Chapter Two

Even Zombies Like to Party

TUESDAY, 12:23 AM

“EEE-III-AAA-YYY!” Charleston shrieked, still clutching his armful of chicken parts. Ernestine grabbed him by his most convenient part (which happened to be his arm) and dragged him across the street just in time to avoid being turned into pre-zombies.

The antique limo swiped the graveyard’s wrought-iron gates, breaking apart the chain and padlock. Then, as though the driver was playing a game of tag with Charleston and Ernestine, the car turned again, hurtling toward the brick wall surrounding MacGillicuddie House.

Ernestine ducked into the garden to escape, but Charleston froze like a deer (or zombie) in headlights. Running back out again, she tried to tug him into the garden with her, but he remained rooted to the ground.

“Charleston!” Ernestine cried, but he just pressed the poultry parts tightly against his body and huddled for impact as the driver hit the brakes, causing the tires to shriek and burn into the ground.

Shoving her stepbrother as hard as she could, they both tumbled out of the way of the car’s massive silver grille just in time. Instead of their bodies, it bit into the brick wall as the car came to a halt in a cloud of blue smoke.

Coughing and sputtering, they both rolled over and looked at the dented fender a few inches away from their heads.

“What were you doing?” Ernestine demanded, scowling at Charleston. Being afraid always made her irritable.

“You said to make sure we saved the drumsticks for supper.” From behind his glasses, Charleston blinked at her like this was obvious.

“Not if it means ending up as a zombie!”

“Wouldn’t I just be a corpse, not a zombie?”

“Well, sure, not right away.” Exasperated, Ernestine helped her stepbrother up. Charleston never did make any long-term goals. Nobody ever starts out as a zombie. It’s something you have to work toward, obviously.

The driver’s side door flew open and out tumbled their landlady, Mrs. MacGillicuddie, owner of MacGillicuddie House, an apartment building that served as a retired artist colony. Which was sort of like an ant colony only filled with loopy old artists rather than mindless insects. Mrs. MacGillicuddie lived on the ground floor in an apartment approximately the size of a small neighborhood. The rest of the three stories she rented out to retired painters, musicians, and actors, while Ernestine’s family lived in the attic and took care of the building.

Mrs. MacGillicuddie herself was eighty years old with jet-black hair, lots of makeup, and a face that had had so much cosmetic surgery done to it that a very exclusive clinic in Switzerland threw a party every year in her honor. Tonight she wore a silver dress, a mink coat, and a real diamond tiara on her head because, as Mrs. MacGillicuddie had once explained to them, when you were eighty, you never knew how many more opportunities you might get to wear the family jewels.

What she wasn’t wearing were her glasses, which might possibly explain why she had almost turned Ernestine and Charleston into zombies-in-waiting.

“Oh, hello, darlings!” she trilled as she spotted them. “I didn’t see you there!”

“Mrs. MacGillicuddie,” Ernestine said sternly. “You know you’re supposed to be wearing your glasses when you drive.”

“Don’t be ridiculous, darling!” Her landlady waved her gloved hand about dismissively. “I can see perfectly well without those silly things! However, with all of the fog about tonight, I thought I’d better pull over before something else jumped out at me the way that awful mailbox did. What it was doing in the middle of the road, I don’t know!”

“Where’s Eduardo?” Ernestine demanded, referring to Mrs. MacGillicuddie’s butler and limo driver.

Eduardo himself answered the question by tumbling out of the car, dressed as a Roman general for reasons unknown. After the wild car ride, his feathered helmet was askew on his head and he seemed a bit unsteady on his legs. Still, he managed to remain impressively upright, which was just as well given that he also held a swan in his arms.

Ernestine and Charleston stared at them both. This was not, exactly, what Ernestine had in mind for an apocalypse. Their zombie was missing and now they seemed to have gained a swan.

