Reanimated Readz by Rusty Fischer Read Free Book Online Page B

beer. Yeah, like that’s going to happen.
    “Is…is…that true, Randall?”
    The voice is startling, and unexpected. I turn—we all turn—to see Brandy standing on her front porch, shotgun in hand, pointed right at me.
    “Of course it isn’t,” I insist.
    She shakes her head, black curls spilling over the shoulders of her baby-doll T-shirt. “Now it all makes sense.” Her voice is sad, her eyes duller than usual, her expression placid, as if she’s used to being disappointed. “That’s why you showed up today, at the Bagel Barn, right out of the blue.”
    “No! Honest, Brandy, that’s not it.”
    “Get him, Brandy!” Brock shouts, inching forward. “Get that no-good zombie! You know you want to!”
    Brock’s voice shocks us all. It’s high-pitched and hysterical, a voice that says merely arresting a zombie isn’t going to be good enough. I wish I hadn’t heard voices like it several times over the last year, but it happens.
    All that sadness and fear, all that pent-up rage and survivor’s guilt, just comes spilling out all of a sudden. On the street, in the Slushee line, at the bank, random strangers will just explode for no reason, simply because there’s a zombie in their midst and they’ve had enough of playing polite.
    I get it. I understand. It’s the cost of living among the living, I guess.
    “Get up!” Brock says, kicking my feet.
    “Brock.” Ryan steps forward and waves a hand to get him to back up a bit. “Careful, bro. We have to do this right. Laws are laws, even if they’re zombie laws.”
    Sure, he’s saying the right words, but his voice isn’t much more than a sneer.
    “He’s stalking Brandy, Ryan. What else do you need to know?”
    Brandy looks from me to Brock. Her face does that slow processing thing like it did at the Bagel Barn after I made my “brains” joke.
    “But why tonight, Brock?” she asks, shotgun still aimed squarely at my head. “I haven’t seen Randall since they kicked him out of school a few months back. Why all of a sudden is he showing up at my work, and then…in the tree outside my bedroom? On the same night you happen to show up with one of the Reanimation Patrol dudes. Hi, Ryan, by the way.”
    “Hi, Brandy.”
    “I came by earlier, to check on you,” Brock lies. “And…and…I saw Randall up in the tree.”
    Brandy’s moving a little faster now. “So you left and went to get Ryan? That’s your first thought as a boyfriend? Not to warn me, not to sneak me and Mom out the back door? To go get your football buddy and come back an hour or so later.”
    Suddenly, she aims the shotgun down an inch. It’s still in blowing-a-hole-through-the-nearest-zombie range, but at least this way I’ll be able to keep my nose.
    I wait for Ryan to put two and two together—he was in Honors classes, before I left school for good—but from the way he avoids Brandy’s eyes, I can tell: he’s in on it. Has been from the minute Brock walked in my door, three bills in his pocket, so new they barely looked folded.
    They probably had this planned from the get-go. For whatever reason, Brock wanted me gone and ever since the plague passed and zombies who’d lived past their “violent stage” were proven harmless, this was his only way—his only legal way—of doing it.
    “Why, Brock?” I ask. I figure he owes me that much, an explanation at least. “Why me? Why now?”
    “Why any of you?” he says, face going all weasely again as he stands there, beady-eyed and nostrils flaring. “You zombies got my mother, my brother, my grammy. Why not you, Randall? Why not now?”
    Brandy pouts and lowers her gun another inch. “They got my dad, too, Brock. And they got Randall’s parents, too. Both of them. And his little sister, right, Randall? And Ryan’s brother, too. They got a lot of us, Brock. They were a lot of us. This here shotgun’s the same one I used to put my dad down. And don’t think I won’t put you down, too.”
    “Me?” Brock asks. I