“But he’s real? You’ve actually seen him.”
“I shook his hand this morning.”
“Frak me,” said the other man. “Anyway, there’s all of them, a ninja, the dead girl, and a ghost.”
Now the pulse was behind both of his eyes. It had grown from a firm hint to a scheduled meeting in no time at all. “Did you say a ghost?”
“Yeah. I think that may just be a dream thing. I don’t think it means anything.” He paused for a moment. “Can I tell you something else? Or ask you something else, I guess?”
“Sure.”
“This one’s going to sound really weird.”
“Weirder than the whole ‘random strangers hundreds of miles apart sharing dreams’ thing?”
“Yeah,” said Barry, “I think so. This is like first-season-LOST-level weirdness.”
“Okay.”
“Have you ever heard of George Romero?”
He wrinkled his brow. It took a minute to get his mental footing again. “The film director?”
“Yes!” The voice on the phone sounded relieved. “Okay, part two. Do you know what kind of movies he makes?”
“Errrr … horror movies?”
“Yeah, but what kind of horror movies? Can you be more specific?”
George rubbed his temple. The headache was swelling inside his skull. “Ummm … monster movies, aren’t they? Gory ones.”
“But what kind?” insisted Barry. “Vampires? Werewolves? What’s the monster?”
“I don’t know,” George said. “I’m not really into the whole horror thing.”
“Well, I am,” said Barry. “I’m a big ol’ geeky fanboy. One of the biggest. And you know what?”
“What?” George’s headache arrived and settled in. The sun hurt his eyes. The sounds coming from his phone were sharp and grating, like needles in his ear.
“I don’t know what kind of monsters they are, either,” said the man in Albuquerque. “I’ve checked Google, Netflix, Amazon, a couple fansites. I’ve been trying to figure it out for days and I don’t know.”
GEORGE’S PHONE SLIPPED from his fingers. His head was pounding. His pulse was pounding in his ears like a car blasting its subwoofer. He’d never had a migraine before, but this had to be worse. Some part of him wondered if a blood vessel or something might’ve burst in his head. Maybe an aneurysm. It wasn’t hard to believe these could be the last seconds of his life.
He heard a rasping noise in front of him. He lifted his head and forced his eyes open. It took a moment for his vision to focus.
A group of people stood in front of him. Students and faculty, on a guess. There were three women and two men. In the corner of his eye he could see another man walked toward him. A couple watched from a few yards away.
They were all dead.
The corpse closest to George had a red fire axe buried in the top of its shoulder. The axe wobbled and sent the dead thing close to tipping over every time it moved. A woman’s shirt had three bullet holes ringed with dark stains. An overweight young man held out arms that were gnawed down to the bone. At least half his fingers were missing. A dead girl with one eye had a monkey backpack looped over her shoulders.
Their jaws moved up and down, and their teeth cracked together again and again. Some of them had chipped or broken their enamel. The axe man had nothing but jagged stumps. The sound of their teeth was like hail or bubble wrap, a constant click-click-click.
George twisted away from them and took a few steps along the side of the building. The long grass brushed his knees. He glanced up at the gray building. Thick grime coated the windows he’d been cleaning. Years of dust and condensation, streaked and spotted from rainfall.
The dead people staggered after him. The corpse with the gnawed arms stumbled and fell face-first into the side of the building. Its face crunched against the brick. The others made slow adjustments and shifted their paths to follow.
His head was still pounding and nausea tickled the back of his tongue. He thought about calling campus security, but his phone was somewhere back in the tall grass. Even if he could get past the creatures, he wasn’t sure how long it would take him to find it. He ran in a wide circle around the dead things and headed out along the long walkway of the Court of Sciences.
At least two dozen more monsters staggered in the courtyard. Maybe more. A few wore gore-splattered suits and ties. Some others had backpacks or messenger bags. One dead woman wore a UCLA sweatshirt. Something with one leg and long hair was dragging itself across the pavement. It had worn its face and chest down so far George couldn’t tell if it had been a man or a woman. The sound of clicking teeth echoed between the buildings.
A dead thing over by the Geology building was wearing a campus security uniform. It was missing an arm. It raised the arm it did have at George, as if it could grab him from across the plaza.
The court looked old. Weeds pushed up between the bricks. The small trees were withered and brown. Dark stains dotted the whole area, along with a few pieces of sun-dried garbage that looked like dead animals, but not enough to hide what they’d really been. The few windows around the court that weren’t shattered had more streaks of grime.
Part of him, some animal, instinctive part, told him to run. Just run. That part shrieked in time with his pulsing headache. The corpses were still spread out wide enough to dodge. But he wasn’t sure where to go. Back to the maintenance office? Back to his car?
And another part of him wanted to fight. Something told him these things weren’t a threat. Not to him, anyway. Buried right down next to the instinct to run was a certainty the dead things couldn’t hurt him.
Running still won out.
George ran a dozen feet and the throbbing pain in his skull made his eyes water. He made it a few
