Zomburbia Read Free Page B

wasn’t I smart. Two: Get patted on the head and told that I was wrong and, gee, wasn’t I cute. This time though, Mom just started bawling and Dad looked at me like I’d just taken a crap in his shoe. Not at all what I was expecting.
    So, there you go. My only memories of the event that defined our whole life, more or less. Not real great, huh?
    But anyone that’s interested in learning about those times just has to turn on their TVs most any night and they’ll see some made-for-TV movie or Discovery Channel re-enactment about it.
    And, weird, zombie movies are a big hit now. Especially old ones. They’re kind of thought of the same way sci-fi movies from the ’50s used to be viewed: quaint in how wrong they showed a future the makers could only barely imagine.
    Because here’s what all the George Romeros in Hollywood got exactly wrong: The zombie infestation didn’t cause the world to come to an end. Sure, things were real shitty for a while—in a lot of places, especially big cities, they still are—but for the most part, things recovered.
    Okay, yes, there are whole countries where you can’t go anymore because they’re overrun by hordes of ghouls. That’s pretty uncommon, though, and those are places you wouldn’t want to go anyway. Places in, like Africa and China. Those places weren’t cool to begin with so it’s not too big a loss, right?
    A lot of people in America live in gated communities now, and those who can’t afford that—people like me and Sherri and most of the kids we go to school with—all have chain-link fences around their houses. Shufflers are not big on manual dexterity so things as simple as gate locks, doorknobs, and flights of stairs can hold ’em back. Of course, a chain-link fence won’t stop a whole herd of the undead. Not that there have been big roving groups of them since right after they came back.
    Cities are mostly abandoned since the zombies like to gather there. This means, of course, that everyone lives in the freaking suburbs.
    And it was the suburbs north of Bully Burger that I was riding through with Sherri and our friend Willie. I say “friend.” He’s got a car. Okay, I’m being unfair; I’ve known Willie almost as long as I’ve known Sherri. Somehow, though, he’s always felt like he’s on the fringe of our little group of just three people.
    Willie is tall—like, six feet at least—and kind of big. Husky. The ungenerous would call him “fat.” He’s always been this way. When we were kids, he was the boy who wouldn’t take off his shirt to go swimming. You know that kid, right? When he grew up, he dressed all in black with his dyed-black hair swept up into a really outrageous ’50s-style pompadour. I totally respect his hair. The thing about Willie is, I think he’d be kind of good looking if he wasn’t, you know, big boned? It’s kind of how a movie star lets himself go when he starts to get older. You look at him and you can still see the thin, sexy guy he used to be. Willie is like that, only he was never ever thin or sexy.
    I might be able to look past all of that, except for one thing. Please believe me that I feel sort of mean and petty when I say this: Willie is not all that smart. I mean, he’s not in a single AP class, for Pete’s sake! Me dating him would be like M. Curie dating the guy who cleaned up her lab. Right?
    His redeeming feature was that he absolutely had a car. And what a car.
    Besides being huge—probably too big to be on the road—the defining characteristic of the land boat was that it had a custom front bumper. One day the previous year, Willie and his dad beefed up the front suspension and swapped out the factory-installed bumper—a bumper that thousands of people were perfectly happy with, I might add—and replaced it with a freaking railroad tie. A huge six-foot length of