Chris Grabenstein: The Smoky Corridor

Davy had worked on farms all his life. First in Kentucky, which explained his funny way of talking, then right across the highway from where Zack’s new house was built.

“What are you doing here, Davy?”

“Can’t rightly say.”

“Right. The rules.”

Zack knew that ghosts weren’t allowed to come and go as they pleased or to do or say whatever they wanted to do or say. Being dead was sort of like being in school.

“Can you give me a hint?”

“Why you whisperin’ like that, Zack?”

“I don’t want anybody to see me talking to you!”

“Don’t worry, pardner. I’m invisible to everybody except you.”

“Well, that just makes it worse! I look like a crazy person, sticking my head in an empty locker and talking to myself!”

“All right, I’ll make this quick. First off, don’t listen to everything the Donnelly brothers might tell you. Them two still like to play with fire.”

“Okay.”

“Second of all, watch out for the zombie.”

“The what?”

“Zombie. Corpse brought back to life but without any soul inside. Mindless and mean. Can’t be drowned, suffocated, shot, or poisoned. If you cut off his head, the head will stay alive and keep snappin’ at ya. Fire’s just about the only thing that can kill ’em.”

Fire? Zack gulped. He didn’t want to do that again!

“Anything else?”

“Plenty. A zombie’s teeth can tear a man in half with a single bite. Likes to rip open coffins and eat the carcasses of dead people. If he bites you while you’re still alive and you somehow escape, guess what?”

“What?”

“You turn into a zombie, too!”

“Gross.”

“First human soul you bump into becomes your slave master.”

“Yuck.”

“Hang on. It gets worse. Zombies like to eat brains best of all. The younger, the better. He’ll scoop out your skull, gobble ’em down, take a nap, then nibble on the rest of you for a week.”

“And he’s here? At the school?”

A school filled with young brains!

“Not the school but somewheres close by. Been hanging around for over a century. Just ask any of the folks buried out back in the dadgum graveyard whose bodies he ate. Now, here’s the news flash: This zombie feller just woke up after snoozin’ for twenty years. There could be trouble a-comin’.”

“So you and your friends ‘upstairs’ want me to stop this demon like I stopped the others?”

“Don’t know if that’ll be possible this time, Zack. This here zombie is under the control of a supreme voodoo master, a ghost with juju so strong, not only can he control his meat puppet from the far side of the grave, he can also block us from seein’ where the zombie’s at or what he’s up to.”

“Juju?”

“Black magic. Witchcraft. Evil forces stronger than anything you ever gone up against. It’s why you kids are gonna need guardian ghosts for a while. Can’t bring no adults into this zombie situation.”

“Why not?”

Davy shook his head. “They won’t let me say.”

“What about Judy? She’s not like ordinary adults.”

“Best keep her out of it, too.”

“But …”

“Hey, Zack!”

He whipped around.

It was Malik from the bus.

“You better hurry. We don’t want to be late for homeroom!”

“Right. Thanks.”

He waited for Malik to head up the hall, then turned around to talk to Davy some more.

Only Davy wasn’t there.

20

Wade Mugginslimped across the janitor’s closet, pressed the third shelf on the phony supply rack, and stepped back as the secret panel swung open.

His tailbone was still aching from when he had sprained his butt during the explosion. He hobbled over to the wall and checked out the jagged hole his propane rodent repellant had blasted open.

Fortunately, nobody had heard the big kaboom, because they had all been way out back in the auditorium when it had happened. Now Wade noticed that the explosion had crackled the layer of dried hardpan coating the root cellar floor.

He kicked away some of the chunks.

“Whoa. Dude.”

He dug deeper.

First he found a rusty old revolver Horace P. Pettimore must have buried in the root cellar’s dirt floor. He tucked it into his pants.

Then he found a flagstone with some extremely whacked stuff carved into its top.

Wade found a whisk broom and brushed the stone clean like an umpire dusting home plate. The stone was etched with all sorts of screwy symbols like Martians probably used in their spaceship manuals; only one sentence was spelled out in earthling letters.

“Dude, this is like a discovery on the National Geographic Channel! Totally!”

And the flagstone was right in front of the hole in the wall.

“The aliens probably left it here, man. When they hid their spaceship … underground!”

He studied that one line about turning back.

“Okay. On their journey, they watched a lot of our TV transmissions, Sesame Street and stuff, and they learned just enough English to carve that one line so they could scare people away from their parking spot!”

It made sense.

If Wade were a Martian, he would definitely hide his flying saucer where nobody could see it.

Underground. Under a school. Maybe all the way out back, under the cemetery.

And then he’d make a Martian sign so he’d remember how to find it when it was time to fly home.

Dude! This was going to make Wade so famous he would be on the local news at six and eleven!

He quickly ran back to his secret entrance to the Wade Cave, pulled the shelving unit shut, reset the spring, and locked himself in the root cellar. He didn’t want to share his fame and glory with anyone.

“I come in peace!” he shouted into the darkness.

Then, grabbing a flashlight, he crawled into the hole he had blown through the wall.

21

Fortunately, homeroomwas only scheduled to last ten minutes.

Zack sat in the very last row of desks, closest to the window.

He needed to find a computer. Do an Internet search on zombies. He’d always thought they were mindless, unfeeling monsters like in those movies about the living dead. Davy made the zombie living (even though he was dead) near the school sound worse.

Zack’s homeroom teacher, Mrs. Kleinknecht, was up at the front of the classroom, trying to turn on a TV monitor she couldn’t reach because it was mounted to a wall bracket and she was four and a half feet tall. She dragged over an empty desk to use as a step stool and finally switched the TV on.

“Good morning, students,” said the principal, Mr. Smith, whose face filled the screen. “Welcome to an exciting new year at Horace P. Pettimore Middle School!”

Yeah , Zack thought, the resident zombie just woke up. Should make things real exciting .

Half the kids in the room were yawning. The first day of school was always a tough one. Hard to wake up when you’ve gotten used to sleeping in all summer.

Zack, already bored with the morning announcements, let his eyes wander around the room. He saw Malik. Benny. Tyler.

And a girl with extremely black hair. She was slumped in her seat and carving something into the denim cover of her three-ring binder with a ballpoint pen she held like a dagger. Zack had never seen anybody with such black black hair. Her fingernails were painted black, too.

The girl must’ve sensed Zack staring at her, because she whirled around to stare back at him.