The Zombie Playground Read online

  “We don’t know yet, Brin,” Tessa said. “The remains haven’t been identified—”

  “Enough!” Brin screamed at her mom, running past her and upstairs to her bedroom. Paul and Tessa heard Brin’s bedroom door slam shut.

  “This is horrible,” Tessa said to Paul. “This is just so…” She didn’t seem phased by her daughter’s unexpected outburst. “I just wish I had some idea of what happened to those two boys.”

  Paul nodded and averted his eyes away. “Uhh, yeah,” he said. “Me too.”

  ---

  Grisly High was now the new ghost town, not in the sense that it was empty, but in the sense that it was eerily quiet. Brin, Ash, and Paul entered the school on Friday morning in a manner that felt like slow motion, passing by students who were comforting each other and crying on each other’s shoulders. Many by now knew the context behind Chace and Sawyer’s disappearance, so all eyes were on Brin as the trio walked to their first classes of the day. Paul was the invisible man in the group—most of the students knew Ash had been involved in the Bodie incident, but nobody knew who Paul was.

  Ash finally snapped as they turned the corner into another hallway.

  “What?” he said. “What the hell are you looking at?”

  “Ash, stop.” Brin said, pulling him close. “Yelling at everyone’s not gonna help us. Keep your cool.”

  “How am I supposed to keep my cool when everyone’s just staring at us? It’s creepy.”

  “Think of it this way,” Brin said. “After two and a half years we’re finally the celebrities of Grisly High. And we didn’t even have to win a state championship.”

  Paul waved good-bye and disappeared into Chemistry, while Brin and Ash kept marching past all the staring students. Even some of the teachers and administrators stopped what they were doing to look in disgust at the film-loving duo. Brin knew that most of the sadness and anger at the school wasn’t over the death of Sawyer—he wasn’t that well known or highly regarded on campus—but on Chace, who had been one of the most popular guys at Grisly High. The star quarterback of the football team, with a cheerleader girlfriend, with more friends on campus than there were actual students—Chace was the reason that everyone was grieving.

  “You fat ugly bitch!” a girl shouted at the end of the hall. Brin and Ash picked up speed, finding Anaya near the lunchroom getting attacked by Chace’s girlfriend, the tanned Nellie. “I know what you did! I’m not stupid!”

  “Stop it!” Anaya said, as Nellie swung her heavy purse into her face. “Owww! That hurt!”

  “It’s because of you my boyfriend’s dead! It’s because of your stupid fat ass that my boyfriend is gone!”

  Brin approached the strenuous scene. She knew Anaya could put up a fight and strike this scrawny girl down with the flick of a finger if she wanted to, but Anaya was playing the sad piñata.

  “Nellie,” Brin said. “Nellie, stop.”

  “You’re one to talk,” the girl said with a snap, pressing her chest against Brin’s in a matter of seconds. Before Brin could say another word, Nellie pulled down hard on Brin’s hair.

  “Owww!” Brin shouted. “What are you—”

  “You’re just as much at fault as the fat whale over here!”

  “Stop it!” Brin shouted. “You’re hurting me!”

  “Good! I’m glad!”

  Brin turned to Ash. He was just standing there. The guy had saved her life in Bodie by crashing through vampires, but he was somehow afraid of the short, feisty cheerleader.

  “Tell me the truth!” Nellie shouted. “What happened to Chace?”

  “I don’t know!”

  “Liar!”

  Brin glanced to her left. The circle around them had grown from a few students to dozens. The morning bell was about to ring, and Brin wasn’t sure if she was going to survive long enough to make it to her first class.

  “Hey!” Principal Stine shouted from afar. “Stop this right now!”

  He rushed forward and split up the two, slamming Brin, not Nellie, against the wall.

  “What’s going on here?” he shouted, the veins on his massive forehead looking like they were going to explode.

  “Nellie attacked me,” Brin said.

  Stine leaned in to Brin and whispered, “What are you doing, Brin? You need to stay out of trouble. At least today. Of all days.”