“Oh, the swan’s ours!” The Swanson twins, Libby and Mora, tittered as they climbed out of the back of the limo and saw Charleston and Ernestine’s looks of confusion. They had just moved into apartment 3A the previous week, and by the standards of MacGillicuddie House, the twins were quite young, being only about sixty years old, and they were identical, right down to every last wrinkle. They had once been famous acrobatic dancers, known for their ability to each simultaneously balance a spinning plate upon a big toe while balancing on a tightrope. How a person discovered they had this ability, Ernestine didn’t know, but evidently the Swanson twins had found a way.

Tonight, they wore their signature swan costumes, which involved sparkly white swimsuits with enormous white feather headdresses, more white feathers around their wrists, and extremely high, sparkly heels that Ernestine suspected you had to be a certified acrobat to even buy, let alone walk in. They made the stiletto high heels Mrs. MacGillicuddie always wore seem downright sensible.

As soon as the Swanson twins made it out of the car, they were followed by Mrs. Talmadge, a pink-haired, retired British pastry chef who lived in apartment 2C.

A pink-haired, retired British pastry chef who was carrying the front end of a whole roast pig. Well, Ernestine assumed it was whole. Right now she could only see its snout, an apple shoved into its mouth.

“Oh, hullo, luv!” Dressed as an egg with horns, she gave Ernestine a cheerful little finger wave. “Have you come for the party?”

“No, I’m looking for my zombie. I seem to have lost it.”

“Oi, keep on moving there, Pansy.” The roast pig poked at Mrs. Talmadge. For one startled moment, Ernestine thought that not only was it a zombie roast pig, but one that had also learned to talk in spite of the apple stuffed in its mouth. Then Mrs. Talmadge tugged the pig free of the car, allowing her husband, Mr. Talmadge, to emerge.

“Vegan garbage,” he muttered. Mr. Talmadge carried a rubber knife and had cereal boxes strapped all over his body. “Frou-frou rabbit food, that’s what he was trying to serve us. What she was thinking having him cater, I don’t know.”

“I thought there was a party going on in your suite, Mrs. MacGillicuddie.” Charleston peered through the wrought-iron bars of the fence to confirm that, yep, there were indeed the silhouettes of people clearly having a very good time in Mrs. MacGillicuddie’s half of the mansion’s first floor.

“Oh, there is, darling! A costume party for Mardi Gras!”

“But it isn’t Mardi Gras yet,” Ernestine pointed out.

“Well, I don’t want to be throwing a Mardi Gras party when everyone else is throwing a Mardi Gras party, now do I? How gauche would that be?” Mrs. MacGillicuddie took the swan from Eduardo and set it down on the ground so it could follow along next to her on its leash. “We just had to run out and get some meat for Mr. Talmadge since he doesn’t like the vegan canapés dear little Dill was serving, and some swans for the Swansons here! Eduardo had forgotten them, the silly boy!”

Eduardo, who hadn’t been a boy in at least fifty years, leaned over to murmur into Mrs. MacGillicuddie’s ear. As he did so, the feathers on top of his helmet swiped across Ernestine’s face like a mop. She sneezed and swatted them away, as he murmured in his posh Spanish accent, “I thought the sight of Libby’s swan might get Mr. Sangfroid more excited than his heart could take.”

Mrs. MacGillicuddie giggled and said to Eduardo, “Oh, you are terrible!”

Mr. Sangfroid lived in apartment 2D and had once been an art curator. These days, he spent most of his time as a professional cranky old man, always complaining about something. Why a swan might make him grumpier than usual, though, was a mystery to Ernestine. However, before she could ask, Mrs. MacGillicuddie cried, “Come join us, my darlings! I’m sure your parents won’t mind!”

“Okay.” Never one to mind staying up late and missing school, Charleston stepped agreeably forward, only to jump backward again when the swan hissed and flapped her wings at him.

He followed her beady gaze down to the dismembered poultry parts in his arms. To the swan, he said, “Oh. Don’t worry. They weren’t relatives. Well, maybe distantly, I guess.”

“No, thank you,” Ernestine said firmly to Mrs. MacGillicuddie, still wiping feathers off her face as Charleston made friends with the bird. “We have school in the morning, and we have to find our zombie. We seem to have misplaced it.”

