Zombie

A zombie movie-obsessed teen is forced to face a dark family secret in this shocking debut literary novel from a talented new author.  Fourteen-year-old Jeremy Barker attends an all-boys Catholic high school where roving gangs of bullies make his days a living hell. His mother is an absentee pillhead, his older brother a self-diagnosed sex-addict, and his father disappears night after night without explanation. Jeremy navigates it all with a code cobbled together from the zombie movies he's obsessed with: Night of the Living Dead, 28 Days Later, Planet Terror, Zombieland, and Dawn of the Dead among others.The code is put to the test when he discovers in his father's closet a bizarre homemade video of a man strapped to a bed, being prepped for some sort of surgical procedure. As Jeremy attempts to trace the origin of the video, this remarkable debut moves from its sharp, precocious beginnnings to a climax of almost unthinkable violence, testing him, and the reader, to the core.From the Trade Paperback edition.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

1According to my father, there are three types of necktie knots: theWindsor, the Half-Windsor, and the Limp Dick.“Jeremy, I’d bet my hand,” he says, adjusting his seatbelt, “thatevery swinging dick at Byron Hall wears the Windsor.”“Could you not talk about dicks first thing in the morning?”“The ladies love masculine things,” he says, pinching his silvertie at the base of its knot.“Dad, it’s an all guy high school.”“It’s the principle of the thing.”“What is?”“The size of a man’s knot. His bastion of strength.”“Don’t say bastion of strength. Gross,” I say, shivering.“It’s true,” he says. “Fact. Proven.” Dad turns, facing me, andexposes the flauntingly fat Windsor knot of his silver tie.Welcome to Necktie 101. I will be your professor today.According to Ballentine Barker, in order to make a Windsor,you must cross the long, fat end over the short, skinny one; doubleloop through the cross-over; make a tunnel over the loops;and funnel it through. The Windsor usually makes you look like afuckwad.What is that Bible story about the whale and Jonah? Or is hisname Jonas? And Jonah is swallowed whole by some gigantic whalefor whatever reason—I don’t know—and Jonah lives inside thewhale? And then the whale spits him out. Or is it that he swimsout? Or is it that he gets blown out through the blowhole? Or doeshe die inside the whale? Am I thinking of Moby Dick?We pass a sign on the side of the road that reads Baltimore: TheGreatest City in America. Get in on it.“When they say that—get in on it—what do they mean?” I ask.“That Baltimore is a secret not many people know about,” Dadsays.“A secret?”“Get in on it. Be one of the people in the know. Be in on thesecret. A part of the club.”“What secret? What club?”“It’s like referring to Baltimore as Charm City. The name createsa buzz where no buzz is buzzing.”“Buzzing?” I ask.Dad says, “You ask too many questions.”Jackson used to call Baltimore by a bunch of different names.B-town. Charm City. Crabtown. City of Firsts. Monument City. MobTown. Murderland. He’d say them mainly to impress girls. They’dstop by the house in the evenings. Groups of them. Whore-ds ofthem. Get it? Whore-ds of them? And ask if he was home. Theywould travel from far away. Randallstown. Ellicott City. Columbia.Westminster. Cockeysville. Perry Hall. Take 81 South to ColdSpring Lane or I95 to Russell Street past M&T Bank Stadium.Travel just to see him. They’d stink of perfume, wearing short skirts,tight tops, big hair, lipstick-red lips. Jackson would emerge fromhis room, sometimes wearing only a robe, and descend down thestairs like some Casanova Fuck. “Welcome,” he’d say, “to the Cityof Firsts.”What an ooze.We drive past a middle-aged woman speed walking in pinkSpandex shorts and a black tank top. She has medium boobs, herbutt cheeks shifting back and forth with each step. The Spandexcups her ass and hips such that she might as well be wearing underwear.I immediately feel guilty, like I just lied to a priest. I thinkabout her tits. Amazing.Dad taps his horn. “Ballentine likes what he sees,” he says. Dadrefers to himself in third person from time-to-time, including onhis voicemail messages. I am constantly reminded where Jacksongets his ooziness. “A little beep-beep now and again keeps themfeeling young, son. Lets them know they still got it.”“Do you think she has kids?” I ask.