Zombies vs. Unicorns Read online

  Evan, looking pale, backed up, tripped on his own feet, and fell into the beer-soaked mud, much to the amusement of everyone present.

  Spank, meanwhile, cried for someone to let him borrow their cell phone.

  No one did. Instead everyone hurried to snap more pictures of Princess Prettypants. A few even took short films with their cell phones to upload later to their YouTube channels.

  “Well,” Liz said, conscious of there being many more things that she had to do in order make amends to everyone she’d wronged. “I have to go. Alecia, do you think you can get your mom to come pick you up?”

  “Oh, sure,” Alecia said. “This party is about to be over anyway.” She pointed at Spank, who had managed to wrangle away someone’s cell phone and was whining into it, “Dad, some girl sicced her pet unicorn on me. No, I haven’t been drinking again. I haven’t! No, don’t come get me! Don’t—”

  Kate, overhearing this, whirled on Spank and, slapping him, cried, “Omigod, your dad is coming over here? Do you have any idea how many laws I’m violating here? And you just called your dad? Are you crazy?”

  After the mad rush that followed to go before Sheriff Waller showed up, few partygoers remained, with the exception of Alecia and Liz.

  Contented, Liz gave Alecia’s arm a squeeze. “I’ll see you tomorrow.”

  “Thanks,” Alecia said, and hugged her. “I guess when boys tease you,” she whispered into Liz’s hair, “it doesn’t always mean they like you.”

  “Actually,” Liz said, “it does. It just doesn’t mean they’re necessarily nice guys.”

  Alecia pulled away and nodded. “I get it now.” She gave a shy glance toward the unicorn, whose eyes had turned back to their normal sparkly lavender. “Thank you … um … What’s her name?”

  “Princess Prettypants, officially,” Liz said. “But I’m really going to have to rethink that.”

  The spray of small stones hit Jeremy’s bedroom window a few hours later. Looking bleary-eyed, his hair sticking up in dark tufts, he opened it and looked down. “What time is it?” he asked, confused.

  “After two,” Liz replied cheerfully. “Come down.”

  Jeremy rubbed his eyes. “Is that Princess Prettypants?”

  “Gloria,” Liz corrected him. “I changed her name. Princess Prettypants didn’t really suit her.”

  “Gloria,” he said thoughtfully. “After Gloria Steinem, queen of the second-wave feminists, I assume?”

  Liz nodded. “Exactly.”

  “Fitting,” Jeremy said.

  “Come down,” Liz said again from where she sat astride Gloria in the side yard beneath Jeremy’s bedroom window. “I want to show you something.”

  “I’ll be there in a few,” Jeremy said, and shut the window. A little while later he was opening the front door to his house and coming out onto the porch in jeans and boots while buttoning a clean white shirt. Liz tried not to feel distracted by his naked chest, which had quite a different effect on her than the sight of her ex-boyfriend’s had earlier in the evening.

  “Hey,” Jeremy said, coming to stand beside her in the moonlight.

  Liz patted Gloria on the neck, and the unicorn obligingly knelt down, allowing Liz to slide off her back and into the dew-moistened grass.

  “Whoa,” Jeremy said, impressed by Gloria’s good manners.

  “Right?” Liz said, glowing. “Isn’t she great? She’s fast, too. When we were putting the geese back—”

  Jeremy looked surprised. “You put them back?”

  “Yeah,” Liz said. “Just now. Well, Gloria and I did. It was kind of hard, because I couldn’t remember which one went where. So some people may have gotten geese wearing the wrong outfits. But at least they got their geese back. Maybe they can all get together and swap. But it didn’t matter, because all I had to do was picture the houses in my head, and Gloria knew right where to—”

  “Why’d you do that?” Jeremy wanted to know. “Put them back?”

  “Well, I had to,” Liz said, blinking up at the moonlight. “I can’t really afford to do the wrong thing anymore. Or someone could end up being killed.”

  She looked meaningfully over at Gloria, who was contentedly pulling up large segments of Jeremy’s parents’ lawn and eating it.

