Thirteen Roses Book Four: Alone: A Paranormal Zombie Saga (9 page)

‘You saved my life.’ He sounded surprised.
 

‘Uh, yeah, whatever.’

‘Thank you. It’s the first time.’

Krystal laughed. ‘Hopefully the last. Doesn’t happen all that often, you know.’

He shrugged. ‘Maybe more so now. Thanks.’

‘It’s fine. Least I could do. You wanna explain what happened in there?’

‘Drugs. Whatever it was on the table set them off.’

‘It’s scary. I mean, they can change that much.’

Luke rose to his feet. ‘It is. I’d assumed they move the way they do because their bodies were no longer strong enough to do anything else but that isn’t true. If something gets hold of them like that stuff did, they can move… well, you saw them.’

‘Oh yeah I did. That’s some scary shit.’

He offered her a hand and pulled her up. Leaving her brushing herself down and spitting to clear her mouth of vomit, he went back into the room. She would be happy to never go in there again but the thought of her sword had her stepping reluctantly closer. Luke emerged bearing the bag of white powder in one hand and her sword in the other and she breathed a long sigh of gratitude.
 

He pulled the door closed behind him. ‘I’m never going in there again.’

She chuckled and cleaned then sheathed her sword. In the meantime, Luke was staring at the drugs.
 

‘What?’ She asked.
 

‘I’m wondering if we can put this to use.’

‘Normally you just put it up your nose. I’m not sure that’s a good idea, though. I mean, it’s tempting, but I don’t think we’d be very safe.’

‘No, no, not us. I mean with the zombies. Would turning them into that,’ he waved a hand at the room, ‘help us somehow?’

‘Hmm, let me think. Shall we make the zombies more dangerous?’ She gave him a look she hoped expressed her disgust for the notion and he nodded sadly.
 

‘I think you’re right. Down the toilet, then.’

She stared at the bag as he walked away. What was the street value of that stuff? A month ago she’d have killed for a bag of coke that big. Not to take but to sell. She could have stayed in a hotel for a couple of weeks, bought some new clothes. Now they were flushing it down the toilet.
 

Luke returned a couple of minutes later without the bag and gestured around the warehouse. ‘We’re happy it’s got what we want?’

‘Yeah, think so. Enough to survive on.’

‘Great. Shall we grab something to eat before we head back?’

She nodded and they ambled around the warehouse until they found stuff they didn’t need to heat up. They sat in the centre of the enormous space eating from tins and jumping at every creak and rattle that reached them. They finished fast and, with a lump in her gut from cold sausage and beans, Krystal strolled back towards the front door.
 

The quiet was blissful. She could stay in here all day, drinking it up, if it wasn’t for the feeling that at any moment some coked-up zombie was going to emerge from hiding and bite her face off.
   

They wheeled the bikes back out and wound through the housing estate, dodging zombies as they went. It reminded her of where she and Ed had spent the night. It was far creepier than the city. There were two elderly zombies in macs and walkers creeping side by side down the street. They probably thought they were heading for church. They certainly showed no signs of knowing they were zombies. Until the rumble of bikes made one turn, fix its dark eyes on her, and bare its teeth.
 

She gunned the bike and rode on. They passed a green space with swings where kids were still playing. One lay beneath the swings, legs twisted where it must have come off and broken them. Another of the children looked up from where it chewed its playmate’s arm, blood running down its jaws. Its eyes fixed on her as well. They were eyes that should have been too big for its face, the eyes of a child, but they were sunken just like the old lady’s.
 

She turned away and fixed her gaze on the back of Luke’s bike, determined to keep it there until they reached the main road.
 

She let out a sigh of relief when they did and rolled up next to him as he paused at the top of the slip road. He lifted his visor. ‘Are you alright?’ He asked.
 

‘Yeah, think so. That was pretty horrible.’

‘It’s almost as though the plague never came to them.’

‘Except for the children eating children bit.’

‘Oh no, I’ve seen that before.’

