Zombies Vs. Unicorns

“You staying back there? Am I your chauffeur?”

I kick the back of his seat.

“What was the unicorn like?”

“Real.” I say, and then, to keep him from asking anything else, “What was Summer’s tongue like?”

Yves peels out.

As soon as Yves pulls into his driveway, I open my door and tumble out, unsteady because the car is still moving. I sprint across his lawn, jump over Biscuit, old Mrs.

Schaffer’s annoying yellow cat, and am halfway up my front walk before I hear the engine die, before he shouts at me.

“Wen! Wait, Wen, we should talk about this!”

And then I’m inside my house, and I can’t hear him yelling anymore, and I can’t see the moon, and most of all, I can’t feel that unicorn calling out to me from all the way across town.

That’s the part I still don’t get, after I’ve knocked on my folks’ door to say good night and changed into my pajamas and said my prayers and gotten into bed.

Because if I’d done like those Italian nuns had asked, if I’d gone off with them, I’d have trained to be a unicorn hunter. A unicorn killer.

But there was no mistaking that unicorn. She wanted my help. Did she want me to kill her? I could easily believe that living in captivity, confined day and night by all those chains, might be unbearable. Was that what she wanted? A mercy killing?

I punch my pillow down and pull the covers over my head to protect my eyes from the moonlight, which seems so much brighter now than it did at the carnival. Just stop thinking about the unicorn. Just stop.

For six months I lived in fear of waking up one morning and finding a whole herd of monsters in my backyard, such was my power to draw their evil down on me. But now that I’ve met another unicorn, now that I know what it is to have one near, I understand. I recognize what it feels like now. I just have to overcome it. The trick is to think of something else. Something pleasant.

So I imagine I’m kissing Aidan, that he is touching my back the way he touched my hand in the tent tonight. It’s probably not the right image, though, because the only experience I have kissing anyone is with Yves, last fall. And instead of feeling Aidan’s long blond hair between my fingers, I am feeling Yves’s dark, wiry curls; I’m feeling Yves’s full lips against mine; I’m hearing Yves whisper my name, just like he did last fall, like instead of grabbing him by the shoulders and kissing him I’d waved my arms and conjured lightning out of a blue sky.

I’m glad for Summer. I really am. I want Yves to find a girlfriend and forget about trying to go out with me. I want him to forget about kissing me, even if it was his first kiss as well. And I want to forget too.

I want to forget it all.

Yves isn’t waiting for me at my locker on Monday morning. He and Summer spend lunch canoodling at the far end of the table. Which is fine by me. Less fine is that Marissa hangs off Aidan all through the food line and arranges the seating so he’s nearest her and farthest from me at lunch. Plus, they only want to talk about their current events class. Apparently the government napalmed some unicorn-infested prairie out West somewhere to try to control the spread of the monsters. It didn’t work.

“The pictures on the news didn’t look anything like that thing we saw at the sideshow,” says Aidan. “Maybe it was a fake.”

I keep my mouth filled with coleslaw. Least fine of all is that the unicorn has been calling to me all weekend. Even in church on Sunday. I almost told my parents, but I was too scared by what they’d say. Like maybe if I still feel it, it’s because I haven’t been trying hard enough to banish this evil from my heart.

I can feel it tugging on me now.

“Of course it was a fake,” says Marissa. “Everyone knows that unicorns can’t be captured.”

“Everyone knows a lot of things,” Noah points out. “Like how you can’t kill them with napalm. But then they also show unicorn corpses on the news. Who killed them, and how?”

I dare to look up then, and I notice that Yves is focusing on me. Only we know who is really killing unicorns, and I swore Yves to secrecy last fall.

Right before I kissed him.

Katey shudders and pulls the crusts off her sandwich. “Fake or not, it was scary.

Unicorns are awful—the ones on the news, the little fat one at the fair—doesn’t matter. I hope whoever is killing them gets that one in the woods. The one that killed those kids last fall.”

“Don’t you think there are better things to do than just wipe them out?” Summer asks. “They’re an endangered species.”

