Dawn of the Jed Read online

  The thing Luke loved a distant third after doughnuts and kicking my butt was seeing someone willingly humiliate himself.

  “I’ll take off my pants and wave them over my head as I take a lap around the court.”

  “Really?”

  “No lie.”

  Luke put his hands on his hips, looking down deep in thought.

  “Deal, but you won’t do the lap today.” He lifted his eyes, targeting me. “It will be Monday. At lunch.”

  “You can’t be serious.” He was very serious.

  “I am very serious,” Luke said. See?

  It was one thing to run around with my pants overhead in an empty playground. But doing it at lunch on a school day, with hundreds of kids armed with cell phones capable of high-def video, that was another ballgame.

  What choice did I have?

  “Deal,” I said. I held out my hand.

  Luke pumped it once, twice. “People are going to wish they could un-see things once they get a look at you in your underwear.”

  “Maybe, maybe not,” I said in a voice that lacked all confidence.

  When I retrieved the ball from under the basket, it was much heavier than I remembered.

  Luke waited at the top of the key. I walked toward him, the ball tucked under my right arm. With each step, Luke seemed to get farther away.

  “Keep going, Jed, you’re almost to me,” Luke said, with a smile that was way bigger than it should have been.

  Finally, I faced Luke, my long journey over. I hesitated to turn around. I knew the rim was about a mile away.

  “To show you I’m not heartless, I’ll give you two shots,” Luke said. “But if one of them is an air ball, you have to run two laps Monday.”

  I wanted to take that deal. I felt confident I could hit the rim, so that second lap wasn’t a threat. The first shot would be perfect for gauging the distance. A little practice could make or break this bet.

  “No. One shot.” Where did that come from? Stupid pride.

  “Have it your way,” Luke said, stepping away. “The top of the key is all yours.”

  I put my right foot past the curving white line, brought my left foot even with the right. I pivoted one hundred eighty degrees on my heels to face the basket, keeping my eyes on the blacktop.

  I bounced the ball once. Twice. One more time. Three was lucky.

  I raised my eyes and spotted the rim.

  There it was, in the next county. And it was about as wide as a ping-pong ball.

  This was not my best idea. Like the time I challenged Luke to a speed-eating contest involving ice cream. I learned two things that day—no one eats faster than Luke, and zombies can get a really bad case of brain freeze.

  I focused on the basket. I’d made this shot before. Dozens of times at least. But never with so much on the line.

  I brought the ball up to my chest. I took a deep breath only because it seemed like the right thing to do. I lifted the ball up over my shoulder, elbow bent, now straighten, flexed my wrist, and launched.

  We had liftoff, all right. And I seriously misjudged the trajectory.

  The ball was too high, traveling too far. Unless the rim backed up at least three feet, I was going to have my underwear run plastered all over Instagram in two days.

  The high arc gave me plenty of time to ask Luke if that second shot offer was still good, but I couldn’t take my eyes off the ball. Like how you stare at a wreck as you drive by in slow motion.

  The ball hit high on the backboard, but where I was expecting a solid thunk, it was more a hollow thud.

  And the shot dropped straight into the basket. Through the net.

  It was good.

  It was good!

  “Oh my God, you hit a dead spot,” Luke said, shaking his head.

  “No, I hit an undead spot,” I said. “Zombie luck.”

  “That ball should’ve ricocheted so hard, you’d still be chasing it.”

  “True, but it didn’t. It went into the hole, baby, just as I planned.”

  “Really? That’s what you intended.”

  “Of course not. But I’m taking it.”

  It was time for me to collect. Only now, I was more nervous than when I took the shot.

  I walked slowly to get the ball, wondering exactly what I was going to say. And once I got it out, what was Luke going to do? Laugh? Deny everything? Walk away?

  I picked up the ball, still surprised at its heft. I dribbled it one, two, three times.

  I looked at Luke.

