Return of the Jed Read online

  Dad held out his hand. “Let me see it close-up. I need to know for sure.”

  Dr. Armendariz stepped back, but Dad grabbed the doctor’s wrist. He wrestled the tube out of the doctor’s grip and shoved the small man into the chair, breaking the clipboard with a snap.

  Dad held the tube to the light and told me to get dressed. My left arm slowed me down since it was at about seventy percent efficiency and still tingling. I pulled my clothes from the plastic bag on the counter, put them on, and joined Dad.

  “You want to touch it?” Dad asked, though it was more an order. He removed the tube’s rubber stopper.

  “Yeah, let’s make sure,” I said.

  Placing my left index finger on the top of the tube, I tilted it with my right and watched the liquid ooze along the glass (and that’s why I’ve always called it Ooze).

  My skin tingled as soon as the liquid made contact. It seemed to be Ooze, but my skin also tingled when I dipped my fingers in syrup and honey, because that’s how much I loved syrup and honey. Besides, I had a hard time believing this was the one true Ooze, knowing I was its only source. My surprised reaction told Dad what he needed to know.

  “So we may have the genuine stuff?” Dad said. “Maybe we should follow Dr. Armendangerous out of here. If it’s what it appears, we’re going to have a lot of questions.”

  “Good,” Dr. Armendariz said, rising and picking up the pieces of his clipboard. “My office is not too far from here.”

  “Wait, what about Mendoza?” I said. “And Tread? Luke left him outside.”

  “Mr. Mendoza has been informed all is fine, and that you are on your way home soon with your father,” Dr. Armendariz said. “Tread is safe, in my office, waiting for us. I … anticipated … your decision.”

  I didn’t like the way this was going, but I knew we didn’t have a choice.

  “Do I get a vote?” Luke said.

  “No!” the three of us said at once.

  “I was just going to ask if we could stop for some agua fresca on the way, geez.”

  “There happens to be a bodega on the way,” Dr. Armendariz said. “We’ll give you a few minutes. Besides, we can all probably use something refreshing. Now,” he turned to Dad, “if I may have my property back.”

  “Not just yet,” Dad said in the kind of testosterone-fueled voice he only used when sending me to my room. It was cool hearing it used on an adult.

  “Fine, let’s go,” Dr. Armendariz said. “I am sure once I explain everything, you will be happy to leave it with me.”

  He was wrong.

  Undead wrong.

  Chapter Thirty-Five

  “How do they get all that amazing meat taste into one sixteen-point-nine ounce bottle?” Luke said, draining the last of an agua fresca the color of a prairie tornado.

  “You don’t want the details,” Dr. Armendariz answered. “Because once you find out, you can never un-know it. I don’t want to be responsible for that.”

  I was perched on the edge of an exam table in a room roughly the same color of the just-consumed agua fresca. Anatomy posters covered the walls, most picturing what can go wrong if you wait a year to have a doctor look at that odd lump or tiny bite. Tread slept in a corner, making me feel a little better about being here.

  I just didn’t like the way the skeleton was looking at me with his creepy glass eyeballs. I’d gaze right back, but how do you win a staring contest against an opponent that is eyelid-challenged?

  “May I introduce you to Mrs. Skellerton,” Dr. Armendariz said, noticing my interest.

  “Clever name,” Dad said.

  “What do you mean?” the doctor said. “Maxine Skellerton donated her body to science. And do not believe the stories that we may have collected a bit too early.”

  Luke looked away from a poster showing the most surprising areas insects have laid eggs in the human body. “I haven’t heard those stories, but I want to now,” he said.

  “I am kidding, of course,” Dr. Armendariz said. “But please, let’s get down to business. I am sure you have many questions.”

  I’d thought of at least a dozen as we walked the four blocks from the hospital. Disappointment sank in when we entered the medical building housing the doctor’s office. I was expecting something darker, drearier, befitting a mad scientist. Because that’s how Dr. Armendariz struck me. How else could he have come across Ooze, if that truly was Ooze, what with me being the world’s only supplier and never having donated any?

