Zombies Don't Forgive by Rusty Fischer

want to get rid of, like a cop on your tail or some stalker chick who can’t take no for an answer or a piece of gum on your shoe. You don’t shake somebody you care about, someone you’re supposed to actually love, even if you’ve seen them 24 hours straight every day for months.
    I’m so upset I’m deep in the graveyard before I realize it. I look back and can’t see the gate or the road from here. Even so, I don’t feel scared. I mean, if there are Sentinels or even Zerkers in the area, they wouldn’t want just one of us. It’s the whole banquet they’re looking for, not just the appetizer.
    Besides, Dane will be along soon to apologize. And nowadays I’m scarier than most thugs who’d be out this time of night.
    A medium-sized gravestone is calling my name. It’s graced with a bulging, moss-covered gargoyle right in the middle. I sit in front of it, sliding off my bag and digging inside for a paintbrush I bought at the dollar store. I gently brush off the moss until the stone is clean and dry. Then I take a smaller brush to weed out the cracks, sending dirt and bugs and little moss boogers flying everywhere.
    I pause by the owner’s name: Jace Hawkins, b. 1917, d. 1934.
    Seventeen. Just like me. Seventeen forever. Just like me. Jace. Boy or girl? That name could go either way. Jace. It sounds so Civil War, so Southern.
    I picture Jace in overalls, barefooted, fishing in a stream, a bowl haircut, a freckled nose. Then again, Jace could have been one of those frilly Southern belles. Sheesh, back then, they married you off at 15 or 16. Jace could have had a kid! What did him/her in?
    I let these thoughts fill my mind as I gently tape a poster board—sized sheet of onion skin across Jace’s gravestone, using strips of gray duct tape to fold the edges around the side and keep them secure.
    I grip a piece of fresh charcoal and gently, gently rub the gargoyle from Jace’s headstone onto the onion skin. The charcoal rasps against the paper, revealing an ornate forehead, then lonely eyes, a sharp nose, and fanged teeth.
    Then I go and ruin it, pressing too hard. The thin paper tears, and I have to start again. It’s after I’m through taping the crinkly paper back to the headstone that I hear the footsteps.
    Dane.
    But no. The footsteps are too heavy, and there’s one pair too many. And they sound ugly.
    I realize I’m alone in a graveyard in the middle of the night, and I think fleetingly,
Of course there are two pairs of footsteps: Stamp and Dane. Duh.
    I turn, half-smiling, just in time to see a giant boy-man-thing crouching over my bag. He smells not of death but of sweat and smoke and booze and bad intentions. His eyes are alive and glassy and young. Fourteen, maybe fifteen young. He is soft and fleshy, but that flesh? There is lots of it, and you can’t be weak to carry that much around. I immediately wonder,
What are they feeding him?
He has on a black T-shirt and a gray ski jacket, the puffy kind that budget rappers wear. He has white sunglasses pushed on top of his shaved head.
    The older one, though still young, stands, tall and bony, waving a switchblade in each hand. The blades shine in the moonlight, sharp and threatening but nowhere near as cold as the gleam in his angry eyes.
    â€œStupid,” he says, looking at the crumpled paper beneath my trembling hand. “The other one was fine.”
    How long have they been watching me? And why didn’t I hear or sense them sooner?
    I go to stand, but the bigger one puts a hand on my shoulder. “That would be even more stupid.”
    Their voices are dark and menacing, like they’ve practiced for this in the mirror a few hundred times. They don’t sound as young as they look. Then again, if this was happening, say, at Burger Barn at two in the afternoon, they probably would look as young as they are.
    The big guy’s eyes are half-lidded, his three greasy white