Undead Much (4 page)

  “Monica! I saw one of your friends.” I grabbed a handful of Monica’s sweater on my way by and tugged her along with me.

  “What the heck, Megan? I swear to God I-”

  “One of your
special
friends.” My eyes went wide and I prayed she got the message in the next ten seconds, because we were swiftly running out of time. If we didn’t haul ass, those black-magically raised zombies were going to make it out of the cover of the trees and we’d both be royally screwed.

  We’d have no choice but to fight them in the open to keep our friends from getting turned into zombie chow. Then Settlers’ Affairs would have no choice but to send both us and our families far, far away. Being discovered by someone from the mortal world was just about the worst thing that could happen to a Settler. If SA even
thought
you’d been spotted by an average person, you were likely to find yourself in some seriously deep poo.

  My parents had already been relocated once, from California to Sticksville, Arkansas, and I really didn’t want to find out where we’d be headed if I got caught kicking zombie tail on the Kroger parking lot.

  “Oh shit,” Monica hissed under her breath. “You’re f-ing kidding me.”

  “No. In the trees. Hurry!”

  She threw down her sponge and raced after me, making pretty good time for a chick in stiletto boots. I was going to have to reevaluate my opinion that movie people were stupid for always dressing women crime fighters in heels.

  “Monica, Megan, where are ya’ll-”

  “We’ll be right back, don’t worry!” I called over my shoulder to London.
And please don’t follow us,
I silently prayed. If the other girls got close to the edge of the trees, they were going to see what Monica and I were up to. It was getting dark, but not that dark, and there were no leaves to hide us.

  On the upside, that meant there was nothing to hide the RCs, either.

  Seconds after we stumbled through the first of the soggy, snow-covered leaves, I spotted them-four of the Undead hustling it toward Monica and me with a speed that was unnerving. It wasn’t the full-on racing speed of a normal Unsettled, but neither was it the slow, horror-movie shuffle of a black-magically raised zombie.

  These guys were different. They moved nearly as fast as the living and their eyes-though lacking that spark that said, “Yo, I’m not dead”-weren’t glowing red. RCs
always
had red eyes-it was one of the key things that let you know they were RCs. In addition to the supernatural strength and the trying-to-munch-on-your-nummyhuman-flesh stuff and all that.

  And not only were their eyes
not
red, but their faces and clothes-which, oddly, looked like pajamas, not your average burial wear-weren’t dirty. There wasn’t a speck of grave dirt on them, and from the looks of their skin, they hadn’t been dead more than a few hours, tops. They weren’t decomposing and had a soft pink flush to their cheeks.

  But thankfully, no matter how odd these guys were, there were only four of them. I should be able to work the
reverto
spell and get rid of them in no time. It was only if there were a bunch of Undead that Monica and

  I would have to resort to trickier spells to get the job done.

  “
Reverto!
” I held up both hands and willed my power out of my palms, already feeling the relief that comes with getting a Settler crisis under control.

  Until I realized the zombies weren’t turning and heading back to their maker. Heck… they weren’t even slowing down.

  “
Reverto!
” I repeated, throwing everything I had into the command. My hands buzzed with the force of my power until it felt like I’d grabbed hold of the wrong end of my flattening iron, but still the RCs didn’t stop. If anything, they seemed to move a little faster.

  “Crap!” With a groan I reached down and grabbed a handful of snow, grateful for the relief of the cold against my burning skin.

  “Jesus, Megan. What’s wrong with you tonight?” Monica shoved in front of me and raised her own hands. “
Desino! Absisto!
”

  I didn’t know whether to be relieved or freaked that Monica’s freezing commands didn’t work either. On the one hand-good to know I wasn’t having some weird power outage. On the other hand-zombies, coming closer, clearly wanting taste of girl flesh, “nom nom nom…”

  “We’re going to have to put them down the hard way.” I risked a quick glance over my shoulder, relieved to see we were still alone and none of the girls had risked cold, soggy feet by coming to see why we’d run off into the woods like a couple of lunatics. “Do you have-”

  “Of course I have my knife.” Monica whipped her tiny blade from somewhere near her waist.

