Zombie Apocalypse Read online

  Copyright

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is coincidental.

  Copyright © 2017 by Hachette Book Group, Inc.

  Text written by Stacia Deutsch

  Tales from the Scaremaster logo by David Coulson

  TALES FROM THE SCAREMASTER and THESE SCARY STORIES WRITE THEMSELVES are trademarks of Hachette Book Group

  Cover design by Christina Quintero. Cover illustration by Scott Brundage.

  Cover copyright © 2017 by Hachette Book Group, Inc.

  Hachette Book Group supports the right to free expression and the value of copyright. The purpose of copyright is to encourage writers and artists to produce the creative works that enrich our culture.

  The scanning, uploading, and distribution of this book without permission is a theft of the author’s intellectual property. If you would like permission to use material from the book (other than for review purposes), please contact [email protected]. Thank you for your support of the author’s rights.

  Little, Brown and Company

  Hachette Book Group

  1290 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10104

  Visit us at lb-kids.com

  First Edition: April 2017

  Little, Brown and Company is a division of Hachette Book Group, Inc. The Little, Brown name and logo are trademarks of Hachette Book Group, Inc.

  The publisher is not responsible for websites (or their content) that are not owned by the publisher.

  ISBNs: 978-0-316-39894-7 (paperback), 978-0-316-39891-6 (ebook)

  E3-20170315-JV-PC

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Epigraph

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Epilogue

  Tales from the Scaremaster

  Don’t make the same mistake Ryan and Tyler made. Don’t read my book.

  —The Scaremaster

  I warned you.

  Chapter One

  “Tyler!” I called across the cramped and crowded costume shop to my brother. “You gotta see what I found!” I grabbed big boxes, small boxes, and thickly stuffed clear plastic envelopes in all sizes off the shelves until my arms were full.

  A package of latex peeling skin got away from me and fell to the floor. There was no way I could pick it back up without dropping everything, so I left it where it landed.

  “Where are you?” I shouted past frenzied shoppers looking for the best deals.

  The costume shop was a small space. Tall display shelves formed mazelike aisles. Merchandise was so packed in that it made the already-tight store feel dark and mysterious. To me and Tyler that meant “extra-awesome”!

  “Over here. In the makeup aisle.” Tyler gave what we called the “family whistle.” One sharp burst followed by three softer tweets.

  I listened closely to pinpoint the sound, then headed toward it, hurrying down the first empty aisle I found. I didn’t want to waste time dodging shoppers. I was moving so fast my straight brown bangs flopped down over one of my brown eyes. Mom wanted me to cut my hair, but I refused. I could use the other eye just fine.

  “Excuse me.” A pale-faced, pencil-thin young woman with long black hair appeared in the center of the aisle.

  “Whoa!” I didn’t see her until it was almost too late. I managed to stop in time, but it was a serious near miss that could have been a big crash. I fumbled the things in my hands, and I dropped another package of fake skin. Oh well. I’d picked up so many of them, losing one more wouldn’t matter.

  “No running,” she said, pinning me with her bright blue eyes. Her voice wasn’t raised, like whenever I get caught dashing around school by the principal; it was calm and firm, kind of like Mom’s when she gets angry. The woman scooped up the fallen package of fake skin but didn’t offer it back to me.

  “We don’t act like monsters in my shop.” She handed me a plastic basket with two handles. “Put the items you wish to buy in here.”

  Heaving a sigh, I dumped everything I was carrying into the basket. I was in a hurry—couldn’t she see that?

  “Now can I go?” I asked, feeling impatient.

  She held up a hand like a stop sign. “Let me see what you have.”

  The woman took her time going through the items I’d chosen. “Dirty, torn shorts, muddy, ripped T-shirts, red-colored contact lenses, artificial skin, bandages…” She neatly stacked it all, then handed the newly organized orange basket back to me, asking, “Zombie, right?”

  “My brother and I are going to the school Halloween dance on Friday,” I told her, feeling a surge of happiness. Halloween is my favorite holiday. “We’re going to have the most amazing costumes!”

  “I see.” Her voice was now kind and soft. “You’re certainly off to a good start.” Her blue eyes seemed to shift to green when she told me, “You’ll find your brother at the end of the next aisle to the left.”

  “How did you know—” I started to ask.

  “Twins,” she replied with a small smile that twinkled in her eyes, making them seem yellow. “He looks exactly like you.” She added, “Except for the hair.” Tyler’s was cropped short, the way Mom wanted.

  “Of course,” I said with a small nod. Being a twin was both a good thing and a bad thing. It was annoying when people mixed us up. But on Friday night, it was going to be epic when we mixed ourselves up on purpose.

  “Go on,” the woman said, pointing the way. “I’m sure you two have a lot of planning to do.” She paused, still blocking my way and staring into my one uncovered eye for a few heartbeats before stepping aside so I could pass.

  I shivered. There was a spark of something in the woman’s now-brown eyes that made me nervous. She was nice enough, so I didn’t know what was giving me the chills.