  “But Mr. Stine, she—”

  He put his index fingers on her lips to stop her from saying another word. “Shhh. Just start walking.”

  Brin nodded and moved away from the man. As she pushed through everyone, who were all clearly on Nellie’s side and not hers, she worried that this mob of students would have a better shot at killing them than that mob of vampires ever did.

  “Are you going to class?” Brin said as Anaya broke through the back of the crowd and stormed down the hallway toward the exit doors.

  “Hell, no!” Anaya shouted. “I’m going home!”

  And with that, the girl stomped past the door and out of sight.

  ---

  Mr. Barker’s quiet footsteps chilled Brin more than the snowy weather in Bodie. They were slow and soft, so scary in their complacency. Brin turned around to see Anaya’s chair vacant, but Lavender’s chair filled behind her. Lavender looked like death, her hair covering most of her pale face. She had tears in her eyes.

  “So,” Mr. Barker said, “here we are.”

  Brin crossed her arms and settled back in her chair. She could feel every set of eyes staring with confusion and sadness, and mostly anger, at the back of her head.

  The teacher wasn’t crying, but he was obviously shaken. He had never showed this serious of a side before.

  “I don’t know how any of this happened,” Mr. Barker said. “And I’m not going to judge anyone in this class for what went down. Chace and Sawyer… are gone. And it’s no fault but my own. If I hadn’t given the assignment, they would still be here. They would still be alive.”

  Brin wanted to speak up. She wanted to defend her teacher, easily her favorite compared to the other five witches and demons she had to face on a day-to-day basis. And she knew everyone in the class felt the same. Everybody knew that, yes, most likely, Chace and Sawyer wouldn’t have died if Mr. Barker had never assigned the film project, but that what happened couldn’t possibly be construed as his fault.

  If Mr. Barker asked us all to write essays, and two of us got bad paper cuts, would that be his fault, too?

  “Mr Barker—” Brin said, but he put his hands out.

  “Shh,” he said. “Let me finish.”

  Brin could feel her heart beating fast, and it wasn’t from the anxiety of thirty other students staring at her back. She knew, whatever it was, that the end of Mr. Barker’s announcement wasn’t going to signal good news.

  “A member of the faculty, unfortunately, has to take responsibility for what happened, and that person has to be me,” Mr. Barker said. “Therefore, I have submitted my resignation as a teacher from this school, effective immediately. On Monday you will have a new teacher in this class.”

  The students erupted in united indignation. “What? No!”

  “You can’t go!”

  “That’s not fair!”

  “It’s not right!”

  The students were sad and bewildered by the news of the two student deaths. But they were seemingly even more aggravated by this devastating announcement.

  “It’s OK,” he said. “Don’t feel sorry for me. I knew the risks of this assignment. But never in my worst nightmare could I have imagined an outcome like this. My goal, every day, has been to inspire my students, to engage you, to make you all better, smarter people. It was never my intention to put any of you in danger. And in that regard, I failed.”

  He stood up from the table and walked back to his chair. He turned around as the sound of a sniffle emanated from his face. Brin and Ash stared at each other, mortified that the unfortunate events in Bodie had led all the way to this, to the firing of their favorite
teacher.

  “This isn’t right,” Brin said. “We’re going to fight for you.”

  He shook his head and noticeably wiped a tear from his cheek as he sat down in his chair. Brin noticed, for the first time since entering the classroom, that his valuables—stapler, pens, books, DVDs—had vanished from his desk. He really was leaving.

  Mr. Barker didn’t respond to Brin. He just said, “You can all take out work from other classes if you want. You can do homework or read silently for the rest of the period.”

  He remained in his chair, staring forward for a minute or more, like he was stunned, like he never intended to break free from his daze.

  But then he got back up on his feet, gave the class a melancholy grin, and opened the door to his office. He wandered inside and shut the door without saying another word.

  Nobody worked on homework. Nobody read silently. Nobody knew what to do.

