My Zombie Girlfriend

Chapter 8

After school Zane headed to the locker room like usual, a knot in his stomach. He hoped Ross and the other guys on the team weren't too mad at him and that the whole thing from lunch had blown over. When he arrived in the locker room, however, no one was there, not even Coach Thompson.

Was he late? A glance at the clock told him he was actually a little early. In that case... Zane slid over toward Coach Thompson's darkened office. He peered inside at the floor. Not a trace of blood. He didn't know why he was even checking. It was all a hallucination, a product of a drug-addled brain.

"What are you looking at?" came Wilson's voice behind him.

Zane jumped and turned around, his heart racing. "Nothing," he said.

"Yeah, looks like Coach is still MIA." Wilson headed over to the lockers and pulled out his practice uniform. "I wasn't sure you'd even be here."

"Why?" Zane asked, then remembered. "Oh, yeah, the thing at lunch."

"I can't believe you were at Levi Marsh's house and you didn't tell me," Wilson said. "Seriously."

"I didn't know that was where this... zombie thing... started. And we were literally there for two minutes. Harmony went in and got drugs, and I barely remember the rest of the night."

"Whoa. Good shit, huh? What kind of drugs are we talking about? Coke? Meth? Heroine?" When Zane didn't answer immediately, Wilson added, "LSD? Peyote? Quaaludes?"

"Uh, no," Zane said. "She called them bath salts."

"Shit, man, bath salts? Haven't you heard about that stuff?" Wilson reeled with his pants still around his knees. "Shit. It probably isn't zombies at all, then. Bath salts. Fuck!"

"So, you've heard of..."

"Yeah, dude! Don't you ever go on YouTube? Haven't you ever heard of the internet? Jesus! Bath salts! That shit fucks you up."

"What are you all wound up about?" Ross asked, walking in. Mason and Dylan or Tyler were close behind him.

"Shit, man, Zane here was telling me they were all doing bath salts up at Levi Marsh's house."

"Bath salts!" Ross said. "You mean that stuff that makes people go cannibal?"

Suddenly Zane knew that his minor transgressions at lunch time had been forgotten. Everyone seemed to have a story about something they'd seen on the news about bath salts, or some video on YouTube.

"I heard that some guy attacked a homeless dude and chewed his face off," said Mason. "The cops had to shoot him like eight times before he went down."

"There was another guy who was eating himself," said Dylan or Tyler. "When the cops came in, he threw pieces of his own intestines at them."

"And you took this stuff?"

All eyes turned to Zane.

"What was it like?"

Zane described how he'd blacked out and woken up in the locker room. "The lights were flickering, and I could barely stand up, then I saw Harmony eating off Coach Thompson's face." He laughed to show how ridiculous this was, but the sound quickly died off when he took in his teammates' expressions.

"Shit, I knew it!" Ross yelled, jabbing a finger in the air. "Harmony's a freaking zombie!"

"Oh, come on," Zane said, "I was completely high. Don't you think someone would have noticed a dead body in the locker room? I checked his office, there's no trace of blood on the floor or anything. I was hallucinating, guys."

The guys had crowded around Coach Thompson's office and were peering in at the floor.

"So that's what you were doing," Wilson said quietly. He had managed to get his pants on all the way by this time.

"It felt so real... but it couldn't have been. I mean, there would have been traces of it. And I left Harmony there. I don't think a zombie would have cleaned up after herself."

"You have a point." Wilson nodded. "Guys, it's totally illogical. Someone would have found his body. There would have been blood and carnage everywhere. So either zombies now clean up their murder scenes, or it didn't happen."

"I guess," said Ross, visibly disappointed.

The locker room door slammed, and everyone turned to see Mr. Goodman, one of the gym teachers, standing there. "What are you ladies doing?"

"Nothing, sir," Ross answered.

Mr. Goodman pressed his lips together and managed to give the entire football team the stink eye.

"I'll ask again. Why aren't you ladies in uniform and on the field?"

They all looked at each other. "Because Coach Thompson isn't here?" Wilson said.

"Damn right he isn't here. I'm here. And I'll be running this piss-poor excuse for a football team until Thompson gets his head out of his ass and shows up for work." Mr. Goodman put the whistle around his neck between his lips and blew a short burst. "Now get moving! I expect everyone out on the field in two minutes."

Zane sped to his locker and started ripping off his clothes along with everyone else. It was a roiling mass of elbows and feet and clothes flying. In the midst of it all, Mr. Goodman hollered, "What in God's name is this?"

He stood before the white board with his hands on his hips.

"Nothing, sir!" Ross said, attempting to turn the board around to the other side, as Wilson jumped in to attempt to wipe out the diagram of the fire extinguisher bomb and the stick figures with the X's on the heads. "In Coach's absence I got a little creative in our training. That's all."

"Listen up, ladies. I spent ten years in the military, and eight of those years I was a drill sergeant. I've dealt with more than pansy asses than I care to count, and if I can make those pansy asses acceptable to Uncle Sam, I can turn you pansy asses into a halfway decent football team. Coach Thompson's been on a losing streak since 2003, and I plan to change that. So no more art class during practice, got it?"

"Yes, sir," said Ross and Wilson in unison.

"I believe two minutes is up!"