“They’re dangerous,” Noah corrects, slipping his arm around Katey. “I bet you’d drop your whole animal rights act if you had seen that thing try to break through the bars and eat Wen last weekend.”

“It tried to eat you?” Yves asks abruptly.

You’d know that if you weren’t so busy macking with Summer, I almost snap at him. But the truth is, I don’t think it was trying to eat me. Get to me, certainly. But eat me?

I wonder what else they say about unicorns that isn’t true. I wonder, if I’d gone with those guys from Italy last fall, would I know now?

After school I head straight to the library, because if not, Yves might think I want a ride home, which would probably complicate whatever after-school plans he has with Summer. In the library I do a little bit of homework and a lot of thinking, and eventually I go over to the computers and look up the city bus routes online.

It takes me three different buses to get out to the fairgrounds, and I almost turn around and go home at each change. I probably shouldn’t be doing this, but at the same time, I have to know. Maybe I’m imagining it, letting the fear of last fall put all sort of ideas in my head.

The sun’s already low in the sky by the time I reach the entrance gate, and once inside the fairgrounds, I lose my nerve. I buy and drink a soda. Then I play ten straight rounds of Skee-Ball and win so many tickets that the carnie manning the machines starts giving me the stink eye, so I finish up and trade my tickets for the first thing my eyes land on: a unicorn doll.

“Not a common choice,” the carnie says, digging it out of the pile of teddy bears and puppy dogs. “Not these days, anyway. Kids are too scared by the news stories.”

He hands me the doll, and its gilt horn sags over one eye. I focus on it and say nothing, worried for a second that he’s calling me a sicko for picking up such a macabre doll.

“You know we have one here, in the sideshow?” says the carnie, who apparently never learned when to leave well enough alone. “At least, that’s the pitch. They keep it locked up real tight, though, so maybe it is real.”

I nod.

“But they weren’t showing it today.” He shrugs. “Said it’s sick.”

And then, over the din of bells and alarms on the midway, over the screams of the people on the rides and the raucous music emanating from every speaker on the fairgrounds, I hear her. The unicorn. She is sick. And she needs help.

And before I know it I’ve taken off, backpack flouncing hard against my spine, unicorn doll grasped firmly in my fist. The same speed that carried me far away from the unicorn last Saturday now takes me back to the sideshow tent, but I know —somehow I know—she’s not inside. It never occurs to me to stop, to push this unicorn sense away, to pray for God’s protection from this evil. Instead, I just go.

I wave at the guy manning the entrance, and as soon as his attention’s elsewhere, I sidle toward the side, pretending to read the garish posters advertising the acts within, then skitter around the corner. The side wall of the tent comes flush with the fences surrounding the fairgrounds, but I can see that the tent actually extends a ways beyond that. I press against the canvas walls, but they’re pulled snug, with little room to maneuver around, and massive bungee cords secure the sides to the fence so no one can sneak inside the fairgrounds—or, apparently, sneak out.

I’m ready to go back to the entrance of the fairgrounds and walk all the way around the outside, when I hear the unicorn cry out again. And this time it’s not in my head but a shrieking roar of anguish so loud that I can see the people on the midway pause in surprise.

And then my foot is on the lowest bungee cord and I’m pulling myself over the top of the fence with one hand. I drop to the ground on the other side, soft as a cat.

The sun has dipped below the horizon, and twilight blurs the edges of the trailers, caravans, and Porta Potties that fan out haphazardly over the dirt. Still, I know exactly where she is, and I beeline toward her.

What I’m going to do once I get there, I don’t know. Even if the unicorn wants to die, I have no clue how to kill her.

The unicorn wrangler’s trailer is dented and in need of a new paint job. I plaster myself to its rusted sides as I hear a voice coming from a tentlike patio spilling out the back. I recognize the voice as the woman who grabbed my arm last weekend, and she’s saying words my father would wash my mouth out for.

The unicorn is alternating pitiful little bleats with full-on growls, and I edge closer, trying to peek between the trailer and the canvas flaps and see what’s going on.