  “So,” I said. “Want to grab a drink at the Bucket?”

  “Really, that was your question you wanted me to answer honestly? The one you risked parading your undead butt around the basketball court? Sure, I want to grab a drink at the Bucket.”

  “That was a question. Not the question.”

  “I know. Kidding. But yeah, let’s go to the Bucket. Talk. If you were willing to wave your pants in the air like you just don’t care, it must be important.”

  “Yeah, it is. And how about that shot? Looks like I beat you.”

  “No, I’m still ahead, like, three letters. All that shot did was postpone the inevitable. Another loss.”

  “Fine,” I said. “We’ll call it a tie.”

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  We took a seat at a booth in the back. For a Saturday afternoon, Burger Bucket was busy but not too crowded. I scanned the customers and didn’t recognize anyone. We had some privacy.

  I leaned toward the straw and took a sip of my extra large soda. I was thirsty enough for the jumbo size, but I wasn’t sure I could lift it. Last thing I needed was trying to heft the jumbo and having both arms come off, especially with the sign posted not long after my last visit when Tread fetched my hand.

  “No shirt, no shoes, no maintaining the limbs you arrived with, no service.” Fortunately, it was posted next to the calorie content of the menu, so no one ever saw it. And if the Bucket really didn’t serve people with no shirt or shoes, it would go out of business.

  “So, what’s going on?” Luke said, taking a sip from his Smoothie Keg.

  “It’s just, you know, I mean, stuff like this,” I said. “Look how weird this feels. We used to hang out every day. Now I hardly see you.”

  “It’s not like you haven’t had better things to do.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “Jed, come on. Anna’s your best friend now. You don’t need me.”

  “Don’t need you? Don’t need you? I’ve never needed you.”

  “Really? What about at lunch when the Wheel of Meat came up with a question mark? Who needed me to taste it first to make sure it was something that was digestible?”

  “Luke, that’s different. That was survival. This isn’t about need, it’s about friendship. Except it hasn’t been much of a friendship. Not since Tread.”

  Luke leaned back and ran his hand through his hair, still staring at his drink.

  A shattering of glass interrupted the moment, followed by light applause.

  “Burger Bucket has glass?” I said.

  “Collector glasses,” Luke said. “Some zombie movie tie-in. ‘Attack of the Undead Revenge’ or ‘Return of the Dead Rises Again’ or something. Have to say, knowing a zombie personally changes your attitude toward what’s considered undead entertainment. Like finding out the worst thing about a zombie isn’t that he wants to eat you. It’s all the drama.”

  “What is that supposed to mean?”

  “You brought me here to talk, then just talk.”

  “It hasn’t been that easy, what with you avoiding me.”

  “Me avoiding you? Try other way around.”

  If I thought Luke had a bit of zombie inside, I would have strangled him right there. I was in the mood to lay on a little hurt, but nothing long-term.

  “I’m going to do what I should have done at Christmas break and address the eight hundred pound elephant in the room.
”

  Luke smiled, “If there were an elephant at Burger Bucket, it’d be on the menu by now. Ele-burgers.”

  I was not to be deterred. “You know what I mean. Tread.”

  “Tread. Yeah, the freak dog. Nice trick, that. What about him?”

  “You hate him. No, you don’t hate him. You hated that I did that.”

  There, I said it. Brace for the worst.

  Luke put his palms flat on the table and took a big breath.

  “You are so way off that maybe you are as brain-dead as everyone thinks.”

  As he took a sip, I slapped the Smoothie Keg off the table so fast Luke still had the straw between his lips. A slimy pink trail led from the table to the smoothie pond on the floor, the source of a dozen tiny streams flowing along the cracks.

  A voice from behind the counter. “You think I’m cleaning that—” interrupted by a lower, more adult voice. “Yes, you are, because that’s your job.”

  Luke and I said nothing until the clerk had finished mopping, not even a clichéd, “Missed a spot,” which we would have uttered at the same time not so long ago.