“Not all mothers are your mother,” he says.I’m surprised Dad mentions Mom at all, especially on the firstday of school as it always used to be her day. She would get up early,make a big breakfast of pancakes and eggs and strawberry milk.After, she’d pose me on the front steps of our house for the annualfirst day of school photo. She kept the photos framed in a collageon the wall, reaching all the way back to my first day of pre-school.There’s a black rectangle on the wall where the collage used tohang. Today there was no first day of school photo. Today therewas no breakfast or strawberry milk. I wonder where those framedphotos are now.“Your mother is not here, Jeremy,” Dad says. “I am.” Dad’s cardrifts into the other lane, crossing briefly over the double yellowlines before weaving around a garbage truck. “The size of a man’sknot,” Dad continues, “indicates his massiveness.”“Massiveness? Oh, Jesus.”“Language.”“Dad, seriously.”“Listen. You need to hear this: Windsor equals monster. Half-Windsor equals babyshit.”“Babyshit?”“Babyshit.”Allow me to professor your ass with some Half-Windsorknowledge.The Half-Windsor folds like a paper football, easy with perfectangles. Personally, I think it’s the best knot. It’s easier than the Windsorbecause you only make one loop over the cross-over instead oftwo. But getting the length right takes skill, practice, and a sense ofpride. Where the Windsor, more often than not, gives you a stumpybitch length, the Half-Windsor—if you get it right—hangs sexyand perfect right to the tip of your belt. That triangular tip of thetie skimming a silver belt buckle. It’s badass. Totally badass. But Ihaven’t figured out how to tie it perfectly yet.We drive past a private golf course—some members only clubsurrounded in a super high fence to keep the wrong kind of peopleout. There is a valley in the road, then a hill, which Dad acceleratesthrough, and as we reach the peak, I see Byron Hall in the distance.Dad says, “Survival scenario—you’re in school. English. Zombiescrash through the windows. Unstoppable. Sick. Savage. Yourschool is under siege. It’s a zombie apocalypse.”“Crashing?” I ask.He loosens his grip on the steering wheel, his fingers spreadopen and relaxed. “Crashing.”“I’m in English class and zombies are crashing through thewindows?”Dad coasts down a straightaway of red brick houses with longdriveways. A man wearing a cowboy hat and mirrored sunglassesnavigates a wheelchair down his driveway to the street and slidesenvelopes inside a mailbox. Dad rides the brake, cutting our speeddown quick, and looks over his shoulder as we pass, watching theman spin and roll away from the street, retreating in his wheelchair,completely legless.“Dad, you said zombies were crashing through the windows ofmy English class?”“Right—crashing. They’re crashing.”“Through the windows. A zombie apocalypse, you said.”“What is your weapon and what is your escape plan?” He looksat me longer than anyone driving should. “And no Minigun either.You always say Minigun. Use another movie other than Planet Terroras an example. Think outside the box.”Stopped at a red light, I see the Byron Hall campus up acrossfrom a strip mall, just like the one in Dawn of the Dead. His turnsignal clicks.“Break the glass of one of those emergency panels with myelbow, grab the axe, and chop my way across the street to the mall.”I chop my arm from the school across the street to the mall. “Holdup there. Last-stand style. Barricade the doors with bike locks froma sporting good store and wait for the cavalry to come. I’d grab afew extra things—blowtorch, propane tank. If I have to make abomb. Blow some shit up. What about you?” I ask.“You couldn’t pay me to go back to high school,” he says.We pass an empty football field with metal bleachers and twoyellow wishbone goalposts. Dad pulls in behind a long line of cars,waiting to turn into the entrance. The sign out front reads: ByronHall Catholic High School for Boys. We jerk to a stop at the top of thecircle where two Christian Brothers greet students as they enter.The Brothers wear long black tunics that brush their shiny blackshoes, although if memory serves me correct from when Jacksonwent here the Brothers have the options to wear the long blacktunic, or all black suits like a priest or just rock the regular sportcoat, button down shirt and tie. But not these Brothers. TheseBrothers are old school. These Brothers look like hippie priests intheir tunics. The Byron Hall mascot, an angry fighting blue jay,stands with the Brothers waving his blue-feathered wings at peoplepassing by. The blue bird is equal parts terrifying and gay.“Well, here we are, son,” Dad says, palming the back of my head.I knock his arm away. “You’re messing up my hair.”He wipes his hand on a handkerchief. “It’s like a fucking greasepit up there.”“Hair gel.” I lower the overhead visor to see the mirror, to fixthe brown curls he ruffled out of place, the curls I rushed thismorning to not make him late. I comb a few strands of hair backinto a part and adjust my thin black tie. I aim my shoulders to thedoor, so he won’t see my knot.