  The most obvious question was my first to the doctor. “Where did you get that test tube?”

  “From a leading medical supply store,” he answered.

  This was like dealing with Luke, only an older and shorter version.

  “No, where did you get what’s in the test tube?” Dad said, patting his left pocket where he’d put it.

  “Ah, of course,” Dr. Armendariz said. “That makes much more sense. Though if you want to know more about the best deals on test tubes, I’d be happy to fill you in.”

  “Can you just buy one, or do you have to order an entire case?” Luke said. “Because it would be nice to have a test tube on hand—”

  “Luke!” I stopped him. “Please?”

  “Sorry, dude.”

  Dad and I stared at the doctor, waiting for an answer.

  “It happened a few years ago,” Dr. Armendariz began, settling on a wheeled stool. “A gentleman came to see me after hearing of my work in an alternative field of medicine.”

  “Alternative field?” Dad asked.

  “Yes. Longevity. I focused on ways to keep people alive much longer.”

  “That doesn’t sound so alternative,” Dad said. “In fact, that sounds like every late-night infomercial I’ve ever seen.”

  “Let me be more specific.” Dr. Armendariz thrust his legs forward, the stool squealing as it rolled into a medical cabinet, jostling the bottles and instruments inside. “Oil.”

  “What?” I asked. “Oil? Not Ooze?”

  “Ooze for the squeaky wheels on this stool? Oil is the more preferred material for lubrication. Time-tested and such. Nor am I aware of what sort of ooze you’re talking about, nor what it oozed from.”

  That’s right, the good doctor had no idea what I was talking about. I called it Ooze, but who knew what he might have named it. Assuming he really had authentic Ooze.

  “Never mind,” I said. “What were you saying about being more specific?”

  “Yes, my specialty. It’s not just living longer, it’s about a refusal to accept death.”

  “Like pretending not to be home when the Grim Reaper knocks?” Luke asked. “When I see some guy holding a clipboard coming up the walk, and I don’t want whatever he’s selling, I turn down the TV and wait him out. It takes fifteen minutes sometimes, but he always gives up.”

  “No, not like that at all,” Dr. Armendariz said, exasperation in his voice.

  “So then not going toward the light,” Luke continued. “Instead you take the door marked ‘More life.’”

  “Do you really think it’s that simple?” Dr. Armendariz lowered his face into his hands and rubbed his temples.

  “I kind of do,” Luke said. “But I’ll admit the Grim Reaper is probably way more patient than the water-treatment salesman, and a vortex might suck you toward the light.”

  “It is much more complicated,” Dr. Armendariz said, lifting his head to look at the ceiling. “If you only knew.”

  “Tell us,” I said. “Please. Before Luke opens his mouth again.”

  The doctor leaned back and folded his arms across his chest, still staring at Luke as if daring my best friend to interrupt.

  “Death does not have to be an end,” he said. “Consider it intermission, leading to the next act. What I am talking about is …”

  He paused for effect.

  And waited.

  Still waited.

  He’s waiting for the dramatic music, I thought. T
he suspenseful chords that signal a shocking revelation.

  Luke started to say something, but thankfully, Dr. Armendariz cut him off at the verbal pass.

  “Reanimation,” he said. “Bringing dead tissue back to life.”

  “You mean like in the movie Re-Animator, where the mad scientist injects dead people, and they go all evil.” Luke again. You can’t stop him. You can only hope to contain him.

  “First, that movie is totally age inappropriate for you,” Dr. Armendariz said. “Secondly, it’s nothing but Hollywood rubbish.”

  I knew all about Hollywood rubbish. In all the movies of the undead, I’d never seen a zombie spend all night studying for a math test. Or celebrate after bowling a one hundred and eighty-seven. Or pick up after a zombie dog who had done his duty under a thorny bush on a really hot day.

  But the second I start shuffling and moaning, just because I’m tired, everybody’s arming themselves and talking about the zombie apocalypse.

