A/N I have had a craving for some Halloween fun! I'm thinking about doing this one shot as a cure to my writers block and as a little Halloween treat. If you've ever read Zombies vs. Unicorns you know where I got this from. I've eerily obsessed with both creatures lately. It's just a rewritten version of the short story Cold Hands by Cassandra Clare. BT-Dubbs this I not an OC story. It's staring that Annie chick off of Big Time Beach Party. And it's an AU story…but you could have guessed that. But anyway here's a Big Time Rush edition of the zombie story Cold Hands. ENJOY! *Inserts evil laughter here*
Disclaimer: I do not own neither Big Time Rush, nor Zombies vs. Unicorns. I do own my rendition though
*~Cold Hands~*
James was the boy that I was going to marry. I was sure of it. I loved him more than I loved anything else in this world. We were seven when we met. He was seventeen when he died. You might think this was the end of our story, but it wasn't. Death is never the end of anything, not in Zombie Wood.
Zombie Wood is what other people call it, of course. Those who live here call it by its real name, Lych Wood. In my opinion it might as well be known as Zombie Wood. In Old English, "lych" means "corpse". James told me that it means our town is one that's always been touched by death, but it hasn't always been like this. Lych Wood used to be a nice place to live. Palm trees always standing at attention along the streets. Nice houses, hotels, and manors, all orderly lined up down the boulevard. Beautiful flowers outside the window panes of every house soaking in the warm sun that would cast over the town every day, no matter the season. The Duke's palace at the north end of town, with Sunny Hill rising up behind it. Then, one day in the early morning, while everyone was just waking up, getting the morning paper, making coffee, and listening to the Duke's morning address, Sunny Hill came to life. The dirty slid off the graves like an old skin. The earth peeled back and all of the dead came out, blinking in the sun like newborn puppies. They limped and shuffled and crawled their ways out. They turned their eye sockets toward the path that leads into town. And then they began to walk.
It was the fourth of July- one of our town's biggest festival days. All of the streets were strung with lights, the sky filled with fireworks set off by the kids from the middle school. James and I were in one of the older parts of the city, and James was buying flowers from a dead woman.
Her name was Sandy. She ran the little flower stand down the street from the palace, and she sold the best flowers in the town. I know that you think it weird that a dead person could own a flower stall. Well, she didn't technically own it. The dead don't have property rights. But ever since the morning the Curse struck, and the dead had been coming back alive, the city council has been struggling to figure out what to do with all the zombies. They're pretty quiet- they don't say much- but if you can't get a zombie to go back to its grave within the first week or so when it comes back, they tend to stay forever. So they hang around the town, sitting and staring, cluttering up the streets. It's much better to give them jobs like street cleaning, trash collecting. Flower selling.
James handed me a single pink rose, one of my favorites. Probably because it reminds me of his lips. I watch as he takes out a coin, stamped with his uncle Gustavo's face, to pay Sandy. The bones of her fingers clicked and clacked together as she took the money.
He turns back to me, his hazel eyes searching. "You like the flower?"
That was one of the things I loved about James. No matter how long we had been together, no matter how many times he'd given me gifts, or I'd given to him –even though I could never match what he could afford- or even how he sometimes came off as being self centered, and narcissistic he always worried about whether I would like something or not. He always wanted to please people.
I nodded, and he relaxed, starting to smile that thousand watt smile that had all of the girls at his feet. He slid his wallet back into his pocket. That was when the car came screeching around the corner. James saw it; his eyes widened and he shoved me back, toward the sidewalk; I fell, and scrambled up just in time to see the car crash into him, and watch it speed away with its tires squealing.
Sandy, the zombie, was going crazy, making those weird noises they do, and shuffling around knocking flowers from her cart. Leaving torn petal pieces littering the street. People had started coming by the bunch, but I hardly noticed them. I was running towards James. James, who was lying there partly in the road, but not quite all the way. His legs were bent at unnatural angles. I still thought he might be alright –broken legs are survivable- until I pulled his head into my lap. He looked at me with those eyes and then opened his mouth to talk, but instead of words, blood started to bubble out of his mouth.
I never knew what his last words were.
Sandy screamed and screamed when he died. It was like she had never seen anyone die before.
