Chapter 15

Chapter Fifteen The page is snow-soaked, but mostly intact. My hands are shaking from the cold—but it's also more that that. I'm quivering because this is BIG. This can tell us WHY Evie stole the Slicer! I spot Bardle and Quint standing beneath the old Buffalo Wing joint. "Hey, knowledgeable buddies!" I shout as I race toward them. "Look! The missing page from the library book!" Bardle's long fingers take the page. I watch his eyes scan it. Bardle's pupils don't go back and forth when he reads—they just keep going, disappearing at one side of the eye, reappearing on the other. Like they move in a circle. It's super unnerving, no lie... What he says, though, and what I see—it's even more unnerving...

STEP TWO, CAPTURE AN UNDEAD HUMAN BEING. THE HUMAN MIND IS A COMPLEX THING. SO GAS REQUIRES A FRESHLY ZOMBIES BODY TO ENTER THE SIMPLIFIED BRAIN. WORKINGS OF THE UNDEAD. MAKE A ZOMBIE THE PERFECT VESSEL. STEP THREE, PLACE THE ARTIFACT IN the zombies human's hands to OPEN a PORTAL, ALLOWING GO to ENTER THE ZOMBIES BODY. GOD WILL THEN TAKE CONTROL OF THAT PERSON'S BODY. FOR

Those words repeat in my head: FRESHLY ZOMBIFIED BODY. I heard Dirk cry out. And I don't see him. Suddenly there's this tight, burning, screaming feeling in my chest. I want to puke, right there in the snow. But I don't. Instead, I'm turning, leaving, even as I hear my friends calling after me. Evie trapped us in her house and tried to zombify us. But we outsmarted her. Our geekiness defeated her geekiness. Only she wasn't done. She needed a new zombie. She came back, head-on, into Wakefield Town Square. I thought we defeated her. But now I'm afraid I'm wrong... I'm marching across the Town Square. My head is snapping from side to side, quick looks, scanning, searching. Monster friends are rising, checking each other for injuries. No serious wounds. I come to the tree house. I'm grabbing the ladder. Climbing.

Heart slamming. Palms sweaty. Pulling myself over the side. I find him... "Dirk?" He doesn't respond. "Hey, buddy," I say softly. "You OK?" After a long moment, he shrugs. "Nah. I'm not." My heart stops slamming, because the fear of not knowing is over. Now it's just coldness. It's cold on my insides, spreading outward. "I messed up," Dirk says. "I got sloppy."

I slowly step forward. I see it. The wound is on his forearm. Just a tiny drop of blood. But it's a zombie bite, just the same. Dirk is calm. "Nothing to do, bro. I know you want to save the day—but you can't. Then you'll feel lousy—like you failed. Here's a Dirk secret: If you don't try, you can't fail. My old man taught me that." I just want to sit here for one more minute That. Ok? Then I'm going to leave. Just walk, walk and walk until KNOCK IT OFF.

I get right in his face—closer than anyone has probably ever gotten in Dirk's face before. Or if they did, they left with their face looking a bit mangled. "Buddy," I say. "I would love to belt out a big, over-the-top, movie-type speech right now all about how much I love you and all the reasons I won't let you get zombified. But there's no time. Right now—there's only time for fixing you." CLANK CLANK CLANK... Our pulley conveyor. I see Bardle step from the lift basket, followed by June and Quint. They see Dirk, they see my face—and they know. "We must act quickly," Bardle says. His voice is barely a whisper. Dirk doesn't resist. Moments later, he's stretched out on our poker table... I expect it to be like a scene from one of those TV shows with doctors running around emergency rooms. You know the ones, where they spend like half their time saving lives and the other half making out in hospital closets? Those shows were