I should have been scared to leave, but I wasn’t. I knew I would miss the soft beds but I wouldn’t miss the air conditioning blasting all the warm out of the house. I’d miss the smell of the coffeepot in the kitchen but not the trapped-indoors smell of Danny’s pus-leaking leg. I would miss watching SpongeBob but not the dead guy who watched it with us from his stained spot on the couch.
I couldn’t keep watching SpongeBob anyway because Danny’s Daddy took the TV and put it in the golf cart. He took a whole bunch of other stuff too. It looked like we were using that little car to move which Houston said was the idea. I wonder how the scientists felt about all of this. They left clothes that fit my body and food that fit my tummy and they said they’d turn the heat and hot water back on after Danny died so we’d want to stay and play nice with our neighbors. But we’re not monsters so we took whatever we wanted for our trip. It was like we showed up at somebody’s snooty dinner party just to put the food in a doggie bag and leave.
It turns out we weren’t the only ones who wanted to go. We all had our split kits on our backs, ‘cept Danny of course, and we started to leave the house so I called out “Bye, Harold! Don’t wait up!” Harold surprised us when he stopped staring at the space the TV left and followed us out the door. And there were more of his friends waiting near the cart. None of us was bothered about that. I thought that was really something, a bunch of dead people were waiting for us and we didn’t care. And we still didn’t care when more and more of the dead showed up and followed the cart while Ghost drove it super-slowly towards the fence. I wondered if they knew what we were doing. I didn’t feel anything from the bugs inside my head when we first got here, but now they were back to their buzzing, ‘cept they weren’t talking to me, they were talking to our neighbors. I couldn’t hear words, but I could feel that they were sick of being cooped up and they only acted human to trick those scientists into thinking they weren’t dangerous. At least that’s what I think they were saying. Maybe it was all in my imagination.
So by the time we got to the end of the houses we had everyone. I thought they came to see a good show. They must have been super-bored doing the same thing every day and wanted to see if the golf cart would explode when it hit the fence.
Ghost put a brick on the “go” pedal and let it ride all the way into the wall of red-lasers. We then stood way back so we wouldn’t get fried or anything. I heard Ghost whisper to KC that he found a few more of Harold’s liquor bottles hidden in the house and he added those to the pile in the back. That explained why the thing immediately caught fire when it hit the electric fence. Those weirdly powerful sprinklers came on again to put the fire out, but it was too late. The golf cart had pushed against those thin wires so hard they broke, and the whole fence powered down with the sound of a giant disappointed robot sighing “Awww…” If this was a movie the crowd would have been cheering and clapping when the fence went down, but most of them were dead and couldn’t make “Yea!” noises and the rest of us were too tired to say anything. We just walked over the snapped wires. They lay like long burnt out snakes that were no longer poisonous. We kept on walking towards the mountains like it was no big deal. I did feel this wave of relief from our neighbors. If they could talk, they would have been shouting “Finally!” together. Instead they just stepped over that dead fence and they didn’t follow us no more. They went in the opposite direction, towards a clump of trees that seemed to be hiding something.
“Where do you suppose they’re going?” Mouse asked. She didn’t sound like she was that interested in knowing, she was just talking to fill the silence like I do sometimes.
“I think that’s where New Hope is based. If you look closely you can make out the line of a roof halfway up the trees.” I don’t know how Ghost could pick up on things that I can’t see until he points them out to me.
“Wow, I hope they’ve got a better security system than The Suburb of the Dead,” said Houston. His voice had a lot of worry in it. He seemed to be the only person who still cared about those heartless scientists. I don’t know why he would do that, especially after Margaret joined up with them and treated us like guinea pigs.
“I hope they don’t,” said Danny’s dad. And then he yelled after the RBs “Sic ‘em boys!”
We were almost over the ridge when we heard the Woosh! of a fire starting up fast. We looked back and saw the clump of trees covered in flames. It made me think of the time the RBs set our home on fire so they could catch us as we ran out. I wondered if the New Hope building had as good of sprinklers as our neighborhood had. “How did they do that?” asked Nemesis.
“I gave them my lighter,” said Danny’s dad as a spooky smile took over his face.
Woah, he really was angry. And he was starting to scare me more than any zombie could.