'They blow up. Candy people blow up when they get scared.'
The top button of Chet's pajamas shot off and hit him in the chest.
"It's a game!" Ray grabbed him by both shoulders. They were warm and tight, like a basketball with too much air in it. "Zombies! It's a party game, from across the sea!"
The whine wobbled. "A g-game?"
"Yeah. One guy's the zombie. He walks really slow with his arms out, and everybody else..." Ray had nothing. "...walks away from him. Also slow. It's tag for lazy people."
Chet thought about it. The whine ran down like a kettle taken off the stove, his cheeks went back to the size of cheeks, and the striped pajamas hung loose on him again, minus one button.
"That sounds fun. Can we play it?"
"Later. Way later." Ray let go of him one finger at a time. He now had a boat at the bottom of the sea, a country full of dogs and a party game called Zombies.
Chet wandered off toward the punch. Ray went the other way, fast, around the Truth or Dare circle, and caught Finn by the backpack.
"Ray! Hey! Don't look at the windows! There's no reason, just don't!"
"I looked at the windows."
Finn's smile fell off. He checked the candy people nearest to them and pulled Ray behind a pillar by the sleeve. Up close, the kid was shaking worse than Chet had.
"I can't tell you anything. I royal promised the Princess." He was whispering so hard he spat. "You can't break a royal promise, Ray. I don't even know what happens if you do. She just said never."
"So don't tell me. I'll talk." Ray kept his voice down. "Dead candy people, walking up here from the graveyard. They want the live ones, because of the sugar. And nobody in this room can find out, or they pop. Blink if I'm close."
Finn blinked. Then he stared.
"How do you know that?"
"We've got zombies where I'm from. Stories about them, anyway. A lot of stories." That one was almost true. It went on the list anyway. "You didn't tell me a thing, little bro. I saw a hand on the glass. Your promise is fine."
Finn looked up at the ceiling and waited. Nothing came down from it, and his shoulders dropped about an inch.
"Oh my Glob. Okay. Okay!"
"Where's the princess?"
"In her lab, fixing the..." Finn shut his mouth and pointed at the window instead.
"Got it. How long?"
"She didn't say."
'Of course she didn't.' Ray looked over the hall. There were maybe sixty guests, three doors and a whole wall of windows. His belt was empty, and for once it made no difference; one thunderclap in here, and every guest in the room would go off like popcorn.
"Okay. You run the games and keep their eyes off the glass. I'll handle the noise."
"What noise?"
"There's gonna be noise."
"What are you guys whispering about?" Jake's head came around the pillar on two yards of neck. "Is it the prank? I knew there was a prank."
Finn made a sound like a toy getting stepped on. "Seven Minutes in Heaven! You and Lady! You're up!"
He had both of them shoved into the closet under the stairs before either could vote on it. He slammed the door and put his back against it.
"Seven minutes, man!" Jake's voice came through the wood. "Then you're telling me everything!"
The knocking started before Finn had stepped away from the closet.
It came from the main doors. It was soft and slow, and there was a lot of it, dozens of hands patting at the wood with no rhythm at all. The Truth or Dare circle went quiet.
"Who's that?"
"Everybody's here already."
"Why don't they say something?"
Cups began to rattle on their saucers. The whine started up again, from ten or twelve places this time, and near the doors a lollipop girl's head was getting rounder.
Finn looked at Ray with his mouth open. Ray looked around the hall for anything loud, and what he found was the piano.
It stood by the staircase, white, with a bowl of mints on the lid. He had walked past it twice on his way to the food. He was sitting on the bench before he had thought the plan through, and the plan had a hole in it. He knew four chords.
The third house had kept an old upright in the front room, with two dead keys. An older kid there had shown him four chords one rainy week, and told him four was enough for half the songs on the radio. Ray had been eleven. He had never learned a fifth.
'Four chords. Something loud that everybody can sing. Come on, come on.' Behind him, the whine was climbing.
What came was the Beatles. "Hey Jude." It ended on the same few notes over and over, and a toddler could learn them.
His hands shook on the first chord and found the second one anyway. He opened his mouth.
"Hey, Jude, don't make it bad..."
"Take a sad song and make it better..."
It came out steadier than his hands. He had only ever sung with earbuds in, along with somebody else's voice, in the shower or between the shelves at work where the conveyor covered it.
He had never heard himself come back off a stone ceiling forty feet up. It was lower than he thought he sounded, and it filled the hall to the corners, and for a second he almost stopped playing to listen.
Chet had been about to pop for the second time that night.
The patting at the doors had gotten into his stomach. He could feel his pajamas going tight again, and then the tall human sat down at the Princess's piano and started to sing, and Chet forgot about the doors.
The song was about somebody named Jude, who was sad about something. The tall human sang to him like a friend sitting on the same bench. Chet didn't know any Jude. He felt sorry for him all the same, and then he felt better, which seemed to be how the song worked.