She shuddered and nodded north down the road. Luke lowered his visor, gunned his bike, and was replaced by a piece of flying metal. She thought for a moment he’d been cut in half. Then she thought nothing as a wave of heat and sound washed over her and threw her into darkness.
 

Alex

He wasn’t far behind Bayleigh when they reached the door, but he missed whatever it was that made her back away, hands raised in defence. He slipped by and pushed through the door. A pair of sightless eyes stared at him from the bed. Only they didn’t stare because there were no eyeballs, only empty red sockets.
 

His gorge rose and he pressed his lips together, swallowing as saliva flooded his mouth. He made himself step into the room, which was when he noticed her. Another of the ladies was behind the door, shaking hands pressed against her cheeks. Alex knelt in front of her, blocking the view on the bed, and put his arms around her. She pressed her face into his chest and shuddered until something snapped and she burst into tears.
 

He stayed there until his knees burned with the effort, then lifted her to her feet and guided her to the door. She went willingly enough, running from the room with a choked sob. She was replaced by Bayleigh, who was accompanied by an out-of-breath-Harriet. The three of them stood around the bed, none of them speaking. He didn’t know what to say.
 

He tried to approach it from a scientific point of view. Objectively, one of the ladies was dead. Her blouse was open and there were red marks on her breasts. Her eyes were… as he came around the side of the bed he saw her eyes, or what was left of them, smeared on the sheets beside her. He swallowed again.
 

Her eyes had been gouged out. He couldn’t yet see why she was dead, unless it was the shock alone, which was by no means unlikely.
 

‘What happened?’ Harriet’s voice carried none of her usual assuredness. It shook as much as she did and he went back around the bed to put his arm around her shoulders. She snuggled into him and shook harder.

‘I don’t know.’ He looked over her head at Bayleigh, eyebrows raised, and she shrugged in return. She lifted the lady’s hand and checked her pulse. She only held it a moment before she rested it back on the sheet. She leant over the bed, then stiffened and backed away.
 

He extricated himself from Harriet and joined Bayleigh. As he leant over, she pointed into the eye socket. What he’d thought were just sockets were, in fact, deep pits. Whoever had gouged her eyes out had driven the weapon deep into her brain. He held his breath and leant closer, looking for signs of what the weapon might have been.
 

He wasn’t surprised when he found tearing in the skin around the eyes, as though the murderer had been using something small and sharp. Or their nails. He glanced at Bayleigh. She was white as a sheet and chewing on her own nails.
 

‘Any ideas?’ He asked.
 

She shook her head, gaze fixed on the woman’s face. Alex led Harriet out the room, still swallowing saliva. He had a very good idea who did it, but for some reason he didn’t want to say. There was loyalty among the seven of them, despite Jackson being a… actually, there was no loyalty for Jackson, but Alex felt something for Dave.
 

Mostly, it was sympathy. The guy had been screwed over by whatever Luke did to him, but he was trying. The new emotionless Dave was creepy, but he wasn’t a murderer. Except Alex couldn’t get the image from his mind of Dave slamming the zombie’s face into the floor until it broke. He needed to find him.
 

He led Harriet to where some of the other ladies were huddled together. He wanted to say something, to clear the air after their conversation of earlier. Harriet had dragged him into one of the rooms and told him in a breathy voice she wanted to make love to him. It should have been a wonderful moment, except the next line out of her mouth was that he had to leave with them when they went.
 

He’d tried to talk her around to not going, at which point she’d called him a using bastard, which was rich coming from her. He bit his tongue, though, and tried to make it better, but she’d snapped that if he cared about her, he’d stay with her to make sure she was okay. He’d said he wanted to stay and look after everyone else as well and she’d sneered. He’d left then. He and Lisa had argued from time to time, but he’d always been good at shutting up when the right moment came.
 

Now as he removed his arm from her shoulder and she gave him a grateful look, he knew this was the right moment for something. Except he didn’t know what the something was, so he just smiled and headed back to the room. He met Bayleigh as she came out.
 

‘He stuck his fingers through her eyes.’ She blurted at him.

