Zombies! Episode 3 - Love Bites by Ivan Turner Page B

up on its other end and go
to the States.
     
    It didn't last long. Apparently, as the
favorite son of some very rich parents, Arrick was not prepared for
the rigors of hoofing it cross country. The planning of his trip
was flawed and things began to go awry almost immediately. He'd
barely made it out of New England when his parents all but ordered
him to come home. When he'd stubbornly refused, they cut him off
financially. His father said that he wasn't going to throw good
money over the ocean so his idiot son could waste it. From there it
was a work Visa, some education, citizenship, and eventually
teaching. Without his parents' money, the adjustment to the new
country had become that much more severe. He didn't love the U.S.
He didn't hate it but it didn't draw him the way it did others. At
first, he'd stayed purely out of stubbornness. His father
continuously ordered him home while his mother just got on the
phone and begged. So he'd dug in his heels and made a life for
himself.
     
    Even still, it never really seemed permanent
until his father had died. That had been almost ten years before.
It had been summer when it happened and the memory of the phone
call was as vivid as it ever had been. He could relive it day to
day if he liked.
     
    "John?" his brother, Malcolm, had said
through a staticky phone line. "I'm with mother."
     
    Already that sent up warning bells. "What's
wrong?"
     
    "Dad took ill a few days back. He didn't make
it."
     
    "Didn't make it? You mean he's dead?"
     
    "You've got to come home, John. Can you come
home?"
     
    Arrick remembered thinking that it was all a
hoax. He remembered his doubt and, most of all, he remembered his
anger at his parents having dragged Malcolm into the whole thing.
Of course, he'd spent more money than he'd had on a plane ticket
the next day and arrived home to find that it was no hoax. His
father had really died and he would never see him again. There
would be no way to make amends for having left and never coming
back. After the funeral and the subsequent sorting of affairs, he'd
stayed with his mother for almost six months. He'd helped her
through the grief long after Malcolm had grown tired of the circus
and returned to England where he made his home. And then one
morning, as he stared out at the beautiful mountains of Scotland,
he realized that he didn't think of that country as home anymore.
Though the life he'd built in the United States seemed thin by New
York standards, it was his life. He missed it and wanted to go
back. After another month of helping his mother prepare herself for
life alone, he boarded a plane and returned to the United States
and New York City and teaching English.
     
    So three weeks after the confirmation of the
existence of zombies, life was beginning to return to normal.
Arrick had stuck around, fearful of the things he heard on the news
yet perceiving it in a way that one perceives the news of
catastrophe in another nation on the far side of the world. There
was no evidence of it in his day to day life except the
disappearances of so many panicked people. So he went to work and
bought his groceries miles away at the one store that was open. And
he did whatever it was he had to do until the everyday returned in
full force. With the reemergence of the paranoid into society,
shops began to open and buses and trains began to run on schedule.
Class schedules were put right and Arrick began running his regular
lessons again. Even Shawn Rudd came back to school, which was odd
because Shawn's truancy presumably had had nothing to do with a
fear of zombies. He'd gone missing a full week before the news
broke. The guidance department had sent a note out to Shawn's
teachers two days later simply stating that they were aware of his
absence and that it would continue indefinitely. With a hundred and
fifty other students to worry about, Arrick had simply shrugged his
shoulders and thrown the note away. Shawn was a decent student and
a likeable enough