Page 35 of 10 Things I Hate About Zombies

‘What are you doing?’ came a voice like wet cement. Ugh, Zoey would know that voice anywhere: Beryl, an old biddy who came into her work and took wheatgrass shots with a side of colloidal silver. Zoey would also know Beryl’s face anywhere, mostly because Beryl’s skin had a distinctive blue tint as a side effect of swigging all that sterling in a bottle.

‘Hi, Beryl! Just putting up signs for the Cat Mayor campaign,’ said Zoey, as cheerfully as she could muster. Which was not very.

‘But I’m a dog person,’ snapped Beryl. ‘Adding cats will just confuse things.’

With whom, exactly? Zoey wanted to ask.

‘Here.’ Digging in his wallet, Nick handed Beryl a loyalty card from the Smoothie Maven.

Huh, he must’ve picked one up when he’d visited the shop that first time.

‘It’s good for a half-price mushroom smoothie,’ he improvised.

‘But that’s not what it says,’ huffed Beryl, leaning on her walking frame as she read the card’s fine print.

‘I’ll remember,’ promised Zoey. ‘I own the shop. I make my own rules.’

Beryl recoiled. ‘Make your own rules?’

It was an incongruous response given that Beryl had taken it upon herself to be her own physician, but then people were complex. Just like Zoey, the failed academic who ran a smoothie shop, of all bloody things. Why couldn’t Maeve have owned a bookshop? Although she supposed she was less likely to have met Nick if that were the case.

‘All right, off to our next sign location,’ said Nick cheerfully.

Leaving the azure-tinged Beryl scowling, he rounded up Zoey and Ainsley, and with a wave, they cruised off.

‘Quite a character,’ he noted. ‘Very …’

‘Chet-Baker-inspired,’ added Zoey drily. Although Beryl was a bit beyond ‘Almost Blue’, really.

‘Wow.’ Nick’s dark eyes widened, and she could tell he was biting back a laugh. ‘You are something else, Zoey, and I mean that in the best possible way.’

Zoey fought a grin of her own. Then a grimace when Ainsley gave her another seatbelt jab.

‘See?’ Ainsley hissed in Zoey’s ear. ‘Keeper. Absolute keeper.’

They drove from street to street at Ainsley’s behest, hammering in signs to ensure that Mean George was given a run for his money.

‘Speaking of our mayoral candidate, it would be good form to find him before the winner is announced. It’s not like we can accept a formal municipal role on behalf of someone. That’s, like … voter fraud,’ said Ainsley.

‘Well, everyone on the street is keeping an eye out for him,’ said Zoey, although they hadn’t had any confirmed sightings yet. Just a few messages about furry things that might have been raccoons or opossums. Or furries.

Ainsley sighed. ‘He’s probably found a better, more tuna-rich neighbourhood and simply left us poor plebs behind. I don’t blame him. How could you blame him for following his belly?’

‘I signed up for Nextdoor so I could post an alert to all of the nearby neighbourhoods as well,’ Zoey reassured her. ‘We’re casting a wide cat net. We’ll find him.’

The Nextdoor thing had been a regrettable choice: she was now receiving a hundred neighbourly posts a day about poor parking and kombucha starters and people who played their TVs so loudly that they were spoiling popular shows.

‘And I’ve been doing Romero drive-bys every time I bring Alice to Laurelhurst Park,’ promised Nick. ‘I regularly get screamed at by this one lady who thinks that leaded gas is still a thing, and that I’m the main contributor to her future brain damage.’

‘Ah, she’s just bad at flirting,’ said Zoey. ‘She’s trying to find a point of connection.’

‘I’m sure that’s it, now that you mention it.’

‘Romero will turn up,’ said Zoey, who missed her fuzzy-faced, furious visitor. Even if his contributions to the household mostly involved biting ankles and knocking glasses of water off the coffee table. ‘He’d never miss being crowned mayor.’

Nick turned on the truck’s indicator. ‘You can’t be crowned mayor. Mayors are voted for, not appointed. Haven’t you watched Monty Python and the Holy Grail?’

‘That insult was more than a flesh wound,’ countered Zoey, who was nothing if not a nerd.