“Oh, well, if you find it, tell it’s welcome to come, too! My son and his awful daughter are in there somewhere, so it’ll have plenty to snack on!”

“I’ll keep that in mind,” Ernestine said dryly as Eduardo helped a second swan out of the Studebaker. She watched as the swans, Swansons, millionairess, chefs, and manservant all went inside. Shaking her head, she said, “C’mon, Charleston, let’s go find our zombie before it can eat someone.”

They headed into the front garden, which was full of very strange sculptures made by Charleston’s father, Frank. At the moment, it also contained a lot of musicians taking a break from the party.

“You cats on your way to the party?” called out a large, elderly African American man. He had a rich, deep voice and wore a very impressive black leather coat. His name was Mr. Ellington and he lived in apartment 3C. He had played saxophone with the Hep Cats since sometime in the middle of the previous century. Tonight, all of the Hep Cats were wearing purple and green peacock masks, probably because of the early Mardi Gras party Mrs. MacGillicuddie was throwing.

“Not tonight. We have school in the morning,” Ernestine called back. “Hey, have any of you cats seen a zombie go by?”

“Not tonight.”

Leaving Mr. Ellington and the other musicians behind, they continued on their way through the darkened garden, careful not to trip over, run into, or get impaled upon any of Frank’s many interesting sculptures made out of things like old washing machines, discarded VCRs, chainsaws, and obsolete cell phones.

Over by the side porch, they ran into an excitable Mr. Sangfroid as he waved his cane disapprovingly at his neighbors from across the hall, Mr. Theda and Mr. Bara.

“Those movies of yours aren’t art!” he ranted, almost whacking Charleston in the head with the pronged foot of his cane. “They’re garbage! Pretentious hoodlumism attacking our culture!”

Mr. Theda was a retired horror movie villain, currently dressed as a pasty-faced Dracula, while Mr. Bara had once been a movie special effects expert. Their movies were the sort that tended to be released straight to video back in the days when people watched things on videotapes rather than streaming them on their TVs and phones.

“They’re social commentary,” Mr. Bara said with great dignity. Or at least as much dignity as he could manage given that he was currently dressed as a mutant alien chicken from a movie called The Perils of Poultry: Sometimes, They Eat Back, which Ernestine had once watched late at night when she was four. She hadn’t been able to sleep with a feather pillow ever since, secretly convinced that it might come to life and eat her. Possibly with a side of coleslaw.

When not dressed as a monster, Mr. Bara had a bald head, very dark skin, and always wore a thick gold hoop in one ear. Ernestine had once asked him what his ancestry was, and he had told her he was ten percent Abatwan, thirty percent Basajaunak, thirty percent Zerzurian, and thirty percent Gandharvian. When she did a search online to figure out what those were, she discovered that Mr. Bara was actually one hundred percent none of her business.

“Bah! They’re the end of civilization, that’s what they are!” Mr. Sangfroid yelled. Though he technically hadn’t dressed for the party, Mr. Sangfroid was so old and leathery, he looked exactly like an unwrapped mummy. He was the only one among the residents who wasn’t an artist, having instead been an art curator and critic. These days, no one was willing to pay him for his criticisms, but that didn’t stop Mr. Sangfroid from offering them anyway. No one in the house liked him, but he had once done Mrs. MacGillicuddie a great favor. What that favor might be, no one knew, but whatever it was, their landlady was still apparently in his debt.

Dodging another swipe of his cane as he tried unsuccessfully to whack the antenna off Mr. Bara’s head, Ernestine cleared her throat and said, “Uh, speaking of the end of civilization, have either of you seen a zombie pass by?”

“Just the one standing in front of us,” Mr. Theda sneered, whirling his cape menacingly.

Ducking under Mr. Sangfroid’s cane, Ernestine dragged Charleston forward. “We’ll take that as a ‘no.’”

The garden path narrowed to a dark ribbon of bricks as it squeezed between the house and fence. The shadows seemed to swallow up the sounds of the party taking place on the other side of the house. Between the brick wall rising up on one side and the house on the other, the narrow passageway felt like a tomb. Which was exactly the sort of place no one wanted to hang out in, whether they were a zombie or not.

