Fat Girl with a Knife
-1-
Dahlia had a pretty name, but she knew she wasn’t pretty.
Kind of a thing with the girls in her family. None of the Allgood girls were making magazine covers.
Her oldest sister, Rose, was one of those college teacher types. Tall, thin, meatless, kind of gray-looking, with too much nose, no chin at all, and eyes that looked perpetually disappointed. She taught art history, so there was that. No one she taught would ever get a job in that field. There probably weren’t jobs in that field. When was there ever a want-ad for art historian?
The sister between Rose and her was named Violet. She was the family rebel. Skinny because that’s what drugs do; but not skinny in any way that made her look good. Best thing you could say about how she looked was that she looked dangerous. Skinny like a knife blade. Cold as one too. And her moods and actions tended to leave blood on the walls. Her track record with “choices” left her parents bleeding year after year. Violet was in Detroit now. Out of rehab again. No one expected it to stick.
Then there was the little one, Jasmine. She kept trying to get people to call her Jazz, but no one did. Jasmine was a red-haired bowling ball with crazy teeth. It would be cute except that Jasmine wasn’t nice. She wasn’t charming. She was a little monster and she liked being a little monster. People didn’t let her be around their pets.
That left Dahlia.
Her.
Pretty name. She liked her name. She liked being herself. She liked who she was. She had a good mind. She had good thoughts. She understood the books she read and had insight into the music she downloaded. She didn’t have many friends, but the ones she had knew they could trust her. And she wasn’t mean-spirited, though there were people who could make a compelling counterargument. A lot of her problems, Dahlia knew, were the end results of the universe being a total bitch.
Dahlia always thought that she deserved the whole package. A great name. A nice face. At least a decent body. A name like Dahlia should be carried around on good legs or have some good boobs as conversation pieces. That would be fair. That would be nice.
Failing that, good skin would be cool.
Or great hair. You can get a lot of mileage out of great hair.
Anything would have been acceptable. Dahlia figured she didn’t actually need much. The weight was bad enough; the complexion was insult to injury. But an eating disorder? Seriously? Why go there? Why make it that much harder to get through life? Just a little freaking courtesy from the powers that be. Let the gods of social interaction cut her some kind of break.
But … no.
Dahlia Allgood was, as so many kids had gone to great lengths to point out to her over the years, all bad. At least from the outside.
No amount of time in the gym—at school or the one her parents set up in the garage—seemed able to shake the extra weight from her body. She was fat. She wasn’t big boned. She wasn’t a “solidly built girl,” as her aunt Flora often said. It wasn’t baby fat, and she knew she probably wouldn’t grow out of it. She’d have to be fifteen feet tall to smooth it all out. She wasn’t. Though at five-eight, she was a good height for punching loud-mouth jerks of both sexes. She’d always been fat, and kids have always been kids. Faces had been punched. Faces would be punched. That’s how it was.
But, yeah, she was fat and she knew it.
She hated it. She cried oceans about it. She yelled at God about it.
But she accepted it.
Dahlia also knew that there was precedent in her family for this being a lifelong thing. She had three aunts who collectively looked like the defensive line of the Green Bay Packers. Aunt Ivy was the biggest. Six feet tall, three hundred pounds. Dahlia suspected Ivy had thrown some punches of her own in her day. Ivy wasn’t one to take anything from anyone.
Mom was no Sally Stick Figure either. She was always on one of those celebrity diets. Last year it was the Celery and Carrot Diet, and all she did was fart and turn orange. Before that it was a Cottage Cheese Diet that packed on twenty extra pounds. Apparently the “eat all you want” part of the pitch wasn’t exactly true. This year it was the Salmon Diet. Dahlia figured that it was only a matter of time before Mom grew gills and began swimming upstream to spawn.
Well, maybe that would have happened if the world hadn’t ended.
-2-
It did. The world ended.
On a Friday.
Not her mom growing gills, but the world ending? Yeah.
Somehow it didn’t surprise Dahlia Allgood that the world would end on a Friday. What better way to screw up the weekend?
-3-
Like most important things in the world, Dahlia wasn’t paying that much attention to it. To the world. To current events.
She was planning revenge.
Again.
It wasn’t an obsession with her, but she had some frequent flyer miles. If people didn’t push her, she wouldn’t even think about pushing back.
She was fat and unattractive. That wasn’t up for debate, and she couldn’t change a few thousand years of developing standards for beauty. On the other hand, neither of those facts made it okay for anyone to mess with her.
That’s what people didn’t seem to get.