  Brin ran her hands through her hair, took a deep breath, and exhaled loud enough to break the silence in the room.

  Brin was so close to jumping up to her feet and announcing to the class that vampires had killed Sawyer and Chace. She wanted to get everyone in the class—hell, everyone in the school—to band together, travel to Bodie, and beat the vampires still left alive in that hellhole into a bloody, messy pulp.

  But she didn’t say a word.

  Instead she turned around and looked at the back of the classroom to see Paul, slouched in his chair, staring back at her and mouthing, “I’m sorry.”

  Brin nodded and looked back toward the front of the room. She couldn’t tell anyone about the vampires, because she didn’t want anyone to find out about Paul. He had to stay a secret, or he’d be gone from her life forever.

  She rubbed her fingers against her eyes, blinked a few times, then glanced at Ash.

  But the sight of her best friend didn’t grab her attention.

  She looked past Ash, past the other students, to the small window in the corner of the classroom.

  Droz was staring back at her.

  Chapter Ten

  “Bastard,” Brin said, jumping up from her chair and racing toward the door, not thinking about the consequences, not considering that her second vision of Droz since her return to Grisly might be a figment of her imagination.

  “Brin?” Ash said as she elbowed the door open. She looked back, only briefly, to see Ash whisper, “What are you doing?”

  She didn’t even look at Paul. She slammed the door behind her and started running down the hall.

  It only took a few seconds for one of the superintendents to catch sight of her.

  “Hey!” the burly man shouted. “No running in the halls!”

  But Brin didn’t care. She knew she was in trouble already, and one more sprint out of the school wasn’t going to change how the faculty, how the Principal, how all of Grisly, currently felt about her.

  Brin turned the corner and smashed her body against one of the four front doors of the school. Her right foot collided with the side of the rail, but she saved herself from tripping and smashing her face against the cement ground. She turned to her right and started racing past a set of small trees, over to Mr. Barker’s window.

  Brin darted her eyes in every direction. She didn’t see Droz. She didn’t see anyone.

  Come on, you son of a bitch. Show yourself.

  She ran up to the window. She looked in to see Ash, who did a double take when he saw Brin outside.

  She turned around to see a security officer and two superintendents jogging over to her. The officer spoke fierce and intensely into his walkie talkie, like he was calling in a bomb threat.

  “Brin Skar!” one of the superintendents shouted at her. “Stop now!”

  She had made it this far. She couldn’t stop now.

  Brin turned to her left and started running again, this time to the side field of the school, where she could get one more glance at the front of the campus. She jumped over some hedges and raced past the tiny school theatre, finding the packed parking lot. She stopped at the edge of the curb and looked forward, blocking the sun from her eyes with her hand. She didn’t see anything unusual. She turned to her left. She caught sight of a giant fence, one that separated the school from the soon-to-be-opened Macabre Golf Course. She even thought she could see a glimpse of one of the fairways in the distance. But she didn’t see Droz.

  She turned around. The school. She turned to her left. More cars. She turned back around.

  A figure dressed in black glided into an alley on the other side of the street.

  “Oh my God!” Brin shouted. “That’s him! That’s—”

  The security guard tackled her to the ground before she could run toward the street.

  “Get down on the ground!” he shouted.

  “What are you doing?” Brin said. “I’m not the one you want!”

  “Get off her, Sam.” Brin glanced up to see Principal Stine.

  “But Sir,” the officer said,” “she was—”

  “Step away, Sam,” the Principal reiterated, pulling Brin up by her arms. She was surprised to discover he was much stronger than he appeared to be.

  “Mr. Stine,” she said.

  “What are you doing, Brin? What the hell are you doing out here?”

  “I thought I saw something.” She didn’t know what else to say.

  “What? What did you see?”

  Brin stared at him, her face cold, stiff, and tired. What am I supposed to do? Tell him that I saw the scary leader of a vampire clan who played a large part in putting down Chace and Sawyer last weekend?

  She didn’t have a way to talk herself out of this mess. So she said the first thing that came to mind.