  “Oh, no,” she said with a groan. “Gloria! No. We have apples and sweet hay at home. Stop it! Great, now she’ll be making rainbow farts all night.”

  Jeremy shook his head. “I don’t get it.”

  “Oh, right.” Liz pulled her aunt Jody’s birthday card out of her pocket and opened it. “See, I missed that part at the bottom of Aunt Jody’s card. I have to make sure everything we feed her is organic and sweet. Also, there was a warning that unicorns take on the emotions of their owner. So, like, if I get mad, Princess Pretty—I mean Gloria—gets mad. There was already an incident earlier this evening over at Kate Higgins’s house—”

  “Wait,” Jeremy interrupted, laughing. “You went to Kate Higgins’s party?”

  “Yeah,” Liz said, putting the card back into her pocket. “I had to. It turned out you were right about me encouraging Alecia to like Spank Waller.”

  Jeremy’s smile died on his lips. “Why? What happened?”

  “Let’s just say that thanks to some negative reinforcement on Gloria’s part, Spank won’t be messing with any girls for a while.” Liz cleared her throat. “I don’t think Evan Connor will either.”

  Jeremy raised his eyebrows. But his tone was carefully neutral when he asked, “Oh? Evan was there too?”

  “Yeah,” Liz said. “’Cause he’s the kind of guy who goes off to college but still comes back to town for high school parties, apparently. Which shouldn’t be a big surprise to anyone. What may have come as a surprise to some people is how scared he was of a harmless little unicorn.”

  “So,” Jeremy said, smiling again, “I take it you’re not selling Gloria on eBay after all, then?”

  Liz’s jaw dropped.

  “What? No way!” Liz looked appalled. “Why would I do that? She’s the best present I ever got! Which reminds me. I really love your gift—” She held up the key with the bow on it. “But I still don’t get what it’s for.”

  His smile broadened. “Don’t you? It’s to the Cutlass Supreme. I finally got it running.”

  “Oh my God, that’s fantastic, Jeremy!” Liz was so excited she couldn’t help throwing both her arms around him and giving him a big hug, which he returned.

  As she held on to him, however, Liz became uncomfortably aware that this wasn’t her old friend Jeremy she was hugging.

  Maybe it was the unfamiliar muscularity in the arms that were around her.

  Or maybe it was something else. She wasn’t sure. Whatever it was, it caused her to let go of him abruptly and take a quick step backward, her face suddenly feeling as if it were on fire.

  “B-but I can’t accept this. You’ve b-been working on that car forever,” she stammered. “Why would you give it to me?”

  “Well,” Jeremy said, his gaze on hers steady. “I just got to thinking that I don’t really have anywhere to drive to. Everything I’ve ever wanted is here in Venice. Even,” he added, his tone carefully neutral again, “as close as right next door.”

  At first Liz was sure she’d heard him wrong. Or that maybe she hadn’t understood him correctly. Surely he hadn’t said … He couldn’t mean that he … not like that.

  Then Liz felt a soft—but firm—muzzle at her back, and she was enveloped in the scent of night-blooming jasmine.

  Gloria, fed up with her owner’s obtuseness—and knowing, as she did, Liz’s true feelings—pushed Liz into Jeremy’s waiting arms.

  Which was when Liz, gazing up into his eyes, realized what she’d known all along, but had never admitted to herself until that very moment: Everything she had ever wanted had been right next door all along, as well

  Except, perhaps, a unicorn.

  “Cold Hands”

  Justine: Cassandra Clare’s zombies are more influe
nced by the voudin tradition of the possessed dead. They do not shuffle or leak from too many body parts, and they have no interest in eating anyone’s brains. It’s true that they’re not the world’s greatest conversationalists, but they’re loyal and they don’t lie. In fact, they are emo zombies who will love you forever. Entirely, up to you to decide whether that’s a good thing …

  I think you should also note how many of the zombie stories are love stories and how few of the unicorn ones are. Very telling, that.

  Holly: Another story where I can just pretend that we’re talking about an undead type that I like. There’s not even any brain eating! Excellent for me!