Maybe someone sent a mass text that it was okay to say things about her weight. Or stick pictures of pork products on her locker. Or make oink-oink noises when she was puffing her way around the track in gym. If so, she didn’t get that text and she did not approve of the message.
Screw that.
It’s not that she was one of the mean girls. Dahlia suspected the mean girls were the ones who hated themselves the most. And Dahlia didn’t even hate herself. She liked herself. She liked her mind. She liked her taste in music and books and boys and things that mattered. She didn’t laugh when people tripped. She didn’t take it as a personal win when someone else—someone thinner or prettier—hit an emotional wall. Dahlia knew she had her faults, but being a heartless or vindictive jerk wasn’t part of that.
Revenge was a different thing. That wasn’t being vindictive. It was—as she once read in an old novel—a thirst for justice. Dahlia wanted to be either a lawyer or a cop, so that whole justice thing was cool with her.
Justice—or, let’s call it by the right name, revenge—had to be managed, though. You had to understand your own limits and be real with your own level of cool. Dahlia spent enough time in her head to know who she was. And wasn’t.
So, when someone did something to her, she didn’t try to swap cool insults, or posture with attitude, or any of that. Instead, she got even.
When Marcy Van Der Meer—and, side note, Dahlia didn’t think anyone in an urban high school should have a last name with three separate words—sent her those pictures last month? Yeah, she took action. The pictures had apparently been taken in the hall that time Dahlia dropped her books. The worst of them was taken from directly behind her as she bent over to pick them up. Can we say butt crack?
The picture went out to a whole lot of kids. To pretty much everyone who thought they mattered. Or everyone Marcy thought mattered. Everyone who would laugh.
Dahlia had spent half an hour crying in the bathroom. Big, noisy, blubbering sobs. Nose-runny sobs, the kind that blow snot bubbles. The kind that hurt your chest. The kind that she knew, with absolute clarity, were going to leave a mark on her forever. Even if she never saw Marcy again after school, even if Dahlia somehow became thin and gorgeous, she was never going to lose the memory of how it felt to cry like that. Knowing that while she cried made it all a lot worse.
Then she washed her face and brushed her mouse-colored hair and plotted her revenge.
Dahlia swiped Marcy’s car keys during second period. She slipped them back into her bag before last bell. Marcy could never prove that it was Dahlia who smeared dog poop all over her leather seats and packed it like cement into the air-conditioning vents. Who could prove that the bundle of it she left duct-taped to the engine had been her doing? No one could be put under oath to say they saw Dahlia anywhere near the car. And besides, the keys were in Marcy’s purse when she went to look for them, right?
Okay, sure, it was petty. And childish. And maybe criminal. All of that.
Did it feel good afterward?
Dahlia wasn’t sure how she felt about it. She thought it was just, but she didn’t spend a lot of time actually gloating. Except maybe a couple of days later when somebody wrote “Marcy Van Der Poop” on her locker with a Sharpie. That hadn’t been Dahlia, and she had no idea who’d done it. That? Yeah, she spent a lot of happy hours chuckling over that. It didn’t take away the memory of that time crying in the bathroom, but it made it easier to carry it around.
It was that kind of war.
Like when Chuck Bellamy talked his brain-deprived minion, Dault, into running up behind her and pulling down the top of her sundress. Or, tried to, anyway. Dahlia was a big girl, but she had small boobs. She could risk wearing a sundress on a hot day with no bra. Chuck and Dault saw that as a challenge. They thought she was an easy target.
They underestimated Dahlia.
Dahlia heard Dault’s big feet slapping on the ground and turned just as he reached for the top hem of her dress.
Funny thing about those jujutsu lessons. She’d only taken them for one summer, but there was some useful stuff. And fingers are like breadsticks if you twist them the right way.
Dault had to go to the nurse and then the hospital for splints, and he dimed Chuck pretty thoroughly. Both of them got suspended. There was some talk about filing sexual harassment charges, but Dahlia said she’d pass if it was only this one time. She was making eye contact with Chuck when she said that. Although Chuck was a mouth-breathing Neanderthal, he understood the implications of being on a sexual predator watch list.
Dahlia never wore a sundress to school again. It was a defeat even though she’d won the round. The thought of how it would feel to be exposed like that … Everyone had a cell phone; every cell phone had a camera. One photo would kill her, and she knew it. So, she took her small victory and let them win that war.
So, it was like that.
But over time, had anyone actually been paying attention and keeping score, they’d have realized that there were very few repeat offenders.
