Zombies! A Love Story Read Free

beside Amy’s. I jerked backward, jumping and shrieking. Amy’s boyfriend, Mark. He was as messed up as she was. The same mud on his face and smeared through his hair, eyes not meeting mine, mouth wide and gnawing at the glass.
    “Suzy, get away from the window!”
    That was my mom. She was standing in my bedroom doorway with a baseball bat in one hand and the phone in the other. “I mean it, get back!” she shouted in a very un-Mom-like manner. “And get some clothes on. Quick.”
    I frowned and backed up a little, standing now, between my bed and my mother, my eyes glued to my friends outside, my ears attuned to Mom’s conversation with, I presumed, a 911 operator.
    “They’re all around the house,” she said. “I’m telling you, there’s something wrong with them.”
    I pulled on a pair of jeans, a tank top, socks. “Bath salts,” I said. “Some idiot must have brought bath salts to the party.”
    Mom met my eyes, and I could see she disagreed. “I tried calling Chief Mallory at home, ma’am,” she said to the dispatcher on the phone. “There was no answer. This is a one-cop town. You need to send in the State Police.”
    I was getting scared, dropped my running shoes and quickly shoved on my black pleather hiking boots.
    Mark lifted a hand and slammed my window with something. As he pulled back and hit again, I saw what he was using as a weapon and backed into my mom so hard I almost knocked her over, shouting, “It’s an arm it’s an arm it’s an arm!”
    Glass shattered. Mark and Amy started clambering through, dragging themselves over dagger-like shards that should’ve killed them. Their flesh tore away, but they kept on coming, and the gurgling groaning sounds they made were more animal than human.
    “They’re inside! We’re getting out of here!” Mom threw the phone at Amy, clocking her in the forehead. It didn’t even faze her. We lunged into the hallway and I slammed my bedroom door closed behind us, wishing it would lock from the outside. I was gripping Mom’s arm for dear life as we ran down the hall. Her bedroom door was closed, and I could hear pawing and groaning from the other side of it as we ran past, into the living room.
    “Mom, what the hell is going on?”
    “I don’t know, I don’t know!”
    We headed for the front door, but before she could open it, I planted my heels, skidding us both to a stop. “Wait!” I crept nearer and looked through the window pane. “There are more of them out there. Just dragging themselves up and down the street.” My breath steamed the glass, and I wiped it with my hand. They all looked familiar to me. They were all my age. They’d all been at the party, at least a lot of them had.
    God, where was Chuck? And Sally, what about Sally?
    “How many are there?” Mom asked.
    I shook my head. “A dozen. Then the two in my room–”
    “Three in mine, that I know of,” she said.
    “That’s seventeen.” But I hadn’t seen Chuck among them. The banging from the bedroom doors got louder. “They’re going to come through those doors, Mom. We have to get out of here.” And I had to find Chuck. I had to make sure he was all right.
    “We’ll go out through the garage, take the car.” Mom handed me her baseball bat and stopped at the living room closet, reaching for something on its upper shelf.
    “Mom, we don’t have time to pack.” I heard wood splintering. “They’re breaking through the bedroom doors. Mom!”
    She pulled down a shoebox, and fumbled with shaking hands until the lid fell off and she held a hefty silver handgun.
    “Holy crap, Mother, where the hell did you get that?”
    She shrugged and to my utter shock, my little four-foot-eleven, formerly scared of her own shadow mom jammed a clip into the gun’s hollow handle and worked the action. “I’ve been alone out here while you’ve been going to school. I took precautions.” She stuffed the gun into the waistband of her mom-jeans, gathered three more clips and a