The puckered flesh ached a bit as I huddled back under the covers, determined to get back to sleep and
not
to dream. Not to remember. It had been years since I’d been able to recall so many details about that night, and I certainly didn’t want to dredge up any more. My mind had buried those memories for a reason, and they should
stay
buried.
Just like corpses should stay in the ground.
CHAPTER 1
My cell rang at ten till six. Jess was talking before I could even say hello.
“So what are you wearing, the dress or the butt jeans?” she asked, sounding nearly as breathless as I felt.
This was it: the first night of the rest of my life, the beginning of my social ascension at Carol High School. Pom squad tryouts were a couple of weeks away, but it looked like I was going to be accepted into the ranks of the trendy and gorgeous even before I was issued my official Cougar Pride dance team uniform.
I’d scored a date with the hottest guy in school over a Bunsen burner in junior chem. I was a year ahead and Mr. Hottie a year behind, but it was clearly fate—and not smarts or a lack thereof—that had made us lab partners.
“The dress,” I said, taking one final spin in front of my mirror. “The one with the yellow and brown flowers.”
“Yellow and brown? I thought they were red.”
“Nope. Remember, it’s the one we got at—”
“Take a picture and send it to my e-mail,” she said. “The stepmonster is still borrowing my phone until hers is fixed, but I’m online and—”
The doorbell rang and I did my best to stifle a squeal of excitement. “He’s here!” Josh Pickle—lame last name, but trust me, he’s studly enough to pull it off—was really here to pick
me
, Megan Berry, only marginally cool sophomore, up for a date!
“Okay, go! But IM as soon as you get home. I want to hear everything!”
“Will do. Bye,” I said, already halfway to the front door. I had to get there before my parents. Dad was wearing his weird “who flung poo?” monkey pajama pants and could not be allowed to interact with
anyone
. Therefore, I could not afford to play it cool and make my senior sex god wait at least a few seconds so it didn’t seem like I’d raced to the door like a total loser.
But whatever—Josh had to know I was into him. It wasn’t like I was very good at hiding my feelings where he was concerned, and he’d still asked me out.
“Right. Deep breath,” I whispered, my biggest smile on my face before I’d even opened the door. “Hey, give me just a sec and—”
Oh. My. God. There was a dead person on my porch.
Again.
My flesh crawled and my stomach threatened a second showing of the seven-layer salad we’d had for dinner.
“Mom!” I screamed, barely able to force out the word through the massive, softball-size lump in my throat. I slammed the door in the guy’s face and fumbled with the lock, doing my best not to hyperventilate.
This could not be happening! Josh was supposed to be ringing my doorbell, not some dead guy.
It
was
a guy, right?
I opened the door just a crack. Yep. Definitely a dude. The shoulder-length hair had thrown me for a second. The fact that his face was half covered in grave dirt—eww!—didn’t help things either. At least he hadn’t decomposed . . . much. He must have been a fairly recent member of the Unsettled.
“What is it, Megan? Dad and I were right in the middle of—oh my God!” Mom spied the dead guy and jumped about a foot in the air, then turned and raced back into the kitchen. She emerged seconds later with a bunch of newspapers and began spreading them on the floor near the front door.
Déjà vu hit like a ton of bricks. It was suddenly as if the past five years hadn’t happened, as if I hadn’t been zombie free and normal long enough to be lulled into thinking that my freedom was permanent. Even with the creepy dreams I’d been having lately, I’d never thought my powers were coming back. After the attack, my entire family had assumed I was done with Settling the Dead.
But the guy on the porch, the newspaper on the floor to catch the dirt . . . God, it was so horribly familiar I expected to look down and find myself wearing the Hello Kitty pajamas I so loved when I was ten.
“Invite him in, Megan. I’ll go get the record book. I’m sure I stuck it somewhere in the walk-in.” My mom brushed her long brown hair out of her eyes and shot me an excited smile. She was
excited
about this!
Excited
that I was once again one of the freakiest kids in the South.
“No way, Mom. Josh could be here any second. I’m not going to do this tonight!” Or any night if I had my say about it, but there was no need to go there just yet. I knew my mom considered our family’s legacy as Settlers of the Dead something wonderful, a vital paranormal service to those recently troubled in death and blah, blah, blah.
“Megan Amanda Berry. You invite that boy in. Now. That is a person out there, a person in need of your help, and—”
“I know it’s a person, Mom, but it’s a dead person. His life is already over. Mine doesn’t have to be.”
“Megan—”
“Seriously, my life
will
be over if Josh shows up for our first date and sees a corpse in the entryway.” I used my most reasonable tone and willed her with wide brown eyes to take pity on me in my moment of desperation. I mean, couldn’t she understand the position I was in? Everyone felt sorry for the kid in
The Sixth Sense
, and he was the only one who could see the dead people. Creepy, yes, but at least he didn’t have to worry about a zombie tailing him to softball practice and scaring half the population of Carol, Arkansas.
“Well, then, you’d better hurry and take his statement before Josh gets here.” She disappeared into the kitchen, no doubt on her way to her and Dad’s room to look for the Book of Unsettled Records. I’d thought I was done with that thing after what happened, after that night—
Even with the humid air streaming into the house, I shivered. I didn’t want to think about that night. Not now. Not ever. The dreams were bad enough—I didn’t have to torture myself while I was awake.