“Look at you,” he says, poking me in the back. He drapes hisarm over the wheel. “Barely a freshman and already primping likea Revlon girl.”“Quit,” I say, slamming the car visor up. I grab my book bagand push open the door when his hand grabs me by my navy bluesports coat.“I’ll quit,” he says. “Sure. If you turn around.”“I’m late.”“I’m your father.”I know what he wants to see, but it’s his fault for rushing me thismorning, goddamit.“I’m really going to be late for homeroom. You’re going to makeme late.” Dad’s words from my lips.Dad smells like aftershave and coffee and bleach. He disappearedagain last night. Showed up at the house early—scattered, paranoid,rushed. Like always, Dad disappeared and no one knows anythingabout it. He thinks he’ll be able to keep it a secret. He thinks hewill be able to scare people away, but I follow the Code—ZombieSurvival Code (ZSC). The ZSC is a list on how to survivea necroinfectious pandemic, otherwise known as a zombie apocalypse.B-t-dubs, it should be noted, that I totally ripped the idea ofsurvival rules off of Zombieland. Big holla to Jesse Eisenberg. I don’tknow if I heard this somewhere or thought it up myself, but hereis the deal—rules are meant to be broken, but codes are made tobe followed.Zombie Survival Code #1: Avoid Eye Contact (ZSC#1)Zombie Survival Code #2: Keep Quiet (ZSC#2)Zombie Survival Code #3: Forget the Past (ZSC#3)Zombie Survival Code #4: Lock-and-Load (ZSC#4)Zombie Survival Code #5: Fight to Survive (ZSC#5)“I asked you to turn around,” he says. “Show me. Now.”“You want me to miss first period?” ZSC#1: Avoid eye contact—I look away.“I want you to obey your father. It’s in the Bible. Now turnaround.”I’d been hiding the knot with my sports coat all morning. I refuseto answer and hope he let’s it go and leaves me alone—ZSC#2:keep quiet. I thought I’d be able to get away with it. I know whathe’s going to say but there’s no avoiding it, so I turn around.“Limp Dick?” he asks, slapping his forehead. “Fuck me. That’s aLimp Dick.”Hey now, hey now—Prof Knot in the house.The third and final knot—the Limp Dick—is self-explanatory.The Limp Dick has no loop, but instead folds in an impulsivemovement from the cross-over to the tunnel and funnels through,dangling down limp-like. Self-explanatory. Limp Dick.“Mom wouldn’t care about my knot,” I say“You’re right. She wouldn’t. When’s the last time you saw her?”Dad slips the car into drive, his foot still on the brake. He makes afist and punches the dent in the dashboard in slow motion with asound effect of an explosion on impact. “Jeremy. After school. Youand me. Necktie refresher course.”“You’re such a loser,” I say.“I’m not the one rocking a Limp Dick,” he says.“Dad,” I say, “where did you go last night?”“Spent the night at Liza’s.” He smiles. “Don’t worry so much.”“I don’t believe you.”“Yes, you do.” Then, raising his hands, he says, “Have a good day,son.”I raise mine too as our hands turn into fists and we bang themtogether like boxers tapping gloves before a fight.2The Byron Hall Catholic High School for Boys—nicknamed TheHall—is made up of five hallways. There is no second floor. Theschool has not changed a lick since Jackson graduated four yearsago.On an aerial sketch of the school, like an architect’s layout, likethe kind Mom used to spread out on the dining room table, TheHall would look like the number eight on a solar-powered calculator.Three mini horizontal hallways—one at the top, one in themiddle and one at the bottom of the school. Two long verticalhallways on the sides—one with even classroom numbers, one withodd. Each lined with lockers for 1300 students, lockers so skinnyand tight they would barely hold a broom.According to Jackson, the cafeteria is called the cafe and sits pastthe mini hallway at the top of the school. Jackson told me thatDad said the cafe reminded him a lot of the Marine chow halls atFort Drum in New York where he was stationed before deployedto Vietnam. Simple room to describe, really—blue-jay-blue tiledwalls; eggshell white, linoleum floors; long, boring, brown tablesseating six evenly spaced across an L shape. A sign on the wall reads:Fire Occupancy 585. I wonder what would happen if all 1300 kidshad a free period at the same time.When I got my course schedule and locker assignment a fewweeks ago, Jackson volunteered to drive me up to his old stompingground, a phrase he likes to use like some kind of old man. Heescorted me around like some big dick hotshot, head held high,walking with a swaggerly limp. He even got all dressed up—khakipants, white button-down shirt, plaid sport coat with an all bluetie