Chapter Nine

When Confronted With a Zombie, Panic

THURSDAY, 12:17 AM

Step four of Ernestine’s zombie survival guide stated quite specifically that as soon as you were finished panicking, you should arm yourself with something deadly before confronting the undead. Without something to kill them when you ran at them, you were pretty much offering yourself up as fast food.

Now, confronted not only with a zombie, but a zombie carrying a weapon, Ernestine found herself armed with nothing more deadly than chickens. Chickens. It was too humiliating for words.

Oh, well. If all she had for a weapon was chickens, then she’d just have to use chickens as a weapon. As the zombie slashed the candelabra toward Mrs. MacGillicuddie’s head, Ernestine screamed, “You wanna eat something? EAT CHICKEN!” and flung the birds right at the creature’s head.

As these things went, “Eat chicken” wasn’t terribly clever. But it was a zombie. Its brain was liquefying in its skull. It wasn’t like it would appreciate witty banter, anyhow.

Ernestine’s shriek woke up Mrs. MacGillicuddie, who saw the danger and rolled out of the way just in time. Rather than breaking open her skull to reveal a delicious, juicy brain inside, the candelabra tore her pillow apart. A cloud of feathers puffed up into the air, joining those already flying from the furious birds as they landed on the zombie. They took out an entire evening’s worth of aggression by pecking mercilessly at its decaying flesh. Ernestine had just wanted the zombie to eat the chickens rather than Mrs. MacGillicuddie, but she was fine if they wanted to eat the zombie instead. Birds. Who would’ve thought they’d be excellent allies in the coming war against the undead? Ernestine would have to make a note of it in her zombie survival guide.

Worried that her allies might not be able to finish the zombie off all on their own, Ernestine launched herself forward and pummeled it right in the stomach with her outstretched hands.

It turned its hideous, deformed face to gaze at her with a slack jaw and purple, mottled skin. Ernestine swallowed hard, wishing she’d kept one of the chickens to defend herself with. Whatever she had seen in the alleyway this afternoon, the creature before her definitely had a skin problem. As in, its skin was rotting away and hanging in flaps off its cheeks, which Ernestine assumed would be a problem for most creatures, even ones who hadn’t gotten out of their coffins much the last couple of decades.

While Ernestine was wishing she’d thought to bring along a rain poncho in case it decayed all over her nice coat, the zombie fell to the ground and tried to crawl away. Mrs. MacGillicuddie clutched her satin sheets to her chest and shrieked, “What is it? What is it?”

“Mrs. MacGillicuddie, meet Ella James, deceased! We just raised her,” Ernestine yelled as the zombie sprang to its feet. It swung the candelabra at her and would have gotten her on the nose if Ernestine hadn’t jerked back in time. Then it kicked her with a stiletto heel, which smarted like anything.

“Ow!” Ernestine grunted, rubbing at her shin as Charleston burst into the room and flipped on the lights.

Just like Mrs. MacGillicuddie, he shouted, “What is it? What is it?”

“What on earth do you think it is?” Ernestine snapped back in exasperation. The late Ella James tried to kick her again, but Ernestine wrenched its shoe off instead.

Its zombie brain must work pretty well given that it had been dead for the better part of the last century. Because Ella James clearly seemed to realize she was outnumbered and tossed off the last bird to dash past Charleston. He tried to decapitate it with his baseball bat, which was a lot better than flinging it at the zombie and screaming hysterically the way he had last time, but Ella also moved pretty fast for someone who not only was missing a shoe, but who’d lately spent more time decaying in the ground than exercising. Its legs just couldn’t be attached all that well anymore, yet it darted right past him, leaving the bat to whiz through the air.

Ernestine wasn’t about to lose a second zombie in less than a week. Shoving the stiletto heel into Charleston’s hands, she bolted down the hallway and managed to grab the zombie by the hair as it made it to the kitchen. Her victory was short-lived, though. While Ella James’s legs were remarkably well-attached, its hair was not. As Ernestine tugged at its curls, they slipped right off the zombie’s head. Ernestine blinked stupidly down at the hunk of hair, allowing the creature time to kick her right into an enormous garbage can full of debris from the party the other night.