I turned back to the zombie, eying him up and down. He seemed normal enough—for a zombie. He didn’t drool or lunge at my throat. He just stood there, looking a little spaced out, the way most Unsettled did until you gave them the cue to start spilling their guts.
I motioned him inside with a resigned sigh, being careful not to let him touch me as I shuffled around to close the door. It wouldn’t matter how hot I looked if I smelled like a decomposing corpse.
The musty, slightly rotted smell of the Unsettled was hell to get out of clothing, and there was no way I was ruining the outfit that had taken me two hours to pick out. The white strappy sundress with brown and yellow flowers was retro without being too prissy. It picked up the goldish swirls in my brown eyes and looked great with my end-of-summer tan.
Over the summer I had finally outgrown the last of my awkward stage and looked good in clothes, even though I still had barely enough up top to fill out the built-in bra of my dress. My mother’s fault. We look scarily alike, and she’s always been super thin, with a not-quite-B cup.
“Hey, Meggy, heard you had a visitor.” Dad popped his head out from the doorway to the kitchen but didn’t come any closer. He still wasn’t completely cool with the zombie stuff, even though he’d been married to Mom for twenty-three years, the first eight of which she’d been on active Settling duty. Her zombie-summoning power had started to fade when her offspring—that would be me—started showing signs of power.
Dead people started showing up on my porch when I turned five. Dead kids, to be specific. Settlers usually attract people of around the same age, something to do with the quality of our Settler vibes that I never really understood.
“Yeah. What a great surprise, right?” I smiled at Dad, trying to act like this wasn’t freaking me out as much as it was. The dead guy grunted and shuffled on the papers, but his eyes remained fixed somewhere in the distance. I guess he could tell I wasn’t talking to him yet. Normal zombies are fairly perceptive that way and far more mannerly than your average
Walking Dead
movie would have you believe.
“Your mom said this might happen, you know, as you got older and started to . . . develop.” Dad looked like he’d just swallowed expired milk. I didn’t know what was bothering him more, the zombie or discussing my hormones. Mom had warned me almost a year ago when I’d started my period that hormonal fluctuations sometimes enhanced Settler skills.
As if T-zone breakouts and cramps from hell weren’t enough.
“Right. Did she find the book yet?” I asked, ready for a subject change.
“Not yet, but you know how things are in the Closet,” Dad said.
The way we say
closet
in our house makes it clear the
c
is capitalized. The Closet is great and fearsome and full of more crap than any three-person family should own, let alone try to squeeze into a four-by-six-foot space. I nearly killed myself trying to sneak a peek at my Christmas presents when I was twelve and hadn’t been in there since.
“Crap.” I checked my watch. Less than ten minutes to arrival if Josh was on time. “Dad, could you just grab me that notepad Mom uses for the grocery lists? I’ll write the stuff down there and transfer the info later.”
“Is that SOP?”
Dad’s retired air force and believes there’s an SOP—standard operating procedure—for everything.
“No, but neither is letting someone outside the family see an out-of-grave phenomenon.”
He nodded at the wisdom of that statement. “I’ll grab you something to write with and then help your mom look. Be back in two minutes.” He practically ran from the room, obviously not wanting Josh to see the zombie in our foyer any more than I did. Before I was born, a neighbor caught on to what was happening at the Berry house. My mom and dad had been forced to move halfway across the country from sunny California to Sticksville, Arkansas.
That
would
happen before I was born, so I couldn’t even have the cool factor of saying I was born in Cali despite the fact both of my parents grew up there. Luckily my dad had been able to transfer to an air base in Arkansas last time, but I could tell he worried where we might be sent if we were discovered again. Settlers’ Affairs doesn’t mess around when it comes to being discovered. If you break cover, they decide how fast you run and how far.
Apparently Dad didn’t want to find out if we’d be relocating to Outer Mongolia if my movie date met up with my zombie date. He was back in a flash with pen and paper. “I’ll go check on your mother. If you hurry, you can have this guy out the back before I dig her out of the Closet.”
“But she gets pissed if I let them walk through the house,” I said, though something other than violating Mom’s house rules was bothering me. I hadn’t done this in so long. What if I forgot something?
“I’ll vacuum after you leave for your date.” Dad smiled and disappeared, and I couldn’t help but smile back. For a man who had been adamantly opposed to letting his not-quite-sixteen-year-old go out with a senior, he was being incredibly cool.
Right! Screw doing things the Settler way. I had to get this guy out of here and get on with my real life.
Taking a deep breath, I turned back to the dearly departed. Hopefully, I still remembered how this was supposed to go.
“Welcome to your after-death session. My name is Megan. May I have your name, last name first?” The words rolled off my tongue with the same practiced ease they had years ago. And here I’d thought I suppressed all that zombie stuff.
“Anderson, William.” His eyes focused in on me and I could see they had once been quite a nice shade of blue. Nearly as nice as the grin he flashed as the human part of him came online. Even with the dirt in his teeth, you could tell that smile had broken a few hearts when he was alive. “Hey, nice to meet you.”
“Nice to meet you, too.” I felt that familiar flash of sadness that always came with dealing with kids my own age who had already met their end. Settlers were a fairly spiritual group, and I’d been raised to believe these troubled souls would be going to a better place after they got their earthly business off their chests . . . but still, it was sad, especially with people so young.