It was James who had told me the truth about the Curse. Everyone knew it had started over a hundred years ago, with the dead coming back. We all knew it had something to do with a sorceress in Lych Wood. She had summoned up the dead, but had never been able to put them back. What he had told me was that she was a member of the Duke's -of James's- family and that the dead man that she summoned up cursed her and cursed the town too…for good measure.
That's why the curse sticks to everyone who lives in Lych Wood like monster glue. Even if we move away from the town, our dead follow us. They belong to us. They come after the ones they knew when they were alive. Their living friends and family. They want to be with them, the dead. That's why no other town will have us. That's why we can't ever leave.
I don't remember much of what happened after James died. I know there were the flashing lights of the police cars and EMTs, and other people who were trying to pry him out of my arms. I wouldn't let him go. What was the point? He was dead anyways. There was nothing they could do for him. It was ten minutes of the officers trying to convince me to let go when one of James's friends came over to me. Carlos. He knelt next to me and looked at me with wide sad eyes. He had put his hand on my shoulder.
"Let him go. There's nothing you can do to save him…just let him go." He whispers to me. I look at him through glassy eyes. The first tear makes it was out of my eye, and for once I wish this was a movie and that, that single tear could bring him back to life. I swallow a large lump in my throat and look away. A white limousine pulls up next to the curb. We'd ridden in that limousine plenty of times, James's friends and I. Sometimes we'd go to events at the palace, or sometimes even from school, watching our town go by from the tinted windows.
The door opened and the Duke himself got out. James's uncle, who had married his mother after his father had been murdered. He'd known me since I was nine, and he had known the guys even longer. He'd been at my sixteenth birthday party. He'd given me a teddy bear, an awfully strange thing to give me, as though I was still a little girl. He had brown eyes, not hazel like James's, and weirdly doll like. He often wore a pair of large sunglasses. James had said it was because the responsibilities of being Duke tired him out, but I never liked him. He was a big man, and had a loud voice. I looked forward to the time when James turned eighteen and became Duke and we never had to see his uncle again.
Now, Duke Gustavo looked through me like I wasn't even there. "Take the boy away from her," he says to anyone who can hear. Logan, another one of James's friends, comes over and looks down at me, the girl, sitting in the street, holding her now dead boyfriend.
"We tried. She won't let him go." Logan murmurs.
"Take him," Says Gustavo. "Break her arms if you have to."
He walked back to his limo without looking at me again.
It was the guys who had finally decided on taking me home. Logan stays in the front seat driving his mom's car with Kendall and Carlos in the back seat with me. Both of them were trying to comfort me with quiet words and sweet lies. Just what they knew I need to hear. I bet my dad's dreams of his daughter marrying the next Duke were leaking away. Leaking away just as James's crimson blood had leaked into the gutter at the side of the road.
"It was just an accident," Kendall says rubbing the side of my arm in an attempt to soothe me. Pink petals fell to the floor from off my skin. "Just an accident. At least it was fast, and he didn't suffer."
"It wasn't an accident," I said coldly. I could tell that the guys were upset that I hadn't been crying. It had hit all of us especially hard, and each of the guys had their share of tears for the night. "He was murdered. Gustavo had him murdered so that he wouldn't turn eighteen."
Logan jerked the wheel so hard that we almost ran into the curb and off the road. He whirled around in his seat, his normally pale skin paper white. "Never say that again. Do you understand Annie? Never say that to anyone. If you do…"
He left the sentence in the air, but we all knew what he meant.
Murders don't happen often in Zombie Wood. The punishment is always death. It's always a hanging or a shooting in the town square. Everyone comes to watch. Some people bring picnics. Large baskets filled with cold sandwiches and hot sodas, and sweet pie. They all cheer when the Duke gives the order for the execution to begin. After that, the priest brings the deceased body of the guilty up to Sunny Hill for burning, and the air turns thick with black smoke and gray ash.
It's the only way though. There are stories of them coming back. Doors being ripped off their hinges, whole families slaughtered, judges dragged out into the street by vengeful corpses as a sick sort of revenge.
Murder isn't the only thing that can get you hung though. Stealing from the Duke will do it. Even slandering someone from the Duke's family are all punishable by death.