“Ernestine, are you hyperventilating?” Charleston asked.

“No,” Ernestine gritted through her teeth.

“It sounds like you’re hyperventilating.”

“I’m not hyperventilating! Brave warriors of the apocalypse do not hyperventilate! I’m just breathing deeply, okay?” Ernestine hooked her thumbs around the backpack straps circling her shoulders and forced herself to be calm before admitting, “I just don’t like tight spaces, okay? That’s all.”

“I guess zombies don’t, either.” Charleston shrugged as he studied the darkened windows staring down at them. “Hey, you don’t think the zombie could have gotten inside, do you? Maybe it’s in one of those rooms, eating someone.”

“Nah, it’s too quiet in there. If it was eating someone, we would hear it.” Ernestine didn’t want to take the time to pry one of the windows open and peer inside. She wanted to get off the garden path. Now. Not discuss zombie table manners.

“Some people are quiet eaters. Why not some zombies, too?”

“Charleston, would you just move!” Shoving him forward, they finally burst out into the backyard from behind an elephant made out of old carburetors and a thick mess of network cables. Charleston let out a yelp. “Over there!”

Following his outstretched finger, Ernestine spotted a shadowy figure lurking beneath the laundry room window. As they watched, it turned and shuffled along the path ahead of them, unaware of their presence.

“Excellent.” Ernestine stood up on her toes in delight. “Be quiet, Charleston. We don’t want to startle—”

Before she could finish her sentence, Charleston—who clearly had not been listening to her—screamed, “ZOMMMBIEEE!”

Leaping over a row of dead hosta bushes, Charleston ran toward the zombie with his baseball bat raised while Ernestine clapped a hand to her head in frustration and yelled, “Don’t hit it too hard or it’ll fall apart, and we’ll have to put it back together again!”

Great. Just great. She finally managed to raise a zombie and Charleston was about to break it. How did you even put a zombie back together again, anyhow? Duct tape? Superglue?

Apparently, the zombie didn’t want to find out, either. Rather than shambling forward to slurp out their brains, the figure cringed in terror behind the gazebo in the middle of the garden, further obscuring its face. But before Charleston could get close enough to bash its head off, he stumbled over a low stone bench and into the koi pond, landing with a splash as the thin layer of ice covering the pond crackled apart.

Ernestine grabbed his coat collar and hauled him out of the slush. Sputtering, he yanked a dead lily pad off his head as Ernestine fished around in the bottom of the pond for his baseball bat.

“Charleston, in the zombie apocalypse, there are two things that are very important. One, don’t drown.” Ernestine shoved the baseball bat back into his hands. “Two, don’t let your weapon drown, either.”

“Are th-th-there any r-r-r-rules about l-l-losing your z-z-z-zombie?” Charleston asked through chattering teeth as he tried to wipe off his wet glasses with the hem of his equally wet coat.

“What?!” Ernestine looked around the garden frantically, but Charleston was right. Their zombie had disappeared.

They ran over to the gazebo. Well, Ernestine ran. Charleston mostly squished along and tried not to freeze into an icicle.

“Charleston, are you sure that was a zombie you saw?” Ernestine squinted at the dormant shrubs and dead flowers.

“D-d-d-definitely.” Charleston shrugged, still shivering. “I m-m-m-mean, what else could it be?”

“It’s just that it ran away from us and our nice, delicious, juicy brains. Doesn’t that seem kind of weird to you? What sort of zombie doesn’t try to crack open our skulls or something?”

“Yeah, that does seem kind of w-w-w-weird,” Charleston admitted, his lips beginning to turn blue. “But it was definitely a zombie. Maybe our b-b-b-brains aren’t ripe since we’re kids. You know, kinda like green f-f-f-fruit.”

“There’s nothing wrong with my brain! I bet it’s perfectly delicious,” Ernestine huffed, taking off her coat and handing it to him as she swept her flashlight beam around the garden for footprints. Terrific. Just terrific. She’d finally managed to raise a zombie only to immediately lose it—twice! How embarrassing.