Sadly, a lot of kids seem to have “insult the fat girl” on their bucket list. It’s right there, just above “insult the ugly girl.” So they kept at it.
And she kept getting her revenge.
Today it was going to be Tucker Anderson’s car. Dahlia had filched one of her dad’s knives. Dad had a lot of knives. It probably wasn’t because he was surrounded by so many large, fierce women, but Dahlia couldn’t rule it out. Dad liked to hunt. Every once in a while, he’d take off so he could kill something. Over the last five years he’d killed five deer, all of them females. Dahlia tried not to read anything into that.
She did wish her dad would have tried to be a little cooler about it. When they watched The Walking Dead together, Dahlia asked him if he ever considered using a crossbow, like that cute redneck, Daryl. Dad said no. He’d never even touched a crossbow. He said guns were easier. Ah well.
The knife she took was a Buck hunting knife with a bone handle and a four-inch blade. The kind of knife that would get her expelled and maybe arrested if anyone found it. She kept it hidden, and in a few minutes, she planned to slip out to the parking lot and slash all four of Tucker’s tires. Why? He’d Photoshopped her face onto a bunch of downloaded porn of really fat women having ugly kinds of sex. Bizarre stuff that Dahlia, who considered herself open-minded and worldly, couldn’t quite grasp. And then he glued them to the outside of the first-floor girl’s bathroom.
Tucker didn’t get caught because guys like Tucker don’t get caught. Word got around, though. Tucker was tight with Chuck, Dault, and Marcy. This was the latest battle in the war. Her enemies were persistent and effortlessly cruel. Dahlia was clever and careful.
Then, as we know, the world ended.
-4-
Here’s how it happened as far as Dahlia was concerned.
She didn’t watch the news that morning, hadn’t read the papers—because who reads newspapers?—and hadn’t cruised the top stories on Twitter. The first she knew about anything going wrong was when good old Marcy Van Der Poop came screaming into the girls’ room.
Dahlia was in a stall and she tensed. Not because Marcy was screaming—girls scream all the time; they have the lungs for it, so why not?—but because it was an inconvenient time. Dahlia hated using the bathroom for anything more elaborate than taking a pee. Last night’s Taco Thursday at the Allgood house was messing with that agenda in some pretty horrific ways. Dahlia had waited until the middle of a class period to slip out and visit the most remote girls’ room in the entire school for just this purpose.
But in came Marcy, screaming her head off.
Dahlia jammed her hand against the stall door to make sure it would stay shut.
She waited for the scream to turn into a laugh. Or to break off and be part of some phone call. Or for it to be anything except what it was.
Marcy kept screaming, though.
Until she stopped.
Suddenly.
With a big in-gulp of air.
Dahlia leaned forward to listen. There was only a crack between the door and frame, and she could see a sliver of Marcy as she leaned over the sink.
Was she throwing up?
Washing her face?
What the hell was she doing?
Then she saw Marcy’s shoulders rise and fall. Very fast. The way someone will when …
That’s when she heard the sobs.
Long. Deep. Badly broken sobs.
The kind of sobs Dahlia was way too familiar with.
Out there, on the other side of that sliver, Marcy Van Der Meer’s knees buckled and she slid down to the floor. To the floor of the girls’ bathroom. A public bathroom.
Marcy curled herself into a hitching, twitching, spasming ball.
She pulled herself all the way under the bank of dirty sinks.
Sobbing.
Crying like some broken thing.
Dahlia, despite everything, felt something in her own eyes. On her cheeks.
She tried to be shocked at the presence of tears.
Marcy was the hateful witch. If she wasn’t messing with Dahlia directly, then she was getting her friends and minions to do it. She was the subject of a thousand of Dahlia’s fantasies about vehicular manslaughter, about STDs that transformed her into a mottled crone, about being eaten by rats.
Marcy the hag.
Huddled on the filthy floor, her head buried down, arms wrapped around her body, knees drawn up. Her pretty red blouse streaked with dirt. Crying so deeply that it made almost no sound. Crying the way people do when the sobs hurt like punches.
Dahlia sat there. Frozen. Kind of stunned, really. Marcy?
Marcy was way too self-conscious to be like that.
Ever.
Unless … What could have happened to her to put Marcy here, on that floor, in that condition? Until now Dahlia wouldn’t have bet Marcy had enough of a genuine human soul to be this hurt.
The bathroom was filled with the girl’s pain.
Dahlia knew that what she had to do was nothing. She needed to sit there and finish her business and pretend that she wasn’t here at all. She needed to keep that stall door locked. She needed to not even breathe very loud. That’s what she needed to do.