Quite literally into it. Hitting the rim, she tumbled over the edge and ended up with her face smushed into the remains of a custard tart. Her legs kicked ignominiously in the air while she tried unsuccessfully to get out.

“Ernestine! Are you okay?” Charleston and Mrs. MacGillicuddie each grabbed an ankle and pulled her out.

“I scalped it,” Ernestine said bitterly, custard sliding down the side of her face to dribble onto the floor as she held up the zombie’s hair. Other than that, the zombie was nowhere to be seen.

“Good heavens, darling! You just saved me from being murdered again!” Mrs. MacGillicuddie cried.

Well, there was that, Ernestine supposed, but she’d still lost her zombie. It wasn’t like you could order them online when you ran out of them.

“Come on, Charleston! Let’s see where it went!” Snatching his baseball bat from him, she barreled out the kitchen door without waiting to see if he was following.

“How—are—the—muscles—of—the—undead—in—better—shape—than—mine?” Charleston panted, catching up with her as she paused on the back porch, her eyes searching the immense, silvery garden for signs of the missing zombie. A clatter by the carriage house caught her attention. Through the light snowfall, she saw the gate to the alleyway swing shut.

Grabbing Charleston by the hand, she ran along the icy path, slipping and sliding as they went.

“Whoa!” Charleston hit a patch of black ice and spun right out of her grip to land in a heap of dead hostas. The force of it propelled Ernestine in the other direction so that she banged into the same marble bench Charleston had the other night. Unlike him, she managed to avoid a dive into the koi pond.

Someone—or something—else, it turned out, hadn’t been so lucky.

As Ernestine landed in the frosty mulch, she saw two feet right by her face. One was bare. The other wore a sparkly iridescent stiletto heel just like the one she’d wrenched off the zombie a few minutes ago.

Sitting upright, Ernestine raised her baseball bat to slug the zombie before it could turn her into a late-night snack.

The zombie, however, didn’t move. Perhaps because, other than the feet and legs, the rest of it seemed to be drowning in the pond.

Realizing this, Ernestine leaped up and hefted it out of the pond, only to discover that it wasn’t so much of an “it” as it was a cranky old coot.

“Mr. Sangfroid!” Charleston gasped, getting up only to walk over to Ernestine and collapse again. “Is he dead?”

A sputter of water followed by a frozen goldfish confirmed that Mr. Sangfroid was not, in fact, dead. Though he certainly would have a lot of explaining to do when he woke up.

“Goodness!” Having traded her usual heels for a pair of sensible tennis shoes, Mrs. MacGillicuddie made her way through the garden with remarkable ease. She bent over with hands on thighs to peer down at the unconscious body lying by her koi pond. “Darling little Mr. Sangfroid! Who would have guessed he was the zombie? But whatever has he done with the dress he was wearing?”

Ernestine wasn’t so sure he was the zombie, which would explain why he wasn’t wearing the dress. Something had gone out of the back gate a minute ago, hadn’t it?

“Ernestine! Look!” When Charleston fell the second time, he had landed in a giant old rhododendron bush. From beneath its branches, he pulled out a cloth shopping bag from Dill’s store. Inside it were the remains of the zombie costume, the mask, and the long dress.

“Well, that settles it.” Mrs. MacGillicuddie straightened up. “I suppose I’d better go get my gun so I can shoot him.”

“No!” Ernestine and Charleston simultaneously cried out in horror.

“Whyever not?” Mrs. MacGillicuddie blinked in astonishment at them. “What else am I supposed to do with someone who tries to murder me?”

“Call the police.” Ernestine pointed at the house. “And an ambulance for Mr. Sangfroid.”

“Oh, fine,” Mrs. MacGillicuddie huffed. “But your way is a lot less fun than mine.”

Ernestine thought that probably depended on your point of view. She gazed suspiciously at the back gate. She supposed it could have been the wind or a stray cat that closed it—or perhaps the zombie had just stumbled across Mr. Sangfroid and seized the opportunity to make him look like the guilty party.