The canvas lean-to is secured to the top of the trailer with ropes and staked into the bare ground like a picnic cover on a camper. Is the woman beating the poor thing? Or maybe punishing it for eating a fellow carnie?

“Don’t you dare—,” the woman puffs, out of breath. “Not until I come back, do you hear?”

The unicorn moans again, and I hear a screen door smack against the aluminum siding. I drop to my stomach and peek through the gap between the ground and the canvas tent flap. The unicorn is staring at me. It’s shifting from foot to foot, lowing, and as it struggles to turn, I can see that there’s something weird sticking out of its butt. It looks like two sticks or something, but then I peer closer and realize they are legs. Two tiny legs ending in cloven hooves.

The unicorn’s not fat. She’s in labor.

She struggles to lie down on the hay coating the ground, pulling against her chains so she can lick her backside. I hear the screen door open again, and my view is blocked by the women’s feet and the dirty hem of her skirt.

“I said wait,” the woman snaps at the monster, who merely growls in response. “I don’t have it ready yet.” She sets down a large bucket, and cold water sloshes over the top and splashes me.

That’s weird. I’ve heard of people boiling hot water before births—though I’m not sure why—but a bucket of cold water?

The unicorn pauses in her labor pains and lays her head against the ground.

One big blue eye bores right into mine.

“You better pray this one is stillborn, Venom,” the woman says, and her foot taps the earth near my face. “I hate doing this.”

The unicorn stares at me, her bloodshot eye wide with terror. And with a shudder that goes from the top of my head into the tip of my toes, I get it.

The unicorn bleats and moans and licks and pushes, and slowly I can see the baby’s head pushing out to meet those spindly legs. The head is mottled white and red, and its eyes bulge out from either side of its oblong cranium. Between the baby’s eyes is nothing—no horn. Maybe it grows in later, like antlers on a deer.

Some sort of glossy membrane encases the baby’s body, and it’s turning translucent in the air, or maybe because it’s being stretched. I can’t tell.

I’m scared someone will come round the corner and catch me peeping underneath the tent. I’m terrified the wrangler will lean down and see me. I can’t believe I’m watching the birth of a unicorn. How many people alive have ever seen anything so extraordinary?

The unicorn wrangler is clearly one of them, as I can hear her hissing with impatience, and her foot hasn’t stopped its restive tapping. The unicorn turns to lick at the baby, and the membrane splits wide. For the first time I see the baby unicorn move. It blinks and wiggles and slides even farther out of its mother.

The wrangler hurries over to the unicorn, grabs the baby by its slimy two front legs, and yanks it the rest of the way out. Venom screams in pain, and then the ground is covered with some sort of foul-smelling liquid.

“Jesus, Venom!” cries the woman, dangling the baby just out of my sight range.

“You reek.” She takes a single step back toward the bucket, and the unicorn pauses in its anguish to lock gazes with me.

My hand shoots out beneath the flap and tips the bucket over.

Cold water floods the hay inside the tent and spills outside to soak the front of my shirt and pants. I bite back a gasp, but I needn’t bother, since the wrangler is screaming bloody murder. She drops the baby unicorn, who tumbles into the wet hay in a heap. Then the woman snatches up the bucket and vanishes into the trailer.

The baby shifts feebly on the ground, bits of membrane and hay sticking to its wet hide as it tries to slither back toward its mother’s warmth. But there’s something wrong with Venom. She keeps trying to raise herself and move toward her child, but can’t. She looks at me again, pain and pleading shooting at me like an arrow.

“No,” I say. “I can’t.”

From inside the trailer I hear water running. She’s refilling the bucket. She’s going to come out here any minute, and then she’s going to drown that baby. That poor, innocent little unicorn baby who never killed anyone’s cousins. Who never did anything but get dropped moments after it was born. How can it be evil?

Venom pulls herself over to the foal, licks the rest of the membrane away, and rubs it all over with her snout. The baby’s crying high-pitched, pitiful little bleats and trying to crawl under its mother’s fur. The unicorn glares at me and growls.