Absolutely.
-5-
It’s not what she did, though. Because, when it was all said and done, she was Dahlia Allgood.
And Dahlia Allgood wasn’t a monster.
-6-
She finished in the toilet. Got dressed. Stood up. Leaned her forehead against the cold metal of the stall door for a long ten seconds. Reached back and flushed. Then she opened the door.
Turning that lock took more courage than anything she’d ever done. She wasn’t at all sure why she did it. She pulled the door in, stepped out. Stood there. The sound of the flushing toilet was loud, and she waited through the cycle until there was silence.
Marcy Van Der Meer lay in the same position. Her body trembled with those deep sobs. If she heard the flush, or cared about it, she gave no sign at all.
Dahlia went over to the left-hand bank of sinks, the ones furthest from Marcy. The ones closer to the door. She washed her hands, cutting looks in the mirror at the girl. Waiting for her to look up. To say something. To go back to being Marcy. It was so much easier to despise someone if they stayed shallow and hateful.
But …
“Hey,” said Dahlia. Her throat was phlegmy, and her voice broke on the word. She coughed to clear it, then tried again. “Hey. Um … hey, are you … y’know … okay?”
Marcy did not move, did not react. She didn’t even seem to have heard.
“Marcy—?”
Nothing. Dahlia stood there, feeling the weight of indecision. The exit door was right there. Marcy hadn’t looked up; she had no idea who was in the bathroom. She’d never know if Dahlia left. That was the easy decision. Just go. Step out of whatever drama Marcy was wrapped up in. Let the little snot sort it out for herself. Dahlia didn’t have to do anything or say anything. This wasn’t hers to handle. Marcy hadn’t even asked for help.
Just go.
On the other hand …
Dahlia chewed her lip. Marcy looked bad. Soaked and dirty now, small and helpless.
She wanted to walk away. She wanted to sneer at her. Maybe give her a nice solid kick in her skinny little ass. She wanted to use this moment of alone time to lay into her and tell her what a total piece of crap she was.
That’s what Dahlia truly wanted to do.
She stood there. The overhead lights threw her shadow across the floor. A big pear shape. Too small up top, too big everywhere else. Weird hair. Thick arms, thicker legs. A shadow of a girl who would never—ever—get looked at the way this weeping girl would. And it occurred to Dahlia that if the circumstances were reversed, Marcy would see it as an open door and a formal invite to unload her cruelty guns. No … she’d have reacted to this opportunity as if it was a moral imperative. There wouldn’t be any internal debate over what to do. That path would be swept clear and lighted with torches.
Sure. That was true.
But part of what made Dahlia not one of them—the overgrown single-cell organisms pretending to be the cute kids at school—was the fact that she wasn’t wired the same way. Not outside, God knows, but not inside either. Dahlia was Dahlia. Different species altogether.
She took a step. Away from the door.
“Marcy …” she said, softening her voice. “Are you okay? What happened?”
The girl stopped trembling.
Just like that. She froze.
Yeah, thought Dahlia, you heard me that time.
She wanted to roll her eyes at the coming drama, but there was no one around who mattered to see it.
Dahlia tried to imagine what the agenda would be. First Marcy would be vulnerable because of whatever brought her in here. Break-up with Mason, her studly boyfriend du jour. Something like that. There would be some pseudo in-the-moment girl talk about how rotten boys are, blah-blah-blah. As if they both knew, as if they both had the same kinds of problems. Dahlia would help her up and there would be shared tissues, or handfuls of toilet paper. Anything to wipe Marcy’s nose and blot her eyes. That would transition onto her clothes, which were wet and stained. Somehow Dahlia—the rescuer—would have to make useful suggestions for how to clean the clothes, or maybe volunteer to go to Marcy’s car or locker for a clean sweater. Then, as soon as Marcy felt solid ground under her feet again, she would clamp her popular girl cool in place and, by doing that, distance herself from Dahlia. After it was all over, Marcy would either play the role of the queen who occasionally gave a secret nod of marginal acceptance to the peasant who helped her. Or the whole thing would spin around, and Marcy would be ten times more vicious just to prove to Dahlia that she had never—ever—been vulnerable. It was some version of that kind of script.
Marcy still, at this point, had not turned. Dahlia could still get the heck out of there.
But … she had reacted. She’d stopped sobbing. She was listening.
Ah, crap, thought Dahlia, knowing she was trapped inside the drama now. Moving forward was inevitable. It was like being on a conveyor belt heading to the checkout scanner.