  How she hid the thing in those skintight clothes was anyone’s guess, but I was glad she had the metal required for the
pax frater corpus
spell. I had enough power that I didn’t need to pierce the flesh of a zombie with metal in order to immobilize it-I just had to whack it with my fist while I chanted-but the average Settler did.

  “You get Shorty and Baldy, I’ll get the tall guy, and we’ll split the dude coming up from behind,” Monica said, taking the lead as usual.

  I would have argued that
I
should take the tall football player guy since he looked a heck of a lot more threatening than the two smaller, thinner zombies on the left, but there wasn’t any time. We were about to be surrounded.

  “
Pax frater corpus, potestatum spirituum.
” I chanted the first portion of the spell as I rushed forward, catching the shortest zombie with a sharp thrust of my palm to his face, then crouching down to sweep the legs out from under the bald guy. Two seconds later, I was on top of him, pounding him in the center of the chest. But for some reason, Baldy didn’t seem to be getting the message to lie down and die.

  I poured even more strength into my punches and power into my spell. “
Inmundorum ut eicerent eos et curarent omnem. languorem et omnem infirm-
” I was nearly to the end of the chant when freakishly strong hands fisted in my hair and pulled me off the struggling corpse beneath me, dragging me through the snow.

  At first I thought it was the fourth zombie who had snuck up behind me, but then I spotted that dude still a dozen feet away. It was the short guy I’d already put down! He should have been zonked out in the snow awaiting an SA retrieval team, not up and fighting for his pound of Megan meat.

  The
pax frater
was long and tedious, but it was designed to put zombies down for the count permanently and was the strongest spell I knew that didn’t involve setting things on fire-which might have been an option if I didn’t think flaming pillars of zombie flesh weaving through the trees would attract the wrong kind of attention.

  What the heck was up with these guys? I’d never heard of anything like them, not in four months of irritatingly constant lecturing. The Enforcers were
so
going to get an earful about withholding vital info.

  I dug my heels into the cold ground and did my best to pull free from Mr. Short-and-Perky. But before I could twist around and break the dude’s hold, a hot, slobbery zombie mouth was at my throat.

  Barely resisting the urge to scream-and no doubt bring the rest of the pom squad running-I slammed my closed fist into the guy’s face. He groaned and his teeth slid away without breaking the skin, but he
still
didn’t let go. And now Baldy was up and at ’em, crawling through the snow toward where I struggled in the frozen leaves.

  “Monica! A little help,” I cried out, my words turning into a grunt as I contracted my abs, jackknifing my soggy tennis shoes into the face of the guy behind me. Thank God for flexibility and dancer muscles. Shorty groaned and released his hold on my hair just seconds before Baldy crawled on top of me.

  “No one gets to do that but my boyfriend,” I grumbled into the zombie’s face as I slid one leg between the pair of his and shifted my weight. With a grunt, I flipped us over. Now I was on top, but I wouldn’t be for long.

  Shorty was already lunging toward me, and the straggler dude was closing in from behind. I didn’t have time to pound Baldy’s face. I had to find a more easily defended position.

  I dove to the right, rolling through the snow until I’d put a good six feet between me and the boys. Only then did I spring into a crouched position and take a quick survey of the situation… and immediately wished I hadn’t.

  The news wasn’t good.

  There were more of them. At least two more, staggering through the darkening shadows beneath the trees, and the four we were already fighting weren’t showing any sign of slowing down. The big guy had Monica pinned against a tree while she did her best to keep his teeth from her face, and all three of my guys were closing in with totally weird speed. Very soon we were either going to be discovered or dead, neither of which was a desirable state of being.

  There was only one thing I could think of that might get rid of the zombies and get the two of us out of here in one piece. I hadn’t had to borrow power from another Settler since I was a kid, but back in the days when Ethan had been my tutor, not my boyfriend, he’d made sure I remembered how. If I could just get past the dudes in front of me, liberate Monica, and get the two of us linked up, there was a chance we’d have enough juice to get rid of these guys.

