Excerpt of Undead Much? by Stacey Jay

Ethan paused. “Megan, I—”

Suddenly, there was a knocking at the car window.

I screamed, a piercing, girly scream that made Ethan wince, but I couldn’t help it. Give me creepy flesh-hungry Reanimated Corpses and I can get my Buffy on with the best of them. But interrupt me whilst making out and I am far more the hysterical-screaming-and-clutching-at-my-clothes type of girl.

“Um, sorry. Didn’t mean to freak you out in there.” The voice outside was male, but it didn’t sound like anyone I knew.

He was definitely a young guy, however, which meant we’d escaped discovery by Ethan’s seventy-year-old grandfather. Thank. God.

Not that a complete stranger was a much better option.

“But um…I’m here,” the dude outside said. “So are you coming out?”

“Who the heck are you?” Ethan asked.

Excellent question. Who was he and why was he way out here at the edge of town, lurking in some old man’s back pasture at nine o’clock on a Sunday night? Ethan and I had been sure even the cows would be shacked up somewhere warm.

“Megan? That is Megan Berry in there, right?” The guy asked.

“You know this guy?” Ethan grabbed the flashlight he left rolling around in his trunk, brandishing it like a weapon as he turned toward the window.

“I don’t think so.” I sighed with relief as I finally managed to get my clothes back in position. Call me crazy, but even a possible stalker didn’t seem as scary when securely clothed.

“Did I ever tell you I thought you were a stalker when we first re-met? Or a serial killer fixated on teenage girls?”

“Did I ever tell you that you start weird conversations at totally inappropriate times?” he asked, looking frustrated. Or angry. Or something. Geez, you’d think I’d invited strange dude to come hang out with us while we sucked face.

Groped. Sucked face. Yuck. I really needed to work on my descriptions of kissy-kissy behavior.

“Stay here, I’m going to check out your friend.” He’d popped open the back window and was sliding out into the night before I could protest that dude was not my friend.

Not that it would have mattered. This wasn’t the first time I’d noticed Ethan’s hint of a jealous streak. Though usually it thrilled me to see him get all scowly when one of the other Settler boys checked me out during Enforcer drills.

I mean, Ethan was the hottest boy living—as far as I was concerned—and knowing he felt the same way about me was unbelievable. I’m no dog, but neither am I model material. I’m average height, with average long frizzy brown hair that must be tamed with a scalding hot Chi to achieve any level of smoothness, and pretty decent brown eyes with a hint of gold around the center. I’m a little too skinny, especially after all the training and dancing the past few months, and my figure is nothing to write home about. I mean, I have enough chest to keep strapless clothes in place, but the girls still need creative padding to form any “luscious lady lumps” under my sweater.

“Megan? Did you hear me? You should come out and see this.” Ethan stuck his head through the rear window. He sounded more shocked than jealous, which should have let me know right away there was some Settler weirdness going down. Wasn’t there always? I mean, could we EVER spend a night together without dead people being in some way involved?

No, of course we couldn’t.

Still, I was legitimately surprised to see a dead guy standing next to Ethan, stomping his sneakered feet in the remains of the snow we’d had the night before, looking amazingly lifelike for a zombie. His shoulder length hair—brown or black, I couldn’t quite tell in the moonlight—was clean and soft looking and his expression excited and friendly. In fact, if I hadn’t been able to smell the funky grave odor clinging to his jeans and oversized striped sweater, I wouldn’t have thought he was deceased at all.

“Hey! Megan, good to meet you, I’d recognize you anywhere. That’s some mojo you’ve got going. I caught your energy the second I liberated myself from that crypt.” He smiled, revealing two dazzling rows of super straight teeth and reached out to grab my hand. The guy had been very cute when he was alive, in a sort of saggy pants stoner kind of way. “I’m Cliff.”

“Cliff?”

“Clifford Joseph Frakincense Harvester, reporting for duty.”

“Duty?” I repeated, so shocked I could barely bring myself to squeeze his hand and pump it up and down a few times before detangling myself. Manners are good and all, but the smell of fresh grave just didn’t come out of clothes without some major effort.

I would have dodged the hand entirely, in fact, if I’d ever had a zombie chat me up the way Cliff was doing. Usually the naturally Unsettled were kind of out of it until a Settler gave the cue to start blabbing. Even then, the majority of people who were troubled enough by unfinished business from their living days to crawl out of their graves and seek intervention weren’t in the mood for idle conversation.

They came, they groaned and shuffled, I asked them what was up, and they confessed their issues. Then I promised to take care of their bidness and sent them back to their eternal slumber. End of story, all nice and tidy and relatively easy—except for the grave sealing process. Now that I was a second stage Settler, I had to follow them back to their place of rest and seal them in with a special ceremony so no one could resurrect them with black magic.

After having been nearly killed by Reanimated Corpses—RCs as Ethan liked to call them—back in September, I took grave sealing very seriously. Really, I took just about everything very seriously. Learning that your best friend had been planning to kill you for years did that to a girl. My former BFF, Jess, was now in a Settler Affairs prison in Little Rock awaiting trial and sentencing, but that didn’t really help me feel any safer. If I was stupid enough to be best friends with a witch who wanted to watch black magically raised zombies munch my flesh, my safety wasn’t something I could take for granted.