“Marcy?” she said again. “Are you hurt? Can I … like … help in some way?”
An awkward line, awkwardly delivered.
Marcy did not move. Her body remained absolutely still. At first that was normal. People freeze when they realize someone else is there, or when they need to decide how to react. But that lasts a second or two.
This was lasting too long. It wasn’t normal anymore. Getting less normal with each second that peeled itself off the clock and dropped onto that dirty bathroom floor.
Dahlia took another step closer. And another. That was when she began to notice that there were other things that weren’t normal.
The dirt on Marcy’s red blouse was wrong somehow.
The blouse wasn’t just stained. It was torn. Ripped. Ragged in places.
And the red color was wrong. It was darker in some places. One shade of dark red where it had soaked up water from the floor. A different and much darker shade of red around the right shoulder and sleeve.
Much, much darker.
A thick, glistening dark red that looked like …
“Marcy—?”
Marcy Van Der Meer’s body suddenly began to tremble again. To shudder. To convulse.
That’s when Dahlia knew that something was a lot more wrong than boyfriend problems.
Marcy’s arms and legs abruptly began thrashing and whipping around, striking the row of sinks, hammering on the floor, banging off the pipes. Marcy’s head snapped from side to side and she uttered a long, low, juddery, inarticulate moan of mingled pain and—
And what?
Dahlia almost ran away.
Almost.
Instead, she grabbed Marcy’s shoulders and pulled her away from the sinks, dragged her to the middle of the floor. Marcy was a tiny thing, a hundred pounds. Dahlia was strong. Size gives you some advantages. Dahlia turned Marcy over onto her back, terrified that this was an epileptic seizure. She had nothing to put between the girl’s teeth to keep her from biting her tongue. Instead, she dug into the purse she wore slung over her shoulder. Found Dad’s knife, removed the blade and shoved it back into the bag, took the heavy leather sheath and pried Marcy’s clenched teeth apart. Marcy snapped and seemed to be trying to bite her, but it was the seizure. Dahlia forced the sheath between her teeth and those perfect pearly whites bit deep into the hand-tooled leather.
The seizure went on and on. It locked Marcy’s muscles and at the same time made her thrash. It had to be pulling muscles, maybe tearing some. Marcy’s skirt rode high on her thighs, exposing pink underwear. Embarrassed for them both, Dahlia tugged the skirt down, smoothed it. Then she gathered Marcy to her, wrapped her arms around Marcy’s, pulled the soaked and convulsing enemy to her, and held her there. Protected. As safe as the moment allowed, waiting for the storm to pass.
All the while she looked at the dark stains on Marcy’s shoulder. At the ragged red of her shirt. At the skin that was exposed by the torn material.
There was a cut there and she bent closer to look.
No. Not a cut.
A bite.
She looked down at Marcy. Her eyes had rolled up high and white and there was no expression at all on her rigid face. Those teeth kept biting into the leather. What was this? Was it epilepsy at all? Or was it something else? There were no rattlesnakes or poisonous anythings around as far as Dahlia knew. What else could give a bite that might make someone sick? A rabid dog? She wracked her brain for what she knew of rabies. Was that something that happened fast? She didn’t think so. Maybe this was unrelated to the bite. An allergic reaction. Something.
The spasms stopped suddenly. Bang, just like that.
Marcy Van Der Meer went totally limp in Dahlia’s arms, her arms and legs sprawled out. Like she suddenly passed out. Like she was …
“Marcy?” asked Dahlia.
She craned her neck to look at Marcy’s face.
The eyes were still rolled back, the facial muscles slack now, mouth hanging open. The leather sheath slid out from between her teeth, dark with spit.
Except that it wasn’t spit.
Not really.
The pale deerskin leather of the knife sheath was stained with something that glistened almost purple in the glare of the bathroom fluorescents.
“Marcy?” Dahlia repeated, shaking her a little. “Come on now, this isn’t funny.”
It wasn’t. Nor was Marcy making a joke. Dahlia knew it.
It took a whole lot of courage for Dahlia to press her fingers into the side of Marcy’s throat. Probably the toughest thing she’d ever had to do. They taught how to do it in health class. How to take a pulse.
She checked. She tried to listen with her fingers.
Nothing.
She moved her fingers, pressed deeper.
Nothing.
Then.
Something.
A pulse.
Maybe a pulse.
Something.
There it was again.
Not a pulse.
A twitch.
