Undead Much? by Stacey Jay

Author:Stacey Jay
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Group US

CHAPTER 14

Beige was the color of despair. After twenty minutes sitting in a beige chair, staring at a beige table full of Settler Elders—most of them also dressed in beige—I was certain the awful color even had a smell. It was a sad, musty smell, like that of the ancient swimming pool locker room down at the Y, shot through with the sharper, metallic scent of fear.

Or maybe it was the Elders’ fear I could smell, and it had nothing to do with beige. Because they were all afraid. I could see it in the tight set of their jaws, in the hands that twisted into fists on top of the table. Just looking at them was enough to terrify me, even if they hadn’t just finished telling me and Monica the scariest story I’d ever heard.

“I assume you understand the seriousness of this matter?” Elder Crane asked, his nasal tone grating on my already raw nerves. But then, it was easy to get twitchy when you had just learned one or two screwups on your part could lead to the end of life on earth as we knew it.

Yep. The. End. Like, the BIG end. We’d just been informed that if the Settler world became common knowledge among the human population, Rogue zombies could eventually take over the world. That was what had caused the Settler-Resistant Undead in Europe all those hundreds of years ago and why Settlers had stopped working with human governments and gone underground. Whenever too many humans found out about zombies and the people who attended to them, Settlers started to lose their power over the dead. Before the development of hypnotism and, later, mind-wiping spells fueled by modern technology, there was no way to control the spread of information. Which meant there was no way to stop a zombie plague from destroying a village or, at times, whole cities.

In today’s information age, if a YouTube video got into the wrong hands, we could have a global epidemic on our hands in no time. It wouldn’t matter if not everyone who saw the thing believed in zombies or Settlers. Even a few hundred believers would be enough to put a serious dent in our magic.

We were like the opposite of Tinkerbell. We needed people not to believe in order to maintain our power and keep Rogue zombies from infesting the world like packs of rabid, rotting dogs.

Yet Monica and I had allowed at least three people to see us in action, little people with big mouths who had told the tale of what they’d seen to every grown-up who would listen before SA had finally gotten wind of what had happened and sent out Enforcers to contain the situation. Now they were just praying they’d gotten to everyone and cleared the memory of last night from their minds before the Settlers of the greater Little Rock area began to lose their power and Arkansas was sucked into the grips of a zombie plague.

And it was all our fault.

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