in a Windsor knot. Tool. It was nice, though, to get acquaintedwith the layout of the school, showing me all of the hallways, whichwere empty as fuck except for custodians pushing mops aroundand some people in the front office. No brothers. No students. Heshowed me my locker at the end of the even hallway near the cafeand had me practice the combo. He told me to always make suremy lock snapped shut. One of the things the upperclassmen like todo, apparently, is find someone’s lock undone and put it on backwards.Before we left, he pointed to the vending machines in thecorner of the cafe and said, “I fucked some girl once at a dance overby the vending machines. Fuck central.”Great—fuck central.At my locker, I look around and wait until I feel invisible. Islip off my shoe, pull out a piece of paper, and read a small pieceof paper with my combination and quickly apply the three numbersin perfect left-right-left order. The lock snaps open like a brokenjaw. I slip the paper back inside my shoe and my shoe backon my foot and the lock back on the locker. I wonder if I’m theonly student with a combination cheat sheet in his shoe and aback-up sheet in his bedroom. My backup is in my closet with myother secrets. I dump the contents of my book bag into my lockerand pick out my books for the day. Western Civilization. Algebra.Christian Awareness. English Literature. My locker rattles shut witha good kick. I twist a couple of times to scramble the combination.I’ve already forgotten the numbers.A Brother I haven’t seen yet—a small, Asian man, wearing a longblack tunic and thick black hair slicked back—paces along the backof the cafe, his hands behind his back, watching the boys at the tables,waiting for something to happen. I imagine him to be some kind ofdrill instructor, ready to scream at kids to get to class on time.Outside of the cafe is an overhang with metal picnic bencheswhere kids can chill and eat lunch and congregate like felons onthe prison yard and tell stories that are most certainly all lies—storiesthat mainly consist of fucking girls and drugs and sometimesschool work, but mostly fucking girls and drugs. They, the boys, theyoung men, they all look exactly the same, unified, like an army—an academic siege!—with their neckties and wrinkled sports coats,all crushed together, like a rat king. Then I hear what Jackson callsthe hotness—sweet, honey-like voices—slow and smooth and sexy.Baby, are they sexy.A group of four girls in short plaid skirts and white short sleeve,button-down shirts pass the cafe windows and sit at one of themetal picnic benches. A gaggle of dudes swarm the girls, sharksto chum. The guys wear super baggy pants and speak in this faux-gangsta accent like they thug life, yo, like they’re from the projects,which is funny because they’re probably all from the wealthiestsuburbs just outside of the city, living in mini-mansions ownedby parents who run PR firms and are politicians. It’s that kind ofschool. Retards.The girls know what they’re doing, how they’re sitting, showingsome serious leg, sitting side-by-side, hips cocked, the ends of theskirts pulling up past mid-thigh. My God their skin looks smoothlike a baby’s ass, so smooth you want to lick it—the three whitegirls with this 2% milk sheen and the black girl a dark chocolatedream. The black girl might just be a super model—I mean she isthin and tall with an incredibly angular face in a beautiful way andher big, bold eyes might as well be singing me a song. It’d be hardto execute any of the five zombie survival rules with these girls.The hallways swell inside with dudes stopping, pressing, andpushing each other to see the girls, like it was their first time. Onceguys find a clear line of vision, they freeze and hold. There has tobe a name for this. Is there a word for it? Can I call it something?Hotnified? Yes. Yup. That’s it. We’re hotnified. We’re hotnified, watchingthe girls.My dangerous daydream continues, the girls white-pantied andstrutting around in slow motion to a rock-n-roll soundtrack, whenthe small, Asian Brother sprints across the cafe, bullet-like, and hurlshimself through the double doors to the outside area. I expect to seehim do some kind of back flip or combo leg-swipe kick or crazymid-air Jujitsu. Instead, it looks more like hand-to-hand combat.He grabs boys at their collars and elbows and flings them awayfrom the sexy, girl zombies come to infect and devour the ByronHall Boys. The boys laugh and slide their bags onto their backs andgo back inside the building. The girls are unphased, unmoved, andextend their hands to the Asian Brother as an introduction.I push my way through the crowd of horny high school perverts,their faces pressed to the doors and windows, practically lickingthe glass, the fucks. I edge my way to the front of these bonerboys and head outside, pulled in like some kind of sexual riptide.The air is dead outside, breezeless, hot and heavy with humidity,like the girls brought all of this hot, sexy air with them. I sitat bench and, smooth as all hell, stoop to tie both shoes that arealready double-knotted. The girls, still undressed in my head, circlethe Brother. Seeing girls in short skirts pass by makes my peckershiver for sure, so I can only imagine how the entire school ofhorny bastards feels.