Best to not even think about that.
“What I mean,” Scott said, “is next time we try this, the sonofabitch that’s lying dead in the back of the SUV better not only be a zombie, it better eat the next homeless motherfucker we bring in.”
Steve turned around. “You serious? You want to like, feed homeless people to them?”
Scott shrugged. “Why not? Might be kinda fun to watch, don’t you think?” He glanced at Gordon and playfully punched his arm. Gordon chuckled ruefully, shaking his head. “Hey, come on Gord, think of how gross it would be. It’ll be like watching those zombie movies you’re always pestering me to see. You know, Night of the Living Dead and all that shit.”
“But I told you that the zombies we’re calling up are different!” Gordon said.
“They’re zombies, right?”
“Yeah.”
“And in those movies, zombies eat people, right?”
“Yeah, but in the book Count Gaines loaned me, they — ”
“Who the fuck cares about what books say?”
Gordon opened his mouth to say something, then shook his head. “Okay. Whatever.”
“Whatever? What’s that supposed to mean?”
“Nothing.”
Scott stared at Gordon, silently daring the other boy to keep it up. That strange feeling he’d had earlier about Gordon was still lingering. Was Gordon going pussy on them? He better not be. While Gordon had participated in way too many things with Scott and the rest of the crew that he could be in as much trouble as they should he squeal, Scott didn’t think he would stoop so low as to drop a dime on them. He might be the type to silently bow out, never to contact them again, and that was fine. So long as Gordon kept his mouth shut.
But if he even heard one whispered rumor that Gordon had talked about their recent activities with anybody else outside the group…if he so much as thought about it…
No. That wouldn’t happen. Gordon was in too deep. Gordon would never do anything like that.
Besides, making the zombies was Gordon’s idea.
“Tell me something, Gord,” Scott said. “Why’d you want to make zombies if you knew they weren’t going to eat people?”
Gordon shrugged. “I don’t know. I kinda thought they would eat people…you know, like in the movies. But according to Count Gaines, the zombies we conjured from that spell in the book aren’t those kind of zombies.”
Scott looked at Gordon, the idea settling in with him. “So this is all Count Gaines’ fault, then.”
Another shrug from Gordon. “I don’t know. I guess.”
They were silent as they drove through the country, heading up the winding road that would take them into the hills at the outskirts of town and, eventually, Zuck’s Woods. “Let’s just get there and do what we gotta do,” Scott said. “When he rises, we’ll bring him back to the house and then we can make plans to get another homeless person. Maybe if we don’t feed them for a week or two they’ll be hungry enough to eat the next homeless guy we bring.”
Gordon nodded. “I never thought of that.”
Scott grinned. Let Gordon think that their next victim would be culled from the ranks of the homeless. He had someone else in mind.
Count Gaines himself.
Chapter Fourteen
Tim Gaines had been listening to a CD by The Cult — Love — over and over for the past few days in his room, wondering how things would have been for his parents, and the Ulrich and Romero families, if he were only normal.
Like everybody else.
Tim sighed. He was reclining on his bed in his room. A poster for the band Tool was pinned up on his closet door. A small boom box sat on his bureau, twin speakers currently blaring “Dark Angel,” Ian Ashbury’s voice both soothing and providing a hint of danger. Catty-corner to the bureau was his bookshelf, currently stuffed with dozens of paperbacks and a few hardcovers. Despite everything that had occurred as of late, Tim had a horror novel in his lap — a Jack Ketchum paperback. No matter how bad things got in the real world, escaping to make-believe fantasies was always preferable…even when those make-believe fantasies were as nightmarish as a Jack Ketchum novel.
The song ended and Tim debated getting up from the bed to change the CD. He’d been listening to his mom’s music collection relentlessly since being on house arrest for the past week. His mom was way cool. Dad was cool too, for that matter. In the past week, Mom had introduced Tim to the music of her youth. Bands like The Cult, The Cure, Bauhaus, Gene Loves Jezebel. She’d pulled out an old scrapbook and flipped through it with him and Tim was amazed to see that his mom had been a goth when she was in high school and college. “Of course back then we didn’t call outselves Goths,” she’d said as they sat at the kitchen table. Mom was nursing a glass of wine. “We called ourselves punks. And most of the kids I went to school with were scared of me because of the way I looked…not for anything I’d ever done.”
It was the first time Mom had ever opened herself up that much to him about her youth. He knew she’d gone through a similar experience at Spring Valley High when she was a student there. What he didn’t know was that she’d been just as independent as he was. “The apple doesn’t fall far from the tree, honey,” she’d said, giving him an affectionate squeeze.
“Were the kids you went to school with back then as dumb as the kids are now?” Tim had asked.
Mom laughed at that one. “There were quite a few doofuses in my day. Yeah…I’d have to say that there were brainless idiots when I went to school.”
The difference between Mom’s time and now was that back then the kids weren’t as cruel. The jocks never tried to force-feed a dead rodent to Mom, nor had they consistently targeted her in harassment and rumors. Mom even said that kids these days were just a whole lot meaner than they were in her time. When Tim asked why, she shrugged. “I don’t know, honey. There seems to be such a big emphasis now for parents to push their kids to be more competitive. To always succeed at everything they do and to basically mold them into images either they never lived up to or something they always wanted to be. As a result I think there’s a lot of angry, frustrated kids out there. They lash out, and quite often they lash out at those they perceive to be different. They perceive people like you and me to be a threat because we don’t have those same restrictions. So they lash out at us because it makes them feel better about themselves.”
“Why can’t they just be themselves?” Tim had asked. “I don’t get it.”
“Their parents have certain expectations of them,” Mom had explained. “They’ve set these goals for their kids and for the most part they’re either unattainable or they…they’re not something these kids want. My folks wanted me to be a business administrator when I grew up. Can you imagine me working in an office?”
Tim had grinned. Mom worked in an office, but it was in a very creative setting. She was a Creative Director for a small advertising agency in Lancaster.
“When my folks found out I wanted to major in graphic arts in college they blew a gasket. It was bad enough I went out of my way to wear clothes they didn’t approve of and had a boyfriend they didn’t like because he didn’t look like all the Ken dolls in the neighborhood…I had to express a desire to do something with my life that I actually liked. The difference between what I went through and what a lot of other kids go through is that I stuck to my guns. I did what I wanted, took the college classes I wanted, pursued my interests. My parents weren’t happy, and they made this known to me throughout the time I lived at home. I had to actually move out of the house and show some success in my chosen profession before they finally came around. Don’t you remember when you were little and we’d come here to visit? How your grandparents and I never really talked much?”