  I was waiting for an apology. Luke was waiting for, well, probably just another smoothie.

  “Dude, this has nothing to do with hate,” Luke said, losing our quiet duel. “Shock, yes. Maybe a little fear. Because I thought I knew you better than anyone. I never saw that coming.”

  I nodded. “It freaked me out a little too. But life, and undeadness, goes on. And our friendship didn’t.”

  “You’re right. But not because of hate or whatever you may be thinking.”

  “Then tell me why.”

  “You can’t handle the why.”

  “I’m a zombie. I can handle live wires, asbestos, and small amounts of acid. So try me.”

  Silence, as I expected.

  I looked at the other tables filled with people talking loudly and laughing. I’d bet none of them had the history Luke and I had. We were like brothers, and he was the only kid who thought having a friend with twist-off limbs was pretty cool.

  Now I sat in front of him not knowing what to say, except this.

  “Our friendship is one of the best things I have in my life. I don’t want to lose it. Not like this. Not with so many people always rooting against me.”

  Luke stood without so much as an “Excuse me” and walked away. Determined not to lose it in Burger Bucket of all places, I did the only thing a guy could do. Grab the phone and focus on the screen until he knew for sure he had a grip and wasn’t going to do something really embarrassing. Like cry.

  I saw it was sixty-four degrees in Hong Kong with a chance of rain. I punched in “Mt. Everest” to see if anyone tracked weather there when the table shook.

  Luke returned with another keg of smoothie.

  “If I’m going to tell you the story, it will be with a full smoothie and perhaps a bathroom break or two.”

  I could have asked him why he changed his mind, but I wasn’t about to tempt fate. I was going to believe what I wanted to believe.

  He thought our friendship was worth saving too.

  “It starts with Tread,” Luke said after taking a long sip. “But let’s make this clear. As shocked as I was to see that dog do the undead shuffle, I never thought you or Tread were some sort of Hollywood-style zombie monsters. I knew something was different because if all it took was a little Ooze to create a new zombie, I’d be the general of your undead army. But I was freaked out because that should not have happened.”

  The rest of the story unfolded slowly, interrupted only by two visits to the Burger Bucket bathroom (Luke actually went out back in the bushes, because the last person to go into the Burger Bucket bathroom was never seen again).

  Luke said that after he saw Tread do the undead two-step (his words, trust me), he needed some time to think, because it was clear he didn’t know everything about zombies he thought he knew.

  “Until then, I was the only guy screaming, ‘That’s total crap’ at the screen when a zombie bite turned people into zombies,” Luke said. “Yet you did just that, sort of. What else didn’t I know?”

  Luke went on, telling me how just a half block away, he ran into Ray Knowles and the rest of the Tech Club, who saw the whole thing unfold with Tread and me.

  They saw everything up close, thanks to their binoculars.

  “They said they were bird watching,” Luke said. “Apparently it’s a thing.”

  They asked Luke how many other things I turned into zombies. Pretty soon they were saying I was dangerous, that I had to be removed from school before I zombify other things, if not people.

  Luke said he listened as the group made plans. The first was to frame me for acts that would get me kicked out of school. They talked about hacking into the school’s computer system and changing grades, leaving a link behind that would make it seem as if it came from my laptop. Or breaking into my Facebook account and posting all sorts of evil things.

  Luke saw how serious they were and decided the only defense was a good offense. He convinced them to attack me at my weakest spot—being undead. He told them what he’d witnessed over the years, and how zombies were just like you saw in the movies, only worse.

  “The more crap I made up, the more they believed me,” Luke said. “I was like the Alfred Einstein of zombies.”

  “Albert Einstein,” I corrected.

  “Yeah, the Einstein brothers.”

  “Just go on.”

  Luke had thought that the crazier the alleged zombie facts got, the nuttier it would all seem to the Tech Club. He didn’t count on one thing—the gullibility of middle schoolers.

