The Living Dead 2 (The Living Dead, #2)(124)

Eventually she started dating the school’s janitor, and all of her friends made fun of her for that, joking that the lovers were probably always sneaking off to the boiler room or some such place. The janitor, whose name was Kurt, was a good-looking man, only in his mid-thirties and in fine physical shape. And truth to tell, the two did sneak off together sometimes. To Kurt’s office. His door had a fancy title—Environmental Control Specialist—but it still meant janitor.

Once while she was in his office, Lorraine saw a key hanging from a little nail on the wall behind his desk. The key had a scrap of paper taped to it. The word ATTIC was written on that scrap in blue ballpoint ink. She waited until Kurt’s back was turned, and she took that key.

Even while she was reaching for it, she wasn’t sure why she was taking it. She just knew she had to have it. After school, she stayed behind, waited until everyone was gone and then went up to the attic. It was all storage up there, and the things that had been packed away up there so long ago were now all but forgotten.

Remember where little Arlene ate her parents? In the attic. That’s where the movie-family went to hide from the zombies. The movie-attic had a bed in it, where Arlene used to sleep. She says her four-word line while she’s in that bed. The school attic had a broken cot among its various odds and ends. Obsolete school books, tennis shoes, sacks of that pinkish, pulpy stuff to sprinkle on barf to soak it up and make the smell go away. Lorraine strolled among rows of dusty boxes and stayed up there for about an hour, looking at spider webs and old papers and outdated globes. She realized then that this was the first time she’d been in an attic—any attic at all—since the filming of that movie. Her parents had always lived in apartments. Her dorm room in college had been on the ground floor. A life without attics. She now felt oddly at home—but was it a good home?

When she came down from the attic, left the building and went to her car, the world around her seemed different somehow.

A little less…colorful.

A moment later, Arlene Schabowski saw red in her night-world for the first time. Usually the blood of her victims was shiny black. But she looked down at the hitchhiker she had just torn to bits and saw red, red everywhere. Then she saw that her dress was stained not merely with various splotches of gray, but horrible gouts of rotted filth and gore—red, yellow, brown, green, a veritable rainbow of decay. It made her smile.

A few days later, Kurt was completely confused by Lorraine’s birthday gift to him. “Rainy,” he said, for that is what he called her, “this tie…don’t get me wrong, I think it’s great. And silk, it must have cost plenty. But purple? I don’t know if I’m the purple type…”

“Oh,” she said quite softly. “Is it purple? I thought it was some kind of dark silver. Are you sure it’s purple?”

Lorraine sometimes would bring a book to school to read in the attic, after hours. In the days to come, her students became more and more confused by some of the things she said—especially during art class. Whenever one of them did a drawing, she would ask things like, “What color is that horse?” Or, “That’s a very pretty mermaid—which crayon did you use for the hair?”

Arlene began to notice green leaves among the gray when car headlights hit them just right, and some of the towns she meandered through were bigger than the little country burgs she usually came across. One even had a supermarket. She would hide in the bushes bordering the parking lot and watch the front of the supermarket. Watch all the people rushing in and out. It made her hungry. Sometimes one of the shoppers would hear something rustling in the bushes and go see what it was, worrying that it might be a lost child. They were right to worry.

Lorraine found that the drive back to her house seemed a little shorter every week. And there were fewer cars on the road. Not as many buildings behind the sidewalks. Fewer kids in the school, but more birds in the light blue sky. There was still a bit of color in her world, but not much. The changes were all huge yet gradual. Kurt usually wore a nice polo shirt and jeans to work. It didn’t even surprise her when he started wearing coveralls, or when his voice started to take on a rural twang. He even took to calling her “Honey.”

Arlene just kept on wandering—she was so good at it. Wandering and eating, eating and wandering, always keeping to the shadows, which was getting harder, since there were so many streetlights around. But she was finding more homeless people, so at least she had been eating regularly. No more fields—she was in the suburbs now, and the skies were starting to lighten. Night was slowly giving way to a light blue morning.

You see what was happening, don’t you? They were starting to meet in the middle. Why do you suppose that was happening? Maybe it was because Lorraine was spending so much time up in that attic. I suspect attics have strange powers. They come to points at the top, like pyramids. They’re rather intriguing, aren’t they? And bear in mind, zombie movies were becoming more modern—perhaps the imaginations that had pulled Arlene into existence were pulling her into the present day.

Lorraine was getting pulled, too, but in a different way. Into something…but what? One morning she thought she saw a tractor drive past the school. Later that day, she knew she heard cows mooing in the distance. She broke off her relationship with Kurt. He was becoming more and more rural, like some of the extras in Fear-Farm of the Undead. He was growing too much hair and losing too many teeth. That wasn’t the kind of boyfriend she wanted and this certainly wasn’t the life she wanted to lead. She didn’t like it. No, not one little bit.