Boppin' at the High School Hop

It really pissed Cord Willis off.

Hey, it was bad enough when all the dead dudes and dudettes started stumbling around on the streets like some weirded-out stone-zonked extras from fuckin' Plan Nine from Outer Space, and it was nearly unbearable when all the radio stations and even MTV went off the air.

But he could deal with that.

He'd found that it was even possible to survive without wheels, in a manner of speaking. He still had wheels, man; he just didn't have a car. A skateboard was good enough for most things, and you couldn't beat it for fuckin' with the dead dudes.

He was doing just fine until he found out they'd canceled the sock hop.

"They did what?" he said when Terry Tolliver told him about it. "You must be shittin' me, man."

"It's no shit, Cord." Terry was a skinny guy who used a lot of Clearasil, not that it helped very much. "Hell, you didn't think they'd let us do it with all the goddam brain-eaters roaming the streets, did you? They closed the school a month ago, after all. You couldn't expect them to let us have a fuckin' dance."

"Oh yes I could," Cord said. He could, too. Classes were one thing. The sock hop was something else. "Anyway, they're not brain-eaters."

"I don't care what they fuckin' eat," Terry said. "The hop's called off, and that's that."

"Bullshit. We'll do it ourselves."

Terry laughed. He didn't have a good laugh; it was kind of high-pitched and horsey. "Hey, kids," he said. "Let's put on a show!" He laughed again. "Who do you think you are, Cord? Fuckin' Mickey Rooney? Or is it Judy Garland?"

"Bite my ass," Cord said, not stopping to think how appetizing that remark would have been to the local population of dead dudes. It would've set them to slobbering like St. Bernards except that of course they didn't slobber. "The sock hop is a Hallville High tradition," Cord went on. "I'm not gonna be the senior class president that sees it come to an end."

Terry started to laugh again and then thought better of it. Cord was obviously serious about this. "You're really gonna try it?" he said.

"Who's gonna stop me?" Cord said.

Terry thought he knew the answer to that one, but what the hell. They were only zombies. Maybe Cord knew how to deal with them. It would sure be a surprise if he did, though. Nobody else could.

"The first thing we have to do," Cord said, "is let everybody know the hop's still on." He looked at the hand-lettered notice he'd printed on typing paper with a black Marks-A-Lot. "This oughta do the job."

The notice said:

"If that don't fetch 'em, I don't know Arkansaw," Terry said. They had been reading The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn in his English class when the dead started walking. "But how're you gonna let people know? You can't mail anything, and the phones aren't all that reliable."

The mail had been one of the first services to come to a halt after the dead rose up, though Cord thought that it was hard to tell the difference between the zombies and most of the mail carriers he'd ever seen. They all moved at about the same pace.

"We'll deliver 'em ourselves," Cord said.

"But you don't have any copies."

"We'll make 'em at the school if the electricity's still on there. I know how to run the copier."

Electricity, like phone service, wasn't available everywhere, but many parts of town still had it. The generators didn't require much interference from human operators.

"I guess it's all right if you say so," Terry said. "You're the class president."

"Sure. Let's go."

Cord and Terry, being fourth generation Texans and having fathers who were card-carrying members of the NRA, were naturally a little better armed than the middle-class average American youth, if you didn't take drug dealers into account, and the dealers didn't account for much these days. You might say something had eaten away at their business.

Cord and Terry both strapped on Glock 19s with extended clips--sixteen rounds in the clip and one ready in the chamber--and carried two additional clips of thirty-three bullets sticking out of the back pockets of their jeans, just in case they got into a real battle. For close-in work they had their Gerber Mark II combat knives.

Their fathers thought it was only right that their sons carry on the frontier traditions that had made Texas great, and if the dead were going to walk, it was a young man's patriotic duty to pop their pus-filled heads like you'd pop a pimple.

"Thank God for the United States of America and the right to keep and bear arms," was the way Terry's dad had expressed it. He carried a sawed-off twelve gauge himself, with a Smith and Wesson .38 as a backup. "Those pinko pussies who wouldn't allow a gun in their house are watchin' their wives and daughters slurpin' deadman's salami right this minute. Or they're gettin' slurped. Ain't much to choose between those two, wouldn't you say?"

Terry had to agree.