“Thank God,” said Dahlia, and she realized with absolute clarity that she was relieved that Marcy wasn’t dead. Dahlia fished around for the actual pulse. That would have been better, more reassuring.
Felt another twitch. Not in the throat this time. Marcy’s right hand jumped. Right hand. Then, a moment later, her left leg kicked out.
“No,” said Dahlia, fearing a fresh wave of convulsions.
The twitches kept up. Left hand. Left arm. Hip buck. Both feet. Random, though. Not intense. Not with the kind of raw power that had wracked Marcy a few minutes ago.
It was then that Dahlia realized that this whole time she could have been calling for help. Should have been calling. She shifted to lay Marcy on the floor, then dug into her purse to find her cell. It was there, right under the knife. Directly under it. The knife Dahlia forgot she’d put unsheathed into the bag.
“Ow!” she cried, and whipped her hand out, trailing drops of blood. Dahlia gaped at the two-inch slice along the side of her hand. Not deep, but bloody. And it hurt like hell. Blood welled from it and ran down her wrist, dropped to the floor, spattered on Marcy’s already bloodstained blouse.
She opened the bag, removed the knife, set it on the floor next to her, found some tissues, found the phone, punched 911 and tucked the phone between cheek and shoulder, pressing the tissues to the cut.
The phone rang.
And rang. And, strangely, kept ringing. Dahlia frowned. Shouldn’t the police answer 911 calls pretty quickly? Six rings? Seven? Eight?
“Come on!” she growled.
The phone kept ringing.
No one ever answered.
Dahlia finally lowered her phone, punched the button to end the call. Chewed her lip for a moment, trying to decide who to call next.
She called her mom.
The phone rang.
And rang. And went to voicemail.
She tried her aunt Ivy. Same thing. She tried her dad. His line rang twice, and the call was answered.
Or—the call went through. But no one actually said anything. Not Dad, not anyone. After two rings Dahlia heard an open line and some noise. Sounds that she couldn’t quite make sense of.
“Dad?” she asked, then repeated it with more urgency. “Dad? Dad?”
The sounds on the other end of the call were weird. Messy sounding. Like a dog burying its muzzle in a big bowl of Alpo.
But Dad never answered that call.
That’s when Dahlia started to really get scared.
That was the point—after all those failed calls, after that bizarre, noisy, not-a-real-answer call—that she realized that something was wrong. A lot more wrong than Marcy Van Der Poop having a bad day.
She turned to look at Marcy.
Marcy, as it happened, had just turned to look at her.
Marcy’s eyes were no longer rolled up in their sockets. She looked right at Dahlia. And then Marcy smiled.
Though, even in the moment, even shocked and scared, Dahlia knew that this wasn’t a smile. The lips pulled back, there was a lot of teeth, but there was no happiness in that smile. There wasn’t even the usual mean spite. There was nothing.
Just like in the eyes.
There …
… was …
… nothing.
That’s when Dahlia really got scared.
That’s when Marcy suddenly sat up, reached for her with hands that no longer twitched, and tried to bite Dahlia’s face off.
-7-
Marcy let out a scream like a panther. High and shrill and ear-shattering.
She flung herself at Dahlia and suddenly the little princess was all fingernails and snapping teeth and surprising strength. The two girls fell back onto the wet floor. Dahlia screamed, too. Really loud. A big, long wail of total surprise and horror.
Teeth snapped together with a porcelain clack an inch from her throat. Marcy bore her down and began climbing on top of her, moving weirdly, moving more like an animal than a girl. She was far stronger than Dahlia would have imagined, but it wasn’t some kind of superpower. No, Marcy was simply going totally nuts on her, throwing everything she had into attacking. Being insane.
Being …
Dahlia had no word for it. All she could do or think about was not dying.
The teeth snapped again and Dahlia twisted away, but it was so close that for a moment she and the crazy girl were cheek to cheek.
“Stop it!” screamed Dahlia, shoving at Marcy with all her strength.
Marcy flipped up and over and thudded hard onto the concrete floor. She lay there, stunned for a moment.
Dahlia was stunned too. She’d never really used her full strength before either. Never had to. Not even in jujutsu or field hockey or any of the other things she’d tried as part of a failed fitness and weight loss program. She’d never tried to really push it to the limit before. Why would she?
But now.
Marcy had gone flying like she was made of crêpe paper.
Dahlia stared for a second. She said, “Hunh.”
Marcy stared back. She hissed.
And flung herself at Dahlia as if falling hard on the ground didn’t matter.
Dahlia punched her.
In the face.
In that prom-girl face.