The Duke came to my house the next day. The doctor had come earlier and had given me some medicine that made me feel like my head was separated from my body and was floating away. I couldn't move from my spot on my bed. Everywhere I looked around me were the large wooden picture frames that I had been collecting for a while now. Frames filled with pictures of James and I. One of us in first grade, another of us years later at the beach, and us hand in hand on a hanging day. James with his beautiful brown hair. The hair that he had always made sure to take extra care of. That and his 'face'. A small smile takes place on my face. James looking down at me with his brilliantly bright hazel eyes and wide white grin from everywhere, while the Duke and James's mom speak to my parents with sad words.
I knew that they were stunned…even though James and I had been together for so long and everyone knew we were to get married someday, and by law he had to marry a commoner. They were still struck speechless at the idea of actually welcoming the Duke into their home. They easily agreed when he told them that I couldn't come to the funeral. "It's just for family," he says. "unfortunately, and the ceremony is very elaborate. We're concerned it'll be too much for Annie to handle.
I heard my father making soothing noises down the hall. And as I sit there in my bed I wish that I could be dead too.
Not everybody that dies comes back. Sometimes they come back to right a wrong. Sometimes they come back to reveal a secret that no one else knows, or to tell a family member where a treasure is buried. And sometimes they just can't bear to be dead. If you love someone, you are not supposed to want them to come back. Better a peaceful life in the earth than the life of a zombie- not really dead, but not alive either. You're supposed to pray for a quiet death for your loved ones, for dark oblivion in the earth. But I couldn't bring myself to pray for that for James. I wanted him back- no matter what.
The funeral was the next day, and true to the Duke's words I wasn't allowed to attend. Instead I stayed home and watched out my window as the mourners head to Sunny Hill for his funeral. Sometime after the funeral had begun, Kendall, Logan, and Carlos had shown up at my house. He must have been serious when he meant real family. Everyone knows how the four of them were pretty much brothers. I go down the stairs and open the door for them and I let them into the living room. We all sat in a still silence looking anywhere but each other. I had focused on the drab gray walls that everyone's house had taken on since the Curse had fallen on our town.
Carlos was the first to break the silence. "Maybe he'll come back." All of us turn our attention to him. "I don't think he would just stay there...without some type of fight." He says. All of us look at the ground simultaneously
"Maybe he'll look the same too." Logan chimes in. The Dead's skin turn pale as ashes once they come back reanimated. "All those years of tanning have to be worth something." He says with a slight smile.
"Yeah, and he wouldn't miss his chance at becoming a prince." Kendall adds.
"He always said how he would have made a great prince…" I say. I sigh and look up at the guys. "Do you really think that he'll come back? Or are you just hoping?" I ask.
"I'm not even sure Annie. I think it's a little bit of both. I feel like he's definitely going to come back, but there's this sliver of doubt that he may not." Kendall says truthfully. I nod and look out the window as one of the mourners walks up the path of Sunny Hill and slips. It was raining outside and the pathway was probably slick with mud. But they deserved it. For being allowed to attend the funeral while we were shut out. The speakers on the street played the funeral for all of us not there to hear. The priest said a few words and solemn music played throughout the streets.
I heard Duke Gustavo telling the priest to lower the coffin. I slammed the window, hard, before any of us could hear the sound of dirt clumps hitting wood.
James didn't come back the next day. Or the next. I waited by the window listening for the shuffle of feet on the stones outside the door. Or for the sound of his dead hand knocking on my front door. The graveyard whisper of his voice.
But he didn't come.
It can take the dead some time to return, I reminded myself. They wake up inside the coffin, disoriented and confused. They don't remember dying, most of them. They don't know where they are. Back in the old days they used to bury people with a rope inside the coffin that was attached to a bell aboveground. When the dead rose they could ring the bell and the graveyard keeper would come and re bury them with salt in their coffin. That was before they started burying the dead in mausoleums, the way they do now, stacked one on top another with the most recently dead keeping the other ones down.
At night, sometimes, I think of them one on top of each other whispering down to each other through the dirt and bones.