“Yeah, I figured it was a nice night and I’ve never walked through a fresh snow before,” Cliff said with a shrug.

“So, you came to find me because you’d never taken a walk in the snow?” Never in my entire life—either in five years of Settling the dead when I was a kid or the past four months of being back in the business now that my powers had returned—had I ever heard a request like this.

Usually people had real issues. They wanted to tell someone they were fighting with before they died that they loved them, they had unfinished business that affected the living or made them feel guilty in death, and sometimes they even had to get the name of their killer off their chests and into the hands of the proper authorities.

I’d had more than my share of murdered teens in the past few months. Unfortunately, something about my extraordinarily strong Settler power drew them to me like flies to a steaming fresh pile of cow poo.

Speaking of cow poo, we were bound to run into some if Cliff really wanted to stroll. Looked like my new suede boots—and my romantic date with Ethan—were shot.

“Um, yeah. That’s not something you want to miss out on. So I figured I might as well crawl out of the old grave and go for a stroll. You game?” Cliff asked, then turned to Ethan with a sheepish grin. “If you don’t mind, of course. I’m assuming you’re the boyfriend?”

“No, sure. I mean, yeah. But that’s fine,” Ethan stammered, obviously thrown by Cliff as well. “I’ll wait in the car, you two go ahead and stroll.”

“Okay.” I smiled at Cliff as I grabbed Ethan’s hand and pulled him back toward the car. “Just let me grab my coat.”

“No problem. You living people get cold.” He laughed, a strangely infectious sound that made me want to laugh too. Good thing I didn’t, however, since Ethan didn’t look amused. “I haven’t been dead that long, I remember freezing my balls off at a football game last November. Who decided November was a good time for football? I mean, playing it, sure, since you’re bound to get hot. But watching it? Mostly lame. Unless it’s on television, and you’ve got lots of snacks for during the commercials.”

“This guy talks more than you do,” Ethan mumbled as he opened the door and grabbed my bright red pea coat.

“Thanks a lot.” I shrugged my coat on and reached past Ethan for my scarf.

I got it that he was annoyed, but no need to take it out on me. I couldn’t help my job anymore than he could. So I drew a larger number of Unsettled than the average girl and I hadn’t dared ask another Settler to cover for me because I wanted to save up my favors for nights the pom squad had to dance at basketball games? It wasn’t my fault I was still in high school and balancing stage two responsibilities was a lot harder than stage three—the level Ethan had been since his nineteenth birthday. He only had to be on duty a couple nights a week and the rest of the time could shut off his power and not worry about drawing the Undead.

I, however, was not granted such luxuries…even though I knew I could figure out how to turn my power off if I tried. I was abnormally advanced, after all.

Unfortunately, I’d also landed myself in an abnormally large amount of trouble a few months back while trying to get ahead so now I was trying to walk the straight and narrow. Seems like my boyfriend who worked Protocol and was basically a Settler cop, should be a little more supportive of that!

“I was just kidding.” He rubbed my back as I wrapped my scarf around my neck. “You know I love listening to you ramble.”

He kissed me on the cheek and I melted. I couldn’t stay mad at him. “Then come with us. I’m sure Cliff wouldn’t mind. He seems friendly.”

“Too friendly,” Ethan whispered. “I’m not sure he’s giving you the real 411 on why he left his grave. Maybe he’s holding back until you two are alone.”

“Or maybe he’s just…different?”

“Oh, he’s different all right, but not that different. He knows your name, Meg, and didn’t you say the only Unsettled who have known who you are right off the bat are—”

“The ones who died. Badly.” I cut him off before he could mention “murder”.

In the past few months I’d had a couple of kids who had been murdered by black magic practitioners. Unfortunately, they hadn’t been able to describe the practitioner very well, probably due to the trauma of being murdered and all that. They were the ones who knew who I was before I made the proper introductions. And no one, not even the most experienced Elders over at Settlers Affairs headquarters could guess how the dead kids knew who I was. It was a mystery, like so many other things about me.

Like why I had this incredible power and whether or not I’d be able to control it sufficiently to lead a relatively average life. Or why I still felt like I was living on borrowed time even though the people raising killer zombies had been locked away. No matter how normal I acted in front of Ethan and my parents, I still wasn’t my old self…and I was beginning to think I never would be.

With those cheery thoughts in mind, I turned back to Cliff. “Okay, let’s get strolling.” Might as well get him taken care of and back in his grave and maybe Ethan and I would have a few minutes to talk before my ten o’clock on school nights curfew.

“Call me if you need me,” Ethan called as Cliff and I set off across the pasture.

“You won’t need him. I’m harmless, I promise,” Cliff said in a chummy whisper. “Not like the others.”

I huddled deeper into my coat as a weird shiver raced down my spine. “The others? What others?”

“The…others. The…um…” His smile faded and he looked as confused as I felt, but seconds later his grin returned. “You know what? I can’t remember. Let’s just forget it and enjoy the walk. Cool?”

“Cool,” I said. But it wasn’t.

Nothing about the way this night was ending was cool. But then, what else was new?