Glancing back at her elderly neighbor, Ernestine noticed something clutched in his hand. As her landlady hurried back to the house, Ernestine pried it loose to discover it was a damp piece of paper.

No, not paper. Shaking some of the water off of it, Ernestine unfurled it to discover it was a very old black-and-white photograph.

In it, a toddler stood in front of an enormous fancy mirror and looked in delight at her reflection smiling back at her. She wore a short dress, hair pulled into a bow on one side of her head, and chubby legs shoved into frilly socks and patent leather shoes. The mirror was big enough that she could see herself from head to toe while pressing one hand against it.

It was a very cute picture, but there was also something unsettling about it. Something Ernestine couldn’t quite put her finger on. Perhaps it was the mirror, so big and gothic, it could have been a prop in one of Mr. Theda and Mr. Bara’s horror movies. Except in that case, the adorable little girl would have been smiling because she’d just eaten the family dog and was thinking about the cat for dessert.

Or perhaps it was because she’d seen the picture before.

“That’s it! It’s a picture from a photo album he stole from Mrs. MacGillicuddie,” Ernestine told Charleston.

“What’s that?” Charleston asked as he slipped the frozen koi back into the hole in the ice covering the pond. “When did he steal a picture album from Mrs. MacGillicuddie? And why?”

Ernestine realized that, in all of the excitement of the last couple of days, she had never mentioned the stolen album to Charleston. Honestly, between a missing zombie and an unknown murderer, petty theft had seemed like the least of the problems around MacGillicuddie House. Now, she told her stepbrother about how Sangfroid had picked it up off the floor after the chandelier crashed—and how he had been looking through it when she showed up to fix his leaky pipe.

“Are you sure that was one of the pictures?” Charleston asked skeptically. Flipping it over, Ernestine showed him the writing on the back: MacGillicuddie House, 1952.

That was it. No name. No reason to explain why Mr. Sangfroid might have had it in his grasp.

“Don’t mention it to anyone else right now,” Ernestine warned him, still studying the picture.

The mirror. It still bugged her. And not just because she’d been traumatized by watching Mr. Theda and Mr. Bara’s horror movies at too young an age.

It was the mirror’s frame, Ernestine realized. It was the same one she had stood on down in the basement the other night when she’d argued with Mr. Sangfroid while fixing his leaky pipe. His eyes had widened in surprise as he looked at her. At the time, she had assumed it was because he was afraid she’d hurt herself, but she should have realized that couldn’t possibly have been the case. Mr. Sangfroid was the sort of person who would cheer on the zombies in the apocalypse, not the plucky group of human survivors coming together to overcome them.

No, it was because Mr. Sangfroid had recognized the frame from the picture.

There are things I could tell about the MacGillicuddie family that would turn your hair white if you only knew, he’d told Mrs. MacGillicuddie. Was the story of this little girl one of those things? If so, what had happened to her?

Perhaps these weren’t the first attempted murders to take place at MacGillicuddie House. Could this little girl have been the first?

And if so, had it been a successful murder attempt? She shuddered at the thought.

Slipping the photograph into her pocket, Ernestine heard sirens screaming toward the house for the third time in three nights.

“Wow. Mr. Sangfroid. Who would have thought it was him?” Charleston stuck his hands in his hair in shock.

“Hm,” was all Ernestine would commit to. Several things about this situation bothered her, though at first she couldn’t put her finger on all of them. “Charleston, do you still have that shoe I handed you?”

“Sure.” Charleston had to search around on the ground for a moment, but eventually he came up with it.

Taking it in her hand, Ernestine laid it next to the one still on Mr. Sangfroid’s foot.

“Look.”

Charleston scrunched up his face and stared at the shoes. He nodded solemnly like he got it, too, and then asked, “What is it I’m looking at other than a pair of sparkly green shoes?”

“But that’s just it. They aren’t a pair.” Ernestine pried the shoe off of Mr. Sangfroid’s right foot and held it up. Both shoes were absolutely identical. “They’re both for the right foot.”

