Adam washed his hands and slid them into gloves. Up close, Julius’s wounds and blood looked more like swimming bubbles of infected tar than anything. Adam put a face mask over his mouth and clear glasses in front of his eyes just in case anything decided to spurt out.
“We can’t knock him out,” Adam whispered to Cal and Harper on the other side of the room. “I don’t know what to give him.”533Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡFAOTiqlmpZ
“We could try a clean blow to the head,” Cal offered looking over Adam’s shoulder. “That seems to be the trick with every knock out ever.”
“I’m with Cal on this one,” Harper whispered. “Knock him out and then get out of here.”
“He hasn’t done anything to us. He hasn’t hurt us,” Adam said. “He’s bleeding pretty bad. I can help him up.”533Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡ6U3FtqPKab
“Adam, what are you saying? He’s still saying he’s going to eat us if we don’t do what he says.”
“You don’t want to stay? You’re not overly curious why he’s saying he’s going to eat us?” Adam asked. “It was your question.”
“I know it was,” Harper whispered back, “but I don’t care about it enough to stay here for an even longer time. I want to get out of here.”
“No,” Adam disagreed. “He didn’t tie us up or barricade the door or anything. There’s nothing keeping us here.”533Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡIIhanZOjYm
“Exaclty. Knock him out and we can get out of here. He’s still a whack job,” Harper said. “And I don’t like the way he’s looking at us.”
The three of them turned around and looked at Julius lying on his stomach on the silver table. His yellow eyes were piercing and sent an eerie shiver over Harper.
“We gonna do this?” Julius asked.
“Dude, are you sure you don’t have yellow fever?” Cal asked. “Your eyes are yellow. Like, you’ve been out too long in the sun and the sun rays physically changed your eye color, yellow.”
Julius smirked. “Promise I don’t have yellow fever.”
“Okaaaaaay,” Adam said walking over to the table Julius was on. “I don’t have any anesthesia for you.”
“I don’t need it, it’s fine. Jus’ fix me up, doc.”
Harper typed in how to clean a deep wound to her phone and clicked on the first result, reading it aloud to Adam who listened carefully while staring at Julius’s exposed back.
“If the wound is bleeding severely,” she read, “call your local emergency number.” She stopped reading.
“Yeah…”Julius said. “You can go ahead and skip that. We’re way past 9-1-1.”
Harper kept reading as Cal helped organize the supplies for Adam, who cleaned, and prepped Julius’s back to be stapled shut.
The skin stapler was heavy in Adam’s hand even though the machine itself wasn’t heavy at all. Adam pinched a section of Julius’s skin together, obeying Harper’s instructions, the black ooze rising to the surface with the pressure of Adam’s hand. He lined the skin stapler up with the first fourth of the wound and pulled the trigger. The staple shot out straight, keeping the skin Adam had pinched, together. The small punctures the metal staple had made, disappeared as Julius’s skin melded back together around the small staple.
Adam leapt back from the table.
“What?” Harper asked. “What happened?”
She and Cal stepped forward and looked down at Julius’s back. Cal stepped away with a hand to his mouth, skin blanched.
“His skin healed itself,” Adam explained in awe, getting his face closer to Julius’s back.
Harper grabbed a second set of clear glasses and pushed them on, inspecting Julius’s back as Adam lined up the skin stapler again. He pinched together another fourth section of skin and clamped down on the trigger. Just as it had before, the skin fixed itself under the staple’s punctures.
“What the—” Harper started to say. She walked around to the other side of the table and crouched down to Julius’s eye level.
“New plan,” she said. “You answer this, before Adam does anymore stapling. Why is your back healing up but your massive wounds aren’t? What’s up with your skin?”
“I’m avoiding hospitals because I can’t have them looking at my birth records,” Julius said.
Harper shook her head. “Not what I asked for.”533Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡGTTAN08Xyu
Julius pursed his lips. “Give me a second, will you? I’m getting there.”
“Okay,” Harper said. “Your birth records, why would they care about those?”
“I was born January 31st,” Julius said quietly, “in 1881.”
Adam shot another staple in Julius. Julius grimaced.
“Adam, no more staples until he answers,” Harper said.
Adam held his hands up in surrender. “I have to staple it or the staples holding his back together right now aren’t going to hold and there’s going to be a bigger mess.”
Harper looked back at Julius. “1881?” She asked. “That’d make you…” She did the math quickly in her head, moving a couple of her fingers while she did so silently.
“137?” He had to be lying.
Adam looked over at Cal and Harper. Their expressions looked just as confused as Adam felt. Shocked, Adam sent another staple into Julius on accident. The staple was more crooked than the others but still held the skin closed over the cut.