“How d-d-d-did we raise the wrong zombie, anyhow?” Clutching her coat about him and still dripping, Charleston followed Ernestine as she spotted something on the ground beneath the laundry room window.

“What do you mean, ‘wrong zombie’?” Ernestine asked defensively.

“Well, n-n-n-nothing dug its way out of Herbert’s grave, right? So the zombie m-m-m-must have come from one of the other graves.”

Rather than answering, Ernestine picked up the object lying on the thick mat of autumn leaves. It felt cold and heavy to the touch.

“What’s that?” Charleston asked.

“It’s a crowbar.”

“D-d-d-did the zombie drop it?”

“I don’t know. Maybe? I guess?”

Ernestine blinked at the curved strip of metal. What kind of zombie carried a crowbar around? Of course, zombies did try to break in windows, but they did so by just pounding on the glass with their hideously decayed hands until it broke. They didn’t use tools, did they? Where would a zombie even get a crowbar, anyhow? Unless someone had the foresight to bury them with one, of course. You know, just in case they had to pry the lid off their coffin. But even if they had, why go after the window instead of the much-easier-to-get-into door a few feet away?

“I c-c-c-can’t believe we started the end of the world only to lose our zombie,” Charleston moaned, smacking his hand to his face. “Oh, m-m-man. We’re going to be in so much trouble if it eats s-s-s-someone.”

“I don’t know. It seemed like a scaredy zombie to me, what with all that shuffling and hiding and everything. I can’t see it eating anyone unless they’re, like, really slow or stupid, and that’s hardly our fault if they are,” Ernestine said vaguely as she unlocked the back door and went inside, taking the crowbar with them.

“Oh, it f-f-f-feels good to be in where it’s warm!” Charleston stuttered, dripping pond water onto the floor like some sort of monster from the blue lagoon.

“Here, let’s put our coats in the dryer so they’re ready for us to wear to school tomorrow.” Going into the laundry room, Ernestine stuffed them into one of the dryers. As she did so, she noticed that the window above it had been wedged open a fraction of an inch. The lock had been broken for a while now, but the scratches on the sill looked new.

They also matched up perfectly with the crowbar when Ernestine laid it against them.

Pulling out her notebook, Ernestine made two notes in it. They read:

Fix the laundry room window

Zombies maybe use tools???

Tapping her pen against her chin, Ernestine said, “Charleston, how could the zombie know that window was broken… and that it would be the easiest to open? And since when have zombies been stealthy?”

“What do you mean? In the movies, they’re always sneaking up on people.” Charleston had found a pile of their clothes in a laundry basket that his dad, Frank, had forgotten to take upstairs. Squatting down behind a washing machine, he changed into a dry pair of pajamas. “Ernestine, we can’t let our zombie actually eat anyone. It just wouldn’t be right. We’ve got to find it before it hurts anyone.”

“I guess,” Ernestine agreed reluctantly, still not entirely convinced they had raised a zombie. Sure, it would be nice to think she had released the ravenous undead on the city, but she didn’t want to take credit for something she hadn’t actually accomplished.

On the bright side, someone had tried to break into the house. Maybe it wasn’t a zombie, but it might be a bloodthirsty killer, which was at least a step in the right direction.

Though why that someone had bothered to actually break in, Ernestine didn’t know. Sure, in theory the doors were kept locked, but in practice, Mrs. MacGillicuddie was usually throwing a party that anyone was invited to. Zombies and bloodthirsty killers included.

This quickly became evident when a bloodcurdling scream ripped through the house.

Ernestine shot out into the main hallway that ran like an artery through the entire house. More screams followed, along with the excited rumble of voices that always accompanied interesting things when they happened around a large group of people.

“Oh, this is more like it!” Ernestine beamed approvingly at Charleston as he staggered out of the laundry room, glasses askew and still trying to button his shirt. “Let’s go see who Herbert’s trying to eat!”

“I hope it’s not the Swanson twins. They said they were going to teach me how to walk a tightrope.”

“You want to learn how to walk a tightrope?”

“Seems like a good way to get around if the streets are filled with the zombie hordes.”