“Maybe he has two right feet?” They both looked down at Mr. Sangfroid’s very gnarled, very hairy feet. They looked like he might have gotten them off of an elderly hobbit, but other than that, he had one perfectly normal right foot and one perfectly normal left foot.

“I think someone set Mr. Sangfroid up in case they were caught. I think someone knocked him out before they went into Mrs. MacGillicuddie’s house. Then, on the way back out, the would-be murderer put one pair of shoes on his own feet and the other on Mr. Sangfroid’s to frame him. Only that person was in a hurry and got careless, mixing up the shoes before he shoved Mr. Sangfroid into the pond to distract us and buy time to escape. Look.” Ernestine pointed at the ugly goose egg growing on his forehead.

“Why didn’t the murderer just kill him before he went inside to off Mrs. MacGillicuddie?” Charleston wondered. Then he blinked. “Did I just criticize the way a murderer went about trying to murder someone? Does that seem kind of weird to you?”

“Yes, it does, Charleston.”

“Oh, jeez.” Charleston sat down on the flagstone path in a funk. “I feel like it makes me a bad person if I can tell someone how to be a better murderer.”

“You’re not a bad person, Charleston, you’re just really bad at school. And used to people constantly telling you how to be better at it,” Ernestine comforted him. “Anyhow, since I’m quite good at school, I can tell you why the murderer didn’t drown him before trying to murder Mrs. MacGillicuddie. Because an autopsy would have shown that Mr. Sangfroid died before her, so he couldn’t have killed her. It’s exactly the sort of thing that’s always tripping up criminals on the detective shows on TV.”

“Is it?” Charleston asked in surprise.

“Oh, yes.” Ernestine said confidently. At least, it had been in one TV episode she’d watched. That might not exactly qualify as “always” but Ernestine figured it was close enough. “Anyhow, between that picture and the fact that the would-be murderer wanted him dead, I bet Mr. Sangfroid knows something about whoever is doing this. I think it has something to do with this little girl and something that happened in MacGillicuddie House a long time ago.”

“Wow. That sounds evil. Like, eviler-than-zombies evil.”

“Oh, there are plenty of people who are eviler than zombies,” Ernestine said darkly. “Believe me, I’ve met some of them.”

“Like who?”

“Like none of your business,” Ernestine snapped. Turning her back on him, she refused to speak to her stepbrother again until Detective Kim got there a short time later.

Ernestine showed the detective the shoes but kept the picture to herself as the paramedics loaded Mr. Sangfroid into the back of an ambulance. He was already groaning a bit and complaining about their carelessness, so she suspected he was going to be just fine. Well, aside from the fact that he was probably going to be arrested for murder—maybe wrongly.

“Mother!” Rodney bellowed, making a dramatic entrance through the alleyway gate, followed by Aurora Borealis and Lyndon. Various newspaper reporters shouted questions at Detective Kim, Rodney, and Mrs. MacGillicuddie from outside the gate.

To Ernestine’s great annoyance, no one tried to interview her. If there was anyone they should be talking to, it was her. Not only did she have the inside scoop on the murder attempts, she knew all about the coming zombie apocalypse. Which, honestly, was what they should be focusing on. Why report on a couple of would-be murders when you could report on the possible extinction of the entire human race? Surely that should be a much bigger scoop.

“Mother! This is the last straw!” Rodney shouted as a reporter managed to wriggle her way in far enough to shove a microphone in his face and ask him how he felt about his mother almost being murdered twice within twenty-four hours (Ernestine could have answered that one: disappointed). “This neighborhood is infested with criminals! It is no longer safe for you to live here!”

“Took you long enough to get here. I’d be dead a hundred times over if I had to rely on you to save me!” Mrs. MacGillicuddie snapped, clearly not in the mood. Wrapped in her mink coat, she stood on the porch, trying to look as elegant as possible as the reporters held their cameras over the fence to snap her picture.

“The neighborhood is infested with zombies, not criminals,” Ernestine corrected, irritated that once again everyone seemed to be overlooking the most important detail. “As far as we know, there’s just one murderer wandering about and possibly two zombies.”