Julius flinched from the staple puncture and cast his eyes over to Harper.
“Quick math,” he complimented.
Harper shrugged and brushed off the comment like it was no big deal to her but Cal could tell it actually meant a lot.
“How is that even possible? The oldest lady to ever live was 120 and no way did she look like a 16 year old kid.”
“Seventeen, actually,” Julius said. “You want the short version or the long version?”
“Yeah, short would be good,” Cal piped up quickly before anyone could ask Julius to give the long, tedious story.
Adam kept stapling and Julius talked.
“I was born in 1881, during the middle of the Victorian Era, in Wichita, Kansas. When I was 16, in 1897, I was diagnosed with pneumonia. At the time, there wasn’t a cure for it or any medicines to help it. I was bound to die. My family put me up in a hospital and I stayed there for two months. During which I turned seventeen in 1898. After those long two months, I was visited by Doctor Cassius, a scientist on the search for a cure for mortality. His test subjects were the hundreds of men, women and children, laid up in hospital beds on their death beds. I was one of those test subjects.”
“He infected you with something other than the infection you already had?” Adam asked. Another staple hit Julius’s skin.
“We didn’t know what it was called then,” Julius clarified. “There weren’t enough cases or people who had lived with it to run tests on to figure out what it was. And if there were, the virus killed us off before anyone was able to find out what was causing it.”
Julius continued his story. “He injected us with different variations of this so called cure, tracking our progress and recording it. The cure wasn’t a cure at all. While it killed the actual disease threatening our bodies, once that infection, that virus was gone, it started attacking the healthy body tissue and didn’t stop until we were dead. It killed us from the inside. Doctor Cassius’s hope was to cure mortality but the virus he infected us all with, went one step further and killed our healthy bodies.
“Doctor Cassius recorded how the virus was changing our bodies, slowly killing them and didn’t try to do anything to help. He only wanted to perfect his creation. The virus changed our blood cells, the structure of them and how they operated in our bodies. So when each of us began dying off, Cassius didn’t think anything of it and moved onto the next patients. What he didn’t know was that the virus had regenerated our cells in a way that made us heal faster and crave human flesh.”
Adam immediately pulled his hands off of Julius and took a step back.
Julius looked down at Adam, still standing a good couple of arms lengths away from Julius. “Chill out, I’m not going to hurt you. How close are you to being done?”
“A little more than halfway,” Adam said. He stepped closer to Julius and picked the skin stapler up again.
Julius grunted with another staple shot. His skin melded back together with every puncture.
“You are a zombie.” Cal’s eyes bulged out of his head.
“I’m not, not really,” Julius said. He swiveled his head a little more to get a good look at Cal. “Do I look like a zombie to you?” He asked.
“Trust me dude, I know what a zombie looks like; you’re definitely not it. But the fact you’re craving human flesh? That says something completely different. What do I call you?” Cal inquired. “You guys don’t have some cool nickname you refer to yourselves as? Because I mean, there’s more like you.”
Julius looked Cal straight in the eye but didn’t answer.
“You eat…brains?” Harper asked. Her face was turned up in disgust.
Julius stopped talked and looked around at the three kids. “You’re all taking this surprisingly well.”
Harper shrugged. “Honestly, I think it’s the shock. It’ll fade and we’ll have our freak out moments eventually.” Cal and Adam nodded in agreement. Adam finished the first laceration and moved onto the second, pinching the skin and stapling it shut in a comfortable routine he’d gotten into. For the entire first laceration, Adam felt unsteady while stapling Julius's back shut. The second laceration was better. Each time Adam pulled the trigger and a staple shot out of the mouth, Julius tried his best to keep still but failed every time. He winced, but that was the worst of it. He could keep his muscles from spasming out.
Julius thought about what Cal said. “I told you I’m not a zombie, but we do have a name for ourselves. We’re called Stingers. Similar to being a zombie, but still different.”
“What’s different?” Cal seemed very determined to get to the bottom of it.
Julius’s eyes glowed yellow and he opened his mouth. Fangs popped out of his canine teeth.
Cal looked unimpressed. “So you’re telling me, you’re a vampire, not a zombie? Dude that’s the biggest let down ever.”
“I’m, like, half of each,” Julius said. For some reason he felt like he had to prove he was actually worth something to Cal. He didn’t really know why, but he guessed it was because Cal had the most knowledge among his friends when it came to supernatural beings. Julius felt like Cal would know the most. “I have fangs like a vampire but eyes and the craving for brains like a zombie.”
Cal perked up again. “So yes you are a zombie.”
