod, like she was trying to squeeze a hard rubber ball aga
inst her body with her chin. Then there was a pause, followed by a larger nod.

  Abigail talked a bit more. Then she patted Shawna on the shoulder. Shawna closed her book and ran off. Abigail walked back to us. “Wow,” I said. “I’ll bet you can sit at the popular table at lunch.”

  “I’d rather eat my own liver—with anchovies and horseradish,” Abigail said.

  “I like horseradish,” Mookie said. “Even if it does give me gas.”

  “Air gives you gas,” Abigail said. “Water gives you gas. I think even sunlight gives you gas.”

  “So I might as well eat lots of horseradish,” Mookie said.

  “You were able to help her?” I asked.

  “Yeah. I think she understands it now,” Abigail said.

  “How’d it feel?”

  Abigail glanced back at the bench. “Nice.” Just then, her purse beeped. She grabbed her phone. “It’s from Uncle Zardo.”

  MAD TO COZY GIANT

  “That’s not telling us much,” I said.

  Abigail grinned. “What Uncle Zardo can scramble, I can unscramble. I wrote an app for my phone. It uses fuzzy logic to figure out what he was trying to send before the texteaser messed it up. Watch.”

  She pressed a button, and the message changed.

  I MADE IT TO QASIGIANNGUIT

  “Well, at least part of it is clear now,” I said. “But I think your app needs work.”

  “My app is perfect. All of it is clear,” Abigail said. “This is exactly what he wanted to text. Qasigiannguit is in Greenland.”

  “Greenland?” Mookie said. “Even I know that’s not on the way to the Philippines from here. Or from anywhere.”

  Abigail shrugged. “Uncle Zardo doesn’t always take the shortest route. There are some places he has to avoid.”

  “Like anywhere with police who are looking for him?” I asked.