Zombie Tag Teaser

I didn't mean to start researching zombies. Because right after Graham died, I was pretty much okay. I fell apart in a tidy way. I cried at the funeral and slacked off on homework for a few weeks, but I never unglued myself from reality like Mom and Dad did.

Then I started getting weird. I stopped closing the bathroom door when I was in there, which was kind of bizarre. And I had to know where everyone was all the time. I got antsy if my parents left the room, and I started begging to stay home from school every day, but whenever I did stay home, I’d get freaked out about all my friends at school and worry that they were sick or something. It wasn’t cool.

So after that, after I went as totally bananas as I ever did, I started doing research on bringing dead people back to life.

The truth is, I know way more about zombies that anyone would like me to. I even know how I’d go about bringing Graham back, if I were going to do it. There’s this thing, basically an alarm clock for dead people, but the internet says no one has any idea where it is. It’s probably buried in some cave and booby-trapped and explosive and covered in guns or something. And even though everyone knows there were zombies thirty years ago, no one saw them and no one has any idea what they were like or why they all dropped dead again before anyone ever saw them awake. When a kid at school begged Ms. Hoole to talk about them, she made a big point of reminding us that it was just a theory, that nobody can say for sure that they were really zombies. Yeah. They were just a bunch of people who were supposed to have already been dead, discovered above ground, dead again. Just a theory, sure.

The main point is that there are zero, absolutely zero real reports of what the real zombies were like, so there’s a good chance that if I brought Graham back, he'd be just as brain-hungry as I was last night.

Finding all that out for the first time really freaked me out. I updated my anti-zombie weapons just in case. I made sure I had a baseball bat put away, and a can of bug spray, a few of the really good spatulas. Just in case. Nothing online gave me any reason to believe the real zombies weren't just like the ones from the movies Graham and I used to watch, so I don't know why the techniques we figured out wouldn't really work. That's what Zombie Tag is, really. It's practicing all the methods Graham and I discovered. It's training.

And I can't tell my Dad without him wanting to arrest me, and it's probably never going to matter because Anthony says there's no way the zombies are coming back.