A week after James had died I had gotten delusional. I knew that ghosts didn't exist, but he was everywhere. When I was buying CD's in the music store, and I went to the listening stands to hear the music, I heard his voice. When I went to the supermarket the music on the speakers was him saying my name. When I passed the window of the electronics store, the images on the screens were of his face. I heard him in the hiss of the fire, the dead static of the telephone, the breath of the wind. As I hurried home, the street corner speakers crackled to life, saying that the murderer of the Duke's nephew had been found, and was to be put to death on the next Hanging Day. I froze for a moment, just staring up at Sunny Hill.
And I knew exactly what I needed to do.
I got up at midnight that night and put on all black. Black pants, and a shirt, my hair tied back, black shoes that wouldn't make a sound as I made my way up the path to the cemetery. I stole my father's power drill, a shovel, and a pair of gardening gloves. The moon was the only light as I walked between the graves, which were clothed in a cool sheen of mist. First I went past the graves of the poor. Marked only by concrete slabs. Those lanes gave way to the wide, paved roads of the areas where the richer families were buried. Here each family had a mausoleum, marked over the door with the name and with some stone angels kneeling on each side.
The Duke's was by far the biggest. It towered over the rest in white marble and wrought iron, with names of all the royal family carved down the sides. There were still visible remnants of the funeral that had been held that week –flower petals strewn all up and down the path leading to the mausoleum's front door, and glittering grains of salt from the burial ceremony, scattered like mica in the dirt. I put my hand on the latch of the iron door and it swing open. Inside, the crypt was silent but not dark: There was an electric light in the ceiling that gave enough light for me to see that there was a small chapel inside., with marble benches, and either wall was lined with vaults, like the inside of a bank's safe-deposit room. There were marble floors too. I stood by the slab that had James's name on it and wedged the narrow end of the shovel in the space between the slab and the next stone. I push on it with all my strength until it started to move. It gave way with a piercing sound so harsh that it made my ears sing with pain. My shoulders were aching when the slab slowly inched up. I shoved, hard, and it slid to the side, revealing a dark hole beneath.
In the hole lay the coffin. I dropped the shovel, and knelt. The coffin was bound in brass, heavy and elegant-looking. I took my father's power drill and turned it on.
The screws came out of the coffin hinges easily, as if they were never tightened. Once I had them all out, and had pushed the lid back, I realized why.
I set the power drill down and stared. Tears burned in my eyes.
The inside walls of the coffin were made of brass, etched all over with prayer words meant to seal the bonds of death. The coffin itself was full of salt; James lay amid the salt like a body wash up on a beach, surrounded by sand. There were huge circles sunk in the side of the coffin at his hands and feet, they were connected by thick chains to manacles around James's wrists and ankles. I imagined him waking up in his coffin, struggling against the manacles that held him, choking on the salt in his mouth. I had never seen anything so cruel.
"James," I whispered.
He opened his eyes. His skin was paler. Not as ash gray as most of the dead, but definitely paler. His hazel eyes now the black color that the eyes of the newly dead often turn. He wore a white shirt and black pants and the big heavy emblem of the ducal name around his neck on a chain. He could have died an hour ago. His gaze fastened on me where I knelt over him with the power drill in my hands.
He smiled.
"I knew you'd come for me, Annie," he said.
We sat on the steps of the mausoleum and looked out over the town. There were lights down in the streets, and bright illumination in the center of town where they were setting up the stage for tomorrow's Hanging Day.
"I woke up in the coffin," he said. "It must have been days ago. I yanked and pulled at the manacles, but all that happened was this." He showed me his ragged wrists. There were wounds braceleting them, torn but not bloody. The wounds of the dead never heal, but they never bleed either. I had seared the metal of the manacles with the drill until they'd come apart and fallen away. I was wincing as I did it, terrified I would hurt him even though I knew I couldn't.
"Your uncle did this," I said. "He didn't want you coming back to accuse him."
"He must have planned for this for a long time. Had the coffin made. The manacles they put in. paid the marker to be silent. Hired a man to run me down." James was looking toward the town. Toward the brightly illuminated gallows. "They're hanging him tomorrow, aren't they?"
I nodded. "They're calling him a drunk driver. Your death was an accident, but he still has to die for it."
"It wasn't his fault," said James distantly. "No one says no to the Duke." He turned to look at me. "If it weren't for you, I'd still be in that coffin."
I looked at him. He was still the same James, his beautiful face hardly changed at all. But something behind his eyes had gone away, something indefinable and strange. I said, "What's it like?"