“And half vampire.”
“Do you eat living people, too?”
Julius shrugged as well as he could lying on a table with Adam stapling his back. “Only if I have to. But living people are gross. There are plenty of Stingers who would go for living people, but I don’t ever keep it on my menu.”
“So you’re a dead guy, who eats dead guys?” Cal asked. He nodded his head like he answered his own question. “I can roll with that.”
“I lied,” Julius groaned as Adam shot another staple into his back. “I need something to numb it. It’s just like a constant thumping on my back and it feels like you keep placing the gun in the same spot.”
Adam shot out another staple. “I promise I’m not. But I can distract you from the pain. You can keep answering our questions. Like, what are you doing here?” They hadn’t gotten to the root of the problem yet, of why Julius had broken into Adam’s family’s mortuary in the first place.
“I told you,” Julius said through grunts of pain. “I needed someplace to go. I came here because if I go to a hospital, they’ll call the police, they’ll call whoever is their officers and it’ll just go up from there. They’ll test and figure out what to do or how I became the way I am. It’ll be endless.”
“And you don’t know where this Doctor Cassius is?” Harper asked.
“We’re trying to find him,” Julius answered. “We’ll pick up leads here and there, but nothing absolutely for sure. Mostly just rumors, but we have to check them out just in case because there’s always the chance they could be true.”
“How many of you are there?” Adam asked.
“Hard to say,” Julius replied. “If Doctor Cassius is still making the serum and distributing it, which we are pretty sure he is, there could be thousands.”
“How can you tell which ones are like you?”
“Is there an end to the questions? Julius asked.
“You just told us you’re a zombie—”
“Stinger,” Julius interrupted.
“—you can’t expect us not to have questions,” Cal said.
“How would you respond to a guy with your story?” Harper shot back. “Wouldn’t you have a lot of questions too? We’re curious.”
“You’re an awful lot to handle,” Adam added, “not to mention I’m using my parents supplies to fix up an insanely crazy person’s back who says he’s over one hundred years old.”
“One of the only setbacks though is that I can’t use my senior citizen discount.” Julius shrugged. “Apparently I don’t look the part.”
Cal asked, “That’s what you’re sad about?”
Julius ignored Cal and turned to Adam. “I have another big favor to ask of you.”
Adam mentally sighed but didn’t do or say anything.
“I have to avoid any place that will report or ask me about my being, so I need to crash somewhere for the night. Do you mind if I sleep here tonight?”
Adam felt Harper’s and Cal’s gazes move to him, watching him. Adam didn’t know what to say. If his parents found out, he wouldn’t see the rising sun for two months. Not to mention, they’d probably call the police and put out a search for Julius, and then most likely find out that he and Harper had lied to the police. If Julius stayed at the mortuary, there was a huge chance Adam’s dad could find him the next morning when he opened the place. Adam’s mind was reeling. He stapled the last bit of Julius’s skin and stepped away from the table.
“Hypothetically,” Adam started slowly, “if you stay here tonight, you have to promise you’ll be out of here by 8 AM. That’s when my dad opens up shop and that man is the most punctual person I’ve ever met. If you’re still here, I can’t help you. Also because I’ll already be at school. And if you’re here in the morning and my dad finds you, he’ll absolutely call the police because what sane person calls the police but lies to them about someone breaking into their family business?”
Julius got the feeling they weren’t talking really about Adam’s dad anymore.
“If my dad finds you and pins it back on me, I’ll personally hunt you down and kill you two months later because that’s how long I’ll be grounded, best case scenario. Deal?”
Julius nodded and didn’t say anything.
Adam stripped his face mask and gloves off, the put the clear glasses back where he had found them and wiped up any messes made around the room. He grabbed the rolls of bandages he’d found in the cabinets and wrapped Julius’s mid section with it, taping the end tightly. Finally, Adam grabbed his history textbook, the stupid textbook that started all of this mess in the first place, and walked toward the back door. Cal and Harper followed him, watching Julius carefully as they left.
Adam and his friends were two feet from the hallway when he swiveled on his heels, almost bumping directly into Cal and Harper.
“Um, please don’t eat anything? “ Adam said but the statement ended up coming out more like a question. “Because then that’d just be super suspicious and obvious and my dad’ll get people poking around so just…leave the bodies where they are.”
Julius’s eyebrows peaked a little bit, questioning if Adam was really serious.
Adam stood there, not moving a muscle.
“I feel like I have to say it,” Adam defended his words. “I don’t know what you plan on eating or if you even eat at all, but I feel like I have to tell you not to touch the corpses.”
