Passing Strange by Daniel Waters Page B

made Katy giggle.
    “She loves you,” Mom said when Dad had disappeared down the hall with his warm bundle. She’d looked almost proud when she’d kissed Kaitlyn, as if she were proving something not only to me and Dad, but to herself.
    “I love her,” I said. “She’s…” I paused. I was about to say, “She’s the only good thing that came out of my dying,” but I checked myself, not knowing how Mom would react. I made the pause seem like a typical zombie pause rather than one of self-censorship.
    “A great kid.”
    Mom nodded and went back to her book. When Dad came out of Katy’s room twenty minutes later, I wished them both good night and went downstairs into my cave, a big smile on my face.
    But it wasn’t all healing, psychic and otherwise, that was taking place at the DeSonne household. I’d Tivo’d the Guttridge footage and must have watched it a thousand times over the course of the holiday season. I was searching for clues, of course, and clues began to appear.
    Not only were “the zombies’” walks all wrong, but the carpets they were carrying didn’t look like they had bodies in them. They didn’t bulge enough and there didn’t seem to be enough weight on the “zombies” shoulders. And then another weird thing I noticed: In one brief clip, two “zombies” were facing each other at either end of the carpet they were carrying across the Guttridge’s back lawn. Other clips of the house showed the front steps and a sliding door that led to a high deck, which meant that there were multiple cameras and the footage had been edited together.
    One day my father came into the living room while I was watching the footage.
    “Something bothers me about those clips,” he said.
    I tried to be nonchalant, even though I’d just paused the screen on the most distinct image of Fake Tak, who was much wider across the shoulders and chest than real Tak, who is tall and lanky. Fake Tak looked like a football player. Fake Tak looked like Pete Martinsburg.
    “Oh, really?”
    “Yeah. I’ve watched it a few times now. The whole time I was thinking, those look like movie zombies, really low-budget movie zombies. And they’re built like men, not kids. Except for maybe that guy you’ve frozen on.”
    Sometimes I really wanted to hug my Dad. I probably should have hugged him then; I don’t even think he would have minded. But you never know. “Yeah, you’re right,” I said.
    “There’s a story out now that Guttridge was under investigation by the IRS.”
    “Oh?” Like I said, my Dad was a Reagan-era punk. It makes him more attuned to the idea of governmental conspiracy and cover-up. “I hadn’t heard that.”
    “And then there’s the evidence having gone missing. Very strange, in light of there being a newly formed unit of the FBI to deal specifically with crimes involving zombies.”
    “The Undead Crimes Unit,” I said, and then I told him about having met agents Alholowicz and Gray in Undead Studies class. It was just like every cop show you’ve ever seen, with Iceman Gray acting all bad-coppy while his overweight partner, Alholowicz, shirttails flapping out of his suit-from-Sears pants, did his best to be all buddy-buddy. They came in to grill us about stuff that happened at the Winford cemetery, and they already thought Takayuki was responsible for that crime and probably a dozen others. I went all dumb blonde and asked them if Takayuki was the chicken you could get on sticks at Sakura in the mall food court.
    They were less than pleased with me.
    Dad slipped a couple gears when I told him about the grilling. At first he was a little miffed that I hadn’t told him about it before, but we haven’t really had the sort of relationship where I come home and blather on about my school day. He never asked, and I never offered. I never told him about the Undead Studies class, even. I just went. I think for us dead kids, parental permission was sort of optional anyhow; there was a space for a