Passing Strange Read Online Free Page B

brought my fingers to my cheeks I could feel a bump just below the skin where the hole was. I pushed lightly and—this is another gross part, I’m sorry—I could see a flat gray lump, like a small pebble. Somehow the bullet had worked its way up to the surface of my skin.
    I leaned over the sink and pressed at the edges, squeezing slightly. A few seconds later I could feel part of the bullet protruding from my cheek, and then I brushed it and it clattered onto the basin with a small tinkling sound.
    The bullet was so small. I pinched it between my thumb and forefinger, then flicked it across my room.
    The hole in my face looked smaller, even after pressing the bullet out. It was no bigger than a nostril. I probed around the wound gently with my fingertips, and though there was still a slight sensation of looseness between my bones, the sickening movement beneath the surface of my skin was gone. The hole was centered on my cheekbone, which the night before had felt like small shards of pottery in a thick plastic bag. Today the bone felt solid, with maybe a slightly tenuous anchor to the rest of my face, but solid, nonetheless.
    I was healing.
    My body was repairing itself, and at an incredible rate. This was no hallucination. I had the slug to prove it.
    I stared at my reflection—vanity, vanity. I imagined—was I imagining it?—that there was a slight itchy sensation under my skin, as though my cells were reattaching themselves to each other.
    Zombies don’t heal. Tak’s cheek never healed. Tommy still has an open wound where he’d been shot with an arrow. The burns that Melissa received after her death have never gone away. Why was I healing? The type of wound didn’t factor into things, either—when Adam wears a T-shirt, you can see a raised bump on his chest from the bullet that killed him. I’d read hundreds of e-mails and posts that zombie kids have sent to Tommy’s site, mysocalledundeath.com, and I’ve never once heard anyone mention that they had the ability to heal.
    I wanted to call my dead friends and ask them if they had experienced this, but I was scared. I’ve always been one of the “fast” zombies—I can move and talk in a way that lets me pass for human—and I’ve always been conscious that my ability might make others feel bad. Traditionally biotic people hated me because I was dead; what if differently biotic people started to hate me because I was, well, coming alive?
    I went upstairs and turned on the television and surfed over to CNN. I still had no idea what made the police react so violently. There was some talk-show type thing on, so I went into the kitchen and took a handful of spices out of the spice rack. I went back to the couch, unscrewed the caps, and sniffed them one at a time. The cumin and the coriander I could smell, but not the nutmeg. Is there something about nutmeg that is scent-invisible to zombies, or is this a Karen-specific thing? Anyhow, my advice to zombiekind everywhere is to keep practicing your sense of smell. I’m convinced it’s one of the keys to life.
    Eventually there was a news update that had a brief segment on zombie murders. They ran the clips on the lawyer who we supposedly killed—Gus Guttridge. There were very grainy clips of the Guttridge home and some “zombies” removing lumpy forms that viewers were supposed to think were the corpses of the Guttridge family. One of the “zombies” looked a lot like Tak, if you didn’t know that Tak hitches on his left side and not his right like the big faker in the video is doing. One of the other fakes does this weird arms-out-in-front walk, along with not bending his knees at all. The faces are completely frozen, and I can only guess that they’re masks, the kind of thing that people who assume we all look alike would wear if they were going to pretend to be us.
    The newscaster, looking grave, ha-ha, said that one living impaired person was taken into custody, and others were wanted for questioning.