Cal and Harper stood on either side of Adam, watching the exchange between their friend and the very odd, random very old stranger who broke into a mortuary he picked by random for some crazy reason.
Adam pressed his lips together so tightly, Julius knew he wanted to say something else, so Julius threw him a bone.
“Is that—“ Julius didn’t have time to finish his question before Adam spit out the rest of what he was holding back.
“I need to hear you say it. That you won’t touch anything, I mean. I’m not really used to talking with…” he paused, not really sure himself what he was about to say, “…super old but not quite dead…people.”
Julius smirked. “Yeah, I won’t touch anything. I’ll leave everything how it is. I won’t eat any part of the corpses.”
Adam nodded again, assuring himself that everything was good. Or, at least given the circumstances, mediocre. He turned back and walked through the hallway and out the door he came through, Harper staying right with him.
Cal stayed in the mortuary for a second and mock saluted Julius. “Maybe we’ll see you around, Orange.”
“Why Orange?” Julius asked. “Doesn’t make sense.”
“It does if you think about it,” Cal said and he followed his friends out the door.
Adam shut the door after Cal and locked it. He stepped away from the door then leaned forward and jiggled the handle to make sure it was locked.
“Did we just lock a zombie in your family’s mortuary?” Cal whispered.
The three of them stood facing the shut, locked door, staring at it.
Harper glanced over at her two friends. Their eyes were as wide as her’s felt.
“I think so,” Adam whispered back.
“Was that a good idea?” Cal asked. His eyes grew wider. Adam couldn’t tell if Cal was excited about basically trapping a zombie—or whatever they were called—inside Adam’s family’s mortuary, or his shock wave was setting in. Adam knew his own shock was coming.
“I have no idea, Cal. I didn’t have time to flip through my zombie manual and I haven’t ever had to deal with a zombie before let along an injured zombie,” Adam whispered loudly at Cal.
“Hey,” Harper interrupted, whispering and snapping her fingers at her friends. “Let’s take this someplace else, yeah? This place just got infinitely more creepy.”
Adam grabbed his bike off the side wall of the building and flipped it around, wheeling it into the mortuary parking lot.
“Are you really going to help him?” Cal asked, grabbing Adam’s arm, forcing Adam into a stop. The size of Cal’s eyes made Adam think he was more excited than anything else. “He’s a zombie.”
“He doesn’t know what he was infected with,” Harper said. “He’s not technically a zombie.”
Cal widened his eyes. “Not technically a zombie?” He let go of Adam’s arm and they continued walking to Harper’s parked car with his friends walking at his side. “The kid said he was born in 1881. I don’t know about you but the oldest person I’ve ever met was Carl Jenkins. That dude lived to be 96 and was scary as freeeeeak. I don’t know anyone who’s lived over that. 137? Come on. That has to be Guinness Book of World Record status.”
“He could be lying to us,” Harper offered. She opened her trunk and laid down the seats with Cal’s help, then they shoved Adam’s bike in the back.
“Who admits to craving human flesh?” Cal questioned.
“He could be insane. Like, insane asylum, insane.”
“Why are you trying to break my hope that he’s a zombie?” Cal pushed. “This is the coolest thing that’s ever happened in my life.”
Adam bit the inside of his cheek. “I hate to agree with Cal on this—”
“You hate to agree with me?” Cal sounded confused.
“—but his blood was black, Harp. Human blood isn’t black.”
“Sometimes it’s a deep enough red it can look bla—” Harper tried.
“Harper!” Cal yelled, throwing his hands up in the air.
“Keep your voice down, I’m just being realistic. No way this guy is a zombie.”
“Why d’you gotta say it like that?” Cal actually looked hurt. “You’re saying zombie like it’s a bad thing.”
Harper raised her eyebrows. “You know, Cal? If this is real, it’s actually going to be a pretty bad thing.”
Cal didn’t say anything. The wind picked up outside and carried a few seconds of a relieving cool night breeze, breaking up the intense heat of Arizona. It tossed Cal’s blonde shoulder length hair in almost all directions before he reached up and ran his fingers back through it, holding it out of his face.
“Don’t get butt hurt because I think he’s lying, Cal,” Harper said, folding her arms. “It’s crazy for all of us. We don’t know what we’re doing. This guy could be insane for all we know.”
“I gotta get home,” Adam muttered to Harper after a minute of silence.
Cal walked around to the passenger side of the car and got in, leaving Adam and Harper standing outside.
“You don’t believe this guy is a zombie, do you?” Adam asked her.
“I’m going to need a lot of convincing if this guy is what he says he is. Until then, I’m sticking with crazy.”
Harper shut her trunk.
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