  “I thought I saw…” She tried to cry. It wasn’t hard to fake it. “I thought I saw Chace and Sawyer.”

  She planted her face against the Principal’s shoulder and started to weep.

  “It’s OK, Brin,” he said, not in a rush to push her away. “I know… I know this has been really hard for you.”

  “I just want them back,” Brin said. She was going for the Oscar with her crying, but part of her was still sad enough to wring out real, actual tears. “I’m tired of everyone being so sad.”

  “I know,” he said. “Come on. Let’s get you back to class.”

  They started heading back toward the school. Brin tried to walk like she was fragile and feeble, even though she had enough strength at the moment to run 100 miles.

  “And please, Principal Stine… please don’t fire Mr. Barker. He had nothing to do with what happened.”

  The Principal nodded but didn’t say a word. He wasn’t about to debate this subject. They made their way through the front doors and into the main hallway.

  “There’s just five more minutes left of class, Brin,” he said. “Be well… and please… don’t blame yourself.”

  Brin wiped her eyes with her palms and nodded. “OK. I’ll try.”

  She walked down the hallway and quietly entered Mr. Barker’s classroom. Everyone turned to her with varied amounts of interests.

  There were no movies playing; no serial killers, no zombies, and certainly no vampires displayed on the pull-down screen. There wasn’t even a relaxing soundtrack playing over a speaker to put the class’s fears at ease. Mr. Barker was nowhere to be found, and only a few of the students were making conversation. The loudest audible sound was the ticking of the classroom clock up above Barker’s tall bookshelf, once chockfull of books and DVDs, now just empty and depressing.

  “He’s really leaving?” Brin said to Ash.

  Ash nodded. He looked like he wanted to throw up. “Yeah… I guess he is.”

  “This is so messed up.” Brin looked back at dozens of students, all with blank looks on their faces, like they didn’t have opinions on the matter. “Are we gonna stand for this? Are we really gonna let them fire Mr. Barker?”

  So many had been staring at Brin all day that it felt weird for people to noticeably look away from her. Th
e students looked out the window, at the ground, at the ceiling. But nobody spoke up. Not even Dylan, or the usually reliable Anaya, said a word.

  Brin looked back at Ash, and he shrugged.

  “There’s nothing we can do, Brin.”

  “Like hell there’s not.”

  Brin kicked her chair out from under her and marched up to Mr. Barker’s closed office door. She was heated, both from all that running outside and from her increasingly turbulent emotions. She knocked on the door and started tapping her shoes against the hardwood floor.

  “Mr. Barker? We need to talk to you!” She said ‘we,’ even though she knew ‘we’ at this moment was going to mean ‘me.’

  Brin listened for a response, but none was given. She looked back to see students rising to their feet, not to help her on her quest to save their teacher’s job, but to race out of the classroom as soon as the bell rang.

  She knocked again. “Mr. Barker? Hello?”

  Brin tried the handle; the door was unlocked. She pushed it open and looked inside the tiny space to see cluttered tables, drawers, and papers.

  But no Mr. Barker.

  “What the hell?”

  She stepped forward and peered around the corner. There was nothing but a wall draped in pen markings and spider-webs. There weren’t any windows in the office, no tunnels or secret passageways.

  Where could he have gone?

  “Brin?” As the sound of the bell bellowed through the entire school, and as the grating noise of footsteps erupted in the classroom, Ash approached the office door. “Brin, what is it?”

  He poked his head in and surveyed the room, so messy with endless crap scattered everywhere that he made a face that screamed, filthy pig.

  “So?” Ash took a step inside. He wasn’t a germaphobe but he clearly refrained from touching anything. “Where is he?”

  “I don’t know,” she said, turning around with an irked frown on her face. “Way to make me look like an idiot.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Making me believe he was in here. You could’ve said something.”

  “No. He was in here.”

  “I know. But when I went outside, to chase after—” She stopped. “I mean, when I was outside, Mr. Barker left the room, right?”