  Still, I couldn’t imagine reanimation without thinking of the movie Luke mentioned. We’d watched it almost a year ago when his parents were out, since they’d have a fit if we streamed an R-rated movie.

  It was as violent as it was stupid, and I wished I could un-watch it. Now every scene ran through my head.

  I turned toward Tread, lying there with his eyes closed and legs twitching. What do zombie dogs dream of? Running free without fear of losing a leg? Or biting the mailman and turning him into a zombie? Not that that’s necessarily a bad thing.

  Tread had turned out OK after being brought back to life, the poster dog of reanimation. But everything had lined up perfectly. I was at his side seconds after he was run over, and he died as I watched. Ooze mixed with my tears fell into his wounds, creating a tiny lightning storm of chemical reaction.

  He’d opened his eyes, and the rest was history. Sure, Tread still had the occasional accident in the house, but he never showed interest in eating anyone.

  Talk of reanimation still made me uncomfortable.

  Dad cleared his throat as if about to speak, but said nothing. The look on his face told me everything I needed to know.

  He didn’t like where this was heading either.

  “What have you reanimated?” Luke asked, to no one’s surprise.

  Dr. Armendariz inhaled deeply and theatrically, letting it out through his nose.

  “Nothing that can be proven scientifically,” he said. “I was convinced I’d brought back a cricket, but it may have been dazed rather than dead.”

  Two questions occurred to me, so I waited for Luke to ask them. He did not disappoint.

  “How do you daze a cricket?” he said on cue. “And why would you want to bring back a cricket? Better yet, bring a sponge to life. Though I think that’s already been done.”

  “You’re thinking SpongeBob Squarepants,” I said. “And that’s animation, not reanimation.”

  “Right,” Luke said. “Sorry.”

  Dr. Armendariz merely smiled and continued. “As I said, there are bugs, so to speak,” the doctor said, working in some pun action. “All will be well when I figure out this mysterious substance. You mentioned Ooze? Is that what you call it?”

  “No idea what you’re talking about,” I said, wondering if Dr. Armendariz knew far more than he was letting on.

  “Son, it’s clear you referred to the substance in the test tube. I knew immediately what you were talking about, and I apologize for playing coy.”

  I stared at Luke and counted down. Three, two, one.

  “What’re you looking at me for?” he said. “You think I’m going to make some goofy comment about playing coy, right? Like, ‘Do you need dice for that’?”

  “Yeah,” I said. “Absolutely.”

  “For your information, I know what ‘playing coy’ means,” Luke said. “But I do have a question for the good doctor.” Pivoting his gaze to the resident physician, he asked, “Where did you get Ooze, assuming you even have genuine Ooze, and what the heck are you planning to do with it?”

  “Finally, a meaningful question from my curious friend,” Dr. Armendariz said. “I must begin with describing an incident from about four years ago.”

  “On a dark and stormy night?” Luke quizzed.

  “I don’t recall. Is that important?”

  “It is to me. Great stories begin with either ‘Once upon a time’ or ‘On a dark and stormy night.’ Your choice. One always has a happy ending. Guess which one?”

  “On a dark and stormy night,” Dr. Armendariz started.

  Chapter Thirty-Six

  When Dr. Armendariz finished his story, I checked my lower jaw to make sure it was still there.

  It wasn’t. Luke picked it up off the floor. And the fact Dr. Armendariz hardly reacted at all indicated his story was true, as worrisome as that was.

  “First time I saw a literal example of a jaw-dropping story,” Luke said. “Definitely worth the wait.”

  “Thanks, Luke,” I said. Tried to say, anyway. It came out, “Thaw yah,” as I discovered a lower jaw is essential to proper pronunciation.

  “Hold on, I’m going to get staples and some napkins. Staples to put you back together. Napkins because you have some serious saliva production going on right now with nothing to catch it.”

  Dad wrapped his arms around me, and I was happy to disappear inside them. He whispered, “He may be full of crap. Let’s just see if any of this is true before we take the next step. One day at a time, OK?”