  “If for one second I thought people would believe that zombies preferred their brains medium-well instead of sushi style, I would have been way less creative,” he said. “Who really thinks one zombie could create an army of undead cockroaches large enough to eventually lead to a zombie apocalypse? Seriously, for a bunch of geniuses, these guys were idiots.”

  As Luke sank deeper and deeper into the Tech Club and the lies, he said he knew he would jeopardize his plans if he was seen with me. Who hangs around a kid who’s in the middle of creating an undead cockroach army?

  “So you had a plan,” I said.

  “Of course I had a plan. What’s the sense in all of this without a plan?”

  “So when did you come up with a plan?”

  “About the time of the cockroach army.”

  I shot him a look over my jumbo.

  “I was still dealing with stuff.”

  “What kind of stuff?” I asked.

  “Don’t take this wrong, but seeing you and Anna together all the time, like you were joined at the hip or something.”

  “Did you think maybe that was because you’d resigned as the president of the Zombie Friends League?”

  “Maybe.”

  “And I am pretty sure we were separated long enough for you to squeeze in.”

  “Not the picture I had—”

  “And Anna was the one told me to keep giving you a shot, so let that sink in until your Luke sense tingles.”

  He sucked on his Smoothie Keg and wouldn’t look at me. Because he knew I was right.

  “Anyway,” Luke said, doing what Luke often did when he was wrong—skip over that part and just keep going, hoping no one noticed. I knew the only way to stop the NZN madness was making its members look like fools. Which is just what we’re going to do at the Science Fair.”

  And ten minutes later, Luke and I were OK again. Maybe not best friends, but it was a good start.

  But there were still some details to work out as far as Luke’s big Science Fair plan, and for that we needed Anna’s help.

  We were about to teach a lesson about messin’ with a zombie and his friends.

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  As Luke and Anna squared off against one another, meeting for the first time after I suggested we work together on a science
fair project, the term “Escalating arms race” came to mind.

  But those were my arms, and I wanted them back.

  “If you break them, it’s not like you bought them!” I yelled, trying to get between them. “It just means I’ll be in casts for months.”

  I really had no idea if I’d need casts or not. As many times as my limbs had been yanked, twisted, and otherwise removed, they tended to bend rather than break. But as Luke took another swing at Anna, who ducked as my right arm slammed into the wall inches above her head, it looked like the streak was about to end.

  “Luke, I’ve always considered you my right-hand man, but this isn’t what I meant,” I said, reaching for him until I realized I had nothing to reach with.

  “That the best you’ve got?” Anna said, poised to take a two-handed backswing with my left arm. “I’m armed and dangerous so you better step back.”

  Not only had I lost half my limbs, but I’d launched a bout of very bad puns.

  This was what I got for trying to step between the two when their heated science fair argument got out of hand.

  Who fights about a science fair? It wasn’t like they were fighting over something important, like who goes first on the rare Pizza Day in the cafetorium. Anyone behind Luke had to spend ten minutes picking the anchovies from the only slice left. But this was the Science Fair, a nerd-a-palooza second only to the Dr. Who Film Fest each summer (and I would need to figure out an excuse soon when Dad bought tickets for the family, keeping alive his streak of going alone for six straight years).

  A few days earlier, when I told Anna how Luke and I had a meeting of the minds after a long conversation at the Burger Bucket, she seemed happy to hear it. As she and I talked, I had a meeting with my own mind, something that made me feel a lot better going forward. “It was a Tread thing,” I explained to Anna. “Luke got a little freaked out, what with me raising the dead and all.”

  “I get that,” Anna said. “And I hope you do. I just wish he’d been honest with you from the start. The drama we could have avoided.”

  “The drama makes it so much more interesting,” I said. “Besides, Luke didn’t want me to know he was a spy for me. For some reason, he thinks I can’t keep a secret.”