“Ladies, you must leave,” the small, Asian Brother says. “No girlson school.” He shakes his head. “Three thirty, then you return.” Hetaps the face of his watch. “Then girls on campus.”“What’s your name, Brother?” a girl asks, a tan girl with dark,red hair. She looks over at me and without even thinking or anythingI raise my fucking hand and wave to her with a big old goofballsmile on my face. She doesn’t smile back. Fuck me.“I am Brother Lee,” he says.“We’re looking for the drama department,” the girl with dark,red hair says. She hands him a stack of papers. “We are members ofthe drama club at Prudence High, Brother Lee, and are workingon the Byron Hall Fall drama, but we need to turn these in beforeauditions.”“You bring after school,” Brother Lee says. “I’m no mailman.”Brother Lee crosses his arms over his chest. “I look like mailmanto you?”“No, Brother,” the super model says, “you don’t look like a mailmanat all. They have better uniforms.” She smiles at him.“I don’t think this is funny,” he says.She touches his arm and says, “They are our parental permissionslips. We need to give them to Father Vincent Gibbs.”“You wait to last minute,” Brother Lee says, shaking his head indisapproval, but even Brother Lee is powerless against the plaid skirtand teenage shaved legs. “Follow me. No walking.” He rushes downthe sidewalk toward the lecture hall building, herding them awayfrom the rest of us, like cattle away from a cliff; although in this scenariothe girls seem more like the cliff and the rest of us the cattle.The girls march single file past Brother Lee who follows quicklybehind them. The girl with the dark red hair looks at me over hershoulder again, but still without a smile, not at all like in the movies,like in those RomComs—the movies where two souls are destinedto be together and love one another and get married but for anhour and a half they keep missing each other, either by chance orfate, or by some kind of bullshit, until one rainy or sunny or snowyday their lives crash together and they see each other for the veryfirst time. The girl passes by the boy and smiles over her shoulderand the boy returns the smile, maybe adding a wave, but she doesn’tsee the wave because the guy that she’s with is her boyfriend whodistracts her. The smile is what I’m really talking about here, thesmile that says they will meet up again soon. Then, the girl falls outof love with her fuckneck boyfriend just as the boy is about to settlefor some plain girl who is good enough for him, when in thenick of time the boy and the girl wind up at a public park feedingbirds, or at a used library browsing books in the same section, orstrolling through a grocery store in the produce section—his handssqueezing cantaloupe melons as she digs her way through a bin ofavocadoes—and they see each other again, but this time it will bethe last time they see each other like strangers and the first timethey see each other as friends.Yeah, this girl that I like doesn’t look at me like that in theslightest. This girl looks at me like she thinks I’m just another pervert,like she knows I undressed her, got her completely naked inmy head.Brother Lee escorts the girls to the lecture hall building as theydisappear.I walk back into the even hallway of the school by the cafe andrealize I am still smiling and when I stop smiling it makes me feelsad for some reason. Because she never smiled back.

About the Author

J. R. Angelella is the author of the novel Zombie (Soho Press) as well as a forthcoming Southern Gothic supernatural YA series (Sourcebooks/Teen Fire) co-written with his wife, Kate Angelella. He is a contributing author to the forthcoming murder-mystery anthology Who Done It? (Soho Teen), benefiting the nonprofit organization 826NYC. His short fiction and essays have appeared in numerous publications. He holds an MFA in Creative Writing from Bennington College and teaches fiction at the Gotham Writers Workshop in New York City. He lives in Brooklyn. For more information, visit his website at jrangelella.com or follow him on Twitter: @jrangelella.

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