Help! My Brother's a Zombie! (3 page)

Dad and Mum didn't notice what I'd done because they were busy nailing all the windows in the attic shut.

Parents are so weird.

I wasn't surprised to hear from Nick the next day at school that his dog had disappeared during the night.

That doggy smell outside my door the night before came back to me.

I tried my best to stay awake that night, but it was hard and I didn't manage it.

In my dreams, I thought I saw a shadowy figure looking at me with eyes that I remembered from a face I used to know.

It was a weird dream, not scary, but it scared me.

Especially when I woke to find a human fingernail beside me on the pillow.

Did you know our fingernails go right down into our finger?

They have this bloody root that keeps them in place and stuff.

The fingernail on my pillow had a bit of skin attached to it, grey and knobbly with purply clots of blood gripping to the bottom like full stops at the end of someone's life.

I screamed and Mum came running.

When I showed her the fingernail, she said, ‘What fingernail?' and put it in her pocket.

I told her that I hadn't been imagining it.

And that I would keep on looking and poking around till she told me the truth, so she might as well get it over with and save us both the trouble.

She let out a big sigh and called my Dad.

They both held my hand and we climbed the attic stairs together, as a family.

We unlocked the door and there was Stephen's bedroom, perfectly recreated in the attic. Except with chains.

There had to be chains, see, to keep Stephen from getting out.

It was
his
fingernail.

I knew because his finger was all bloody where the nail was missing.

He had dug it into Mum earlier, she said, when she gave him his dinner. It must have fallen on my pillow when she went in to check on me. She took it out of her pocket and showed it to me again.

It was still disgusting.

Stephen always gets a little bit excited around dinner time.

That's because he is kept cooped up in the attic with nothing much to do.

Mum and Dad can't let him out any more, you see, because it would be dangerous.

People would be afraid of Stephen.

They wouldn't see past the green face, the flaky skin, the patchy looking hair. The smell.

The long curved nails and yellow teeth.

The eyes with red in the white bits.

The growling.

But we see past all that because we are his family.

We have to love him and take care of him because he is ours and nobody else will.

He is our little secret.

And if he likes to eat a dog or a cat or a rabbit, fur and bones and all, every now and then, isn't that a small price to pay?

I mean, why shouldn't we give him food when he's hungry?

The sort of food he likes and deserves.

Live food.

Our Stephen has changed but he's still my brother.

Brothers have to look out for each other.

Even if that means that Dad and I have to sneak out after dark once or twice a week and drive to a neighbourhood where the dogs are free to roam.

We kind of ran out of dogs in our estate after the first few months.

People don't buy pets around here any more.

There's no point.

And the funny thing is that even though he's my big brother,
I'm
the one who has to mind
him.

I mean, if I weren't there to help Dad, he'd get a lot hungrier than he does now.

Mum can't, you see. She has her work cut out keeping the smell inside the attic.

And like Dad always says, two pairs of hands are so much better than one.

Especially with cats.

Cats can be very wriggly.