Free Zombified by Adam Gallardo Page B

arm behind his head. What was he doing, and where was this going? And how was this going to make it okay that I wasn’t going to New York?
    â€œHer parents wanted her to go into medicine,” Dad went on. “So she chose that to make them happy. At the expense of her own happiness. Know what happened next?”
    â€œYeah, you two fell in love and you got a job teaching out here so you left one of the coolest places on earth to move out to nowhere, Oregon.” Jesus, was it possible for me to sound any more like a spoiled child?
    Dad chuckled. “That’s almost everything that happened. She got pregnant. I got her pregnant.” He propped himself up. “With you.” He frowned, then got a faraway look in his eye. “I think she saw it as an opportunity to chuck school and get away from her family. I’m sure she thought she’d be happy, but it turned out that a family of her own wasn’t what she wanted, either.”
    He sat up and rubbed his face. “Maybe you can blame me for the zombie invasion. I got her pregnant, after all. Or maybe you can blame yourself. Who knows, maybe if she’d . . . given you up, maybe she’d have stuck with school and concocted a miracle cure for the undead.” He stood up. “The point is that it’s pointless to assign blame in a situation like this. There’s a lot to go around, but assigning it won’t make things better. Maybe you can think about no longer blaming her, and maybe you could stop feeling like you need to make up for something you never had any part in.”
    He walked over to where I sat and put his hands on my shoulders. I didn’t shake him off, but I also didn’t make any move to hug him or anything.
    â€œI love you,” he said. “And I’ll support anything you want to do. I just wish you wanted to do it for you and not because you feel you owe it to the world.”
    I didn’t know what to say, so I didn’t say anything at all.
    â€œOkay,” he said. He bent and kissed the top of my head. “We can talk about this later.”
    He walked out of the room and left me alone with my shitty mood.
    â€œIt is what I want,” I said to no one in particular.
    After fuming for a long time—a period when I waited for my dad to come back in my room to apologize so that I might either scream at him or ignore him altogether—I got up and climbed into bed without changing out of my street clothes. I switched out the light, lay on my back, and stared up at the ceiling. What the hell did he know about why I was doing what I was doing? Sure, he was a psychologist but that didn’t give him any great insight into my inner workings. If he really knew what was going on in my head he wouldn’t just give me all of that cash, he’d be on the corner helping me sell more Vitamin Z so I could leave to go to school.
    My phone lit up as it received a message. The green light threw long shadows up on the ceiling and made me think of monster movies. I guessed it was a message from Phil asking if I wanted to go out to kill the undead. To which I was going to give a resounding, “Hell, yeah!” Instead, the message was from a number I didn’t recognize right away:

    You ever gonna call me?

    Perfect. It was from Brandon. I stared at the screen until it went black from inactivity, then I thumbed it to life. My thumb hovered over the call button. Any other night, I’d have deleted the dumb message and gone to bed. But that night I was feeling weak and vulnerable, and I was curious about what he was doing with himself. It might have made me a horrible person, but I was also flattered that he kept reaching out to me.
    I brought my thumb down on the call button and put the phone to my ear. It rang three times and I started to think it was going to go to voice mail. Maybe he’d turned it off for the night, or maybe he’d gotten another call. Whatever, I was