I Dream of Zombies (Book 2): Haven (16 page)

Thursday, 25

“Come in!”

Marla opened the door and walked into Commander Caballero’s office. “You asked for me, sir?”

“Yes, sit down
,” he said, shuffling some papers on his desk. “We have a suspect to interview regarding the incident in the basement.”

“That’s good you’ve found someone, sir.”

“Yes, he turned himself in because of the number of people who died. I need you to interview him?”

“Me? Why?”

“Basically, because he asked for you,” Caballero replied, looking her straight in the eye. “You know him. It’s Robert.”

Marla blinked. “Robert?!
Are you sure? Why would he…”

“Tha
t’s what I want to find out. He’s dating your sister, isn’t he?”

She
shook her head. “He was, but he broke it off with her. She told me that he had been saying some strange things, but I put it down to the pressured situation in here, sir.”

“It appears it was something else. And please drop the sir, Marla. It’s Juan.”

“Right, sir.”

He
chuckled slightly and stood up. “We have him in the interview room, so if you’d like to come with me, we can get started.

“You know that whatever he has done has nothing to do with me or my sister?” said Marla, feeling wary.

“I do know that,” he replied, his tone unchanging.

***

Marla walked into the interview room and closed the door quietly behind her. The place was completely empty except for two metal chairs and a matching table. There was something clinical and detached about it. When the man sitting at the table lifted his head, she almost did a double-take. He looked completely different, as if he had not slept in weeks. His appearance was unkempt and he rubbed the side of his face in a nervous way. Marla thought he did not look himself at all. “Hello, Robert,” she said, pulling out the chair opposite him.

He nodded.

“You asked to speak to me?”

Robert failed to
make eye contact, focusing on a spot on the wall instead. “I didn’t really plan to do anything... I wouldn’t have, not really, only…” His sentence trailed off.

Marla stayed quiet. She
sensed the man wanted to tell her something, but he was having trouble getting his words out. Moving her chair away slightly, she leaned back to give him some distance. If he was feeling paranoid and nervy, leaning towards him was not going to help.

He
scrutinised his fingers as though seeing them for the first time, and he turned them over and over, examining them, before looking up again, straight into her eyes. “I didn’t want anyone to get hurt, only them.”

“Who are ‘them’?”

Robert shifted in his seat and peered around the room as though wary of someone listening. “Them, the things, they’re not who we think they are.”

“You mean the dead
that are alive?” asked Marla, resisting the urge to lean in.

He shook his head. “No, t
he other ones.”

“I don’t follow. You mean the dead in here that the scientists
were working on?”

“No.”

“Okay, you mean there are more of them in this place?” she asked, her pulse quickening.

With a sigh he shook his head aga
in. “You are
not
listening. They are in here,
inside
! They’re not the dead out there or in here. They’re different.”

“So what are they?”

Robert lifted his hands in the air and turned them, palms up, towards her. He leaned backwards. “I don’t know, but they’re not like us. I don’t know what they are. You can’t see them. I was trying to get rid of them, save everyone. They don’t want us here.” He started to scratch the side of his face, grimacing as he glanced behind him.

Marla
did not know what to say. The man was obviously disturbed by his experiences and imagining things that did not exist; only they were very real in his mind. She considered what to say next, but she did not have to as he spoke first.

“They’re not
who they seem and Doctor Sleep, he wants to read your mind, control you. The power over life and death is…” He faltered and stared at the wall.

She frowned, perplexed, but decided to go with his hallucination. “
So you thought that using the dead to kill them was the right idea? You could have killed everyone.”

“I know, I know,” moaned Robert
, bowing his forehead low to the table and placing his hands on the back of his head. He laced his fingers together. “And I have to live with that. I only got one.”

“One what?”

He looked up again and smiled. “One of
them
.”

Marla stared at him
. She had no idea what he was talking about and guessed he was not going to elaborate, probably because he couldn’t. Robert seemed to be living in his own private hell and she had no wish to make it worse. At that moment the door opened and Caballero strode in.

“
Are you leaving?” Robert asked Marla, looking distinctly frightened. He seemed to shrink away from the commander.

“I’m sorry,” Marla answer
ed, and she was. Sorry that he was suffering. But, really, with everything that had been going on over these last weeks, she would be very surprised if he was the only one cracking under the strain.

“Thank you
,” said the commander, nodding towards her. “I can take it from here.”

“What’s go
ing to happen to me?” Robert pleaded as she got up to go.

“Don’t worry,”
she replied. “They want to help you.”

“They’re liars,” he shouted out. “
You should check down below, Marla. The secret places.”

She glanced back to see Robert place his head on the table and cover it with both arms. Caballero stood over him. As she left the interview room, she hoped her words were true and that Robert would
gain the necessary care he so clearly needed. Her conscience wrestled with what she should tell Ellen.

Friday, 26

“Penny for your thoughts?” asked
Jakob.

Marla fiddled with the spoon in her cereal. “Sorry, I was miles away.”

“You’ve been doing that a lot lately.”

“It’s
too early in the day for me,” she replied. “I’m too sleepy to concentrate.”

“Does it bother you?”

“What does?” Marla asked.

“Her?”
said Jakob, flicking his wrist in the direction of a nearby table in the cafeteria. “His ex-wife. You keep staring at her.”

She followed his gaze to where Tommy was laughing with his son. “No,” she said, turning back. “Why should it? He’s my friend, like I told you before.”

“I was just wondering. You seem different, preoccupied with him.”

“That’s nonsense. I’m just the same.
What does it matter to you anyway?” Marla added. “We’re not dating or anything. We’re friends, no?”

Jakob
frowned and bit into his toast.