  Justine: Yet another story where Holly’s secret zombie adoration is revealed. You know, Holly, you could just cut to the chase and admit that Team Zombie has won.

  Cold Hands

  By Cassandra Clare

  James was the boy I was going to marry. I loved him like I’d never loved anything else. We were seven when we met. He was seventeen when he died. You might think that was the end of our story, but it wasn’t. Death is never the end of anything, not in Zombietown.

  Zombietown is what other people call it, of course. Those who live here call it by its name, Lychgate. In Old English, “lych” means “corpse.” James says that means we’re a town that’s always been touched by death, but it wasn’t always like it is now. Lychgate used to be a nice place to live. Orderly houses set out in neat arrangements, pretty rows of streets decked in flowers, and the Duke’s palace at the north end of town, with Corpse Hill rising up behind it. Then, one day, in the early morning, when people were just getting up and starting to get the morning paper, and putting the coffee on, and turning on the radio to hear the Duke’s daily address, Corpse Hill came to life. The dirt sloughed off the graves like old skin. The earth peeled back and the dead came out, blinking in the sun like newborn kittens. They limped and shuffled and crawled. They turned their eye sockets toward the path that leads down to the town. And then they began to walk.

  It was Saint John’s Eve—one of the town’s four big festival nights. All the streets were strung with colored lights. James and I were down in the old part of the city, and James was buying flowers from a dead woman.

  Her name was Annie. She ran the flower stall down the street from the main square, and she sold the best flowers in town. I know what you’re thinking—it’s weird that a dead person could own a flower stall. Well, of course she couldn’t own it. The dead don’t have property rights. But ever since the morning the Curse struck, ever since the dead started coming back to the town, the town council has been struggling to figure out what to do with all the zombies. They’re pretty quiet—they don’t say much—but if you can’t get a zombie to go back to its grave in the first week or so after it comes back, it’ll just stay forever. So they hang around the town, sitting and staring, cluttering up the streets. Much better to give them menial jobs like road sweeping, and trash collection. And flower selling.

  James handed me a bunch of blue roses, which are my favorite—the same color as his eyes. I watched him as he took out a handful of coins, each stamped with his uncle’s face, to pay Annie. The bones of her fingers clacked together as she took the money.

  He turned back to me, his eyes searching. “You like the flowers?”

  That was one of the things I loved about James. No matter how long we had been together, no matter how many times he’d given me gifts, or I’d given them to him—though I could never match what he could afford—he always worried about whether I would like something or not. He always wanted to please me.

  I nodded, and he relaxed, starting to smile, starting to slide his wallet back into his pocket. That was when the car came screeching around the corner. James saw it; his eyes widened and he shoved me back, toward the sidewalk; I fell, and scrambled around just in time to see the car knock him down, then speed away with its tires screeching.

  Annie, the zombie, was going crazy, making those weird noises they do, and shuffling around in a frenzy, knocking flowers off her cart by the handful until torn petals littered the street. People had started to come running, but I hardly noticed them. I was crawling toward James, who was lying partly in the road, partly out of it, his legs bent at strange angles. I still thought he might be all right—broken legs are survivable—until I got to him and pulled him into my lap. When he looked at me, blood bubbled up out of his mouth, so I never knew what his last words were.

  Annie screamed and screamed when he died. It was like she’d never seen anyone die before.

  It was James who told me the truth about the Curse. Everyone knows that it started about a hundred years ago, the dead coming back. We all know it had something to do with a sorcerer in Lychgate, someone who summoned up the dead and then couldn’t put them back. What James told me was that the sorcerer was a member of the Duke’s—of James’s—family and that the dead man he summoned up cursed him and cursed his town, too, for good measure.

  That’s why the Curse sticks to the inhabitants of Lychgate like glue. Even if we move away from the town, our dead will follow us. They belong to us. They come after the ones they knew when they were alive—their living friends and family. They want to be with them. That’s why no other town will have us. That’s why we can’t ever leave.