  Using my “best manners” just like Mom would expect of me, I said, “Thank you, ma’am,” and walked away.

  Of course, my manners faded when I was out of her sight. With a quick look behind me to make sure she wasn’t following, I took off running again.

  “What took you so long, Ryan?” Tyler asked when I found him, exactly where the woman had said.

  Suddenly, I felt as if someone was staring at my back, which was odd because I’d just checked. Now I double-checked. No one was there.

  Shaking off the feeling, I held out the basket, jamming it toward Tyler. “I found some cool stuff.”

  My brother was a turtle. He took his time, slowly inspecting each item before asking, “Do we have to match?”

  “Absolutely,” I said, bouncing on my toes. We’d agreed a long time ago. “You promised me that we could be scary matching zombies when we went to middle school… and now it’s middle school!”

  “Oh.” Tyler turned his attention back to the makeup. “I was sorta thinking we’d both be zombies, but you could be a crawler and I’d be a boney.”

  Boneys and crawlers were the most frightening kinds of zombies.

  Tyler had spent a lot of time on the Internet reading about the undead over the past few months. He’d been the one to find this store. We had to take a bus, but the online comments said the man who owned it was an expert in monsters and would have everything we needed. The review was right about the costumes but possibly wrong about the man who owned it. I was pretty positive that the woman with the strange eye
s was the owner. I didn’t have any proof—she just acted like someone who didn’t want me to mess up her store.

  “Fine. Let’s both be crawlers,” I said. Tyler had told me that those were the kind of zombies with bad injuries that made them hobble along. They were really common in movies, and Tyler and I had seen a lot of horror movies. I hadn’t known exactly what they were called until Tyler did his costume research.

  I held up the shorts I’d found. “We can put fake blood all over our legs.” I pointed at some tubes of blood on the shelf behind his shoulder.

  “I really wanted to be a boney,” Tyler countered. Boneys had their skin peeling off so that the bones showed through. He showed me these soft fake bones that you stuck to your skin to make it look like your bones were on the outside. There were leg bones and arms bones. They were kind of expensive, but I had to admit, they were really, really cool.

  “Sure, great,” I said. It didn’t matter what kind of zombie we were, as long as we were the same kind.

  For two and a half months, we’d kept our plans a secret. No one would be expecting what we were going to do. In fact, and just to really freak everyone out, Tyler was going to cut my hair short to match his right before the dance. We were going to shock everyone by appearing in two places at once! It was going to be a historic Halloween, one that would be remembered forever.

  “Pick the makeup,” I told Tyler. I really didn’t care as long as it was scary. “I’ll be whatever kind of zombie you want.”

  Tyler turned back to the makeup display. “Boneys,” he said, more to himself than to me. “We need white and red and black.…” He surveyed the selection. “Liquid latex, eyeliner, green slime, a lot of these fake bone pieces, and dark purple paint for bruises.” All that went neatly into my basket.

  I tried to be patient, but it was hard. Tyler wasn’t just neatly organizing the things he found—he was organizing them alphabetically! When he finally took a pause, I snatched the heavy basket away before he could add anything else and fled to the register.

  The woman with the changing eyes was at the counter. Without speaking, she nodded at each item as she rang up our choices. She didn’t say a word until she told us the price.

  Tyler looked at me with a horrified expression. “We don’t have enough money.”

  “Are you sure?” I fished a combination of dollar bills and coins from my pocket. “We have all this!” I dumped our stash on the counter. It was every cent of our allowance and money we’d found in the couch since July. I’d even added two quarters I’d found on the sidewalk last week.

  “I counted it last night,” Tyler said, pinching his lips together while contemplating the glowing digits on the cash register display. “We’re going to have to put a lot of stuff back.”

  I sighed as Tyler started separating the items into two piles. Most of the things I’d picked were ending up in the put-back pile.

  “Can’t we keep any of it?” I moaned.

  “I don’t think so.” Tyler was distracted, adding totals in his head. “Makeup is the most important thing. Plus, it was my idea to come here.…” he reminded me, as if that meant he got first dibs on what we bought.

  “But—” I started to argue, when the woman at the counter cut in, saying, “I have a solution to your problem.”

  I’d honestly forgotten she was still standing there.

  We looked up at her.

  She crooked a finger. “Follow me.” It was more of a command than a request.

  Tyler glanced at me. We didn’t just look alike; sometimes it was as if I could hear his thoughts. He wasn’t scared, but he was more cautious than me. I knew he’d come along, but at his own pace after carefully considering her odd invitation. In the meantime, I wasn’t waiting. I took off after her. Seriously, she owned the most amazing shop on the planet. What could go wrong?

  I could feel Tyler’s eyes burning into my back and knew he was scowling. But as I predicted, a second later I heard his footsteps behind me.

  The woman led us through the store, down a narrow hallway, to the most incredible storage room I’d ever seen. The door was made of intricately carved heavy wood with a polished brass handle. It was awesome—perfectly spooky for a costume shop!

  The hinges creaked as she twisted the knob and stepped inside.

  “This is where I keep the discount items,” she told us. “Only special customers get to come back here.”