Week 13

Sunday 28

It was coming up to 5 p.m. when Marla eventually knocked on Tommy’s door after thinking things over for the entire afternoon. From inside she heard muffled sounds and then the door yawned open. Tommy greeted her with a lopsided smile and a vibrant, “Hey!”

“Marla!”
a young voice called out.

Caught off guard, she
peered over Tommy’s shoulder to see his son playing with Bob. “Hi, Ash, how’s it going?” she asked as cheerfully as possible, but as soon as the Labrador spotted her, he bolted forward, wagging his tail with so much effort that his butt looked about to fall off. He was such an attention seeker. Giggling, Marla bent down to ruffle his ears. “If you’re busy, I can come back,” she said, standing up again.

“No, it’s fine,” said Tommy. “C
ome on in.”

“
Ah, I needed to talk to you privately, but it can wait.”

He looked at her for a moment. Marla guessed he detected it was something serious
because his expression changed. Turning back to the boy, he said, “Ash, I need to speak to Marla for a little while. Can I take you back to your mum?”

Ash
stood up and gathered his toy cars. “Sure thing, Dad.” After stroking Bob one last time, he followed his father out of the room with a shy nod to Marla.

“I’m just taking him to Hanna, so
stay out here,” said Tommy, locking the door. Marla nodded and sat down on the floor with her back to the wall. Raising her knees, she watched Tommy take Ash’s hand and lead him towards the elevator. They disappeared inside. After ten minutes or so, Tommy reappeared and made his way back to her. “What’s happened?” he asked.

“
Thanks for talking,” Marla said, standing. “I don’t know where to start, to be honest, but I can’t discuss it with Ellen. There’s some weird shit going on in here and I don’t know what to think.”

He scratched the side of his jaw.
“Okay, start at the beginning and go from there.”

“We can’t talk here.”

“How about we grab a coffee in the cafeteria?”

Marla shook her head. “Too public. I need to talk to you alone. My room, come on,” she said, walking a few rooms down.

Mystified, Tommy followed her inside her room and sat on the chair by her desk. “I’m all ears.”

She closed the door and kicked off her
DMs. After smoothing her hair behind her ears, she perched on the end of her bed. “What I’m about to tell you is going to sound odd,” she began.

“Okay.”

Marla took a deep breath. “Right, well, don’t say anything until I finish. Robert was responsible for releasing the dead that were being experimented on…”

“Robert?
Hell no!”

Marla
raised her eyebrows.

“Oh, right, sorry, go on,” said
Tommy, leaning back in the chair.

“I was asked to interview him because Robert
asked for me. It was secret, so everything I’m about to tell you I was told not to tell anyone. I haven’t even been able to tell Ellen, which makes me feel crap. I’m going to have to tell her at some point.”

“Not necessarily…”

“He broke things off with her. She has no idea. He only told her that he couldn’t cope with things because he was depressed. I know Robert wasn’t acting himself recently because Ellen told me, or she tried to, but I didn’t take it seriously. He kept talking about people in the facility not being who they seem. He said they’re not like us and dangerous. I thought he meant the dead-lookers as they were being experimented on in here.

“I had no idea they were keeping the dead in this place until Jakob told me once, but he still didn’t tell me that it was going on now… and then the incident
in the lab happened and I saw for myself. Anyway, Robert kept saying he meant people who look like us, but aren’t like us. He said he only got one of
them
.”

“Who did he mean by them?”

“Exactly! I’ve no idea. When I pressed him on it, he was answering me, but then Caballero stopped the interview. I just thought Robert had cracked up under the pressure of being here. And I have no idea what has happened to him since.”

He leaned forward in his chair and ran his fingers through his hair. “
Maybe he means someone is working against everyone else – someone from the government maybe, or a terrorist?”

She
shrugged. “I have no idea. Government would be my bet, but what could they be hiding here?”

“I don’t have any answers
. Perhaps they’ve been engineering something new and the virus was a side effect?”

“I don’t get it. I’ve been thinking and rethinking, and I didn’t sleep much la
st night. It doesn’t make sense.”

“That’s the government and army for you,” remarked Tommy with a dry laugh. “There are always secrets. Have you spoken to Caballero about
this?”

Marla shook her head.

“He seems a decent guy.”

“What about Jakob? What does he say about all this?”

She sighed. “I
haven’t told anyone.”

“Don’t get me wrong, I believe everything you’ve told me. I’ve known you long enough to trust you, and I hope you trust me, especially after all the crap we’ve been through. But I know this place can make you stir crazy, paranoid even, and the things we’ve seen… well, it’s enough to crack you up.”

“You think I’m imagining things?”

“I didn’t say that. I’m just saying that maybe you could look at it from a different angle. Robert was having some serious issues and wasn’t in a stable frame of mind when you interviewed him. He got people killed when he released those freaks.”

Marla
stared at Tommy for a second and then nodded. “Maybe… maybe you’re right. I’m probably over-thinking everything, blowing it out of proportion.”

He smiled. “I don’t want to sound harsh, but you know… we saw people lose it in warzones.”

She looked back at him in silence, biting her lip as she contemplated what to say next, but he beat her to it. “I should really go and collect Ash,” he said. “His mum has plans and I said I’d look after him. I’m holding her up and I’d like to keep on the right side of her.”

Marla nodded. “
That’s okay. My head is too confused to make sense of all this and I should probably just sleep on it.”

“Me too,” he
agreed, standing up to leave. “Just try not to worry too much. It causes wrinkles, you know!”

“Cheers, Tommy, I love you too!”

Her laugh made him smile as he left the room, glad to have cheered her a little. But his own smile faded quickly as he made his way back to his room, deep in thought.