Hard.
Really damn hard.
Dahlia wasn’t sure what was going to happen. She didn’t think it through. She was way too scared for anything as orderly as that. She just hauled off and hit.
Knuckles met expensive nose job.
Nose collapsed.
Marcy’s head rocked back on her neck.
She went flying backward. Landed hard. Again.
Dahlia scrambled to her feet and in doing so kicked something that went skittering across the floor.
The knife.
She looked at it. Marcy, with her smashed nose and vacant eyes, looked at it.
With another mountain lion scream, Marcy scrambled onto hands and feet and launched herself at Dahlia. For a long half-second Dahlia contemplated grabbing that knife; it was right there. But this was Marcy. Crazy, sure, maybe on something, and certainly no kind of friend. Still Marcy, though. Dahlia had known her since second grade. Hated her since then, but that didn’t make this a grab-a-knife-and-stab-her moment.
Did it?
Marcy slammed into her, but Dahlia was ready for it. She stepped into the rush and hip-checked the little blonde.
Marcy hit Dahlia. And Marcy rebounded. As if she’d hit a wall.
Any time before that moment, such a clash, such a demonstration of body weight and mass, would have crushed Dahlia. It would have meant a whole night of crying in her room and eating ice cream and writing hate letters to herself in her diary.
That was a moment ago. That was maybe yesterday. This morning.
Now, though, things were different.
Marcy hit the edge of a sink and fell. But it didn’t stop her. She got back to her feet as if pain didn’t matter. She rushed forward again.
So, Dahlia punched her again.
This time she put her whole heart and soul into it. Along with her entire body.
The impact was huge.
Marcy’s head stopped right at the end of that punch. Her body kept going, though, and it looked like someone had pulled a rug out from under her feet. They flew into the air and Marcy flipped backward and down.
Which is when a bad, bad moment got worse.
Marcy landed on the back of her head.
The sound was awful. A big, dropped-cantaloupe splat of a sound. The kind of sound that can never ever be something good.
Red splashed outward from the back of Marcy’s head. Her body flopped onto the ground, arms and legs wide, clothes going the wrong way, eyes wide.
And Marcy Van Der Meer did not move again.
Not then. And, Dahlia knew with sudden and total horror, not ever again.
She stood there, wide-legged, panting like she’d run up three flights of stairs, eyes bugging out, mouth agape, fist still clenched. Right there on the floor, still close enough to bend down and touch, was a dead person. A murdered person.
Right there was her victim.
Her lips mouthed a few words. Maybe curses, maybe prayers. Maybe nonsense. Didn’t matter. Nothing she could say was going to hit the reset button. Marcy was dead. Her brains were leaking out of her skull. Her blood was mixing with the dirty water on the bathroom floor.
Dahlia was frozen into the moment, as if she and Marcy were figures in a digital photo. In a strange way she could actually see this image. It was framed and hung on the wall of her mind.
This is when my life ended, she thought. Not just Marcy’s. Hers too.
She was thinking that, and the words kept replaying in her head, when she heard the screams from outside.
-8-
For a wild, irrational moment Dahlia thought someone had seen her kill Marcy and that’s what they were screaming about.
The moment passed.
The screams were too loud. And there were too many of them.
Plus, it wasn’t just girl screams. There were guys screaming too.
Dahlia tore herself out of the framed image of that moment and stepped back into the real world. There were no windows in the girls’ room, so she tottered over to the door, her feet unsteady beneath her. The ground seemed to tilt and rock.
At the door she paused, listened. Definitely screams.
In the hallway.
She took a breath and opened the door.
The bathroom was on the basement level. This part of the school was usually empty during class. Just the bathroom, the janitor’s office, the boiler room, and the gym.
She only opened the door a crack, just enough to peer out.
Dault was out there, and she froze.
Dault was running, and he was screaming.
There were three other kids chasing him. Freshmen, Dahlia thought, but she didn’t know their names. They howled as they chased Dault. Howled like wildcats. Howled like Marcy had done.
Dault’s screams were different. Normal human screams, but completely filled with panic. He ran past the bathroom door with the three freshmen right behind him. The group of them passed another group. Two kids—Joe Something and Tammy Something. Tenth graders. They were on their hands and knees on either side of one of Marcy’s friends. Kim.
Kim lay sprawled like Marcy was sprawled. All wide-open and still.
While Joe and Tammy bent over her and …
Dahlia’s mind absolutely refused to finish the thought.