  Leaning over to my brother, I said, “This is soooo cool.”

  It was like we’d won the costume shop lottery. The room was creepy. The woman was creepy. I couldn’t wait to see what she had hidden here.

  I pushed past Tyler and ran over to a shelf filled with items. There was a sign posted. “Seventy-five percent off,” I exclaimed. “Check it, Ty!”

  “That’s a huge discount!” Tyler hurried over. We excitedly started searching through the items. “Forget what we picked outside. Everything we need is right here,” he told me.

  I expected the woman would leave us and go back out to her other customers, but instead, she moved to the side of the room and sat down in a chair that I hadn’t noticed at first. This wasn’t just a discount room. It was also her office, which confirmed to me that the online forums had been wrong. For sure, she was the owner.

  The large throne chair, carved in a pattern similar to the door’s, had interwoven circles and strange squiggled patterns along the back. It sat behind a clean, polished desk. The smooth surface reminded me of Tyler’s desk at home. I hadn’t seen the top of my desk in a long time.

  I felt like we should hurry so she could go back into the busy shop, but the woman didn’t appear to be in a rush. I looked at Tyler. He shrugged, and we silently agreed to take our time.

  We started picking things off the discount shelf. Tyler organized what we wanted to buy into a neat pile, adding up the prices.

  “You’ll find expired fake blood, opened packages of peeling skin that were returned, and damaged bone pieces,” the woman explained. “I can’t sell any of it in the regular store.”

  “This is great!” Tyler cheered.

  Then I noticed a box on the top shelf, just above our heads and a little out of reach. “What’s in that?” I asked her.

  “I’m glad you asked,” she said with a small smile as she rose from the desk and stood on her tiptoes to bring the unmarked cardboard box down. She set the box on her desk. “You can have anything in here for free.”

  “Really?” Tyler checked. “Are you sure?” When she nodded, he stopped searching through the discount shelf, and we both went to look. “Free is even better than discounted,” he said happily.

  The things Tyler wanted were on the discount shelf, but everything I’d wanted was inside the free box! There were torn and dirtied costumes, similar to the ones he’d put back. It was amazing. There were slight package defects, but the box seemed to have two of everything I wanted: shorts, ripped T-shirts, packages of colored contact lenses, and long strips of loose bandages!

  “Think we can have it all?” Tyler whispered to me.

  I nodded. “She said ‘anything.’”

  I knew that he was wondering the same thing as me. Was it greedy to take the whole box?

  Tyler decided to ask. “Can we—” he began.

  The woman interrupted, answering even though he never finished the question. “It’s all yours.” She then took an old-fashioned ledger, a quill, and an inkwell out of the desk drawer and turned her attention to her work. I wondered again why she didn’t go back out front to the store. What if other customers needed help or wanted to pay for their costumes? I hadn’t seen any other employees.

  It was strange, but she must have wanted to wait until we finished.

  From underneath all the ragged clothing, Tyler pulled out an old book. He leaned in and whispered to me, “Hey, Ryan, check this out. Do you think she means we can have this book too?”

  At Tyler’s question, the woman raised her head and said, “The whole box is yours. I wouldn
’t have offered it if I didn’t mean it.” She noted the book in Tyler’s hand. “It’s a vintage journal. Practically an antique. It would be a shame not to use it.” She stood, came across the room, and tapped the cover. “Perhaps you could draw your zombie costume designs inside.” As quickly as she’d approached us, she went back to her desk.

  “Let me see.” I took the journal from Tyler. The book felt heavy and smelled like an odd combination of dirt and metal. I pushed back a little brass locking clasp on the cover and opened the pages. “It’s damaged,” I told Tyler. “There are these weird stains all over the first page.”

  “Maybe that’s why she wants to give it to us for free,” Tyler said. He took the book back. “It looks like marks from berries or grass.” Holding the book against his chest, Tyler said, “I like it. We should take it.”

  On the bus home, I carried the free-stuff box. Tyler held the bag of discount makeup.

  We were excited to go through our purchases. We didn’t live far, but still, the ride felt like it was taking forever. To pass the time, I took the journal out of the box. I traced my finger over the strange triangle pattern etched into the cover. There were some long scratch marks dug into the leather, and I traced those as well.

  “If only this book could tell us where it’s been,” I muttered to myself. Full of curiosity, I opened to the second page, the clean one after the berry-marked page, then made up a title and wrote it at the top.

  “What else should I write?” I asked Tyler.

  “I don’t—” Tyler started, when suddenly, I jumped up, grabbing Tyler’s hand and squeezing it hard.

  “No way! What the heck?!” I gasped.

  The bus driver told me to sit back down.

  “What is going on?” Tyler yanked back his hand.

  Without another word, I lowered myself into my seat and turned the book toward my brother.

  I’d written:

  Awesome Zombie Costumes

  Under that, mysterious handwriting had appeared:

  Zombies, is it? Oh, the Scaremaster knows a thing or two about the undead. You shouldn’t have started this story. Now I get to finish it!