  Of course, getting past these three was going to be easier said than done. They were freaking determined to get a mouthful of Megan, which made me pretty certain I was the one they’d come for. Black-magically raised zombies were raised to hunt a specific target. I was going to have to check for totems-dolls resembling me, items of clothing, etc.-on their graves once we got them safe and snug in the ground again.

  Assuming we managed to get them back in the ground at all.

  “Megan! Do something.” Monica’s legs churned wildly in the air, and her face was turning an unhealthy red. The linebacker was going to strangle her if I didn’t do something. Fast.

  Praying that the pom squad had plenty of clients to keep their attention trained on washing cars, not burning zombies, I turned to Baldy and invoked the flame command. “
Exuro!
”

  The good news was that Baldy’s pajamas went up in flames like they’d been soaked in vodka, drawing the attention of Shorty and friend long enough for me to cut to the left and skirt around them. The bad news was that Baldy started screaming bloody murder, very likely drawing the attention of the living people only fifty or sixty feet away.

  “
Opprimo
.” I tossed the smothering command over my shoulder, trying not to freak out that the zombie I’d set on fire was acting so very un-zombie-ish. I’d heard zombies shriek before, but nothing that sounded so human.

  And not only should he
not
have sounded so lifelike, the other two guys shouldn’t have noticed the fire or Baldy’s screams, let alone been so distracted by them that they let their prey escape. There was something horribly wrong, and I wasn’t sure even linking mine and Monica’s power would do any good.

  “It’s going to work; it has to work,” I muttered beneath my breath as I grabbed a hefty fallen limb from the ground and raced toward the big zombie at top speed. If Baldy could be distressed by fire, maybe Butch here could be bothered by a log upside the head.

  Wood collided with melon with a sickening thud, making the big guy release his hold on Monica’s scrawny neck. She sucked in a gasp of air and kneed the dude between the legs as hard as she could, triggering another non-zombie-ish reaction.

  “What is wrong with these guys?” We both stared in shock as Butch’s knees hit the ground and he collapsed sideways in the snow, clutching his wounded
cojones
.

  “I don’t know, but I suggest we get rid of them first and ask questions later,” I said, grabbing Monica’s hand in mine. “Let down your shields, give me everything you’ve got.”

  It was a testimony to how freaked the Monicster was that she didn’t argue or make a single smart comment. Her shields simply collapsed and her energy came rushing into me, faster and faster, until my entire body burned with the force of the combined power. But still I waited, knowing I’d only have one chance to cast before the boys were on us.

  Closer. Closer. I forced myself to hold back until Shorty was close enough to touch and the newcomers were no more than six feet away before throwing up my free hand and giving the RCs everything I had. “
Reverto!
”

  The air in front of me buckled, wavering like water in a pond. Time seemed to hold its breath, the entire world gone silent as the zombies reached for me and the bubble of power reached for them.

  Luckily for me, the power got to them first.

  The spell hit the RCs with an audible pop and my body hit a tree behind me a second later. I’d been bounced by my own spell, something I’d heard of but never experienced. But I sure was experiencing it now. My body hit with enough force to knock the wind from my lungs, and my head smashed into the wood, making little black spots explode in front of my eyes.

  By the time I slid to my side in the snow, everything was spinning. Still, through the cartoon birds tweeting around my head, I thought I saw someone hiding in the trees, watching the weird RCs stumble back through the darkened woods. Someone with dark eyes who didn’t like what they were seeing. Didn’t like it at all.

CHAPTER 4

  “
C
ome on, you can’t stay there. Someone’s coming.” Hands tugged at my coat, and when that didn’t produce the desired reaction, moved to my hair and tugged even harder.

  “Ouch. God, leave me alone… my head.”

  “You won’t care about your head if Penny and Terra see those zombies.”

  “Why? What?” What was she talking about? Nothing seemed to make sense. All I could think about were the eyes… and the sweater. Where had I seen that sweater before?

  Monica’s face swam into focus only inches away from mine. “Why? Because I’m going to smash it in with a rock if we’re discovered. So. Get. Up. Now.”