  I sank deeper into his chest, still trying to wrap my undead brain around what I’d heard.

  Dr. Armendariz started by defending himself, saying he had been the butt of several scientific-community jokes when he appeared at his first conference to reveal breakthroughs in reanimation, a field at the time pioneered only by fictional characters.

  The audience rejected his theories revolving around electrically charged nanoparticles and their effect on soft tissue. They stood and applauded when Dr. Armendariz’s two-hour talk ended, more because he was finally finished than for his claims. The crowd remained unconvinced because of one irrefutable fact of his research—he had yet to reanimate anything, be it insect or animal.

  The problem, Dr. Armendariz believed, was his audience rather than his research. He sought like-minded scientists and soon appeared at a conference hosted by the Bureau of Unexplained but Reasonable Phenomenon, a group dedicated to the advancement of paranormal research. He advanced his reanimation theories in an article published in BURP’s newsletter, Findings and Accomplishments of Research Tribune.

  “The group embraced me even without knowledge of my years of work in the paranormal field,” Dr. Armendariz said. “My first breakthrough occurred three decades ago, yet went largely unnoticed for reasons I can’t explain to this day.”

  That discovery? A werewolf in Romania. Having read stories of a beast terrorizing the countryside outside Bucharest, Dr. Armendariz traveled to Mizil, the attacks seeming to center around the village.

  “This was back in the 1980s, years before you could Google ‘werewolf’ and find exactly what you’re looking for,” he said. “Such a pain. Paranormal scientists have no idea how easy they have it today.”

  Dr. Armendariz said townspeople led him to a man named Costel, who had an unsightly skin condition as well as a taste for human flesh.

  “He confessed to the skin condition,” Dr. Armendariz said. “But he insisted he ate only lamb with an occasional goat, poached from neighboring farms, a habit that got him in trouble with the locals. I did the only thing I could do. I waited for the full moon, and sure enough, he’d had a definitive five o’clock shadow by four o’clock in the morning—”

  “That’s hardly proof,” Dad said.

  “I’d expect that reaction from someone who has not spent a lifetime in the paranormal field,” the doctor said. “But trust me, a werewolf that can control his transformation like that is the most dangerous werewolf of all.”
>
  Dr. Armendariz moved on to his greatest triumph, stumbling across indisputable evidence of a vampire. Not just any bloodsucker, but Vampire Zero.

  He beckoned us closer, having us gather around him as he flipped through the menus on his phone. He tapped a few buttons, and a grainy black-and-white video played. On screen, an upright casket burst open to reveal a tall, lean figure with pointy ears and a hooked nose wearing what appeared to be a very nice suit. The video flickered, and now the shadowy figure leaned toward a woman cowering in fear. She disappeared within the folds of his cape before the screen went black.

  “Nosferatu,” Dad said.

  “So you’ve heard of my research.” Dr. Armendariz grinned. “Splendid. I do enjoy meeting people who have heard of the vampire Nosferatu, an indication my reputation is growing.”

  “No, not Nosferatu the vampire. Nosferatu the silent film.”

  Silent film? I thought. Who’s ever heard of a silent film? Dad’s losing it.

  “Yes, this particular bit of vampiric evidence does not have sound, I’m afraid,” Dr. Armendariz said. “One of my great regrets to this day. Yet it is understandable given this evidence—which goes on for some time—is nearly one thousand years old, and long before the invention of film.”

  “No, that’s not true at all,” Dad said.

  “It has to be that old because sound wasn’t even invented yet,” Luke said. “Let’s watch it again.”

  “Of course,” Dr. Armendariz said, tapping his phone to launch the ghostly images again. It sure did look almost a thousand years old, but I knew Dad was right. It was an old movie, shot when people couldn’t afford color.

  When the screen dimmed to black, Dr. Armendariz cleared his throat.

  “But these success stories are merely a prelude to what I really want to talk about.” He paused. “The first time I saw a zombie.”

  “You mean Jed,” Luke said. “We all know that story.”