‘He?’

‘Any women here strong enough to do that?’

‘I don’t think you have to be all that strong. And there are a lot more women here than men.’

Bayleigh sniffed and wrinkled up her nose. ‘Either way, it’s a sick, twisted thing to do.’

‘Yeah. Do you think the attacker opened her blouse or was it already open?’

‘Does it matter?’

‘Well it’s just whether they were doing something together and then it changed or—’

‘So what, they were going to have sex so it’s her fault he killed her?’

‘God, no, what are you talking about? I just meant, if they were in there and doing something already, it would take much less effort to have done it.’ He shuddered and swallowed.

‘Was she gay?’ Bayleigh said.

‘We can ask.’

‘Right, because all those lovely Christian girls are going to know or even admit to one of them being gay.’

He leant against the door frame and rubbed his eyes. ‘This is horrible. The world’s full of zombies and we’re doing their job for them.’

He could feel Bayleigh’s eyes burning in to him and met her gaze as she spoke. ‘You think you know who did it, don’t you?’

He shrugged and walked past her into the room. She’d pulled the sheet up to cover the corpse and he walked past the bed to the window. ‘I don’t want to say in case I’m wrong.’

‘Or right, right?’

‘Yeah.’

‘Was it Dave?’

‘I… I don’t know. Just, after seeing him fight the zombies in reception… he was feral, completely off the rails. He could have done this and not even know he did it.’

‘But why?’

‘Dunno. That’s why I’m not saying anything, because what’s his motive?’

‘We should find him.’

There was no avoiding it so he brushed past her and out the door. An inspection of the rooms within the field turned up nothing so they split up and began to explore the hospital. Even knowing it as well as they did, it was going to take hours. If he had a mobile they could at least have phoned him, but he’d never got another after throwing his off the miniature St Paul’s.
 

Alex started in the children’s ward, shivering as he walked through the now-empty rooms. Jackson and Luke had cleared this one and he’d been pathetically grateful he hadn’t needed to go with them. Now the silence was almost as bad.
 

Room by room he trawled the hospital, not finding Dave and not really expecting to. So where the hell had he gone? Had he realised what he’d done and run away? Maybe he’d gone outside to die. Maybe he’d gone the same way as Jackson and headed back to the soldiers. He could be looking to them to take him in, which would be bad news. He knew what the group were doing and planning.
 

Alex snarled and headed back to the ward. The sound of the ladies reached him long before he stepped off the stairs and he slowed, trying to gauge the mood. There was anger and tears, predictable considering the circumstances. Harriet’s voice carried loud over everyone else.
 

‘This is the reason you asked me to give you. You needed a reason to leave and here it is. These people are murderers. Luke claims he went to find food, but what’s to say he’s not right here, waiting for his next victim? We all know the girl is on his side.’

Alex stalked down the corridor and shoved through the women, ignoring their cries of protest until he came face to face with Harriet. She started to smile at him until he opened his mouth.
 

‘You don’t like Luke, and that’s fine. But don’t use the death of anyone to make your political point. Ever. That’s a crappy thing to do and you know it. This wasn’t Luke. What we need to do is work out who it was and how to keep everyone safe. So why not put your brain to use doing that instead of causing hysteria in a place that’s already far too close to it.’

He left a silence in his wake as he stormed off. His hands were shaking. He’d spent the last four years of his life buried in the lab and the thought of speaking like that to anyone was ridiculous. He found himself smiling as he reached the private room. He shoved the door open and froze.
 

Ed and Dave were sat on the two beds, chatting to one another. They both raised a hand in greeting then went right on talking. He stood and stared for a minute, blinking. They were talking about computer games, Call of Duty from the sounds of it. He’d never been a role-player, he enjoyed Mortal Kombat far too much.
 

He strolled over, trying to calm the churning in his gut, and sat in one of the chairs. He tried to get in a position where he could get Ed out quick if he needed to. His machinations made them break off the conversation and look at him.
 

‘Hi, Alex, are you alright?’ Ed asked.