This was an excellent point, and Ernestine was chagrined that she hadn’t already thought to include it in the zombie survival guide she was planning on publishing. However, before she could pull out her notebook, they had reached the swinging door that led into the front foyer.

Rather than swinging forward, though, it thumped against something solid.

“Oof!” Ernestine said as she bumped against it.

“Oof!” Charleston gasped as he bumped against her.

Mr. Ellington, the saxophone player from 3C, cracked the door open and let them through. He had been the something solid the door had hit a moment before. Even though he was a very strong man, he had difficulty opening the door enough to let them wriggle into the foyer.

The reason for this became immediately clear once Ernestine and Charleston were inside. A very large crowd of elderly partygoers had jammed the hallway as the Swanson twins, each clutching a swan, climbed out onto either end of a tightrope hooked to the balcony three stories above. Swans and Swansons alike appeared riveted by whatever was going on in the middle of the foyer beneath the chandelier’s blazing light.

“Fifty on the skinny grocer!” One of the twins yelled merrily down into the crowd.

“The chef has a meat cleaver, Libby!” shouted the other twin, who must have been Mora. “I say seventy on him!”

“What the—” Ernestine began, only to be cut off by Mr. Ellington.

“Mr. Talmadge is going to fight Dill, the vegan grocer from around the corner.” Mr. Ellington crossed his arms and shook his head as though that explained it all. And maybe it did. Just not to Ernestine or Charleston.

“Why?” Charleston asked, spotting a platter of vegetable canapés and scooping up a handful of miniature baked potatoes and a couple of mushroom tarts. Ernestine grabbed a canapé herself and squeezed her way forward to get a better look.

“Because they both want to open up a restaurant in the empty building next to Dill’s vegetable co-op,” explained Mr. Ellington.

That didn’t make a bit of sense to Ernestine, though Charleston nodded thoughtfully around a mouthful of potato and hummus as though it did to him. Personally, Ernestine didn’t really care what the reason was. While she thought that learning to wield a meat cleaver against an opponent was excellent training for fighting zombies in the coming apocalypse, she also knew she’d be the one stuck cleaning the blood off the floor if Mr. Talmadge actually managed to whack anything vital off of Dill.

Plus, she quite liked Mr. Talmadge and would prefer not to see him sealed inside a jail cell like Jell-O in a plastic cup, just waiting to be cracked open by the first zombie someone was thoughtless enough to leave the prison gate open for.

“Last call for bets!” Mrs. MacGillicuddie called out cheerfully from the middle of the room as Eduardo counted the wads of cash people kept shoving at him. Her nephew Lyndon seemed to be trying to set up his own betting ring over in the corner but everyone kept ignoring him. “Twenty-to-one odds on Mr. Talmadge, fifty-to-one odds on the skinny grocer! Sorry, Dill, darling.”

“Pin him up against the door, Parsley, or whatever your name is!” Libby Swanson leaned forward to call out, accidentally dropping her swan in the process. “Oopsy!”

The outraged swan flapped its wings as it landed, causing the crowd to skitter out of its way. Ernestine almost fell down but was able to grab Mr. Theda’s cape just in time to keep herself upright.

Spotting her, Mr. Bara pulled her to the front of the crowd so she could see better. Now that she had a clear view, Ernestine watched Mr. Talmadge and Dill circling each other. Burly Mr. Talmadge had once been personal chef to rocker Alice Cooper. From the stories he liked to tell, this wasn’t the first time he’d brought a meat cleaver to a fight. Meanwhile, Dill looked around dazedly like he wasn’t entirely sure how all of this had happened. Especially given that his weapon against the meat cleaver appeared to be a dinky paring knife.

“You know, it really just isn’t one of Mrs. MacGillicuddie’s parties until someone tries to murder someone else,” Mr. Theda drawled to his partner.

“I’m taking one-hundred-to-one odds that it’s Talmadge.” Lyndon wiggled hopefully through the crowd to stand next to them. He had a desperate look on his skinny, hang-dog face, possibly because he’d yet to get a single person to place a bet with him in spite of all the knives flashing about.