What Joe and Tammy were doing was obvious. All that blood, the torn skin and clothes. But it was impossible. This wasn’t TV. This wasn’t a monster movie.
This was real life, and it was right now, and this could not be happening.
Tammy was burying her face in Kim’s stomach and shook her head the way a dog will. When tearing at …
No, no, no, no …
“No!” Dahlia’s thoughts bubbled out as words. “No!”
She kept saying it.
Quiet at first.
Then loud.
Then way too loud.
Joe and Tammy stopped doing what they were doing and they both looked across the hall at the girls’ bathroom door. At her. They bared their bloody teeth and snarled. Their eyes were empty, but there was hate and hunger in those snarls.
Suddenly Joe and Tammy were not kneeling. They leaped to their feet and came howling across the hall toward the bathroom door. Dahlia screamed and threw her weight against it, slamming it shut. There were two solid thuds from outside and the hardwood shook with what had to have been a bone-breaking impact. No cries of pain, though.
Then the pounding of fists. Hammering, hammering. And those snarls.
Far down the hall, Dault was yelling for help, begging for someone to help him. No one seemed to.
Dahlia kept herself pressed against the door. There were no locks on the bathroom doors. There were no other exits. Behind her on the floor were three things. A dead girl who had been every bit as fierce as the two attacking the door. A cell phone that had seemed to try to tell her that something was wrong with the world.
And the knife.
Dad’s knife.
Just lying there.
Almost within reach.
She looked at it as the door shuddered and shuddered. She thought about what was happening. People acting crazy. People—go on, she told herself, say it—eating people. Marcy had been bitten. Marcy had gone into some kind of shock and seemed to stop breathing. No. She had stopped breathing. Then Marcy had opened her eyes and gone all bitey.
As much as Dahlia knew this was insane and impossible, she knew there was a name for what was happening. Not a name that belonged to TV and movies and games anymore. A name that was right here. Close enough to bite her.
She looked down at Marcy as if the corpse could confirm it. And … maybe it did. Nothing Dahlia had done to the girl had worked. Not until she made her fall down and smash her skull. Not until Marcy’s brain had been damaged.
All of those facts tumbled together like puzzle pieces that were trying to force themselves into a picture. A picture that had that name.
Began with a z.
“Aim for the head,” whispered Dahlia, and her voice was thick with tears. “Oh God, oh God, oh God.”
Tammy and Joe kept slamming into the door. The knife was still there. Very good blade. And Dahlia was very strong. She knew how to put her weight into a punch. Or a stab.
“… God …”
When she realized that she had to let go of the door to grab the knife, it changed something inside of her. She waited until the next bang on the door, waited for them to pull back to hit it again, then she let go and dove for the knife, scooped it up as the door slammed inward, spun, met their charge.
Tammy, smaller and faster, came first.
Dahlia kicked her in the stomach. Not a good kick, but solid. Tammy jerked to a stop and bent forward. Dahlia swung the knife as hard as she could and buried the point in the top of the girl’s skull. In that spot where babies’ skulls are soft. The blade went in with a wet crunch. Tammy dropped as quickly and suddenly as if Dahlia had thrown a switch. One minute zombie, next minute dead.
That left Joe.
A freshman boy. Average for his age. As tall as Dahlia.
Not quite in her weight class.
She tore the knife free, grabbed him by the shirt with her other hand, swung him around into the sinks, forced him down and … stab. She put some real mass into it.
Joe died.
Dahlia staggered back and let him slide to the floor.
Outside she heard Dault screaming as he ran in and out of rooms, through openings in the accordion walls, trying to shake the pack of pursuers.
Dahlia caught a glimpse of her own face in the row of mirrors. Fat girl with crazy hair and bloodstains on her clothes. Fat girl with wild eyes.
Fat girl with a knife.
Despite everything—despite the insanity of it, the horror of it, the knowledge that things were all going to slide down the toilet in her world—Dahlia Allgood smiled at herself.
Then she lumbered over to the door, tore it open, and yelled to Dault.
“Over here!”
He saw her and almost stopped. She was bloody, she had that knife. “W-what—?”
“Get in here,” said Dahlia raising the blade. “I’ll protect you.”
Yeah.
She was smiling as she said that.
This story was written at the request of George R. Romero, the writer-director of Night of the Living Dead, and the godfather of the entire modern zombie genre. George was a friend and colleague, and we co-edited an anthology, Nights of the Living Dead (St. Martins, 2017), which was released just five days before he passed. George had asked me to take a character from Fall of Night and bring him into the world of his landmark 1968 movie, and this is that story.