  I don’t really remember what happened after James died. I know there were the flashing lights of the police cars, and the EMTs who arrived in the ambulance and tried to pry him out of my arms. I wouldn’t let him go. What was the point? He was dead anyway. There was nothing they could do for him. They were trying to convince me to let go of him when the Duke’s limousine pulled up. I’d ridden in that limousine plenty of times, to events at the Duke’s palace, sometimes just home with James after school, watching the town go by through the tinted windows.

  The door opened and the Duke got out. James’s uncle, who’d married his mother after James’s father had died. He’d known me since I was nine. Been at my sixteenth birthday party. He’d given me a teddy bear—a weird thing to give a sixteen-year-old, like he thought I was still a little girl. He’d smiled at me. He had blue eyes like James, but they were weirdly lifeless, like doll eyes. James said it was because the responsibilities of being Duke tired him out, but I’d never liked him. I looked forward to the time when James turned eighteen and became Duke and we never had to see his uncle again.

  Now Duke Grayson looked through me like I wasn’t even there. “Take the boy from her,” he said to the EMTs, who were standing around looking miserable.

  “We’ve tried. She won’t let him go,” I heard them murmur.

  “Take him,” said the Duke. “Break her arms if you have to.”

  He walked back toward his limo without looking at me again.

  It was my parents who finally came to get me, to put me in the back of their car and drive me home. My mother sat next to me, murmuring soothing words; my father sat up front, looking shattered. I could see all his dreams of his daughter marrying the next Duke leaking away like James’s blood had leaked into the gutter at the side of the road.

  “It was just an accident,” my mother said, stroking my hair. Blue petals clung to her fingers. “Just an accident. At least it was fast, and he didn’t suffer.”

  “It wasn’t an accident,” I said coldly. I could tell my mother was upset that I wasn’t crying. “He was murdered. Duke Grayson had him murdered so he’d never turn eighteen.”

  My father jerked the wheel so hard that we ran off the road and bumped up over the curb, the wheels grinding. He whirled around in his seat, his face as white as paper. “Never say that again. Do you hear me, Adele? Never say that again, to anyone. If you do …”

  He left the sentence hanging in the air, but we all knew what he meant.

  Murders don’t happen in Lychgate often. The punishment is always death, and they carry out the hanging or shooting in the town square. Everyone comes to watch. They bring picnic lunches—egg salad sandwiches in brown paper bags, warm bott
les of soda pop, bars of chocolate. They cheer when the Duke gives the order for the execution to begin. After that the priests bring the bodies of the guilty up to Corpse Hill for burning, and the air turns black with smoke, and for a few days people walk around with surgical masks on to keep out the ash and grit. The other towns don’t like it—they can see the smoke at a distance—but they know what happens in Lychgate if you don’t burn the vengeful dead. They’ve heard the stories—doors ripped off their hinges, whole families slaughtered, judges and jury members dragged out into the street by walking corpses whose eyes burn like angry fire.

  Murder isn’t the only crime that can get you hung. Stealing from the Duke will do it. Vandalizing ducal property. Or slandering a member of the Duke’s family. All are crimes punishable by death.

  The Duke came to my parents’ house the next day. The doctor had come that morning and given me a shot that made me feel as if my head had separated from my body and was floating away somewhere. I couldn’t move from where I was lying on the bed. Everywhere around me were the big silver-framed photographs of me with James that I had been collecting since we had met in first grade. James and I at the playground as children, at the beach when we were older, holding our All Hallows’ Day soul candles as we painted our faces to go out, hand in hand on Hanging Day. James with his sandy hair and his blue eyes and his big grin, looking down at me from everywhere and all around as my parents sat downstairs with the Duke and his wife, James’s mother, listening to their sad words.

  I knew they were stunned by the honor. Even though I had been with James for so long that everyone knew it was inevitable that we would marry—even though the Duke, by law, had to marry a commoner—my mother and father were still struck speechless at the idea of actually welcoming Duke Grayson into their home. They just agreed when he told them that I couldn’t come to the funeral. “It’s just for family,” he said, “unfortunately, and the ceremony is elaborate. We’re concerned it will be too much for Adele to handle.”