“You’re taking bets on whether someone actually dies?” Mr. Bara slowly cocked an eyebrow in such a way that Lyndon blushed.

“Well, it’s not like I’m actually trying to kill someone!” he protested, hunching his shoulders. “I’m just—er—trying to make money off of it. Nothing wrong with that, right?”

“Are you taking bets on whether one of them will come back as a zombie afterward?” Ernestine asked, feeling that Lyndon—as usual with Mrs. MacGillicuddie’s nephew—was missing the real opportunity here.

Lyndon blinked. “Is that likely?”

“I don’t know. Aren’t you the one taking bets?”

“Mother! I insist you put an end to this farce this instant!” Mrs. MacGillicuddie’s son, Rodney, pushed his way through the crowd. He wore the costume of an Egyptian pharaoh and had swelled up his chest pompously, his moustache quivering with rage. Nearby, his daughter Aurora Borealis was dressed as a black cat. Or at the very least, a black cat who wore a miniskirt and stiletto heels. She was old enough to be in college but had decided to try and be an Instagram star instead. Somehow, Aurora Borealis had already managed to amass a hundred thousand followers—and she certainly hadn’t done it by hanging out with a bunch of elderly artists. Right now, she sat on the steps next to the ornate Cupid statue holding up the bottom of the banister, only looking up from her jewel-encrusted phone to throw a bored, pouty look at all of the chaos.

“Daaaaaaddyyyyyy,” she whined, “is it time to goooooo yet? This party is sooooo lame. Nothing interesting ever happens at any of Grammy’s parties. I’ve, like, already lost a million followers.”

“Rupert, you put that meat cleaver down right now!” Mrs. Talmadge bellowed through the crowd. “He’s only got a paring knife! I’ll go get the bread knife for him, luv! Make it a fair fight and all!”

That immediately brought about a new round of betting as the promise of a new weapon seemed to substantially improve Dill’s odds, though Dill himself looked far less convinced.

“Mrs. MacGillicuddie, I really don’t think this is a good idea.” As Ernestine tugged at her landlady’s fur coat, she swept the room with her eyes. There was so much chaos, her zombie could stumble in here and graze like it was at a five-star buffet without anyone ever noticing. Even her parents, Frank and Maya, had wandered out of their artist studio down to the third-floor balcony to see what all of the commotion was about.

Just as she spotted them, Ernestine noticed that the immense crystal chandelier dangling from the ceiling nearby had begun to sway far more violently than it had any reason to, as though all of the excitement below had gotten it worked up, too. Easily ten feet tall, its curly silver arms, glittery pendants, and bright lights hung close to the third-floor balcony where the Swanson twins were still balancing precariously on their tightrope.

The light fixture had to weigh a couple of hundred pounds, Ernestine realized in horror as she watched it sway. Heavy enough to turn them all into humanburger patties, if it fell. She frantically tried to get her mother and Frank’s attention, but they were already heading down the stairs toward her.

The Swanson twins had realized something was wrong, too. Perhaps they had seen Ernestine’s panicked pointing. Or maybe they had finally noticed the way their tightrope was quivering from the breeze from the shaking chandelier. Either way, they looked upward in alarm just as half of the bolts holding the chandelier popped out of the ceiling, showering the crowd below with dust and plaster.

“Is it snowing?” Mr. Talmadge asked in confusion, cleaver in hand.

“Twenty-to-one odds that it is!” Lyndon shouted, waving his arms frantically in effort to be noticed through the crowd.

“No! Look!” Ernestine cried, pointing upward.

“What is it, darling? Oh, my!” Mrs. MacGillicuddie gasped.

“Oh, help!” the twins screamed.

Before anyone could say or do anything else, several more bolts gave way. The base of the chandelier, still attached to part of the ceiling, cracked and lurched downward, exposing the electrical wires above. For one breathless moment, it seemed like they would hold.

Then, in a shower of sparks, the wires snapped apart. Slicing through the tightrope, the chandelier plummeted to the floor.

Directly toward Ernestine and Mrs. MacGillicuddie.