“Oh, not that again!” Aurora Borealis rolled her eyes as she posed for the reporters in her short skirt and sparkly white stiletto heels. Stiletto heels that had recently belonged to the Swanson twins, Ernestine realized, recalling how Mrs. MacGillicuddie’s granddaughter had stolen them the other night. Just like she had the earring and the Fabergé egg.

The question was, what else had she stolen? Perhaps a pair or two of iridescent green heels like those used to make Mr. Sangfroid look guilty?

“Oh, yes, that again!” Ernestine shot right back, waving about the zombie’s scalp. “What’s the point of surviving a murder attempt only to get eaten by a horde of ravenous zombies? We need a game plan, people!”

“And Ernestine seems to have a better track record of stopping murders than you do, Aurora Borealis!” Turning around, Mrs. MacGillicuddie marched into the house, her mink coat flowing about her like a cloak. Detective Kim tried to give her a hand, but she slapped his hands smartly out of the way as they all trailed her into the grand foyer.

She stopped at the base of the cherrywood staircase. Enormous wooden cupids held up decorative balls at the bottom of the stairs, while leaves and flowers curled around the banister as it soared up three stories above. Mrs. MacGillicuddie went over to one of the cupids and yanked it downward, causing the cherub to swivel at the waist. Everyone yelped and jumped backward as dust filled the air and a panel snapped forward on the third step.

Then everyone peered forward to see a huge stash of cash, all wrapped up and stacked neatly inside the secret compartment.

“Cool!” Charleston gasped, impressed.

“Mother, you never told me that was there!” Rodney swelled up with outrage.

“What, so you could steal it from me, you ungrateful brat?” Mrs. MacGillicuddie fished out one of the bundles of cash and tossed it to Charleston. He snatched at it, almost dropped it, caught it, almost dropped it again, and then clutched it to his chest like he thought it might try to wriggle free. With a sigh, Mrs. MacGillicuddie just handed the second bundle to Ernestine.

“For saving my life again, darling. I should have given it to you last night, but I’ve been too distraught over planning poor Fluffy-Wuffy-Kins’s funeral.” She sniffled delicately. “It’s going to be a grand affair, you know. I’ve contacted the pope to see if he could preside.”

“Mother! I refuse to let you give away the family fortune!” Rodney shouted indignantly, with Aurora Borealis and even Lyndon chiming in. In fact, Lyndon was salivating so much he was practically drooling as he looked at all of that cash, and Ernestine was reminded once again that he stood to benefit as much as anybody if Mrs. MacGillicuddie died. At least Aurora Borealis and Rodney were already wealthy; they just wanted to be wealthier.

“Oh, put a sock in it, you greedy fools!” Mrs. MacGillicuddie shouted right back as the reporters pressed their faces against the stained-glass windows on either side of the front door, trying to get a good look inside. The detectives surged all around them, clearly alarmed that they might have to bring in body bags to go along with all of those evidence bags.

“Let’s go, dearies,” Mrs. Talmadge whispered, appearing out of nowhere. She had a very contrite-looking Mr. Talmadge by the ear and was dragging him up the stairs. At the top, the Swanson twins glared down at him with their arms crossed. If looks could kill, then these would have caused a massacre. In fact, Ernestine was fairly certain that they’d be able to stop an entire zombie army with one disapproving squint of their eyes.

To the twins, Mrs. Talmadge murmured, “Thank you for bringing him home. Give Dill our apologies, will you?”

Without another word, they marched back to their apartment and slammed the door shut behind them. For once, they weren’t wearing their usual fancy costumes. Instead, they had on the black yoga tights and shirts they’d been wearing the other morning in the garden.

Adding to this new mystery, Mr. Talmadge was holding a can of black spray paint. Following Ernestine’s gaze, an exasperated Mrs. Talmadge took it from him.

“What happened to you?” Charleston asked, nonplussed, as they followed the Talmadges into their apartment.