"What's what like?"
"Being dead."
He reached up and put his palm to my cheek. His hand was cold, so cold, but I leaned into it anyway, fitting the curve of my cheekbone to his palm as I had so many times before. "When I woke up, I could hear everything." His black eyes reflected the lights of the town like mirrors. "I could hear the guys crying, my mom…" he pauses. "I could hear you. I could hear your heart beating. But I couldn't sleep in my grave without you."
"James…" I swallowed. "In the morning they'll know what happened. That I dug you up. We have to get out of here- run away. Maybe we can go to the city-"
"No one runs away from Lych Wood." he tilted his head to the side slowly. "Where can we go? In any other town, when they look at me, they'll see a walking corpse. They'll chase us away with pitchforks and torches."
"Then what can we do?" I looked at him. I wondered when the black had eaten the hazel in his eyes. Had it been gradual, or had it happened all at once?
"I want you to come with me," he said. "To Hanging Day, tomorrow."
"James–" I was horrified. "You uncle will be there. If he sees you, he'll know what I did. That I got you out. I'll go to jail."
"No, you won't." he sounded completely confident.
"You can't be sure of that."
"Annie." He turned to me. "Do you trust me?"
I hesitated. He was James, still. I had always trusted him. Even if his skin was the faded color of an old book now, and his eyes were black instead of hazel, and smelled of cold stone and fresh dirt. "Yes."
"I won't let anything happen to you. Not while I–"
He hesitated. I knew he had been going to say while I'm alive. It was something he'd always said.
"Not while I'm here," he finished. He reached to take my hands. He wrapped them around mine. His were like twigs carved out of ice.
"After that can we run away?" I said. "Hide somewhere, where they'll never find us?"
He leaned forward and touched his lips to mine. His were cold and tasted of salt.
"Whatever you want," he said.
Hanging Day began early, with crowds gathering in the square by nine in the morning. I had brought James some of his old clothes that he'd left at my house– a graphic shirt and jeans would be much less likely to stir up notice than his somber funeral gear.
We stood at the outskirts of the crowd, in the shadow of one of the taller buildings. James kept his head down, his hair hiding his face. the return of the Duke's nephew form the dead would have been an event newsworthy enough to take the attention off Hanging Day, or even bring it to an end completely. He was totally silent, watching the stage, the scaffold, and the lectern where his uncle would stand. When he was alive, I could always read his face, but now I couldn't imagine what he was thinking.
Slowly the town square filed up with people. Teenagers in laughing groups, parents with their children on their shoulders, young couples carrying picnic baskets. And as I stood there with James, I saw something I had never really noticed before. I had always been close in to the festivities in the center of the square. But now as I stood outside everything, I saw that there were zombies here, clinging to the shadows, folding themselves into the darkness at the edges of the crowd. The stood with their black eyes fixed on the scaffold, their hands hanging empty at their sides.
It would have never crossed my mind that zombies enjoy a Hanging Day just like everyone else. But of course, we had been trained to ignore the undead. Not to see them when they were there. They were like trash lying in the gutters; you looked up and away, trying to concentrate on more pleasant things.
A shout went up from the crowd, and I looked to see what they were shouting about. The Duke's stretch limousine was sliding through the crowd like a shark through shallow water. The people in the crowd began shouting and waving. Behind the limo drove a police wagon with barred windows. I felt James, beside me, grow as stiff as a plank of wood.
The Duke's car drew up to the stage, and he helped from the black limousine by his attendants. The crowd was surging; I could see only bits and pieces of what was going on– the policemen opening the back of the wagon, yanking out a terrified-looking man who was handcuffed and gagged. He struggled and kicked as they dragged him up the steps to the scaffold, where the executioner stood, all in black.
The Duke took his place at the lectern. He looked out over the crowd, smiling, as a few feet away the murderer was forced to stand over the square trapdoor cut in the stage's floor.
"Greetings, good Folk of Lych Wood," the Duke said, and a roar went up from the crowd.
James hand tightened on mine. Suddenly he was moving, pulling me after him forward through the crowd. I tried to dig my heels in, but his grip was as hard as iron.