Around him the whining died out one voice at a time, and the lollipop girl's head went back to its proper size.
"Then you'll begin to make it better..."
Then the song ran out of words and kept going.
"Na, na-na-na-na-na-na-na-na, hey, Jude!"
It was the easiest thing Chet had ever heard. He had it by the second time around, and so did Mr. Cupcake, and by the fourth the whole hall was on its feet and singing at the ceiling with their arms around each other. If anybody was still patting at the doors, there was no hearing them.
The closet under the stairs opened a crack. A yellow head came out of it on a long neck, rose all the way over the crowd, and hung there above the piano with its ears up.
"Dude." The dog looked down at the tall human for a while. "The guy's tall, he's handsome, he shoots lightning, and he sings like that? Finn, I think we got out-cooled."
"You've got four more minutes!" The human boy jumped, caught the head by both ears and stuffed it back through the door.
Chet sang louder.
...
Ray kept the ending going for a good ten minutes, which was more than twice what the record did, and he only stopped because his left hand cramped. By then the patting outside had turned into cracking. A pane went in one of the garden windows, under all the noise, and a grey arm came through the hole.
Finn had seen it too. "New game! Blockado! The game of barricades! Everybody grab some furniture!"
They loved it. Candy people dragged chairs and cushions to every door and window and cheered whenever something went on a pile. Ray put his shoulder to the food table and ran the whole thing up against the side door, tower of donuts and all. It hurt him to do it.
The barricades held for about as long as the song had. When the main doors started to bow inward, Finn looked up at the piñata over the staircase, a paper donkey that had spent the evening telling the guests he was only decoration, and the idea showed on his whole face.
"Piñatas! Everybody gets a blindfold and a stick!" He went down the line tying strips of taffy over eyes.
The doors gave. They came in slowly, thirty or forty of them, green and grey and caved in, dragging their feet across the blankets. The smell was burnt sugar and wet dirt.
Ray stood there with a chair leg in his fist, and the nearest one came straight for him. It had been a candy cane once, and its stripes had gone brown. It stopped a foot away and sniffed at his shirt. Then it walked around him like he was a pole and shuffled on toward a marshmallow in a nightcap.
'Right. Sugar. I'm not on the menu.' He stood in the middle of them with the chair leg up, and none of them so much as looked at him.
"No peeking, Ray! It's the rules!" Something sticky slapped over his eyes from behind.
"Finn, I'm not even—"
"Swing!"
So he swung. He did it blind, with no lightning anywhere in it. The chair leg hit something soft, which burst, and hard little pieces rained down on his head and rattled away across the floor. All around him sticks thumped and candy people whooped.
One of the pieces had landed in his open mouth. It was butterscotch, and he spat it out as soon as he remembered where it had come from.
When the thumping stopped, he peeled the taffy up onto his forehead. The hall was ankle-deep in candy, and the guests were on their knees scooping it up and eating it. He decided not to think about that.
The closet opened. Jake came out chewing a jelly donut, with Lady behind him. "Whoa. What'd we miss?"
"Candy zombies! The Princess made them by accident, and I had to royal promise not to tell anybody, but it's over now, so—"
Finn was gone. One blink he was standing in front of Jake with his arms spread, and the next there was an empty patch of tiles with candy still rolling across it.
"...Finn?" Jake's donut stopped halfway to his mouth.
Ray turned all the way around. Nothing in his memory covered this part. He was still turning when a door banged at the top of the stairs, and Finn came down them three at a time, with the princess behind him carrying a glass jug of something green.
"Four! It was four!" Finn was out of breath and lit up like a lamp. "The Gumball Guardians froze everybody, Jake, and they were gonna do fire, but then they did math, and I did the math!"
"You broke a royal promise?" Jake finally ate the donut. "Dude. You just had to say it was a royal secret. I would've respected that."
"...You would?"
Bubblegum had no time for either of them. She pulled the cork and poured a line of green over the nearest heap. The pieces shivered, drew together and stood up as a candy cane with bright red stripes, blinking at the lights.
She went on through the hall, heap by heap, and the Blockado piles came down to let in the ones still outside. Before long there were twice as many candy people as had come to the party. A gumdrop kid ran into the legs of an old gumdrop with a mustache and held on.
Ray watched that one for a while. Then he sat down on the piano bench, took the napkin out of his shirt pocket and ate a bread roll.
The light in the broken windows was going grey, and he was alive, with taffy in his hair.
'Made it. Didn't even get bitten.' He was starting on the second roll when the princess picked her way over to him through the candy, with the notepad out.
She looked at the piano, then at the taffy on his forehead, then at his face.
"Peppermint Butler says you kept my citizens calm with a song. And Finn says you worked the whole thing out by yourself, from one look at a window."
"We have stories about zombies back home."
"Across the sea. Where your boat sank." She wrote it down. "Stay for breakfast, Ray. Afterwards, I'd like to run a few tests."