>

“You staying back there? Am I your chauffeur?”

I kick the back of his seat.

“What was the unicorn like?”

“Real.” I say, and then, to keep him from asking anything else, “What was Summer’s tongue like?”

Yves peels out.

As soon as Yves pulls into his driveway, I open my door and tumble out, unsteady because the car is still moving. I sprint across his lawn, jump over Biscuit, old Mrs.

Schaffer’s annoying yellow cat, and am halfway up my front walk before I hear the engine die, before he shouts at me.

“Wen! Wait, Wen, we should talk about this!”

And then I’m inside my house, and I can’t hear him yelling anymore, and I can’t see the moon, and most of all, I can’t feel that unicorn calling out to me from all the way across town.

That’s the part I still don’t get, after I’ve knocked on my folks’ door to say good night and changed into my pajamas and said my prayers and gotten into bed.

Because if I’d done like those Italian nuns had asked, if I’d gone off with them, I’d have trained to be a unicorn hunter. A unicorn killer.

But there was no mistaking that unicorn. She wanted my help. Did she want me to kill her? I could easily believe that living in captivity, confined day and night by all those chains, might be unbearable. Was that what she wanted? A mercy killing?

I punch my pillow down and pull the covers over my head to protect my eyes from the moonlight, which seems so much brighter now than it did at the carnival. Just stop thinking about the unicorn. Just stop.

For six months I lived in fear of waking up one morning and finding a whole herd of monsters in my backyard, such was my power to draw their evil down on me. But now that I’ve met another unicorn, now that I know what it is to have one near, I understand. I recognize what it feels like now. I just have to overcome it. The trick is to think of something else. Something pleasant.

So I imagine I’m kissing Aidan, that he is touching my back the way he touched my hand in the tent tonight. It’s probably not the right image, though, because the only experience I have kissing anyone is with Yves, last fall. And instead of feeling Aidan’s long blond hair between my fingers, I am feeling Yves’s dark, wiry curls; I’m feeling Yves’s full lips against mine; I’m hearing Yves whisper my name, just like he did last fall, like instead of grabbing him by the shoulders and kissing him I’d waved my arms and conjured lightning out of a blue sky.

I’m glad for Summer. I really am. I want Yves to find a girlfriend and forget about trying to go out with me. I want him to forget about kissing me, even if it was his first kiss as well. And I want to forget too.

I want to forget it all.

Yves isn’t waiting for me at my locker on Monday morning. He and Summer spend lunch canoodling at the far end of the table. Which is fine by me. Less fine is that Marissa hangs off Aidan all through the food line and arranges the seating so he’s nearest her and farthest from me at lunch. Plus, they only want to talk about their current events class. Apparently the government napalmed some unicorn-infested prairie out West somewhere to try to control the spread of the monsters. It didn’t work.

“The pictures on the news didn’t look anything like that thing we saw at the sideshow,” says Aidan. “Maybe it was a fake.”

I keep my mouth filled with coleslaw. Least fine of all is that the unicorn has been calling to me all weekend. Even in church on Sunday. I almost told my parents, but I was too scared by what they’d say. Like maybe if I still feel it, it’s because I haven’t been trying hard enough to banish this evil from my heart.

I can feel it tugging on me now.

“Of course it was a fake,” says Marissa. “Everyone knows that unicorns can’t be captured.”

“Everyone knows a lot of things,” Noah points out. “Like how you can’t kill them with napalm. But then they also show unicorn corpses on the news. Who killed them, and how?”

I dare to look up then, and I notice that Yves is focusing on me. Only we know who is really killing unicorns, and I swore Yves to secrecy last fall.

Right before I kissed him.

Katey shudders and pulls the crusts off her sandwich. “Fake or not, it was scary.

Unicorns are awful—the ones on the news, the little fat one at the fair—doesn’t matter. I hope whoever is killing them gets that one in the woods. The one that killed those kids last fall.”

“Don’t you think there are better things to do than just wipe them out?” Summer asks. “They’re an endangered species.”