"Today we stand as one, united in our desire for justice," the Duke went on. "A terrible crime has taken place. The murder of my beloved nephew–"
His voice was drowned out by the crowd yelling. They were yelling James's name. None of them noticed that James was there among them, stepping on their toes and jostling their elbows as he dragged me closer to the stage. He was just some scruffy zombie pushing though the crowd.
As we make our way to the front I catch sight of Logan. We make eye contact and he mouth's "Who is that?" I shake my head and look away. He'll know soon enough.
"-The punishment for which, as I am sure you know, is death by hanging-"
We were nearly at the stage now. The Duke's amplified voice was deafening my ears.
"-And burning, the ashes to be scattered on Sunny Hill-"
There was a police line around the stage, blocking the crowd from getting too close to the steps. As we neared it, an officer threw out his arm as if to stop us. It was Carlos's dad. James came to a halt, still holding my hand, and looked full in Officer Garcia's face.
He lowered his arm slowly, looking astonished. "James?"
"-And if any among the crowd has an objection, or evidence of his man's innocence, bring them forth now!"
The Gustavo's voice rang out like a bell. He was required to say these words; the crowd could always come forth and speak up for the prisoner; no one ever did.
Except now. James raised his head and in his slow, dead voice, said loudly:
"I speak for the prisoner."
The Duke looked stunned. "Who was that? Who spoke?"
"It was me, Uncle." James took a step forward and Officer Garcia stepped out of the way, but another police officer blocked him. James gave him a stern look. "Don't you know who I am?"
"Y-yes, the man stuttered. "But-" You're dead. I could see he wanted to say it, but he didn't. Instead he stood aside and let James ascend the lectern. The crowd was screaming, watching James as he made his slow and steady way to the stage.
His uncle was staring at him. Duke Gustavo was putty colored, like a zombie himself. He looked as if he couldn't believe his eyes. "But-but-we bound you," he said, finally. "With salt, and bronze-"
"Bronze can be shattered," said James, "and locks broken. I stand before you today and demand to see my murderer punished."
Duke Gustavo pointed toward the trembling man with the rope around his neck. "He's there, James."
James smiled a cold, unpleasant smile. "I meant you."
Now there was chaos. The crowd was screaming and milling. Officer Garcia took me and set me on the steps to the stage, as if worried I would be crushed in the melee.
The Duke was blustering. "I don't know what you imagined happened, but I never harmed you-"
"Never harmed me?" James snarled. It was frightening to see the way he looked, his stark white teeth bared and his black eyes glowing with the low light of the rage full undead. "You wanted to be the Duke. You never wanted me to live to eighteen. You hired someone to run me down, and then found some poor vagrant you could pin the crime on and bribed the judge to make it stick. I heard you, Uncle. I heard you, paying off the murderer you hired. I heard you after I died."
The Duke spun towards the crowd. "He's gone mad," he said. "You that death can shatter men's minds."
My heart was pounding. I had not known what James wanted to do in the square, but I had not imagined a direct confrontation. Trust me, he had said. And I did. Even knowing there was no way out of this for him now. For us, now. Not unless James knew something I didn't.
"I am quite sane, nonetheless," said James, and I saw, from the way the crowd was looking at him, that they believed him.
"The testimony of a dead man means nothing!" the Duke shouted. "Officers, take him away!"
But the police didn't move. James was the son of the old Duke, and both had been beloved in Lych Wood. They would not hurt him, even in death.
"What can you possibly hope to gain by accusing me, boy?" the Duke demanded of James in a low voice that was half snarl and half wail. "You have lost the Dukedom. Accept it. If I die, there will be no one left with our blood to hold the title of Duke of Lych Wood. Do you want that?"
"No," said James.
"Then-"
"I will be the Duke of Lych Wood," Said James.
"But you're dead. A dead man can't hold a title-"
"Can't he?" the rage had faded from James's expression; there was a cool, calm smile on his pale lips instead. He turned to the crowd. "Who here would prefer a dead man to a murderer for their Duke? Who here wants the son of the true Duke Diamond as their ruler?"
The crowd stirred; I could sense their ambivalence. They had adored James when he was alive. I knew how much he had been loved; I had been there with him in the streets when they had stopped us both to wish him good health, or take photographs of him with their phones and cameras. But now he was dead, and the dead were not like us. Carlos's hand shot up in the air, soon followed by Logan's and then Kendall's.