“What happened to him? What happened to him?” Mrs. Talmadge shoved Mr. Talmadge down onto the couch. The various nuts and bolts in her ears shivered with rage as she bellowed, “He got caught, that’s what happened!”

“Now, Pansy, dear.” Mr. Talmadge hunched his shoulders sheepishly. “It was just a bit of fun, pet. Like back in the old days.”

“You didn’t get caught back in the old days!”

“Um, maybe we should leave,” Charleston whispered to Ernestine.

“Are you kidding me? I think she might shank him with a paring knife.” If Mrs. MacGillicuddie and Eduardo had been there to take bets, Ernestine definitely would put her new stack of fifties on Mrs. Talmadge. In fact, she was pretty sure the elderly, pink-haired chef could fillet an entire army of the undead without breaking a sweat.

“And what has that poor boy done other than open a successful business?” Mrs. Talmadge demanded, clueing Ernestine in that they were probably talking about Dill. “Just because you both want to open a restaurant in the same space, you’re determined to have a ridiculous feud with him!”

“Successful business! Bunch of vegetable garbage, that’s what his food is! We called it ‘compost’ back in my day, and now he’s selling it for twenty dollars a plate!”

“Well, I happen to like it.” Mrs. Talmadge crossed her arms as Mr. Talmadge slowly raised his head in horror from where he had been holding it in his hands.

“Pansy, say it isn’t so!” he gasped.

“It is, and furthermore, I’m the one who told Mrs. MacGillicuddie not to give you your inheritance early! She was all set on it, you know!”

“What?” Furious, Mr. Talmadge rose up off the couch.

Mrs. Talmadge grabbed a frying pan off the rack in the kitchen and flung it at the wall.

“That’s right, it was me, you old codger, you!”

Yelping, Ernestine and Charleston dove under the kitchen table for cover.

“How dare you!” Mr. Talmadge snatched up a butcher knife and buried it into the counter.

“Because you’re seventy and have had two heart attacks already! You don’t need more stress!” Dishes hit the floor.

“Well, they brought me back both times, didn’t they?” A meat mallet hit the table, making it shake violently. Already feeling claustrophobic, Ernestine shot out from underneath it just in time to have a teacup go whizzing past her nose and smash against a cupboard door.

Charleston yanked her back under again.

“I didn’t want to find out if a third time was going to be the charm!” An entire drawer full of cutlery clattered down onto the floor like it was raining all about the table. Ernestine desperately wanted to get out from the dark, confined space, but Charleston kept a tight grip on her for someone so tiny.

“I’m not past it yet, Pansy! I could handle opening a new restaurant at my age!”

“Like you could handle spray-painting graffiti all over poor Dill’s storefront?” More dishes smashed against the walls. “What if it had been the police who caught you instead of the Swanson twins?”

“Aw, Pansy. We’ve had to bail each other out of prison plenty of times, luv!” Mr. Talmadge’s voice softened as he said it. Things finally stopped breaking all around them. “Remember that time I had to bail you out for lobbing a tea cake at Margaret Thatcher’s hat?”

“It was her nose I was aiming for. It landed in her hat by accident,” Mrs. Talmadge said mistily. “Those were the days, weren’t they, Rupert?”

“They were, luv, weren’t they?”

“Rupert, I’m not done having days. And I’d like to have you there with me when I have them. Opening a new restaurant would kill you.”

“Aw, luv.” Now their feet moved closer together. As Mrs. Talmadge lifted up one foot, the sounds coming from above the table clearly indicated they were kissing passionately, completely having forgotten the children in their apartment.

Ernestine made a let’s go gesture to Charleston, and the two of them crawled out from beneath the cramped table.

“Now I wish I hadn’t done what I did to Mrs. MacGillicuddie,” Mr. Talmadge admitted.

Both Ernestine and Charleston froze, still on their hands and knees.

“No harm done in the end,” Mrs. Talmadge whispered. “And she’ll never know it was you.”

Charleston opened his mouth, but Ernestine quickly clapped her hand over it and shoved him out the door.

Forget about being eaten by the ravenous undead.

Now they had to worry about ending up as the main course for two unscrupulous chefs.