“They’re dangerous,” Noah corrects, slipping his arm around Katey. “I bet you’d drop your whole animal rights act if you had seen that thing try to break through the bars and eat Wen last weekend.”

“It tried to eat you?” Yves asks abruptly.

You’d know that if you weren’t so busy macking with Summer, I almost snap at him. But the truth is, I don’t think it was trying to eat me. Get to me, certainly. But eat me?

I wonder what else they say about unicorns that isn’t true. I wonder, if I’d gone with those guys from Italy last fall, would I know now?

After school I head straight to the library, because if not, Yves might think I want a ride home, which would probably complicate whatever after-school plans he has with Summer. In the library I do a little bit of homework and a lot of thinking, and eventually I go over to the computers and look up the city bus routes online.

It takes me three different buses to get out to the fairgrounds, and I almost turn around and go home at each change. I probably shouldn’t be doing this, but at the same time, I have to know. Maybe I’m imagining it, letting the fear of last fall put all sort of ideas in my head.

The sun’s already low in the sky by the time I reach the entrance gate, and once inside the fairgrounds, I lose my nerve. I buy and drink a soda. Then I play ten straight rounds of Skee-Ball and win so many tickets that the carnie manning the machines starts giving me the stink eye, so I finish up and trade my tickets for the first thing my eyes land on: a unicorn doll.

“Not a common choice,” the carnie says, digging it out of the pile of teddy bears and puppy dogs. “Not these days, anyway. Kids are too scared by the news stories.”

He hands me the doll, and its gilt horn sags over one eye. I focus on it and say nothing, worried for a second that he’s calling me a sicko for picking up such a macabre doll.

“You know we have one here, in the sideshow?” says the carnie, who apparently never learned when to leave well enough alone. “At least, that’s the pitch. They keep it locked up real tight, though, so maybe it is real.”

I nod.

“But they weren’t showing it today.” He shrugs. “Said it’s sick.”

And then, over the din of bells and alarms on the midway, over the screams of the people on the rides and the raucous music emanating from every speaker on the fairgrounds, I hear her. The unicorn. She is sick. And she needs help.

And before I know it I’ve taken off, backpack flouncing hard against my spine, unicorn doll grasped firmly in my fist. The same speed that carried me far away from the unicorn last Saturday now takes me back to the sideshow tent, but I know —somehow I know—she’s not inside. It never occurs to me to stop, to push this unicorn sense away, to pray for God’s protection from this evil. Instead, I just go.

I wave at the guy manning the entrance, and as soon as his attention’s elsewhere, I sidle toward the side, pretending to read the garish posters advertising the acts within, then skitter around the corner. The side wall of the tent comes flush with the fences surrounding the fairgrounds, but I can see that the tent actually extends a ways beyond that. I press against the canvas walls, but they’re pulled snug, with little room to maneuver around, and massive bungee cords secure the sides to the fence so no one can sneak inside the fairgrounds—or, apparently, sneak out.

I’m ready to go back to the entrance of the fairgrounds and walk all the way around the outside, when I hear the unicorn cry out again. And this time it’s not in my head but a shrieking roar of anguish so loud that I can see the people on the midway pause in surprise.

And then my foot is on the lowest bungee cord and I’m pulling myself over the top of the fence with one hand. I drop to the ground on the other side, soft as a cat.

The sun has dipped below the horizon, and twilight blurs the edges of the trailers, caravans, and Porta Potties that fan out haphazardly over the dirt. Still, I know exactly where she is, and I beeline toward her.

What I’m going to do once I get there, I don’t know. Even if the unicorn wants to die, I have no clue how to kill her.

The unicorn wrangler’s trailer is dented and in need of a new paint job. I plaster myself to its rusted sides as I hear a voice coming from a tentlike patio spilling out the back. I recognize the voice as the woman who grabbed my arm last weekend, and she’s saying words my father would wash my mouth out for.

The unicorn is alternating pitiful little bleats with full-on growls, and I edge closer, trying to peek between the trailer and the canvas flaps and see what’s going on.