Duke Gustavo smiled a thin smile. "Don't you see?" he said. "They don't want you. Officers, take my nephew-"
There was a rustle then, a sort of wave of sound that went through the crowd, I saw the Duke's expression change as he looked out over the people of Lych Wood, and I stood up myself, to get a better view.
It was the zombies. They were coming forth from the shadows, moving in their slow deliberate way. Without making a sound they pushed through the crowd toward the stage and stood -at least a hundred of them- in a circle around it. The implication was clear. James was not to be touched.
Now it was James who was smiling. "You see," he said. "They do want me."
"They're dead," said the Duke. "They don't matter."
"Don't they?" said James. "I think it is time that we stopped pretending. Who among us cannot count a family member –a child, a parent, a wife or husband- or a friend who has returned from the dead? We know what they call this place- Zombie Wood. We know that the Curse follows us. If it is even a curse. Maybe we should stop and ask ourselves if there is any real reason for us to be ashamed. In other towns death is the end. Here we see our dead. We speak to them. And they love us."
At that, he looked at me.
"Perhaps," he said, "it is time for Lych Woods to have a Duke who represents what the town really is. A union of living and dead."
He held his hand out then. I stood. It was not as I had always imagined it would be. I had thought I would marry James before the entire town, with a carpet of white flowers spread out at my feet and James, handsome in a tuxedo, waiting for me in the gardens of the Duke's palace. Now he was asking me to stand up with him in front of everyone while there was grave dirt under my nails and clinging to the soles of my shoes. It flaked off in clumps as I made my way across the platform and took his hand.
It was as cold as ice.
We turned to face the crowd, together. I saw them. The faces of the town. They had never smiled when they'd looked at me, but now they smiled at us. We were young and in love. We were living and dead. The faces of the zombies shone as they gazed at us.
The crowd began to clap. Slowly at first, then fast, a sound like thunder. Carlos's screaming was loudest, and I could hear Kendall and Logan whistling. I laughed a little at our friends. I heard the Duke cry out. He turned to run, but the zombies were there, blocking his way, encircling the stage. They looked to James for instruction.
He gave it.
"The Duke is yours," he said.
The dead swarmed up the steps like driver ants. They took hold of Duke Gustavo and dragged him, struggling and screaming, to the trapdoor. The executioner released the innocent prisoner, who fled. The Duke was gagged and the rope placed about his neck. It was one of the zombies who pulled the lever that opened the trapdoor and dropped the Duke, twisting and kicking, into neck-snapping space.
So the town had its Hanging Day after all.
After the Duke's death, the officers led James and me to the limousine and helped us in. we drove slowly through the crowd, who watched us go- some cheering, some looking on with silent, stunned faces. I passed my parents, who were standing hand in hand. Gawking like the rest. I rolled down the window to wave at them, but they looked at me as though had never seen me before in their lives. I had become someone else to them.
I have not been home since. I live in the palace now, where there is a room made up for me. Because he is the Duke, my parents don't object to me living here. They know we have to stay together. The town accepts their Duke is dead, because I am alive. I am the symbol. I am what proves that though James is dead, he is still human.
He has even found a priest to marry us. It used to be illegal, the marriage of the living and the dead. After this, I don't know. Everything is different now. Everything is changing. Because I am the betrothed of the Dukes, I don't have to endure the curious stares of the townsfolk when I go out to the market, or to the square, or up to the cemetery to put salt on the graves of my ancestors. I ride in the town car, and I keep the tinted windows rolled all the way up so I don't have to see their faces when they look at me. I know they wonder what it is like, to love and be loved by the dead.
I would tell them it is much like it is to be loved by the living. James is not like he was when he was alive. He is quiet now; he talks very little, and does not share his thoughts with me. He does not sleep at night, and cannot dream. But many men are quiet, and don't share their thoughts even with the ones they love. In many ways he is just like the James I always knew.
Except that when he touches me, even now, I can't help but shiver. If only the dead did not have such cold hands.
A/N there we go. And just in time for Halloween! Yay! I hope you guys liked it. This you don't have to review, it was more for my entertainment. That's it…yup.
~Love,
I'm Adorkable~