The canvas lean-to is secured to the top of the trailer with ropes and staked into the bare ground like a picnic cover on a camper. Is the woman beating the poor thing? Or maybe punishing it for eating a fellow carnie?

“Don’t you dare—,” the woman puffs, out of breath. “Not until I come back, do you hear?”

The unicorn moans again, and I hear a screen door smack against the aluminum siding. I drop to my stomach and peek through the gap between the ground and the canvas tent flap. The unicorn is staring at me. It’s shifting from foot to foot, lowing, and as it struggles to turn, I can see that there’s something weird sticking out of its butt. It looks like two sticks or something, but then I peer closer and realize they are legs. Two tiny legs ending in cloven hooves.

The unicorn’s not fat. She’s in labor.

She struggles to lie down on the hay coating the ground, pulling against her chains so she can lick her backside. I hear the screen door open again, and my view is blocked by the women’s feet and the dirty hem of her skirt.

“I said wait,” the woman snaps at the monster, who merely growls in response. “I don’t have it ready yet.” She sets down a large bucket, and cold water sloshes over the top and splashes me.

That’s weird. I’ve heard of people boiling hot water before births—though I’m not sure why—but a bucket of cold water?

The unicorn pauses in her labor pains and lays her head against the ground.

One big blue eye bores right into mine.

“You better pray this one is stillborn, Venom,” the woman says, and her foot taps the earth near my face. “I hate doing this.”

The unicorn stares at me, her bloodshot eye wide with terror. And with a shudder that goes from the top of my head into the tip of my toes, I get it.

The unicorn bleats and moans and licks and pushes, and slowly I can see the baby’s head pushing out to meet those spindly legs. The head is mottled white and red, and its eyes bulge out from either side of its oblong cranium. Between the baby’s eyes is nothing—no horn. Maybe it grows in later, like antlers on a deer.

Some sort of glossy membrane encases the baby’s body, and it’s turning translucent in the air, or maybe because it’s being stretched. I can’t tell.

I’m scared someone will come round the corner and catch me peeping underneath the tent. I’m terrified the wrangler will lean down and see me. I can’t believe I’m watching the birth of a unicorn. How many people alive have ever seen anything so extraordinary?

The unicorn wrangler is clearly one of them, as I can hear her hissing with impatience, and her foot hasn’t stopped its restive tapping. The unicorn turns to lick at the baby, and the membrane splits wide. For the first time I see the baby unicorn move. It blinks and wiggles and slides even farther out of its mother.

The wrangler hurries over to the unicorn, grabs the baby by its slimy two front legs, and yanks it the rest of the way out. Venom screams in pain, and then the ground is covered with some sort of foul-smelling liquid.

“Jesus, Venom!” cries the woman, dangling the baby just out of my sight range.

“You reek.” She takes a single step back toward the bucket, and the unicorn pauses in its anguish to lock gazes with me.

My hand shoots out beneath the flap and tips the bucket over.

Cold water floods the hay inside the tent and spills outside to soak the front of my shirt and pants. I bite back a gasp, but I needn’t bother, since the wrangler is screaming bloody murder. She drops the baby unicorn, who tumbles into the wet hay in a heap. Then the woman snatches up the bucket and vanishes into the trailer.

The baby shifts feebly on the ground, bits of membrane and hay sticking to its wet hide as it tries to slither back toward its mother’s warmth. But there’s something wrong with Venom. She keeps trying to raise herself and move toward her child, but can’t. She looks at me again, pain and pleading shooting at me like an arrow.

“No,” I say. “I can’t.”

From inside the trailer I hear water running. She’s refilling the bucket. She’s going to come out here any minute, and then she’s going to drown that baby. That poor, innocent little unicorn baby who never killed anyone’s cousins. Who never did anything but get dropped moments after it was born. How can it be evil?

Venom pulls herself over to the foal, licks the rest of the membrane away, and rubs it all over with her snout. The baby’s crying high-pitched, pitiful little bleats and trying to crawl under its mother’s fur. The unicorn glares at me and growls.